m those hopes and prayers, although she knows
that the result she so ardently desires will be the establishment by
military power of a huge slave-empire, a counter-civilization to that
of Christianity. Fear of her life makes England false and timid. Her
dependence upon other nations has compelled her to abdicate her position
as the head of Saxon civilization, which is the gradual enlarging of
liberty as the only permanent security of universal international
prosperity and peace. Indeed, it is not denied that the tone of British
opinion in regard to human slavery is radically changed. That change is
the measure of the timidity and sophistication, the moral deterioration
inevitably produced in any people by the consciousness of its dependence
for the means of labor and life upon other nations. The crack of the
plantation-whip scares Washington no longer, but it pierces the heart of
Westminster with terror.

"See how utterly mean and mortifying is her attitude toward us. John
Bull looks across the highway of the world into his neighbor's house.
'D' ye see,' he mutters, 'that man chastising his son in his house
yonder? Let's play that they are not related, and ask him what he means
by assaulting an innocent passenger.' Then he turns to the rest of the
people in the street, who know exactly how virtuous and mild John Bull
is in his own family-relations, who have watched his tender forbearance
with his eldest son Erin, and his long-suffering suavity with his
youngest son India, and says to them,--'To a moral citizen of the world
it is very shocking to see such an insolent attack upon a peaceable
person. That man is an intolerable bully. If he were smaller, I'd step
over and kick him.'--Do you feel drowsy?" asked my watch.

"I was never more awake," I answered; "but you seem to me,--although,
when I look at you and think of Waltham, it is the most natural thing in
the world,--yet you do seem hard upon Old England, Mother England, spite
of all."

"Ah!" ticked my American watch, "not even I would for a moment seem to
be unjust to all that is manly and noble and friendly in England and
among Englishmen. There are two nations there, as Disraeli had already
said in one sense, when Gasparin said it in another. There is the sound
old stock from which flowers the finest modern civilization. From that
come the sweetness, the candor, the perception and sympathy of men like
Mill and Cairnes and Bright. From that springs all the nobler