lonel MacTurk, I am desired by my principal to declare at
this eleventh--this twelfth hour, that he is willing to own that he sees
HE HAS BEEN WRONG in the dispute which has arisen between him and your
friend; that he apologizes for offensive expressions which he has used
in the heat of the quarrel; and regrets the course he has taken?" If
something like this has happened to you, however great your courage, you
have been glad not to fight;--however accurate your aim, you have been
pleased not to fire.

On the sixth day of January in this year sixty-two, what hundreds of
thousands--I may say, what millions of Englishmen, were in the position
of the personage here sketched--Christian men, I hope, shocked at the
dreadful necessity of battle: aware of the horrors which the conflict
must produce, and yet feeling that the moment was come, and that
there was no arbitrament left but that of steel and cannon! My reader,
perhaps, has been in America. If he has, he knows what good people
are to be found there; how polished, how generous, how gentle, how
courteous. But it is not the voices of these you hear in the roar of
hate, defiance, folly, falsehood, which comes to us across the Atlantic.
You can't hear gentle voices; very many who could speak are afraid.
Men must go forward, or be crushed by the maddened crowd behind them.
I suppose after the perpetration of that act of--what shall we call
it?--of sudden war, which Wilkes did, and Everett approved, most of
us believed that battle was inevitable. Who has not read the American
papers for six weeks past? Did you ever think the United States
Government would give up those Commissioners? I never did, for my
part. It seems to me the United States Government have done the most
courageous act of the war. Before that act was done, what an excitement
prevailed in London! In every Club there was a parliament sitting in
permanence: in every domestic gathering this subject was sure to form
a main part of the talk. Of course I have seen many people who have
travelled in America, and heard them on this matter--friends of the
South, friends of the North, friends of peace, and American stockholders
in plenty.--"They will never give up the men, sir," that was the opinion
on all sides; and, if they would not, we knew what was to happen.

For weeks past this nightmare of war has been riding us. The City was
already gloomy enough. When a great domestic grief and misfortune visits
the chief perso