growth of a
commonwealth where freeholders existed by the million, and religion was
not in bondage to the state, and now they could not repress their joy
at its perils. They had not one word of sympathy for the kind-hearted
poor man's son whom America had chosen for her chief; they jeered at
his large hands, and long feet, and ungainly stature; and the British
secretary of state for foreign affairs made haste to send word through
the palaces of Europe that the great republic was in its agony; that
the republic was no more; that a headstone was all that remained due by
the law of nations to "the late Union." But it is written, "Let the
dead bury their dead;" they may not bury the living. Let the dead bury
their dead; let a bill of reform remove the worn-out government of a
class, and infuse new life into the British constitution by confiding
rightful power to the people.

But while the vitality of America is indestructible, the British
government hurried to do what never before had been done by Christian
powers; what was in direct conflict with its own exposition of public
law in the time of our struggle for independence. Though the insurgent
States had not a ship in an open harbor, it invested them with all the
rights of a belligerent, even on the ocean; and this, too, when the
rebellion was not only directed against the gentlest and most
beneficent government on earth, without a shadow of justifiable cause,
but when the rebellion was directed against human nature itself for the
perpetual enslavement of a race. And the effect of this recognition
was, that acts in themselves piratical found shelter in British courts
of law. The resources of British capitalists, their workshops, their
armories, their private arsenals, their ship-yards, were in league with
the insurgents, and every British harbor in the wide world became a
safe port for British ships, manned by British sailors, and armed with
British guns, to prey on our peaceful commerce; even on our ships
coming from British ports, freighted with British products, or that had
carried gifts of grain to the English poor. The prime minister, in the
House of Commons, sustained by cheers, scoffed at the thought that
their laws could be amended at our request, so as to preserve real
neutrality; and to remonstrances, now owned to have been just, their
secretary of state answered that they could not change their laws _ad
infinitum_.

The people of America then wished, as they