e of the few British peers that have enjoyed the distinction of
being hanged,) the entire population of America is descended from the
middle and lower classes in the old countries. The difference has been,
that the man at the South who raised cotton and sold it has gradually
grown to consider himself a superior being by comparison with his own
negroes, while the man at the North who raised potatoes and sold them
has been content with the old Saxon notion that he was as good as his
neighbors. The descendant of the Huguenot tradesman or artisan, if in
Boston, builds Faneuil Hall or founds Bowdoin College; if in Charleston,
he deals in negroes and persuades himself that he is sprung from the
loins of Baldwin, King of Jerusalem. The mass of the population at the
South is more intensely democratic, so far as white men are concerned,
than the same class at the North.

There is a little inconsistency in the English oracles in this respect;
for, while they cannot conceal a kind of sympathy with the Southern
Rebels in what is supposed to be their war upon democratic institutions,
they tell us that they would heartily espouse our cause, if we would but
proclaim a crusade against Slavery. Suppose the Squires of England had
got up a rebellion because societies had been formed for the abolition
of the Corn-Laws; which would the "Times" have gone for putting down
first, the rebellion or the laws? England professes not to be able to
understand the principles of this wicked, this unholy war, as she calls
it. Yet she was not so slow to understand the necessity of putting down
the Irish Insurrection of 1848, or the Indian Rebellion ten years later.
She thinks it impossible for the Government of the United States to
subdue and hold provinces so vast as the Cotton States of America; yet
she neither foreboded nor as yet has found any impracticability in
renewing and retaining her hold on the vaster provinces of British
India,--provinces inhabited, all of them, by races alien in blood,
religion, and manners, and many by a population greatly exceeding that
of our Southern States, brave, warlike, and, to some extent, trained in
European tactics. To have abandoned India would have been to surrender
the greatness of England. English writers and speakers, in discussing
our affairs, overlook wholly the fact that a rebellion may be crushed by
anything except force of arms. Among a people of the same lineage and
the same language, but yesterday conte