According to the Royal Proclamation, the blockade of any one of the Northern ports by one of the ships of the Secessionists would be as lawful an act as the blockade of Charleston by a dozen of the Union’s cruisers; and England allows that a privateer from Pensacola could seize an English ship that should be engaged in bringing arras to New York or Philadelphia.  Thus are the two “parties” to the war placed on the same footing by the decision of the English Government, though the one party is a nation having treaties with England, and engaged in maintaining the cause of order, and the other is only a band of conspirators, who have established their power through the institution of a system of terror, much after the fashion of Monsieur Robespierre and his associates, whose conduct was so offensive to all Britons seven-and-sixty years ago.  But Montgomery is much farther from England than Paris, and the French had no cotton to tempt the British statesmen of 1793-4 to strike an account between manufacturing and morality.  Distance and time appear to have united their powers to make things appear fair in the eyes of Russell that inexpressibly horrible to those of “the monster Pitt.”

The Royal Proclamation forbids Englishmen affording the Union assistance in any way.  No British gunmaker can sell us a weapon, no English merchant can use one of his ships to send us the cannon and rifles we have purchased in his country, and no English subject of any degree can lawfully carry a despatch for our Government.  Never was there—­a more forbidding state-paper put forth; and the arid language of the Proclamation is rendered doubly disagreeable by the purpose for which it is employed.  We are placed by its terms on the level of the men of Montgomery, who must be vastly pleased to see that they are held in as much esteem in England as are the constitutional authorities of the United States.  If we were to seek for a contrast to this extraordinary document, we should find it in the proclamation put forth by our own Government at the time of the “Canadian Rebellion,” and in which it was not sought to convey the impression that we had the right to regard rebels and loyalists as men entitled to the same treatment at our hands.  It is a source of pride to Americans, that nothing in their own history can be quoted in justification of the cold-blooded conduct of the British Government.

It has been sought to defend the action of England by referring to precedents.  We are reminded by Lord John Russell of the acknowledgment of the Greeks as belligerents by England; and others have pointed to her acknowledgment of the Belgians, and of those Spanish—­Americans who had revolted against the rule of Old Spain.  We cannot go into an extended examination of these precedents, for the purpose of showing that they do not apply to the present case; but we may say, and an examination into the facts will be found to justify our assertion, that England