the Spanish Bourbons.  Mr. Canning’s conduct was statesmanlike, but it was also spiteful; and had England been in the condition to send sixty thousand men to Spain, probably the recognition of the independence of Spanish-America would have been much longer delayed.  He had to strike a blow at a mighty enemy, and he delivered it skilfully at that enemy’s only exposed point, where it told at once, and where it is telling to this day.  But his action affords no precedent to the present rulers of England for the treatment of our case, for he moved not until after the colonies had achieved their independence.  Now the British Government proclaims its purpose to acknowledge the Southern Confederacy in less than a month after the beginning of the attack on Fort Sumter, and in about a week after it had heard of the fall of that ill-used fortress!  Is there not some difference between the two cases?

England did not admit the Poles to the honors she has allowed to the American Secessionists, after their revolt from the Czar, in 1830-31, though their cause was popular in that country, and they had achieved such successes over the Russian armies as the Secessionists have not won over the armies of the Union.  Neither did she acknowledge the Hungarians, in 1849, though they had actually won their independence, which they would have preserved but for the intervention of Russia.  It was not for her interest that Austria should be weakened.  Is it for her interest that the United States should be weakened?  Is it the purpose of her Government to give our rebels encouragement, step by step, in order that the American nation may be thrown back to the place it held twenty years ago?

The Cottonocracy of England, and those who for reasons of political interest support them, proceed erroneously, we think, when they assume that American cotton is the chief necessary of English life, and that without a full supply of it there must ensue great suffering throughout the British Empire.  That it would be better for England to receive her cotton without interruption may be admitted, without its following that she must be ruined if there should be a discontinuance of the American cotton-trade.  Men are so accustomed to think that that which is must ever continue to be, or all will be lost, that it is not surprising that British manufacturers should suppose change in this instance to be ruin.  They are quite ready to innovate on the British Constitution, because in that way they hope to obtain political power, and to injure the landed aristocracy; but the idea of change in modes of business strikes them with terror, and hence all their wonted sagacity is now at fault.  Lancashire is to become a Sahara, because President Lincoln, in accordance with the demands of twenty million Americans, proclaims the ports of the rebels under blockade, and enforces that blockade with a fleet quite sufficient to satisfy even Lord John Russell’s notions as to effectiveness.  We have never believed,