even say this Nation, as a government standing in solemn treaty relations with Great Britain, has just cause of complaint and offence at the prevailing tone and spirit of the English people, and press, and mercantile classes, towards us, in view of the rebellion which is convulsing our land.  That tone and spirit have not been characterized by justice, magnanimity, or true sympathy with a noble and imperilled cause; they have not been in keeping with the professions and avowed principles of that people; they have not been consistent with the former intimations of English opinion towards us, as regards our position and our duty; and they have sadly disappointed the hopes on whose cheering support we had relied when the dark hours which English influence had helped to prepare for us should come.

Before we proceed to our specifications, let us meet the suggestion often thrown out, that we have been unduly and morbidly sensitive to English opinion in this matter; and let us gratefully allow for the exceptions that may require to be recognized in the application of our charges against the English people or press as a whole.  It has been said that we have shown a timid and almost craven sensitiveness to the opinions pronounced abroad upon our national struggle, especially those pronounced by our own kinsfolk of England.  It is urged, that a strong and prosperous and united people, if conscious of only a rightful cause, and professing the ability to maintain it, should be self-reliant, independent of foreign judgment, and ready to trust to time and the sure candor and fulness of the expositions which it brings with it, to set us right before the eyes of the world.  But what if another nation, supposed to be friendly, known even to have recommended and urged upon us the very cause for which we are contending, represents it in such a contumelious and disheartening way as to show us that we have not even her sympathy?  Further, what if there is a spirit and a tone of treatment towards us which suggests the possibility that at some critical moment she may interfere in a way that will embarrass us and encourage our enemies?  The sensitiveness of a people to the possible power of mischief that may lie against them in the hands of a jealous neighbor, ready to be used at the will or caprice of its possessor, may indicate timidity or weakness.  But Great Britain, knowing very well what the feeling is, ought to understand that it may consist with real strength, courage, and right purposes.  It is notorious now to all the civilized world, as a fact often ludicrously and sometimes lugubriously set forth, that millions of sturdy English folk have lived for many years, and live at this hour, in a state of quaking trepidation as to the designs of a single man of “ideas” across their Channel.  What bulletin have the English people ever read from day to day with such an intermittent pulse as that with which they peruse quotations from the “Moniteur”?  The English people, whatever might have been true of them once, are now the last people in the world—­matched and overawed as they are by the French—­to charge upon another people a timid sensitiveness for even the slightest intimations of foreign feeling and possible intentions.