To the actual ignorance or obfuscation of mind of the majority of the English people, as regards our country and its institutions, we are doubtless to refer much of the ill-toned and seemingly unfriendly comments made upon our affairs in their organs.  Thus, it is intimated to us by many English writers, that they regard the North now as simply undertaking to patch up a Union founded and sustained by mean compromises, an object which has already led us into many humiliating concessions,—­and that the moment we announce that we are striking a blow for Liberty, we shall have their sympathy without stint or measure.  No Englishman who really understood our affairs would talk in that way.  One of the chief lures which instigated and encouraged the Southern rebellion was the assurance, adroitly insinuated by the leading traitors into their duped followers, that opposition by the rest of the country to their schemes would take the form of an anti-slavery crusade, in which form the opposition would be put down by the combined force of those who did not belong to the Republican party.  They were deceived.  Opposition to them took the form of a rallying by all parties to the defence of the Constitution, the maintenance of the Union.  For any anti-slavery zeal to have attempted to divert the aroused patriotism of the land to a breach of one of its fundamental constitutional provisions would have been treacherous and futile.  The majority of our enlisted patriotic soldiers would have laid down their arms.  If the leadings of Providence shall direct the thickening strife into an exterminating crusade against slavery, doubtless our patriots will wait on Providence.  But we could not have started in our stern work avowing that as an object of our own.  And as to the meanness of our concessions and compromises for Union, we have to consider what woes and wrongs that Union has averted.  Has England no discreditable passages in her own Parliamentary history?  Have her attempts at governing large masses of men, Christian and heathen, Roman Catholic and Protestant, and of all sects, privileged and oppressed, never led her into any truckling or tyrannical legislation, any concessions or compromises of ideal or abstract right?

But we must come to our specifications, introducing them with but a single other needful suggestion.  We have not to complain of any acts or formal measures of the English Government against us,—­nor even of the omission of any possible public manifestation which might have turned to our encouragement or service.  But it will be admitted that we have grievances to complain of, if the tone and the strain of English opinion and sentiment have been such as to inspirit the South and to dispirit the North.  If English comments have palliated or justified the original and the incidental measures of the Rebellion,—­if they have been zealous to find or to exaggerate excuses for it, to overstate the apparent or professed grounds of it, to wink at the meannesses and outrages by which