it has thriven,—­if they have perverted or misrepresented the real issue, have ridiculed or discouraged the purposes of its patriotic opponents, have embarrassed or impeded their hopes of success, or have prejudged or foreclosed the probable result,—­it will be admitted, we say, that we have grievances against those who have so dealt by us in the hour of our dismay and trial.  And it is an enormous aggravation of the disappointment or the wrong which we are bearing, that it is visited upon us by England just as we have initiated measures for at least restraining and abating the dominant power of that evil institution for our complicity in the support of which she has long been our unsparing censor.  We complain generally of the unsympathizing and contemptuous tone of England towards us,—­of the mercurial standard by which she judges our strife,—­of the scarcely qualified delight with which she parades our occasional ill-successes and discomfitures,—­of the baste which she has made to find tokens of a rising despotism or a military dictatorship in those measures of our Government which are needful and consistent with the exigencies of a state of warfare, such as the suspension, on occasions, of the habeas corpus, the suppression of disloyal publications, the employment of spies, and the requisition of passports,—­and finally, of the contemptible service to which England has tried to put our last tariff, and of her evident unwillingness to have us find or furnish the finances of our war.  Not to deal, however, with generalities, we proceed to make three distinct points of an argument that crowds us with materials.

Foremost among the grievances which we at the North may allege against our brethren across the water—­foremost, both in time and in the harmful influence of its working—­we may specify this fact, that the English press, with scarce an exception, made haste, in the very earliest stages of the Southern Rebellion, to judge and announce the hopeless partition of our Union, as an event accomplished and irrevocable.  The way in which this judgment was reached and pronounced, the time and circumstances of its utterance, and the foregone conclusions which were drawn from it, gave to it a threatening and mischievous agency, only less prejudicial to our cause, we verily believe, than would have been an open alliance between England and the enemies of the Republic.  This haste to announce the positive and accomplished dissolution of our National Union was forced most painfully upon our notice in the darkest days of our opening strife.  Those who undertook to guide and instruct English opinion in the matter had easy means of informing themselves about the strangely fortuitous and deplorable, though most opportune and favoring combination of circumstances under which “Secession” was initiated and strengthened.  They knew that the Administration, then in its last days of power, was half-covertly, half-avowedly in sympathy and in active cooperation