because of their superior strength or resources?  A very little inquiry would have set aside that suggestion.  Was it because of the nobleness of their cause?  A very frank avowal from the Vice-President of the assumed Confederacy announced to liberty-loving Englishmen that that cause was identified with a slavocracy.  Or was the Rebel cause to succeed through the dignity and purity of the means enlisted in its service?  It was equally well known on both sides of the water by what means and appliances of fraud, perfidy, treachery, and other outrages, the schemes of the Rebellion were initiated and pursued.  If, in spite of all these negatives, the English press prophesies success to the Rebels, was not the prophecy a great comfort and spur to them?—­Again, this prophecy of our sure discomfiture prejudiced us before the world.  It gave a public character and aspect of hopelessness to our cause; it invited coldness of treatment towards us; it seemed to warn off all nations from giving us aid or comfort; and it virtually affirmed that any outlay of means or life by us in a cause seen to be impracticable would be reckless, sanguinary, cruel, and inhuman.—­And, once more, to those among ourselves who are influenced by evil prognostications, it was most dispiriting to be told, as if by cool, unprejudiced observers from outside, that no uprising of patriotism, no heroism of sacrifice, no combination of wisdom and power would be of any avail to resist a foreordained catastrophe.—­In these three harmful ways of influence, the ill-omened opinion reiterated from abroad had a tendency to fulfil itself.  The whole plea of justification offered abroad for the opinion is given in the assertion that those who have once been bitterly alienated can never be brought into true harmony again, and that it is impossible to govern the unwilling as equals.  England has but to read the record of her own strifes and battles and infuriated passages with Scotland and Ireland,—­between whom and herself alienations of tradition, prejudice, and religion seemed to make harmony as impossible as the promise of it is to these warring States,—­England has only to refresh her memory on these points, in order to relieve us of the charge of folly in attempting an impossibility.  So much for the first grievance we allege against our English brethren.

Another of our specifications of wrong is involved in that already considered.  If English opinion decided that our nationality must henceforth be divided, it seemed also to imply that we ought to divide according to terms dictated by the Seceders.  This was a precious judgment to be pronounced against us by a sister Government which was standing in solemn treaty relations with us as a unit in our nationality!  What did England suppose had become of our Northern manhood, of the spirit of which she herself once felt the force?  There was something alike humiliating and exasperating in this implied advice from her, that we should tamely and unresistingly submit to a division of continent, bays, and rivers, according to terms defiantly and insultingly proposed by those who had a joint ownership with ourselves.  How would England receive such advice from us under like circumstances?  But we must cut short the utterance of our feelings on this point, that we may make another specification,—­