Nelson’s signal, “England expects every man to do his duty.”  When we have risen to that level and are content to stand there, with no thought of self, but only of our country and what we owe her, we need wince at no hostile sneer nor dread any foreign combination.  Granted that we have been a little boyish and braggart, as was perhaps not unnatural in a nation hardly out of its teens, our present trial is likely to make men of us, and to leave us, like our British cousins, content with the pleasing consciousness that we are the supreme of creation and under no necessity of forever proclaiming it.  Our present experience, also, of the unsoundness of English judgment and the narrowness of English views concerning our policy and character may have the good result of making our independence in matters of thought and criticism as complete as our political emancipation.

Those who have watched the tendencies of opinion among educated Englishmen during the last ten or fifteen years could hardly be surprised, that, when the question was presented to them as being between aristocratic and democratic ideas, between a race of gentlemen and a mob of shopkeepers and snobs, they should have been inclined to sympathize with the South.  There have been unmistakable symptoms of a reaction in England, since 1848 especially, against liberalism in politics and in favor of things as they are.  We are not to wonder that Englishmen did not stop to examine too closely the escutcheon and pedigree of this self-patented nobility.  With one or two not very striking exceptions, like Lord Fairfax and Washington, (who was of kin to one of the few British peers that have enjoyed the distinction of being hanged,) the entire population of America is descended from the middle and lower classes in the old countries.  The difference has been, that the man at the South who raised cotton and sold it has gradually grown to consider himself a superior being by comparison with his own negroes, while the man at the North who raised potatoes and sold them has been content with the old Saxon notion that he was as good as his neighbors.  The descendant of the Huguenot tradesman or artisan, if in Boston, builds Faneuil Hall or founds Bowdoin College; if in Charleston, he deals in negroes and persuades himself that he is sprung from the loins of Baldwin, King of Jerusalem.  The mass of the population at the South is more intensely democratic, so far as white men are concerned, than the same class at the North.

There is a little inconsistency in the English oracles in this respect; for, while they cannot conceal a kind of sympathy with the Southern Rebels in what is supposed to be their war upon democratic institutions, they tell us that they would heartily espouse our cause, if we would but proclaim a crusade against Slavery.  Suppose the Squires of England had got up a rebellion because societies had been formed for the abolition of the Corn-Laws; which would the “Times”