the spoil of guilt had been partaken.  But while we behold with awe, in the present calamity, the manifestation of Supreme Justice, we look with confident hope to the final issue to which it must lead.  In whatever mode that end may be brought out, and through whatever struggles America may yet be doomed to pass, we are assured that only one termination can await a conflict between a nation which has abjured its complicity with crime and a confederation which exists but to perpetuate that crime forever.  It is not now, in the presence of the events of the last three years, that we shall be tempted to fear that Wrong and Robbery, and the systematic degradation of woman, may possibly prove to be principles of stability, capable of producing the security and consolidation of a commonwealth!  Your courage in this Titanic strife,—­the lavish devotion with which the best blood of your land has been poured out on the field, and the tears of childless mothers shed in homes never before visited by the sorrows of war,—­the patriotic generosity with which your treasures have been cast into the gulf opened suddenly in your busy and prosperous land, even as of old in the forum of ancient Rome,—­these noble acts of yours inspire with confidence in you, no less than pride in the indomitable energies of our common race.  But above your valor and your patriotism, we look with still higher hope to those moral laws whose vindication is involved in the issue of the conflict; and we feel assured, that, while for the Slave-Power the future can hold no possibility of enduring prosperity, for Free America it promises the regeneration of a higher and holier national existence, when the one great blot which marred the glory of the past shall have been expiated and effaced forever.

“This, Madam, is the belief and these are the hopes of thousands of Englishmen.  They are, we are persuaded, even more universally the belief and hopes of the Women of England, whose hearts the complicated difficulties of politics and the miserable jealousies of national rivalry do not distract from the great principles underlying the contest.  The failure of English sympathy whereof you complain is but partial at the most, and for that partial failure we deeply and sorrowfully grieve.  But the nation at large is still true; and wherever it has been possible to learn the feelings of the great masses, no lack of ardent feeling has ever been found in England for the Northern cause.  Though senseless words and inhuman jests have been bandied across the Atlantic, yet we are assured that in the heart of both our nations survives unchanged that kindred regard and respect whose property it is, above other human feelings, to be indestructible.  At this hour of your own greatest need and direful struggle,—­at this hour, when a pirate from our ports is ravaging your shores, as you believe (albeit erroneously) with our guilty connivance—­at this very hour you have come forward with noblest generosity, and sent us the rich vessel which has brought food to our starving people.  The Griswold has been your answer to the Alabama.  It is a magnanimous, a sublime one; and English hearts are not too cold to read it aright, or to cherish through all future time the memory thereof.  Scorn and hate are transient and evanescent things; charity and love have in them the elements of immortality.