It is natural to sympathize with people who are fighting for their rights; but if these prove to be the right of selling children by the pound and trading in husbands and wives as merchantable articles, should not Englishmen think twice before giving their sympathy?  A pirate-ship on the high seas is fighting for independence!  Let us be consistent.

It has been said that we have been over-sensitive, thin-skinned.  It is one inconvenient attendant of love and respect, that they do induce sensitiveness.  A brother or father turning against one in the hour of trouble, a friend sleeping in the Gethsemane of our mortal anguish, does not always find us armed with divine patience.  We loved England; we respected, revered her; we were bound to her by ties of blood and race.  Alas! must all these declarations be written in the past tense?

But that we may not be thought to have over-estimated the popular tide against us, we shall express our sense of it in the words of an English writer, one of the noble few who have spoken the truth on our side.  Referring to England’s position on this question, he says:—­

“What is the meaning of this?  Why does the English nation, which has made itself memorable to all time as the destroyer of negro slavery, which has shrunk from no sacrifices to free its own character from that odious stain, and to close all the countries of the world against the slave-merchant,—­why is it that the nation which is at the head of Abolitionism, not only feels no sympathy with those who are fighting against the slaveholding conspiracy, but actually desires its success?  Why is the general voice of our press, the general sentiment of our people bitterly reproachful to the North, while for the South, the aggressors in the war, we have either mild apologies or direct and downright encouragement,—­and this not only from the Tory and anti-Democratic camp, but from Liberals, or soi-disant such?

“This strange perversion of feeling prevails nowhere else.  The public of France, and of the Continent generally, at all events the Liberal part of it, saw at once on which side were justice and moral principle, and gave its sympathies consistently and steadily to the North.  Why is England an exception?”

In the beginning of our struggle, the voices that reached us across the water said, “If we were only sure you were fighting for the abolition of slavery, we should not dare to say whither our sympathies for your cause might not carry us.”

Such, as we heard, were the words of the honored and religious nobleman who draughted this very letter which you signed and sent us, and to which we are now replying.