When these words reached us, we said, “We can wait; our friends in England will soon see whither this conflict is tending.”  A year and a half have passed; step after step has been taken for Liberty; chain after chain has fallen, till the march of our enemies is choked and clogged by the glad flocking of emancipated slaves; the day of final emancipation is set; the Border States begin to move in voluntary consent; universal freedom for all dawns like the sun in the distant horizon:  and still no voice from England.  No voice?  Yes, we have heard on the high seas the voice of a war-steamer, built for a man-stealing Confederacy with English gold in an English dockyard, going out of an English harbor, manned by English sailors, with the full knowledge of English Government-officers, in defiance of the Queen’s proclamation of neutrality.  So far has English sympathy overflowed.  We have heard of other steamers, iron-clad, designed to furnish to a Slavery-defending Confederacy their only lack,—­a navy for the high seas.  We have heard that the British Evangelical Alliance refuses to express sympathy with the liberating party, when requested to do so by the French Evangelical Alliance.  We find in English religious newspapers all those sad degrees in the downward sliding scale of defending and apologizing for slaveholders and slaveholding with which we have so many years contended in our own country.  We find the President’s Proclamation of Emancipation spoken of in those papers only as an incitement to servile insurrection.  Nay, more,—­we find in your papers, from thoughtful men, the admission of the rapid decline of anti-slavery sentiments in England.  Witness the following:—­

“The Rev. Mr. Maurice, Principal of the Working-Men’s College, Great Ormond Street, delivered the first general lecture of the term on Saturday evening, and took for his subject the state of English feeling on the Slavery question.  He said, a few days ago, in a conversation on the American war, that some gentlemen connected with the College had confessed to a change in their sympathies in the matter.  On the outbreak of the war, they had been strong sympathizers with the Government and the Northern States, but gradually they had drifted until they found themselves desiring the success of the seceded States, and all but free from their anti-slavery feelings and tendencies.  These confessions elicited strong expressions of indignation from a gentleman present, who had lectured in the College on the war in Kansas.  He (Mr. Maurice) felt inclined to share in the indignation expressed; but since, he could not help feeling that this change was very general in England.”

Alas, then, England! is it so?  In this day of great deeds and great heroisms, this solemn hour when the Mighty Redeemer is coming to break every yoke, do we hear such voices from England?