“No, no; lose no time; go regularly on,” answered I.

“Very well; while England sneers and rages at us, let us be warned by her.  She lives by her looms; but her looms and her laborers are fed from abroad.  Therefore she lies at the mercy of her enemies, and she takes care never to make friends.  She snarls and shows her teeth at us.  She sees us desperately fighting, and yet she can neither spring nor bite.  It is the moment most favorable for her to strike, but she cannot improve it.  She hopes and prays for the ruin of our government, seeing, that, if it falls from internal disease, and not from a foreign blow, her most threatening political and commercial rival is overthrown.  And she does not shrink from those hopes and prayers, although she knows that the result she so ardently desires will be the establishment by military power of a huge slave-empire, a counter-civilization to that of Christianity.  Fear of her life makes England false and timid.  Her dependence upon other nations has compelled her to abdicate her position as the head of Saxon civilization, which is the gradual enlarging of liberty as the only permanent security of universal international prosperity and peace.  Indeed, it is not denied that the tone of British opinion in regard to human slavery is radically changed.  That change is the measure of the timidity and sophistication, the moral deterioration inevitably produced in any people by the consciousness of its dependence for the means of labor and life upon other nations.  The crack of the plantation-whip scares Washington no longer, but it pierces the heart of Westminster with terror.

“See how utterly mean and mortifying is her attitude toward us.  John Bull looks across the highway of the world into his neighbor’s house.  ‘D’ ye see,’ he mutters, ’that man chastising his son in his house yonder?  Let’s play that they are not related, and ask him what he means by assaulting an innocent passenger.’  Then he turns to the rest of the people in the street, who know exactly how virtuous and mild John Bull is in his own family-relations, who have watched his tender forbearance with his eldest son Erin, and his long-suffering suavity with his youngest son India, and says to them,—­’To a moral citizen of the world it is very shocking to see such an insolent attack upon a peaceable person.  That man is an intolerable bully.  If he were smaller, I’d step over and kick him.’—­Do you feel drowsy?” asked my watch.

“I was never more awake,” I answered; “but you seem to me,—­although, when I look at you and think of Waltham, it is the most natural thing in the world,—­yet you do seem hard upon Old England, Mother England, spite of all.”