“Ah!” ticked my American watch, “not even I would for a moment seem to be unjust to all that is manly and noble and friendly in England and among Englishmen.  There are two nations there, as Disraeli had already said in one sense, when Gasparin said it in another.  There is the sound old stock from which flowers the finest modern civilization.  From that come the sweetness, the candor, the perception and sympathy of men like Mill and Cairnes and Bright.  From that springs all the nobler thought of England.  It is to that thought, to that spirit of lofty humanity and pure justice, that Garibaldi appeals in his address to the English people from his prison,—­an appeal which seems utterly ludicrous, if you think of it as addressed to the historic John Bull, but which is perfectly intelligible and appropriate, if you remember that Sir Philip Sidney was an Englishman as well as George IV., and that John Stuart Mill is no less English than Lord Palmerston or Russell.  It is with that spirit that American civilization is truly harmonious.  But there is the other, merely trading, short-sighted, selfish spirit, which is typified by the coarse John Bull of the pictures, and which has touched almost to a frenzy of despair Carlyle in the “Latter-Day Pamphlets” and Tennyson in “Maud.”  That is the dominant England of the hour.  That is the England which lives at the mercy of rivals.  And that is the England which, consequently, with feverish haste, proclaims equal belligerence between the leaders of an insurrection for the extension and fortification of slavery and the nation which defends its existence against them.  That is the England whose prime-minister alleges that a friendly power has authorized an insult, while at the very moment in which he speaks he carries in his pocket the express disclaimer of that power.  That is the England which incessantly taunts and reviles and belies a kindred people, whose sole fault is that they were too slow to believe their brothers parricides, and who were credulous enough to suppose that England loved not only the profit, but the principle, of Liberty under Law.”

“It is very sad; but it certainly seems so,” said I.

“Seems, my dear friend? nay, it is,” ticked my watch, persistently.  “It is the inevitable penalty of national deterioration which any people must pay that in its haste to be rich forgets to secure its actual independence.  Thus Richard Cobden, the most sagacious of English statesmen, is the most unflinching apostle of peace, because he knows that England has put it out of her power to go to war.  I saw you reading his late argument against a blockade.  Did you reflect that it was really an argument against war?  ‘How absurd,’ he cries, ’that a commercial nation, which lives by imports and exports, paying for the one by the other, should, by shutting up ports in which it wishes to buy and sell, cut its own hands and feet off, and so bleed to death!’ ’In a commercial nation,’ says the orator, ‘the system of blockade is mere suicide.’