As if all wars for independence were by nature just and deserving of sympathy, and all wars for empire ignoble and worthy only of reprobation, or as if these easy phrases in any way characterized this terrible struggle,—­terrible not so truly in any superficial sense, as from the essential and deadly enmity of the principles that underlie it.  His Lordship’s bit of borrowed rhetoric would justify Smith O’Brien, Nana Sahib, and the Maori chieftains, while it would condemn nearly every war in which England has ever been engaged.  Was it so very presumptuous in us to think that it would be decorous in English statesmen if they spared time enough to acquire some kind of knowledge, though of the most elementary kind, in regard to this country and the questions at issue here, before they pronounced so off-hand a judgment?  Or is political information expected to come Dogberry-fashion in England, like reading and writing, by nature?

And now all respectable England is wondering at our irritability, and sees a quite satisfactory explanation of it in our national vanity. Suave mari magno, it is pleasant, sitting in the easy-chairs of Downing Street, to sprinkle pepper on the raw wounds of a kindred people struggling for life, and philosophical to find in self-conceit the cause of our instinctive resentment.  Surely we were of all nations the least liable to any temptation of vanity at a time when the gravest anxiety and the keenest sorrow were never absent from our hearts.  Nor is conceit the exclusive attribute of any one nation.  The earliest of English travellers, Sir John Mandeville, took a less provincial view of the matter when he said, ’For fro what partie of the erthe that men duellen, other aboven or beneathen, it semethe alweys to hem that duellen that thei gon more righte than any other folke.’  The English have always had their fair share of this amiable quality.  We may say of them still, as the authour of the ‘Lettres Cabalistiques’ said of them more than a century ago, ’Ces derniers disent naturellement qu’il n’y a qu’eux qui soient estimables’.  And, as he also says,_’J’aimerois presque autant tomber entre les mains d’un Inquisiteur que d’un Anglois qui me fait sentir sans cesse combien il s’estime plus que moi, et qui ne daigne me parler que pour injurier ma Nation et pour m’ennuyer du recit des grandes qualites de la sienne_.’  Of this Bull we may safely say with Horace, habet faenum in cornu. What we felt to be especially insulting was the quiet assumption that the descendants of men who left the Old World for the sake of principle, and who had made the wilderness into a New World patterned after an Idea, could not possibly be susceptible of a generous or lofty sentiment, could have no feeling of nationality deeper than that of a tradesman for his shop.  One would have thought, in listening to England, that we were presumptuous in fancying that we were a nation at all, or had any other principle of union than that of booths at a fair, where there is no higher notion of government than the constable, or better image of God than that stamped upon the current coin.