It is time for Englishmen to consider whether there was nothing in the spirit of their press and of their leading public men calculated to rouse a just indignation, and to cause a permanent estrangement on the part of any nation capable of self-respect, and sensitively jealous, as ours then was, of foreign interference.  Was there nothing in the indecent haste with which belligerent rights were conceded to the Rebels, nothing in the abrupt tone assumed in the Trent case, nothing in the fitting out of Confederate privateers, that might stir the blood of a people already overcharged with doubt, suspicion, and terrible responsibility?  The laity in any country do not stop to consider points of law, but they have an instinctive perception of the animus that actuates the policy of a foreign nation; and in our own case they remembered that the British authorities in Canada did not wait till diplomacy could send home to England for her slow official tinder-box to fire the ‘Caroline.’  Add to this, what every sensible American knew, that the moral support of England was equal to an army of two hundred thousand men to the Rebels, while it insured us another year or two of exhausting war.  It was not so much the spite of her words (though the time might have been more tastefully chosen) as the actual power for evil in them that we felt as a deadly wrong.  Perhaps the most immediate and efficient cause of mere irritation was, the sudden and unaccountable change of manner on the other side of the water.  Only six months before, the Prince of Wales had come over to call us cousins; and everywhere it was nothing but ‘our American brethren,’ that great offshoot of British institutions in the New World, so almost identical with them in laws, language, and literature,—­this last of the alliterative compliments being so bitterly true, that perhaps it will not be retracted even now.  To this outburst of long-repressed affection we responded with genuine warmth, if with something of the awkwardness of a poor relation bewildered with the sudden tightening of the ties of consanguinity when it is rumored that he has come into a large estate.  Then came the Rebellion, and, presto! a flaw in our titles was discovered, the plate we were promised at the family table is flung at our head, and we were again the scum of creation, intolerably vulgar, at once cowardly and overbearing,—­no relations of theirs, after all, but a dreggy hybrid of the basest bloods of Europe.  Panurge was not quicker to call Friar John his former friend.  I cannot help thinking of Walter Mapes’s jingling paraphrase of Petronius,—­

’Dummodo sim splendidis vestibus ornatus,
Et multa familia sim circumvallatus,
Prudens sum et sapiens et morigeratus,
Et tuus nepos sum et tu meus cognatus,’—­

which I may freely render thus:—­

So long as I was prosperous, I’d dinners by the dozen,
Was well-bred, witty, virtuous, and everybody’s cousin;
If luck should turn, as well she may, her fancy is so flexile,
Will virtue, cousinship, and all return with her from exile?