but it is to the House of Commons that these high functionaries are principally accountable, and because, if they forfeit the confidence of the House of Commons, the House of Lords can avail them but little.  The matter is of much importance and much difficulty.  We can only hope that the opportunity of redressing this manifest imperfection in the structure of the present government will not be lost, and that the House of Commons may recover those political privileges which it has hitherto been its pride to enjoy.”

This distribution of power in the English Cabinet furnishes a sufficient solution of the present attitude of the English Government towards this country.  The ruling classes of England can have no sincere sympathy with the North, because its institutions and instincts are democratic.  They give countenance to the South, because at heart and in practice it is essentially an aristocracy.  To remove the dangerous example of a successful and powerful republic, where every man has equal rights, civil and religious, and where a privileged order in Church and State is impossible, has become in the minds of England’s governing classes an imperious necessity.  Compared with the importance of securing this result, all other considerations weigh as nothing.  Brothers by blood, language, and religion, as they have been accustomed to call us while we were united and formidable, we are now, since civil war has weakened us and great national questions have distracted our councils, treated as aliens, if not as enemies.  On the other hand, the South, whose leaders have ever been first to take hostile ground against England, and whose “peculiar institution” has drawn upon us the eloquent and unsparing denunciations of English philanthropists, is just now in high favor with the “mother-country.”  Not only has the ill-disguised dislike of the Tories ripened into open animosity, not only are we the target for the shallow scorn of the Chestertons, (even a donkey may dare to kick a dying lion,) but we have lost the once strongly pronounced friendship of such ardent anti-slavery men as Lord Brougham and the Earl of Shaftesbury.  Why is this?  Does not the explanation lie in a nutshell?  We were becoming too strong.  We were disturbing the balance of power.  We were demonstrating too plainly the inherent activity and irresistible energy of a purely democratic form of government.  Therefore Carthago delenda est.  “But yet the pity of it, Iago!” Mark how a Christian nation deals with a Christian ally.  Our destruction is to be accomplished, not by open warfare, but by the delusive and dastardly pretence of neutrality.  There is to be no diplomatic recognition of an independent Southern Confederacy, but a formidable navy is to be furnished to our enemies, and their armies are to be abundantly supplied with the munitions of war.  But how?  By the English Government?  Oh, no!  This would be in violation of solemn treaties.  Earl Russell says, “We