the moroseness of an enemy who is compelled to yield.  While Lord Russell has been cautious how he offended our Government in acts, his repeated sneers in Parliament, at dinners, and on the hustings have exhibited the rancor of a jealous mind.  There has been no hearty will to do justice, no word other than of discouragement.  Even the amicable assurances which customarily pass between the statesmen of two nations seem to have been dropped.  We believe that any American would rather bear the manly and outspoken denunciations of the Earl of Derby, consistent and honest in his hostility, than the sly, covert insinuations to which the Foreign Secretary gives utterance, at the very time he is advocating a favorable course toward us.

The ministry have constantly been met with the fact that our Government has assumed throughout that the Union was to be preserved, and both the act and the possibility of secession forever crushed.  They cannot have failed to observe, that, while the inevitable fortune of war has at times brought momentary depression to our arms, the field of the Rebellion has steadily contracted,—­that those great conflicts which have seemed drawn games have contributed in every instance to the general end,—­that repulse has been invariably followed by overbalancing success.  They must have been aware that the contrast between the feeling of the North and that of the South has tended to foreshadow the issue.  Upon grounds of political economy, a life-long study to them, they must have viewed with vast suspicion the ability of a people to attain independence, who are trammelled by a blockade which they are themselves fain to acknowledge effectual, prevented from the usual methods of subsistence by inferiority of population, and under dreadful apprehensions from the existence in their midst of millions of malcontent slaves.  They have not needed a subtle knowledge of political philosophy to teach them that during the progress of the war the Federal idea has received new strength, which its success will make permanent, and which only total failure can diminish.  Their favorite doctrine, that governments within a government cannot exist, and that our Constitution is weakened by the accession of every new State and the rise of every new disagreement, is meeting its refutation every day.  A concentration of extraordinary power at the centre does not seem to shatter every bond of union, as they have predicted,—­and the States hold together and work together with amazing zeal for so feeble a tie as that they have represented.  In their intercourse with our Government, they have illustrated the effect which events have had on their policy.