Mr. Beecher openly accused certain “important organs” of deliberately darkening the truth and falsifying the facts.  The audience thereupon gave three groans for a paper called the “Times,” once respectably edited, now deservedly held as cheap as an epigram of Mr. Carlyle’s or a promise to pay dated at Richmond.  He showed the monstrous absurdity of England’s attacking us for fighting, and for fighting to uphold a principle.  “On what shore has not the prow of your ships dashed?  What land is there with a name and a people where your banner has not led your soldiers?  And when the great resurrection-reveille shall sound, it will muster British soldiers from every clime and people under the whole heaven.  Ah! but it is said this is war against your own blood.  How long is it since you poured soldiers into Canada, and let all your yards work day and night to avenge the taking of two men out of the Trent?” How ignominious the pretended humanity of England looked in the light of these questions!  And even while Mr. Beecher was speaking, a lurid glow was crimsoning the waters of the Pacific from the flames of a great burning city, set on fire by British ships to avenge a crime committed by some remote inhabitant of the same country,—­an act of wholesale barbarity unapproached by any deed which can be laid to the charge of the American Union in the course of this long, exasperating conflict!

Mr. Beecher explained that the people who sympathized with the South were those whose voices reached America, while the friends of the North were little heard.  The first had bows and arrows; the second have shafts, but no bows to launch them.

“How about the Russians?”

Everybody remembers how neatly Mr. Beecher caught this envenomed dart, and, turning it end for end, drove it through his antagonist’s shield of triple bull’s-hide.  “Now you know what we felt when you were flirting with Mr. Mason at your Lord Mayor’s banquet.”  A cleaner and straighter “counter” than that, if we may change the image to one his audience would appreciate better, is hardly to be found in the records of British pugilism.

The orator concluded by a rather sanguine statement of his change of opinion as to British sentiment, of the assurance he should carry back of the enthusiasm for the cause of the North, and by an exhortation to unity of action with those who share their civilization and religion, for the furtherance of the gospel and the happiness of mankind.

The audience cheered again, Professor Newman moved a warm vote of thanks, and the meeting dissolved, wiser and better, we hope, for the truths which had been so boldly declared before them.

What is the net result, so far as we can see, of Mr. Beecher’s voluntary embassy?  So far as he is concerned, it has been to lift him from the position of one of the most popular preachers and lecturers, to that of one of the most popular men in the country.  Those who hate his philanthropy admire his courage.  Those who disagree with him in theology recognize him as having a claim to the title of Apostle quite as good as that of John Eliot, whom Christian England sent to heathen America two centuries ago, and who, in spite of the singularly stupid questionings of the natives, and the violent opposition of the sachems and powwows, or priests, succeeded in reclaiming large numbers of the copper-colored aborigines.