tidings came to us, and soon were spread over the world, that the Rebels had experienced the most terrible disasters in the Southwest, whereby the so-called Confederacy had been cut in two.  These facts gave pause to those intentions of acknowledgment which had undoubtedly been entertained in European courts and cabinets; and nothing afterward occurred, down to the day of Chickamauga, which was calculated to effect a change in the minds of the rulers of the Old World.  But when intelligence of Chickamauga reached Europe, England had taken a position so determinedly hostile to intervention in any of its many forms and stages that even a much greater disaster than that could have produced no evil to our cause abroad.  For it is to be remembered that the whole business of intervention has lain from the beginning in the bosom of England, and that, if she had chosen to act against us in force, she could have done so with the strongest hope of success, if merely our humiliation, or even our destruction, had been her object, and without any immediate danger threatening herself as the consequence of her hostile action.  The French Government, not France, or any considerable portion of the French people, has been ready to interfere in behalf of the Rebels for more than two years, and would have entered upon the process of intervention long since, if it had not been held back by the obstinate refusal of England to unite with her in that pro-slavery crusade which, it is with regret we say it, the French Emperor has so much at heart; and without the aid and assistance of England, the ruler of France could not and durst not move an inch against us.  Not the least, nor least strange, of the changes of this mutable world is to be seen in the circumstance that France should be restrained from undoing the work of the Bourbons and of Napoleon I. by England’s firm opposition to the wishes and purposes of Napoleon III.  The Bourbon policy, as well in Spain as in France, brought about the early overthrow of England’s rule over the territory of the old United States; and the first Napoleon sold Louisiana to us for a song, because he was convinced, that, by so doing, he should aid to build up a formidable naval rival of England.  The man who seeks to undo all this, to destroy what Bourbon and Bonaparte sacrificed so much to effect, is the heir of Bonaparte, and the expounder and illustrator of Napoleon’s ideas; and the power that places herself resolutely across his path, and will not join in his plot to erase us from the list of nations is—­England!  In a romance such a state of things would be pronounced too absurd for invention; but in this every-day world it is nothing but a commonplace incident, extraordinary as it may seem at the first thought that is bestowed upon it.