600,000 soldiers.  But if the Northerners should now elect to throw themselves into a quarrel with England, if in the gratification of a shameless braggadocio they should insist on doing what they liked, not only with their own, but with the property of all others also, it certainly did seem as though utter ruin must await their cause.  With England, or one might say with Europe, against them, secession must be accomplished, not on Northern terms, but on terms dictated by the South.  The choice was then for them to make; and just at that time it seemed as though they were resolved to throw away every good card out of their hand.  Such had been the ministerial wisdom of Mr. Seward.  I remember hearing the matter discussed in easy terms by one of the United States Senators.  “Remember, Mr. Trollope,” he said to me, “we don’t want a war with England.  If the choice is given to us, we had rather not fight England.  Fighting is a bad thing.  But remember this also, Mr. Trollope, that if the matter is pressed on us, we have no great objection.  We had rather not, but we don’t care much one way or the other.”  What one individual may say to another is not of much moment, but this Senator was expressing the feelings of his constituents, who were the legislature of the State from whence he came.  He was expressing the general idea on the subject of a large body of Americans.  It was not that he and his State had really no objection to the war.  Such a war loomed terribly large before the minds of them all.  They know it to be fraught with the saddest consequences.  It was so regarded in the mind of that Senator.  But the braggadocio could not be omitted.  Had be omitted it, he would have been untrue to his constituency.

When I left Boston for Washington, nothing was as yet known of what the English government or the English lawyers might say.  This was in the first week in December, and the expected voice from England could not be heard till the end of the second week.  It was a period of great suspense, and of great sorrow also to the more sober-minded Americans.  To me the idea of such a war was terrible.  It seemed that in these days all the hopes of our youth were being shattered.  That poetic turning of the sword into a sickle, which gladdened our hearts ten or twelve years since, had been clean banished from men’s minds.  To belong to a peace party was to be either a fanatic, an idiot, or a driveler.  The arts of war had become everything.  Armstrong guns, themselves indestructible but capable of destroying everything within sight, and most things out of sight, were the only recognized results of man’s inventive faculties.  To build bigger, stronger, and more ships than the French was England’s glory.  To hit a speck with a rifle bullet at 800 yards distance was an Englishman’s first duty.  The proper use for a young man’s leisure hours was the practice of drilling.  All this had come upon us with very quick steps since the beginning of the