“What would you in England have thought,” a gentleman of much weight in Boston said to me, “if, when you were in trouble in India, we had openly declared that we regarded your opponents there are as belligerents on equal terms with yourselves?” I was forced to say that, as far as I could see, there was no analogy between the two cases.  In India an army had mutinied, and that an army composed of a subdued, if not a servile race.  The analogy would have been fairer had it referred to any sympathy shown by us to insurgent negroes.  But, nevertheless, had the army which mutinied in India been in possession of ports and sea-board; had they held in their hands vast commercial cities and great agricultural districts; had they owned ships and been masters of a wide-spread trade, America could have done nothing better toward us than have remained neutral in such a conflict and have regarded the parties as belligerents.  The only question is whether she would have done so well by us.  “But,” said my friend, in answer to all this, “we should not have proclaimed to the world that we regarded you and them as standing on an equal footing.”  There again appeared the true gist of the offense.  A word from England such as that spoken by Lord John Russell was of such weight to the South that the North could not endure to have it spoken.  I did not say to that gentleman, but here I may say that, had such circumstances arisen as those conjectured, and had America spoken such a word, England would not have felt herself called upon to resent it.

But the fairer analogy lies between Ireland and the Southern States.  The monster meetings and O’Connell’s triumphs are not so long gone by but that many of us can remember the first demand for secession made by Ireland, and the line which was then taken by American sympathies.  It is not too much to say that America then believed that Ireland would secure secession, and that the great trust of the Irish repealers was in the moral aid which she did and would receive from America.  “But our government proclaimed no sympathy with Ireland,” said my friend.  No.  The American government is not called on to make such proclamations, nor had Ireland ever taken upon herself the nature and labors of a belligerent.

That this anger on the part of the North is unreasonable, I cannot doubt.  That it is unfortunate, grievous, and very bitter, I am quite sure.  But I do not think that it is in any degree surprising.  I am inclined to think that, did I belong to Boston as I do belong to London, I should share in the feeling, and rave as loudly as all men there have raved against the coldness of England.  When men have on hand such a job of work as the North has now undertaken, they are always guided by their feelings rather than their reason.  What two men ever had a quarrel in which each did not think that all the world, if just, would espouse his own side of the dispute?  The North feels that it has been more than loyal