What would be an English merchant’s character after a few such transactions?  It is not improbable that the moralists of the Herald would call him a rascal.  Why have the United States been paying seven, eight, ten per cent for money for years past, when the same commodity can be got elsewhere at half that rate of interest?  Why, because though among the richest proprietors in the world, creditors were not sure of them.  So the States have had to pay eighty millions yearly for the use of money which would cost other borrowers but thirty.  Add up this item of extra interest alone for a dozen years, and see what a prodigious penalty the States have been paying for repudiation here and there, for sharp practice, for doubtful credit.  Suppose the peace is kept between us, the remembrance of this last threat alone will cost the States millions and millions more.  If they must have money, we must have a greater interest to insure our jeopardized capital.  Do American Companies want to borrow money—­as want to borrow they will?  Mr. Brown, show the gentleman that extract from the New York Herald which declares that the United States will confiscate private property in the event of a war.  As the country newspapers say, “Please, country papers, copy this paragraph.”  And, gentlemen in America, when the honor of your nation is called in question, please to remember that it is the American press which glories in announcing that you are prepared to be rogues.

And when this war has drained uncounted hundreds of millions more out of the United States exchequer, will they be richer or more inclined to pay debts, or less willing to evade them, or more popular with their creditors, or more likely to get money from men whom they deliberately announce that they will cheat?  I have not followed the Herald on the “stone-ship” question—­that great naval victory appears to me not less horrible and wicked than suicidal.  Block the harbors for ever; destroy the inlets of the commerce of the world; perish cities,—­so that we may wreak an injury on them.  It is the talk of madmen, but not the less wicked.  The act injures the whole Republic:  but it is perpetrated.  It is to deal harm to ages hence; but it is done.  The Indians of old used to burn women and their unborn children.  This stone-ship business is Indian warfare.  And it is performed by men who tell us every week that they are at the head of civilization, and that the Old World is decrepit, and cruel, and barbarous as compared to theirs.

The same politicians who throttle commerce at its neck, and threaten to confiscate trust-money, say that when the war is over, and the South is subdued, then the turn of the old country will come, and a direful retribution shall be taken for our conduct.  This has been the cry all through the war.  “We should have conquered the South,” says an American paper which I read this very day, “but for England.”  Was there ever such puling heard from men who have