been in the day of trial?  Into whose hands would the Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the nation as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in spite of the volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered the roar of the first gun at Sumter?  Worse than all, are we permitted to doubt that in the very bosom of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but not sleeping, which only listened for the first word that made it safe to strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend its golden scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the cotton-fields.  Who would not wish that he were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can forget the mysterious warnings that the allies of the rebels were to be found far north of the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own streets, against their own brothers, that the champions of liberty were to defend her sacred heritage?

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish the means for its commission.  It would have been to placard ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud labor-thieves called us.  It would have been to die as a nation of freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere, and to humanity.  You have only to see who are our friends and who are our enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are combating.  We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with us.  We know what the West End of London wishes may be result of this controversy.  The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the shears, threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or later cut into shreds the old charters of tyranny.  How they would exult if they could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one resistless weapon!  The man who of all living Americans had the best opportunity of knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in March, 1862:  “That Great Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master it, and then become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect way possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably be the verdict made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the evidence.”

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occupied the same position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn Republic.