A nation which has made the professions that England has, does not
with impunity, under however great provocation, betake itself to
frustrating the objects for which it has been calling on the rest of
the world to make sacrifices of what they think their interest. At
present all the nations of Europe have sympathized with us; have
acknowledged that we were injured, and declared with rare unanimity,
that we had no choice but to resist, if necessary, by arms. But the
consequences of such a war would soon have buried its causes in
oblivion. When the new Confederate States, made an independent Power
by English help, had begun their crusade to carry negro slavery from
the Potomac to Cape Horn; who would then have remembered that England
raised up this scourge to humanity not for the evil's sake, but
because somebody had offered an insult to her flag? Or even if
unforgotten, who would then have felt that such a grievance was a
sufficient palliation of the crime? Every reader of a newspaper, to
the farthest ends of the earth, would have believed and remembered one
thing only--that at the critical juncture which was to decide whether
slavery should blaze up afresh with increased vigor or be trodden out
at the moment of conflict between the good and the evil spirit--at the
dawn of a hope that the demon might now at last be chained and flung
into the pit, England stepped in, and, for the sake of cotton, made
Satan victorious.
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