The diplomatic correspondence which has just come over from New
York looks ugly. It authenticates the statement that the American Government had definitively requested the recall of Mr. Crampton. There is reason to doubt whether this eorre- ppondence is not to a certain extent out of date—whether the ac- tual tone of relations between the two countries is so bad as it would look from these documents. Diplomacy always seems to throw a veil over the truth, and to preset an appearance instead of facts.
Mr. Buchanan's appearance as a guest at the Mansionhouse of London is a fact, and most of the statements that he made are matters of fact. It is true that a war between England and America would throw back the course of civilization and of human liberty ; true that in proportion as the frontiers of either extend, freedom and liberal institutions are extended over the unsettled parts of the earth. It is also true that there has al- ways been "a group of unsettled questions between the two countries "—questions arising from the diversity of view neces- sarily taken by those who have their stand upon the old country and those who are moving upon the new land. We who live in compact islands, with a police survey over every acre, naturally think it a gross dereliction of duty in a Government which per- mits wholesale trespassing even upon adjacent waste land ; but in America, where, generation after generation, the squatter has trespassed upon the domain of the savage, and the borderer has encroached upon the ill-defined settlement next him, without the sound of the policeman's voice to check him, they hold en- croachment to be a thing as easily controlled as the winds ; and any question arising on the subject of land-occupation must necessarily derive a distinct colour, have a distinct aspect, to the two sides. We must have questions unsettled, perhaps for some few generations more ; but we have business men—the Websters and the Ashburtons have not entirely passed away ; and we ought to be able to prevent war, if we cannot prevent bickering. That we take to be the moral of Mr. Buchanan's speech ; certainly it was a moral which found favour at the Lord Mayor's dinner- table ; it is the accepted moral in the commercial public of England ; and we happen to know that it is the moral for the steady-going part of the American public. The fact that Mr. Buchanan said such things, and was cheered by an English .company in saying them, cannot be without its political influence in the United States.
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