TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ENGLISH TEMPER TOWARDS AMERICA. THE state of feeling between England and America is one to excite grave, and we fear it may be lasting, anxiety in the minds of all attentive politicians. Our relations are strained and critical, and are scarcely likely to become much less so. There is serious fault on both sides, and true candour on neither. Lord Russell is the only prominent statesman on either shore of the Atlantic who is guiltless, or nearly guilt- less, of blame for this state of tension. America boasts and England taunts. America asks nominally for neutrality, when she means something very like an alliance ; and Eng- land offers as neutrality what is something very like hostility. But the true cause, after all, of the electric state of the political atmosphere is this,—that the North feels the attention of England fastened on her inferiority to the South in equanimity of bearing and administrative skill—which is as conspicuous as it is irritating,—while she gets no sympathy at all for that superiority to the South in purpose and motive which made her feel the revolution so bitter and intolerable an injury. And this is a consequence in great degree of our aristocratic standards for estimating political government. English statesmen think of composure, high bearing, a firm will, and a strong arm, as the external signs of good government, just as they would take the same characteristics in an indi- vidual as the external signs of good blood and high breeding. They go no further in their estimate than the mere demeanour of a government. They see the Northern statesmen boastful, fidgetty, and wavering—intoxicated with a little success, trying to ignore great failures—and they stamp the Govern. ment at once as mean, while it is only plebeian. They see the Southern Government comparatively reticent, promising little, performing much, tranquil in adversity, unelated in prosperity, and they stamp the Government at once as good, when it is only able, and united by the vigour of an evil ambition. The causes which cement its public opinion may be—we know are—very discreditable causes—causes which imply the vital strength of a degraded prejudice in the masses, and the intelligent use of those prejudices by the few. But not the less does the superficial opinion of English culture judge by the result and ignore the cause. It is always easier in England to fight for a bad cause well managed, than for a good cause ill managed, or rather not managed at all, which is nearly the case of the Federal cause. We have no patience in England with mere political yeast And the North, for the last two years, since it was delivered from the defined purposes and statesmanlike yoke of the Slavery party, has been a mere massof fermentation, traversed in every direction by a thousand streams of incoherent ten- dency, knowing nothing" save its wish to keep the Union unbroken, and not knowing at all the best way to do that.
The English system of misrepresentation, which sows the seeds of so much bitterness in the North, has never been more ably or more flagrantly expressed than in Mr. Horsman's oration last week in the House of Commons. Mr. Horsman is one of those politicians who, when he transgresses the wise sobriety of the legislative temper, should be beaten with many stripes. Poor Mr. Roebuck, on the other hand, is one who deserves, even for much worse offences, to be beaten with but few. Mr. Horsman, as a conspicuous orator, as accustomed to study the views and wishes of temperate aristocratic thinkers, as wielding a considerable influence therefore in the country, though himself but an incon- siderable statesman, naturally spoke yesterday week " under a deep sense of that responsibility which weighs on every gentleman who speaks on American affairs." And the deeper was his sense of responsibility, the deeper ought now to be his remorse, for he sacrificed statesmanship to oratory, the duty of taking a calm view to the pleasure of taking an exciting one, the obligation (which he evidently understood) of forming an impartial estimate of the situation, to the craving, which he evidently shared, to paint up a false antithesis, and tune the flow and ebb of his eloquence to the prejudices of his audience. No one expounded better than Mr. Horsman the great issues which depend now on the equity of English public men. No one showed a keener appreciation of the imminence of war with America, of the fearful evils of such a catastrophe, of the duty of a severely dignified neutrality. But no one did more to provoke what he deprecated,—to misinform the imaginations and mislead the sympathies of those who heard or read those artistic and persuasive periods. Mr. Horsman has really exhausted the whole truth of his philippic against the North when he calls its leaders "bewildered and desperate men ! " he has exhausted the whole truth of his eulogium on the South when he speaks of the President as " having given elevation to the Southern cause " " by the dignity of his counsels, the high bearing of his army, and the devotion of his people." Both these assertions recommend themselves as true to an impartial critic,—and they are the only truths of Mr. Horsman's speech ; for, with a rhetorical artifice more skil- ful than worthy, he tried to eke out, by misrepresentation and innuendo, these meagre materials into a vehement panegyric on the Southern cause and a vehement invective against the Northern. He spoke of Englishmen as not willing to tole- rate cant,—a national characteristic of which, by the way, we have but little reason to boast,—and his speech, from beginning to end, is one long specimen of that stately aristo- cratic cant which does more than anything else to blind the eyes of the governing classes to the true political facts of life.
His first indictment against the North, that it has fostered — " passions and hatreds which reader this war a disgrace to the civilization of the age," is, in the mouth of an Englishman, the worst kind of cant. There probably never was yet a civil war conducted with so little vindictiveness, certainly never one in which the aggrieved Government,—for, of course, the actual power rebelled against always stands in the position of the aggrieved party,—was so guiltless of any spirit of revenge. Except in the case of General Neil's passionate act of revenge (a proceeding disowned by Mr. Lincoln), we doubt if a single life has been taken, otherwise than in battle, by the betrayed Government. We are not afraid to say that the Federal Government has shown, on the whole, a humanity of which England would be incapable in a like case,—was incapable in India a very few years ago. We should not have countenanced, indeed, an ungentlemanly despot of the precise character of General Butler,—but does Mr. Horsman happen to remember the mild, apologetic tone in which Mr. Cooper's massacre at the well of Umritsur was discussed in the House of Commons? Did he himself interpose then to denounce such acts of fearful bloodshed as a " disgrace to the civilization of the age,"—or was not (perhaps rightly) every excuse made for a man who knew that there was but one method of keeping a province forthe empire? We dislike General Butler's rule as much as Mr. Horsman, but we confess that we knowno worse cant than the cant of the English Conservatives, who speak of the severities of the Federal Government as "a disgrace to the civilization of the age," when they have shown themselves, a thousand times, willing to endorse infinitely bit- terer disgraces to the civilization of the age, in order to pre- serve a single square mile to the English rule. If Mr. Horsman had said what he meant, he would have expressed his disgust for a Government which talks more disreputably than it acts. Educated taste and aristocratic composure prefer one which, while it strikes fiercely, can talk with self- restraint. Mr. Horsman is severe on "an extinct authority and a malevolent legislature," but he has never a word to say against Austria, when she holds down Venice with a hand far more cruel than General Butler's, because there the authority, though malevolent, is silent, and only the legislature is extinct.
But the worst specimen of Mr. Horsman's aristocratic cant is his cant about the President's Emancipation Proclamation, when he denounces it as " as one of the worst crimes against civilization and humanity which the world has ever seen." The almost vulgar sincerity of the North comes out in curious contrast to this favourite morsel of prevalent English cant. Mr. Horsman accuses most inconsistently the Northern Govern- ment of continuing, under the disguise of philanthropy, " a war of extermination," while admitting in the same sentence that there was no such disguise about it, but that it was pro- claimed by the Federal Government a " stem military necessity." If there is no disguise in the Northern plea for its emancipation policy, there is plenty of disguise in Mr. Horsman's denunciation of it. He tries to present the question as an alternative between the admitted purposes of the North and the purposes of true philanthropists who should have ample power to emancipate as they pleased, and exclaims :—" I don't require to be told by my honourable friend that slavery is a great crime ; but ho does require to be told by me that there is yet a greater crime than slavery. For a crime it is, of a deeper and more unpardonable dye, for a white man and a Christian to invite a negro to achieve his freedom by a carnival of crime, forgetting that emancipation, to be safe, must be gradual,—that it should be peaceful, not violent,-that it should be preceded by measures of prepa- ration to make freedom a blessing, not a curse, to its reci- pient." And who are the deadly opponents of gradual eman-
cipat on except Mr. Horsman's clients ? To whom is it due tha there is no hope left for that statesmanlike solution of the
atest problem with which politicians ever had to deal? Was iyot the deadly fear and hatred of this humanizing necessity the rime cause of the revolution? Who knows better than Mr. Horsman that slavery, had its area been strictly limited accord- ing to the programme of the Republican party—excluded from the Territories, tied up in the area of the present States—must have died gradually out by the very process the English apologist of the Slaveowners recommends,—that it was pre- cisely because Mr. Jefferson Davis would not admit this solution at any price, that he proclaimed the South a mis- sionary Slave power, and led it out of the bondage of even modi- fied association with freedom ? It is the cant of a wilfully per- verted intellect to cry out with horror against the North for trying to cut the knot which the South has not only angrily refused to untie, but gone apart by itself to knot into more and more complicated and pernicious folds. We all reviled the Republicans three years ago for adopting so mild and weak an Anti-slavery policy—the policy of an external restraint gradually undermining the life of the domestic institution. And now the very men who did so, turn round and revile the Republicans for accepting the alternative forced upon them by the wicked ambition of the South, and preferring the dangers of a sudden emancipation to letting a missionary Slave power go. Mr. Horsman well knows that the alternative to sudden emancipation is, not gradual emancipation, but a rapid and powerful growth of the slave system. It was that for which his statesmanlike friends contended when they made the admission of slavery into the Territories, the sine qua non condition of peace ; it is that for which they are fighting now. It is he who, in defending them, is the " apologist of des- potism ;" it is his friends, with their novel and blasphemous corner-stone, who are " destroying a nation and disgracing an age."
If Mr. Horsman really abhors cant, let him look a little beneath the dignified exterior of the Southern, a little also be- neath the undignified exterior of the Northern statesmanship, and tell us what he sees. He will find in the one, singleness of purpose of that kind which gives strength to the Government at the expense of the people, a capable class built up on an incapable populace, uniformity avoided by tyranny, variety ensured by consecrating the imperious passions of an oligarchy and the systematic pillage of the labouring class. He will find in the other the collective incoherence of mind which absolute uniformity of individual culture appears to give, ideas sometimes flatulent and sometimes noble bubbling up freely here and there, but nowhere, as yet, attaining a legitimate consistency and control—vindictive language and placability in action,--the changeful mood of an intelligent, but not intellectual, community ; in short, very much the mind and temper of our own middle class shorn of the better educated thought which steers, and the better educated purpose which uses it. As an aristocrat he will, perhaps, prefer the former ;—if he has in him also something deeper than aristocracy, he will see that it is both wiser and better to make friends of the latter. For England, at least, it is a question of no small moment whether she chooses the friendship of a great, active, ill-organized people, or of a well-organized oligarchy rotten at its roots, and re- commending itself to the nineteenth century only by boldly proposing to renew the greatest curse of the heathen world, under the auspices of an oppressive constitution and a hypocritical Christianity.
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