TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD RUSSELL ON HIS DEFENCE. LORD RUSSELL and Mr. Sumner have we sincerely believe, the same cause of freedom warmly at heart; nor is the latter at all more honest or more hearty than the former in his utter hatred of a society founded upon slavery, which the Secessionists have formally adopted as the chief aim and object of their present crusade. And yet it is scarcely possible to conceive a wider contrast than is presented by the speeches in which the senator for Massachusetts has assailed, and Lord Russell last Saturday at Blairgowrie defended, the attitude of the British Government. We do not refer to tone, though the tone of each was in keeping with the sub- stance of his speech,—Mr. Sumner's ornate, diffuse, fanciful, acrimonious,—Lord Russell's brief, grave, judicial, and yet incisive. We refer to the much wider difference of which that tone is merely the reflection. Mr. Sumner, heartily as he has embraced what we believe to be the one greatest, and deepest, and most masculine principle of modern society, speaks almost like an angry woman. All the distinctions and laws of modern statesmanship escape him. He fixes his eye on the one great object which closes the vista of all hearty lovers of human freedom, and can see nothing else beside. He is a "Know-nothing" in the sense of knowing nothing but the one object of uprooting slavery, and scolds every one who can see that we must advance to this goal by the wise rules and well approved habits of modern states- manship as if they were traitors to the cause instead of its truest servants. He fancies that we should serve the great cause—which is in far higher hands than ours—by flinging to the winds every principle by which Europe has slowly learned to subdue the anarchical rivalries of mutuallyjealous States, and throwing aside every dignified habit by which the horrors of warfare, great enough at all times, are mitigated and kept within certain limits. He does not see that if the defeat of the Secession crusade could be obtained only at such a cost as this, it might introduce on this side of the Atlantic almost fiercer passions than it extinguished on the other. Indeed, we may fairly say, that whenever we conceive ourselves obliged to break through humane and civilizing rules of statesmanship and of warfare to gain a humane and civilizing purpose, we are, in fact, in our narrow impatience, distrusting the larger purposes and calmer order of that Providence which never asks us to make the level of sober wisdom attained in one age a sacrifice to the purposes of the next.
For example, the idea which runs through the whole of Mr. Sumner's speech is that, in a case so bad as this of a Confederacy deliberately founded upon slavery, we ought—he does not say to have allied ourselves actively with the North, but—without a positive alliance, to have given the North all the benefits of a virtual alliance. That is really, in one form or other, the running drift of his bitter charges against our Foreign Secretary ;—we admitted belligerent rights too soon, and with too little limitation,—the Queen's proclamation said we would be neutral, and we were neutral ; the tone of our Foreign Secretary was morbidly neutral ; we not only supplied the North with arms and ammunition, but the South also ; we did not exercise any British authority in aid of the American fleet which had established the blockade ; we showed too much hesitation in straining the letter of a most inefficient and confused law, which, no doubt, intended to prevent the Confederates from building a navy with our ship- builders ; in short, when we said we would, as a nation, stand aside and aid neither party, we did, as a nation, stand aside and aid neither party,—and our Foreign Minister strove to give (successfully, as it seems) to his despatches the tone of neutrality which the nation had deliberately adopted. That is really Mr. Sumner's charge. He does not openly say, what it would have been far more statesmanlike and plausible to say, "ours is the cause of freedom and of the timer civilization, and you ought to have adopted it,"—for that there might be a case. But he virtually says that, without professing to adopt it, we ought to have adopted it morally, and interpreted our nominal neutrality so as to mean active official aid to the North.
For example, Mr. Sumner does not deny that, as a matter of fact, the belligerent power of the South on land was too great to be ignored. He thinks, indeed, that we recognized that undeniable fact with indecent promptness so soon as we discovered it, and that we ought to have waited to receive "explanations" from the North,—as if it were an act of courtesy before recognizing an earthquake to ignore it till we had received explanations from the unfortunate people who were suffering by it, only in order that we might then declare the explanations to be unsatisfactory, and the cracks in the ground and fallen houses huge and monstrous but un- questionable facts, after all. But even Mr. Sumner does not insist much on this very weak point, he tries to persuade us that, there was a stronger position intermediate between a complete blindness to the rebellion and complete neutrality towards the belligerent powers. He thinks we might have acknowledged the fact of a substantial belligerent on land, and refused to acknowledge the same power's belli- gerent rights at sea,—admitted Lee and ignored Semmes,— considered the South a power -in Virginia, but a pirate in the brigs Jefferson Davis and Sumter. Belligerency, he quotes from all the legal authorities, is a question of fact. If there is substantial power, admit it,—if not, not. And, no doubt, that is the principle ; but certainly a more eccentric application of it than Mr. Sumner's we never heard of. The admission of the belligerent rights and the claim to be neutral,. is the admission of a state of war in which the neutral declines to be mixed up. Without it, as we know, the Northern blockade would be internationally unjustifiable, and our rights would be invaded by the seizure of ships attempt- ing to pass the blockade,—so that the North cannot afford to blame us for acknowledging what is the guarantee of all their naval pretensions. But having acknowledged the state of war, Mr. Sumner bids us acknowledge it only on land, and leave- the ships of the Confederates, if they launch any, to be dealt with as pirates. Is it possible for the human intellect to conceive a proceeding more ingeniously and, so to say, womanishly unfair, more utterlyfatal to the acknowledged decencies of international intercourse ? It is like saying to a man, whose right hand is strong and whose left hand rather feeble, "If you fight.
with your right hand against this rival who uses both, we- will look on and say nothing ; but if you attempt to use that feeble left hand in aid of the stronger right, we will cut it off." Surely Mr. Sumner cannot be so babyish a partizam. as to fancy that any respectable State, having once recognized. a belligerent power, would deny it one of the most effectual weapons of a belligerent. That it is a question of fact whether a rebellion is able to claim belligerent rights at all is true ;— but that, if in fact it can make effectual resistance on one element, it should be denied the right of extending that resist- ance to the other, is the childish dream of weak and blind partizanship. It would be exactly as rational to admit the South as a belligerent in Virginia and ignore it as a belligerent in Maryland ;—so that we should have to claim redress from the South for any injury to British subjects committed by Southern officers south of the Potomac, and from the North for any injury to British subjects committed by the same men on the North side of the river,—on the rather Irish principle that the only belligerent in Maryland is the Northern belligerent. It is an imbecility of which no statesman could be guilty, to ignore the fact that the rights. of war, once admitted, must be admitted wherever the war drifts, whether it ebbs southward or flows northward— whether it gets on to the water, or, were that possible, mounts into the air. Mr. Sumner will be telling us next that we ought to regard the Federah; as de facto in possession of the whole sky of the American continent, because the Federal balloons anticipated the balloons of the Confederates. To admit the primd facie fact of belligerency is to admit it for the same two powers wherever no third power has a prior right, and Mr. Sumner might just as well tell us we may admit it on the ice, but deny it on the water into which that ice melts, as admit it on land and deny it on sea. It is only the weak inventiveness of passionate prepossession that could have suggested such a piece of transparent sophistry as this. The truth is, that Lord Russell sees what Mr. Sumner does not see—that, however much we may hate slavery, it is in- finitely more important for both Europe and America that it should be fought fairly, and by the universal rules of warfare, than that great and wise precedents should be broken in order to gain here and there an advantage against it. There might be a case for saying we should have allied ourselves with the North. That would have been at least fair and open, though we know it would have been a mistake, and, what is more, we doubt whether the North would have liked it.But. when the critical moment came for the crystallization of English public opinion, the North, so far from professing to fight against the whole system of slavery, was anxiously trying to assure the South that nothing could be safer. We, indeed, and a few of our contemporaries, saw that this was but a superficial state of things, and that a war against the extension of slavery would soon come to mean nothing less than a war against slavery itself. Still it was not for the English people to interfere in a strife at such a distance in which they thought neither party had clean hands. They very wisely held aloof. But having made up their minds to do so, the holding aloof should be a reality and not a sham. It is of more consequence to us to discharge our interna- tional duties honestly than even to beat down slavery. What could come of precedents for the future such as Mr. Sumner would have us make except the commencement of a new era of international duplicity, in which "neutrality" would have a hundred different shades of meaning, according as we were stimulated by secret sympathies to interpret it favour- ably to the one party or the other? Blinded by passion, he does not see that when nations choose a course, it is a thousand times more important they should honestly abide by their choice than even that they should choose rightly. Lord Rus- sell has proved in twenty ways that his neutrality is not a name. We think, indeed, a mistake was made about the Ala- bama which it might be better openly to admit; but otherwise we have certainly not only acted sincerely in the neutral policy, but resisted the temptations of France—whose con- duct Mr. Sumner eulogizes in the comparison—to act other- -wise. No doubt, it is true,—and we regret deeply that it is so—that the cultivated portion of English society has far more sympathy with the Slave power than the culti- vated portion of French society. And if Mr. Sumner had inveighed against the English middle and upper class only, we should have thought it unwise and useless, but natural. It is altogether different, however, when he speaks of the people and the Government. Lord Russell truly says that the numerical majority of the English people sympathize heartily with the North, and that the Government is, there- fore, honestly neutral. Mr. Sumner is the last man from whom we should have expected to hear such sophistry as he has sent us. If he knew his country's interests, he would do all in his power to increase the respect felt there for Lord Russell's statesmanship ;—for he alone, perhaps, among our 'present English statesmen, can at once hold with steady hand the balance of perfect neutrality, and yet use the whole weight of his moral influence to prevent any English treachery to the tense of freedom.
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