criminals, violators of her laws, to be dealt with by her just like any other transgressors. Our government gave them no countenance, not the slightest recognition, except as rebels in arms against lawful authority, and to be put down and punished like any other class of wrongdoers, like a mob in London, or highway-men in Lancashire. Such has been our uniform treatment of foreign rebels; and we certainly had a right to expect as much in return; but England's treatment of us has been the very reverse of ours in those memorable cases.

3. Still more do we complain of her early and eager concession of belligerent rights to our rebels. Here was her cardinal error, morally, if not diplomatically, a grievous wrong. We know well that she had an abstract right to do this, just as we might have done in behalf of her own rebels in Canada, Ireland and India, without violating the letter of our treaty obligations; but had we done so, and thus increased fourfold her sacrifices in reducing them to submission, would not England have deemed it an act of virtual hostility, a real, if not flagrant, violation of the friendship we had pledged in our treaties of peace and amity with her? In just this light do we view her concession of belligerent rights to our rebels. It was the very thing they needed at the time, worth a mint of money, and a host of soldiers. Its intent was clear and indubitable. It must have been meant to help the rebels, and injure ourselves. It was a gratuitous injury and insult; for she was under no treaty obligations to them, and had no right, legal or moral, to know them except as a component part of our population, any more than we should have to recognize a gang of insurrectionists or bandits in the heart of England as entitled to belligerent rights.

But what is meant by such concession of belligerent rights? England by this act said in effect to our rebels, We cannot consistently aid you by our arms; but we show you our good will, our anxiety for the success of your rebellion, by doing for you all we safely can. The concession of belligerent rights is all we can grant at the start; and this will authorize you to commit all the deeds of war with impunity. It gives you license to perpetrate whatever crimes you choose,—to kill and rob, to plunder and destroy at will,-without being called to any account. It is true we form no treaty with you, such as we have with the lawful government to which our faith has been pledged for so many generations; but we will treat you with equal, if not even greater favor, and hope you will succeed so far in your rebellion that we can ere long recognize you as an independent nation. This, however, we cannot well do until you have drenched one continent in fraternal

blood, and perhaps covered another with wide and fearful distress. We know very well that you are doing what we never tolerate in our own subjects, what we always treat as the climax of all crimes, what is likely for a time to put in peril the welfare of the world; but still you have as good a right to do all this, as the American government, or any other one, has to put in execution its own laws against those who violate them. By banding together as rebels under the forms of law, you have acquired a right to commit at pleasure the whole catalogue of crimes which civil government is designed to prevent and punish; and, while perpetrating such wholesale bloodshed, havoc and devastation, we shall deem you as worthy of our esteem as we do the loyal supporters of the American government. At present, however, we can give you only this expression of our good will; but we hope ere long to see your rebellion crowned with success in permanently crippling, if not overthrowing, a government to which we have so long been bound by the strongest obligations of duty and interest.'

All this did England say in effect to our rebels by conceding to them belligerent rights. It was in fact, though not in form, a clear act of hostility, a violation of her plighted faith, and a grave offence against the cause of good government the world over. Its animus and aim could not be mistaken. It was giving our rebels her permission to dissever our government, and to commit, with her sanction or connivance, all the outrages, and inflict all the evils inseparable from a gigantic civil war, all for the support, extension and perpetuity of the slave system against which she has so long and loudly protested. By that act she made herself, before God and the world, an ally of our slaveholders' rebellion; and whatever she may herself suffer from it, must be regarded as a righteous recoil of her own guilt and folly. Such a recoil upon her people, we deeply deplore; but if it could be restricted to the men in England who have lent their countenance and aid to our slaveholding rebels, we could feel little sympathy for their sufferings.

4. Nor has England's Proclamation of Neutrality done much to mend the matter. It may soothe her conscience, and screen her reputation, but cannot hide her latent hostility, nor excuse her moral recreancy to her treaty obligations. It is a palpable connivance at the greatest crime of the age, at a gigantic conspiracy against justice, humanity, and all good government. If a villain should attempt to burn or rob your neighbor's house, and you should coolly fold your hands at the outrage, insist that there be no interference to prevent its success, and then claim credit for fairness and friendship because for

sooth you did not yourself join at once in the crime, you would have our conception of England's neutrality; a neutrality that has all along played, and must have been meant to play, into the hands of our rebels. Under this specious pretence, she has from the start been the chief support of our slaveholders' rebellion. It is her sympathy, countenance and encouragement, her gold or her credit, her merchants, her ship-yards, her fast-sailing and iron-clad steamers, her sailors and her flag, that have been mainly instrumental in enabling our rebels to continue their struggle against our government. It has been a tissue of connivance, if not active aid. England, ten times more than all the world besides, has been the hope and reliance of our rebellion; and God and history will hold her largely responsible for its disastrous results. Had she done her duty from the first, it would never have arisen; if she would now do her duty, it would probably die of itself in six months.

5. Another count in our indictment against England, is her resistance of our wish to join the convention, proposed by the Peace Congress at Paris in 1856, for the abolition of Privateering. The Protocol for this purpose is well known. It invited all the governments of Christendom, without restriction as to the time when they should do so, to unite in this great measure. It was a slaveholding influence that delayed our acceptance of this invitation; and as soon as the friends of freedom came into power here, we signified in due form our wish to join the convention, but were coolly repulsed by the two governments, France and England, chiefly active in proposing that Protocol, and the only powers that have now betrayed a disposition to use their naval resourcesin favor of our piratical rebels. If they had shown their friendship to us by simply adhering to their own offers and invitations at the Paris Congress, the world might have seen ere this an end practically put to privateering. England alone, if she had chosen, might have secured this result; and for its failure she must be held chiefly responsible, a responsibility that one day she will bitterly rue.

To these complaints we might add many others less definite, but not less keenly felt by our people. We might allude to England's contradiction in this case of her own anti-slavery professions for the last halfcentury; her severe, oft-repeated reproaches of us for not abolishing slavery at once in States where we had no legal right to touch it; -her inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in throwing nearly the whole weight of her influence in favor of a rebellion designed, as its chief aim, to extend and perpetuate the slave-system in this country;-her

readiness to endorse and circulate the stale apologies so long current here in favor of slavery, and against any feasible or effective measures for its abolition; her ill-disguised delight at the successes of our rebels;—the wish, so generally shown by her rulers, and her chief organs of public opinion, both political and religious, to see our republic torn into fragments, with a legacy of interminable wars among ourselves;-her arrogance in presuming to understand our affairs better than we do ourselves, and this while betraying a strange ignorance of both our polity and our very geography; · her virtual denial to us of the right, claimed by herself and every other government, to execute our own laws against those who attempt their violation; her disposition to hold our government responsible for the evils that may result from a proper and necessary enforcement of its laws against those who transgress them, just as if we, and not the wrong-doers, were to blame for such evil; - her loud complaints of us for doing, as in the case of "stone blockades," just what she has herself repeatedly done, and still persists in justifying;—her partiality in censuring us for what she overlooks in our rebels, and charging upon us barbarities which they have perpetrated or provoked. The chief fault of our government, according to the common rule of judgment, has been its excessive lenity; but, while rebel atrocities are winked out of sight, nearly all the outrages incident to such a contest are charged upon ourselves. The rebels at the very start destroyed more than a hundred lighthouses, nearly all we had for more than a thousand miles of our coast; but we do not recollect to have heard any complaints by foreign governments or presses of these barbarous acts. The rebels have never hesitated to obstruct their own rivers or ports, and the State of Georgia alone has just appropriated half a million of dollars for this purpose; but we hear from foreign sympathizers no indignant protest, as in the case of our own attempt to stop up the harbor of Charleston, against these Vandal outrages. The only difference would seem to be that the latter are done, not for the protection of freedom and good government, but in the interest of a slave-holding rebellion.

To all this it may perhaps be replied, that the people of England are not responsible, and that the government have of late done much to repair their blunder in conceding belligerent rights to our rebels. We are glad to admit the force of this partial palliation; but there still hangs a heavy responsibility before God and the world upon her people and her rulers for what they have done, and are still doing, to encourage as great a crime as history anywhere records. We can hardly conceive it

possible that they did not know better; for ample means of information have been within their reach, and some of her own ablest writers, like Mill and Cairnes, have made a pretty full exposition of the case. If they are not now convinced, it must be, as it seems to us, because they wish not to be convinced; and the burden of our complaints against England is, that she has purposely thrown her influence against our government in favor of slaveholding rebels whose grand aim is to cover our country, if not our continent, with the crime and curse of human bondage. We cannot help thinking that such a course, though strenuously upheld by her aristocratic classes, and her leading organs of public opinion, will yet be repudiated by the mass of her people. Her aristocracy both in church and state, we have all along regarded as the natural allies of our slave-holders, morally and politically their own kith and kin; but we shall be slow to believe that they can, with all the engines of influence at their command, ever chain the countrymen of John Knox, John Hampden, and William Wilberforce to the car of American slavery. They will spurn indignantly such a brand of indellible infamy. Millions of them are even now proving their noble fidelity to principle by their patient endurance of the evils to which our rebellion has subjected them. All honor to these martyrs! May God soon grant deliverance from the wide and terrible recoil of slavery upon the general interests of humanity!

FORECAST OF REFORMERS.

We all know what reproaches are cast upon reformers. They are common targets for shallow, flippant, reckless abuse. Demagogues, and the whole brood of moral vampires that live and thrive on hoary wrongs, have a personal interest in overwhelming such men with scorn and contempt. Their craft is in danger; and they are ready, on every hopeful occasion, to start a general howl of denunciation. Just as fast as reform succeeds, will their "Othelo's occupation" be gone; and hence these leeches of society instinctively cling with a death-grasp to the stereotyped follies, vices and wrongs that feed and gorge them. With sedulous care do they guard the moral carrion on which they live, and will not, if they can prevent it, allow the evils of society to be touched with any earnest view to their removal, but obstinately persist in their sinister and selfish efforts to cover every such attempt with ridicule, contempt and scorn. It is in the teeth of such resistance that every reform must work its way; nor can we wonder that reformers so