AND BRITISH BLUSTER; A RECORD OF UNFULFILLED PROPHECIES, BAFFLED SCHEMES, AND DIS- ΤΟ READ AND INSTRUCTIVE TO ALL WHO ARE CAPABLE OF LEARNING. BY OWLS-GLASS. NEW YORK: THE AMERICAN NEWS COMPANY. 119 & 121 Nassau, St. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by THE AMERICAN NEWS COMPANY, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. کا کر PREFATORY NOTE. It must not be thought that the following pages are the fruit of a search through the British journals for articles upon our late civil war. Life is too short for such an employment of time without prospect of much greater benefit, public and private, than that task could accomplish, however effectually performed. The articles, extracts from which are here reprinted were, with many others, cut out and laid aside in the course of the current perusal of British journals during the war, as interesting utterances of opinion and feeling, to which there would probably arise some occasion for reference. This selection from and arrangement of these articles is offered as a curious study of the attitude, temper, and purposes of the largest and most influential part of a great and enlightened nation in regard to one of the most important political movements of modern times. It is published, as its last sentences show, with no intention of putting a rougher edge upon the natural exasperation caused by the tone of the undeniably able and dextrous writers and politicians, who, to please the public for whom they wrote and spoke, opposed, ridiculed, and contemned our people and our government during the tremendous struggle for the worthy and honorable existence of our country. It would not be very easy for us to forget these efforts of our inimical kinsfolk, or indeed desirable that we should lose sight of so instructive a warning, but it will be very easy for us to forgive them. Indeed, as after 1776, and 1812, it will be much easier for us to forgive them their ill-treatment than for them to forgive us our success. But it may be well for us to cast one reflective glance upon this subject as we pass on to the great work before us, thinking the while of our country (in the words of Mr. Lowell's Ode in commemoration of the Living and Dead Soldiers of Harvard University, which reaches the present writer opportunely just as these pages are going to. press,) "No challenge sends she to the elder world REBEL BRAG AND BRITISH BLUSTER. INTRODUCTION. When the people of the late Slave States were be-✔ trayed and incited by a selfish and ambitious oligarchy into undertaking the destruction of our Republic, they appealed directly to the interests, the fears and the prejudices of the governing classes of Great Britain for countenance and aid in their rebellion. Consequently, the Government and the people of the Free States looked with interest to see what attitude would be assumed in regard to the coming contest by that part of the British people which exercised a controlling influence upon the British Government and the British press. They knew that these people to a certain degree at least, and in a certain way hated slavery, and had been committed for a generation to a strong anti-slavery policy. The slaveholders of our Southern States having seceded, by their own admission, solely on account of the announced determination of the party coming into power to resist the extension of slavery into the unorganized national territory, and having declared by the mouth of the Vice President of their Confederacy that they meant to found their government upon slavery as its corner stone, it might have been reasonably expected that the moral weight of the British people would be thrown entirely with the Government of the United States and against the slaveholding insurgents. Perfect neutrality between |