All men connected with the government in
England have felt themselves from time to time more or less
hampered by the necessity of publicity.
Our statesmen have been
forced to fight their battles with the plan of their tactics open
before their adversaries. But we in England are inclined to
believe that the general result is good, and that battles so fought
and so won will be fought with the honestest blows and won with the
surest results. Reticence in this matter was not possible; and
Lord John Russell, in making the open avowal which gave such
offense to the Northern States, only did that which, as a servant
of England, England required him to do.
"What would you in England have thought," a gentleman of much
weight in Boston said to me, "if, when you were in trouble in
India, we had openly declared that we regarded your opponents there
are as belligerents on equal terms with yourselves?" I was forced
to say that, as far as I could see, there was no analogy between
the two cases. In India an army had mutinied, and that an army
composed of a subdued, if not a servile race. The analogy would
have been fairer had it referred to any sympathy shown by us to
insurgent negroes. But, nevertheless, had the army which mutinied
in India been in possession of ports and sea-board; had they held
in their hands vast commercial cities and great agricultural
districts; had they owned ships and been masters of a wide-spread
trade, America could have done nothing better toward us than have
remained neutral in such a conflict and have regarded the parties
as belligerents.
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