Our foreign Relations.
The terms of honest and manly reprobation in which the
President refers to those foreign Governments which, having recognized by treaty in the last century the separate independent sovereignty of the
Southern States, now not only refuse us recognition, but give aid and comfort to the enemy, will find a warm response in every patriotic Southern heart.
For some of the wrongs we have suffered at their hands, says the
President, "we may not properly forbear from demanding redress," when we shall have achieved our independence.
We rejoice that the
Confederacy has come to understand the true character and policy of foreign powers relative to this country.
That of
England in particular (we speak of the
Government, not the people,) has been not merely unfriendly, but malignant in the last degree.
In her revenge for the
American Revolution, and the
American naval successes of the late war, and in her selfish design to monopolize the manufactures, the cotton and the commerce of the world, she has, in cold blood, with the most dogged perseverance, sought for thirty years the disunion of
America through the agitation of slavery.
When at last, she was successful, she has had but one policy — that of helping both the belligerents utterly to devour and destroy each other.
If she has shown most favor to the
North, it is because she feels sure the destruction of Southern slavery would involve Northern commerce and manufactures in the same ruin with Southern labor.
All the blood and all the misery of the war are grateful to her nostrils, for the longer they are protracted, the more certain she feels of her object.
Was ever such deliberate diabolism?
Are nations justifiable, any more than individuals, in coining their gold out of human suffering?
if not,
England has a day of reckoning before her, which may well make her humble.
That day may not be as distant as she imagined.
