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[391] to maintain in the United States constitutional order against conspiracy and rebellion, and tie cause of freedom against chattel slavery.

The first effect of the proclamation, therefore, was to change the position in which England nd Englishmen stood to the United States, to the disadvantage of the latter. Before the proclamation, for an Englishman to serve the United States Government in maintaining its integrity was regarded honorable; after the proclamation such service became a crime. The proclamation makes it an offence now for an Englishman to light for the Government at Washington as great as it was for Englishmen before the proclamation to fight for the rebels of Montgomery. It thus, in a moral view, lowered the American Government to the level of the rebel confederacy, and in the next place, it proceeded, in an international view, to place the rebel confederacy on a par with the American Government, by recognizing then, not as rebels and insurgents to he dealt with by our Government as our Constitution and laws should determine, but as a belligerent power, to be classed with the United States, (of which they were but a rebellious fraction,) and equally entitled with the United States to the rights of belligerents under the law of nations.

No ingenuity can blind us to these facts:--Before the proclamation, to support our Government was an honorable office for the subjects of Great Britain, and the rebels were insurgents, with no rights save under the American Constitution. After the proclamation, for an Englishman to serve the United States is a crime, and the rebels are elevated into a belligerent power — and this intervention of England, depriving us of a support which her practice permitted, and giving the rebels a status and right they did not possess, we are coolly told is neutrality. Dr. Johnson in his famous letter gave us a sketch of a Chesterfieldian patron seeing a man struggling for life in the water, and when lie reached ground encumbering him with help. Lord John has taught us the meaning of British neutrality towards a nation supposed to be in like condition. Let us trust that the English people will not endorse the definition.

What would England have said to such a proclamation of neutrality from us in her domestic troubles in Canada, in Ireland, or in India? What would the English people have thought of a state paper from Washington, declaring it the sovereign will of the people of the United States to remain perfectly neutral in the contest being waged in Hindostan between the British government on the one side and the Mogul dynasty on the other, and forbidding American Citizens to enter the service of either of the said belligerents? What would they have thought of the American President intimating with cold etiquette that it was a matter of profound indifferenco to this Government which of the belligerents should be victorious, the King of Oude and Nana Sahib, or Lord Canning and the immortal Havelock Or is it that the British have become so enamored of rebellion, aye and of treachery too among their sepoys, that they thus court our great mogul and his fellow-traitors of Montgomery?

This Queen's proclamation strikes not simply at the moral position of our Government, but according to the English press it strikes also at our right to execute our own laws against piracy and we are told by the London Times that if we venture to hang, under these laws, a pirate who is licensed to plunder and murder by Jefferson Davis's letters of marque, now endorsed by the sovereigns of England and France, it will be regarded as an outrage by the civilized world; and this gentle intimation comes to us from a nation who are hardly recovered from the effects of a rebellion, to end which, without staying to ask the opinion of the world, they blew their rebels from the guns.

It was intimated that the British cabinet were puzzled how to act in regard to tlhe United States on the one hand, and her rebel conspirators on the other, and that after a careful search for precedents, one was found in the royal proclamation touching the war between Greece and Turkey, and that on that was based the proclamation which has so displeased and wounded the American people.

It could not have escaped the cabinet in their search for precedents, for we know with what thoroughness such searches are made, that a very similar state of things existed but a few years since between Great Britain and the United States, when the integrity and honor of the British empire were assailed by her Canadian colonists, and she had occasion to learn what in the opinion of the United States constitutes tlhe duties of neutrality towards a friendly nation. Unsuccessful rebellions are soon forgotten, and perhaps many Englishmen may be surprised on being told that the Canadian rebellion was so deeply seated and so widely spread, as seriously to threaten the crown with the loss of the Canadas. Mr. Leader declared in Parliament that all the English government could do would be to subjugate and hold the principal cities, leaving the country occupied by rebels. The number of British troops under Sir John Colbourne was only 20,000, while the rebels are said to have had 14,000 at Montreal, 4,000 at Napiersville, and thousands more in arms in different parts of the Canadas, fierce with indignation at the murder of a party of patriots by Indians in the employ of the British government.

In November ‘37 two battles were fought between the British and the rebels, the one at St. Dennis, and the other at St. Charles, which was taken from a force of 3,000 Canadians, of whom 200 were killed, and 30 wounded.

In December, Mackenzie, the head rebel, who seems to have been the prototype of Davis, organized a provisional government and assuming

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