The "Times" and our Commissioners.
Our English files have brought us, in its length and breadth, the philippic of the London
Times upon
Commissioners Mason and
Slidell.
The reviling of the leading British journal are even more gross and vulgar than the condensed dispatch had represented them.
It is wanton, gratuitous, brutal, and blackguard.
The writer must have bought a bad fish at Billingsgate the day it was written; and had a wrangle with one of its redoubtable dames.
The tirade betrays an authorship fresh from such a contest.
With a pitiful want of taste, justice, and the great journal charges these innocent gentlemen with the cost of the recent large shipment of English troops, arms, and military supplies to
Canada.
This cost is supposed to be about three millions of pounds sterling, or fifteen millions of dollars, and poor
Messrs Slidell and
Mason are charged with the sum. Invited by the advertisements of the
British packet at
Havana, these gentlemen went aboard of her, paid their passage money to
England, and betook themselves quietly to their state rooms.
After a few days of quiet sailing the vessel was suddenly brought to by cannon shots fired across her bow she was boarded, and the
Commissioners, with their
Secretaries, after protest and remonstrances, forced off the steamers as prisoners of war, or apprehended rebels.
Upon this state of facts, with a logic worthy of the intellectual
Times, and of the leading exponent of British opinion, that journal charges this affair, not to
Commander Wilkes, nor to the
Yankee Government, but to the innocent, passive, and helpless victims of the outrage.
The great complaint of the
British Cabinet was that the
British flag had been insulted, and British honor outraged, by the proceedings of
Wilkes; and with a good deal more reason and logic could the London
Times call upon the
British public at home to fender no ovation to the flag which had been the cause of the trouble, and to regard the
British honor that had been outraged as of no more worth than ‘"two negroes."’ ‘"This flag and this honor has cost us,"’ it might say, ‘"three millions of pounds sterling; and we owe it to the Exchequer to taboo and pay no mark of consideration to the two baubles that have put us to so much cost.
Let them go their way in the Kingdom; we have laid out too much money and suffered too big a scare on their account to bestow on them any further attention."’
Take it all in all, this puerile and impotent outburst of ill-nature from the
Times is one of the most remarkable incidents of the war. Our Southern people have not demeaned themselves unworthily in seeking the recognition or sympathy of
Great Britain.
Our tone towards that people and Government has rather breathed defiance than entreaty.
We considered ourselves masters of the situation being fully as able to dispense with British gold and fabrics as
England was able to dispense with our cotton and our markets.
We had never approached that country as petitioners for favor, but only as equals, having benefits to confer fully equivalent to the benefits we might receive.
We recognized the embarrassments which her large vested interests at the
North imposed upon
Great Britain, and we were not impatient of that recognition and renewed intercourse which we knew to be inevitable, but which we also felt must be delayed for a time.
It is not to be denied that the warm sympathy which our cause had elicited from the Engish masses, had kindled a like feeling of cordiality towards the old country in our own breasts; and we had begun to dismiss that antipathy which hostilities and rivalries of ninety years duration had engendered and rooted in the
Southern breast.
We had begun to recur to the annals of the olden time, anterior to the Revolution, when it was the pride of our ancestry to proclaim and inculcate a devoted loyalty to the
British crown.
We reflected that the tides of immigration that had set in upon American shores for so many years had spread themselves over the
North, and had very little overflowed into our Southern boundaries; that our blood was, in consequence, still purely
English, and that ties of consanguinity, if they had any force, bound us more closely to the
English than to the hybrid and motley races that inhabit the
North.
These remote recollections, these obvious reflections, and the feelings naturally springing from them, were fast producing a strong partiality for the mother land in the hearts of our race; and we were looking with an interest, somewhat dramatic, to the reception which our Commissioners would receive — not from the
British Government, which we know would be formal and probably not even public — but from the people of
Great Britain.
The vulgar vituperation of the
Times has not at all changed our expectations in this behalf.
We are at a loss to know what influences could have led that journal into so rude and brutal a proceeding; but the very fact that it finds it necessary to inveigh so bitterly against a probable ovation to our Commissioners; proves that the temper of the public was setting strongly in that direction.
The specious logic employed by the
Times in its protest against a measure evidently finding much favor with the
British people, we have already remarked upon; but it was really unworthy even of the
Times to resort to falsehood in the attempt to make good its assault upon our Commissioners.
That these gentlemen are American statesmen, and, as such, have at times employed a free tone of speech against our late national rival, is not denied; but that they owe the prominence they have attained in our country, as the
Times alleges, to antipathies constantly expressed against
England, is a positive slander.
Bad logic may be excused in the
Times; black guardism may be deplored; but willful falsehood is to be denounced in the foul mouth of the slanderer who employs it.
