The London correspondent (February 11) of the New York Tribune says that no sick oysters could have opened more quietly than Parliament on its seventh and last session. Whether the consciousness of its impending dissolution affected its spirits, whether the members were under the influence of the weather, or whether they are reserving themselves for more appropriate opportunities, quien sabe? Pope's Goddess of Dullness was prevalent. Of all the barren Queen's speeches that ever were delivered — and that is saying a good deal --the last is probably the barrenest. We are interested in it (says the correspondent) only so far as it quietly scatters to the winds all the foolish rumors of "recognition"by the utterance of the cold word "neutrality "--which might be stereotyped for future use until there shall be no further occasion. We cannot understand how a speech can be considered "barren," in the United States, which contains that consoling assurance. The correspondent treats Her Majesty with irreverence and ingratitude. It is obvious that all the pains taken to impress the United States with a sense of the obligations incurred by British neutrality are thrown away. We would like to learn, by the way, where all these foolish rumors of "recognition" come from. We have had them now for nearly four years. Almost every month in that time, one of them starts up and soars aloft; and no sooner is it fairly on the wing than that double-barrel shot-gun, Palmerston-Russell, brings it headlong to the earth. So far as we are concerned, it is a piece of refined cruelty to palm such stories upon the public. There is no more chance of British intervention — there never has been since the beginning of this quarrel — than there is of the intervention of the man in the moon. We have got along thus far without it, and expect to do so to the end of the chapter. A Government which has spent a great deal of time and money in getting up the American war is not going to be the first to bring its own devices to naught.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.