The policy of England.
As the war drags its slow length along, the
British Government avails itself of every suitable occasion to reiterate, in terms too explicit and emphatic to admit of misconstruction, its positive determination not to intervene in American affairs.
It strikes us that the
British Government might save breath and time by saying nothing more on that subject.
If its object is to dispel from the
South the false hopes it entertained on that subject, it may rest satisfied that the
South has long ago ceased to look for foreign intervention, and has learned not to put its trust in princes.
Nor is this all. The South, from its own experience of war, might be disposed not much to censure
Great Britain for avoiding a dire alternative which has already entailed upon her an enormous national debt and national and individual distress beyond computation.
But it has become painfully evident to reflecting men in the
South that the policy of
Great Britain in this contest is impartial not so much in friendship as in enmity; that it seeks with equal regards the mutual destruction of North and South, and that it refuses to interfere in this war simply because the war is the very thing which she has been laboring to bring about for the last thirty years, and because peace in
America is just what she does not want till both parties are so worn out and helpless as no longer to be an object of alarm to each other or to the world.
The long and persistent efforts of the
British Government to inflame the two sections of the old Union against each other through the influence of abolition, and the immediate disappearance of that question from all prominence in
England or soon as it had produced its destined fruits in the division and civil war in
America, are too significant to have escaped the observation of calm and dispassionate spectators.
The only solution of English policy afforded by her course during the present war is that she desires equally the destruction of North and South, so that she may make the world dependent upon the cotton production of
India for its supplies.
No other theory has been suggested which at all explains and harmonizes the whole policy of
Great Britain in peace and war, towards the
American States.
The supreme malevolence of such counsel is no argument against their existence, for nations know no conscience, no principles, no humanity, no law of any kind but their own interests.
At this moment the
British Government beholds, unmoved, the terrible distress among its own manufacturers; and if I can permit its own people to suffer thus, for the purpose of working out the ultimate independence of
Great Britain in the production of cotton, we cannot wonder that she is supremely indifferent to the distress of strangers.
These remarks apply exclusively to the
Government, and not to the people, who, in general, sympathize with the
Southern cause, and, if their voice could be heard, would recognize the
South to-morrow.
With or without recognition, however, our independence is equally certain, and we shall have no favors to acknowledge, no friends to reward, no interests but our own to make supreme.
