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[413] So everywhere in England it was, ‘that long-sighted benevolence, sweeping the distant horizon for objects of compassion, but blind as a bat to the misery at the door.’ It was not so in 1840 alone. I have been in England several times since, but I never saw a good year for the poor of that oppressive empire. To show that this was all the poorest of shams, and that England owed us no good-will, let us step from 1840 to 863. We saw all things the same in England, except in the ‘negro business.’ Here all was changed. British sympathy was shifted from the slave and lavished on his master,—from ‘moral pocket-handkerchiefs and religious fine tooth-combs’ to the overseer's lash and the unleashed bloodhound,—from the maintenance of free institutions to their overthrow,—from civilization to barbarism,–from liberty to bondage. In 1840, Mr. Stephenson, our Virginia slave-breeding Ambassador near the Court of St. James, became so odious that no chance to snub or insult him was lost by the British Government. Mr. Adams, holding that same post, and embellishing it with all the great and noble qualities of illuminated talents and Christian philanthropy, was treated with far more neglect and far less cordiality by the same class which pretended to despise Stephenson and feted Harriet Beecher Stowe. Then England complained of our remissness or shirking in not doing our share towards putting down the slave-trade. Now all her sympathies were with the supporters of slavery itself, which was the only support of slavery on the earth; and her ship-yards and arsenals
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