The old charge again.
The London Past continues to repeat the infamous slanders of Richmond coined by the correspondent of the New York Times. It is almost incredible that one mendacious scribbler should thus have power to blacken the reputation of a whole people. We do not, however, hold the English journals culpable to the same degree of criminality with those who manufactured the story. Yet, it is about time that they should learn the truth, and then, when they shall have learned its falsity from the lips of the Duke of Newcastle, they will become as vile as the inventors of the fable, if they do not retract the calumny, and do justice to those whom they have so cruelty wronged. As to their diatribes upon slavery, let them pass. It feeds their own factories and keeps them from starvation. When men speak thus of the means whereby they live, they pronounce their own condemnation more completely than it can be done by the mouths of their worst enemies. In the event of a separation of the American Union, England will have a chance to show whether her horror and detestation of Southern institutions are real or affected. Let her turn over the trade of the new Confederacy to France or some other nation which is not afflicted with the awful qualms of conscience upon the subject. Let her refuse thenceforth to employ her ships and her manufactories upon the products of slave-grown labor, and form an alliance with the Northern States for the production and exchange of anti-slavery tracts and sermons. We have great respect for the better classes of English society, but there seems to be a reeking mass of vulgar anti-slavery Pharisaism in that island, which ‘ "Compounds for sins it is inclined to,By damning those it has no mind to,"
’ and which can only be propitiated by purging the skirts of the nation completely of all commercial as well as social connexion with the slave regions. We wait with interest, in the general "wreck of matter and crush of worlds" which seems to be at hand, to see England demonstrate her anti slavery faith by her works, and give up, for the benefit of her noble ally, France, the carrying and manufacture of slave grown productions. If she is at all tardy in this course of manifest consistency, the South ought, as far as possible, to spur up her benevolent impulses by taking temptation out of her way, and making some other nation our commercial ally. At the same time, it is but just to say that Old England derives most of her anti-slavery ideas from New England, and her notions of Southern character from just such representations as those of the New York Times. We are informed that, not only in England, but in every part of Europe, the most calumnious caricatures of Southern society are current, propagated by anti-slavery American tourists on the continent. A Southern American cannot enter society in any part of the world, without being confronted at the threshold by the effects of these insidious libels, whilst gentlemen from Cuba and Brazil, both slave countries, find no such embarrassments in their way, thus showing that it is not slavery which causes the prejudice, but the deliberate and malignant use of it that is made to our injury by the traveling enemies of the Southern States. Strange and incredible as it may seem to us, this story about the insult to the Prince in Richmond, which is known to be untrue by the Duke of Newcastle, the admirable and esteemed British Consul at this city, by the May or and Richmond Committee in attendance, has now traveled over the civilized world, and gone so fast and been so long upon its journey, that it is questionable whether the truth will ever overtake it.
