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The insulting letter of Mr. Seward, refusing to receive the amount raised at a fair in England for the benefit of the Confederate prisoners, and distinctly imputing to the English the crime of being the authors of all the troubles in America, is received by the London Times with commendable meekness. Not a spark of resentment or spirit lights up its sluggish comments on that remarkable document. The British Lion is a designation which can hereafter be only ironically applied to Great Britain. The King of Beasts is not in the habit of being bearded in his den with impunity. The patient Ass would be a more appropriate emblem of a government which bears anything that can be put upon it, and greatly prefers provender to battle.

There was a time when the sword of England would have leaped from its scabbard at the slightest of the provocations, now innumerable, which it has received from the United States. But that day has past. Its chivalry has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. Its people are as brave and manly as ever, but the spirit of trade and money-getting has deadened the sentiment of honor, and the canker of a long peace has eaten out the pith and vitality of military pride. Ever since the downfall of the Tory party and the predominance in the national councils of the commercial interest, national chivalry has been dead in England. The Tories, with all their faults and errors, were the true representatives of the British Lion. That king of beasts disappeared with them.--It is not possible that he is still in his old cage, when Brother Jonathan can poke the longest kind of pole into it every day without eliciting a single roar.

We agree for once with W. H. Seward when he says that England is responsible for the present calamities of this continent, and that our once prosperous and happy States are now the scenes of almost unparalleled bloodshed and misery, the responsibility rests upon Great Britain. The anti-slavery party in the North would have died out long ago but for the inspirations it received from a country to which all Americans were in the habit of looking for lessons in civilization and morals.--By books of travels, by novels, by songs, by sermons, by reviews, by newspaper articles, by Exeter Halls and political emissaries, by contributions of money, by diplomacy, by social and religious influences; in fine, by every instrumentality that could be brought to bear upon the human mind, England has been laboring for the last thirty years to propel her whole moral weight upon the Northern mind, so as to instigate and inflame it to sectional hostility against those States of the Union in which slavery existed. The most distinguished Southern statesman, on a visit to her capital, was ostentatiously slighted by the nobility, and a fugitive slave publicly petted by the same Duchess of Sutherland who dispossessed her white tenantry in Scotland to convert their farms into sheep walks. The South never had a friend in England till this war began! Was all this philanthropy? Every child knows that England has been the greatest slave-trader in the world, and herself planted the institution here which suddenly became so abhorrent to her moral sense. Even an idiot can understand that she only used anti-slavery as a wedge to accomplish the disruption of a hated and formidable power, and hence, now that her object is accomplished, she preserves a "rigid neutrality," and takes sides with neither "belligerent."

But the day of retribution will one day come. We are beginning to think that day is not far distant. Her hold upon the magnificent province of Canada is precarious, and her ancient domination of the seas may, ere long, be successfully disputed. We have no doubt she sympathizes with "the rebellion," and wishes that it would last forever; but it is only that her own prosperity may be built upon the common ruin of the United States and the Confederacy.

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