ST. VERAN, 31st October
1862.
MY DEAR SIR, — Allow me to thank you most warmly for your
long and interesting letter, which if it had been twice as long as it was would
only have pleased me more. There are few persons that I have seen only once
with whom I so much desire to keep up a communication as with you; and the
importance of what I learn from you respecting matters so full of momentous
consequences to the world would make such communication most valuable to me
even if I did not wish for it on personal grounds. The state of affairs in
America has naturally improved since you wrote, by the defeat of the enemy in
Maryland and their expulsion from it, and still more by Mr. Lincoln's
Anti-Slavery Proclamation, which no American, I think, can have received with
more exultation than I did. It is of the highest importance, and more so
because the manifest reluctance with which the President made up his mind to
that decided step indicates that the progress of opinion in the country had
reached the point of seeing its necessity for the effectual prosecution of the
war. The adhesion of so many Governors of States, some of them originally
Democrats, is a very favourable sign, and thus far the measure does not seem to
have materially weakened your hold upon the border Slave States. The natural tendency
will be, if the war goes on successfully, to reconcile those States to
emancipating their own slaves, availing themselves of the pecuniary offers made
by the Federal Government. I still feel some anxiety about the reception which
will be given to the measure by Congress when it meets, and I should much like
to know what are your expectations on the point. In England the proclamation
has only increased the venom of those who, after taunting you so long with
caring nothing for abolition, now reproach you for your abolitionism as the
worst of your crimes. But you will find that, whenever any name is attached to
these wretched effusions, it is always that of some deeply-dyed Tory — generally
the kind of Tory to whom slavery is rather agreeable than not, or who so hate
your democratic institutions that they would be sure to inveigh against you
whatever you did, and are enraged at being no longer able to taunt you with
being false to your own principles. It is from there also that we are now
beginning to hear, what disgusts me more than all the rest, the base doctrine
that it is for the interest of England that the American Republic should be
broken up. Think of us as ill as you may (and we have given you abundant
cause), but do not, I entreat you, think that the general English public is so
base as this. Our national faults are not now of that kind, and I firmly
believe that the feeling of almost all English Liberals, even those whose
language has been the most objectionable, is one of sincere respect for the
disruption which they think inevitable. As long as there is a Tory party in
England it will rejoice at everything which injures or discredits American
institutions, but the Liberal party, who are now, and are likely to remain much
the strongest, are naturally your friends and allies, and will return to that
position when once they see that you are not engaged in a hopeless, and
therefore, as they think, an irrational and unjustifiable contest. There are
writers enough here to keep up the fight and meet the malevolent comments on
all your proceedings by right ones. Besides Cairns, and Dicey, and H.
Martineau, and Ludlow, and Hughes, besides the Daily News, and Macmillan, and
the Star, there is now the Westminster and the London Review, to which several
of the best writers of the Saturday have gone over; there is Ellison of
Liverpool, the author of “Slavery and Secession,” and editor of a monthly
economical journal, the Exchange; and there are other writers less known who,
if events go on favourably, will rapidly multiply. Here in France the state of
opinion on the subject is most gratifying. All Liberal Frenchmen seem to have
been with you from the first. They did not know more about the subject than the
English, but their instincts were truer. By the way, what did you think of the
narrative of the campaign on the Potomac in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 15th
October by the Comte de Paris? It looks veracious, and is certainly
intelligent, and in the general effect likely, I should think, to be very
useful to the cause.
I still think you take too severe a view of the conduct of
our Government. I grant that the extra-official dicta of some of the Ministry
have been very unfortunate, especially that celebrated one of Lord Russell, on
which I have commented not sparingly in the Westminster Review. Gladstone, too,
a man of a much nobler character than Lord Russell, has said things lately
which I very much regret, though they were accompanied by other things showing
that he had no bad feelings towards you, and regretted their existence in
others. But as a Government I do not see that their conduct is objectionable.
The port of Nassau may be all that you say it is, but the United States also
have the power, and have used it largely, of supplying themselves with
munitions of war from our ports. If the principle of neutrality is accepted,
our markets must be open to both sides alike, and the general opinion in
England is (I do not say whether rightly or wrongly) that, if the course adopted
is favourable to either side, it is to the United States, since the
Confederates, owing to the blockade of their ports, have so much less power to
take advantage of the facilities extended equally to both. What you mention
about a seizure of arms by our Government must, I feel confident, have taken
place during the Trent difficulty, at which time alone (and neither before nor
after) has the export of arms to America been interdicted.
It is very possible that too much may have been made of
Butler's proclamation, and that he was more wrong in form and phraseology than
in substance. But with regard to the watchword said to have been given out by
Pakenham at New Orleans, I have always hitherto taken it for a mere legend,
like the exactly parallel ones which grew up under our own eyes at Paris in
1848 respecting the Socialist insurrections of June. What authority there may
be for it I do not know, but, if it is true, nothing can mark more strongly the
change which has taken place in the European standard of belligerent rights since
the wars of the beginning of the century, for if any English commander at the
present time were to do the like he never could show his face again in English
society, even if he escaped being broken by a court-martial ; and I think we
are entitled to blame in others what none of us, of the present generation at
least, would be capable of perpetrating. You are perhaps hardly aware how
little the English of the present day feel of solidarité with past generations.
We do not feel ourselves at all concerned to justify our predecessors.
Foreigners reproach us with having been the great enemies of neutral rights so
long as we were belligerents, and with turning round and stickling for them now
when we are neutrals; but the real fact is we are convinced, and have no
hesitation in saying (what our Liberal party said even at the time), that our
policy in that matter in the great Continental war was totally wrong.
But while I am anxious that liberal and friendly Americans
should not think worse of us than we really deserve, I am deeply conscious and
profoundly grieved and mortified that we deserve so ill; and are making, in
consequence, so pitiful a figure before the world, with which, if we are not
daily and insultingly taxed by all Europe, it is only because our enemies are
glad to see us doing exactly what they expected, justifying their opinion of
us, and acting in a way which they think perfectly natural, because they think
it perfectly selfish.
SOURCE: Hugh S. R. Elliot, Editor, The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Volume 1, p. 263-6
No comments:
Post a Comment