Naushon Island, September 30,1861.
We here feel more and more each day the miracle of M. de
Tocqueville's prophetic vision of our history. It seems almost like
clairvoyance! Our Channing's prevoyance of the results of our Texas land
thefts is almost as strange. Such men of genius may well be called seers.
I am sorry that you still class me with the crowd who always
seek to forget their own sins in abusing their neighbors. The fact is, all my
prepossessions were in favor of England, and I had watched with the greatest
satisfaction the subsidence of the old animosities, growing out of the two
wars, and the growth of that good fooling which ought to animate the two
nations who are, or might be, the bulwark of free institutions against the
despotisms of the Old World.
When we cast off the nightmare despotism, which had so long
ruled us, the slave oligarchy, which sympathized with Russia because of
serfdom, and dismissed your minister to show their homage to the Czar, and
which refused you a limited right of search, because it favored the slave
trade; in fine, when at last we placed ourselves right on the question of
slavery, which has always been a reproach from you to us, I thought the entente
cordiale was complete. I did not look for material aid nor want it, but
only such forbearance of countenance towards our Sepoys" as would help to
discourage them, and would bring our two nations still more into harmony.
Perhaps I feel the disappointment more bitterly than the mob
does, because my hope and prejudices were strongly for a warm English alliance—
now, I fear, deferred another twenty years. Your "Times " I expected
nothing better from than we have had in its cold sneers at the breaking of our
bubble of democracy, but from your ministry I did look for something better
than a proclamation of strict neutrality, putting us upon precisely the same
footing with our “Sepoys,” forbidding either party to bring prizes into your
ports, prohibiting your subjects aiding either; and this, too, issued just as
our new minister was arriving, thus giving him no opportunity to confer upon
mutual interests; for I contend that it is our mutual interests that have been
endangered, not ours alone.
I beg your Sepoys’ pardon for naming them with ours. They at
least had foreign conquerors, and a hated religion to conspire against, and yet
we watched your Indian battles with a brother's eye, and canonized your
Havelocks, Hodsons, and other martyrs, as if they had been our own. Even our
press, loose as it is, uttered no sound of exultation at what seemed at one
time to be the downfall of your Indian empire.
Had your Sepoys brought a prize into our California ports,
we should have known only the British owner, and restored her. Once more I beg
your Sepoys' pardon. They were not guilty of the deep crime against their
nationality and the principles of government which marks our more barbarous
rebels!
One word about the Morrill tariff. It is a labored, clumsy
production, and it will fall by its own weight. Some of its blunders have been
partially corrected; but you mistake the intention of those who passed it, or
at least of the majority of them.
Its aim was to substitute the steadiness of specific duties
for the vibrating, cheating system of ad valorem. Certain high duties
were doubtless smuggled in under guise of specifics, and the extreme difficulty
of so framing our specific duties that our poorer classes shall not pay the
same duties, per yard or per pound, on their cheap cloth or tea, will probably
cause a repeal of the tariff. Yet I think British experience and opinion favor
the principle of specific rather than ad valorem duties. One tends to
cheat the people who buy the poorest qualities, the other tends to enormous
frauds against government and profits by false swearing, and encourages the use
of poor, showy goods, as against the more substantial ones which come in under
specifics.
You are a little more encouraging as to results than you
were, but I still think you do not properly appreciate the fact that we are not
fighting to subjugate the South, but to put down a small class who have
conspired against the people, and who are a thousand times worse enemies of the
mass of the people at the South than the North.
The only pinch is our finances. Cannot you help us upon the text
of the cutting within, if you find that sound? Our moneyed men continue to take
their tone very much from England, and confident views of financial success
coming from your side have great weight. . . .
Very truly yours,
J. M. Forbes.
SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and
Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 247-50
