Page:Australian views of England.djvu/41

  It is comforting, whatever may betide, to feel that right is undeniably on our side in this quarrel. But for that very reason we can afford to be calm, and to forbear so long as there is hope of a peaceable adjustment. It will concert most with the magnanimity of a great nation to be slow to draw the sword against one of kindred origin, however she may err, at the moment when the sword of civil war is already pointed at her breast. Our pride might well be enlisted here, even if we were insensible to the interests of freedom and the claims of humanity. Can it be that the Cabinet of Washington will leave no way open from an appeal to arms?

The death of the Prince Consort has come upon the nation with a singular concurrence of solemn circumstances. The suddenness of the blow, in the midst of health and happiness, was sufficiently appalling; but he who had made it the business of his English life to understand the English nation has been snatched away at the approach of the gravest peril the nation has had to meet in his time, and just when the prejudices against his foreign birth were fading utterly away, and his character, but slowly recognised in its fine