Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/72

46 countries calculated to impair the high esteem in which his name was universally held there. It was his speech on the Alabama case, preceding the rejection by the Senate of the Clarendon-Johnson treaty. He was accused of having yielded to a vulgar impulse of demagogism, in flattering and exciting, by unfair statements and extravagant demands, the grudge the American people might bear to England. No accusation could possibly be more unjust, and I know whereof I speak. Mr. Sumner loved England—had loved her as long as he lived—from a feeling of consanguinity, for the treasures of literature she had given to the world, for the services she had rendered to human freedom, for the blows she had struck at slavery, for the sturdy work she had done for the cause of progress and civilization, for the many dear friends he had among her citizens. Such was his impulse, and no man was more incapable of pandering to a vulgar prejudice.

I will not deny that as to our differences with Great Britain he was not entirely free from personal feeling. That the England he loved so well—the England of Clarkson and Wilberforce, of Cobden and Bright; the England to whom he had looked as the champion of the anti-slavery cause in the world should make such hot haste to recognize—nay, as he termed it, to set up, on the seas, as a belligerent—that rebellion, whose avowed object it was to found an empire of slavery, and to aid that rebellion by every means short of open war against the Union,—that was a shock to his feelings which he felt like a betrayal of friendship. And yet while that feeling appeared in the warmth of his language, it did not dictate his policy. I will not discuss here the correctness of his opinions as to what he styled the precipitate and unjustifiable recognition of Southern belligerency, or his theory of consequential damages. What he desired to accomplish was, not to extort from England a large sum of