Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/80

74 nearly the same. Here, as well as there, there was a great and rapid increase of wealth; and here, as well as there, there was a temporary decay of faith. We had gone in fact so far in the backward path that now, as in the time of Charles I., our reactionary politicians seem to think that they can set their feet on the Great Charter, and our reactionary ecclesiastics that, with a few bells and a little incense, and a word or two whispered into the ears of wealthy devotees, they can undo the Reformation. We have shared the moral decline of America, and we shall share her regeneration. Already a change is felt, and the breeze of morning begins faintly to blow over the long stagnant sea.

To stem this tide of sympathy with the slave-owner; to do justice to the large classes, especially the working classes, of this country, who were not represented by the reactionary press; to prevent the moral weight of England, perhaps even her sword—from being cast at a momentous crisis of human destiny into the scale of Slavery; to save the honour of our country from being sullied by a great apostasy; to confirm the Government in neutrality, and see that it was a real neutrality, not a neutrality of Alabamas; to keep alive, if possible, the good feeling between the two kindred nations, and avert the deadly rupture, deadly not only to England and America but to the highest interests of mankind, which the Southern party in Parliament and the Press were labouring to bring on,—this Association and its sister associations were formed. They were not formed till support had been organised in this country for the South, so that our action, like that of the party in America with which we sympathised, was strictly defensive. We did not make the civil war, nor did we instigate the Americans to make it. Most of those who are here can