Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/815

1868.] in an hour. … So long as we leave them to decide it for themselves alone, so long we must expect it to be evaded.

Bosh! Prussia easily renounced feudal allegiance, as will England, without heaving a sigh.

Meanwhile, Parliament talks the American claims over in a conciliatory tone, which, quite possibly, means "pay." Officials frown upon underlings who annoy American-born travellers. The American Government is thanked for stopping Fenianism. There is found, after all, much to admire in America—"substantially ourselves, you know." A somewhat musty and dusty kinship is dragged before the eyes of the world again—"the two nations being essentially one." Fox and his friends in the Miantonomoh, Farragut and his staff in the Franklin, are royally feasted. Ah! it is not now as in the evil days, when insolence and disdain met our officers on English soil, and Southampton cheers, London lionizing, club patronage, and drawing-room honors were reserved for Confederate brokers and privateersmen.

Perhaps a cynic might become satirical over this change in national sentiment; but cynicism is out of place in diplomacy, nations being avowedly governed by selfishness: and why should not success be a cardinal virtue with John Bull as well well as with another? Few Englishmen, it seems, really expected the Union to weather the great storm. I do not speak of the Lowes and Lairds, but of such as Gladstone, who said, at Newcastle, in 1862, "We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States, as far as regards their separation from the North."

Not expecting, I say, the Union to live, English statesmen naturally displayed their foresight by predicting its obsequies, and preparing to attend them; but it would have been more prudent to have come as mutes.

Prophecy, good and bad, was done on this side of the ocean, also: "We have only to succeed," said that distinguished divine, Homer Wilbur, less than nine months after the outbreak of the war, "and England will not only respect, but, for the first time, begin to understand us. And let us not, in our justifiable indignation at wanton insult, forget that England is not the England only of snobs who dread the democracy they do not comprehend, but the England of history, of heroes, statesmen, and poets, whose names are dear, and their influence as salutary to us as to her." Such, in fact, has been the result; and though it be, perhaps, hardly stimulating to brotherly love to know that we were to be decried if defeated, respected if victorious, yet it is pleasant to reflect that a test so hard was gallantly endured.

In what spirit, then, shall we meet the advances of the "mother country?"—for to that title does the disowned child of her loins return. I say, for one, in a spirit of welcome as frank and hearty as becomes a great nation. Talk of keeping open the piracy claims, so as to let loose hereafter a hundred Semmeses upon English commerce, is unworthy of us. Spiteful propositions like that to "recognize Abyssinia" are born of ignoble minds. We must outgrow not only stupid bombast about the emblematic biped that "soars aloft," but the fashion of loose, braggart threats of war, and even of irritating language in public discussion. I would strike out the first paragraphs of this unimportant essay did they seem to tend that way; but I do not believe that for a renewal of friendship it is needful to begin with hypocrisy, or that in order to forgive it is needful first to forget.

What stirs ill-blood betwixt the two lands is not our war claims, nor citizenship claims, nor anything of that sort—it has been mainly, of late, the supposed countenance of Fenianism. John Bull is in good humor with America just now, except for that; but—habet fœnum in cornu: the Fenian shows he is a mad Bull, after all. The best thing the late Administration did, regarded Fenianism. I hold it to be infinitely more worthy of the Republic than Abyssinian resolutions and Foreign-Enlistment-Act threats, that we throttled Fenianism at Buffalo, and strangled it in our own hands at the very St. Albans which witnessed the Canadian raid of 1864. All this was only our duty, a duty made the more imperative because (and a suggestive historic fact it is) America breeds Fenians faster than Ireland.