When the war opened with the combat between Fort Sumter and Beauregard, the London press amused itself with the trifling expenditure of blood which occurred. It was evident that the amiable philanthropists of that region either comforted themselves with the assurance that Americans were not a sanguinary race, or sought to jeer and taunt them into an expenditure of blood that would make the quarrel incurable. Whatever the motive, we trust they are now satisfied of the mistake of their first impressions. For four years Death has held a high carnival in a once peaceful land. No European war of recent date has seen such slaughter as in all that time has desolated the land.--The foreign connoisseurs of murder will observe that Americans stand killing remarkably well, and we cannot congratulate them upon the conclusions which they will have to draw from that fact.
The elephant, the horse and the ass are patient and loyal animals, because they do not know their strength. It is not at all likely that they would consent to be used for the purposes of man if they had brains in proportion to their muscle. If they had known their own power, the American elephant, horse and ass would scarcely have submitted to such indignities, for example, as the cruisers of Great Britain heaped upon the country only as late as the Administration of the lamented James Buchanan. We should like to know whether Lord Palmerston, with the lights now before him, would like to repeat that little experiment. He is very solicitous for an end to be put to this "unhappy war," and would be delighted to hear that the belligerent South had shaken hands with the belligerent North, and that all were once more in the old family fold. Perhaps the British Government expects to be believed when it reiterates this assertion. But we are no longer green on this continent. Four years of such experience have added a century to our stock of self-knowledge and to our knowledge of mankind. If such a thing as the triumph of the old Union over both the arms and the hearts of the Confederate People were not simply among the impossibilities, there is no British statesman who could look upon the future without greater dismay than filled that island when the first Napoleon had united Continental Europe against Great Britain.
This is no extravagant assertion. It is not based upon the ridiculous idea that America could cross the ocean to-morrow and plant its standard in Hyde Park. Nor does it ignore the ruin that the war has worked in its own resources. But four years is a short time in the life of man, and no appreciable period in that of a nation. Were it possible to raise the dead Union to life, a quarter of a century would restore its commercial and manufacturing resources, and a consciousness of its military power would give it a disposition to have a controlling voice in the affairs of this continent. It would never cease to remember that Great Britain was the author of all its woes, and would only await the first favorable conjunction of events to have a settlement of a long-accumulating account. When France is prepared to form another combination against England, she will find, in the event of American consolidation, one of the first military and naval Powers of the world as eager as herself to humble British pride and arrogance — a Power which can bring a million soldiers into the field, and a thousand ships of war, and will begin the campaign by wiping out every vestige of British domination from this continent.
Perhaps it will not be a matter of such exultation, then, that England has taught America the taste of blood. Her only salvation is the independence of the Confederate States; and yet, with a madness which looks like that which goeth before destruction, she stubbornly holds aloof from a contest, the results of which may involve her own national existence.
