The London Times lifts up its hands an affected horror, and amazement, at the spectacle exhibited by this continent to the civilized world. While it asserts that the world never beheld such fighting, and for the like must imagine two or three of Napoleon's bloodiest campaigns, all fought together in one country "by the hostile factions of one people" and with all the fresh aids and appliances which act has since contributed to the service of war, it affects to deplore the "melancholy fact" that the British have contributed almost everything necessary to the spectacle. "We have supplied from our own race, both combatants, at least nine out of ten of them. We have supplied the bone of contention, both the original slavery, and the more modern cry against it. We have furnished arms, powder, nay the very percussion caps and the medicine chests, the clothing and a good deal of the shipping and of all the other materials required." All this was done, too, for the love of gain, the Times might have added, men's lives, nay, their immortal souls being as nothing when the sacrifice of either or both may lead the way to wealth. We therefore take the jeremiad of the Times exactly for what it is worth, and that is the paper on which it is written, not being prone to believe that it is in English human nature, really to regret any calamity to the rest of the world, which may swell the prosperity of Britain. If the Times any concern on the score of humanity, it could easily have pointed out a way of avoiding all these horrors in the commencement of the struggle. At that time before the yankee nation had felt its own power, the British ministry might have put an end to it by a word. The inference is that was an agreeable as well as profitable spectacle to the pretended neutral party, and that the lamentations which we so often hear from the ministerial benches, are neither more nor less than sheer hypocrisy.
But there is one aspect of the case which seems to affect the nerves of the Times. It is that this war, already so gigantic in its proportion, must spread. It is the nature of war to be ever extending its influences, and embracing new countries in its circuit. It is like the ringlets that grow out of throwing a stone into a placid, lake; it is like a tornado, that beginning from a small point, embraces entire districts in its whirl; it is like a fire kindled in the middle of a vast prairie. No man can tell whither it will go, what country it will reduce to ruin, how it may be extinguished or where it may end. A dispute about a few chests of tea, in an insignificant fishing town in Massachusetts, grew into a war which involved England, France, Spain, Holland and America. Factious quarrels in the streets of Paris gave rise to the wars of the French Revolution, which extended all around the globe, and involved nearly every nation upon its surface. Complications may arise, which even the callous honor of Lord Russell cannot submit to disentangle by submitting to insult. This is the craven thought that now reigns uppermost in the imaginations of that people, once so renowned for their belligerent propensities, that they would permit none of their neighbors to settle their own domestic affairs, without interfering to direct them. Probably a policy of submission to all manner of humiliation may secure them peace, for honor seems to be out of the question.
And yet it will hardly preserve to Britain the boasted trident of the seas, or secure her Indian possessions from invaders more powerful than she, or keep unbroken the long train of treasure ships which constantly traverse the deep from Australia to Liverpool. England must give up all these things, should the Yankees succeed in this war, Ships, Commerce, Manufactures and Colonial possessions. Like a second Tyre she will shrink to her true dimensions, and be the England of other days no more.
