But Great Britain, knowing very well what the feeling is,
ought to understand that it may consist with real strength, courage, and
right purposes. It is notorious now to all the civilized world, as
a fact often ludicrously and sometimes lugubriously set forth, that
millions of sturdy English folk have lived for many years, and live at
this hour, in a state of quaking trepidation as to the designs of a
single man of "ideas" across their Channel. What bulletin have the
English people ever read from day to day with such an intermittent pulse
as that with which they peruse quotations from the "Moniteur"? The
English people, whatever might have been true of them once, are now
the last people in the world--matched and overawed as they are by the
French--to charge upon another people a timid sensitiveness for even the
slightest intimations of foreign feeling and possible intentions.
We must allow also for exceptions to the sweep of the specific charges
under which we shall express our grievances at the general course of
English treatment towards us. There have been messages in many private
letters from Englishmen and Englishwomen of high public and of dignified
private station, there have been editorials and communications in a few
English papers, there have been brief utterances in Parliament, and
from leading speakers at political, mercantile, literary, and religious
assemblies, which have shown a full appreciation of the import of our
present strife, and have conveyed to us in words of most precious and
grateful encouragement the assurance that many hearts are beating with
ours across the sea.
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