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To the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, &c.[*] December 4/62 My dear Sir, I am honoured, and was at first embarrassed, by your kind communication; embarrassed by some uncertainty whether to answer it from a private or from a public point of view. If the matter belonged to a crisis already passed, my obvious and simple way would be thankfully to acknowledge your unexpected and kind mention of me; to regret if I had misunderstood you; and express my satisfaction that you do not like to be thought to sympathise with the detestable cause of the South. But, in the first place, I need to send your disavowal to the Star, that your contradiction may appear in the columns which inserted what you regard as my erroneous statement. In the next, I painfully remember that the crisis, which for America (I trust) is fast passing, is for England only at its commencement. Most glad should I be if political questions could be wholly impersonal. But even if I had your near friendship, instead of a slight acquaintance (which through your affability has justified me in occasional communication on a very few matters), still the vast importance of the future relations between England and England's greater progeny would forbid me to indulge in the pleasure of a yielding reply. It is a terrible fact, that that conduct of English statesmen for which you have been represented as claiming high moral credit, is at this moment goading North and South into hatred against us. I see no chance of allaying the malignant elements which the upper classes of England have stirred up, without much plain speaking, with little care whom we offend. The seeds of an unnatural and dreadful war have been sown. The plague is not yet stayed. Pirate ships are yet about to issue from Liverpool. The Government which was so active about Hale's rockets, and would not allow arms to be sent to noble Hungary, shows no signs of activity, when succour in the most odious form and most damaging to the fair fame of England, is to be sent to that slave power, . . . in comparison with which the late tyranny of Naples was respectable and endurable. You first earned honour with me by your denunciations of that tyranny when no other public man spoke. Much should I have rejoiced to see in you a strong heart of righteousness able to stem the tide of contemptible national jealousy. I read your Newcastle speech with great pain, I will not say with surprise; for in a private speech the papers had represented you as reiterating, after six months, Earl Russell's monstrously untrue epigram, that "the North is fighting for dominion, the South for independence." This I supposed to be meant as an encouragement to the South, and a gratuitous display of sympathy with it. Your Newcastle speech was, I believe, universally understood as intended to feel the way towards the recognition of the South by England. The words in it which first impressed me were, first, the declaration (which you were represented to have made) that you "expected the liberation of the slaves by their own masters, sooner than from the North." This was said after the emancipation of the slaves in Columbia; after the Territories had been legislatively secured to freedom; after Congress had offered pecuniary aid to emancipation; after the President had implored rebels to accept in due time the terms offered; finally, after he had announced the day upon which the offer was to be withdrawn, and uncompensated liberation enforced. The Southern papers bitterly complain of the vast numbers of slaves freed by the Northern armies. To none of these things did you allude (unless the papers astonishingly belied you), but you are besides made to say "Jefferson Davis and the other leaders of the South have made an army; they are soon, I understand, to have a navy; but, gentlemen! they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation!" I certainly understood this as applause for a great and noble work; whether the fact affirmed be true is a separate question. Prudence sometimes imperatively enjoins silence on public men, when humble persons may be usefully open-mouthed. I do not claim that English statesmen shall denounce all the guilt of all Governments. But when a comparable power, only to Thugs, buccaneers, and cannibals, tries to thrust its hideous head among nations, and claims the protection and privileges of international law; a power which rose against the freest rule on earth, for the avowed motive of propagating the worst form of slavery ever known; having no legitimate complaint, or if it had, certainly trying no constitutional means of redress, but plunging at once into arms, and that when the arsenals had been emptied, and the fortresses seized by the treason of office-holders: I hold it to be an offence against law, order, and public morality, for a statesman whose words carry weight, to speak at all of such a power without declaring abhorrence of it; or at least, to speak in such a tone that he cannot for a moment be suspected of desiring its success. No one will believe that it is the policy of an English Ministry to encourage insurrection, as such. They must have some urgent reason for it. The party now fostered by them (not, I thankfully add, at all to the extent which the élite of London would have desired, but still, as no insurrectionists in the very best cause were ever before fostered), this party of insurgents, has no moral claims, even if there were no North. All the world therefore, inevitably believes that England has been actuated by an intense desire to see the destruction of the Union, and that every other pretext is hypocrisy. We have to clear ourselves of the dreadfully plausible imputation, of having desired an opportunity of war, at the time of the outrage on the Trent. In the letter with which you now honour me, you say that you count yourself a better friend of the North than I am, in that you do not "encourage it to a hopeless and destructive enterprise." To pronounce it hopeless and destructive, is to encourage and almost to justify the rebels. On no previous occasion have English statesmen taken on themselves to prejudge the ability of a friendly Government to put down insurrection. I am in high hope that the righteous cause will be blessed by a righteous God, since its upholders are at length in earnest. I have the honour to be, sincerely yours,
[*Reply to the letter of 1 Dec. 1862 from Gladstone to Newman, originally published in the Morning Star.] |