Australian views of England/Letter 3
LETTER III.
THE WAR OF KINDRED—THE NATIONAL MOURNING.
THIS will be a solemn Christmas-eve in England. Thousands of artisan families will meet it with the bitter prospect of want and starvation blanching their cheeks; and very many of their employers will hardly be able to turn their gaze from the brink of ruin on which they stand to the objects of grief and apprehension which weigh down the public mind. Breaking through the commercial gloom, every hour and from every quarter have come of late the discordant notes of warlike preparation, and the heavy tolling of the bell of death. Never, perhaps, was the nation in a more sorrowful mood, and never had it deeper cause for sorrow.
Let us reason as we will, we cannot free ourselves from the painful consciousness that we are about to plunge into a fratricidal war—about to vindicate our honour in the shadow of the blood-red banners of slavery. Bold and boastful as is the language of the London Press, it is easy to see that there is a tremour in the writer's hand. Every second morning a tone of misgiving seems to soften the reckless bravery even of the Times. It will not do; people cannot satisfy their consciences, though goaded on by the sense of insult, that it is a high Christian thing to burden the nation with debt, and to spill the nation's blood on the wrong side of the American civil broils. At first the sense of wrong sent every man's hand to the sword-hilt. But the hard logic of consequences has tempered men's minds wonderfully during the last three weeks. Those who are little affected by feelings of brotherhood or sympathy with freedom, see reason to pause in the loss, of trade and the increase of taxation, and I doubt much whether, if war be declared, it will long remain a popular war.
We have lately lived in such a Babel of international law—such a dinning conflict of opinions from publicists, journalists, and Parliamentarians, that the ground of quarrel can only be reached through "confusion worse confounded." It is agreed, however, that the Northern republic is in the wrong. I do not think any voice in Europe, entitled to consideration, has denied that. In fact, the French, as the greatest maritime power in Europe next to England, is equally interested with England in the just settlement of the question raised by the affair of the Trent, and there is every reason to suppose that the Imperial Government will view their interests in this light. But is there no way to redress but a bloody and protracted war?
London, and the great seats of population throughout the provinces, were suddenly agitated on the 27th of November, by the telegraphed information that Messrs. Slidell and Mason, the Secessionist Commissioners to Europe, had been forcibly taken out of the English mail steamer Trent, while on her passage from Havannah to St Thomas, by a Federal ship of war. The Trent left Havannah on the 7th of November, with the commissioners on board as passengers; on the following day she was stopped in the Bahama Channel by the United States frigate San Jacinto, under the command of Commodore Wilkes, your old scientific friend who surprised the good citizens of Sydney some eighteen years ago by anchoring his ships in the Cove one summer morning before they were up or knew anything about his visit. The San Jacinto brought the Trent to by firing a shotted gun across her bows, and a lieutenant with a company of armed marines boarded the mail steamer, and seized the commissioners and carried them away prisoners, under the protests of the English commander and the naval agent in charge of her Majesty's mails. The news was brought to Southampton by the steamer Plata, which vessel ought to have brought the commissioners, according to their arrangements at Havannah.
A meeting of the British Cabinet was held immediately, and it became known that the law officers of the Crown were in frequent communication with Ministers. On the third day from the receipt of the intelligence, a Privy Council, attended by the Queen, was held at Windsor, and on the evening of the same day a Queen's messenger left London with a despatch for Lord Lyons. This rapid succession of movements told sufficient to the nation. Tory members of Parliament, more loudly than Ministerialists, expressed their satisfaction that the honour of the country was in the hands of Lord Palmerston. The friends of peace looked to Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Milner Gibson, and refused to believe that an ultimatum was winging its way across the Atlantic. Men of money and of commerce began to count the cost; more than £100,000,000 of British capital was sunk in American stocks, and at least £50,000,000 was employed in the trade between the two countries. Were we prepared to have it wiped out by a bloody sponge? Blusterers were for chastising the Yankees at all hazards. Lancashire cried, in subdued groans, "Open the Southern ports!" Yorkshire and Staffordshire wailed aloud, "Heaven help us, if you close the markets of the North!" The confusion and anxiety spread wider and deeper as time rolls on. But amidst it all there is a large class of thoughtful public-spirited Englishmen, whose anxiety arises from a full knowledge of the terrible cost of war, and a feeling of national pride that would preserve the honour of their country at any cost. They see nothing of the attempt, for the first time in the history of the world, to create a new empire avowedly on the foundation of slavery. They refuse to consider what direction the new quarrel may give to the old. They cannot calculate consequences. In this matter they only know, with a wringing sense of shame, that their country's flag has not been a protection to those who believed themselves secure where it waved. Only atonement for the outrage can relieve them from the duty of vindication.
A publication, which often sends a voice of heroic poetry ringing through its playful sallies of wit, has finely expressed this feeling of the nation:
"All war she knows drags horror in its train,
Whate'er the foes, the cause for which they stand;
But worst of all the war that leaves the stain
Of brother's blood upon a brother's hand.
The war that brings two mighty Powers in shock,
Powers, 'tween whom fair commerce shared her crown:
By kinship knit, and interest's golden lock,
One blood, one speech, one past of old renown.
All this she feels, and, therefore, sad of cheer.
She waits an answer from across the sea:
Yet hath her sadness no alloy of fear.
No thought to count the cost, what it may be.
Dishonour hath no equipoise in gold.
No equipoise in blood, in loss, in pain:
Till they whom force has ta'en from 'neath the fold
Of her proud flag, stand 'neath its fold again.
Four or five days more, and the "answer from across the sea" will reach the widowed Queen of England in her secluded sorrow, and there is scarcely room for hope that her first act in her widowhood will not be to sign a message which will make thousands of her countrywomen widows. Yet, if men reasoned honestly on their proper part in these momentous transactions of life and death, we might still hope for the union of honour and peace. Contraband of war in no sense could the Southern Commissioners be. If an issue of international law be raised, all authorities appear to agree, and the agreement is in accord with the natural reason of the thing, that nothing carried by a neutral ship, between one neutral port and another, can be deemed "contraband of war." Such precisely was the case of the Trent and her passengers. On the other hand, if Messrs. Slidell and Mason are pursued as rebels, they cannot be followed upon English soil without violating the right of asylum, and the deck of an English ship is part of the soil in national law. All legal ailments and State doctrines bring us back to these two issues, and in either case the verdict of civilised nations must be against America.
It is comforting, whatever may betide, to feel that right is undeniably on our side in this quarrel. But for that very reason we can afford to be calm, and to forbear so long as there is hope of a peaceable adjustment. It will concert most with the magnanimity of a great nation to be slow to draw the sword against one of kindred origin, however she may err, at the moment when the sword of civil war is already pointed at her breast. Our pride might well be enlisted here, even if we were insensible to the interests of freedom and the claims of humanity. Can it be that the Cabinet of Washington will leave no way open from an appeal to arms?
The death of the Prince Consort has come upon the nation with a singular concurrence of solemn circumstances. The suddenness of the blow, in the midst of health and happiness, was sufficiently appalling; but he who had made it the business of his English life to understand the English nation has been snatched away at the approach of the gravest peril the nation has had to meet in his time, and just when the prejudices against his foreign birth were fading utterly away, and his character, but slowly recognised in its fine force and manly simplicity, was winning to himself the love and pride of the English people. It has been said that England has lost in Prince Albert the most valuable life in all the gifted ranks of her widespread population. Surely that cannot be the true estimate of the nation's loss. But she has lost the one man of rare judgment, rare sagacity, and rare humanity, whose place can never be supplied. She has lost him in the prime of life, in the summer of his splendid intellect, before his calm spirit of practical wisdom had reached its maturity.
"The hope of unaccomplished years
Was large and lucid round his brow."
Prince Albert died an hour before midnight, on the 14th of this month, after an illness which had lengthened through eighteen days from the first attack, but which had not been regarded with apprehension until the last forty-eight hours, even by those immediately around the Royal household. The following day being the Sabbath, when the ordinary means of communication were for the most part closed, the sad intelligence was some time before it impressed its certainty upon the minds of the inhabitants of London. Men tried to console their minds with lingering doubts in spite of the toll of the great bell of St Paul's. Could it possibly be that the death-bell was tolling for that noble Prince, who had appeared amongst them so lately the picture of health and vigorous life, and whose image had never been associated with death in the thoughts of the most mournful? But the sorrowful truth gradually spread in every home and every heart. Throughout the provinces people generally became aware of the nation's loss as they assembled at the house of God, and from one end of England to the other the effect was one of universal visible grief, as if death had come to the doors of every family in the land. The signs of mourning have continued everywhere until today, when the body of the Prince has been consigned to the grave. Never in English history has any death, been so visibly felt by all ranks of the English people. The working classes, for the improvement of whose social condition Prince Albert laboured so earnestly, so wisely, so effectually, have assembled in thousands and sung together the Rev. Newman Hall's beautiful adaptation of the National Anthem.
To-day I heard seven thousand people of all social degrees mingling their voices in this strain of national sorrow and supplication. In every city and town of England to-day the ordinary pursuits of life have been suspended. But it is not by closed shutters and doors, by habiliments of mourning, by the tolling of Church bells, and by drooping flags wreathed with crape, that the national sorrow is most touchingly expressed. You see it everywhere in the grief-burdened faces of the people. You see it in the utter absence of any expression or sign inconsistent with this sense of loss. Deeply, and with a true love, do the people mourn for the Consort of their beloved Queen,
And she, poor Royal Lady! how does her woman's heart bear up in this great and sudden trial? "Many poor women have had to bear this trial," was the simple outburst of Victoria's grief and resignation. The people are told that their Queen is calm. Nothing more is known from the seclusion of her island-home.
Unhappily this is a season of deep-seated misery at the hearths of many of her people: In the neighbourhood of Manchester alone it is supposed that at least 60,000 hands are out of work. In London strenuous efforts are being made to relieve the widespread destitution. In Yorkshire and Staffordshire short time and low wages are doing their work, and empty houses and hazard faces tell the doleful story. If severe weather set in, the suffering from poverty will be terrible.
In the event of war, Parliament will probably meet on the 14th of January, and we may expect the debates to be fierce and stormy. The friends of peace will muster with a strong array of talent but the Government will have an overwhelming support in the course they have taken, and money and men will be supplied with a lavish hand. It is to be feared that the progress of hostilities will soon engender a bitter and relentless feeling of antagonism on both sides in the quarrel.
In considering the eventualities of the war, so for as I have been able to learn, little thought has been bestowed upon the Australian colonies. It is very possible, I think, that your danger is not fully foreseen by the English authorities. You may depend upon it, however, that if England and America plunge into a great naval war, American privateering will exceed everything of the kind known of other countries in former times. There are thousands of men, who sail under the stripes and stars, who possess the adventurous spirit and desperate courage which fit the privateer for his peculiar kind of aggressive operations in a naval war. You had better lose no time in preparing for your own defence. Do not lull yourselves into a false sense of security by depending too much upon the naval superiority of England. American privateers will be recruited from sources independent of the supplies to the Federal fleet. But the Northern States, under the pressure of the new crisis, will soon have a powerful fleet afloat. The boasts of some American writers may not be fulfilled; she may not have 100,000 sailors and 10,000 guns afloat in six months. But it is a delusion to suppose that the Washington Government has exhausted its resources or will be unable to present a defiant front in the impending conflict. Sydney and the surrounding districts ought to muster 5000 volunteers.
London, Dec. 24, 1868.