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604      DOUGLASS MONTHLY.      FEBRUARY, 1862

THE ENGLISH PRESS ON THE SURRENDER OF MASON AND SLIDELL.

The Europa arrived at Boston on Tuesday night.  We give extracts from the English papers on the late difficulties and the surrender of MASON and SLIDELL:

THE TIMES OF MASON AND SLIDELL.

A turn of the wheel, which the American Cabinet has managed to make as sudden as possible, brings us a new question.  The four American gentlemen, who have got us into our late trouble, and cost us probably a million a piece, will soon be in one of our ports.  Any day and hour we may expect to hear of their arrival at Liverpool, and their journey to the metropolis.  Like the rest of their countrymen, they believe themselves to be of immense importance to their cause, whatever it may be.  Neither side can give England the smallest credit for understanding or wishing to understand, or having the capacity to understand, the rights of their case; and so nothing will serve them but that somebody must be always dinning into our ears some details or platitudes to which the speakers attach a special value.  Federalist after Federalist, Confederate after Confederate, has arrived in this country in the full persuasion that if he were once permitted to occupy the attention of Lord Palmerston or Lord Russell night and day for a fortnight, or to fill a page of the Times every day for that period, England would at last begin to have an inkling of the case, and would rush to the aid of the Federal or the Confederate cause.  These two commissioners and their secretaries are not unlikely to think even more of their importance than other similar arrivals, having witnessed in their own persons the rabid anxiety of their Northern countrymen not to let them be seen or heard in this island.  To the sedate English mind this ridiculous rivalry for the exclusive possession of the British ear, is only an older version of what is often winessed in our nurseries.

A fearful uproar of words, screams, and blows reaches the mother, who hastens to allay the tumult.  When she arrives she finds all confusion, and Master John and Master Tom each with a tale of outrages and provocations, each resolved to have the last word, and afraid of nothing so much as that the other should get a hearing.  The parent sees enough to be sure that both were abundantly in the wrong, but that it is impossible to adjudicate between them.  The general opinion in this country is that both sides in the States have acted as ill as could be, and that it is not for England to decide which of them bears the palm for insolence, outrage, treachery, and folly.  However, Messrs. Mason and Slidell will not be be easily persuaded but that they can throw much new light on the rupture, and on its bearings upon our interests.  If we will only be so good as to shut both our eyes and our ears to everybody and everything else, and take in for gospel all that they say, we shall at last be in a condition to form an opinion on this quarrel, and the only opinion we can possibly come to is that we must immediately recognize the Southern States, send a fleet to break up the blockade, sweep the Northern commerce off the sea, and finally assist to inaugurate Mr. Jefferson Davis in whatever city of the whole Union he would prefer for that purpose.

How, then, are we to receive these illustrious visitors?  Of course they will be stared at, and followed, and photographed, and made the subject of paragraphs.  There is no help for that.  Mr. Thomas Sayers cannot walk the streets with a friend, or ask the Mayor for permission to put up a booth in a market place, but the crowd immediately conclude the rough, hard-visaged, ill-favored pair to be the Confederate Commissioners.  Messrs. Mason and Slidell, with their two Secretaries, though not so handsome or graceful as their countryman Blondin, would certainly fill the Chrystal Palace if they proposed to address the visitors there on the merits of their cause.  But for the benefit of the discriminating——for the guidance of the minority that prefers at least a respectable idol, and that does not wish to throw away its confidence and applause, we may as well observe that Messrs. Mason and Slidell are about the most worthless booty it would be possible to extract from the jaws of the American lion.  They have long been known as the blind and habitual haters and revilers of this country.  They have done more than any other men to get up the insane prejudice against England which disgraces the morality and disorders the policy of the Union.  The hatred of this country has been their stock in trade.  On this they have earned their political livelihood and won their position, just as there are others who pander to the lower passions of humanity.  A diligent use of this bad capital has made them woat they are and raised them to the rank of Commissioners.  It is through their lifelong hatred and abuse of England that they come here in their present conspicuous capacity.

The nation under whose flag they sought a safe passage across the Atlantic–the nation that has now rescued them with all her might from the certainty of a dungeon and the chances of retaliatory murder, is that against which they have always done their best to exasperate their countrymen.  Had they perished in the cell or on the scaffold, amid the triumphant yells of the multitude, memory would have suggested that their own bitter tirades had raised one storm, and that their death was only the natural and logical conclusion of their own calumnies and sophistries.

So we do sincerely hope that our countrymen will not give these fellows anything in the shape of an ovation.  The civility that is due to a foe in distress is all they can claim.  We have returned them good for evil, and, sooth to say, we should be exceedingly sorry that they should ever be in a situation to choose what return they will make for the good we have now done them.  They are here for their own interest, in order, if possible, to drag us into their own quarrel, and, but for the unpleasant contingencies of a prison, rather disappointed, perhaps, that their detention has not provoked a new war.  When they stepped on board the Trent they did not trouble themselves with the thought of the mischief they might be doing an unoffending neutral; and if now, by any less perilous device, they could entangle us in the war, no doubt they would be only too happy.

We trust there is no chance of their doing this, for, impartial as the British public is in the matter, it certainly has no prejudice in favor of slavery, which, if anything, these gentlemen represent.  What they and their secretaries are to do here passes our conjecture.  They must not suppose, because we have gone to the very verge of a great war to rescue them, that therefore they are precious in our eyes.  We should have done just as much to rescue two of their own negroes, and, had that been the object of the rescue, the swarthy Pompey and Caesar would have had just the same right to triumphal arches and municipal addresses as Messrs. Mason & Slidell.  So, please, British public, let's have none of these things.  Let the Commissioners come up quietly to town, and have their say with anybody who may have time to listen to them.  For our part, we cannot see how anything they have to tell can turn the scale of British duty and deliberation.  There have been so many cases of peoples and nations establishing an actual independence, and compelling the recognition of the world, that all we have to do is what we have done before, up to the very last year.– This is now a simple matter of precedent.– Our statesmen and lawyers know quite as much on the subject as Messrs. Mason and Slidell, and are in no need of their information or advice.

THE TIMES ON THE STONE BLOCKADE.

The Times, satisfied with the deliverance of England from the war which threatened to arise out of the Trent affair, is beset with wonder, pity, and indignation when it contemplates the vindictive character of our national hostilities thus far, and when the half million of Northern soldiers are launched at their adversaries it looks for deeds such as the warfare of "hereditary rivals," such as England and France, would never know.  It sees that the war for empire is already a war for vengeance, although the President and his advisers formally adhere to the theory that the South is merely for a time in the hands of traitors, who must be crushed, and then all will be well.  But the Times believes a stronger and deeper current is setting in, which will soon sweep away these "fictions of legality," and the conquest, and failing that, the destruction of a detested foe will take their their place.  The blocking up of the harbor of Charleston by the "stone fleet" is brought forward as an evidence of the growing ferocity and vindictiveness which is to culminate, according to the Times, in unheard of atrocities, and it protests against the violation of all the laws of warfare, challenges history to produce its parallel, and winds up by calling it a "savage innovation, left to republicans of our own day, and first put in practice against a city the people of which the officer who does the work would, a few months since, have addressed as citizens and countrymen."  The Times simply protests; it suggests nothing in relation to the matter in question.

STRANGE SUPPRESSION OF AN IMPORTANT FACT.

Wilmer and Smith's European Times exposes a most iniquitous imposition on the feelings of the people of England in connection with the Trent affair.  It says:

There is one thing sincerely to be regretted in this affair, and how it has been overlooked, the authorities at the Foreign office, or the American Minister in London, can best explain.  The seizure of the Commissioners on board the steamer Trent was known almost simultaneously in England and America.– Appreciating the seriousness of the act, Mr. Seward lost no time in writing to Mr. Adams, the Federal Ambassador at the Court of St. James, requesting him to inform Earl Russell that Capt. Wilkes acted in the seizure without instructions, and entirely on his own responsibility, and hoping that our Cabinet would consider the subject in a friendly temper, which would be met with the best disposition on the part of the Washington authorities.  Mr. Adams, no doubt, carried out the instructions of his official superior, but not the slightest intimation was given to any one on this side of the existence of such a communication.

The London Times of yesterday, ignoring the important communication, which must have reached England about the middle of December, and probably before the death of Prince Albert, says:  "There is little mystery in modern diplomacy.  The bees work under glass houses, and seem to find pleasure and advantage in the transparency of their toil."  The simile is pretty, but as applied by the Times to this particular case of diplomacy it is not only not true, but the very reverse of the truth.  The first inkling we get of this highly important declaration is from the other side of the Atlantic.  With whom, then, rests the suppressio veri?  If the existence of this admission had been known, how much angry writing and fierce invective would have been spared?  A pacific and friendly solution would have been regarded by all reasonable men as certain; whereas, in the absence of this information and the constant dispatch of troops and munitions of war to Canada in mid-winter, an appeal to force was generally regarded as inevitable.  The impression, prompted by the most warlike portion of the London press, was that the Washington Cabinet would justify the act of Capt. Wilkes, and this notion our Ministers, by the withholding of the information they possessed, did their utmost to encourage.  This is a matter that ought and must be sifted." 

The Daily News joins in the general gladness expressed by the presses, with but one or two exceptions, because of the settlement of the question of war.  It says:

"The reparation due to Great Britain is made, and the honor of our flag is signally, yet peacably, vindicated.  The incidental effects of a war waged by England against the government of the United States, the character of an intervention which it must have assumed, and above all the practical alliance into which it must have brought us with an abhorred league of men stealers, have had a thousand times more to do with the dread of an unfavorable answer from Washington than any estimate of loss to ourselves; and in a crisis, the necessity of maintaining our position among the nations of the world must and would have over ruled ever other consideration.  From these gloomy precepts we are now happily delivered.  Our government has united firmness with conciliation.  The government of Washington, which we were lately told was a puppet in the hands of a New York mob, has acted with all the reserve and decision which can attend independence and responsibility."

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