Speeches on Questions of Public Policy Part 10

The experiment of universal liberty has failed. The evils of free society are insufferable. Free society in the long run is impracticable; it is everywhere starving, demoralizing, and insurrectionary. Policy and humanity alike forbid the extension of its evils to new peoples and to coming generations; and therefore free society must fall and give way to a slave society-- a social system old as the world, universal as man.'

Well, on another occasion, the same paper treats the subject in this way. The writer says:--

'Hitherto the defence of slavery has encountered great difficulties, because its apologists stopped half way. They confined the defence of slavery to negro slavery alone, abandoning the principle of slavery, and admitting that every other form of slavery was wrong. Now the line of defence is changed. The South maintains that slavery is just, natural, and necessary, and that it does not depend on the difference of complexions.'

But following up this is an extract from a speech by a Mr. Cobb, who is an eminent man in Southern politics and in Southern opinion. He says:--

'There is, perhaps, no solution of the great problem of reconciling the interests of labour and capital, so as to protect each from the encroachments and oppressions of the other, so simple and effective as negro slavery. By making the labourer himself capital, the conflict ceases, and the interests become identical.'

Now, I do not know whether there is any working man here who does not fully or partly realize the meaning of those extracts. They mean this, that if a man in this neighbourhood (for they pity us very much in our benighted condition as regards capital and labour, and they have an admirable way, from their view, of putting an end to strikes)--they say that, if a man in this neighbourhood had ten thousand pounds sterling in a cotton or woollen factory, and he employed a hundred men, women, and children, that instead of paying them whatever wages had been agreed upon, allowing them to go to the other side of the town, and work where they liked, or to move to another county, or to emigrate to America, or to have any kind of will or wish whatever with regard to their own disposal, that they should be to him capital, just the same as the horses are in his stable; that he should sell the husband South,-- 'South' in America means something very dreadful to the negro,--that they should sell the wife if they liked, that they should sell the children, that, in point of fact, they should do whatsoever they liked with them, and that, if any one of them resisted any punishment which the master chose to inflict, the master should be held justified if he beat his slave to death; and that not one of those men should have the power to give evidence in any court of justice, in any case, against a white man, however much he might have suffered from that white man.

You will observe that this most important paper in the South writes for that principle, and this eminent Southern politician indorses it, and thinks it a cure for all the evils which exist in the Old World and in the Northern and Free States; and there is not a paper in the South, nor is there a man as eminent or more eminent than Mr. Cobb, who has dared to write or speak in condemnation of the atrocity of that language. I believe this great strife to have had its origin in an infamous conspiracy against the rights of human nature. Those principles, which they distinctly avow and proclaim, are not to be found, as far as I know, in the pages of any heathen writer of old times, nor are they to be discovered in the teachings or the practice of savage nations in our times. It is the doctrine of devils, and not of men; and all mankind should shudder at the enormity of the guilt which the leaders of this conspiracy have brought upon that country.

Now, let us look at two or three facts, which seem to me very remarkable, on the surface of the case, but which there are men in this country, and I am told they may be found even in this town, who altogether ignore and deny. The war was not commenced by those to whom your resolution refers; it was commenced by the South; they rebelled against the majority. It was not a rebellion against a monarchy, or an aristocracy, or some other form of government which has its hold upon people, sometimes by services, but often from tradition; but it was against a Government of their own, and a compact of their own, that they violently rebelled, and for the expressed and avowed purpose of maintaining the inst.i.tution of slavery, and for the purpose, not disavowed, of re-opening the slave trade, and, as these extracts show, if their principles should be fully carried out, of making bondage universal among all cla.s.ses of labourers and artisans. When I say that their object was to re-open the slave trade, do not for a moment imagine that I am overstating the case against them. They argue, with a perfect logic, that, if slavery was right, the slave trade could not be wrong; if the slave trade be wrong, slavery cannot be right; and that if it be lawful and moral to go to the State of Virginia and buy a slave for two thousand dollars, and take him to Louisiana, it cannot be wrong to go to Africa, and buy a slave for fifty dollars, and take him to Louisiana.

That was their argument; it is an argument to this day, and is an argument that in my opinion no man can controvert; and the lawful existence of slavery is as a matter of course to be followed, and would be followed, wherever there was the power, by the re-opening of the traffic in negroes from Africa.

That is not all these people have done. Reference has been made, in the resolution and in the speeches, to the distress which prevails in this district, and you are told, and have been told over and over again, that all this distress has arisen from the blockade of the ports of the Southern States. There is at least one great port from which in past times two millions of bales of cotton a-year have found their way to Europe--the port of New Orleans--which is blockaded; and the United States Government has proclaimed that any cotton that is sent from the interior to New Orleans for shipment, although it belongs to persons in arms against the Government, shall yet be permitted to go to Europe, and they shall receive unmolested the proceeds of the sale of that cotton.

But still the cotton does not come. The reason why it does not come is, not because it would do harm to the United States Government for it to come, or that it would in any way a.s.sist the United States Government in carrying on the war. The reason that it does not come is, because its being kept back is supposed to be a way of influencing public opinion in England and the course of the English Government in reference to the American war. They burn the cotton that they may injure us, and they injure us because they think that we cannot live even for a year without their cotton; and that to get it we should send ships of war, break the blockade, make war upon the North, and a.s.sist the slave-owners to maintain, or to obtain, their independence.

Now, with regard to the question of American cotton, one or two extracts will be sufficient; but I could give you a whole pamphlet of them, if it were necessary. Mr. Mann, an eminent person in the State of Georgia, says:--

'With the failure of the cotton, England fails. Stop her supply of Southern slave-grown cotton, and her factories stop, her commerce stops, the healthful normal circulation of her life- blood stops.'

Again he says:--

'In one year from the stoppage of England's supply of Southern slave-grown cotton, the Chartists would be in all her streets and fields, revolution would be rampant throughout the island, and nothing that is would exist.'

He also says, addressing an audience:--

'Why, Sirs, British lords hold their lands, British bishops hold their revenues, Victoria holds her sceptre, by the grace of cotton, as surely as by the grace of G.o.d.'

Senator Wigfall says:--

'If we stop the supply of cotton for one week, England would be starving. Queen Victoria's crown would not stand on her head one week, if the supply of cotton was stopped; nor would her head stand on her shoulders.'

Mr. Stephens, who is the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, says:--

'There will be revolution in Europe, there will be starvation there; our cotton is the element that will do it.'

Now, I am not stating the mere result of any discovery of my own, but it would be impossible to read the papers of the South, or the speeches made in the South, before, and at the time of, and after the secession, without seeing that the universal opinion there was, that the stoppage of the supply of cotton would be our instantaneous ruin, and that if they could only lay hold of it, keep it back in the country, or burn it, so that it never could be used, that then the people of Lancashire, merchants, manufacturers, and operatives in mills--everybody dependent upon this vast industry--would immediately arise and protest against the English Government abstaining for one moment from the recognition of the South, from war with the North, and from a resolution to do the utmost that we could to create a slave-holding independent republic in the South.

And these very men who have been wishing to drag us into a war that would have covered us with everlasting infamy, have sent their envoys to this country, Mr. Yancey, Mr. Mann (I do not know whether or not the same Mr. Mann to whom I have been referring), and Mr. Mason, the author of the Fugitive Slave Law. These men have been in this country,--one of them I believe is here now,--envoys sent to offer friendship to the Queen of England, to be received at her Court, and to make friends with the great men in London. They come,--I have seen them under the gallery of the House of Commons; I have seen Members of the House shaking hands with them and congratulating them, if there has been some military success on their side, and receiving them as if they were here from the most honourable Government, and with the most honourable mission. Why, the thing which they have broken off from the United States to maintain, is felony by your law. They are not only slave owners, slave buyers and sellers, but that which out of Pandemonium itself was never before conceived,--they are slave breeders for the slave market; and these men have come to your country, and are to be met with at elegant tables in London, and are in fast friendship with some of your public men, and are constantly found in some of your newspaper offices; and they are here to ask Englishmen--Englishmen with a history of freedom--to join hands with their atrocious conspiracy.

I regret more than I have words to express this painful fact, that of all the countries in Europe this country is the only one which has men in it who are willing to take active steps in favour of this intended slave government. We supply the ships; we supply the arms, the munitions of war; we give aid and comfort to this foulest of all crimes.

Englishmen only do it. I believe you have not seen a single statement in the newspapers that any French, or Belgian, or Dutch, or Russian ship has been engaged in, or seized whilst attempting to violate the blockade and to carry arms to the South. They are English Liberal newspapers only which support this stupendous iniquity. They are English statesmen only, who profess to be liberal, who have said a word to favour the authors of this now--enacting revolution in America.

The other day, not a week since, a member of the present Government,--he is not a statesman--he is the son of a great statesman, and occupies the position of Secretary for Ireland,--he dared to say to an English audience that he wished the Republic to be divided, and that the South should become an independent State. If that island which--I suppose in punishment for some of its offences--has been committed to his care,--if that island were to attempt to secede, not to set up a slave kingdom, but a kingdom more free than it has ever yet been, the Government of which he is a member would sack its cities and drench its soil with blood before they would allow such a kingdom to be established.

But the working men of England, and I will say it too for the great body of the middle cla.s.ses of England, have not been wrong upon this great question. As for you,--men labouring from morn till night that you may honourably and honestly maintain your families, and the independence of your households,--you are too slowly emerging from a condition of things far from independent--far from free--for you to have sympathy with this fearful crime which I have been describing. You come, as it were, from bonds yourselves, and you can sympathize with them who are still in bondage.

See that meeting that was held in Manchester a month ago, in the Free Trade Hall, of five or six thousand men. See the address which they there carried unanimously to the President of the United States. See that meeting held the other night in Exeter Hall, in London; that vast room, the greatest room, I suppose, in the Metropolis, filled so much that its overflowings filled another large room in the same building, and when that was full, the further overflowings filled the street; and in both rooms, and in the street, speeches were made on this great question. But what is said by the writers in this infamous Southern press in this country with regard to that meeting? Who was there? 'A gentleman who had written a novel, and two or three Dissenting ministers,' I shall not attempt any defence of those gentlemen. What they do, they do openly, in the face of day; and if they utter sentiments on this question, it is from a public platform, with thousands of their countrymen gazing into their faces. These men who slander them write behind a mask,--and, what is more, they dare not tell in the open day that which they write in the columns of their journal.

But if it be true that there is nothing in the writer of a successful novel, or in two or three pious and n.o.ble-minded Dissenting ministers, to collect a great audience, what does it prove if there was a great audience? It only proves that they were not collected by the reputation of any orator who was expected to address them, but by their cordial and ardent sympathy for the great cause which was pleaded before them.

Everybody now that I meet says to me, 'Public opinion seems to have undergone a considerable change.' The fact is, people do not know very much about America. They are learning more every day. They have been greatly misled by what are called 'the best public instructors.'

Jefferson, who was one of the greatest men that the United States have produced, said that newspapers should be divided into four compartments: in one of them they should print the true; in the next, the probable; in the third, the possible; and in the fourth, the lies. With regard to some of these newspapers, I incline to think, as far as their leading columns go, that an equal division of s.p.a.ce would be found very inconvenient, and that the last-named compartment, when dealing with American questions, would have to be at least four times as large as the first.

Coming back to the question of this war; I admit, of course--everybody must admit--that we are not responsible for it, for its commencement, or for the manner in which it is conducted; nor can we be responsible for its result. But there is one thing which we are responsible for, and that is for our sympathies, for the manner in which we regard it, and for the tone in which we discuss it. What shall we say, then, with regard to it? On which side shall we stand? I do not believe it is possible to be strictly, coldly neutral. The question at issue is too great, the contest is too grand in the eye of the world. It is impossible for any man, who can have an opinion worth anything on any question, not to have some kind of an opinion on the question of this war. I am not ashamed of my opinion, or of the sympathy which I feel, and have over and over again expressed, on the side of the free North. I cannot understand how any man witnessing what is enacting on the American continent can indulge in small cavils against the free people of the North, and close his eye entirely to the enormity of the purposes of the South. I cannot understand how any Englishman, who in past years has been accustomed to say that 'there was one foul blot upon the fair fame of the American Republic,' can now express any sympathy for those who would perpetuate and extend that blot. And, more, if we profess to be, though it be with imperfect and faltering steps, the followers of Him who declared it to be His Divine mission 'to heal the broken- hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,' must we not reject with indignation and scorn the proffered alliance and friendship with a power based on human bondage, and which contemplates the overthrow and the extinction of the dearest rights of the most helpless of mankind?

If we are the friends of freedom, personal and political,--and we all profess to be so, and most of us, more or less, are striving after it more completely for our own country,--how can we withhold our sympathy from a Government and a people amongst whom white men have always been free, and who are now offering an equal freedom to the black? I advise you not to believe in the 'destruction' of the American nation. If facts should happen by any chance to force you to believe it, do not commit the crime of wishing it. I do not blame men who draw different conclusions from mine from the facts, and who believe that the restoration of the Union is impossible. As the facts lie before our senses, so must we form a judgment on them. But I blame those men that wish for such a catastrophe. For myself, I have never despaired, and I will not despair. In the language of one of our old poets, who wrote, I think, more than three hundred years ago, I will not despair,--

'For I have seen a ship in haven fall, After the storm had broke both mast and shroud.'

From the very outburst of this great convulsion, I have had but one hope and one faith, and it is this--that the result of this stupendous strife may be to make freedom the heritage for ever of a whole continent, and that the grandeur and the prosperity of the American Union may never be impaired.

AMERICA.

IV.

THE STRUGGLE IN AMERICA.

ST. JAMES'S HALL, MARCH 26, 1863.

[The meeting at which this speech was delivered was convened by the Trades' Unions of London to enable the working men to express their sentiments on the war in the United States. Mr. Bright was Chairman of the meeting.]

When the Committee did me the honour to ask me to attend this meeting to-night and to take the Chair, I felt that I was not at liberty to refuse, for I considered that there was something remarkable in the character of this meeting; and I need not tell you that the cause which we are a.s.sembled to discuss is one which excites my warmest sympathies.

This meeting is remarkable, inasmuch as it is not what is commonly called a public meeting, but it is a meeting, as you have seen from the announcements and advertis.e.m.e.nts by which it has been called--it is a meeting of members of Trades' Unions and Trades' Societies in London.

The members of these Societies have not usually stepped out from their ordinary business to take part in meetings of this kind on public questions.

The subject which we have met to discuss is one of surpa.s.sing interest-- which excites at this moment, and has excited for two years past, the attention and the astonishment of the civilized world. We see a country which for many years--during the lifetime of the oldest amongst us--has been the most peaceful, and prosperous, and the most free amongst the great nations of the earth--we see it plunged at once into the midst of a sanguinary revolution, whose proportions are so gigantic as to dwarf all other revolutionary records and events of which we have any knowledge. But I do not wonder at this revolution. No man can read the history of the United States from the time when they ceased to be dependent colonies of England, without discovering that at the birth of that great Republic there was sown the seed, if not of its dissolution, at least of its extreme peril; and the infant giant in its cradle may be said to have been rocked under the shadow of the cypress, which is the symbol of mortality and of the tomb.

Colonial weakness, when face to face with British strength, made it impossible to put an end to slavery, or to establish a republic free from slavery. To meet England, it was necessary to be united, and to be united it was necessary to tolerate slavery; and from that hour to this-- at least, to a period within the last two or three years--the love of the Union and the patriotism of the American people have induced them constantly to make concessions to slavery, because they knew that when they ceased to make concessions they ran the peril of that disruption which has now arrived; and they dreaded the destruction of their country even more than they hated the evil of slavery. But these concessions failed, as I believe concessions to evil always do fail. These concessions failed to secure safety in that Union. There were principles at war which were wholly irreconcilable. The South, as you know, has been engaged for fifty years in building fresh ramparts by which it may defend its inst.i.tutions. The North has been growing yearly greater in freedom; and though the conflict might be postponed, it was obviously inevitable.

In our day, then, that which the statesmen of America have hoped permanently to postpone has arrived. The great trial is now going on in the sight of the world, and the verdict upon this great question must at last be rendered. But how much is at stake? Some men of this country, some writers, treat it as if, after all, it was no great matter that had caused this contest in the United States. I say that a whole continent is at stake. It is not a question of boundary; it is not a question of tariff; it is not a question of supremacy of party, or even of the condition of four millions of negroes. It is more than that. It is a question of a whole continent, with its teeming millions, and what shall be their present and their future fate. It is for these millions freedom or slavery, education or ignorance, light or darkness, Christian morality ever widening and all-blessing in its influence, or an overshadowing and all-blasting guilt.

There are men, good men, who say that we in England, who are opposed to war, should take no public part in this great question. Only yesterday I received from a friend of mine, whose fidelity I honour, a letter, in which he asked me whether I thought, with the views which he supposed I entertain on the question of war, it was fitting that I should appear at such a meeting as this. It is not our war; we did not make it. We deeply lament it. It is not in our power to bring it to a close; but I know not that we are called upon to shut our eyes and to close our hearts to the great issues which are depending upon it. Now we are met here, let us ask each other some questions. Has England any opinion with regard to this American question? Has England any sympathy, on one side or the other, with either party in this great struggle? But, to come nearer, I would ask whether this meeting has any opinion upon it, and whether our sympathies have been stirred in relation to it? It is true, to this meeting not many rich, not many n.o.ble, have been called. It is a meeting composed of artisans and working men of the city of London,--men whose labour, in combination with capital and directing skill, has built this great city, and has made England great. I address myself to these men. I ask them--I ask you--have you any special interest in this contest?

Privilege thinks it has a great interest in it, and every morning, with blatant voice, it comes into your streets and curses the American Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle for many years past. It has beheld thirty millions of men, happy and prosperous, without emperor, without king, without the surroundings of a court, without n.o.bles, except such as are made by eminence in intellect and virtue, without State bishops and State priests,--

'Sole venders of the lore which works salvation,'--

without great armies and great navies, without great debt and without great taxes. Privilege has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if this grand experiment should succeed. But you, the workers,--you, striving after a better time,--you, struggling upwards towards the light, with slow and painful steps,--you have no cause to look with jealousy upon a country which, amongst all the great nations of the globe, is that one where labour has met with the highest honour, and where it has reaped its greatest reward. Are you aware of the fact, that in fifteen years, which is but as yesterday when it is past, two and a half millions of your countrymen have found a home in the United States,--that a population equal nearly, if not quite, to the population of this great city--itself equal to no mean kingdom--has emigrated from these sh.o.r.es? In the United States there has been, as you know, an open door for every man,--and millions have entered into it, and have found rest.

Now, take the two sections of the country which are engaged in this fearful struggle. In the one, labour is honoured more than elsewhere in the world; there, more than in any other country, men rise to competence and independence; a career is open; the pursuit of happiness is not hopelessly thwarted by the law. In the other section of that country, labour is not only not honoured, but it is degraded. The labourer is made a chattel. He is no more his own than the horse that drags a carriage through the next street; nor is his wife, nor is his child, nor is anything that is his, his own. And if you have not heard the astounding statement, it may be as well for a moment to refer to it,-- that it is not black men only who should be slaves. Only to-day I read from one of the Southern papers a statement that--

'Slavery in the Jewish times was not the slavery of negroes; and therefore, if you confine slavery to negroes, you lose your sheet anchor, which is the Bible-argument in favour of slavery.'

I think nothing can be more fitting for the discussion of the members of the Trade Societies of London. You in your Trade Societies help each other when you are sick, or if you meet with accidents. You do many kind acts amongst each other. You have other business also; you have to maintain what you believe to be the just rights of industry and of your separate trades; and sometimes, as you know, you do things which many people do not approve, and which, probably, when you come to think more coolly of them, you may even doubt the wisdom of yourselves. That is only saying that you are not immaculate, and that your wisdom, like the wisdom of other cla.s.ses, is not absolutely perfect. But they have in the Southern States a specific for all the differences between capital and labour. They say,--