The Sun.
London, England, 1862-04-25 00:00:00

MR. GLADSTONE ON AMERICA.

Yesterday a numerous meeting was held in the ;
Town-hall, Manchester, on the occasion of the pre-
sentation
of an address by the Chamber of Com-
merce to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The
Mayor of Manchester in the chair.
Mr. GLADSTONE, in the course of his address,
said,—Mr. Mayor and gentlemen, I now come to
that which more particularly touches the state of
your own district and community. We stand here
at a time when, but for one unfortunate event, it is
probable that you and your workpeople would alike
be enjoying a great prosperity. That unfortunate
event you have described, and I think truly de-
scribed, in your address, as " the deplorable struggle
in which the two sections of the great American
Republic are now engaged." It is, gentlemen, a
deplorable struggle. We are not of those, if such
there were, who envied the greatness of the Ameri-
can Republic. (Hear, hear.) We could have been
well content to see her enlarge her borders from
year to year, gradually increasing in her wealth
and strength. We should have retained the
consciousness that on our part nothing would
be done to prevent the continuance of
the most friendly and peaceful relations,
and the admiration with which we regard the
energy of that nation would have been totally un-
tinged either by envy or by fear. (Hear, hear.)
But the struggle has come about through no fault
of ours, and I think we cannot but feel that the po-
sition and attitude of this country with respect to
the United States have not on the other side of the
Atlantic been quite fairly or impartially judged.
(Hear, hear.) Now, lam not going to make this
a matter of complaint. Let us sympathise with
our American brethren in their difficulties. Let
us allow that under the excitement of those
difficulties, and of so desperate and agonising
conflict, the minds of men are not in that
state of tranquillity which renders them the best
judges of the conduct of their neighbours. In such
circumstances the proportion of objects alters before
the eye, and expectations are formed and thought
to be just which in a dispassionate moment will be
seen and felt to have been unfounded. Why, gen-
tlemen, there was a demand made upon us by the
public voice in America at the outset of this deplor-
able struggle for what was called sympathy. What
was the real meaning of that demand ? And I hope
that in what I say I shall not use a word inconsis-
tent with that fraternal feeling which .1 desire to
cherish towards all men, and especially towards our
kindred beyond the Atlantic. But, practically, the
meaning of that desire and call for sympathy, as far
as I understand it, was this,—that we should take
such a course, by our language and by our public
acts, as would place the 6,000,000 or the 10,000,000
of men of the South—l care not which estimate of
their numbers you adopt—in permanent hostility
with us. (Hear.) Now, we may have our own
private opinions about the countenance that has
I been given to those institutions in the North.
(Cheers.) But that is no reason why on the one
side or the other we should pursue a course of con-
duct that is to lay the foundation
of alienation of
feeling and permanent hostility between ourselves
and those who may hereafter be
a great nation
claiming to enter into peaceful relations with us.
(Cheers.) Why, no doubt, if we could see that
this was a contest of slavery or freedom, there is
not a man in this room—there is hardly, perhaps,
a man in all England—who would for a moment
hesitate as to the side he should take. Bat we have
propagation of free institutions at the
)—it is not by such means
point of the SW
no faith in the propagation
that the ends of freedom are to be gained. Free-
dom must be freely accepted—freely embraced. You
cannot invade a nation in order to convert its insti-
tutions from bad ones into good ones (cheers); and
our friends in the North have, as we think, made a
great mistake in supposin—
g that they can
the horrors of this War to philanthropic enbend all
ends. In-
deed, gentlemen, there are those among us who
think—and I
confess that I, for one, have shared
A the apprehension—that if in the course of the vicis-