The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1872-02-10


and Our Settlement AZ Agreed Upon
with England.
1t is not surprising that the "American
case" on the Alabama claims, as submitted to
the Geneva Court of Arbitration, has awakened
a profound excitement and great indignation
in England touching the inferential and conse-
quential damages involved. It is not surpris-
ing, because Englishmen had generally &C
cepted the Treaty of Washington as embrace
ing the abandonment of all indirect claims in
the premises on the part of the United States !;
and because the acts, the facts, the dates and
specifications, with the argument thereon, sub
mitted in our case, are fearfully strong, not
only in behalf of consequential damages, but in
support of the American opinion that Eng
lands neutrality in our late rebellion, from
the beginning to the end, was but thin dis
| guise covering an active alliance with JEFF
| Davis.
In the course of the argument of the Amer
lean case, after reciting the several treaties
between the two countries from 1914 to 1854,
and the numerous concessions made on the
part of the United States from time to time
in behalf Of peace and relations Of close
| friendship with England, it is said that
when threatened with our Southern rebel
lion, the United States had "a right
to feel confident that in any contro-
versy which might grow out of the unhappy
existence of African slavery in certain of the
| Southern States the British government would
not exercise its sovereign powers questionably
or unquestionably in favor of the supporters of
slavery" Down to the month of May, 1861,
this was the almost universal opinion through
out our loyal States. 1t was an opinion natu-
rally resulting from the activity with which
English abolitionsts and the British govern
ment had supported for twenty-five or thirty
years the abolition agitation in this country.
After all the services in this cause of the noto-
rious Thompson and other English emissaries !;
after all the books of English travellers on
American barbarisms, including the horrible
atrocities of American slavery, from Mrs.
Trollope down to Charles Dickens, and after
the dedication in England of William Lloyd
Garrison and the astonished authoress Of
''Uncle Toms Cabin" our Northern people to
the last moment secuted the idea that between
the United States and rebellious Southern
confederacy, founded on ''the corner stone Of
negro slavery" England would take the side
of slavery.
But she did, and with an indecent haste and
with shameless audacity, in Lord John
Russell's proclamation of belligerent rights,
which we could not at first understand,
because at first we could not believe it to be
true. We were soon convinced, however,
that, not only were the sympathies and the
moral support of the British government and
the British aristocracy pledged to the so-called
Confederate States, but that Lords Palmer
s.on and Russell were only waiting for con-
venient pretext to become an active armed
ally of JEFF Davis 1t was made clear, from
Russells belligerent proclamation, that Eng
lands active philanthropy in reference to
American slavery had had for its object, not
the emancipation of our Southern slaves, but
the dissolution of the great American republic
| and the overthrow of its popular institutions,
80 dangerous to the ''divine rights Of kings"
and feudal aristocracies. The sectional
division of this Union on slavery to the issue
i of war, for which England had been working
for quarter of century and more, had come
at last, and, with the organization of the
Southern Confederacy at Montgomery,
Alabama, and before gun had been fred to
break the peace between the North and
South, England took the position that this
Union was dissolved; that the Southern Con-
| Gya Co hat
venient pretext would soon enable her to
settle the question.
| The entente cordidle cemented between
Lord Palmerston and Louis Napoleon in
| the war of the Crimea enabled the former,
without difficulty, to unite France with Eng
land in this matter Of bellgerent rights. Nor
was Napoleon behind hand in his confidence
in our Southern Confederacy; and he, too,
had his grand designs in gathering his share
of the rich fruits that would be offered to Eng
| land and France from the dissolution of the
great American Union. To England, with the
success of our gigantic rebellion, would fall
the monopoly, on her own terms, of our South
ern cotton trade; and between the Northern
and the Southern Confederacy she could hold
both subject to her good will and pleasure.
Above all, with the collapse of this republic
the crown and the aristocracy of England would
be established as on rock for, perhaps, Gen.
turtles to come. Louis Napoleon, with an eye
TO the ultimate restoration to France OF the
outlets of the Mississippi and the command OF
its great traffic, and to the appropriation OF
California, saw that his way was conveniently
open through Mexico. He took military pos
session of that couutry-our hands being tied;
he established his Austrian instrument, the
accomplished Macmillan, over it, on the