Government of this country has followed at all times and under all circumstances. Whatever may have been the sympathies of our people, whatever may have been the moral aspects of the foreign wars on which they have looked, and however much they have desired the success of one party over the other, they have inflexibly refused to throw their powers into the scale, or to allow any of their citizens to violate the neutrality which the Government enjoined. From the administration of Washington to the administration of Lincoln, through all the wars of the French Republic and the French empire, through the struggles of mastery in Eastern Europe, through the great civil wars in Poland, in Hungary and in India, we have steadily asserted the policy of non-interference, and maintained it in practice. And we have never resorted to the paltry evasion of doing secretly what we professed openly to avoid. What we said we meant, and what we meant we said. We have held the obligation to be paramount and universal. We complain of England and France, first for the proclamation or profession of neutrality, and then for the violation of the neutrality thus professed. This is not the place to enter upon the reasons which justify these complaints. The loyal people of this country have made up their opinions on both these subjects. They are convinced that England and France have wronged them in both respects, and are just as strongly convinced that Russia, whose naval officers are our guests to-night, has acted differently; has done us no injury; has conformed her conduct to the solemn injunctions of the law of nations, in accounting us competent to manage our own affairs; treating the established and recognized Government of the country as the only lawful belligerent, and holding no relations whatever with the rebels. It is impossible to mistake the settled convictions of the American people. They will never forget, through all the changes of future years, that in their mortal struggle the Czar has been true to them, and in the exercise of his great office has been inflexible in his adherence to the grand and salutary principles of public law. And they will just as surely never cease to believe that the Governments of England and France have desired the disruption of the republic, and have hastened unjustly to lift the rebels into the condition of legal belligerents; have offensively professed neutrality between the lawful and the rebel forces, and, after all, have evaded that professed neutrality by every species of indirect assistance which it was possible to give short of engaging in hostilities. _These things will never be forgotten so long as Americans can read and remember. And, more than this, the men of this generation, who have smarted under these wrongs, will not rest until some of them are righted._ We see the ground fresh with graves, half of which would never have been opened but for the countenance which England and France have