“I would prefer a war with England to the humiliation which we have tamely submitted to; and I venture the assertion that such a war would have called into the field five hundred thousand men who are not now there, and never will be without it, and have developed an energy and power in the United States which no country has exhibited in modern times, except France, in her great struggle in 1793.”[30] In equal opposition to the British demand, Mr. B. F. Thomas, of Massachusetts, an able lawyer, said:-- “The surrender is made, the thing done. In the presence of great duties we have no time for the luxury of grief. Complaint of the Government would be useless, if not groundless. It was too much to ask of it to take another war on its hands.… But we are not called upon, Mr. Speaker, to say that the demand was manly or just. It was unmanly and unjust. It was a demand which, in view of her history, of the rights she had always claimed and used as a belligerent power, of the principles which her greatest of jurists, Lord Stowell, had imbedded in the Law of Nations, England was fairly estopped to make.… When the matter is more carefully weighed, it will be seen and felt that no wrong was done to England,--that there was no wrong in the forbearance to exercise an extreme right,--no insult, for none was intended,--that our feeling, if any, leaned to virtue’s side, was a relaxation of the iron rigor of law from motives of humanity and Christian courtesy,--that, on the other hand, England has done to us a great wrong, in availing herself of our moment of weakness to make a demand, which, accompanied as it was by the ‘pomp and circumstance of war,’ was insolent in spirit and thoroughly unjust.… But the loss will ultimately be hers. She is treasuring up to herself wrath against the day of wrath. She has excited in the hearts of this people a deep and bitter sense of wrong, of injury inflicted at a moment when we could not respond. It is night with us now; but through the watches of the night, even, we shall be girding ourselves to strike the blow of righteous retribution.”[31] In similar spirit, Mr. Wright, of Pennsylvania, said:-- “Let England take them; if she has a mind to fête and toast them, let her do it,--it is none of our business; if England desires to make lions of Confederate Rebels, it is a mere matter of taste. If they have to be surrendered, then let them be surrendered under a protest, while we shall remember hereafter that there is a matter to be cancelled between the British Government and the United States of North America.”[32]