interferes to warn us against a stone blockade in a war to put down Rebel Slavery. (5.) The same propensity and the same inconsistency appear in another instance, where an eminent peer, once Foreign Secretary, did not hesitate, from his place in Parliament, to charge the United States with making medicines and surgical instruments contraband, “contrary to all the common laws of war, _contrary to all precedent, not excluding the most ignorant and barbarous ages_.”[13] Thus exclaims the noble Lord. Now I have nothing to say of the propriety of making these things contraband. My simple object is to exhibit the spirit against which we are to guard. It is difficult to understand how such a display could be made in face of the historic fact, exposed in the satire of Peter Plymley, that Parliament, in 1808, by large majorities, prohibited the exportation of Peruvian bark into any territory occupied by France, and that this prohibition was moved by no less a person than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Perceval, who commended it on the ground that “the severest pressure was already felt on the Continent from the want of that article,” and that “it was of great importance to the armies of the enemy.”[14] Such, in an age neither “ignorant” nor “barbarous,” is authentic British precedent, but now ostentatiously forgotten. (6.) The same recklessness, of such evil omen, breaks forth again in a despatch of the Foreign Secretary, where he undertakes to communicate the judgment of the British Cabinet on the President’s Proclamation of Emancipation. Here, at least, you will say there can be no misunderstanding and no criticism; but you are mistaken. Under any ordinary circumstances, when great passions find no vent, such an act, having such an object, and being of such unparalleled importance, would be treated by the minister of a foreign power with supreme caution, if not with sympathy; but, under the terrible influence of the hour, Earl Russell, not content with condemning the Proclamation, misrepresents it in the most barefaced manner. This was done in a communication to Lord Lyons here in Washington. Gathering his condemnation into one phrase, he says that it “makes Slavery at once legal and illegal”[15]; whereas it is obvious to the most careless observer, who looks only at the face of the Proclamation, that, whatever its faults, it is not obnoxious to this criticism, for it makes Slavery legal nowhere, while it makes it illegal in an immense territory. An official letter so incomprehensible in motive, from a statesman usually liberal, if not cautious, is another illustration of that irritating tendency which will be checked, at last, when it is fully comprehended.