(9.) These same Cabinet orators, not content with giving us a bad name, allow themselves to pronounce against us on the whole case. They declare that the National Government cannot succeed in crushing Rebel Slavery, and that dismemberment is inevitable. “Jefferson Davis,” says one of them, “has created _a nation_.” Thus do these representatives of declared “neutrality” degrade us and exalt Slavery. It is apparent that their utterance, though made in Parliament and repeated at public meetings, was founded less on special information from the seat of war--disclosing its secret--than on political theory, if not prejudice. It is true that our eloquent teacher, Edmund Burke, in his famous Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, argued most persuasively that Great Britain could not succeed in reclaiming the colonies which had declared themselves independent. His reasoning rather than his wisdom enters into and possesses the British statesmen of our day, who do not take the trouble to see how the two cases are so entirely unlike that the example of the one is not applicable to the other,--that the colonies were battling to found a _new_ power on the corner-stone of Liberty, Equality, and Happiness to All Men, while our Slavemongers are battling to found a _new_ power on the corner-stone of Slavery. The difference becomes a contrast, so that whatever was once generously said in favor of American Independence now tells with unmistakable force against this new-fangled pretension. No British statesman saw the past more clearly than Earl Russell, when, long ago, in striking phrase, he said that England, in her war against our fathers, “had engaged _for the suppression of Liberty_”;[21] but this is precisely what Rebel Slavery is doing. Men change, but principles are the same now as then. Therefore do I say, that every sympathy formerly bestowed upon our fathers now belongs to us their children, striving to uphold their work against bad men, who would not only break it in pieces, but put in its stead a _new_ piratical power, whose declared object is “the suppression of Liberty.” And yet British ministers, mounting the prophetic tripod, presume most oracularly to foretell the doom of this Republic. Their prophecies do not disturb my confidence. I do not forget how often false prophets have appeared, like the author of the “Oceana,” who published a demonstration that monarchy was impossible in England[22] less than six months before Charles the Second was welcomed to London amid salvos of cannon and hurrahs of the people. Nor do I stop to consider how far such prophecies uttered in public places by British ministers are consistent with that British “neutrality” so constantly boasted. Opinions are allies more potent than subsidies, especially in an age like the present. Prophecies are opinions proclaimed and projected into the future; and yet these are given freely to Rebel Slavery. There is matter for reflection in this instance, but I adduce it only as another