When a power comparable only to Thugs, buccaneers, and cannibals tries to thrust its hideous head among nations, and claims the protection and privileges of International Law,--a power which rose against the freest rule on earth for the avowed motive of propagating the worst form of Slavery ever known, having no legitimate complaint, or, if it had, certainly trying no constitutional means of redress, but plunging at once into arms, and that when the arsenals had been emptied and the fortresses seized by the treason of office-holders,--I hold it to be an offence against law, order, and public morality for a statesman whose words carry weight to speak at all of such a power without declaring abhorrence of it.--PROFESSOR FRANCIS W. NEWMAN, _Letter to Mr. Gladstone, December 1, 1862_. * * * * * I blame men who are eager to admit into the Family of Nations a state which offers itself to us, based upon a principle, I will undertake to say, more odious and more blasphemous than was ever heretofore dreamed of in Christian or Pagan, in civilized or in savage times. The leaders of this revolt propose this monstrous thing: that over a territory forty times as large as England the blight and curse of Slavery shall be forever perpetuated.--JOHN BRIGHT, _Speech at Birmingham, December 18, 1862_. * * * * * We are already culpable for a part of this bloody war; for, better informed or less indifferent, less selfish or more adroit, above all, more wise, more sincerely the friends of what is right, we could, from London and Paris, have thrown into the midst of the combatants this declaration, which would have rendered the conflict ephemeral: “Never will either England or France, Christian nations, liberal nations, recognize the existence of a people seeking to found Liberty and Independence on Slavery!” The misfortune of the times, in obscuring our judgment, in dulling our passion for the beautiful ideas of Freedom, has, then, already made us participants, in some respect, in the rebellion of the people of the South, and, in order to mask what was gross and low in our voluntary error, we set up vague reasons of commercial policy and general policy at which our fathers would have blushed.… The truth is, that the revolt of the South is the most impudent and most odious insult that has ever been offered to the ideas of modern Civilization.--JOURNAL DES ÉCONOMISTES, Avril, 1864, Tom. XLII. p. 88.