_Armed_ intervention is war, and nothing less. Of course it can be vindicated only as war, and it must be resisted as war. Believing, as I do most profoundly, that war can never be a game, but must always be a crime when it ceases to be a duty,--a crime to be shunned, if not a duty to be performed swiftly and surely,--and that a nation, like an individual, is not permitted to take the sword except in just self-defence,--I find the same limitation in armed intervention, which becomes unjust invasion in proportion as it departs from just self-defence. Under this head is naturally included all that intervention moved by a tyrannical or intermeddling spirit, because such intervention, whatever its professions, is essentially hostile,--as when Russia, Prussia, and Austria partitioned Poland, when the Holy Alliance intermeddled everywhere and menaced even America, or when Russia intervened to crush the independence of Hungary, or France to crush the Roman Republic. All such intervention is inexcusable, illegal, and scandalous. Its vindication is found only in the effrontery that might makes right. _Unarmed_ intervention is of a different nature. If sincerely unarmed, it may be regarded as obtrusive, but not hostile. It may assume the form of mediation or the proffer of good offices, at the invitation of both parties, or, in the case of civil war, at the invitation of the original authority. With such invitation, this intervention is proper and honorable; without such invitation, it is of doubtful character; but if known to be contrary to the desires of both parties, or to the desires of the original authority in a distracted country, it becomes offensive and inadmissible, _unless obviously on the side of Human Rights_, when the act of intervention takes its character from the cause in which it is made. But it must not be forgotten, that, in the case of civil war, any mediation, or, indeed, any proposition not enjoining submission to the original authority, is in its nature adverse, for it assumes the separate existence of the other party, and secures for it temporary immunity and opportunity, if not independence. Congress, therefore, was right in declaring to foreign powers that any renewed effort of mediation in our affairs will be regarded as an unfriendly act. There is another case of unarmed intervention which I cannot criticize. It is where a nation intercedes or interposes in favor of Human Rights, or to secure the overthrow of some enormous wrong,--as when Cromwell pleaded, with noble intercession, for the secluded Protestants of the Alpine valleys, when Great Britain and France declared sympathy with the Greeks struggling for independence, and when Great Britain alone, by splendid diplomacy, set herself against Slavery everywhere throughout the world. * * * * *