Meanwhile there is one simple act which the justice of England cannot continue to refuse. That fatal concession, made in a moment of eclipse, when reason and humanity were obscured, must be annulled. The _blunder-crime_ must be renounced, so that Slave pirates may no longer sail the sea, robbing, destroying, burning, with British license. Then will they promptly disappear forever, and with them the occasion of strife between two great powers, who ought to be, if not as mother and child, at least as brothers among the nations. And may God in His mercy help this consummation! * * * * * Here I leave this part of the subject, founding my objections on two grounds. (1.) The embryo of Rebel Slavery has not that degree of sovereignty _on the ocean_ which is essential to belligerence there. (2.) Even if it possessed the requisite sovereignty, no Christian power can make such concession to it without shameful complicity with Slavery. Both are objections of _fact_. Either is sufficient. Even if the belligerence seems to be established as _fact_, still its concession in this age of Christian light must be impossible, except under some temporary aberration, which, for the honor of England and the welfare of Humanity, should speedily pass away. * * * * * Again, fellow-citizens, I crave forgiveness for this long trespass. If the field traversed is ample, it has been brightened always by the light of international justice, exposing clearly, from beginning to end, the sacred landmarks of duty. I have been frank, disguising nothing and keeping nothing back, so that you have been able to see the perils to which the Republic is exposed from the natural tendency of war to breed war, as exhibited in examples of history, and also from the fatal proclivity of foreign powers to intermeddle, as exhibited in recent instances of querulous criticism or intrusive proposition, all adverse to the good cause, while pirate ships are permitted to depredate on our commerce; then how the best historic instances testify in favor of Freedom, and how all intervention of every kind, whether by proffer of mediation or otherwise, becomes intolerable, when its influence tends to the establishment of that soulless anomaly, a professed Republic built on the hopeless and everlasting bondage of a race; and especially how Great Britain is sacredly engaged by all the logic of her history and all her traditions in unbroken lineage against any such unutterable baseness; then how all the Christian powers constituting the Family of Nations are firmly bound to set their faces against any recognition of the embryo government.--first, because its independence is not _in fact_ established, and, secondly, because, even if _in fact_ established, its recognition is impossible without criminal complicity in Slavery; and, lastly, how these same Christian powers are firmly bound by the same twofold reasons against