When I speak to gentlemen in private upon this matter, and hear their own candid opinion,--I mean those who differ from me on this question,-- they generally end by saying that the Republic is too great and too powerful, and that it is better for us--not by 'us' meaning you, but the governing classes and the governing policy of England--that it should be broken up. But we will suppose that we are in New York or in Boston, discussing the policy and power of England. If any one there were to point to England,--not to the thirty-one millions of population in these islands, but to her one hundred and fifty millions in India, and nobody knows how many millions more in every other part of the globe,--might he not, whilst boasting that America has not covered the ocean with fleets of force, or left the bones of her citizens to blanch on a hundred European battle-fields,--might he not fairly say, that England is great and powerful, and that it is perilous for the world that she is so great? But bear in mind that every declaration of this kind, whether from an Englishman who professes to be strictly English, or from an American strictly American, or from a Frenchman strictly French,--whether it asserts in arrogant strains that Britannia rules the waves, or speaks of 'manifest destiny' and the supremacy of the 'Stars and Stripes' or boasts that the Eagles of one nation, having once overrun Europe, may possibly repeat the experiment,--I say all this is to be condemned. It is not truly patriotic; it is not rational; it is not moral. Then, I say, if any man wishes the Great Republic to be severed on that ground: in my opinion, he is doing that which tends to keep alive jealousies which, as far as he can prevent it, will never die; though if they do not die, wars must be eternal. But then I shall be told that the people of the North do not like us at all. In fact, we have heard it to-night. It is not reasonable that they should like us. If an American be in this room to-night, will he feel that he likes my honourable Friend? But if the North does not like England, does anybody believe the South does? It does not appear to me to be a question of liking or disliking. Everybody knows that when the South was in power,--and it has been in power for the last fifty years,-- everybody knows that hostility to this country, wherever it existed in America, was cherished and stimulated to the utmost degree by some of those very men who are now leaders of this very insurrection.