“Many Englishmen made fortunes by sending blockade runners from England to furnish supplies for the South. They have told me this, rubbing their hands with great satisfaction at their skill in outwitting the ‘Yankees.’ Can they expect the ‘Yankees’ to forget these things when sometime a nation or colony may give their lion’s tail a twist? The bill for their little fun in being neutral was however settled, and the bitterest pill probably that John ever swallowed was when he had to pay fifteen millions of dollars for the destruction caused by his Alabama. “All this is history and we would not refer to it but for the over-bearing arrogance and assumption of these islanders. When they ever treat us civilly it is with a patronizing air. If there is anything which I think a true man dislikes it is to be patronized, for this insinuates an inferiority in the one receiving the patronage. With this spirit the English often refer to their colonizing America. We admit, to the shame of England, that some of our earliest settlers were obliged to leave that country to escape persecution and death but their settlement in America was compulsory. Large numbers, ‘Puritans,’ as they were styled, were deported, not for any crimes, but for their belief that they had a right to worship God according to their own consciences. Just one instance. A cargo of 841 human beings were sent to the West Indies to be sold as slaves. These, mind you, were not negroes, but white English people. They were not suffered to go on deck and in the holds below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease and death. The Queen of England had an interest in this shipment. The profits which she shared in the cargo after making a large allowance for those who died of hunger and fever during the passage cannot be estimated at less than a thousand guineas. This is the statement of an English historian, not an American. “But the fact is that some of our best people were from Holland. Manhattan Island, now New York, was settled by them, and for many years there was not an English speaking person in that settlement, and many of the old wealthy families now in New York are descendants of the Hollanders. At the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when fifty thousand of the best people of France were exiled, many of them went to the United States. Another large class are the descendants of the Scotch-Irish who had to flee from the tyranny of England, while the Irish now in America outnumber those in Ireland itself. The minority of the people are the descendants of the English. “At times, in a patronizing way to curry favor with us, the English claim relationship, but none scarcely admit that we have anything except what we borrow, that is stolen from her, and even that we do not speak the English language. I have really been asked by educated Englishmen if we speak English in America.