The British _aristocracy_, with all its dependent followers, cannot help being against us. The bearing which our success would have on its interests is obvious enough, and we cannot wonder that the instinct of self-preservation opens its eyes to the remote consequences which will be likely to flow from the continued and prosperous existence of the regenerated, self-governing Union. The privileged classes feel to our labor- and money-saving political machinery just as the hand-weavers felt to the inventor and introducers of the power-loom. The simple fact is, that, if a great nation like ours can govern itself, they are not needed, and Nobility has a nightmare of Jews going about the streets with half a dozen coronets on their heads, one over another, like so many old beavers. What can we expect of the law-spinning heir-loom owners, but that they should wish to break this new-fangled machine, and exterminate its contrivers? The right to defend its life is the claim of everything that lives, and we must not lose our temper because the representatives of an hereditary ruling class wish to preserve those privileges which are their very existence, nor because they have foresight enough to know, that, if the Western Continent remains the seat of a vast, thriving, irresistible, united republic, the days of their life, as an order, are numbered. "The _people_," as Mr. Motley has said, in one of his official letters, "everywhere sympathize with us; for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy." We have evidence that this is partially true of the British people. But we know also how much they are influenced by their political and social superiors, and we know, too, what base influences have been long at work to corrupt their judgment and inflame their prejudices. We have too often had occasion to see that the middle classes had been reached by the passions of their superiors, or infected by the poison instilled by traitorous emissaries. We have been struck with this particularly in some of the British colonies. It is the livid gleam of a reflected hatred they shed upon us; but the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence, and we feel sure that the British inhabitants of an African cape or of a West-India islet would not have presumed to sympathize with the Rebels, unless they had known that it was respectable, if not fashionable, to do so at home. It is one of the most painful illustrations of the influence of a privileged class that the opinions and prejudices and interests of the English aristocracy should have been so successfully imposed upon a large portion of the people, for whom the North was fighting over again the battles of that long campaign which will never end until the rightful Sovereigns have dispossessed the whole race of Pretenders.