Let us not, therefore, waste our strength in threats of vengeance against those misguided governments who mistook their true interest in the prospect of our calamity. We can conquer them by peace better than by war. When the Union emerges from the battle-smoke,--her crest towering over the ruins of traitorous cities and the wrecks of Rebel armies, her eye flashing defiance to all her evil-wishers, her breast heaving under its corselet of iron, her arm wielding the mightiest enginery that was ever forged into the thunderbolts of war,--her triumph will be grand enough without her setting fire to the stubble with which the folly of the Old World has girt its thrones. No deeper humiliation could be asked for our foreign enemies than the spectacle of our triumph. If we have any legal claims against the accomplices of pirates, they will be presented, and they will be paid. If there are any uncomfortable precedents which have been introduced into international law, the jealous "Mistress of the Seas" must be prepared to face them in her own hour of trouble. Had her failings but leaned to Freedom's side,--had she but been true to her traditions, to her professions, to her pretended principles,--where could she have found a truer ally than her own offspring, in the time of trial which is too probably preparing for her? "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!" No tardy repentance can efface the record of the past. We may forgive, but history is inexorable. England was startled the other day by an earthquake. The fast-anchored isle was astonished at such a tropical phenomenon. It was all very well for Jamaica or Manila, but who would have thought of solid, constitutional England shaking like a jelly? The London "Times" moralized about it in these words:--"We see, afar off, a great empire, that had threatened to predominate over all mankind, suddenly broken up by moral agencies, and shattered into no one knows how many fragments. We are safe from that fate, at least so we deem ourselves, for never were we so united." "_A great empire, that had threatened to predominate over all mankind_." That was the trouble. That was the reason the "Times" was so pleased to say, a few months ago, "The bubble has burst." How, if the great empire should prove not to have been shattered? how, if the bubble has not burst?--nay, if that great system of intelligent self-government which was taken for a bubble prove to be a sphere of adamant, rounded in the mould of Divine Law, and filled with the pure light of Heaven?