Though it would be hard to deny that some injustice has been done to the Northerners by the tone of the most influential of our newspapers, nothing can be more false in substance or rude in manner than the imputations thrown by the Americans on the policy of the English government. There is something so puerile in the notion that the recognition of the belligerent rights of the Southerners involves an approval of their proceedings, that it is difficult to argue seriously against it. Unless the Northerners mean to execute their prisoners as murderers and traitors, they must treat them as belligerents. That is, they must recognize the very rights which they blame us for recognizing. No doubt their real grievance is that their vanity has been wounded by the manner in which their performances have been criticized by English writers. The preceding observations are intended to show how far they have a just cause of complaint, but it is highly probable that the fact that we have not taken their demonstrations in quite the same heroic vein as that in which they are made has had as much to do with their ill-temper and bad manners, as the misconception as to the true state of the case, which certainly has pervaded much of our current literature. For this cause of offence no apology and no regret is due. One of the principal services which one nation can render to another, especially where their language and literature are identical, is that of letting them know when they are exposing themselves. In America, both politics and periodical literature have fallen, to a great extent, into the hands of an ill-educated class. The excessive vulgarity of a great part of what they say and write gives far too low a notion of the strong points of the American character, and has a fatal tendency to make their policy as unworthy a representative of the real powers of their minds as their literature unquestionably is. It is very desirable that every reasonable opportunity should be taken of showing the noisy and ill-bred people who have constituted themselves the representatives of the opinions and feelings of the United States, that we rate them exactly at what they are worth, and that their brag and fustian have just as much and just as little effect upon us as the raw-head-and-bloody-bones swagger which were the precursors of the famous battle of the cabbage-garden in 1848. The proposal that the North and South should forget their differences in a joint piratical attack upon Canada and Cuba, is worthy only of the infamous source from which it proceeds. Those who make it ought to recollect that something more than newspaper articles will be wanted to conquer a British colony. Hard words seem at present to be more in their line than broken bones, and they are much less to the purpose. FOOTNOTES [1] _See_ Miss Martineau’s pamphlet, _A History of the American Compromises_. Reprinted, with additions, from the _Daily News_. Chapman, 1856. Burlesques.