The Contest in America — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Contest in America
John Stuart Mill · en
In considering this matter, we ought to dismiss from our minds, as far
as possible, those feelings against the North, which have been
engendered not merely by the _Trent_ aggression, but by the previous
anti-British effusions of newspaper writers and stump orators. It is
hardly worth while to ask how far these explosions of ill-humor are
anything more than might have been anticipated from ill-disciplined
minds, disappointed of the sympathy which they justly thought they had
a right to expect from the great anti-slavery people, in their really
noble enterprise. It is almost superfluous to remark that a democratic
Government always shows worst where other Governments generally show
best, on its outside; that unreasonable people are much more noisy
than the reasonable; that the froth and scum are the part of a
violently fermenting liquid that meets the eyes, but are not its body
and substance. Without insisting on these things, I contend, that all
previous cause of offence should be considered as cancelled, by the
reparation which the American Government has so amply made; not so
much the reparation itself, which might have been so made as to leave
still greater cause of permanent resentment behind it; but the manner
and spirit in which they have made it. These have been such as most of
us, I venture to say, did not by any means expect. If reparation were
made at all, of which few of us felt more than a hope, we thought that
it would have been made obviously as a concession to prudence, not to
principle. We thought that there would have been truckling to the
newspaper editors and supposed fire-eaters who were crying out for
retaining the prisoners at all hazards. We expected that the
atonement, if atonement there were, would have been made with
reservations, perhaps under protest. We expected that the
correspondence would have been spun out, and a trial made to induce
England to be satisfied with less; or that there would have been a
proposal of arbitration; or that England would have been asked to make
concessions in return for justice; or that if submission was made, it
would have been made, ostensibly, to the opinions and wishes of
Continental Europe. We expected anything, in short, which would have
been weak and timid and paltry. The only thing which no one seemed to
expect, is what has actually happened. Mr. Lincoln's Government have
done none of these things. Like honest men, they have said in direct
terms, that our demand was right; that they yielded to it because it
was just; that if they themselves had received the same treatment,
they would have demanded the same reparation; and that if what seemed
to be the American side of a question was not the just side, they
would be on the side of justice; happy as they were to find after
their resolution had been taken, that it was also the side which
America had formerly defended. Is there any one, capable of a moral
judgment or feeling, who will say that his opinion of America and