1860. July 18.—Judge Longstreet, the United States Delegate to the International Congress, sent yesterday his written withdrawal, in consequence of Lord Brougham’s conduct.
There is no telling to what this outrage may lead. Brougham is already feeling the weight of a unanimous public opinion. He attempted to-day to make an explanation or apology; said he meant no disrespect to me or my government, and then, with a fatuity scarcely comprehensible, went on to make the matter worse. Is he, on this question of slavery, deranged?
Dr. J—, the delegate sent by the Statistical Association of Massachusetts, called upon me. He said he came from Lord Brougham, and was by him authorized to remove any impression that I might have imbibed that he intended to wound my feelings. I interrupted Dr. J—, and said that I could receive nothing from Lord Brougham at second-hand; if he wished to do what was right and restore the state of things his folly had disturbed, he must make an ample and distinct apology for the insult upon the United States; he must do this in the very body where he had made the attack, and what he said should be sanctioned and approved by that body; if this was satisfactorily done, the personal indignity to myself would melt into nothing before the infirmities of his great age. Alas! that an American citizen should have witnessed, as Dr. J— did, this outrage upon his country, and yet be so bent upon his wretched statistical essay or report as to prefer reading this last to resenting the former. Dr. J— distinguishes: says Lord Brougham’s act don’t touch him, because he is from a free State! “Out upon such half-faced fellowship!”
