1861. January 8.—South Carolina, it appears, adopted her Ordinance of Secession on the 19th of December, unanimously. It has been hailed with exultation in most of the Southern States. Mr. Mason rather intimates that the movement is designed to compel adequate concessions from the North, or to form a basis upon which the confederacy may be reconstructed.
The first article of Blackwood’s Magazine for this month, “The Political Year,” is one of much ability. Its purpose is to depreciate the present government by special attacks on Mr. Gladstone and Lord John Russell. In the concluding paragraph I find the following: “The last news from America announces that, Lord John Russell having complained of the inactivity of the American cruisers in the suppression of the slave-trade, Mr. Dallas informed his Lordship, in October last, that ‘the British Foreign Office had better mind its own business.’ He wound up by stating that ‘the government at Washington did not require to be continually lectured as to its duty by our Foreign Secretary.’ Can anything be more absurd? We have a Foreign Secretary who writes letters and gives good advice to all the world, and who, at one time, cannot get his effusions answered, at another time gets snubbed for them, yet again finds them quoted as authorizing rebellion, and always finds himself doing more harm than good.” It is true, that, on the 24th of November, I read, as instructed, a despatch from General Cass, dated the 27th of October, to Lord John Russell. His Lordship did not like it; said that all Christendom had condemned the slave-trade, and he had a right to speak against it. I merely remarked that perhaps the serenity of the State Department at Washington would not be disturbed by one or two exhortations, but that his Lordship must be aware that too frequent recurrences in diplomatic correspondence to the obligations of humanity imply a neglect of them by those addressed, and cannot but be unacceptable. When I reported this matter to the Secretary of State, I added: “English statesmen generally have a complacent and irrepressible sense of superior morality, and are apt, without really meaning incivility, to be prodigal of their inculcations upon others.” Here is the basis of Blackwood’s remarks.
