He seems to have thought that every thing happens in America, as La
Rochefoucauld said of France. We are sorry that he was not permitted
to go, for he would have helped us to some clearer understanding of a
campaign about whose conduct and results there seems to be plenty of
passionate misjudgment and very little real knowledge. But when should
we hear the last of the vulgar presumption of an American reporter who
should try to hitch himself in the same way to the staff of a British
army?
Mr. Russell's testimony to the ill effects of slavery is as emphatic, if
not so circumstantial, as that of Mr. Olmsted. It is of the more weight
as coming from a man who saw the system under its least repulsive
aspect. His report also of what he heard from some of the chief plotters
in the Secession conspiracy as to their plans and theories is very
instructive, and deserves special attention now that their allies in the
Free States are beginning to raise their heads again. We have always
believed, and our impression is strengthened by Mr. Russell's testimony,
that the Southern leaders originally intended nothing more than a _coup
d'etat_, which, by the help of their fellow-conspirators at the North,
was to put them in possession of the Government. It is plain, also, from
what Mr. Russell tells us, that the movers of the slaveholding treason
reckoned confidently on aid from abroad, especially from England;
and this may help Englishmen to understand that the sensitiveness of
Northern people and statesmen to the open sympathy which the Rebellion
received from the leading journals and public men of Great Britain was
not so unreasonable as they have been taught to regard it.
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