THE AMERICAN REVOL UTION. 191 



a British law ; if a man was odious he was called an " old Tory ;" 

 and it has been with us a common piece of political blackguard- 

 ism till within a short time, if it is not now, to speak of those of 

 an opposite party as under British influence. 



The war had been with us a war of the people ; not a woman, 

 as she sipped her tea, but imbibed hatred to the taxing British, 

 and suckled her offspring with its nourishment ; not a man of 

 spunk in the country but was hand to hand fighting with the 

 British, and teaching his sons never to yield to them. 



In England, on the other hand, comparatively few of the 

 people knew or cared at all about the war ; even the soldiers 

 engaged in it were in considerable numbers mere hirelings from 

 another people, whom the true English would have rather seen 

 whipped than not, so far as they had any national feeling about 

 it. Their hostile feeling was even then more directed towards 

 France than towards America ; and now, I do not believe there 

 is one in a thousand of the people of England who has the slight- 

 est feeling of hostility towards us, descending or inherited, from 

 that time.* It was much so again in the later war. England 

 was at war with half the world in those days, and if a general 

 disposition of enmity towards us had been at all aroused in the 

 course of it, all recollection of it was lost in the fiercer wars with 

 other nations that immediately followed. I doubt if one in a 

 hundred of the voters of England could tell the name of a single 

 ship engaged in the war of 1812 ; whether it was General Hull 

 or Commodore Hull who was heroized in it; whether, in the 

 assault upon New Orleans or Washington, it was that their forces 

 were successful ; or whether, finally, they carried or lost the di- 

 plomatic point for which their soldiers and sailors had been set to 

 fighting. 



Even if the people of England could remember us equally 



* Such a supposition is now to me utterly preposterous (1858). 



