TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. SUMNER ON ENGLAND'S OBLIGATIONS TO THE UNITED 'STATES.
MR. SUMNER has expounded in the Senate of the United States his conception of the reasons which rendered the late Convention negotiated between Lord Clarendon and Mr.
Reverdy Johnson totally unsatisfactory as a mode of settling the liabilities known popularly as the Alabama claims. His speech is, from what we cannot but regard as his very singular point of view, temperate, dignified, and not wanting in statesmanlike grasp of the importance of the emergency. What astonishes us is not the sentiment of his speech, which is manly, natural, and patriotic, nor in any considerable degree its practical counsel (to reject the Convention), which we can at least fully understand ; but the extraordinary mixture of strictly sentimental with strictly legal considerations which pervades it throughout. If he had simply said that he, like the great majority of American statesmen, considers the circumstances leading to the fitting-out and escape of the Alabama and of many of her consorts less from any legal point of view than as a symptom of the deliberate unfriendliness of a great part of the British people, and, as a consequence, though in a less degree, of the British Government, towards the Northern States during the Civil War ;—that this unfriendliness was of a character which might well have led to war then, and which may still lead, if not to war, to greedy reprisals on England should we ever be in circumstances to suffer equally severely from a similar policy on the part of the United States,—and that this source of bitterness cannot be removed without a frank apology and expression of regret from England for what has happened,—if this, we say, had been the drift of Mr. Sumner's speech, we should have been disposed to agree with him very heartily. It is perfectly true that we must ascribe to the favour with which the Southern cause was looked upon by an influential portion of the English people, that is, of the aristocracy and the middle-class, the confidence with which the South applied to us for their loan, and for the ships and ammunitions of war in which they invested that loan. Had their cause been one as hateful to England as that of Ferdinand of Naples, they would have got little help and no open sympathy :—our most " respectable " ship builders would not have undertaken to build their ships, and if by chance any one of them had done so, our Government would have been supported by public opinion in doing much earlier, and with much less trepidation, what they did at last in the case of the rams,—namely, strain very decidedly a legal point to prevent a breach of international comity. No sensible person will doubt that it was the insane enthusiasm of our aristocracy and bourgeoisie for the most detestable of causes which really supplied the Southern rebellion with money, ships, arms, and good wishes, and daunted our Government in its rather hesitating and tremulous attempt to preserve a friendly attitude towards the Government of the United States. So much we admit without difficulty to Mr. Sumner.
Nay, we go further, and say that had their case been ours,—had the upper crust of the United States expressed its hearty sympathy with an Irish rebellion, raised a loan for it, and sent out privateers under an Irish flag to scour the seas in search of British commerce—we should in all probability have either declared war with the United States, or if deterred from that course by a mere prudent calculation of consequences, still have been thoroughly disinclined to condone the offence and resume cordial international relations with the United States, without extracting from their Government something more than a dry contract to refer the legal claims of injured individuals to arbitration.
But while we admit all this to Mr. Sumner, we confess that it seems to go a very little way towards explaining his speech.
One Government may fairly say to another, — The moral damage which your people have inflicted upon us, and to which you have been more or less a party, touches our honour so vitally, goes so far beyond any infraction of law of which we can com plain, that we decline to enter into a convention which implies that it is in any sense a question of damages. You might as well ask a man of sensitive honour to accept damages as reparation for an unretracted insult.' Such a line as that is quite intelligible. But it is not intelligible to say, what, in effect, Mr. Sumner does, We ground our claims on a number of extremely questionable and insecure, not to say unsubstantial, legal considerations, which we expect you to admit, not on legal grounds, but as a mode of making moral compensation to ns for entirely extra-legal blunders and sins.' That seems to ns simply unbusinesa-like and wholly untenable. So far as the United States make legal claims, let us treat them as legal claims in the strictest sense of the word. And for claims of that kind, what can we propose fairer than arbitration by an impartial tribunal ? But so far as the United States com_
plain of our moral attitude,—which they have every reason to do, let us deal with that quite separately, not affect to
mix it up with legal claims, but either settle it, or leave it unsettled, if we cannot settle it, without prejudice to those claims.
The only pretence which Mr. Sumner seems to us to have for his very remarkable mode of mixing up the unfriendly animus of our people and press with the legal claims which, if they are tenable, may have been more or less due to that unfriendly animus as their fostering source, is that he has discovered two cases in which a convention, concluded expressly to determine the exact extent of the reparation we proposed to make, was preceded by a general apology on the part of the English Government for the wrong we had done. But then, in both these cases the wrong we had done was an undoubted and undeniable legal wrong, which we admitted at the outset,— indeed, could not deny,—and therefore, of course, never proposed to submit on its merits to the arbitration of any tribunal. It would have been simply impossible, when we had, by our own admission, committed a grave breach of international law, to begin our reparation otherwise than by expressing our regret. When the British frigate Leopard boarded the United States' frigate Chesapeake to regain possession of the persons of four British subjects said to be impressed there, the act was so monstrous a breach of international law, that when the matter was settled, it was settled by disavowal, by restitution, and by compensation ; and, of course, a solution by which Great Britain acknowledged herself wholly in the wrong was necessarily preceded by apology. So, too, of the incursion across the Canadian border into the United States in 1837 ;. —the obvious criticism on that matter being not Mr. Sumner's, one of satisfaction that we apologized at last, but one of wonder that the apology, so obviously required, was so long delayed. There was in that affair a real defiance of the independent authority of a peaceful and friendly state, and of course the first condition of reconciliation was to express regret that our people had been betrayed into so indefensible an act. But Mr. Sumner fails to see that in the present case the whole question at issue is simply this,—whether we did in any respect whatever violate the slightest rule of international law by our proceedings in the Alabama case ? That is the very point to be decided. If it is to be decided by the only fair method in the case of any international disputer equitable arbitration, it is monstrous to propose that we should preface its decision by language equivalent to an admission that we were in the wrong. To plead guilty before the Court first, and then defend our innocence, is the strangest recommendation ever yet made to an accused person. Yet, as far as we understand Mr. Sumner, that is what he kindly proposes for England ;—unless, indeed, he really means that we are not entitled even to submit the legality of our conduct to arbitration at all, but only the amount of the penalty. We agree with Mr. Sumner that the tone of the English Parliament and the uppermost stratum of the English people in the beginning of the Civil War was in the highest degree unfriendly to the United States. But we do not happen to agree with him that there was any clear breach of legal neutrality committed from beginning to end of the war,—though we do believe that there was sufficient negligence in allowing the escape of the Alabama to make that matter a fair case for arbitration. Moreover, we do not suppose that there is a single eminent statesman (not even Mr. Bright) or lawyer in England who would go further than we do in Mr. Sumner's direction, and very few who would go so far. Now, what is it, then, which Mr. Sumner calmly pr0poses to us all,—even those who, like ourselves, approach him most closely in political bias I Simply this ;—to submit our political and legal consciences in the most abject manner to ,a dogma which not a single man amongst us worth a moment's consideration holds to be true,—to confess a legal guilt of which we are entirely unconscious, and this as a condition sine qud non of reconciliation with the United States. Was anything so monstrous ever proposed on this earth before by any man taking the rank of a statesman ? He does not ask us to express regret for a grave political error,—and, as we think, even sin,—for which the people at large were not responsible, though the most influential of them were,—but to begin by a frank admission of legal culpability, and this on one of the most important of all points of international law, which might be turned against us to-morrow, in a case where all our sympathies, and all American sympathies too, might happen to be just the other way. He wants us to make an insincere admission, which, by the bye, if it were of any legal value as a precedent at all, would in all probability be first quoted by Spain in support of a peremptory demand for apology from the United States for the advice which the House of Representatives has tendered to the President in relation to Cuba, on grounds infinitely less plausible. Mr. Sumner seems to us, we confess, to be confounding legal considerations of the first importance with totally distinct moral considerations in a manner almost 'childish, when he makes a preliminary apology by England the first condition of a convention, the sole object of which is to settle whether or not there is the vestige of a ground for asserting that any breach of law has been committed. If he supposes that a nation which heartily believes itself guiltless of a breach of law, even though on one point it may see that there is a fair opening for doubt and discussion, is likely to 'declare itself guilty simply to conciliate an opponent, he is more sanguine and credulous, or more disposed to believe in English cowardice, than we should have thought possible. As regards Mr. Sumner's argument to prove that we were guilty of a breach of international right, that we did violate the laws of neutrality in our policy towards the South, we need not say much. Some things he said which are fair arguments to lay before an arbitrator ; others he said which seemed to us coloured by prejudices and prepossessions so extraordinary, that we read them twice before we could credit him with having made any statement so monstrous,—(such, for instance, as the assertion that the fitting-out of the Alabama was as much the fitting-out of a hostile expedition " as if she had sailed forth from Her Majesty's dockyard ") ; but the great feature of his speech is that in treating the legal questions he does not even condescend to grapple with any one of the more powerful considerations which tell against him. He ignores the point that the acknowledgment of the fact of -belligerency at sea was essential to give the United States the power of blockade in the sense in which they wanted and used it, —namely, to stop vessels on the high seas bound to any blockaded port. He ignores the fact that the friends of the North felt this so strongly that some of them urged the recognition of belligerency and proclamation of neutrality on the British Government, in the interests of the North alone. He ignores altogether the question whether the breach of any municipal law like our Foreign Enlistment Act can be rightly made matter of international complaint by a foreign government. He is inconsistent, too, with himself ; for while he makes it (not unjustly, as we think) a great charge against us that we were so negligent in executing our own municipal law in the Alabama case, a great part of his accusations rest on the -assumption that we should have proceeded, in violation of that municipal law, to stop vessels accused of being intended for Southern privateers, on wholly inadequate and inadmissible evidence which no judge or jury would have listened to for a moment. In short, Mr. Sumner's legal argument is a very poor ex parte statement of the United States' case, without even a pretence of a judicial discussion. But be that as it may, it is too obvious that ex parte legal arguments, if they were the best in the world, are not reasons why judgment -should go for the pleader without ever hearing the case on the other side. Mr. Sumner has nothing to say which has not been heard a hundred times before, though he suppresses a great deal which has also been heard a hundred times before, and which seems to us of much greater weight. But what he does say, instead of being put forward as proof that there is something to discuss,—for which only it would serve,—is unfortunately put forward as proof that there is nothing to discuss,—which it not only does not prove, but disproves. On the whole, Mr. Samner's speech impresses us very deeply with the necessity there is for greater candour on both sides of the Atlantic. Those who feel keenly as we do the moral strength of Mr. Sumner's case against England, ought to favour every opportunity for informally expressing that keen sense of regret and mortification which we heartily believe that the great majority of the people of Great Britain and Ireland entertain with regard to the, conduct of the ruling class and Lim Government during the first four years of the Civil War. Those, on the other hand, in America who feel with corresponding keenness the utter unreasonableness of such assumptions as Mr. Suraner's,—that England committed in this case a conspicuous breach of international law like the boarding of the Chesapeake, or the raid of 1837 into the territory of the United States,—should do their best to restrain such unreasonable and self-contradictory demands as Mr. Sumner's, which seem contrary to all the most obvious principles of law. Of course, if we are decided to have been guilty of a breach of international law, let us by all means apologize ; but to assume the very point in discussion, on the ground that we have certainly been guilty of ill-feeling, is as monstrous as it would be for us to ground our own defence on the plea that America has sympathized openly with the Fenian conspirators. Informal national sins must be expiated, if at all, by informal national expressions of regret. We do not ask the Government of the United States to apologize for the sine of its people in relation to the Fenian matter. America cannot ask the Government of England to apologize for the sins of its people in relation to the Civil War. If, as we heartily believe, the only even disputable point as regards legal liability, is the negligence of the Government in permitting the escape of the Alabama, how is it possible to ask us to express formal contrition till it is decided whether even then we were not acting strictly within our legal competence ? Mr. Sumner's real grievance and the real grievance of the Northern people is, that the English Parliament displayed a hearty sympathy with a cause naturally hateful to it, the Slavery cause, out of some poor jealousy of the growing power of the North. Well, that is not a breach of international law. By all means let us do what we can to wipe out a blot on English national character which many of us always marvelled at and sorrowed over. But, on the other hand, let the more moderate and sensible statesmen of the United States restrain their sensitive politicians from the undignified weakness of confounding an act of marvellously bad taste and bad feeling,—though one which unfortunately is too often imitated by America itself without any formal reproach from us,—with an international crime.
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