And you, too, have you not known in the course of your history a slack-tide of faith, a less aspiring hour? Have not you, too, known a temporary ascendancy of material over spiritual interests, a lowering of the moral tone, a readiness, for the sake of ease and peace and secure enjoyment, to compromise with evil? Have not you, too, felt the tyranny of wealth, putting the higher motives for a moment under its feet? What else has brought these calamities upon you? What else bowed your necks to the yoke which you are now breaking at so great a cost? Often and long in the life of every nation, though the tide is still advancing, the wave recedes. Often and long the fears of man overcome his hopes; but in the end the hopes of man overcome his fears. Your regeneration, when it is achieved, will set forward the regeneration of the European nations. It is the function which all nations, which all men, in their wavering progress towards perfection, perform in turn for each other.
This temporary lowering of the moral tone in English society has extended to the question of Slavery. It has deadened our feelings on that subject, though I hope without shaking our principles. You ask whether England can have been sincere in her enmity to Slavery, when she refuses sympathy to you in your struggle with the Slave Power. Talleyrand, cynic as he was, knew that she was sincere, though he said that not a man in France thought so but himself. She redeemed her own slaves with a great price. She sacrificed her West-Indian interest. She counts that achievement higher than her victories. She spends annually much money and many lives and risks much enmity in her crusade against the slave-trade. When your Southern statesmen have tried to tamper with her, they have found her true. If they had bid us choose between a concession to their designs and war, all aristocratic as we are, we should have chosen war. Every Englishman who takes the Southern side is compelled by public opinion to preface his advocacy with a disclaimer of all sympathy with Slavery. The agent of the slave-owners in England, Mr. Spence, pleads their cause to the English people on the ground of gradual emancipation. Once the "Times" ventured to speak in defence of Slavery, and the attempt was never made again. The principle, I say, holds firm among the mass of the people; but on this, as on other moral questions, we are not in our noblest mood.