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A NEW YEAR’S LETTER
FROM
JONATHAN TO JOHN.
Cassius. You love me not.
Brutus.
I do not like your faults.
Cassius. A friendly eye could never see such faults.
Brutus. A flatterer’s would not, though they do appear
As huge as high Olympus.
Julius Ceesar.
LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
1868.
��A NEW YEAR’S LETTER
♦
FROM
JONATHAN TO JOHN.
Dear John,—-I hope I need make no apology for
addressing you, in these critical times, on matters pro
foundly concerning us both. The wine-makers have a
belief that in the season of the blossoming of vines the
wine in its bottles ferments anew in sympathy, and then
chiefly breaks its bottles. Blood, John, is thicker
and more fiery than wine. Ours long ago flowed
from your heart, and it has never failed to be
stirred when your periods of change and agitation have
arrived. It was not by accident that our fathers
named their bleak home on these shores New England.
When your people were sending King James the
Second adrift to sea, the happy tidings thereof found
our ancestors at Boston doing precisely the same for
that monarch’s sub-king in New England. The stamp
of Cromwell’s foot, when he cried, “Take away that
�4
bauble !” was echoed along our coasts ; and when
Charles came back, and gave Whitehall its ghastly
coronet of skulls, there were few in this land who did
not hear above the ocean’s roar the groan of Bunyan in
his prison, and of Milton in his hiding-place. Then we
took to growing our own wine, and, somehow, it has
been imported by your people, and ever since you have
been visibly affected by our flowering season. Nature
makes very little of our lands and seas. The earthquake
at Lisbon toppled down a hundred chimneys in our
Boston. The revolution of America for independence
shook down a throne and an aristocracy in France, and
it formed a democratic party in England which has
been slowly and steadily revolutionising your society
and government from that day to this. We may as
well face the facts, John: we are one and the same
people; twenty millions of us have English blood in
our veins; our history is English history. We never
more plainly showed ourselves chips of the old block
than when we rebelled against the old block. And, on
the other hand, we cannot fail to perceive that, under
whatever disguises your internal troubles come, each,
when unmasked, is sure to turn out American. Trades’Unionism, Beales-ism, Fenianism—they are all, best and
worst, Americans. Abu Taleb wrote:
“ He who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.”
You feel, and I know, that every step of the English
people away from feudal forms is the later Mayflower
�5
struggling through storms to its New England. The
voices of the Robinsons and Standishes in your Par
liament are unmistakable; their Plymouth Rock is
ahead. And, in the converse, your instinct is equally
clear as to your feudal friends in this country. Old
England was planted here, in the South, alongside
of New England in the North; it battled stoutly
for two hundred and fifty years, until, in its final
struggle — notwithstanding your instinctive sympathy
and aid—it perished. We understood your sympathy
well enough. There are a dozen chapters of our history
through which the story of the Alabama runs. No
one man or generation is to blame for this antagonism.
We are in the hands of fate, which has its own remorse
less methods of providing that the New World shall not
be a mere duplicate of the Old. “ Perhaps,” said our
chief philosopher, on his return from England—“perhaps
the ocean serves as a galvanic battery to distribute acids
at one pole and alkalis at the other. So England tends
to accumulate her Liberals in America, and her Con
servatives at London.” All this involves the repulsion
of positive and negative; but it should mean only the
awakening of certain talents that have slept in our En
glish race, which is a magazine of the powers of many
races. And, in fact, John, whilst in our workshops
and telegraphs we make a good thing out of action and
reaction, positive and negative, I fear that, politically,
the new year finds us both, not the masters, but
the fools of fate. I have heard Mr. Seward and Lord
�6
Lyons speak to each other across a dinner-table in a
humanlike way; but in the Alabama correspondence
there is snarling and the show of teeth. Eighteen
hundred and sixty-eight finds us with a great cable
binding us together for good ends by means of positive
and negative poles; but when I read our Blue-Books, I
have to turn and see if they were not printed a hundred
years ago, when we were getting ready to fight. Are
we never to reach a new year which shall ring out
those sad years of the seventeenth century, when the
farms of our poor settlers were given away to English
noblemen ; when the English Church pursued over the
ocean and tried to crush the religion it had banished;
when the Charters of American Colonies were taken
away; when all that our fathers could wring from the
rock on which they had settled was taxed to carry on
wars and sustain projects which they detested ?
The appearance of your greatest novelist on our
shores at present reminds us that, above our feudal, or
monarchical, or democratic forms of society and govern
ment, there is a great commonwealth of thought which
owns loyal citizens in every civilised land. Fortunately
for us both, we are a reading people; and, fortunately
for all but your authors, we Americans have appro
priate your library to an extent that will, I trust, cause
astonishment and contrition in our coming generation.
We have crammed ourselves and our childreu with Mill,
Spencer, Grote, and Arnold; Thackeray, Dickens, and
George Eliot and Hughes have woven your country
�7
seats and your city dens into romance for us; Tennyson
has for some time filled up the poets’ corners of all our
papers; our babies lisp Carlylese; the other day I found
our soldiers, by their camp-fire on the Mississippi,
gathered around a fellow who was reciting to them, with
appropriate gesture, “ How they brought the good news
from Ghent to Aix,” as related by Robert Browning.
You produced these fine spirits; we welcome and love
them. With this friendly cloud of witnesses around,
let us sit down, this New Year’s Day, and look over our
unsettled accounts. The common heart and brain of
•our respective countries shall be our court of arbitra
tion.
And, first of all, John, let me say that I have, after
much severe experience, discovered that an ounce
balances an ounce. The assertion may seem to you
paradoxical, but I am quite serious in making it.
Lately, I read in one of your weekly journals the
question, “Why is it that with America France may
steal a horse, where England must not look over the
hedge ?” The question is most pregnant, and is answer
able thus: France’s theft comes at the end of two and
a half centuries of benefits; England’s look comes at
the end of two and a half centuries of unfriendliness.
The usurper in Mexico had behind him the help ren
dered by the French in Canada to the pinched and
freezing pilgrims of Plymouth, the free-trade between.
Nouvelle France and Boston, the sword of Lafayette,
the earliest recognition of American independence.
�8
This was the accumulated capital in the American heart
which he had to trade upon. England did not earlier
recognise, nor her rulers more sympathise with, those
who lately tried to destroy the United States; she did
not do anything half so offensive to the American
people as he who tried to establish the throne of a
Hapsburg in Mexico; but what she said and did was
added to a column of historical oppressions, unbalanced
by any entries of generosity. Do not turn red and
deny this, John; it is true. There are, indeed, long
neutral years in which you did us no wrong; you had
no occasion in them to do us any wrong; but neither all
this while has it occurred to you that there is a balance
against you among us. The traditional policy of Eng
land toward America required to be distinctly reversed.
I know how your living generation speaks of these
old days—how it repudiates the persecutions which,
having driven the Pilgrims from England’s side, still
pursued them, which robbed them of manufactures
and stifled them with Navigation Acts, and the hard
days of taxation which ended in the revolution; and
how it protests against having these sins of their
fathers visited upon the Englishmen of to-day. But
you cannot cancel your national debt, John, because it
was contracted by your dead ancestors. I observe that
your present family is comfortable and satisfied. I
looked in on your Pan-Anglicans the other day, and
was impressed by the unctuous way in which your
rotund Bishops, addressing Heaven, said, “ We have
�9
done those things that we ought to have done, and have
left undone those things that we ought to have left
undone, and are in a thoroughly soun.d condition.” I
was not trained in “ the Church,” and may not quote
the words exactly, but am quite sure that I give their
tone and spirit correctly. And I must say that I can
trace the same comfortable assurance in the way your
people have of throwing off their consciences the wrongs
they have inherited, while lifting no finger for their re
moval. A generation adopts every wrong it inherits,
and does not its best to redress. But if this is so,
what shall be said of a generation that steadily follows
instead of reversing the bad precedents of the past ? It
was not you, the contemporaneous John, who stoned
the Puritans, taxed our colonies, imprisoned our
sailors at Dartmoor, and burned our capital; but in
taunting the defenders of our Union, and helping those
who were seeking to establish a vast Slave-empire on the
ruins of our Republic, did you not prove yourself the
legitimate child of those who stoned our ancestors ?
The present cannot escape being interpreted in the
light of the past. Your people of the lower orders
sympathised with us in our dark hour—that is to say,
the unemigrated America in Europe sympathised with
its pioneer wing on this side of the Atlantic. And no
wonder, for our defeat would have moved back the
shadow on their dial many, many years. But their
interest in us is the other side of your instinctive dislike
of us and oppression of them.
�10
The fact is, John, the more we scrutinise your part
in our recent struggle the darker it appears. When
the rebellion broke out, you said you were with us, and
we believed it; we were grappling Slavery under the
watchwords of your own great emancipators—men
whom you bitterly persecuted, it is true, while they
were alive, but whose sons you have made baronets.
At last, we said, the Anglo-Saxon heart is one; pro
gressive America and Conservative England will be
hereafter right and left hands, working harmoniously
for great human ends. A mere accident was the spear
touch that revealed the hypocrisy of your sympathy.
An American officer seized two Confederate envoys on
one of your ships; instantly all England (rather impe
riously) demanded their restoration, and they were
restored; but under cover of the popular unanimity
against that act, your old and real hatred of America
grasped the sceptre again, and, in the face of former
declarations, maintained and wielded it to the end with
an enthusiasm, beside which your early Federal sym
pathy was ice. The newspapers with their ante-Trent
and post-Trent articles are no doubt on file at the
British Museum ; you will find them instructive read
ing. The former are stammering, the latter easy and
eloquent.
Thus, then, after eight generations, for each of which
your government had left some scar upon mine, the
ninth began with a kiss and a stab. You were defeated,
John; the Southern Confederacy was not more severely
defeated in our civil war than you were; and I do
�11
believe that you are sorry you were found on the
losing side. But it is the honest way to let you know
the full extent of the dangers that have been brought
upon us both by the course you then took. If
you could not free yourself from eight generations
of antipathy to a Republic which your persecu
tions established and made strong, neither can we
escape from the accumulated illustrations of the spirit
of feudal society etched in the shadow of every chapter
of our history, and every institution of our country.
Quisque suos patimur manes. You have managed to
make England the dark background of our Forefathers’
Days, our Thanksgiving Days, our Independence Days;
and every child is inevitably trained to associate his
holidays with, and fire his crackers at, English oppres
sion. (Ah, had you given us the right to say : “ Child,
that was the England of the far past: the England of
to-day does not tax Dissenters, nor burthen its colonies
(witness Jamaica), for the advantage of a class; it sees
how both parties won in our Revolution, and rejoices in
American Independence, not simply endures it, much
less welcomes its dangers!”
Consider the ingenuity by which the freest firstclass power of the Old World has become to the
United States the agent of all the annoyance that
despotism can inflict upon liberty! It is only about
seventy-five years since people were suffering in English
prisons for selling works which rehearsed the A B C of
the United States Government, and their author—poor
Tom Paine—fled from a State trial to France and to
�12
America. So into our diary it goes: In England
assertion of the “ Rights of Man” = imprisonment or
exile. Ben Franklin, welcomed in France, is snubbed
in England. Thomas Jefferson is slighted at Court.
These men gave Washington City its traditions, and
the Honourable Messrs. Chandler, Robinson, and others
are at this day, in their speeches against England, quite
unconsciously, avenging slights put by George III.
upon the representatives of a government he had been
forced to treat with, but never forgave.
Lately I was reading with peculiar interest, in
Howell’s State Trials, an account of the proceedings
against Henry Redgrave Yorke, James Montgomery,
and Joseph Gales, for some alleged seditious proceedings
and speeches at Sheffield, toward the close of the last cen
tury. This Mr. Joseph Gales, a man of great ability,
fled with his wife and child (seven years of age) to
Hamburg, and thence to America, and so escaped
the term in York Castle awarded to “ Citizen Yorke,”
to Montgomery “ the Christian poet,” and others. He
(Gales) was nearly penniless when he arrived at Phila
delphia, where the Congress of the United States then
sat. But he was soon editing the leading newspaper of
the city, a paper which afterwards migrated with Con
gress to Washington. There it became the chief journal
in America, and was, as the National Intelligencer, for
over forty years edited by the son who had fled from
England with his parents. The same refugee esta
blished a newspaper in North Carolina. American
�13
journalism was at its beginning more influenced by
these men, father and son, hunted out of Hallamshire,
than by all others. What is that influence, so far as it
affected American feeling toward England, likely to
have been ? When you burned our capitol in 1812,
one other house you thought worth burning, and did
burn—the office of Mr. Gales.
I tell you, John, there remain in our cities old
men who witnessed some of the events that have
left skeletons in your closets; men who have seen the
insides of your prisons ; who saw that recruiting officer
plunge with his horse among men, women, and children
at Castle Hill, Sheffield, cutting them down with his
sword; still more who heard those shrieks at Peterloo
which have never died out of the air. These men may be
poor and vulgar; but they are strong-headed men, who
have tongues touched with some of that flame which shot
out on your walls in the songs of the Corn Law Rhymer.
Thus you have been ever careful to keep our ancient
memories green. Many Mayflower ships, with fleeing
pilgrims aboard, have followed the track of the first;
and we all know that, when your troops were driven
hence, it was still against America they were let
loose, whether in France or England. There were
not wanting those among us who maintained that
a certain class in England was quite ready to treat our
people as rebellious subjects, if they got a chance;
that the spirit was willing, though the arm was weak.
Well, a kind of opportunity came ; and is it wonderful
�14
that the blood of ’76 stirred in our veins when we saw
the Alabama sailing from an English port by acknow
ledged connivance of English officials, with the boast of
its owner in Parliament, and, despite the affected
deprecations of ministers, entertained by your represen
tatives in every English port of the world, and cheered
on her voyage of destruction ?
A pound will only be balanced by a pound, John;
and—think me not transcendental—the rule holds when
it comes to tons.
The Alabama was no common ship. There was a
soul in it, breathed out of two and a half centuries. Its
hull sank to the bottom, but its ghost still sails the
seas, and I fear will haunt them for some time yet.
It is this “ Flying Englishman” that is now the spectre
ship. At this particular moment it has the Fenian flag
nailed to its mast.
We both know, John, that if you had not longed for
the overthrow of this Republic, the Alabama would
never have sailed from Liverpool; and, in our hearts, we
both know that if the Alabama had not sailed Fenianism
would never have been permitted to plot against you
openly in our cities. “ Its proper power to hurt each
creature feels.” You showed a marvellous alacrity in
discovering our vulnerable point, and we would not be
your genuine scion if we had not discovered yours. It
is surprising how much of this kind of thing can be
done within the precincts of municipal law—how much
war can be waged with the weapons of peace!
It so happens that there is but one nation on earth
�15
that can suppress Fenianism; and that nation is not
yours, John!
Do not throw down my letter at this point; I have
good reason to know your feelings on this matter, and
hasten to declare at once that I am no Fenian. If there
is anything that runs dead against the average native
American’s faith about his own country, it is the whole
Fenian theory. What America means to say to the
whole world is—“Your free Germany, your liberated
Ireland, your Tae-ping China, are here; all your
utopias are provided for here !” The mere fact that
the Fenians are making a tremendous ado about a
bit of Old World land, not by a tenth so big or fruitful
as the lands we are offering them for nothing out
West, is enough to settle the matter with our lower
classes. But we all have an inborn contempt for people
who foster interests and enthusiasms of clan or race,
separate from the aggregate of us, or who think it
nobler to be Irish than to be American, that is, of the
fraternity of races. The other day a wealthy citizen of
New York, being applied to for a subscription to help
some Fenian expedition to Ireland, took down his
check-book and said to the deputation, “ I will give you
one thousand dollars, provided no Fenian that goes shall
ever come back again !” I assure you he spoke our
average sentiment. With all our combing and washing
we have never been able to make a decent American of
the Irishman. On our most important questions he
seems to be utterly without principle, and votes with
.this or that party, according to its declarations about
�16
the internal politics of Great Britain! Fancy our Ger
mans testing us with Bismark or the mysterious hyphen
between Sleswick and Holstein! The worst of it is
that the Irish are so numerous that they are able to
bribe parties and demoralise our national politics.
There is something in all this, no doubt, more un
pleasant to you than if I should say we sympathised
with Fenianism and its objects; you detect that the
part we have in this ugly business — the part of a
masterly limitation of ourselves to the letter of our
restrictive laws—is one of simple unfriendliness to your
Government. It is even so. Were there a conspiracy
here to crush Garibaldi, we should certainly prevent it.
There is no feeling in America which can be depended
upon to sustain any officer who should go one hair’sbreadth beyond the law-line, or who should be very
officious even there, for the sake of England.
That is a sentence I have written with heaviness of
spirit, John I I pause upon it. And let it stand. Be
tween us be truth! We like your people personally:
we admire and try to imitate your beautiful homes: we
worship your poets, scholars, thinkers. But your Govern
ment seems to us a great apotheosis of Jesuitism, a hard
systematised selfishness, and we hate it. The utter abo
lition of the English Constitution from the face of the
earth would not evoke a sigh from a hundred of our
people; whilst tens of thousands would weep at the
death of certain of your poets and thinkers. No one of
us believes that anything but powerfully organised
�17
selfishness would give greater privilege and power
to a titled idiot than to an untitled Carlyle. None
among us imagine that it is anything but that ineradi
cable virus of Jesuitism, with which Europe has been
fatally inoculated, that taxes a man for a religion he
abjures, or admits a chimpanzee to the highest scho
lastic advantages, can he chatter the Thirty-Nine Ar
ticles, whilst excluding Martineaus and Mills. We
inherit your great history, and are proud of it; but
all of its bright epochs are to us those in which your
Government was defeated by some small untiring
band of reformers. With what groans you abolished
slavery! How you consoled the master with money,
without thought of the helpless negro! And when
opportunity offers, how eagerly do you take to the old
sport of negro-hunting you were forced to give up! No,
John, we never think of your Government as doing
a noble or humane thing except under the compulsion
of fear. We see you just now preparing to do some
thing for Ireland, and we understand it. It is the
old story. “ Because this widow troubleth me.”
Nevertheless, little as we love your Government,
it might, but for our late quarrel, have depended
upon a determined defence of its rights of national
amity in this country. Were France, or Switzer
land, or Italy, or Prussia, the object of a conspiracy
in the United States, our laws would harden into ada
mant before the conspirators. The whole theory of
foreign politics with America is summed up in “ Nonc
�18
intervention” and the 11 Monroe Doctrine,” which are
obverse and reverse of the same determination to avoid
all complications with the Old World, and to prevent the
repetition of its regime and its balance-of-power struggles
in the New World. So we have always been bin died
against any attempt to organise here movements against
foreign countries, even when advocated by the elo
quence of Kossuth, and at this very moment Mazzini
and Garibaldi are appealing to our strongest sympathies
in vain, so far as any material aid beyond private con
tributions of money is concerned. I do not contend
that this vehement antipathy to all intervention in
foreign affairs is right; but it exists, and Fenianism is
the only case in which it has not animated the law.
Fenianism passed eastward through rents in our fence
made by the prow of the Alabama when sailing west
ward. (How would those laws of yours have bristled
along the Mersey had the Alabama been starting out to
destroy Belgian or Danish commerce !)
While I am no Fenian, John, and while there is no
comeliness in Paddy that I should desire him, I do not
wish to vindicate myself from a suspicion of pity for
him. I feel a dull pain as I see him carted out West
to be manure for my seeds of civilisation, or as often as
I drive my coach over roads paved with his brains. (I
understand that you are drawing a metaphysical dis
tinction between Paddy and the Fenian; but you will
get nothing by that—there is a potential Fenian in
every Irish man and Irish woman.) I have before me
�19
at this moment the last cartoon of the Fenian in
Punch: it represents a huge monster of an Irishman
astride a barrel of gunpowder, to which he has applied
a fusee, whilst prattling children play around him, and
a mother nurses her babe behind him. I recognise the
portrait; it is the same ugly foreheadless fellow who
has repeatedly burnt the homes of poor negroes in
our large cities, slaying some and driving others into
the streets. He once dragged my foremost reformer
through the streets of Boston with a rope around his
neck, and hurled a huge stone at the head of my finest
orator, which would have killed had it struck him.
His shillelagh has here succeeded the tomahawk. Yes,
I recognise this Fenian on his, barrel; but when the
cartoon arrived in America there was just behind him
the figure of a man with round, full paunch and heavy
watch-seals, erecting a gallows, and of this latter the
Fenian was plainly the shadow! Who was it, John,
that, through long ages, pressed down that forehead
and weighted that brutal jaw? Who was it that shotted
those eyes with blood, and sank those gaunt, hungry
cheeks? You see no alternative but hanging your
Manchester and Clerkenwell prisoners; yet is it not sad
that you have assiduously reared children with one
hand for whom you must now rear a gallows with the
other ? I will not dwell on the ancient cruelty of British
rule in Ireland, or the law that men treated like savages
have a tendency to become such in reality; I am more
likely to be understood when I remind you that your
C2
�20
course has not been business-like. Your country is
now swarming with special constables; you have had
to refit your old castles and replenish your armaments,
as if suddenly relapsed into feudal ages; any Yankee
would have been ’cute enough to show you how the
money these things cost you might have been better
invested. With it and your church endowments in
Ireland you might even have transplanted Ireland,
might have given to every poor family a free transit
across the ocean, a snug farm on their arrival upon
your unutilised lands in Canada, planting in each
a kindly feeling toward England, in place of hate.
The swallows, it is said, shove their young out of the
nest to die when there are no flies with which to
feed them ; but men and women are of more value,
John, than many swallows; and the swallow-plan is
hardly a good model for English statesmanship. Your
nest is small—especially considering the room demanded
by your aristocracy—and there are more swallows than
flies; but your fledglings are of a kind that will not
die quietly, and, unprovided with another nest, propose,
at Cork, Sheffield, and elsewhere, to fight you for yours.
They will not get it for a century or so yet, I think;
but it will be many a long year before you and Mrs.
Bull will be able to rest quietly in your well-lined nest
with these exasperated, hungry home-exiles fluttering
and screaming around you. For I do not think so
hardly of you as to suppose that you can find any
deep repose under these circumstances. I have not
failed to observe the crumbs you have occasionally
�21
thrown out for the starvelings. But it evidently never
occurs to them that your gifts have higher motives than
your own desire for quiet and comfort; and the cla
morous demands have increased with their successes.
And, alas!—I cannot help reverting with pain to
what might have been—the only hand that could
have supplemented yours and satisfied them you have
estranged!
Nevertheless, to that estranged hand some millions of
them have appealed; and—despite your taxation in one
age and Alabama depredations in another—that hand
has been full enough to feed them, occasionally, on both
sides of the ocean. Having fed, it might have soothed
them, had you not paralysed it. As it is, all the
strength they have gained here has been converted into
animosity toward you ; and this, by slow accumulation,
has gathered to the dark and angry cloud which your
New Year’s sun of 1868 tries vainly to surmount.
You can hardly be in earnest in hoping that such
stupid blunders as that Clerkenwell explosion can have
any material effect in putting an end to Fenian ism.
It will no more perish from such stigmas , than the
British Government from the firing of Sepoys from
mortars, the burning of Kagosima, the butchery of
negroes in Jamaica. Nay, the immediate danger to
your and my relations in the future arises from that
crime which for the time is a blunder For you are now
plainly seized with fear, and fear is cruel. Your reta
liation promises to be not only severe, but blind; and
such retaliation will be followed by retaliation; for the
�22
men you fight with will, if you try to hide your own
cruelties under it, see at Clerkenwell only a more swift
and concentrated specimen of disasters chronic in their
own country: for every dying child or woman at
Clerkenwell they will recall one, or perhaps more, at
home. But when their retaliation becomes as furious as
it is likely to be—striking high—you may recur under
some form or other to your old weapon, martial law.
Now, it is just here, John, that it becomes my duty
to warn you that there is danger ahead. It is hardly
possible that you can take that weapon down without
using it upon Americans; and it is utterly impossible
that it can, however disguised, be used upon Americans
without firing the train which, in the way I have
shown, has been ingeniously laid between your Capitol
and mine.
The indignant appeals of Irish-American criminals
to the United States for protection as American citizens,
recently uttered in your court-rooms, reached our shores
at a peculiar political juncture. The old Democratic
party, long excluded from power, had just seen the
tide turn in its favour at local elections, and was
gathering its forces for the great national campaigns
of 1868. But it was in want of a new “ platform,”
and a taking party cry. For many reasons its former
watchword—“ States’ Rights”—is not yet a safe one;
on the question of Protection parties are divided and
confused; but what better could there be than the
cry coming from English prisons—“ Protection to
�23
American citizens”? It was at once caught up, and
the Democrats called a great meeting in New York to
proclaim it through the land. But the Republicans
were too shrewd not to see that a monopoly of such
a telling cry must not be permitted to its opponents;
and so when the great meeting was held the leaders
of both parties were present—Horace Greeley sat
beside Fernando Wood—and then ensued a grand com
petition in enthusiasm for the new watchword. Similar
meetings, marked by the same unanimity and enthu
siasm of all parties, followed in the largest cities of
the Union. When Congress assembled, it at once re
solved itself into a similar meeting, and no sooner had
the theme been started by the Democratic Mr. Robin
son, of New York, than he was distanced by the fulminations of the Republican Mr. Judd, from the West.
In short, at this moment it seems probable that we
are about to enter on a presidential campaign, wherein
the contest shall be which party shall get hoarsest with
shouting: A Truce for Domestic Strifes, and Pro
tection to Americans everywhere, or fight !
Now it were a serious error, John, to regard this as
one of the many bubbles that appear and disappear on
the surface of American politics. It is because of a
wide and deep popular feeling on this subject that
these politicians and parties are competing for the
representation of it. It is not a new subject between
us; and, since our struggle of 1812, our position on it
has been becoming what it is now—compulsory. When
�24
0
the Fenian prisoners called to us for protection, there
were two reasons why we could not take up their cause;
first, because formally they were criminals; second,
because our code of citizenship is the same with yours.
As a “ nation,” originally meant those born (nati) in a
country, we in America, inheriting the ideas and laws
of citizenship corresponding to that principle, were
satisfied with maintaining so much. But the great
tide of emigration, which has within this half-century
trebled the population and the power of the United
States, has deposited here a new kind of nationality
altogether. When the laws and principles of alienation
are to be decided by a nation of the alienated, the
result may be anticipated. One-third of the American
people are patriotic expatriates. The other thirds are
the descendents of those who were. The doctrine of
once a citizen always a citizen is one that is for us
excluded by a more unalterable constitution than any
that can be contained in precedents or written on paper.
There are sufficient reasons why only now we have
discovered that the right of a man to be protected in
the transfer of his allegiance is to us a vital one. The
first thought of the immigrant was to accumulate some
money, and get the habit and feeling of an independent
man; but having now accomplished that, it seems that
his next thought is to try and visit his old home and
early friends, and to enjoy some of the pleasures which
he remembers keenly, because they were longed for,
but never reached. The German yearns to visit his
�25
Fatherland, and the Irishman dreams of walking, in
proud independence, the streets that once knew him
only as a pauper. That these on their several wan
derings should be liable to interference, to conscrip
tion, and the like, the United States, of course, cannot
permit. A century ago you, John, were struggling
with Spain for the free right and security of an Eng
lish ship in any and all waters, even those solemnly
donated by the Pope to other powers. You did not
recognise any confirmation by the Universe of such
donations. The inducements of the naturalised, and the
disposition of the native, American to roam through
other lands, make each to his country somewhat the
same as her ship was to England in those days. But
I need hardly quote the past; a nation which has an
army defending the immunity of Englishmen from
wrong amid the perils of Abyssinian deserts, will not
require much apology for the hereditary sensitiveness of
Americans on a similar point; nor is there need that
either of us shall be blinded to the true nature of the
flame newly kindled in this country by the partisan
smoke mingled with it.
When we first began to look into this matter, two or
three years ago, we saw at once that there were but two
foreign nations with whom it could bring us into any
serious collision—England and Germany. No other
countries had a sufficient number of their former sub
jects naturalised in America, to induce them to take
any determined stand on the letter of the common law
�26
of nations in this matter. About two years ago some
American-Germans were claimed whilst visiting Prussia
for the ordinary military service, due from the subjects
of that power; but they were released after a careful
consultation between our governments, and the ques
tion has been probably postponed between us. Count
Bismark saw that our position was a necessary one,
and that all Prussia could gain by pressing us to defend
it was thirty millions of enemies, for which a half dozen
impressed and reluctant soldiers would be but a poor
compensation.
The question, then, for the moment, practically re
mains open only between England and America. We
have always demanded of every citizen naturalised in
this country a solemn abjuration of his allegiance to all
other countries; and that we shall now proclaim our in
tention of protecting such in all countries from any
claims arising out of former allegiance is absolutely cer
tain. In ordinary times, and as affecting ordinary
questions, I should have no apprehension of any im
portant disagreement between us about a modification
which America is forced to demand in laws made before
its discovery. Your own Canning showed us the neces
sity of our “Monroe doctrine,” and our new movement
does but contemplate an environment of every indi
vidual American with a Monroe doctrine. Your com
mon sense will suggest that laws good for the times that
produced them may be as useless as ruined castles for
other times. In ancient times the right of alienation
�27
would have been paramount to the right of desertion.
But now, whilst emigration is as useful to your over
crowded islands as immigration to our untilled lands,
you must see that the feudal law can never bring you a
shilling, a subject, or a soldier whom you would not be
safer and stronger without. What a farce were it, for
example, to hold as British subjects, for any national
purpose or trust whatever, your Fenian visitors, whom
you would rejoice to know were all in Walrussia! And
behind these particular aspects of the question lies the
general fact, that the principle of inalienable citizenship
is referable to a period of European history when no such
ideas of personal independence as now prevail existed;
when also steam and exploration had not yet distri
buted through the world those great centres of com
merce and civilisation, whose amity is secured by
their equality, and which really form a commonwealth
transcending national divisions.
All this, I say, might ordinarily, notwithstanding cer
tain difficulties of detail, be trusted to reach a natural
adjustment before the tribunal of our common reason.
But it may happen, I fear, John, that the very occa
sion for our strenuous determination to affirm the new
principle at this moment will constitute the obstacle to
your complete concession of it. For that principle would
not suffer us to stand aloof and see American citizens
punished under any kind of martial law. If they were
punished, it would have to be under laws and formulas
common (substantially) to England and America, and
�28
to all civilised countries. I fear we could not appreciate
your emergencies, nor agree, in our present mood, to
the necessity of extra-judicial trials for wandering Ame
ricans. You could not, you will remember, see the jus
tice of our taking from the Trent envoys journeying for
the avowed object of destroying the American Union.
The excitement produced here, even by the arrest of
that charlatan Train—whom you have made the hap
piest man in your dominions—justifies a fear that these
insurrectionists may succeed, after years of effort in that
direction, in dragging us into some kind of collision.
But be assured of this, John : if the Devil is to have
another triumph of that kind on this planet, it will not
be more than incidentally due to Fenianism, nor to any
real difference between us on the question of citizen
ship; nor will it be due to the Alabama depredations
in themselves; it will be beneath all ascribable to a
general feeling in America that you hate us — consti
tutionally, instinctively, bitterly hate us—and to a
suspicion, that will then have ripened to conviction, that
the peaceful development of our Republic is incompati
ble with your continued naval and commercial supre
macy. We are made up here of all the races of the
world, and in such questions are very apt to identify our
commonwealth with that of humanity; and there is a
question arising whether, on the whole, England is
using her supremacy and power for the welfare of man
kind, or the reverse.
Is it true, John ? Are you really our natural
�29
enemy? It were dreadful if our conceit and your
pride should trick us into thinking we are mortal
enemies, if at bottom we are allies or even friends.
We cannot get out of our ears those ringing shouts
with which your Parliament greeted every disaster to
the army of the Union; nor the sneers about the North
fighting for Empire, and the founding of a great nation
—coming as they did from your “Liberal” leaders.
They think differently now; yes, the mouse having dis
appeared, the cat is woman again; but we cannot forget
what was revealed in those terrible moments, and no
one of those men will ever again be looked upon as
other than a foe of the United States so long as they are
too meanly proud, too cowardly before party taunts, to
confess the wrong, despite the wounds it has inflicted,
or the evils to which it may lead.
On the other hand, the news has come to us that
your Parliament, at the end of its said hilarities, has, at
your suggestion, committed hari-kari before you. It has
under compulsion decided that it is a body which has
shown itself unrepresentative of you, and is now passing
out of existence. The direction from which the new
Parliament is coming seems for us to be signified by
the proposal of a Tory minister to concede us that
arbitration which a Liberal minister had denied. If
this is done in the dry leaf, what will be done in
the green ? I am already becoming suspicious of
my first hasty conclusions about your natural enmity
to us, John! There must be a great, friendly, and just
�30
people where such men as your Mill, Bright, Hughes,
Forster, Taylor, Stansfeld, Fawcett are produced, and
that sturdy crop of Radicals, Frederic Harrison, Goldwin Smith, Beasley, Morley, and the rest, whose rising
glow is visible across the ocean. There is a cry from
Chelsea, too—a cry sharp with the summed-up sorrows
of all your brakesmen, from Strafford to Robert Lowe—
suggestive of something else than the “republican bubble”
bursting. I see, too, that instead of getting slower, as you
get older, you are gathering momentum. It was but
yesterday, when the life of a nation is considered, that the
gentle officers of the first gentleman in Europe charged
upon that crowd of men, women, and children, in St.
Peter’s-field, at Manchester, with the, cry “ Strike down
their banners!” and struck them down with their
mottoes which demanded “ Extension of franchise,”
“Abolition of Corn Laws,” and the like: now I see
nearly every one of those banners, risen from their bap
tism of blood, floating in triumph on the old walls of
Westminster!
After due reflection, John, I mean to wait. I know
well, that in the end we are to be firm friends or
warring enemies; and remembering that one of your
philosophers says that hatred is inverted love, and
another that the unforeseen always comes to pass, I
mean to wait.
So I mean; but I must candidly say that I have still
fears that my intent may be thwarted. That Fenian,
sword, whetted on your stony past, is in the hand of
�31
a madman, and he cares little whether it is wielded
against feudal or democratic England. Our politics are
threatened here just now with another equinoctial storm,
wherein the balances of the elements may be held by
the race whose hatred of you has become their one
motive of existence. And my helm of State is in
the hand of a trickster who has taken a fancy that
|he phantom cruiser shall still be kept afloat. While
the majority of us mean peace, there is a strong and
subtle party here that means war.
Do you with me recoil from that poisoned weapon,
and from all imaginable laurels to be won by it ? Then
hold your pride in abeyance for a little; ascribe my
frankness to something better than Yankee insolence.
Own for a moment that there may be something more
important than u understanding the feelings of English
men ” even ; and give heed to counsel which is offered
in the sacred interest of Peace.
First of all, John, checkmate my ingenious Secretary
at Washington by paying the Alabama claims. I will
not urge that you can do it without perceiving that the
amount has gone out of your heavy purse; I will not hint
that it will cost you more to let the bill run on gathering
political interest. But it is of importance to maintain,
as I do, that you can do it without servility or loss of
dignity. The Minister under whom that infernal ship
got out has declared in Parliament that its escape is a
reproach and scandal to British law, and was effected
through the treachery of British officials. That is
�32
Q
ground enough on which to pay for its devastations.
Cash payment may commit you less than arbitration.
You can still hold your own views about the techni
calities of the matter; you have a perfect right to say
that you do it in the interest of peace; you are strong
enough and rich enough to be beyond the suspicion of
having any dishonourable motive; there is nothing mean
in saying, “ I think I am right, but, at any rate, I will be
rid of a bore ! ” This seems to me the wise plan, John ;
but if your chrysalid Government is not up to doing in
the large way what is so likely to be done in some way,
large or small, I do not see that it would be a humilia
tion to you to agree even to that stupid demand of Mr.
Seward that the recognition of the Confederacy as a
belligerent should also be submitted to arbitration.
“That is,” you said, “inadmissible;” but why? You
had good reasons for such recognition; in it you were
simultaneous with France, and a little later than Pre
sident Lincoln. You could not have lost on such a
question, and you would have given Mr. Seward a
severer fall than he has yet had — he, more than
all men living, being responsible for the early and re*
peated recognition by this Government of the belli
gerency of the South. You cannot, you may say,
admit the principle of submitting to foreign judgment
the internal policy and political course of Great Britain.,
But you have admitted that principle in offering to
submit the Alabama claims at all; they involve the
adequacy of your municipal laws and the policy of your
public servants. Still, I think your safest and most
�33
honourable course is to pay the money, and reserve
your position in your own terms. My fine Secretary
would certainly try to dodge this also; but the American
people are not fools nor heartless, John; and the day
when you pay or offer that money without external
compulsion will lay something stronger than a cable
between your shores and mine!
From that day the other side looms into view. You
cease to be in debt to us; and if we owe any debt to
you, that must begin to press. Let the beam lie level
between us once more, and at least the hand that seeks
to disturb it will bear its own responsibility. And if the
base shall attribute base motives, will it not be compen
sation enough that you have drawn around you, for all
emergencies, the undivided sympathy of your own
people ? Your working men, and their friends in Par
liament, have decided against your rulers in this
matter, John, and reduced you to petition for the arbi
tration you denied. What can you gain by allowing
tricksters to trade on this thing ? Will men say you
act from fear ? There is nothing dishonourable in fear
ing a calamity to mankind; still less in fearing to bear
the responsibility of causing one. Your history and
security enable your people to despise a charge of
cowardice; that, at least, America can never make.
The next thing, John, for you to do is to search your
Irish trouble to the bottom, and to do it at once.
Those executions at Manchester show, I fear, that you
are very far off the right track. The men ought to
have been set to break stones in the streets. The fear
D
�34
of death preponderates with all human beings—Irish
men excepted: to the average Fenian mind your gallows
in Manchester did but suddenly carry three poor men
from their Curraghs to Paradise—did but transform
three obscure men into Emmets, into martyrs and
heroes. Have you heard of John Brown ? He made
an armed attack on slavery a few years ago; he and
those of his comrades who had not perished in the
attack were executed; but we now know that what his
raid could not effect, his execution did much toward—
the abolition of slavery. It never pays to execute on
the gallows men who have not in them the malignity
and selfish passions for which the gallows was reared.
Your Manchester victims were not of the stuff of
murderers. You committed a blunder in hanging
them that might have proved more serious had it
not been for the offset given by the Fenians at
Clerkenwell. You will be wise now to present
your Manchester gallows to the British Museum,
and turn your energies to secure the fair thing for
Ireland. If your existence as a first-class Power is
is necessary, your retention of Ireland is necessary.
But the retention of Ireland as a chronic insurrection
no retention at all. There is a story of a man who
went about all his life with a serpent inside of him;
when it was hungry he must feed it, or it would start
into his throat and threaten to suffocate him, as it did,
I believe, at last. The world sees you, John, as the
man with a snake in his bosom; it sees that your
legislation for Ireland for many years has been food
�35
given for your own exigency, which has only strength
ened the snake. It has grown at length to be Fenianism,
and your question now is, Cannot the fearful thing be
disgorged? I do not hope for you that it will be an
easy matter, for it is plain to me that the grievances of
Ireland are profoundly involved in your entire govern
mental system. The principle of the Irish Church and of
the English Church is the same, only the prevalence of
Roman Catholicism in Ireland makes it there a heavier
burden and insult, because a Protestant Church is as
odious to them as an Atheistic Society would be to
English Dissenters. What would your English Metho
dists and Presbyterians say if they were made to support
a National Comtist Establishment? The Catholic be
lieves your Church as soul-destroying as Atheism; it is,
to him, a lie planted on the ruins of Truth. Similarly,
your British land laws and privileged class happen to
bear more heavily on agricultural Ireland than on manu
facturing and shopkeeping England; but it is all one
system, and it bears heavily on the working people every
where. It is only a question of time, of the increase of
population, when your English people will cut up your
estates and parks, and compel your lands to support
men and women instead of rabbits and pheasants.
So, I fear that, having taken hold of this Irish
trouble, and found how profoundly it is entangled with
institutions resting on social superstitions—how in
evitably the English Church must follow the Irish
Church, and the English land monopoly that of Ireland—you will betake yourself to your old habit of ad
�36
Q
,
ministering opiates. The Irish difficulty, if thoroughly
traced, must lead you to the very heart of your heri
tage of wrong. Are you, after your Christian centuries,
equal to losing your life that you may find it ? At any
rate, John, disgorge that Irish viper, whatever may
have to be disgorged with it.
Your endowments ? Throw them into the sea—any
thing—rather than let them longer send this stench
through the world. Were Paul alive, he would surely
find another Church to which he must say, “ The name
of God is blasphemed through you!” Here at least in
America the Jesuit sharpens his most effectual arrows
on that miserable wrong in Ireland. “You speak of the
cruelties of the Church of Rome in the past; read in
the history of the establishment in Ireland how Pro
testantism has improved upon Popes ! Or would you
illustrate Romish oppression of conscience ? Compare
it with the liberty which Protestant England allows
the poor Catholics of Ireland — how much is their
humiliation of to-day better than that which denied
them citizenship in the past!” In both Ireland and
America Romanism has at present no other bulwark so
strong as your Irish Church, Protestantism no darker
disgrace, and Christianity no deeper shame !
Away with that, John, and then let your living gene
ration address itself to retrace the inglorious victories
by which preceding generations have forced it into an
attitude of despotism towards Ireland, whose natural
sceptre is the gallows, whose kindest provision is the
right of self-exile. All that through centuries you
�37
sought and in the end happily failed to do with America,
you have, by many disastrous successes, had the misfor
tune to accomplish in Ireland: down the fatal necessary
grooves of injustice your conquest came, confiscating the
lands, destroying the manufactures, making penal the
worship of Ireland. The continuous effort to do exactly
the same by Puritan New England trained America to
be a nation. Ireland is not yet a nation; but what
ever elements of nationality it has have been distilled
from traditions of common sorrows and vainly resisted
wrongs
Through sad six hundred years of hostile sway,
From Strongbow fierce to cunning Castlereagh !
If these shall not at length crystallise into nationality
it will not be your fault, unless indeed you discover that
beating a child in order to make it love you, little likely
as it is to secure the object aimed at, is apt—if the child
have any fire in him—to quicken it to independent life.
There is enough land in Ireland to employ and feed
all the Irish that remain to you, John; there are the
sinews, there the soil; if you cannot in some way end
their unnatural divorce, the gods themselves cannot
save you I Your landlords? Make those men look
you in the eye, John ! Not one of them could trace
his land-title, but he would find it was once a trust
for his king and country, perverted by some self-seeker
to the advantage of himself and family; not one fee
or feu, but was originally a fides, or trust for the advan
tage of Great Britain; by no means for any absolute
advantage of Lord Holdfast, who is now making of
his trust a danger to the State, sowing in it dragons’
�38
teeth, to spring up as armed enemies instead of the
valiant retainers which it was given his ancestor to
furnish! It has been for some time becoming apparent
that your land-aristocracy are trying to outwit the laws
of the universe. Let them try to shut up the sunlight
in their mansions, and amid the darkness that ensues
they may meditate on the fact that when humanity at
large really requires their land it will be as impossible
for any one man to maintain it for private ends as to
appropriate the sun for his gaslight. If you will stand
by old principles, John, let them be the oldest. No
landlord is to be regarded as fulfilling the conditions of
the deed whereby your Queen gives him land, who
proposes to maintain an interest in it separate from, or
antagonistic to, the general welfare of his country. He
may not burn his house, nor turn it to a powder-mill,
ad libitum; nor may he turn it, as many of the Irish
landlords do, into a manufactory of explosive Fenians.
If in times of danger the charters of liberty can be sus
pended, surely those of property may be also. Ah!
could you enter upon your Irish task, asking only what
is right for all—emancipated from your superstitions
about class and about land, you could make of Ireland
England’s prairie-land, you could so establish prosperity
there that whatever unassimilable Celtdom survived
must betake itself (and by your aid would speedily
betake itself) to these eupeptic regions which are able
gradually to digest even Irishmen.
Fenianism, then, has two causes. One of these is the
general weakness of your system, John, predisposing
�39
you to the disease; the other, and incidental, cause is
that the general unfriendliness to you in America has
made us wink at its practical projects, that is, has
paused us to deal with the conspiracy according to the
letter, but not the spirit, of the law. In other words,
America and Ireland, with very different aims, have
to some extent made common cause about their griev
ances ; about as much, we think, as you made with
the Southern Confederacy. These two sources of
the evil will grow by neglect, a recognised Fenian
belligerency with its cruisers being not at all un
imaginable. There are a great many mean and
selfish men, John, in your country and mine, and our
squabbles play into their vile hands sadly. But let
England remember our long dreary past of wrong with
which she is associated; let her attest her repudiation
of that past by a deed reversing it, all the better if it
be one beyond arbitrated justice, a deed of magna
nimity; let her make of America an ally; then one
brave session of Parliament can lay the axe to the
root of the tree which poisons your air. Our national
disgust at the whole theory of Fenianism; our hatred
of intervention in Old-World quarrels ; the indifference
to clan-interests and race - antipathies which steadily
grows into something sterner than indifference in a
union of races; our impatience as a people with all fuss
about purely visionary and impracticable schemes; the
English history, speech, and literature we have inherited
and still cherish; all these, veiled for the moment by the
shadow you have thrown athwart our politics, would
�40
-
resume their •'vigour. Nothing entirely unpopular can
live in this country; and I know of no other thing
which, in a normal condition of American feeling, has
so many of the elements of unpopularity in it as Fenianism. I do not defend our coquetting with it; I
wish we had been mature enough to repel such help;
but we are very crude in many respects, John, and we
have not had the best paternal examples of magnani
mity to guide us. It takes us both a sadly long time
to get the civility of our homes into our legislatures,
our fleets, and our international dealings. Had it only
been that Earl Russell’s dog had bitten Mr. Adams’s leg,
what scented notes and inquiries had passed! If any
one had stolen Sir Frederick Bruce’s hat, Mr. Seward
had deputed the American army, if need be, to find it!.
But.it is a navy destroying our commerce; it is treason
aiming at your life ; so fang and claw are claiming their
right to settle the question. Cannot our sixty or seventy
millions manage together to show mankind that there
may be rays of humanity carried into the dismal swamp
of diplomacy ? May we not startle the world by show
ing that, while the Pope is canonising the Chassepot
Rifle, England and America can raise the Golden Rule
to be International Law ?
That the New Year may bring that sorrow for devils,
and triumph for angels, is, John, the honest desire of
Jonathan.
the
END.
• . . ’ -I
LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. WHITING, BEAUFORT HOUSE, STRAND.
Y
�
Dublin Core
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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A new year's letter from Jonathan to John
Creator
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Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 40 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Attribution from Virginia Clark's catalogue based on the content (Anglo-British relations) and a comparison to another 'Jonathan to John' letter, titled 'Lunatics', attributed to Conway by the 'Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals'. Printed by C. Whiting, London.
Publisher
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Chapman and Hall
Date
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1868
Identifier
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G5623
Subject
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International relations
USA
UK
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A new year's letter from Jonathan to John), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Great Britain-Foreign Relations-United States of America
United States-Foreign Relations