But whatever one may think of the wisdom or the disinterestedness of the organs of English commercial sentiment, it cannot be denied that it is of great importance to us that the public opinion of England should be enlightened in regard to our affairs. It would be idle to complain that her policy is selfish; for the policy of nations is always so. It would be foolish to forget that the sympathy of the British people has always declared itself, sooner or later, in favor of free institutions, and of a manly and upright policy toward other nations, or that this sympathy has been on the whole more outspoken and enduring among Englishmen than in any other nation of the Old World. We may justly complain that England should see no difference between a rebel confederacy and a nation to which she was bound by treaties and with which she had so long been on terms of amity gradually ripening to friendship. But do not let us be so childish as to wish for the suppression of the "Times Correspondent," a shrewd, practised, and, for a foreigner, singularly accurate observer, to whom we are indebted for the only authentic intelligence from Secessia since the outbreak of the Rebellion, and whose strictures, (however we may smile at his speculations,) if rightly taken, may do us infinite service. Did he tell us anything about the shameful rout of Bull Run which could not have been predicted beforehand of raw troops, or which, indeed, General Scott himself had not foreboded? That was not an especially American disgrace. Every nationality under heaven was represented there, and an alarm among the workmen on the Plains of Shinar that the foundations of the Tower of Babel were settling could not have set in motion a more polyglot _stampede_. The way to blot out Bull Run is as our brave Massachusetts and Pennsylvania men did at Ball's Bluff, with their own blood, poured only too lavishly. To our minds, the finest and most characteristic piece of English literature, more inspiring even than Henry's speech to his soldiers on the eve of Agincourt, is Nelson's signal, "England expects every man to do his duty." When we have risen to that level and are content to stand there, with no thought of self, but only of our country and what we owe her, we need wince at no hostile sneer nor dread any foreign combination. Granted that we have been a little boyish and braggart, as was perhaps not unnatural in a nation hardly out of its teens, our present trial is likely to make men of us, and to leave us, like our British cousins, content with the pleasing consciousness that we are the supreme of creation and under no necessity of forever proclaiming it. Our present experience, also, of the unsoundness of English judgment and the narrowness of English views concerning our policy and character may have the good result of making our independence in matters of thought and criticism as complete as our political emancipation.