TRUTH-TELLING.
IT is amusing to see how a man in a passion lets the truth escape him. The London Times, which has constantly striven to represent the rebellion as the noble effort of an oppressed people to recover and defend their liberties, and has with perfect success falsified every fact in the history of the war, unguardedly tells the naked truth in a late article written under the consciousness of the extremity of the rebel cause.
It is speaking of the project of arming the slaves at the South, and the Times innocently remarks: ” The South has no reason to doubt that the negro will fight just as bravely in support of the cause of slavery, which is the cause of his master, as he will in the cause of liberty.” And it adds of its particular friends the rebels : ” The man who would submit without a murmur to the impressment of his horses or his crops, may very likely shrink back with a species of superstitious horror from the attempt of his own Government [at Richmond] to deprive him of those very slaves for whom he has already fought a long and desperate war.”
This is as it should be. The Times confesses that this insurrection is an effort to save slavery; and the paper whose asserted pride it is to defend “fair play”—the representative of the aristocratic governing class of England deliberately supports as a manly assertion of an undoubted right the armed effort of a body of men to overthrow a Government, which they do not pretend has ever wronged them, merely for the sake of preserving slavery. Does any really intelligent and thoughtful Englishman wonder that his country is detested by all other nations when he sees that its leading journal, holding a position which no other paper holds in any other country, is guilty of such a crime against human nature and civil society?
We do not for a moment forget the sympathy and generous service of our friends in England who, understanding this war, truly appreciate and despise the course of the Times and its adherents. But the fact of which we speak will help explain to them the indignation which they hear so often breathed against England. They may he very sure that if the mine owners any where in England should revolt against the British Government for the sole purpose of more surely imbruting the unhappy miners, no American statesman in office would applaud their insurrection as the founding of a nation, as Mr. GLADSTONE said of this rebellion ; and if any leading newspaper here, clearly recognizing the object of the insurrection, vehemently supported it, it would be overwhelmed with the derision and wrath of the great body of the people.