his powerful assistance to the cause of nationality, and though all that he did might have been justified on cosmopolitan grounds—such as abhorrence of slavery, or the desire to see the experiment of free institutions worked out fairly upon a great continent—the fact remains, that the transcendentalist was fighting in the ranks with men who cared chiefly for the national flag, and that, except for the momentum of numbers and energy which these men gave, the cause of general civilisation could not have triumphed. It is, of course, theoretically conceivable, though it is surely very improbable, that the human race may gradually be educated into the cosmopolitan conception of duty. Capital, we are often told, has no sentiment. It is determined in its choice of a home by no other considerations than those of gain and security. Accordingly, manufactures are freely transplanted from England to Belgium, or America, or India, without regard to the interests of the English people, the merchant navy of a State entering upon a war is transferred without delay to a neutral flag, and it constantly happens that a belligerent power is supplied with arms or food or money from its enemy.[1] It may be asked, whether the average citizen will not at some future date be careless
- ↑ Two remarkable instances of this may be quoted from the history of the great war with France when feeling on both sides was strained to the uttermost. Rothschild having to transmit £800,000 to the Duke of Wellington, sent it through France (Life of Buxton, p. 289). Bourrienne, being ordered to provide 16,000 military cloaks, 37,000 jackets, and 200,000 pairs of shoes for the French army before the campaign of Eylau, procured them from England through a Hamburg house (Mémoires de Bourrienne, tome vii. chap. xx). In the first case, Frenchmen smuggled eight tons of gold through France to supply the needs of an army fighting against their own countrymen. In the second instance, whole factories in England must have been employed upon what—in the case of the jackets and cloaks, at least—every one knew to be military equipments for the use of the enemy.
