AUTHOR OF A LETTER TO THE LONDON TIMES. BY JOHN LOTIROP MOTLEY, LL.D., D.C.L., "THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC," AND 66 HISTORY OF THE UNITED O THE CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL TO THE EDITOR OF THE LONDON TIMES: The de facto question in America has been referred at last to the dread arbitrament of civil war. Time and events must determine whether the "great Republic” is to disappear from the roll of nations, or whether it is destined to survive the storm which has gathered over its head. There is, perhaps, a readiness in England to prejudge the case; a disposition not to exult in our downfall, but to accept the fact; for nations, as well as individuals, may often be addressed in the pathetic language of the poet "Donec eris felix, multos numerabis amicos, Yet the trial by the ordeal of battle has hardly com- Yet it is often asked, Why have the Americans taken up arms? Why has the United States government plunged into what is sometimes called "this wicked war?" Especially it is thought amazing in England that the President should have recently called for a great army of volunteers and regulars, and that the inhabitants of the free states should have sprung forward as one man at his call, like men suddenly relieved from a spell. It would have been amazing had the call been longer delayed. The national flag, insulted and defied for many months, had at last been lowered, after the most astonishing kind of siege recorded in history, to an armed and organized rebellion; and a prominent personage in the government of the Southern" Confederacy" is reported to have proclaimed amid the exultations of victory that before the first of May the same cherished emblem of our nationality should be struck from the Capitol at Washington. An advance of the "Confederate troops" upon the city; the flight or captivity of the President and his Cabinet; the seizure of the national archives, the national title deeds, and the whole national machinery of foreign intercourse and internal administration by the Confederates; and the proclamation from the American palladium itself of the Montgomery Constitution in place of the one devised by Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay-a Constitution in which slavery should be the universal law of the land, the corner-stone of the political edifice— were events which seemed for a few days of intense anxiety almost probable. Had this really been the result without a blow struck in defence of the national government and the old con |