what direction the new quarrel may give to the old. They cannot calculate consequences. In this matter they only know, with a wringing sense of shame, that their country's flag has not been a protection to those who believed themselves secure where it waved. Only atonement for the outrage can relieve them from the duty of vindication.
A publication, which often sends a voice of heroic poetry ringing through its playful sallies of wit, has finely expressed this feeling of the nation:
"All war she knows drags horror in its train,
Whate'er the foes, the cause for which they stand;
But worst of all the war that leaves the stain
Of brother's blood upon a brother's hand.
The war that brings two mighty Powers in shock,
Powers, 'tween whom fair commerce shared her crown:
By kinship knit, and interest's golden lock,
One blood, one speech, one past of old renown.
All this she feels, and, therefore, sad of cheer.
She waits an answer from across the sea:
Yet hath her sadness no alloy of fear.
No thought to count the cost, what it may be.
Dishonour hath no equipoise in gold.
No equipoise in blood, in loss, in pain:
Till they whom force has ta'en from 'neath the fold
Of her proud flag, stand 'neath its fold again.
