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[199] it is not uncommon now, to hear good leading Whigs say, that, ‘after all, we have made so many mistakes about banking, and currency, and such matters, that perhaps the other party have been as nearly right for the last ten years as we have, and that they may now try their hands at putting things in order.’ And certainly they are in great luck. You will just have gone through the whole odium of the bankrupt law, and the bankrupt banks; will have adjusted everything with England; and, in short, done up whatever disagreeable and dirty work Van Buren would have been unwilling to do, and then he will come in, with renewed strength, upon the sober third thought of the people, and sail upon a sea of glory to the end of his course. Huzza for Demus!1

Webster's letter about the Creole, concerning which,2 of course, you may like to hear a word, excites some talk here, but not a great deal. Sumner is the only person I have met with who is vehement against it. But it is, of course, against the moral sense of our community, and though the legal sense will sustain it, that is not enough.

Alla van leyes,
Adonde quieren reyes,
says the old Spanish proverb; and as the people is King here in New England more than on any other spot of earth since the days of the saurians and ichthyosauria,—who unquestionably made a pure democracy,—the people in the long run will settle the law of this matter as of others. We made a bargain with you south of Mason and Dixon's line, and we mean to keep it; but when it comes to enforcing it, you must expect Venetian law, and nothing more. We shall give you the pound of flesh, but not a drop of blood. Negro slaves are property, by the Constitution of the United States,3 and we are willing to claim them as such for you, when by the act of God, or by violence, they fall into the British power. But by British law they are not property, and therefore, if England turns round and says she is too moral to recognize them as such, we shall reply, perhaps, that it comes with a very ill grace from her, after having for eight centuries


1 The Democrats came in with Mr. Polk.

2 See Curtis's ‘Life of Webster,’ Vol. II. pp. 119-122.

3 For those who are not familiar with the details of our history and form of government, it may be well to say, that Mr. Ticknor here refers to the right to hold slaves as property, not as directly established by the Constitution of the United States, but as indirectly recognized in it, through the arrangements made for the basis of representation in Congress, and the extradition of fugitives.

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