George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[236] hazard by them, but because they involve so deeply the cause of Christian civilization and the paramount interests of our common humanity.

We feel, to be sure, comparatively safe ourselves. Our people are young; we have room enough and bread enough for all; free institutions are the only ones that, even in colonial days, took root here; we have been gradually and thoroughly educated to them, and every year manage them with a more practised skill; in short, from our vast local advantages, and from the whole course of our history as a nation, a republic is a truth here; but what is it in France, or what can it be either there or in Germany?

You will not be surprised to hear that wise men in the United States saw, from the first, that no good was to come—except as God brings good out of evil—from the violent changes that began in the South of Europe and in France last winter, because they saw plainly that, if the institutions of society are once destroyed,—as they were in Paris in February, March, and April,—they can be reconstructed only on the basis of a military despotism, and in the presence and by the authority of the bayonet. But you will, perhaps, be somewhat surprised to learn that the great mass of our people at the North felt no confidence in the French movement from its outset; no more confidence, I may say, than did the wiser. They are accustomed every day to the workings of a truly popular government, and they saw little in France that reminded them of their own experience, and nothing to justify the belief that a wise republic would be founded, in which the people, by severe organic laws, would limit its own powers; in which labor and capital would rest on the same foundations; and in which the rights of the minority would be protected by the same principles that give the majority all its control of the state. They knew that a people who not only are without knowledge enough to be able to read and write, but without the more important political education which enables them to judge the measures of the government they have created,—they knew that such a people can never make a wise, practical sovereign.

All men, therefore, with few exceptions, in this part of America, have judged the changes in France rigorously, but rightly, from the first; predicting events from time to time as they have occurred, and looking now to no more favorable results than they anticipated four months ago. . . . .

Very faithfully, my dear Prince,

Your friend and servant,

George Ticknor.