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

[404] will have as little to do with their diplomacy as it has had in China. Their manufactures will be admitted free at the South, and they will receive free the great staples they need in return;but we at the North cannot make such treaties with them; and though we may possibly, but not probably, get Canada and Nova Scotia, about which they will care little, we can, if separated, never have profitable or really satisfactory relations with these provinces, or with the mother country. The same is the case, though in an inferior degree, with France and the other governments of the Continent, except, as I before said, with Russia, who would be glad to have us for a mighty counterpoise against all the other powers of Europe, with no one of whom can they have any really common interests or, at bottom, friendly relations. All the rest of the great aristocracies have been long predicting that we should prove to be like fruit imperfectly formed and nourished, which rots without ripening. They show us up now as cheats, filibusters who go for lawless conquests of foreign territory, who repudiate our honest debts, and as hypocrites who boast of universal suffrage and boundless liberty, while we hold three million of our fellow creatures in slavery; insinuating always that these are the natural results of democracy, and of intrusting power to ignorant hands to use. And their opinions are beginning to be accepted by the intelligent classes, who have heretofore been little inclined to them, but who, after seventy years of sufferings that have followed the Revolution, begin to fear that society must be preserved, and that the liberty they have hoped, and often struggled for, is to be given up, at least for a time, to do it.

I do not know whether, in writing so learnedly, I have made plain my purpose, and so I will explain it. I have desired to tell you that, in my judgment, whenever the fatal hour that strikes the dissolution of our Union comes, those who stand by it longest will have least sympathy in Europe. The question will be understood by few, and of these few many will be glad to have our country divided, for the sake of the benefits that, as they believe, will accrue to their own institutions, while the great majority will regard it as merely a commercial or political question, to be determined by the interests of their respective countries, which will generally be found opposed to our greatness and to the success of our principles of freedom and confederacy.

Having reached home in September, Mr. Ticknor found his time amply filled, especially by the affairs of the Public Library.