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

To Sir Edmund Head, Bart., Toronto.

Boston, November 18, 1857.

dear Head,—The last time I saw you, I think you were in the hands of a London police officer.¹ Of course we are all, in proportion, glad to find you safely returned to Toronto, and I should have told you so some days since, but I thought it was better to wait until you were fairly settled, and had got through your first batch of business. This, I trust, for your sake as well as mine, is now the case.

We a all well,—daughter that was so ill, grandchild, and all,— and all still living together in Park Street, after the fashion of the patriarchs. But the young folks will soon go away to a new home, which they are now fitting up with all the eagerness of inexperience; and we shall have a heavy miss of them, and a heavier one of the baby, who is now the plaything of the house. It is, however, all right.

But nothing else seems to be so just now. I need not tell you what a hurricane we have had in our commercial and monetary affairs. It has blown somewhat in Canada, I think, and even London and Paris have not been unconscious of it. But here it has been tremendous . . . . . A great deal has, no doubt, been owing to a mad panic. But there have been deep causes at work for years to produce it. The people of this country have been spendthrifts, to a degree that, I think, no people in all its classes ever were before; and as for the great merchants and manufacturers, the bank directors and railroad managers, they have been gamblers,—gamblers more adventurous than any at the Bourse in Paris or in the Credit Mobilier. We shall, however, get over it, and, I suppose, take nothing by our experience. The country was never more really prosperous,—never richer in all that goes to make up national wealth than it is now,— and as soon as this bourrasque is over, we shall go to spending, speculating, and gambling, just as if nothing had ever happened. One of the most curious things about it, and perhaps one of those most worth considering, is the way in which people accept it and submit to it, as if it were the work of an irresistible fate. Debtors claim, as if it were a right, an extension of time for paying their notes, and creditors