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

[220] the manufacturers here being the party complained of, while with you it is the land-owners. So, you see, we are still children of Old England; and if we were not, we should be still doing substantially the same things, for we are all of us children of one family; connected by original qualities that will never permit us to get very far apart, even if we try.

These, however, are great matters, and I might have added to them the Repeal movement; for, though that has been almost as exclusively an Irish affair, in the United States, as it has been in Ireland, it may still serve to show how intimate are the bonds that connect the two sides of the world together. But perhaps small matters will show this even more plainly, and show at the same time how much we are alike; for, as they are not themselves the vast stream of public interests, which, like the Gulf Stream, strike of their own great impulse from one continent over to the other, but rather the feathers and straws that float on its surface, we can, perhaps, after all, measure the movement itself by them, better than we can by the flood that bears us along, as if we were only a part of it. For instance, there is mesmerism. You are all astir with that in England, and I dare say in Ireland. Well, we reprint Miss Martineau's brochures, and read them, perhaps, as much as you do. We have, too, our great mesmerizers, and our great phreno-mesmerizers, some of them like Katterfelto,—if that is the way Cowper spells his name,—with their hair on end at their own wonders, wondering for their bread; and others, mere gross, immoral mountebanks, not at all deluded by the odious tricks they perform . . . . There is, no doubt, something true at the bottom of it; and, as in many other cases, the small portion of truth preserves the large mass of error, into which it is infused, from becoming obvious and odious to all men. That there is such a thing as a mesmeric sleep can hardly now be questioned; but my faith can go no further. One of the curious circumstances about the whole matter is, that the believers should consent to be called by the name of a man whom they themselves must regard as an impostor, and who, by common consent, survived his own honor above a quarter of a century. For Mesmer, I think, did not die till about the time of the battle of Waterloo. . . . .

If you will draw fro m all these facts the inference that the United States—notwithstanding we have just chosen Mr. Polk to be President, and are in great danger of annexing Texas to our already too large territory—will still go on, and work out the original Anglo-Saxon materials of the national character to some good result, I shall