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preponderates in favor of England.
I think there are more of the high nobility of England who are friends of the common people and willing to help the cause of human progress, irrespective of its influence on their own interests, than there are those of a similar class among slaveholding aristocracy, though even that class is not without such men. But I am far from having any of that senseless prejudice against the English nation as a nation which, greatly to my regret, I observe sometimes in America.
It is a relic of barbarism for two such nations as England and America to cherish any such unworthy prejudice.
For my own part, I am proud to be of English blood; and though I do not think England's national course faultless, and though I think many of her institutions and arrangements capable of much revision and improvement, yet my heart warms to her as, on the whole, the strongest, greatest, and best nation on earth.
Have not England and America one blood, one language, one literature, and a glorious literature it is!
Are not Milton and Shakespeare, and all the wise and brave and good of old, common to us both, and should there be anything but cordiality between countries that have so glorious an inheritance in common?
If there is, it will be elsewhere than in hearts like mine.
Sincerely yours, H. B. Stowe.
