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

Chapter 11:

• Letters to Mr. Lyell, Miss Edgeworth, Mr. Kenyon, G. T. Curtis, C. S. Daveis, Prince John of Saxony, G. S. Hillard, and Horatio Greenough.
-- summers at Geneseo, N. Y.; Manchester, on Massachusetts Bay. -- journeys in Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, etc. -- passing Public events. -- slavery and repudiation. -- prison discipline. -- Revolutions of 1848. -- Astor place riots.

To Charles Lyell, Esq., London.

Boston, November 30, 1843.

my dear Mr. Lyell,—I wrote you a word by the last steamer, and now, in continuation, take up the several points in yours of October 12.

The first is repudiation. On the whole of this matter, I refer you to an article which will appear in the ‘North American’ for January. . . . You may depend, I think, on every word of fact or law that you find in this paper.¹ When you come to the prophecy you must judge for yourself. I do not know that anything needs to be added to it for your purpose, except in reply to your suggestion, that an impression prevails in London that the States which have not paid the interest on their public debts are well off. Nothing can be farther from the truth. There has been great suffering in all, and in some, like Indiana and Illinois, a proper currency has disappeared, and men have been reduced to barter, in the common business of every-day life. What you saw in Philadelphia was nothing to the crushing insolvency of the West and South. The very post-office felt the effects of it,—men with large landed estates being unable to take out their letters, because they could not pay the postage in anything the government officers could properly receive.

. . . . How foolish, then, is Sydney Smith in his last letter, to treat is all as pickpockets! He does his cause a great mischief by it; that, perhaps, I could submit to, but I cannot submit to the injury he