[296]
great farmers in Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan,—whose population in 1850 was above three millions and is now above four,—the wheat which it costs forty dollars to these great farmers to raise, they can sell at their own doors for above an hundred, and it is sold in London and Paris for nearly three hundred.
Indeed, your European wars are not only making the States in the valley of the Mississippi the preponderating power in the American Union, but you are making them the granary of the world, more than ever Egypt or Sicily was to Rome.
So interchangeably are the different parts of Christendom connected, and so certainly are the fates and fortunes of each, in one way or another, dependent on the condition of the whole.
The war in the Crimea raises the price of land in Ohio.
A salutary movement to protect our own institutions checks emigration from Ireland and Germany.
The influence of the Know Nothings is felt in Wurtemberg; the Proletaires of Paris enrich the farmers in Illinois, of whose existence they never heard.
The law or the legislation to restrain the use of all intoxicating drinks, by prohibiting the sale of them under severe penalties and by declaring them to be no longer property when so offered for sale, is found ineffectual.
It will be abandoned in the course of the coming winter in all, or nearly all the States where it has been attempted to introduce it.
I hope I shall soon hear again from your Majesty, and that you will give me, not only good accounts of yourself and your family, but of Saxony and Dresden, to which we are all much attached, and of the prospects of an European peace. . . . .
I remain very faithfully, your Majesty's friend and servant,
To Sir Charles Lyell.
Boston, June 9, 1856.
My dear Lyell,—. . . . I want to speak to you of our affairs.
It is a long time since I have done it, and I have never had occasion to do it so sadly.
The country is now almost entirely divided into two sectional, fierce parties, the North and the South, the antislavery fast becoming—what wise men have long foreseen-mere abolitionism, and now excited to madness by the brutal assault on Sumner, by the contest in Kansas, and by the impending Presidential canvass.
I have not witnessed so bad a state of things for forty years, not 