Oh, ay, I quite agree with you about leaving the world-melee to others. For my part, I feel as if I were dead and buried long ago. You said, awhile ago, that you did n't so well like to work as you once did. Sensible, [254] that. I feel the same, in my bones--or brains. There it is, you always say, what I think; except sometimes, when you scathe the opponents,--for I am tenderhearted. I don't like to have people made to feel so "bad." Seriously, I wonder that some of you editors are not beaten to death every month. Ours is a much-enduring society. I could enlarge, but I have n't time; for I must go and set out some trees--for posterity. With our love to your wife and all, Yours ever, ORVILLE DEWEY. To Mrs. David Lane. BOSTON, Dec. 1860. DEAREST FRIEND (for I think friends draw closer to one another in troublous times),--Indeed I am sad and troubled, under the most favorable view that can be taken of our affairs; for though all this should blow over, as I prevailingly believe and hope it will, yet the crisis has brought out such a feeling at the South as we shall not easily forget or forgive. To be sure, as the irritation of an arraigned conscience, we may partly overlook it, as we do the irritation of a blamed child,--as an arraigned, and, I add, not quite easy conscience; for surely conscious virtue is calmer than the South is, today. I know that other things are mixed up with this feeling of the South; but if it felt that its moral position was high and honorable and unimpeachable before the world, it would not fly out into this outrageous passion. If the ground it stood upon in former days were held now, it might be calm, as it was then; but ever since the day when it changed its mind,--ever since it has assumed that the slave system is right and good and admirable [255] and ought to be perpetual,--it has been growing more and more passionate. Well, we must be patient with them. For my part, I am frightened at the condition to which their folly is bringing them. It is terrible to think that the distrust and fear of their slaves is spreading itself all over the South country. To be sure, they, in their unreasonableness, blame us for it. They might as well accuse England; they might as well accuse all the civilized world. For the conviction that slavery is wrong, that it ought not to be advocated, but to be condemned, and ultimately removed from the world,-this conviction is one of the inevitable developments of modern Christian thought and sentiment. It is not we that are responsible for the rise and spread of this sentiment; it is the civilized world; it is humanity itself. And now what is it that the South asks of us as the condition of union with it? Why, that we shall say and vote that we so much approve of the slave-system, that we are willing, not merely that it should exist untouched by us,--that is not the question,--but that it should be taken to our bosom as a cherished national institution.