Knowing the warm interest you take, my dear friend, in the slavery question, and in what concerns myself, I send you the last letter of Gerolt, which was very long in coming, but which will certainly command your attention. Most unfortunately Buchanan will be the next President, and not Fremont, the traveller of great acquirements, who has four times travelled the land route to San Francisco, surveying the country over which he passed, to whom it is owing that California did become a free State. Do _not_ return the letter, nor the enclosure. On the heels of this African absurdity comes another folly, of a more serious cast, though richly fraught with ridicule, not royalistic so much as aristocratically Bernese, and spiced with a little railroad speculation as to whether the route by the way of Neufchatel or that by way of Chaux de Fonds is to be preferred! And the heroic Count,[81] who executes the coup d’état à la Napoleon, whence did he derive his inspiration? From Berlin, while we have a minister at the Diet, whom at this day we pretend never to have recognised. How are these things to be reconciled? We shall have a similar fate with our three ultramarine possessions, the Jade, the Zollern, discovered by Columbus Stillfried, and Neufchatel. I feel for the Constantinopolitan Pourtalès, who finds himself involved in an awkward conflict between his dynasty (the Prussian earldom) and his official liberalism. It is fortunate that the mouth of the English Parliament is still closed. Your faithful A. V. HUMBOLDT. 177. THE PRUSSIAN MINISTER RESIDENT, VON GEROLT, TO HUMBOLDT. NEW YORK, _August 25th, 1856_. MY MOST DEAR AND HONORED PATRON! Since my last letter to your Excellency, of the 8th inst., I was made happy by your favor of the 27th of July, from which I learn, with the most sincere regret, of your temporary indisposition. For the information it contains I return your Excellency my most hearty thanks, and hasten to comply with your wish by sending two extracts from papers published here (the “New York Herald” and the “Courrier des Etats Unis”), containing your publication on the subject of slavery in Cuba, as well as the excuse published by Mr. Thrasher, which is, it must be confessed, exceedingly lame. The affair has excited great attention here, and could not but be welcome to the opponents of slavery, who have made Fremont their candidate. Some days ago, his German supporters, many thousands in number, held a mass meeting in his support, and honored him with a splendid torchlight procession in the evening.