As I have not given you up notwithstanding your very shocking principles and prejudices against design in nature, so we shall try to abide your longitudinarian defection. I suppose it is longitude, and I am sorry to see that there is a wide and general desire in that meridian that we (United States) should fall to pieces. But the more you want us to, the more we won’t, and the more important it appears to us that we should be a strong and unbroken power. God help us, if we do not keep strong enough, at whatever cost now it may be, to resist the influence of a country which looks upon the continuation of our steady policy to protect and diversify our domestic industry as a wrong and sin against it. No, no, we must have our own way. But the triumph of the Republicans was the political destruction of the very people who were always making trouble with England, and, if you would only let us and have some faith in the North, we should have been permanently on the best of terms. What you complain of in the Boston dinner[50] was indeed lamentable; such men should not have talked bosh, even at a little private ovation, and we have reason to know some of them were heartily ashamed of it as soon as they saw it in print. It was immediately spoken of here, by influential people, some of whom refused to attend the dinner, and in at least one paper, in a tone like your own. It was really as bad as the speeches of some members of Parliament, and worse because it was foolish. The fact is, a set of cunning fellows on both sides of the water (but here utterly characterless) have contrived to make both English and Yankees believe that each was bent upon quarreling with the other. Your thinking of me “as an Englishman” would once have been a compliment, and is what from my well-known feelings and expressions I have passed for among my friends here. Had the North gone on giving in to the South as for years past, I should have been one, at least in residence, just as soon as I could have got out of the country. I thank God, it has been otherwise, and that I have a country to be proud of, and which I will gladly suffer for, if need be. With all its weakness and follies (and I know them well) I go for my country, and to be friendly with those we ought to be on good terms with. I am cured of some illusions. We shall do very well, and the two countries will be on the best of terms when we are strong; till then we must not expect it. If it is the old question of struggle for life, good feeling has not much to do with it: the weak must go to the wall, because it can’t help it. “Blessed are the _strong_, for they shall inherit the earth.”