Mr. Bates[46] told me the English were fifty years behind the Americans in commercial enterprise and shipbuilding. He was examined before a committee of the House of Commons. When questioned upon this subject, he said he had been kindly received and treated in England, and did not like to answer the question and have his answers published. They then told him to give his opinion, and it should not be taken down. He told them the reason of the superiority was in the character of masters and sailors. They were educated, had a sense of character and responsibility, entirely different from the same classes in England. Masters were respectable men, and sailors were now shipped from a reading-room in Boston. He expressed his opinion to me that the Americans would, before long, carry on the chief trade between England and China. Everything favored them. The destruction of the East India Company’s charter and of the West India merchants, etc. [He speaks of] The astonishment of the shipbuilder, when he gave the dimensions of a vessel to him, and his astonishment afterwards at being shown the American vessel which was his model, etc. ----- Footnote 38: George IV. Footnote 39: This remarkable woman is regularly chronicled in Encyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries as a Russian diplomatist. She certainly fulfilled that character in an extraordinary manner for a period of about forty years. When Mr. Buchanan met her, on his passage down the Baltic, she was on her way to join her husband in London. She was then forty-nine. The children referred to both died in 1835. The princess died at Paris, January 25, 1857, at the age of 73. She is said to have been a Protestant. In her later years she was a very intimate friend of M. Guizot, who was present at her death-bed. See further mention of her, _post_. Footnote 40: Henry Wheaton, the learned author of “Elements of International Law,” long in the diplomatic service of the United States. Footnote 41: At that time American chargé d’affaires in Paris. Footnote 42: