George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[480] other works, I will venture to predict that it will be more admired than anything he has yet printed. One good, and only one that I know of, can come from this state of opinion in Europe; the Southern States must be rebuked by it, and it is better the reproach should come from abroad than from New England and the North. How general and strong it is in Great Britain I need not tell you, for you see how Sir Robert Peel, and O'Connell, the ‘Standard,’ and the ‘Morning Chronicle,’—the High Tories because they dislike us, and the Whigs because they choose to be consistent,—all unite in one chorus, ever since they have gotten rid of slavery in the West Indies so much more easily than they feared. Just so it is on the Continent. Tocqueville's acute book, which contains so much truth as well as error about us,—and which Talleyrand says is the ablest book of the kind published since Montesquieu's ‘Spirit of Laws,’—has explained the matter with a good degree of truth, but with great harshness. So, too, lately, a series of very able articles in the Journal des Debats, the government paper, mixing up slavery and the mobs of last summer, and showing up the infirmities of our institutions and character, with much knowledge of facts and an extremely evil disposition towards us as a people, have produced a good deal of effect. And just so, too, all the leading papers throughout Germany, who repeat these reproaches against us in perfect good faith, cause us to be here very frequently set down for a good deal of humbug in our pretensions to freedom.

One thing, however, has won us much honor. General Jackson's message, as far as France is concerned,—for they know nothing about the rest of it,—has been applauded to the skies. The day it arrived I happened to dine with the Russian Minister here, in a party of about thirty persons; and I assure you it seemed to me as if nine-and-twenty of them came up to me with congratulations. I was really made to feel awkward at last; but this has been the tone all over the Continent, where they have been confoundedly afraid we might begin a war which would end no prophecy could tell where. The spirit, too, with which New York has met the great calamity it has suffered—and which was vastly exaggerated—has redounded to our honor more, I suppose, than we deserved.

So that, taking all things together, notwithstanding the slave question, and the mobs and riots of last summer,—which it was both disagreeable and difficult to explain,—and notwithstanding the reproaches of now and then a philanthropist who has heard about the Cherokees, it is still very comfortable to be an American;