I am very sorry that I did not answer your letter immediately as I fully intended to. And I have meant to every day since. Not that I have anything of consequence to say. You acted with courage & I don’t doubt rightly, i.e. conscientiously. You do not give me the slightest clue to the reason or process of the sudden conviction. Probably you could not. Instinctive or unexplainable convictions generally have greater weight, & rightly so, than deliberate conclusions of judgment in determining a good hearted person’s action in love. Yet] have felt very sad to see the love of such a man as Bartholomew repulsed, partly from sympathy with him, no doubt, but also from general apprehensions which I suppose are foolish. But the fact is I feel that Bartholomew is one of the very few men I have ever known both in woman’s society & out of it, who do not attempt to be and can not be imposters. Most men do their courting, instinctively it seems, by a steady imposition. Bartholomew is the same to men that he is to women; he has no capacity to hide his faults or deficiencies & never attempts it. They stick out, but his virtues are other men’s manners & are

Edward Sheffield Bartholomew

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As I said I don ’t think it necessary that we should know the reasons of a conviction to act upon it—it is the state of mind (heart) that settles the question. But then it troubles me that the state of mind or conviction on which you acted decisively was but one day old, while as you say your instinct or unreflective “dreams” (state of mind) had all been for weeks previously of an opposite character. You had received no new light, no new fact, no closer observation, no experience of incompatibility of character had occurred; it must have been a sudden reflection or a mere wave of the impulse, a wave of reaction which invariably follows a new state of the mind, under which you acted.

I have been much troubled by reflections of this sort—added to the deepest sympathy which I have for Bartholomew—which I would have for any man under similar circumstances, but peculiarly for one of his character. However, though I don’t know you very well, I have more confidence in your good sense than I would have in most girls’. You have some deficiencies of constitution & are badly diseased in one faculty, but I don’t see that these difficulties could have operated in the present case; so finally I bring myself to believe that it is most probable you have, by whatever process, done what was best, what was most judicious under the circumstances. It is only another case of unfortunate attachment, for which you are in no way responsible. It happens every day. God knows why. It is the most melancholy thing in the world.

I came from London to Birmingham a week ago, staid with Field over Sunday & Monday, & Tuesday to Edinbro’. Three days of business moderately successful there & then here. I return to Edinbro’ tomorrow & to London Tuesday or Wednesday (17th—18th). Sad place this Glasgow, more vice & poverty; crape hat bands; long, severe faces, white cravats & black coats, rags, squalor, drunkenness & riot than I ever saw elsewhere. It is worse than Rome or Naples on the outside. Bad faces & bad manners. They raise good people here at great expense.

The position of an American traveling in Europe is just now a most unpleasant one. In railway carriages and other public places when he is not known as an American, he is obliged to hear language applied to his country which it is difficult to allow to pass in silence, and yet which he cannot deny to be just. The most that he can do is to repudiate the disgrace for himself personally, and his section or his State. And this he finds exceedingly difficult to do satisfactorily. Every American citizen is part sovereign of his country, and responsible for the actions of its Government. Every American citizen is and feels himself in a peculiar sense a foreign Minister of his country, a representative [382] of its sovereign. When civilization is outraged in the Senate of his country, can he refuse to explain or defend the stigma attaching to himself thereby?

In society, when one is known to be an American, the studied avoidance of reference to his country is more expressive than the strongest denunciation of the barbarism that has lately reigned in its high places.

One is met by men whom he has formerly known as admirers and lovers of his country and its Government, with expressions of sadness and disappointment. “I have lately been compelled to admit,” said one of the founders of the Reform Club, but a man of too liberal views to be ranked among the present Whigs, to me, “I have lately been compelled to admit that the experiment of extreme liberalism in America has failed. In its material results merely it has succeeded wonderfully, but its effects on society are evidently the reverse of favorable to the progress of civilization and Christianity. Even your legislators are murderers and ruffians of the worst stamp; your Government plots civil war, and encourages robbery and piracy in order to give strength and stability to an institution in itself barbarous, and which has in all nations heretofore lost ground just as fast as Christianity and civilization have advanced. Your law system, admirable and superior in many respects to ours, as it is, is apparently powerless to punish crime of the most heinous character, when the guilty parties are men of station and wealth.”

It is useless to reply to such allegations that it is but to part of our country they apply. Foreigners cannot understand our nice distinctions between local and federal responsibility. Besides, Washington and Kansas are federally and not locally self-governed. All is charged to the Republican system.

Rarely do we find a friend who is willing to understand late events as favorably to our political principles as the editor of the North British Daily Mail, a leading Scotch newspaper, who thus reflects upon them:

To those who admire the political institutions of the United States, the free and enterprising spirit of the citizens of the Republic, their noble self-taxation (exceeding in amount all other public burdens) for purposes of education alone, whilst we even in Scotland are grumbling in our miserly hearts at the proposal of a penny per pound, the respectability secured to labor, the boundless means of industrial development, and the various characteristics in which the political and social condition of that great nation is superior to our own, there is something inexpressibly painful and disappointing in the present state of its affairs and future prospects. We refer not, to its irritated and hostile relations to ourselves; these are probably but the temporary result of internal maladies, that are far more worthy of consideration. What a scene of anarchy, of outrage, of bitterness, and division, is presented in the interior of the Republic! The protection afforded to noon-day murder in the capital, the introduction of Lynch law into the Senate House, the intolerance of free discussion, the deadly broils between an Anti-Slavery and a Pro-Slavery Party in Kansas, and an infamous war of extermination waged against unoffending Indians in Oregon, present such a [383] combination of elements as can only remind one of “the beginning of the end.” Whilst empty and heedless stump orators are boasting of the glorious position of the Federal Republic, it is treading over the crust of a volcano; whilst they are reveling in brilliant visions of future destiny, it is advancing rapidly to the brink of a precipice. Whatever may be the fortune or the fate of the United States in their national capacity, one cannot but observe and regret at least the practical predominance of a spirit which is totally at variance with the principles of their Constitution and with ideas which we well know to prevail in American society. A man is shot in one of the hotels of Washington with impunity, because he is only a poor Irishman; others are hunted and killed like wolves, because they are only Indians; a Senator is felled with a bludgeon in the Senate House, because he is only a friend of negroes; and a town is destroyed, and a whole Territory given over to organized violence, because they are only inhabited by some citizens who wish to found a Free State! Where, in such acts, is any trace of that freedom, equality and humanity, which form the basis of the Republic, and ought to be its chief glory? The most wretched despotism that has sprung from the dregs of Spanish rule in the New World could do nothing worse than is now being done in the United States; and when a great nation thus departs from its fundamental principles, common sense as well as all history assure us that either a speedy reaction must set in, or that the political system must fall into ruin and dissolution.

At the root of all this disorder in the United States is the question of Slavery. Mr. Herbert, the murderer of the Irish waiter, is protected and screened by the Southern party, because killing a slave or a low Irishman is in their opinion no murder. Mr. Sumner was beaten with a club by Mr. Brooks because he made a speech in support of Freedom and against Slavery. The town of Lawrence is destroyed because it is inhabited by a “Free-State” Party. The present civil war in Kansas has its origin entirely in the breach of the Missouri compromise at the instigation of the Slave States. The grand object of the struggle is to convert Kansas into a Slave Territory, not by fair votes, but by violence, by dragoons and cannon, and by ruffianism. And it is important to observe that of these proceedings of the Pro-Slavery Party Mr. President Pierce is the strenuous abettor and supporter. The Democratic Party finds it necessary to identify itself with all the vilest outrages of the “nigger-drivers.” Even Mr. Buchanan, to whom the Northerners looked for greater impartiality and dignity of mind than have been displayed by other Democratic candidates for the Presidential chair, has adopted, since his return to the States, all the demands of the slave interest.

On the Continent, I assure you, that Republicanism has lost prestige most seriously from the events to which I allude. The German and French Republicans meet an American with melancholy or scornful and averted faces. “The Austrian Government has been guilty of no greater or meaner crime,” said one, “than your Government in its method of extending Slavery, if we may believe the newspaper accounts of the recent movements in Kansas.” It is true. The Austrian tyranny works secretly, but straightforwardly and with avowed purpose. The American, with false pretences of impartiality, connives at and encourages measures which naturally and inevitably lead on to the ruin or [384] murder of those whom it has chosen to make its enemies, and, then, indirectly, shields from justice and apologizes for the murderous banditti it has employed.