Since I last wrote you I have received nothing from you, but the January North American has reached me with your article, which I have read with great interest and satisfaction.* It is particularly agreeable to me to find my crude unassorted knowledge, neatly and snugly built into clear propositions and logical statements, as you can and I can’t do it. I need not say that in the main I agree with you. If there is a difference between you and the writer of the Article on Palfrey’s New England, about the early democracy, my impression would be that the latter was right. I think New-England was from the start more democratic than you seem to admit. I should be inclined to think also that you overlooked some elements in what you say of the comparative smallness of the foreign population & its influence. I have a large casefull of notes on the general subject, which I have been making during the last five years,—hardly so much of the general subject as of every subject which relates to it. I have tried to classify them, so that I could see their value for a narrative or stream of argument but have only made the simplest divisions, and find a good deal that can hardly be brought into these. (I left them all to you in my will more than a year ago.) You have the cream of [the] larger part in your article, but not of all parts, and perhaps it is on this account that your article seems to me incomplete—as if your subject was too large for a review article and you had preferred to give a part of your argument thoroughly and leave other parts to be anticipated, rather than give a full statement of the whole without adequate illustration & citation of evidence of any part. It seems to me the most suggestive & valuable and the best written article in the Review. You are exactly in your place writing for a Quarterly Review. The right style is easy to you and you are under no temptation to under or over elaborate your phrases. [342]That is not the case with all the writers for the January number. But the Review is altogether very fine—the critical notices I particularly admire. They will be very useful. I don’t know of a man living of such elegant and trenchent wit as Lowell. It seems so easy for him to say a clever thing—he hits so deftly and after all with such essential benevolence.

This reminds me to say—the chief moral growth of the pioneer state is found in the greater instinctive charity—the impulse of good nature which says in a thousand forms: “give the poor devil a chance.”—This is at the bottom of a great many of our peculiarities—negligencies of legislation among the rest.

When I read Goldwin Smith’s letter on our finances, with his reference to what I suppose are your views, I wanted to write to you taking back a little of what I said in my last letter. I don’t think I quite agree with him and with you. I don’t think our financial policy has been so contemptible or that the consequences of it will be so terrible as G.S. does. Greenbacks have floated us over a bar on which we were near being wrecked. Something else that you have in mind, would perhaps have saved us more cheaply—but also perhaps it would not have been as tempting, quick, easy & timely in its operation and so would not have saved us. Some important elements in the case seemed to me to be entirely overlooked by G.S.; I am sorry that I have mislaid the letter & cannot now recall them.

There has been no clear progress in Mariposa affairs. Mary has been here on a visit to me for a week & returns tomorrow leaving me here. We are settling down in the expectation of at least spending another summer in the mountains & Mary is planning another campaign into the high Sierras, with a full purpose of carrying herself to a height of 14000 feet.

I am as far from any definite plan of change as ever, and turn & turn without making any progress toward a business. Most likely I shall return to Mariposa and stay there as long as I honestly & honorably can (on $10,000 a year) and then return to New York & wait there for something to turn up. I was called upon to advise about the executive organization of a new corporation last week and sat down and in an hour drew up a complete scheme—wholly original—and did it so easily & satisfactorily to myself & had so much confidence that it would be better than anything else that had been talked about, that the idea has impressed itself upon me that that is my true business. I take to it naturally & easily and do it well—as to nothing else. It may happen that a job of such work may yet chance to be offered me here—if it does & I can earn a comfortable living for the time being by it—I mean five or six thousand a year—I shall stay here & be glad of it. I should resign Mariposa—for any respectable business for which I felt myself fitted here, which paid me half as much.—You will perhaps think it strange that I would stay here [343]on merely living wages rather than return to New York. It is because I don’t feel sure that I can command living wages in the East, and if I can live here without drawing on my last year’s accumulation, I feel confident that I can safely calculate on getting three times as large an interest on my accumulated capital, as I could in the East.

My stocks all continue to stand well.

In petroleum I make no progress. I have put a few hundred dollars in & wait the progress. I should be glad to sell out for $1000 altogether & shall be little surprised if I lose all I have in. If I do, though, what a scrape the Independent & Observer & Ben Silliman & Co will be in. If their property is worth anything mine will be. Capitalists here generally regard it—the Santa Barbara & other big New Yark Cala Petroleum Companies—as stupendous swindles, ala Mariposa. I think they are not swindles but they are gambles. There must be thirty or forty millions of stock valuation of California Petroleum property now held in New York—yet not one paying oil well yet exists in California. The barer is down 130 feet on one of my (shareholder) lots, & I don’t know of but one that is deeper. If you bear California Petroleum in the Times & North American, on the strength of what I have said, don’t forget to add that your remarks have no application to the really substantial enterprises, located away from the feverish atmosphere of the Coast—such as the San Joaquim; the Pacific; the Occidental. These cannot be too highly recommended to the respect & confidence of the pious part of the public.

Don’t think that like C.L.B. I have so thrown myself into “the acquisitive period,” that I am lost to the patriotic—but there’s no sense in writing in the present of what, when you read, will have gone across the Continent & back across the isthmus. I read the telegrams of Sherman’s sweep around Raleigh, over & over—from the mere pleasure of reading the words—and because it is really hard to believe real—at least there is a smack of the imaginative in it, which makes it good to be rolled on the tongue. I have read the article in the Edinburg on the Campaign in America with interest. Who do you think is the author? Also the article “7 per cent”—the views of which are of momentous interest—& seem to me sound. Are they not? One consequence of 7 per cent the reviewers don’t see. Men of small capital will be driven faster than ever to flee to countries where land is very cheap & a little money goes a great deal further than in England toward obtaining permanent security against starvation ar the work house. By the way has the current rate of discounts been higher in Ireland than in England, do you know?

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