Of course we believers in real design make the most of your “frank” and natural terms, “contrivance, purpose,” etc., and pooh-pooh your endeavors to resolve such contrivances into necessary results of certain physical processes, and make fun of the race between long noses and long nectaries!
March 23.
Dr. Wyman,[54] who is a sharp fellow, tells me that, on the authority of the historian Prescott, the Incas of Peru, for no one knows how long, married their sisters, to keep the perfect purity of the blood. Query: How did this strong case of close-breeding operate? Did they run out thereby? Wyman thinks there is no evidence of it.
If it is true, and the Incas stood it for a long course of generations, you must look to it, for it will bear hard against your theory of the necessity of crossing. If they run out, you will have a good case.
April 11.
You see that, at length, the thing is nearly done, and, to use the expression here, rebeldom is “gone up.”
You have long seen, I suppose, that I was right in saying there was but one possible end to the war; also that the continuance for a time or abolition of slavery depended simply on the rebels,—that if they obstinately and persistently resisted, slavery was thereby doomed.
It has been a long, weary, and trying work. But the country has had the needed patience and nerve, and the thing is done, once for all, at great cost, but to immense and enduring advantage.
You are the only Britisher I ever write to on this subject, and, in fact, for whose opinions about our country I care at all.
So I hasten to rejoice with you over the beginning of the end.