If your Lythrum paper shall be at all equal in interest to that on Linum, it will be a gem.
As to tendrils, what are Hooker and Oliver (the latter a professor, too) about, and where have they lived not to know anything of them? Everybody must have seen, in Cucurbitaceæ and Passiflora, tendrils reaching out straight for a certain time, and then, if they reach nothing, coiling up from the end. Also the sweeping of stems....
P. S. [To the above?] Three numbers of Boston newspapers recently sent you, two by this mail (in which my good beau-père is again “spiking the English”), please to forward to Reuben Harvey, Esq., Limerick, Ireland.
You are quite out in supposing that hatred of England is increasing, or that there is the least desire to meddle with you, except in self-defense.
My own feelings were very sensitive at first, because I expected better things, and I then deferred much to British opinion. I now do neither, and nothing strikes me more than the smallness of mind and largeness of gullibility of the British people, as far as I can judge from their press (weeklies, quarterlies, and “Times”). But I do not suppose you will fight us because you dislike us; and so conversely. I suppose I do not see the papers which so abuse England, though I read influential and respectable papers; but from what I do see, I think we receive far more abuse and misrepresentation and unfair usage than we give.
As to the course of the war and policy of our country as to slavery, some day when you turn back to some early letter of mine you will see that I was a fairly good prophet; that the South might have delayed the abolition of slavery by giving up early in the conflict, but that every month of continued resistance hastened and insured the downfall of slavery. That is now doomed, and sure near to rapid death; quick in some places, slower in others, but sure.
Ill-usage of negroes—who make such good soldiers—will soon be unheard of, except with Irish. It will take some generations of American life to breed out the barbarian they bring to the country.
November 23.
The next best thing, of late, is the exposé of Lindsay and George Saunders (the Confederates) by Historicus.
I trust Historicus’ previous letters, in which he shows (about the same time my father-in-law’s articles on the subject reached England) that it is the duty of a country to see that armed or war vessels are not fitted out, quite irrespective of all municipal law, have produced their proper effect. Something has produced a great effect, and a great change in the idea of what it was incumbent on the government to do; and nothing can be more satisfactory than the views now taken; and the effect here is excellent. For we are sure that when the right notions once get a lodgment, as they have, England will faithfully carry them through. Lawyers whom I knew here were confident how the law would ultimately be laid down by your courts; but we greatly feared it would be done only after a few more such vessels had got to sea. All will go well now.