476 LETTERS TO DARWIN AND OTHERS. [1862, 
February 18, 1862. 
Accept a hasty line at the present, when I am busy 
above measure. 
Thanks for the Primula paper, which I have barely 
looked over. 
I do hope that you and the other fourteen of your 
household are out of bed and done with influenza. 
As Lhave not given you up notwithstanding your 
very shocking principles and prejudices against de- 
sign in nature, so we shall try to abide your longitudi- 
narian defection. I suppose it is longitude, and I am 
sorry to see that there is a wide and general desire in 
that meridian that we (United States) should fall to 
pieces. But the more you want us to, the more we 
won’t, and the more important it appears to us that 
we should be a strong and unbroken power. God 
help us, if we do not keep strong enough, at what- 
ever cost now it may be, to resist the influence of a 
country which looks upon the continuation of our 
steady policy to protect and diversify our domestic 
industry as a wrong and sin against it. No, no, we 
must have our own wa But the triumph of the 
Republicans was the clas destruction of the very 
people who were always making trouble with Eng- 
land, and, if you would only let us and have some 
faith in the North, we should have been permanently 
on the best of terms. 
What you complain of in the Boston dinner! was 
indeed lamentable ; such men should not have talked 
bosh, even at a little private ovation, and we have 
reason to know some of them were heartily ashamed 
of it as soon as they saw it in print. It was immedi- 
ately spoken of here, by influential people, some of 
' 1 The dinner after the capture of Mason and Slidell. 
