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 I have not given you up notwithstanding your 

 very shocking princij)les 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 way. But the triumph of the 

 Eepublicans was the political 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 i 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. 



