To A Friend - Page 2

than I supposed. I seldom came into personal relations
with an Englishman without beginning to like him, and feeling my
favorable impression wax stronger with the progress of the acquaintance.
I never stood in an English crowd without being conscious of hereditary
sympathies. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that an American is
continually thrown upon his national antagonism by some acrid quality in
the moral atmosphere of England. These people think so loftily of
themselves, and so contemptuously of everybody else, that it requires
more generosity than I possess to keep always in perfectly good-humor
with them. Jotting down the little acrimonies of the moment in my
journal, and transferring them thence (when they happened to be tolerably
well expressed) to these pages, it is very possible that I may have said
things which a profound observer of national character would hesitate to
sanction, though never any, I verily believe, that had not more or less
of truth. If they be true, there is no reason in the world why they
should not be said. Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America
for courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute
in the least to our mutual advantage and comfort if we were to besmear
one another all over with butter and honey. At any rate, we must not
judge of an Englishman's susceptibilities by our own, which, likewise, I
trust, are of a far less sensitive texture than formerly.

And now farewell, my dear friend; and excuse (if you think it needs any
excuse) the freedom with which I thus publicly assert a personal
friendship between a private individual and a statesman who has filled
what was then the most august position in the world. But I dedicate my
book to the Friend, and shall defer a colloquy with the Statesman till
some calmer and sunnier hour. Only this let me say, that, with the
record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of your character in
my deeper consciousness as among the few things that time has left as it
found them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful forever to
that grand idea of an irrevocable Union, which, as you once told me, was
the earliest that your brave father taught you. For other men there may
be a choice of paths,--for you, but one; and it rests among my
certainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes or
apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more deeply heartfelt,
or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of personal happiness,
than those of FRANKLIN PIERCE.

THE WAYSIDE, July 2, 1863.