comparatively small, there can
be no question which of the Border States enters most importantly into
the calculations of both the belligerent powers; the weight of interests
and wealth of resources that Maryland carries with her--to say nothing
of her local advantages--are such that she cannot eventually be allowed
to adhere to either side with a lukewarm or divided fidelity.

The position I am about to advance will meet with a certain amount of
dissent, if not of incredulity, and some one will probably point at
recent events as furnishing an unanswerable contradiction to much that I
affirm. I will only pray my readers to believe that I have tried hard to
cast prejudice aside in listening, in marking, and in recording; my
opportunities of forming a deliberate judgment on the sympathies of all
classes in this especial State were such as have fallen to the lot of
very few strangers; and my observations _ought_, certainly, to have been
the more accurate, from their field having been necessarily narrowed.
Perhaps I can hardly do better than reprint here the larger portion of a
letter, written in the middle of last March, to the "Morning Post;"
nothing that has occurred since induces me materially to modify any one
of the opinions expressed therein. Though, in common with many others, I
may have regretted the disappointment of our anticipations with regard
to a general rising, in co-operation with the Southern invaders; I think
it is easy to show that there were reasons sufficient to account for, if
not excuse, this second apparent supineness.

"I believe that at home people have a very faint--perhaps a very
false--idea of how men think, and act, and suffer, in this same Border
State. Your impression may be that a lethargy prevails, where, in
reality, dangerous fever is the disease--a fever that must one day break
out violently, in spite of the quack medicines administered by an
incapable Government--in spite of the restrictions unsparingly employed,
by that grim sick-nurse, martial law.

"I fancy the world is hardly aware of the hearty sympathy with the
South--the intense antipathy to the North--which animates at this moment
the vast majority of Marylanders. I have heard more than one assert that
of the two alternatives, he would infinitely prefer becoming again a
colonial subject of England to remaining a member of the Federal Union.
This sounds like an exaggeration; I believe it to have been simply the
truth, strongly