Atlantic; and I dare say that,
at this moment, nine-tenths of the Europeans, who think at all on the
subject, firmly and honestly believe that our institutions are not worth
two years' purchase. This opinion is very natural, because falsehood is
so artfully blended with truth, in what is published, that it requires a
more intimate knowledge of the country to separate them, than a stranger
can possess. I spent an hour to-day in a fruitless attempt to
demonstrate to a very sensible Frenchman that nothing serious was to be
apprehended from the present dispute, but all my logic was thrown away,
and nothing but time will convince him of that which he is so strongly
predisposed not to believe. They rarely send proper diplomatic men
among us, in the first place; for a novel situation like that in America
requires a fertile and congenial mind,--and then your diplomatist is
usually so much disposed to tell every one that which he wishes to hear!
We mislead, too, ourselves, by the exaggerations of the opposition. Your
partizan writes himself into a fever, and talks like any other man whose
pulse is unnatural. This fact ought to be a matter of no surprise, since
it is one of the commonest foibles of man to dislike most the evils that
press on him most; although an escape from them to any other might even
entail destruction. It is the old story of King Log and King Stork. As
democracy is in the ascendant, they revile democracy, while we all feel
persuaded we should be destroyed, or muzzled, under any other form of
government. A few toad-eaters and court butterflies excepted, I do not
believe there is a man in all America who could dwell five years in any
country in Europe, without being made sensible of the vast superiority
of his own free institutions over those of every other Christian nation.

I have been amused of late, by tracing, in the publications at home, a
great and growing admiration for the Prussian polity! There is something
so absurd in an American's extolling such a system, that it is scarcely
possible to say where human vagaries are to end. The Prussian government
is a _despotism_; a mode of ruling that one would think the world
understood pretty well by this time. It is true that the government is
mildly administered, and hence all the mystifying that we hear and read
about it. Prussia is a kingdom compounded of heterogenous parts; the
north is Protestant, the south Catholic; the nation has been overrun in
our own