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Thursday, June 28, 2018

Samuel Gridley Howe to Charles Sumner, August 2, 1850

Edinburgh, Aug. 2, ’50.

My Dear Sumner: — I have flitted from London to this beautiful city to attend the meeting of the British Association.

I missed, however, the two first days, I am sorry to say, having only arrived last night. I have seen several notabilities, of whom I'll say something when I know more.

I had a letter from you by Mann before the last, and was very glad indeed to get hold of your hand. You tell me to read In Memoriam; I read little at home, less in travelling, but I have read, devoured, that beautiful book long ago — I came across it one evening in London.

I knew Hallam père and was glad to receive a very kind message from him through a friend, hoping to see me, &c., he having gone to the Continent.

Who shall, who can write the father's In Memoriam? Oh, Sumner, you have capacities for love, but you have no more conception of some of the ways of love than has a blind man of colour; —the love of children, for instance; a father's love for his son! You would be touched doubtless by hearing of Hallam's pillow being still found wet with the tears that flow from his eyes when they open in the morning to the blank which his son's death has left, but you cannot understand how much of joy there may be in his sorrow. I have been over to Paris for a few days in order to do up some work and save time. Saw not much there, but some things interested me. For instance, the increased circulation among men. We are only at the beginning of the immense improvement to be effected in the world's moral condition by means of steam. Last week some shrewd people got up a plan by which they could make money thus — they advertised that they would pay all road expenses from Paris to London for those who would go on Sunday and come back on Wednesday for thirty francs! six dollars! and one thousand Frenchmen availed themselves of it! Think of that! A Frenchman can go by railroad and then boat from Paris to London in twelve hours, back again in the same time, for six dollars. He may stay in London two days and see much for four dollars more, so that his whole excursion will not cost over ten dollars.

This was only the first essay. There were over four thousand who left Paris on the excursion; some went to Dover and back, some only to Boulogne and back, of course at less prices. This movement will be continued. By new arrangements in crossing and saving time at customhouses they will this month go in eight hours, and by and by in six. You will have tens of thousands of Frenchmen going to England, tens of thousands of English to France, and then how are you going to make them fight?

That company will do more than the Peace Congress; I think I shall take stock in it instead of joining the Peace Society.

The custom-houses are to get a severe shaking by this tramp of the people, and they will be at last shaken down, and the world will rejoice over their fall as it did over the fall of the Inquisition and other bygone abominations. Fifty years hence and there will be free intercourse between England and France — you'll see it — I shall not.

The passport system is getting a shaking already; and but for the temporary reaction in favour of conservatism it would have been put down in France ere now. The conservatives are taking every advantage of this reaction, and the poor thing whose [fate] has put him where he is,1 is trying to make his place a permanent one. You may judge how ardent is the desire for peace and the quiet pursuit of business, and how sick and tired people are of all agitation, when you see that they make no protest at all against the late attempt to gag the press. The fact is that save the agitators, those whose métier it is to trouble the political waters, the people of France don't want to be bothered any more for the present with any political questions; they won't be excited again for awhile, and when the agitators plead, they reply “A plague on both your houses!” By and by, in a few years, they will have rested, the stream will begin to swell again; the million of boys now between five and fifteen years old will be in ten years [restless] turbulent spirits between fifteen and twenty-five, and they will insist upon having their “goings on,” as we used to say in college, and they will have them; and the world will make a hitch forward. As a whole I should say France had gained much by the revolution. But how far they are behind the English in their ideas of personal right and personal dignity. They are fierce republicans, they say, the English still royalists, but a Frenchman submits to infringement of personal right and to personal indignity that would set John Bull in a fury and make him knock down the government official. For instance, he submits meekly to have his pocket searched and his bag overhauled at the city barriers every time he returns from an excursion into the country, and in matters of passport and other things shows the white feather before the man of authority. But I have no time now to do more than to beg you to write me often and fully. I long for your news; why don't you send me some papers? I hope to be home early in October.
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1 Louis Napoleon, afterward Napoleon III. By the Revolution of 1848 he was made President of the French Republic (Dec. 20,1848).

SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 317-20

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