of America in Europe, I instanced the opinion which betrayed itself in England, the nation which ought to know us best, during the war of 1812.  Feeling a commercial jealousy itself, its government naturally supposed her enemies were among the merchants, and that her friends were to be found in the interior.  The fact would have exactly reversed this opinion, an opinion whose existence is betrayed in a hundred ways, and especially in the publications of the day.  It was under this notion that our invaders made an appeal to the Kentuckians for support!  Now, there was not, probably, a portion of the earth where less sympathy was to be found for England than in Kentucky, or, in short, along the whole western frontier of America, where, right or wrong, the people attribute most of their Indian wars to the instigation of that power.  Few foreigners took sufficient interest in the country to probe such a feeling; and England, being left to her crude conjectures, and to theories of her own, had probably been thus led into one of the most absurd of all the blunders of this nature that she could possibly have committed.  I believe that a large proportion of the erroneous notions which exist in Europe, concerning American facts, proceed from the prejudices of this class of the inhabitants.[36]

[Footnote 36:  This was the opinion of the writer, while in Europe.  Since his return, he has seen much reason to confirm it.  Last year, in a free conversation with a foreign diplomatic agent on the state of public feeling in regard to certain political measures, the diplomate affirmed that, according to his experience, the talent, property, and respectability of the country were all against the government.  This is the worn-out cant of England; and yet, when reform has been brought to the touchstone, its greatest opponents have been found among the parvenus.  On being requested to mention individuals, the diplomatic man in question named three New York merchants, all of whom are foreigners by birth, neither of whom can speak good English, neither of whom could influence a vote—­neither of whom had, probably, ever read the constitution or could understand it if he had read it, and neither of whom was, in principle, any more than an every-day common-place reflection of the antiquated notions of the class to which he belonged in other nations, and in which he had been, educated, and under the influence of which he had arrived here.]

In order to appreciate the influence of such a class of men, it is necessary to recollect their numbers, wealth, and union, it has often been a source of mortification to me to see the columns of the leading journals of the largest town of the republic, teeming with reports of the celebrations of English, Irish, German, French, and Scotch societies; and in which the sentiments promulgated, half of the time, are foreign rather than American.  Charitable associations, as charities, may be well enough, but the institutions