There are not a few persons in this community of ours, some of them not deficient in intelligence nor entirely destitute of the spirit of benevolence, who think it a most desirable and praiseworthy thing to stir up all the mischief they can between England and America. These well-disposed individuals doubtless have their reward, which I never felt inclined to envy them, my own ideas always urging me to a directly opposite course, either from some mental blindness which kept me behind the progressive democracy of this advancing age, or because I never intended to put myself in a position which would oblige me to propitiate or toady Irishmen or slaveholders. Ever since my early boyhood it had been a leading idea with me that the great branches of the Anglo-Saxon family, distinguished by their language, by their ethical principles, by their judiciously liberal political institutions, from the rest of the world, ought to work harmoniously together; that a great deal of the bad feeling between them arose from ignorance, and was therefore removable by mere contact and information; and that a citizen of either country who had the opportunity was doing his duty much better by endeavoring to promote a mutual knowledge of each other between the two peoples, and thus dispel many antipathies having more a hypothetical than a real foundation, than by laboring to revive and foster old germs of animosity which time and the natural course of events were already doing so much to kill.