Beschreibung:

Title: Two autograph letters, signed from famed American scholar George Ticknor fearing British social revolution and American "hatreds" Author: Ticknor, George Place Boston Publisher: Date: October 15, 1867 and Jan. 20, 1868 Description: Two ALs. Each 4 pp. With over 1000 words in total. To General [Charles Robert] Fox in England, from this prominent Bostonian, Harvard professor, bibliophile, historian, biographer, and the leading American scholar of Hispanic culture and literature. Visiting England after the War of 1812, and again in the 1830s, Ticknor had become friends with Fox, a rich soldier and politician, illegitimate son of an English Lord and husband of an illegitimate daughter of the late King, with a passion for collecting ancient Greek coins. In these letters, Ticknor comments eloquently on events of the 1860s in England and the United States. Unlike Fox, he was not at all “stunned” by the democratic political reforms just passed by Parliament. “In 1835, when I was in England… I made record of the remarkable change during that interval in the growing tendency towards democracy…The great danger is, that you will take too violent leaps… and that the populace of your great cities will, on some disastrous occasion, take the matter into their own hands. You are not made for a democracy. The very unequal distribution of property in England seems to make a democracy impossible except after a fierce revolution., which would unsettle the whole fabric of your state. And what a fall would that be! The ends of the earth would feel it and my own country would be among the first…to suffer by the concussion. God have mercy upon you, and prevent the catastrophe for the sake of whatever is most to be valued in the civilization of the world…” As for the social unrest, Ticknor had no sympathy for either English or Irish “radicals”, who were “different enough” but “sure enough to meet at last.” He approved of the recent hanging of Irish terrorists: “I call them simply murderers. If you cannot maintain such laws as sent them to the gallows, you can maintain none.” He took more seriously revolutionary agitation at the “bottom of society” in British industrial cities, far worse than during the French Revolution, when “the masses were not nearly so preponderant or so little connected with those above them – and radicalism was not so knowing or so determined as it is now. God give you a good delivery. I love my own country a great deal better than I do yours, but I want to have you maintain your grand position in the world….” As for post-war America, “I foresee nothing – not even the harmony without which we cannot be a country. We have put down the rebellion; and I never doubted that we should do it and that it was our duty to do it…we are making history fast enough to be the subject of as many medals as your old Greek ever struck. What sort of history we are making…I will not undertake to conjecture.… the hatreds of the North and the South increase every month. What is to be the final result of a civil war, which has been more costly in blood that was worth saving and treasure that could ill be spared in a young and thriving country, those people that live a hundred years hence in England and America, will know better than you and I do or are likely to…” Lot Amendments Condition: Light wear; very good. Item number: 231216