"Go into politics, I suppose! A nice business that for an honest man and a gentleman! Why, Ashburner, the democracy of our State, who are always in fear of being reduced to vassalage by a few thousand easy and unambitious rich men, have lost their liberties without perceiving it to hundreds of thousands of alien settlers with their foreign priests. A successful politician here is either a hack lawyer of thirty years' standing, who has had opportunity enough of getting used to the devil's work in his first business, or an upstart demagogue, who has made his way by dint of sheer brass; either a blind partisan, who knows nothing outside of "the regular ticket," or a "non-committal" man, who says everything to everybody, and never gave an intelligible, manly, straightforward opinion in his life. One party would sell us body and soul to the Slaveholders, and the other to the Anti-renters, and both to the Irish. If I could bring myself to enter the lists with such people, I should have to start with the dead weight of being a "millionaire" (as they call every man here who has two or three hundred thousand dollars) and an "aristocrat" (as they call every man who has the habits and education of a gentleman). There is not a voter in this county has less influence than I have;--to be sure, I don't try for any, because I well know that by doing so, I should only make myself more unpopular, without becoming any more influential. Or be a leader of fashion, perhaps--one of those people who talk scandal about one another all day long when they are not dancing, who try to pursue pleasure in a place where every one else is at work, and are so destitute of resources, that they quarrel for pure want of something to do. See what they have made of my brother, who is a clever fellow and a well-educated man, though I say it. He is becoming a third-rate dancer--one of Tom Edwards's _corps_; is growing frivolous and scandalous, and getting his earnest honesty knocked out of him every day. Or profess literature, possibly--Henry does a little of that too; you may see him in the magazines sandwiched between the last learned cobbler and the newest Laura Matilda of the West. No, I don't want to belong to any "Mutual Admiration" Society, and if I did, it's too late now. My mind has been spoken so often and so freely, that were I to write a book as good as one of Fenimore Cooper's, (if you can imagine the possibility of such a thing even in hypothesis) no editor would notice it, and no one read it--unless it contained something personal. Here I shall stay and amuse myself in what one of our ex-great men used to call "dignified retiracy;" and if this railroad drives me out, why, then, _ingens iterabimus æquor_--to England, were I a bachelor, but my wife couldn't live there; no American woman can, after the attention she has been used to at home, except the ambassador's wife--so it will probably be to Italy, or perhaps to Paris, for a man can find occupation there, whatever be his peculiar bent, and fill up his time well in the place without knowing or liking the people."