't know whether to laugh or cry." There certainly is a
very remarkable energy in the American disposition; if they fall, they
bound up again. Somebody has observed that the New York merchants are
of that _elastic_ nature, that, when fit for nothing else, they might be
converted into _coach springs_, and such really appears to be their
character.

Nobody refuses to take the paper of the New York banks, although they
virtually have stopped payment;--they never refuse anything in New
York;--but nobody will give specie in change, and great distress is
occasioned by this want of a circulating medium. Some of the
shopkeepers told me that they had been obliged to turn away a hundred
dollars a-day, and many a Southerner, who has come up with a large
supply of southern notes, has found himself a pauper, and has been
indebted to a friend for a few dollars in specie to get home again.

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The radicals here, for there are radicals, it appears, in a democracy--

"In the lowest depth, a lower deep--"

are very loud in their complaints. I was watching the swarming
multitude in Wall Street this morning, when one of these fellows was
declaiming against the banks for stopping specie payments, and "robbing
a poor man in such a _w_illanous manner," when one of the merchants, who
appeared to know his customer, said to him--"Well, as you say, it is
hard for a poor fellow like you not to be able to get dollars for his
notes; hand them out, and I'll give you specie for them myself!" The
blackguard had not a cent in his pocket, and walked away looking very
foolish. He reminded me of a little chimney-sweeper at the Tower
Hamlets election, asking--"Vot vos my hopinions about primaginitur?"--a
very important point to him certainly, he having no parents, and having
been brought up by the parish.

I was in a store when a thorough-bred democrat walked in: he talked
loud, and voluntarily gave it as his opinion that all this distress was
the very best thing that could have happened to the country, as America
would now keep all the specie and pay her English creditors with
bankruptcies. There always appears to me to be a great want of moral
principle in all radicals; indeed, the levelling principles of
radicalism are adverse to the sacred rights of _meum et tuum_. At
Philadelphia the ultra-democrats have held a large public meeting, at
which one of the first resolutio