times, having read no _Times_ for a long time; but as regards
income-tax, or any other tax, there is no telling how long one may be
free from such galls in America. If they indulge in a few more such
national diversions as this war in Mexico, they will have to pay for
their whistle, in some shape or other, and in more shapes than one.

It is deplorable to hear the despondency of all public and political men
that I see, with regard to the condition of the country. With the
Tories, one has long been familiar with their cries that "the sky is
falling:" but now the Liberals, at least those who all their lives have
been professing Liberals, seem to think "the sky is falling" too; and
their lamentable misgivings are really sad to listen to.

I dined on Saturday at Lady Grey's, with the whole Grey family. Lord
Dacre, and all of them, spoke of Cobden and Bright as of another Danton
and Mirabeau, likened their corn-law league, and peace protests, to the
first measures of the first leaders of the French Revolution; and
predicted with woful headshakings a similar end to their proceedings. I
do not know whether this is an injustice to the individuals in question,
but it seems to me an injustice to the whole people of England
collectively, and to their own class, the aristocracy of England, which
has incurred no such retribution, but which has invariably furnished
liberal and devoted leaders to every step of popular progress--their own
father an eminent instance of devotion to it. Such misgivings seem to
me, too, quite unjust to the powerful, enlightened, and wealthy class
which forms the sound body of our sound-hearted nation: and equally
unjust to those below it, in whom, in spite of much vice and more
ignorance, of poverty and degradation, the elements of evil do not exist
in the degree and with the virulence that spawned that hideous mob of
murderers who became at last the only government of revolutionary
France. The antecedent causes have not existed here for such results;
and it is an insult to the whole English people to prophesy thus of it.

[Lord Dacre, because of his devotion to the agricultural interest,
as he conceives it, and being himself a great practical farmer,
seemed to me at once, at the time of the repeal of the corn laws, to
renounce his Liberalism; and though one of the most enlightened,
generous, and broad-minded politicians I have ever known, _till
then_, to become suddenly timid, fai