s.

All England, just then, was in one of those singular fits of panic
excitement, (not fear, though as sensitive and tremulous as that
emotion,) which, in consequence of the homogeneous character of the
people, their intense patriotism, and their dependence for their ideas
in public affairs on other sources than their own examination and
individual thought, are more sudden, pervasive, and unreasoning than any
similar mood of our own public. In truth, I have never seen the American
public in a state at all similar, and believe that we are incapable of
it. Our excitements are not impulsive, like theirs, but, right or wrong,
are moral and intellectual. For example, the grand rising of the North,
at the commencement of this war, bore the aspect of impulse and passion
only because it was so universal, and necessarily done in a moment, just
as the quiet and simultaneous getting-up of a thousand people out of
their chairs would cause a tumult that might be mistaken for a storm. We
were cool then, and have been cool ever since, and shall remain cool to
the end, which we shall take coolly, whatever it may be. There is
nothing which the English find it so difficult to understand in us as
this characteristic. They imagine us, in our collective capacity, a kind
of wild beast, whose normal condition is savage fury, and are always
looking for the moment when we shall break through the slender barriers
of international law and comity, and compel the reasonable part of the
world, with themselves at the head, to combine for the purpose of
putting us into a stronger cage. At times this apprehension becomes so
powerful, (and when one man feels it, a million do,) that it resembles
the passage of the wind over a broad field of grain, where you see the
whole crop bending and swaying beneath one impulse, and each separate
stalk tossing with the self-same disturbance as its myriad companions.
At such periods all Englishmen talk with a terrible identity of
sentiment and expression. You have the whole country in each man; and
not one of them all, if you put him strictly to the question, can give a
reasonable ground for his alarm. There are but two nations in the
world--our own country and France--that can put England into this
singular state. It is the united sensitiveness of a people extremely
well-to-do, most anxious for the preservation of the cumbrous and
moss-grown prosperity which they have been so long in consolidating, and
incompetent (