ements.
We are too distant from Greece to make the Turks feel our
physical strength and what we can do thro money and
sympathy is little in comparison with what we could if they
were so near as that we might in addition pour out the tide
of an armed northern population to sweep their shores and
overcome the tyrants like one of their pestilential winds.
Nevertheless, sympathy is a wonderful power and the sympathy
of a free nation like our own will not lose its moral
effect. I calculate strongly on this. It is a more refined
and rational kind of chivalry--this interest and activity in
the fate of nations struggling to break the oppressor's rod,
and it should be encouraged even where it is not directed so
as to give it all adequate force. They who would chill it,
who would reason about the why and the wherefore ought to
recollect that such things can not be called forth by the
art of man--they must burst spontaneously from his nature
and be directed by his wisdom for the benefit of his
kind.... We are all here real Radical Democrats and though
some of us came in at the eleventh hour we will not go back,
but on--on--on though certain of missing the penny fee. In
truth this is the difference between real conviction and the
calculating policy which takes sides according to what it
conceives the vantage ground. A converted politician is as
obstinate in his belief as one born in the faith. The man of
craft changes his position according to the varying aspect
of the political heavens. The one plays a game--the other
sees as much of reality (or thinks he sees) in politicks as
he does in his domestic affairs and is as earnest in the one
as the other.
Salve--[Greek: Kai Chaire]
R. BUNNER.
8 o'clock.
I have had a full meeting for your Greeks--and found my men
of more mettle than I hoped for. We will do something thro
the _Country_--We have set the Parsons to work and one
shilling a head will make a good donation. We think we can
give you 4 or 5 hundred dollars.
Mr. Bunner was over sixty years old when he went to live in Oswego, but
he soon became identified with the interests of the place and added much
by his activities to its local renown. In an undated letter to my
father, he thus expatiates upon his situation in his
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