On my return home, I went to a reading-room that I have frequented during our residence here, where I found a good deal of feeling excited by the news from America.  The Swiss, I have told you, with very few exceptions, wish us well, but I take it nothing would give greater satisfaction to a large majority of the upper classes in most of the other countries of Europe, than to hear that the American republic was broken up:  if buttons and broadcloths could be sent after us, it is not too much to add, or sent to the nether world.  This feeling does not proceed so much from inherent dislike to us, as to our institutions.  As a people, I rather think we are regarded with great indifference by the mass; but they who so strongly detest our institutions and deprecate our example, cannot prevent a little personal hatred from mingling with their political antipathies.  Unlike the woman who was for beginning her love “with a little aversion,” they begin with a little philanthropy, and end with a strong dislike for all that comes from the land they hate.  I have known this feeling carried so far as to refuse credit even to the productions of the earth!  I saw strong evidences of this truth, among several of the temporary habitues of the reading-room in question, most of whom were French.  A speedy dissolution of the American Union was proclaimed in all the journals, on account of some fresh intelligence from the other side of the Atlantic; and I dare say that, at this moment, nine-tenths of the Europeans, who think at all on the subject, firmly and honestly believe that our institutions are not worth two years’ purchase.  This opinion is very natural, because falsehood is so artfully blended with truth, in what is published, that it requires a more intimate knowledge of the country to separate them, than a stranger can possess.  I spent an hour to-day in a fruitless attempt to demonstrate to a very sensible Frenchman that nothing serious was to be apprehended from the present dispute, but all my logic was thrown away, and nothing but time will convince him of that which he is so strongly predisposed not to believe.  They rarely send proper diplomatic men among us, in the first place; for a novel situation like that in America requires a fertile and congenial mind,—­and then your diplomatist is usually so much disposed to tell every one that which he wishes to hear!  We mislead, too, ourselves, by the exaggerations of the opposition.  Your partizan writes himself into a fever, and talks like any other man whose pulse is unnatural.  This fact ought to be a matter of no surprise, since it is one of the commonest foibles of man to dislike most the evils that press on him most; although an escape from them to any other might even entail destruction.  It is the old story of King Log and King Stork.  As democracy is in the ascendant, they revile democracy, while we all feel persuaded we should be destroyed, or muzzled, under any other form of government.  A few toad-eaters and court butterflies excepted, I do not believe there is a man in all America who could dwell five years in any country in Europe, without being made sensible of the vast superiority of his own free institutions over those of every other Christian nation.