I am not surprised when you inform me that sympathies with the United States regarded as a nation struggling to maintain its integrity against the assaults of faction are less active in Europe than they might or ought to be in view of the benefits which the Republic has already conferred and the still greater benefits which it promises to confer on mankind.
Nations like individuals are too much wrapped up in their own interests and ambitions to be deeply concerned by accidents or reverses which befall other nations.
I can well enough conceive also that the United States in the first emergency might excite more fervent sympathies abroad by avowing a purpose not merely or even chiefly to maintain and preserve their existing Constitutional organizations, but to modify and change it so as to extirpate at once an institution which is obnoxious to the enlightened censure of mankind.
But, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that although the sympathy of other nations is eminently desirable, yet foreign sympathy or even foreign favor never did and never can create or maintain any state; while in every state that has the capacity to live, the love of national life is and always must be the most energetic principle which can be invoked to preserve it from suicidal indulgence of fear of faction as well as from destruction by foreign violence.
For my own part, it seems to me very clear that there is no nation on earth whose fortunes, immediate and remote, would not be the worse for the dissolution of the American Union. If that consideration shall not be sufficient to save us from unjust intervention by any foreign state or states in our domestic troubles, then that intervention must come as a natural incident in our unnatural domestic strife, and I entertain no fears that we shall not be able to maintain ourselves against all who shall combine against us.
If it were profitable I might reply to your point that our case suffers abroad because we do not win victories so fast as impatient friends could wish. But I have no time for such discussions in the midst of daily duties and cares. It must suffice to say that rebellion if at all successful, matures fast,
