Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

[251]

To Miss A. B. Francis in Europe.

Your letter came, followed by the picture, which arrived two days before my birthday. The little Picciola is a perfect beauty. It will be a “joy forever” to look at it. I have always been in love with Richter's delineation of children. Indeed, the Germans generally excel all other artists in pictures of children. They give them an indescribable air of naturalness and simplicity, which I like far better than the theatrical gracefulness of the French.

I should think one might have rather too much of art galleries. I always supposed that it would be confusing to my mind to wander about in a wilderness of pictures. As for “dead Christs and crucifixions,” and saints stuck full of arrows, and women carrying a dead man's head, and other lugubrious subjects, I dislike them all. One “glorious human boy” is worth the whole host; to say nothing of my charming little Picciola.

The labor question continues to seethe and grumble, like a volcano about to explode. Laborers, instead of serving their own interests by leaving off smoking and drinking, are clamoring for the expulsion of the industrious and frugal Chinese. A great force is brought to bear upon Congress to procure the abolition of our treaty with China; a measure which would be dishonest and disgraceful to the United States, and extremely injurious to our trade with China.

Garrison, Phillips, Ward Beecher, and others are trying their utmost to prevent such a violation of principle. H. W. Beecher, in one of his public [252] speeches, said, in his facetious way : “It is complained that the Chinese are idolaters, and therefore not fit to associate with Christians. We have stoned them, and clubbed them, and persecuted them, and tried religion upon them in almost every shape, and still they won't embrace it.”