THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
could carry on a war against the South for any length of time without exposing itself to great distress. Don Saturnino seemed greatly surprised when I explained to him that the North was by no means an exclusively manufacturing country; that, on the contrary, agriculture was the greatest source of Northern wealth; that, instead of the North depending upon the South for breadstuffs, the South depended in a large measure upon the North; and that, in fact, the North exported a considerable quantity of breadstuffs to European countries, and even to the Spanish colonies, that needed them. This seemed to be to Don Saturnino an entirely new view of the case, and he expressed his evident surprise by an occasional ejaculation, “Ah! ah!” Whether I convinced him or not, I did not know, but he assured me that it was the settled policy of his government to maintain the strictest neutrality between the two belligerent parties, and that this policy would be adhered to in absolute good faith. To impress me, I suppose, with the importance to the United States of such a resolution on the part of such power as Spain, Don Saturnino told me much of the successes recently achieved by Spain over the Moors in Africa, of the great victory at Tetuan, and of the old and new glories of Spanish arms; and he actually stated in the course of his remarks, as a universally known fact about which there could be no reasonable dispute, that Spain was not only the most civilized, but also the most powerful country in Europe. In saying this with a face that could not have been more serious, he was no doubt perfectly sincere.
A veritable treasure I found in my Secretary of Legation,
Mr. Horatio I.J. Perry. He was a native of New Hampshire, a
graduate of Harvard, and a remarkably handsome man. He
had come to Spain in 1849 as Secretary of the American Legation,
under the administration of President Taylor, and had
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