My Dear Brother,

The warm weather seems to have affected your memory, or else the very small amount of success achieved by your shootists in Ireland has turned your brain. Why you miserable little pot-bellied bald-pated, wheezing Yankee! Why you never coped with anything British on their terms but what you were beaten! Not only that but you daren't cross swords with Canadians unless you have very heavy odds in your favour. You didn't dare to attack the South 'til you were than double their strength; and then you narrowly escaped being thrashed. You couldn't go to Mexico 'til you could pour in ten men to one against you.

In fact the only noble success you achieved was your fearless attack some three or four years ago with a band of armed men on a camp of sick Indian women and children, whom you gloriously routed and butchered. And in order to kick up the well known bravery of your beautiful long legged, sallow faced, dyspeptic, lantern-jawed people, you swindle and gouge and grind and cheat and oppress all the unfortunate Aborigines under your rule. Then you drive them to desperation. And then, when in self defense they rise against you, you get up a great hue and cry about their treachery, because forsooth they have poorly learned a lesson or two from their beneficent Yankee schoolmaster.

You have to get Englishmen and Canadians to write for you--and then you grudgingly refuse to pay them any royalty on their works--to read to you, to act for you, and to preach to you--the last seems to be a useless importation, for all the preaching on earth wouldn't stop one appreciable particle of your lives, stealing, murdering, lechery, dirt and filth.

You try to rival Europe by having an International Exhibition. But you--with all your desire to show--are so afraid that any exhibition importing articles may make anything by them that you have them around with conditions and provisions etc., til most of the outside countries have concluded that you are so grasping and grubbing and greedy and avaricious that they want to have nothing to do with you. You make treaties with other people entered into in good faith by them. And then you twist and turn and wriggle to get out of them and cheat those you are dealing with in every underhand way. Your merchants live in great style and put on great appearances and then as unblushingly fail and commence once again, as though bankruptcy were one of the most honourable things that a man could have to do with. You'd kick the coppers off a dead man's eyes, you'd skin a louse for the sake of the hide and tallow. You'd, you'd---

Most affectionately, your brother

I.B. McQuesten [Isaac Baldwin McQuesten]