American news is unusually checkered. While the fortunes of Stirling
are undergoing a speedy decline in the market of New York, the city of New Orleans is ravaged by yellow fever ; and on the other hand, diplomacy is smiling and active on the extensive boundary between British and American interests. Before the re- marks on the Stirling case could return from England, Americans had begun to see through it ; and the quasi prospectus published by a New York paper began to be regarded as a failure. The scourge at New Orleans was almost less shocking in its infliction than the recklessness and debauchery which attended it,—customary horrors when a city is stricken with plague. The diplomatic effort at present in progress is more valuable as a sign of the reciprocal feeling than likely to be at once carried into effect. In the attempt to settle the fishery question, it naturally suggested itself that if Americans were admitted into British waters, English fishers should be admitted with their prey to American markets ; that a bounty on American fish is an inverse tax against English fish ; that sailors who are brothers in the Bay of Fundy need not be strangers excluding or taxing each other on the St. Lawrence or the Erie Canal ; that reciprocity, if good in fish, is available also in many things. A sound idea, and quite harmonious with recent overtures on both sides ; but it is to be doubted whether Free-trade and International ideas have as yet been sufficiently matured in the American mind for such a convention to be completed.
