Whitelaw Reid: “No matter what we wish, the old continental isolation is gone forever.”

I would rather give up my crop to the negroes than the lives of my wife and children.

With her, then, we should most sedulously cherish a cordial friendship, and nothing would tend more to knit our affections than to be fighting once more, side by side, in the same cause.

Spain failed to maintain her title to the security she had pledged, but the lenders knew the instability of that security when they risked their money on it.

That would be “jumping from the frying-pan into the fire,” indeed.