1868-1869. AEt. 54-55.
VISIT TO AMERICA.--RESIDENCE AT NO. 2 PARK STREET, BOSTON.--ADDRESS ON
THE COMING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.--ADDRESS ON HISTORIC PROGRESS AND
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.--APPOINTED MINISTER TO ENGLAND.
In June, 1868, Mr. Motley returned with his family to Boston, and
established himself in the house No. 2 Park Street. During his residence
here he entered a good deal into society, and entertained many visitors
in a most hospitable and agreeable way.
On the 20th of October, 1868, he delivered an address before the Parker
Fraternity, in the Music Hall, by special invitation. Its title was “Four
Questions for the People, at the Presidential Election.” This was of
course what is commonly called an electioneering speech, but a speech
full of noble sentiments and eloquent expression. Here are two of its
paragraphs:--
“Certainly there have been bitterly contested elections in this
country before. Party spirit is always rife, and in such vivid,
excitable, disputatious communities as ours are, and I trust always
will be, it is the very soul of freedom. To those who reflect upon
the means and end of popular government, nothing seems more stupid
than in grand generalities to deprecate party spirit. Why,
government by parties and through party machinery is the only
possible method by which a free government can accomplish the
purpose of its existence. The old republics of the past may be said
to have fallen, not because of party spirit, but because there was
no adequate machinery by which party spirit could develop itself
with facility and regularity.
“And if our Republic be true to herself, the future of the human
race is assured by our example. No sweep of overwhelming armies, no
ponderous treatises on the rights of man, no hymns to liberty,
though set to martial music and resounding with the full diapason of
a million human throats, can exert so persuasive an influence as
does the spectacle of a great republic, occupying a quarter of the
civilized globe, and governed quietly and sagely by the people
itself.”
A large portion of this address is devoted to the proposition that it is
just and reasonable to pay our debts rather than to repudiate them, and
that the nation is as much bound to be honest as is the individual. “It
is an awful thing,” he says, “that this should be a question at all,” but
it was one of the points on which the election turned, for all that.
In his advocacy of the candidate with whom, and the government of which
he became the head, his relations became afterwards so full of personal
antagonism, he spoke as a man of his ardent nature might be expected to
speak on such an occasion. No one doubts that his admiration of General
Grant's career was perfectly sincere, and no one at the present day can
deny that the great captain stood before the historian with such a record
as one familiar with the deeds of heroes and patriots might well consider
as entitling him to the honors too often grudged to the living to be
wasted on the dead. The speaker only gave voice to the widely prevailing
feelings which had led to his receiving the invitation to speak. The time
was one which called for outspoken utterance, and there was not a
listener whose heart did not warm as he heard the glowing words in which
the speaker recorded the noble achievements of the soldier who must in so
many ways have reminded him of his favorite character, William the
Silent.
On the 16th of December of this same year, 1868, Mr. Motley delivered an
address before the New York Historical Society, on the occasion of the
sixty-fourth anniversary of its foundation. The president of the society,
Mr. Hamilton Fish, introduced the speaker as one “whose name belongs to
no single country, and to no single age. As a statesman and diplomatist
and patriot, he belongs to America; as a scholar, to the world of
letters; as a historian, all ages will claim him in the future.”
His subject was “Historic Progress and American Democracy.” The discourse
is, to use his own words, “a rapid sweep through the eons and the
centuries,” illustrating the great truth of the development of the race
from its origin to the time in which we are living. It is a long distance
from the planetary fact of the obliquity of the equator, which gave the
earth its alternation of seasons, and rendered the history, if not the
existence of man and of civilization a possibility, to the surrender of
General Lee under the apple-tree at Appomattox Court-House. No one but a
scholar familiar with the course of history could have marshalled such a
procession of events into a connected and intelligible sequence. It is
indeed a flight rather than a march; the reader is borne along as on the
wings of a soaring poem, and sees the rising and decaying empires of
history beneath him as a bird of passage marks the succession of cities
and wilds and deserts as he keeps pace with the sun in his journey.
Its eloquence, its patriotism, its crowded illustrations, drawn from vast
resources of knowledge, its epigrammatic axioms, its occasional
pleasantries, are all characteristic of the writer.
Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, the venerable senior member of the society,
proposed the vote of thanks to Mr. Motley with words of warm
commendation.