There are rare instances when the sympathy of a nation approaches
those tenderer feelings which are generally supposed to be peculiar
to the individual and to be the happy privilege of private life; and
this is one. Under any circumstances we should have bewailed the
catastrophe at Washington; under any circumstances we should have
shuddered at the means by which it was accomplished. But in the
character of the victim, and even in the accessories of his last
moments, there is something so homely and innocent that it takes the
question, as it were, out of all the pomp of history and the
ceremonial of diplomacy,--it touches the heart of nations and
appeals to the domestic sentiment of mankind. Whatever the various
and varying opinions in this house, and in the country generally, on
the policy of the late President of the United States, all must
agree that in one of the severest trials which ever tested the moral
qualities of man he fulfilled his duty with simplicity and strength.
Nor is it possible for the people of England at such a moment to
forget that he sprang from the same fatherland and spoke the same
mother tongue. When such crimes are perpetrated the public mind is
apt to fall into gloom and perplexity, for it is ignorant alike of
the causes and the consequences of such deeds. But it is one of our
duties to reassure them under unreasoning panic and despondency.
Assassination has never changed the history of the world. I will
not refer to the remote past, though an accident has made the most
memorable instance of antiquity at this moment fresh in the minds
and memory of all around me. But even the costly sacrifice of a
Caesar did not propitiate the inexorable destiny of his country. If
we look to modern times, to times at least with the feelings of
which we are familiar, and the people of which were animated and
influenced by the same interests as ourselves, the violent deaths of
two heroic men, Henry IV. of France and the Prince of Orange, are
conspicuous illustrations of this truth. In expressing our
unaffected and profound sympathy with the citizens of the United
States on this untimely end of their elected chief, let us not,
therefore, sanction any feeling of depression, but rather let us
express a fervent hope that from out of the awful trials of the last
four years, of which the least is not this violent demise, the
various populations of North America may issue elevated and
chastened, rich with the accumulated wisdom and strong in the
disciplined energy which a young nation can only acquire in a
protracted and perilous struggle. Then they will be enabled not
merely to renew their career of power and prosperity, but they will
renew it to contribute to the general happiness of mankind. It is
with these feelings that I second the address to the crown.