[Response of Lord Houghton to the address of Joseph H. Choate at the
farewell reception given in honor of Lord Houghton by the Union League
Club, New York City, November 23, 1875.]
MR. CHOATE AND GENTLEMEN:--Before you spoke I had much
difficulty to interpret to myself the meaning of my reception here. So
unimportant as I know myself to have been before, in political and
social life, I have been surprised at the manner in which I have been
received in the United States of America. You, sir, have given an
explanation of that problem which I am very thankful to receive. The
habit of Americans to welcome Englishmen, whatever may be their
position, in itself proves to me that you regard us as something above
individuals, and that, somehow or other, you connect us in every way by
imagination, if no other, as present with that great country over the
Atlantic which was your mother, and which it has been the habit of many
of your ancestors to call their home. [Applause.] Mr. Choate has alluded
to certain events in my political life, which he says fully justify your
kindness and remarkable sympathy of to-day, and on that matter, if there
are to be any relations between myself and the Americans, upon that
point I can say that I deserve credit. I do not say this with any
affectation, because I understand fully your feelings upon that matter.
I fully recognize, I completely comprehend, as man to man, that in that
day of your greatest trouble, even the small voice that came over the
great Atlantic was listened to with extreme pleasure and unexaggerated
sympathy.
But when I look to myself, I am bound to say I find extremely little
merit in the matter. There was one ground of sympathy between you and
the English people, which you had the holiest right to believe would
have been absolute and overpowering. The English nation had put itself
forward as the great opponent of slavery in the world. [Applause.] It
had stated at the Congress of Vienna that the one point which England
required as the _sine qua non_ was the abolition of the slave trade. For
that purpose England not only asserted itself, but interfered up to the
utmost limit, perhaps beyond the limits of the law of nations, with all
the powers of the world. Therefore, you had a perfect right to believe,
to suppose, that in a question, in a matter in which we were not only
internationally but morally interested, the questions would be fully
considered.
Well, gentlemen, I cannot say that it was so. As an individual I have
not the right to reproach my country upon that point. That was not my
first feeling in the matter. I felt, I knew, slavery was doomed from the
civilized world. My heart, my instincts, my sense of the well-being of
every civilized state was against the continuance of that institution.
[Applause.] I knew, though it was possible--aye, I would fain say
probable--that the condition of the slave, under many conditions, under
many circumstances, might be better than that of the free laborer of the
world, that the condition of the slave owner was incompatible with the
highest form of moral culture and highest ambition. I always think that
question had political as well as moral and religious considerations,
and that, through the unhappy condition of this continent, the question
of slavery got so intermixed with the question of property that, however
humane, however wise men were, yet nevertheless it would bring with it
an incidental condition of cruelty abhorrent to mankind, and that,
therefore, that institution could not continue to the end. [Applause.]
But, making a clean breast of it, that was not the bottom of my
sympathy. My sympathy with you comes, as Mr. Choate has said, by "an
instinct unawares," and this was confirmed by any reasoning and any
deductions I might have had. From the imagination of my earliest youth,
from the sympathy of the most vivid time, and from the most logical look
at the situation in my mature life, I came to the conclusion that the
destiny of the present and the future world rests with great and
undivided empires. [Applause.] I had lived to see Italy, out of its
confusion of States, growing up into a great integrity, renewing the
promises of the wonderful classic times and the glory of Rome renovated
into a new and prosperous nation. I have lived to see, we have all lived
to see, the same process taking place in Germany. In Germany,
notwithstanding the greatest division, the most peculiar separation of
religion and even of races, yet nevertheless that great German empire is
coming forward as a monument of the civilization of the future world,
and as the centre of all Europe against any form of Oriental barbarism.
And I knew from the history of my own country that that was no new
principle, but one we had always maintained. England never at any moment
thought of giving up the principle of the integrity of its empire. You
yourselves are the evidences of the energy with which we sustained it.
[Prolonged applause.] And we had at our doors, we had within us, another
nation, in many points alien to ourselves; of a different race largely,
of a different religion almost generally; a nation which we had treated
sometimes with kindness, sometimes with harshness, sometimes with
justice, and many other times with injustice; but always on the
principle of the integrity of the empire. [Applause.] And I could not
see how an intelligent man could see what Italy was growing to, prophesy
what Germany would become, and, knowing the difficulties of the present
Ireland, how that man could wish to destroy the integrity of the United
States. Fact and history were against him, and in addition to that I
felt that--in favoring or in sustaining your separation, in allowing
special and local sympathy to act upon me, instead of the great logic of
historical truths--if I could have allowed myself to act in that line of
sympathy which would have bound me to my countrymen, I should have felt
I had belied the truth of history as well as, I believe, the foundation
of general morality. [Great applause.]
Therefore, gentlemen, I have little individual merit for whatever I may
have said upon that matter. I tell you that that was the calculation,
the best calculation of my own mind, that it was the simple result of
the deduction of my own reasoning [applause], and if you have shown me
gratitude on this matter I will not say that I have not felt in a
certain sense it was not deserved, from the motives I have alluded to.
And if, as some cynic has said, gratitude is nothing whatever but the
means of securing favors to come, I can assure you that you have
accomplished your object [laughter and applause], and if you have
desired that, in any means which Providence has placed in my power, in
any influence direct or indirect which I may exert, I shall speak as I
have spoken and think as I have thought of the United States of America,
you may be well sure that I will do so. [Applause.]
On another occasion when I have been kindly received, I have spoken of
my literary sympathy with this country. Every Englishman rightly looks
to this country as he would with a sense of appeal to posterity. He
feels that if he has said anything, if he has written anything, if he
has touched any chord, if he has struck even any verbal assurance that
pleases mankind, if you take it up you pass it on; it does not go from
tongue to tongue in the little distant Anglia of Europe.
I recognize that I have met in this country men whom I shall be glad to
meet anywhere and with whose familiarity I have been honored. And I
might say this, that if I were to compare the best men that I have met
here with the best men that I have known in Europe, I should say simply
this, that the men that I have found here seem to me as equal to the
circumstances in which they have been placed, as intelligent in all
their relations of life, as noble in their innermost impulses, as just
in their expressions, as any I have ever met with in my intercourse with
people in Europe. [Applause.] I have been honored with the familiarity
of many distinguished men, I have been received with great kindness by
your intelligent and able President. I had the fortune, the other day,
to sit by the deathbed of that amiable, honest man, your Vice-President
[Henry Wilson], in the Capitol at Washington, dying under the portrait
of Jefferson. I have seen some of your able men with whom I have been
intimate in Europe, and one whom you will allow me to mention above all
others, a man whose career I witnessed during the great and stormy times
of your troubles in England--Charles Francis Adams [long
applause]--whose maintenance of your dignity was concurrent with a sense
of the importance of good relations between England and America.
Gentlemen, next year you will celebrate your Centennial, and I have been
kindly asked by every person who wished me good-bye to come back to this
Centennial. [Laughter.] As for the Centennial itself, I have no
particular inclination to come back. I think it is quite right you
should have your Centennial, but I do not quite see what an Englishman
has to do with it. [Long laughter and applause.] It is a thing which a
philosopher might almost make the foundation of a theory, that you who
are going to have this magnificent celebration of the one hundredth year
of your liberation from the horrible rule of England, at the same time
accompany it with the warmest feelings toward the British nation.
[Laughter and applause.] Now, if you will clearly understand that this
Centennial is to be your last celebration of this kind, and that from
that moment you become part of the great community of Europe, then I say
it will be a very useful celebration and one which all the world will be
ready to honor. Celebrating your independence, you call it. A very noble
act at a very noble time! Your repulsion was fully justified by the
folly and the stupidity and the ignorance of England.
The causes of England and America are not different, but common to both.
You have your own local difficulties, just as we have. You have your own
religious difficulties, just as we have. Take a single instance. The
question of local taxation--a very serious question with you, a question
agitated in the great States. That question is one of the greatest
importance that we are at this moment discussing in politics. It is a
matter of great interest to us whether local taxation should be
entrusted and commissioned to a body of persons specially appointed for
that purpose by the Crown, or whether it should be entrusted to certain
persons selected by the people. That will be one of the most important
questions we shall have to consider in the next session or two of
Parliament. It is said that there is great profusion, great waste, in
our present arrangement of those matters, and that if our local
expenditure were conducted by persons specially appointed for that
purpose, it would be cheaper. I don't say more honestly, but more
economically managed. This is a question that you are agitating at the
present moment, and one that affects the politics of your great cities.
Take again railroads. It is a question whether the railroad should be in
the hands of the State or of private companies. We are talking about it
every day. Our interest in rapid transit has been very much the same as
yours. Our rapid transit has not only gone over certain unfortunate
persons who stood in the way, but it has gone over ruined hopes and
prostrated energies. There is hardly a question that I see agitated in
American newspapers that, in one form or another, is not agitated with
us. The act of Parliament which restored to England specie payments was
met with exactly the same argument, exactly the same controversy,
exactly the same speciousness as meet you in this country. We have
followed you on the matter of popular education. You have been our
teachers in that branch. We are at present following in your footsteps.
[Applause.]