congratulated the country to which he was accredited, and
lamented the misfortune of their own that it would be deprived, even
temporarily, of such virtue. Another was sent to an empire which is
assured by our oft-succeeding envoys that it is the object of our
particular affection. To the aristocracy of the realm this genial person
taught the favorite game of the mighty West. A man of broad views,
feeling that diplomatic attentions were due to commons as well as to
crown and nobles, he occasionally withdrew himself from the social
pleasures of the "West End" to inform the stags of Capel Court of the
value of American mines. Benefactors are ever misjudged. Aristocracy and
the many-antlered have since united to defame him; but Galileo in the
dungeon, Pascal by his solitary lamp, More, Sidney, and Russell on the
scaffold, will console him; and in the broad bosom of his native Ohio he
has found the exception to the rule that prophets are not without honor
but in their own country.

The years of Methuselah and the pen of Juvenal would not suffice to
exhaust the list, or depict the benighted state into which we had
fallen; but it can be asserted of the popular idols of the day that
unveiled, they resemble Mokanna, and can each exclaim:

"Here, judge if hell, with all its power to damn,
Can add one curse to the foul thing I am!"

The examples of thousands of pure and upright people in the North were
as powerless to mitigate the general corruption as song of seraphim to
purify the orgies of harlots and burglars; for they were not in harmony
with the brutal passions of the masses.

In Boston, July, 1872, as co-trustees of the fund left by the late Mr.
Peabody for the education of the poor in the Southern States, President
Grant and I met for the first time since he had accepted the nomination
from the Radical party. He was a candidate for reelection, and much
worshiped; and, though cordial with me, his general manner had something
of "I am the State." Stopping at the same inn, he passed an evening in
my room, to which he came alone; and there, avoiding public affairs, we
smoked and chatted about the Nueces, Rio Grande, Palo Alto, etc.--things
twenty-five years agone, when we were youngsters beginning life. He was
reelected in November by a large majority of electoral votes; but the
people of Louisiana elected a Democratic Governor and Assembly. When, in
January following, the time of meeting of the Assembly arrived, th