Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than
those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occupied the same
position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn Republic.

"It cannot be denied,"--says another observer, placed on one of our
national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--"it cannot be denied that
the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places,
is more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people," he adds,
"everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of
free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against
an oligarchy." These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose
generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by
the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever
spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which
infused a portion of its life into our own,--John Lothrop Motley.

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially of
British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such terms
of the manner in which our struggle has been regarded. We had, no doubt,
very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at least, in a
strife which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its cause, arrayed upon
one side the supporters of an institution she was supposed to hate in
earnest, and on the other its assailants. We had forgotten what her
own poet, one of the truest and purest of her children, had said of his
countrymen, in words which might well have been spoken by the British
Premier to the American Ambassador asking for some evidence of kind
feeling on the part of his government:

"Alas I expect it not. We found no bait
To tempt us in thy country. Doing good,
Disinterested good, is not our trade."

We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest
lines. We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why
they are our enemies. Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat,
which, in spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and consecrated wrongs
so long associated with its history, is still venerated as the throne.
One of these supports is the pensioned church; the second is the
purchased army; the third is the long-suffering people. Whenever the
third caryatid comes to life and walks from beneath its burden, the
capitals of Europe will be filled with the broken furnitur