l the world over, but of which no one could
have an appropriate opinion, unless he had been the recipient of it.
In a character so complex and diversified, one may ask what was the
dominant feature, what was the supreme quality, the one characteristic
which marked the nature of the man. Was it his incomparable genius for
finance? Was it his splendid oratorical powers? Was it his marvellous
fecundity of mind? In my estimation it was not any one of these
qualities. Great as they were, there was one still more marked, and if
I have to give my own impression, I would say that the one trait which
was dominant in his nature, which marked the man more distinctly than
any other, was his intense humanity, his paramount sense of right, his
abhorrence of injustice, wrong, and oppression wherever to be found or
in whatever shape they might show themselves. Injustice, wrong,
oppression acted upon him, as it were, mechanically, and aroused every
fibre of his being, and from that moment to the repairing of the
injustice, the undoing of the wrong, and the destruction of the
oppression, he gave his mind, his heart, his soul, his whole life with
an energy, with an intensity, with a vigour paralleled in no man
unless it be the first Napoleon. There are many evidences of this in
his life. When he was travelling in Southern Italy, as a tourist, for
pleasure and for the benefit of the health of his family, he became
aware of the abominable system which was there prevailing under the
name of Constitutional Government. He left everything aside, even the
object which had brought him to Italy, and applied himself to
investigate and to collect evidence, and then denounced the abominable
system in a trumpet blast of such power that it shook to its very
foundations the throne of King Ferdinand and sent it tottering to its
fall. Again, when he was sent as High Commissioner to the Ionian
Islands, the injustice of keeping this Hellenic population separated
from the rest of Greece, separated from the kingdom to which they were
adjacent, and toward which all their aspirations were raised, struck
his generous soul with such force that he became practically their
advocate, and secured their independence. Again, when he had
withdrawn from public life, and when, in the language of Thiers, under
somewhat similar circumstances, he had returned to "ses cheres
etudes," the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks on the people of
Roumania brought him back to public l