achieved by his consummate
argument in defence of our claims before the late Tribunal of
Arbitration, your honored ex-President, Mr. Evarts."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--It
has, I believe, in the history of our race, never been permitted that a
great nation should pass through the perils of a serious internal
conflict without suffering, in some form or other, an intervention in
its affairs by other nations that would not have been permitted, or been
possible, but for the distraction of its power, or the stress to which
it was exposed by its intestine strifes. And when, in our modern
civilization, a nation so great as ours was pressed by so great a stress
as our Civil War imposed upon us, we could not escape this common fate
in human affairs. It has rarely, in the history of our race, been
permitted to a nation that has suffered this foreign intervention, in
whatever form, to preserve its peace and the peace of the world, and yet
settle its account with the nations which had interposed in its affairs.
[Applause.]

When the great power of France seized upon the occasion of our Civil War
to renew a European possession upon our boundaries, and when England,
upon the same opportunity, swept the seas of our commerce; properly to
deal with those forms of intervention, when our domestic troubles were
ended by the triumph of our arms, called for the exercise of the highest
statesmanship and the most powerful diplomacy. It was at this juncture
that our great minister of foreign affairs (than whom no greater has
been seen in our country, and than whom no greater has been presented in
the service of any foreign nation) was able, without war, to drive the
French from Mexico, and to establish the _principle_ of arbitration, for
the settlement of our controversy with England. [Applause.] It was
reserved for the present administration to extricate the imperfect work
of the adjustment of the differences between England and the United
States from a difficulty of the gravest character, and to place the
negotiations upon a footing satisfactory to the public sense of our
people by the illustrious work of the Joint High Commission at
Washington. It was reserved for that administration to complete, within
its first term of power, the absolute extinction of all antecedent
causes, occasions or opportunities for future contention between our
nation and the mother country, by the actual result of the Geneva