enting the United States of America were appointed on
account of political pressure, and not on their merits. My colleague
at Venice, Howells, one of Mr. Lincoln's most fortunate appointments,
owed his position, not to his literary abilities, which were then
unknown to the country at large, but to his having written a campaign
life of Lincoln, a service which was always considered by the
successful candidate as entitling the biographer to some appointment.
A term of consular service was and is still considered the reward for
campaign services, personal or vicarious, and at the next change of
administration the consul was superseded by another, equally crude,
and with all to learn in his business.

What the character of the Americans as well as of the government,
as such, has suffered of derogation abroad from this political
huckstering with public offices, no one can know who was not much
abroad in the years preceding our war. Marsh was honored and beloved
at Rome by both King and people, as was Adams by the Court of St.
James, but the dead weight which the standing disrepute of our
diplomacy imposed on both those distinguished men can hardly now be
estimated. My predecessors at Rome, and the ministers before my time,
had left a bad odor behind them. One of them was notorious for his
devotion to a form of dissipation much and scandalously known at
Naples during the reign of the Bourbons as a springtime sport, and
which has since been the occasion of a noted crusade in England led by
Mr. Stead. Of a minister of the United States of America found drunk
in the streets of Berlin by the police, and a charge d'affaires who,
in an outbreak at Constantinople, hoisted the flag over a brothel he
frequented, the memory is perhaps too old to have reached men born
much later than I, but for the twenty years of my first knowledge of
European matters our representation abroad was a disgrace to America.

I landed in New York the day after the battle of Gettysburg, and for
the first time in the history of our trouble I felt assured as to the
end, for I perceived that the attempt at invasion by the Confederacy
showed that the government of it felt its affairs to be in a desperate
condition, and the determination on the part of the North was
evidently unshaken. From that time I never felt any anxiety as to
the final result. I found my brother at the head of the construction
department of the revenue service, his friend Salmon P. Chase be