dible grossness, and with such
consequences of offence and alarm attached to it, that my failing
to perceive them justly exposed me to very severe blame. It
illustrates vividly that incapacity which my mind so long
retained, and perhaps still exhibits, an incapacity of viewing
subjects all round, in their extraneous as well as in their
internal properties, and thereby of knowing when to be silent and
when to speak.

I am the more pained and grieved, because I have for the last
five-and-twenty years received from the government and people of
America tokens of goodwill which could not fail to arouse my
undying gratitude. When we came to the arbitration at Geneva, my
words were cited as part of the proof of hostile _animus_.
Meantime I had prepared a lengthened statement to show from my
abundant declarations on other occasions that there was and could
be on my part no such _animus_. I was desirous to present this
statement to the arbitrators. My colleagues objected so largely to
the proceeding that I desisted. In this I think they probably were
wrong. I addressed my paper to the American minister for the
information of his government, and Mr. Secretary Fish gave me, so
far as intention was concerned, a very handsome acquittal.

And strange to say,_post hoc_ though, perhaps not _propter hoc_,
the United States have been that country of the world in which the
most signal marks of public honour have been paid me, and in which
my name has been the most popular, the only parallels being Italy,
Greece, and the Balkan Peninsula.

Among the many calumnies poured upon him in this connection was the charge
that he had been a subscriber to the Confederate Loan. "The statement," he
wrote to a correspondent (Oct. 17, 1865), "is not only untrue, but it is
so entirely void of the slightest shadow of support in any imaginable
incident of the case, that I am hardly able to ascribe it to mere error,
and am painfully perplexed as to the motives which could have prompted so
mischievous a forgery."

IV

As I have already said, the American minister had hinted at passports. Ten
days after Mr. Gladstone's speech Mr. Adams saw Lord Russell. Having
mentioned some minor matters he came to the real object of the interview.
"If I had trusted," he said, "to the construction given by the public to a
late speech, I should have begun to think