this should be a question at all," but
it was one of the points on which the election turned, for all that.

In his advocacy of the candidate with whom, and the government of which
he became the head, his relations became afterwards so full of personal
antagonism, he spoke as a man of his ardent nature might be expected to
speak on such an occasion. No one doubts that his admiration of General
Grant's career was perfectly sincere, and no one at the present day can
deny that the great captain stood before the historian with such a record
as one familiar with the deeds of heroes and patriots might well consider
as entitling him to the honors too often grudged to the living to be
wasted on the dead. The speaker only gave voice to the widely prevailing
feelings which had led to his receiving the invitation to speak. The time
was one which called for outspoken utterance, and there was not a
listener whose heart did not warm as he heard the glowing words in which
the speaker recorded the noble achievements of the soldier who must in so
many ways have reminded him of his favorite character, William the
Silent.

On the 16th of December of this same year, 1868, Mr. Motley delivered an
address before the New York Historical Society, on the occasion of the
sixty-fourth anniversary of its foundation. The president of the society,
Mr. Hamilton Fish, introduced the speaker as one "whose name belongs to
no single country, and to no single age. As a statesman and diplomatist
and patriot, he belongs to America; as a scholar, to the world of
letters; as a historian, all ages will claim him in the future."

His subject was "Historic Progress and American Democracy." The discourse
is, to use his own words, "a rapid sweep through the eons and the
centuries," illustrating the great truth of the development of the race
from its origin to the time in which we are living. It is a long distance
from the planetary fact of the obliquity of the equator, which gave the
earth its alternation of seasons, and rendered the history, if not the
existence of man and of civilization a possibility, to the surrender of
General Lee under the apple-tree at Appomattox Court-House. No one but a
scholar familiar with the course of history could have marshalled such a
procession of events into a connected and intelligible sequence. It is
indeed a flight rather than a march; the reader is borne along as on the
wings of a soaring poem, and sees the rising and decay