ot Republicans by theory. On the
contrary, they had been born and bred under a monarchy. Under that
monarchy they had enjoyed a measure of civil and religious liberty which
the Third Republic certainly refuses to Frenchmen in France to-day. M.
Jules Ferry and M. Constans have no lessons to give in law or in liberty
to which George Washington, or John Adams, or even Thomas Jefferson,
would have listened with toleration while the Crown still adorned the
legislative halls of the British colonies in America. Our difficulties
with the mother country began, not with the prerogative of the
Crown--that gave our fathers so little trouble that one of the original
thirteen States lived and prospered under a royal charter from Charles
II. down to the middle of the nineteenth century--but with the
encroachments of the Parliament. The roots of the affection which binds
Americans to the American Republic strike deep down into the history of
American freedom under the British monarchy. The forms have changed, the
living substance is the same. Americans know at least as well as
Englishmen what the most intelligent of French Republicans apparently
have still to learn, that liberty is impossible without loyalty to
something higher than self-interest and self-will.

This sufficiently explains to me a remark often cited as made to Sir
Theodore Martin by General Grant during the ex-President's visit to
England, to the effect that Englishmen 'live under institutions which
Americans would give their ears to possess.'

General Grant neither was, nor did he pretend to be, a great statesman.
But he was an American of the Americans. Four years of Civil War and
eight years of Presidential power had not been thrown away upon him. He
came into the Presidency as the successor of Andrew Johnson, who was
made President by the bullet of an assassin, and who was impeached, as I
have said, before the Senate for doing his plain constitutional duty, by
an unscrupulous parliamentary cabal.

He left the Presidency, to be succeeded in it by a President who derived
the more than doubtful title under which he took his seat from a
Commission unknown to the Constitution, and accepted by the American
people only as the alternative of political chaos and of a fresh civil
war.

Through his position at the head of the American army, General Grant, as
I have already mentioned, had been drawn into the contest between
President Johnson and the parliamentary cabal bent