AN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT.
There is very general regret, at home and abroad, that the new administration has removed Professor James Russell Lowell from the office of American minister at the court of St. James. There is no disposition to complain; but there is some natural wonderment. Mr. Lowell was an ideal American diplomat; he represented worthily the people as well as the government of the United States. It is no disparagement to his successor to say that no other American can quite fill the place Mr. Lowell has made for himself. It should be remembered that we, fortunately, have very little proper diplomatic business anywhere in the world; and whenever any serious negotiation is to be undertaken, it can be done at Washington. Our important treaties are made in the national capital; and our gravest foreign affairs are always directly administered by the Secretary of State. Since Franklin it has seldom happened that a minister has been entrusted with any grave duties or burdened with any serious responsibilities. Even during the civil war Mr. Seward managed at Washington the more serious business of the foreign department.
In this generation, we have had some successful foreign ministers; but their success has in every case been in non-official or extra-official lines. Mr. E. B. Washburne, our minister in Paris during the Franco-German war, won a high reputation, not as a diplomat of his country, but as an American minister entrusted, by an act of international courtesy, with the rights and welfare of Prussians in Paris. As the agent of the Berlin government during the war and siege, Mr. Washburne endeared himself to the large German population of Paris by his kindness, common sense, and energy in caring for a body of subjects of a hostile country. No one but a typical American could have done this work at all well. A man trained to diplomacy would have failed. It needed a man who could put his character and American office into a breach made by war, and devise means of providing for an extemporaneous necessity. Most men would have failed; Washburne succeeded because he was a typical American of the largest pattern—able, frank, tireless, resourceful.
In England, Mr. Lowell has, under different circumstances, developed a new line of diplomatic representation. He has represented the character and culture of the American people. The average politician supposes himself to be the typical American; the fact that we are ashamed of him is the sufficient proof that he is thoroughly mistaken. In what do Americans broadly differ from most other, if not all other, peoples? Is it not in this, that we are the great reading nation of the world? Our culture goes down to the bottom and reaches out to the extremities of our life. We have no class distinctions, no titled magnates, no rights of birth-privilege; and in the school rooms of the land the rich and the poor meet together, and our great newspapers go into the hands of both rich and poor. We are not so distinctly a nation of commercial people as we are a nation of people under an unexampled influence of general culture. A Professor who was much more than a professor; a man of the world who was also a man of books; an alert and quick, practical man who was also a poet; a gentleman who was, first of all, manly; a diplomat who was at home in a school room, could lecture on any literary theme, could instruct the educated Englishman in the history of his own men of letters; an American who knew Shakspere, Milton, Bunyan, the English Bible, and every shred of English art and song and event by heart—such a man has Mr. Lowell been in England. He was at home there on those levels of life and heights of achievement which are common to us and Englishmen; and his leadership there in literature and learning conferred honor on us in the precisely most honorable things in our character as a people. We simply are not philistines—hard dogmatists of dollars and precedents—we are a thoughtful, informed, studious and brainy people who despise wealth which is not held for the service of truth, well-being and progress. No man could represent us so well as a poet, teacher, essayist and scholar like Mr. Lowell. He could represent us at the level of those ideals and achievements of which we are not ashamed. We despise nothing so heartily as illiterate wealth; no other people on earth equal us in contempt for the commerce which has only sordid aims and results. The American merchant builds schools, museums, churches, asylums, hospitals—if he does not we despise him.
The problem in selecting the best foreign representatives is to secure men who will represent our national character. Our diplomacy is unimportant. Such as we have to do can be carried on at Washington. We want ministers abroad who will be typical Americans, whose conspicuous position will display in them the best and truest results of our unique social and political system. If they are honored abroad, as Mr. Lowell has been in unusual ways and measure, the honor is given to us and glorifies us. There is always a fool to say that our minister is more English than American—simply because Englishmen respect him. It is a poor kind of criticism, and fortunately there is less and less of it in the press. We all stand better abroad, command more honest respect, are better understood in our best characteristics, because James Russell Lowell has represented us in London. May his successor succeed to the full measure of this representative office.
The most distinguished honor ever conferred upon an American has come to Mr. Lowell. The English press, representing the best public opinion of that nation, invites him to remain., in England “as the unofficial representative of American literature, learning, manners, and knowledge of the world.” Nothing like that can be found in the long history of diplomacy. “He has been,” says one great journal, “a sort of guest-friend of England,” and it then describes him as “the most eminent American of this generation,” and adds, “Englishmen of all ranks and stations recognize in Mr. Lowell a faithful and jealous guardian of the interests of his country, and a type of all that is best in its intellectual and moral character.” There is not a word in all these encomiums which is not a eulogy of the American people.