BONDS OF NATIONAL SYMPATHY
[Response of Lord Houghton to the address of Joseph H. Choate at the farewell reception given in honor of Lord Houghton by the Union League Club, New York City, November 23, 1875.]
Mr. Choate and Gentlemen:—Before you spoke I had much difficulty to interpret to myself the meaning of my reception here. So unimportant as I know myself to have been before, in political and social life, I have been surprised at the manner in which I have been received in the United States of America. You, sir, have given an explanation of that problem which I am very thankful to receive. The habit of Americans to welcome Englishmen, whatever may be their position, in itself proves to me that you regard us as something above individuals, and that, somehow or other, you connect us in every way by imagination, if no other, as present with that great country over the Atlantic which was your mother, and which it has been the habit of many of your ancestors to call their home. [Applause.] Mr. Choate has alluded to certain events in my political life, which he says fully justify your kindness and remarkable sympathy of to-day, and on that matter, if there are to be any relations between myself and the Americans, upon that point I can say that I deserve credit. I do not say this with any affectation, because I understand fully your feelings upon that matter. I fully recognize, I completely comprehend, as man to man, that in that day of your greatest trouble, even the small voice that came over the great Atlantic was listened to with extreme pleasure and unexaggerated sympathy.
But when I look to myself, I am bound to say I find extremely little merit in the matter. There was one ground of sympathy between you and the English people, which you had the holiest right to believe would have been absolute and overpowering. The English nation had put itself forward as the great opponent of slavery in the world. [Applause.] It had stated at the Congress of Vienna that the one point which England required as the sine qua non was the abolition of the slave trade. For that purpose England not only asserted itself, but interfered up to the utmost limit, perhaps beyond the limits of the law of nations, with all the powers of the world. Therefore, you had a perfect right to believe, to suppose, that in a question, in a matter in which we were not only internationally but morally interested, the questions would be fully considered.
Well, gentlemen, I cannot say that it was so. As an individual I have not the right to reproach my country upon that point. That was not my first feeling in the matter. I felt, I knew, slavery was doomed from the civilized world. My heart, my instincts, my sense of the well-being of every civilized state was against the continuance of that institution. [Applause.] I knew, though it was possible—aye, I would fain say probable—that the condition of the slave, under many conditions, under many circumstances, might be better than that of the free laborer of the world, that the condition of the slave owner was incompatible with the highest form of moral culture and highest ambition. I always think that question had political as well as moral and religious considerations, and that, through the unhappy condition of this continent, the question of slavery got so intermixed with the question of property that, however humane, however wise men were, yet nevertheless it would bring with it an incidental condition of cruelty abhorrent to mankind, and that, therefore, that institution could not continue to the end. [Applause.]
But, making a clean breast of it, that was not the bottom of my sympathy. My sympathy with you comes, as Mr. Choate has said, by "an instinct unawares," and this was confirmed by any reasoning and any deductions I might have had. From the imagination of my earliest youth, from the sympathy of the most vivid time, and from the most logical look at the situation in my mature life, I came to the conclusion that the destiny of the present and the future world rests with great and undivided empires. [Applause.] I had lived to see Italy, out of its confusion of States, growing up into a great integrity, renewing the promises of the wonderful classic times and the glory of Rome renovated into a new and prosperous nation. I have lived to see, we have all lived to see, the same process taking place in Germany. In Germany, notwithstanding the greatest division, the most peculiar separation of religion and even of races, yet nevertheless that great German empire is coming forward as a monument of the civilization of the future world, and as the centre of all Europe against any form of Oriental barbarism. And I knew from the history of my own country that that was no new principle, but one we had always maintained. England never at any moment thought of giving up the principle of the integrity of its empire. You yourselves are the evidences of the energy with which we sustained it. [Prolonged applause.] And we had at our doors, we had within us, another nation, in many points alien to ourselves; of a different race largely, of a different religion almost generally; a nation which we had treated sometimes with kindness, sometimes with harshness, sometimes with justice, and many other times with injustice; but always on the principle of the integrity of the empire. [Applause.] And I could not see how an intelligent man could see what Italy was growing to, prophesy what Germany would become, and, knowing the difficulties of the present Ireland, how that man could wish to destroy the integrity of the United States. Fact and history were against him, and in addition to that I felt that—in favoring or in sustaining your separation, in allowing special and local sympathy to act upon me, instead of the great logic of historical truths—if I could have allowed myself to act in that line of sympathy which would have bound me to my countrymen, I should have felt I had belied the truth of history as well as, I believe, the foundation of general morality. [Great applause.]
Therefore, gentlemen, I have little individual merit for whatever I may have said upon that matter. I tell you that that was the calculation, the best calculation of my own mind, that it was the simple result of the deduction of my own reasoning [applause], and if you have shown me gratitude on this matter I will not say that I have not felt in a certain sense it was not deserved, from the motives I have alluded to. And if, as some cynic has said, gratitude is nothing whatever but the means of securing favors to come, I can assure you that you have accomplished your object [laughter and applause], and if you have desired that, in any means which Providence has placed in my power, in any influence direct or indirect which I may exert, I shall speak as I have spoken and think as I have thought of the United States of America, you may be well sure that I will do so. [Applause.]
On another occasion when I have been kindly received, I have spoken of my literary sympathy with this country. Every Englishman rightly looks to this country as he would with a sense of appeal to posterity. He feels that if he has said anything, if he has written anything, if he has touched any chord, if he has struck even any verbal assurance that pleases mankind, if you take it up you pass it on; it does not go from tongue to tongue in the little distant Anglia of Europe.
I recognize that I have met in this country men whom I shall be glad to meet anywhere and with whose familiarity I have been honored. And I might say this, that if I were to compare the best men that I have met here with the best men that I have known in Europe, I should say simply this, that the men that I have found here seem to me as equal to the circumstances in which they have been placed, as intelligent in all their relations of life, as noble in their innermost impulses, as just in their expressions, as any I have ever met with in my intercourse with people in Europe. [Applause.] I have been honored with the familiarity of many distinguished men, I have been received with great kindness by your intelligent and able President. I had the fortune, the other day, to sit by the deathbed of that amiable, honest man, your Vice-President [Henry Wilson], in the Capitol at Washington, dying under the portrait of Jefferson. I have seen some of your able men with whom I have been intimate in Europe, and one whom you will allow me to mention above all others, a man whose career I witnessed during the great and stormy times of your troubles in England—Charles Francis Adams [long applause]—whose maintenance of your dignity was concurrent with a sense of the importance of good relations between England and America.
Gentlemen, next year you will celebrate your Centennial, and I have been kindly asked by every person who wished me good-bye to come back to this Centennial. [Laughter.] As for the Centennial itself, I have no particular inclination to come back. I think it is quite right you should have your Centennial, but I do not quite see what an Englishman has to do with it. [Long laughter and applause.] It is a thing which a philosopher might almost make the foundation of a theory, that you who are going to have this magnificent celebration of the one hundredth year of your liberation from the horrible rule of England, at the same time accompany it with the warmest feelings toward the British nation. [Laughter and applause.] Now, if you will clearly understand that this Centennial is to be your last celebration of this kind, and that from that moment you become part of the great community of Europe, then I say it will be a very useful celebration and one which all the world will be ready to honor. Celebrating your independence, you call it. A very noble act at a very noble time! Your repulsion was fully justified by the folly and the stupidity and the ignorance of England.
The causes of England and America are not different, but common to both. You have your own local difficulties, just as we have. You have your own religious difficulties, just as we have. Take a single instance. The question of local taxation—a very serious question with you, a question agitated in the great States. That question is one of the greatest importance that we are at this moment discussing in politics. It is a matter of great interest to us whether local taxation should be entrusted and commissioned to a body of persons specially appointed for that purpose by the Crown, or whether it should be entrusted to certain persons selected by the people. That will be one of the most important questions we shall have to consider in the next session or two of Parliament. It is said that there is great profusion, great waste, in our present arrangement of those matters, and that if our local expenditure were conducted by persons specially appointed for that purpose, it would be cheaper. I don't say more honestly, but more economically managed. This is a question that you are agitating at the present moment, and one that affects the politics of your great cities.
Take again railroads. It is a question whether the railroad should be in the hands of the State or of private companies. We are talking about it every day. Our interest in rapid transit has been very much the same as yours. Our rapid transit has not only gone over certain unfortunate persons who stood in the way, but it has gone over ruined hopes and prostrated energies. There is hardly a question that I see agitated in American newspapers that, in one form or another, is not agitated with us. The act of Parliament which restored to England specie payments was met with exactly the same argument, exactly the same controversy, exactly the same speciousness as meet you in this country. We have followed you on the matter of popular education. You have been our teachers in that branch. We are at present following in your footsteps. [Applause.]