fulfill. A blunder on the part of our envoy to Great Britain would have possibly led to consequences which one trembles to contemplate even in imagination. The services of Franklin in France and the positive good of the French alliance in the Revolution, may be compared with the services of Mr. Adams in England and the negative advantage of non-interference by England on behalf of the South in the civil war. Mr. Adams's coolness, his unerring judgment, and the prestige of his name, in combination, made him the one man in the United States who ought by fitness to have held his post. That he did hold it was, perhaps, one of the two or three essential facts which together made Northern success possible, by the elimination of unfair and extrinsic causes of defeat.
One part only of the picture remains to be drawn, the House of Representatives. It is by no means conducive to a cheerful patriotic pride to contemplate the general throng of the politicians of the country during the war. In plain truth, they did themselves little credit. Amid the excitement of the times they utterly failed to appreciate their true position, their personal and official limitations. They could not let military matters alone; they did not often recognize the boundaries of their own knowledge, and the proper scope of their usefulness. They intermeddled
ceaselessly, embroiled everything, and as a consequence they obstructed success in the field almost as much as if they had been another Confederate army. It has been with some difficulty that any one from among them has been found whose life it was desirable to write. But Thaddeus Stevens was really a man of great power and note. Intense and earnest, he exerted a magnificent influence in the way of encouragement and inspiration. He adhered, if not altogether so closely as he ought, yet at least more closely than did many others, to the proper sphere of his duties as a civilian. Influential in oratory, skillful in political management, masterful in temperament, and of unflinching loyalty, he was long the genuine leader of the House. In recalling the several members of that body he stands forth as the one striking and dominant figure. Nor did his activity cease with the war; he continued preëminent in the questions which immediately succeeded it, so that the reconstruction of the country, without which our story would be incomplete, finds its proper place in his biography. Therewith, I think, the series reaches completion.
JOHN T. MORSE, JR.
September, 1898.