The result would have been most disastrous, for in order to secure a most trifling advantage,—­that of keeping Mason and Slidell at Fort Warren a little longer,—­we should have turned our backs on all the principles maintained by us when neutral, and should have been obliged to accept a war at an enormous disadvantage. . . .

But I hardly dared to hope that we should have obtained such a victory as we have done.  To have disavowed the illegal transaction at once,—­before any demand came from England,—­to have placed that disavowal on the broad ground of principle which we have always cherished, and thus with a clear conscience, and to our entire honor, to have kept ourselves clear from a war which must have given the Confederacy the invincible alliance of England,—­was exactly what our enemies in Europe did not suppose us capable of doing.  But we have done it in the handsomest manner, and there is not one liberal heart in this hemisphere that is not rejoiced, nor one hater of us and of our institutions that is not gnashing his teeth with rage.

The letter of ten close pages from which I have quoted these passages is full of confidential information, and contains extracts from letters of leading statesmen.  If its date had been 1762, I might feel authorized in disobeying its injunctions of privacy.  I must quote one other sentence, as it shows his animus at that time towards a distinguished statesman of whom he was afterwards accused of speaking in very hard terms by an obscure writer whose intent was to harm him.  In speaking of the Trent affair, Mr. Motley says:  “The English premier has been foiled by our much maligned Secretary of State, of whom, on this occasion at least, one has the right to say, with Sir Henry Wotton,—­

              ’His armor was his honest thought,
               And simple truth his utmost skill.’”

“He says at the close of this long letter: 

’I wish I could bore you about something else but American politics.  But there is nothing else worth thinking of in the world.  All else is leather and prunella.  We are living over again the days of the Dutchmen or the seventeenth-century Englishmen.’”

My next letter, of fourteen closely written pages, was of similar character to the last.  Motley could think of nothing but the great conflict.  He was alive to every report from America, listening too with passionate fears or hopes, as the case might be, to the whispers not yet audible to the world which passed from lip to lip of the statesmen who were watching the course of events from the other side of the Atlantic with the sweet complacency of the looker-on of Lucretius; too often rejoicing in the storm that threatened wreck to institutions and an organization which they felt to be a standing menace to the established order of things in their older communities.

A few extracts from this very long letter will be found to have a special interest from the time at which they were written.