lors, and he never could see that the eagle differed essentially from the goose. It required a sagacious humility, which he never possessed, to act upon public feeling, to keep even with it, to confess practically, that, unless our democracy is feigned and our existence a sham, we can scarcely be worse misgoverned than when we are forced aright by an executive. don't believe," says Mr. Wade, in a recent conversation attributed to him, "that a President ought to be setting himself up as a policy-maker. When I am asked what my policy will be in case I have to discharge the Presidential duties, I generally answer that I won't have any policy. It's the duty of Congress to adopt a policy, and the duty of the President to execute it. We've had trouble enough from the efforts of Presidents to set up a policy for themselves, and force Congress into its adoption by the use of the government patronage, and otherwise." To some such clear idea of the business of Presidency General Grant has shown himself to have attained; and whether he has reached it through the experience of a lifetime, or through the events of the two instructive years of Mr. Johnson's administration, we need not very diligently inquire.

West Point, was not of a kind to inspire trust in its infallibility, since it concerned itself so little with Grant personally that it even blundered in his name, and put fame and the family Bible forever at variance about him; nor is it probable that he was led in any very confident or prophetic spirit from West Point to active service in Mexico, and thence to garrison-life in New York and on the Canadian frontier, and, yet later, on military duty to California and Oregon, with their goldmining tumults and Indian wars. Nevertheless, he thus came to know Americans of every class and section; and when, having married, he resigned his place in the army, and tried farming, and, in a small way, slaveholding, in Missouri, and still later devoted himself to the leather business at Galena, he completed his own experience of all the prominent phases of American life, the backwoods, the school, arms, agriculture, and commerce. When the war overtook him with the rest of us, in 1861, he was still selling leather in Galena. We dare say he did not then, in his thirty-ninth year, regard himself as a very successful man, and no effort of the imagination could depict him as a great one. He was a widely experienced, undiscouraged American, who was doing the work that lay next his hand, with no reason to exult in his past, nor any disposition to make less of himself in the future. He must have seemed to everybody a plain man of average ability; but his taciturn habit no doubt did him injustice, and made him pass for a man of less weight than he really was. Considering his whole character and career, it is probable that he valued his neighbors more justly than they valued him; and it is pretty certain that since that time he has had the advantage of his countrymen in approaching the reciprocal understanding which has been finally reached.

It is certain that Grant's whole life has been one to teach him America, if not Americanism; and he has had even wider opportunities to know his countrymen than that great President who understood them better than any other, and with whom he had in common a backwoods origin and a youth of hard work. In order to believe that these opportunities were not lost to a man of his shrewd and independent temper, we need not be at the trouble to suppose that he made an ambitious study of the people with whom he was brought so variously acquainted, or that he was not always chiefly interested in advancing his fortunes by the paths plainest before him. The destiny which took him from his rude early life, and placed him in contact with discipline, science, and culture at

We are all Abolitionists since the emancipation of the slaves; and if we find it hard to forgive Grant, that, up to the beginning of the war, he had failed to

to limit and annul the political influence of slavery, we can remember it merely as we recall the political history of, say, General Butler up to about the same period. Grant's thorough knowledge of Americans as men was the foundation on which he built the victories of Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Richmond, and in the mean time his political education has proceeded with the greatest rapidity. At the outset he saw that the end of slavery had come, and the "three likely negroes" whom his wife owned in Missouri were then freed by private proclamation; nor did he ever propose to subdue the Rebels with one hand and crush the slaves with the other, upon the plan of our more imaginative generals. He felt that the work before him was more serious than this, and that the people behind him were earnest to extremity. put his silent faith in their resolution, and beat out the Rebellion with their inexorable numbers, which he knew could not fail him so long as there was need of them; but, the work done, he respected their supremacy, as if he had been the least of his victorious soldiers, and had never had power over one American citizen.

He

Yet how thoroughly events had educated him in our political character and the most advanced ideas of self-government few of us understood till, two years later, we read those words in protest against the removal of General Sheridan: "I earnestly urge, in the name of a patriotic people, who have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of loyal lives, and thousands of millions of treasure, to preserve the integrity and union of this country, that this order be not insisted on. It is, unmistakably, the expressed wish of the country that General Sheridan should not be removed from his command. This is a Republic where the will of the people is the law of the land. I beg that their voice may be heard. General Sheridan has performed his civil duties faithfully and intelligently. His removal will only be regarded as

It will be interpreted by the unconstructed element in the South—those who did all they could to break up this government by arms, and now wish to be the only element consulted as to the method of restoring order—as a triumph. It will embolden them to renewed opposition to the will of the loyal masses, believing that they have the Executive with them."

Neither for the great exigency of reconstruction, which makes us all Republicans, whatever our opinions of tariffs or debts or taxes, nor for the imperishable principles of justice and freedom upon which our national existence rests, could there have been any franker expression than this. Here is a man who interprets the Presidential duty as respect for the public will, and the Presidential policy as a plain obedience to the laws of Congress. Reading this passage over again in the light of Mr. Wade's attributive theory of the Presidential office, we cannot find how it differs from the ideal of the most radical among us. If there is stuff to make a broader or sounder reconstruction clause for the Republican creed, we shall be glad to have it used at Chicago. Grant's acts since the war, and particularly during the last six months, if they could somehow be formulated, might serve the occasion.

No doubt General Grant will pledge himself to as great truth in the future as he has shown in the past; and we say again, if there is any form of promise by which he can be most clearly and distinctly bound to the purposes and destiny of the party, we owe it to ourselves and to the country to exact it. The one great duty before us is the reconstruction of the Southern States upon the basis of equal rights for every race and color. This is the first thing; but another duty associates itself with it, in all just men's

minds.

The party ought to declare unmistakably against every form of repudiation, lest thereby we who urged on the war at every cost incur a double guilt, such

as never could attach to the opponents of the war if they favored national bad faith. Honesty is the best principle as well as the best policy, and we must secure the national creditors, because, as men of honor, we do not betray the friends who trust us, or forget the claims of those who succor our necessities. The right is plain, and there is no expediency that holds as argument against it. Our bond to our creditors ought to be as good as our word to the liberated slaves.

We think that the Chicago Convention should also give some distinct hope of relief to the tax-payers; and we would have something said in recognition of the justice and reason of free trade, even if no pledge for the immediate reduction of imposts can be made. We might, for example, have a plank in the platform on which, instead of slavery, lately deceased, the protective tariff and Mormon polygamy should figure as "the twin relics

of barbarism." However, we do not insist upon this. It can scarcely be necessary to urge upon the Convention the nomination of a thoroughly tried and upright man for the Vice-Presidency or to dwell on the error of trusting anything to disease or assassination in the secondary choice of an Executive. We must ourselves provide for a chance which is so possible as the accession of the Vice-President to the Chief-magistracy, and see to it that no form of Tyler or Johnson succeeds General Grant, -a man indeed given us by the war that saved us, but also a man who has done everything since the war to keep our honor and gratitude,

a man who, from his own varied life, can judge aright nearly every phase of our national life, a man who is in practical sympathy with American ideas of self-government, and whose words and deeds promise for the future a President without a policy and a people without a master.

History of the United Netherlands: from the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Years' Truce, 1609. By JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, D. C. L. In Four Volumes. Vols. III. and IV. New York: Harper and Brothers.

PHILIP II.'s invasion of France, and the war of the Huguenot Prince of Béarn against the Leaguers for the French sovereignty, with the famous battle of Ivry and siege of Paris, ending in Henry of Navarre's conversion to the Catholic faith and accession to the throne, and thereafter his long life of good-humored treacheries, in-, trigues, coarse pleasures, and perils from Spanish armies and assassins, form but one of the strands of narrative woven into this complex web of history, in which the texture of all interests and aspirations of the time appears. The history of English policy is wrought into it, from the time when Elizabeth smiled on the cause of the Nether

lands till James turned his back upon the Commonwealth's uncertain fortune to betroth his children to those of the Spanish king (whose agents were in the mean time charged to take off the Scotchman by poison or dagger), and did not heartily recollect the ancient friendship of England and Holland till he had occasion to advise the States-General against the toleration of Catholic worship. Here is also sketched the life of the Spanish nation, from the hour when Philip and his Inquisition extinguished the last vestiges of ancient liberty, till wealth, power, industry, all failed during the Duke of Lerma's reign in the name of Philip's imbecile son. Here, above all, is the celebration of the heroic struggle of the Dutch people, from the period when Maurice of Nassau- deeply learned in war, and with a greater genius for arms than any other captain of the age-took command of the Republican forces, and fought the battles of religious freedom and civil rights,

till the truce of 1609, when the Netherlands remained victors at every contested point.

The dispute between the Dutchmen and Spaniards was a simple one enough in itself, being merely a question whether men should be saved by the Inquisition or by their own good works and the merits of Christ; whether a people should rule themselves, or be trampled upon by an alien despot. But into the settlement of this question entered all the ambitions of the epoch; and the interests of not only every prince in Europe, but of every isle and coast accessible to navigation, were involved in results which took the dominion of the seas from Spain and Portugal and gave it to Holland and England, - took it from rapacity and gave it to commerce. Yet for all this vast complexity of motive and purpose among the many peoples and princes who took part on one side or the other, the reader of this history comes to respect at last only the Spaniard and the Dutchman, between whom his admiration is pretty equally divided as between foes each thoroughly convinced of his right and thoroughly self-devoted and sincere. The share of Elizabeth in the struggle was as little honorable and generous as that of Henry, and the business of the rest of Europe was chiefly to contribute mercenaries for consumption in battle. As to the sympathy of the reader, that is, like the sympathy of the historian, always and only with the people, who not merely freed themselves from a foreign tyrant, but broke forever the yet crueller yoke of religious oppression. Persecution continued long after the triumph of the United Netherlands, but their success marked the beginning of a new era, in which men, casting off their allegiance to ecclesiastical authority, have found it possible to suffer every form of belief and worship, and to respect doubt as the beginning of the only faith worth having. This fight of the Dutchman and Spaniard was a pitched battle between men's passions and superstitions and their reason; and, when the Spaniard succumbed, it was fair proof, that, even in arms, the right had grown the stronger in the world.

The moral of the contest so forces itself upon the mind of the annalist at every point, that it tempts him to preach a little more than is needful; and the field of events is so vast that his reader is somewhat confused in following him. These are all but inevitable results, and the floridity of diction noticeable in some passages of the

work does not generally affect the pleasant quality of the style. In fact, we remember with very slight discomfort the homilies and the eloquence, and even the highly spiced description of the early commerce in cloves is not so hot in the mouth but we may own lasting indebtedness to Mr. Motley for a rapid and most picturesque and delightful art of narration, a graphic and agreeable touch in personal characterization, a peculiar skilfulness in all that pertains to the mise en scène of any event. We confess, too, a solid pleasure and pride in his truth to all the ideas of democracy and self-government, and in the contrast which his work offers to that of the greatest of the living English historians, in the homage paid to popular virtue.

Among princes of that time, indeed, we think it would go hard with any but Mr. Carlyle to find grandeur or generosity, and Mr. Motley does not teach us to look for it. Philip II. was alone and almost respectable in his earnest cruelty; but we cannot heartily admire the bigotry of a narrow-minded man which condemned a whole nation to death for heresy, and which impoverished an empire and warred half a century in the attempt to execute the sentence. It had not remained for Mr. Motley to tell us how this sincere Catholic sent assassins to take the lives of the French king and the English queen; how intrigue, falsehood, and violence of every kind were accepted by his piety as just means for the maintenance and propagation of the true faith; and how, in order to place himself on the French throne, and rescue France from heretical rule, he was ready to add incest to these means, and to continue a line of Catholic princes by marriage with his own daughter. There is greater freshness and originality (if we may apply this term to a new conception of historical facts) in the portrait of Henry of Navarre, but the picture is hardly more engaging. The white plume of the hero of Ivry does not dazzle us so much when we see Henry with his casque off, and kneeling before the Archbishop of Bourges to receive instruction in the Romish faith, that he may renounce his Huguenot error, and enter into the possession of the French crown. The historian paints him as a man of cynical goodnature, not despising resentment more than gratitude, nor honoring one form of sincerity less than another, but loving women and wars with equal ardor. He never was so little at peace with Spain as immediately upon the conclusion of some solemn treaty of