CHAPTER XI.

THE CABINET AMERICAN DIPLOMACY-AN EPITAPH-— WORK OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE--

HIS DEFENSE.

OWEVER formal and temperless may seem the

HOW

greater part of the written diplomatic history of a nation, the real facts are often quite different. The scenes behind the curtain are stormy and undignified to the last extreme, in many cases. Mr. Adams's temper was fully displayed at Ghent in dealing with both his colleagues and the British commissioners, and in some elements appearing requisite and admirable in a wise and safe diplomate, he seemed deficient. However well the exhibition of ill-temper may operate at times, it would appear in exceedingly bad taste to speak in favor of such a thing. The moral effects of bluster and anger are at least questionable, and their employment in diplomatic intercourse relating to the affairs of nations is rather a matter of regret and reprehension than of praise. Never in this country, perhaps, was there more ill-temper shown in this branch of affairs than between Mr. Adams and the British Minister, Stratford Canning, the latter gaining the palm for violent outbursts and the habitual display of choler in his official dealings with our stiff Secretary of State. Most of the remaining old issues between the two countries, and other matters of any

importance were discussed by them from time to time, but it was about all they could do to preserve the general amicable tone of our relations. Mr. Canning persistently pressed British views as to the African slave-trade. But he and Mr. Adams could not reach any satisfactory conclusion. The American Administration was not averse to meeting England fully and fairly at all times for the suppression of this crime, but in dealing with that power she always displayed great "nervousness" on two points. These were the matter of foreign alliances for any purpose, and the giving of any kind of color of tolerance to the British claim of right to search American vessels.

Mr. Rush was more fortunate in England about this slave-trade business than it seemed at all possible for Mr. Adams to be at home with a fiery character like Mr. Canning. But Mr. Rush's treaty touched too unmistakably the delicate points above mentioned, and it consequently failed of ratification. In 1823 Stratford Canning withdrew from the post in which he had been successful only in maintaining the stubborn and proud pretensions of his government; and in Mr. Adams's numerous and often angry contests with him there is little to be found to excite admiration or special remark unless it may be in the equally arrogant style with which he met and not unfrequently overcame the irate and arrogant Briton. Canning was in the habit, in his spasms of temper of considering that Mr. Adams treated him as a boy, and in that temper he displayed the magnanimity of telling Mr. Adams that he should always preserve his respect for experience and age, a compliment which was received

in the humor in which it was given. Mr. Adams got many a smarting thrust from this spirited Englishman which he did not soon forget. Of him he wrote in the Diary: :

"I shall probably see him no more. He is a proud, hightempered Englishman, of good but not extraordinary parts; stubborn and punctilious, with a disposition to be overbearing, which I have often been compelled to check in its own way. He is, of all foreign ministers with whom I have had occasion to treat, the man who has most severely tried my temper. Yet he has been long in the diplomatic career, and treated with governments of the most opposite characters. He has, however, a great respect for his word, and there is nothing false about him. Mr. Canning is a man of forms, studious of courtesy, and tenacious of private morals. As a diplomatic man, his great want is suppleness, and his great virtue is sincerity."

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How much of this description could this able and unswerving Englishman not have applied to the diplomatic man who, perhaps, gave him more vexation than all others with whom he had been obliged to treat, the unbending but sincere Mr. Adams?

In 1823, De Neuville also returned to Europe. He was passionately devoted to the Bourbons in France, and during the so-called republic and in the times of Napoleon he fled from his home. For several years at that time he had resided in this country, making a living by what was called the practice of medicine. There is the widest possibility that this was arrant quackery, however inconsistent such a thing may have been with the estimation in which he was held by Mr. Adams and President Monroe, and his honorable conduct as the representative of France at Washington.

No other foreign minister had ever so favorably

impressed Mr. Adams as to his real character, as well as his diplomatic qualities, except, perhaps, Count Romanzoff, the model Russian Chancellor; and during his long controversy with Don Onis and Mr. Canning, Mr. Charles Bagot's successor, his agreeable relations with De Neuville present a striking picture of the better side of political diplomacy.

In one of Mr. Adams's many conversations with Mr. Calhoun, with whom he associated more than with any other member of the Cabinet, in speaking of what England did to preserve the memory of her public men, Mr. Adams said :

"There is a resolution of Congress, existing ever since the death of Washington, that a monument in honor of his memory should be erected. I said that I thought, under that resolution, Congress ought to build a church of durable stone equal in dimension to Westminster Abbey or the Pantheon at Paris; that, sheltered under the roof and in the walls of this church should be the sepulchral monument of Washington, and around it, suitably disposed, those of the statesmen and legislators of this Union. whose lives may, from time to time, honorably close during their attendance here in the service of their country."

Mr. Calhoun appeared to have no sympathy with such views, and said that the people would not support Congress in any thing of the sort. This singular whim of Mr. Adams's never could have been acceptable to many of the so-called great who die in the public. service, nor could it be otherwise than distasteful to those who associate the church with the brighter and better notions of life instead of with the gloom of death. It was a dark, bad thought, and unworthy of a man who had but few of that character.

Although Mr. Adams subsequently desired to fall honorably at his post in the Capitol, and really had

his desire gratified, yet he then would, doubtless, have been unwilling that his remains should lie in this ideal pantheon by the side of Mr. Calhoun, whom he considered one of the most worthy of a place in it at the time he uttered the unrepublican sentiment, or, indeed, any place else than among the Adamses at Quincy. Mr. Adams's idea of a church seemed inseparable from that of a gravestone. By this error no inconsiderable numbers are turned from the one spot where men might together learn to forget death or to care for its sting, to value life and learn to live it well, looking to its eternal advantages.

Mr. Adams said in one of his gloomy retrospections: "I have been a lawyer for bread, and a statesman at the call of my country." A statement which often expressed with great truth the little satisfaction he took in his career. Mr. Adams always did think that his life was lived in the wrong direction, and that it should have been devoted to literary pursuits. In the one main thing touching the career of politicians, office-holding, Mr. Adams was certainly successful in the highest sense, but his whole life was largely a struggle against the popular will.

Over Mr. Adams's own niche in the American Pantheon there should have been written these strange words: A patriot, indeed, virtuous and wise above most of his political contemporaries, but who gained the highest success by a ceaseless fight against the popular inclinations.

At the best there is little enough refinement, delicacy, accuracy, and skill in this world. Quackery Practiced Here would, perhaps, be the sign which a universal congress of wise men would recommend for