MOTLEY 1814-1877 JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, the historian, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1814, and died in England in June, 1877. Graduating at Harvard College at the age of seventeen, he went to Europe, where he spent several years in preparation for a task to which he had early devoted himself, the writing of a "History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic." Young as he was, he had already produced two romances, "Morton's Hope; or, The Memoirs of a Provincial," and "Merry-Mount: A Romance of the Massachusetts Colony," - both long since forgotten. After fifteen years of arduous labor he finished his " History," and its reception on both sides of the Atlantic was exceptionally cordial. Everett said of it that it was, in his judgment, "a work of the highest merit," and placed "the name of Motley by the side of those of our great American historical trio, Bancroft, Irving, and Prescott." The success of this History-the work of a young and unknown writer-was immediate. Motley at once set about a new enterprise, the results of which appear in "The History of the United Netherlands," in which the career of the young nation, the story of whose birth had been told in the previous work, is described with equal spirit and accuracy. In 1874 Motley's third historical work, "The Life and Death of John of Barneveld,” was published; and at the time of his death he was at work on a "History of the Thirty Years' War." In common with the eminent historians with whom Everett classed him, Motley possessed in rare combination the highest intellectual qualifications for his work. He was especially remarkable for a certain breadth of mind which impelled him to take comprehensive and exhaustive views of his subject. His style is full of vigor and grace and in dramatic quality it is surpassed by that of no other historian of this century. It would be, perhaps, impossible to indicate any other historical works than his, of comparatively modern issue, touching which the judgment of critics has been so generally favorable. Some foreign reviewers have charged him with excessive severity in his denunciation of Spanish despotism; but with this exception, his candor and conscientious accuracy have never been impugned. Motley was appointed United States Minister to Austria by President Lincoln, and was later transferred to England, where he represented the American government with conspicuous ability. HISTORIC PROGRESS WE talk of History. No man can more highly appreciate than I do the noble labors of your Society,1 and of others in this country, for the preservation of memorials belonging to our brief but most important past. We can never collect too much of them, nor ponder them too carefully, for they mark the era of a new civilization. But that interesting past presses so closely upon our sight that it seems still a portion of the present; the glimmering dawn preceding the noontide of to-day. I shall not be misunderstood, then, if I say that there is no such thing as human history. Nothing can be more profoundly, sadly true. The annals of mankind have never been written, 1 The selection is from an address delivered before the New York Historical Society in December 1868, the subject being "Historic Progress and American Democracy." never can be written; nor would it be within human capacity to read them if they were written. We have a leaf or two torn from the great book of human fate as it flutters in the stormwinds ever sweeping across the earth. We decipher them as we best can with purblind eyes, and endeavor to learn their mystery as we float along to the abyss; but it is all confused babble, hieroglyphics of which the key is lost. Consider but a moment. The island on which this city stands is as perfect a site as man could desire for a great commercial, imperial city. Byzantium,1 which the lords of the ancient world built for the capital of the earth; which the temperate and vigorous Turk in the days of his stern military discipline plucked from the decrepit hands which held the scepter of Cæsar and Constantine, and for the succession to which the present lords of Europe are wrangling, not Byzantium, nor hundred-gated Thebes, nor London nor Liverpool, Paris nor Moscow, can surpass the future certainties of this thirteen-mile-long Manhattan. And yet it was but yesterday - for what are two centuries and a half in the boundless vista of the past? that the Mohawk and the Mohican were tomahawking and scalping each other throughout these regions, and had been doing so for centuries; while the whole surface of this island, now groaning under millions of wealth which oppress the imagination, hardly furnished a respectable hunting-ground for a single sachem, in his warpaint and moccasins, who imagined himself proprietor of the soil. 8 But yesterday Cimmerian darkness, primeval night. To-day, grandeur, luxury, wealth, power. I come not here to-night to draw pictures or pour forth dithyrambics that I may gratify 1 This was the original name of Constantinople. The beauty and convenience of its situation were observed by the Emperor Constantine, who made it the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire A. D. 328, and called it Constantinopolis, i. e. the City of Constantine. 2 a great city of Egypt, formerly the capital of that country, now in ruins which extend for seven miles along both banks of the Nile 3 the Cimmerii were fabled cave-dwellers 4 enthusiastic strains your vanity or my own, whether municipal or national. To appreciate the unexampled advantages bestowed by the Omnipotent upon this favored republic, this youngest child of civilization, is rather to oppress the thoughtful mind with an overwhelming sense of responsibility; to sadden with quick-coming fears; to torture with reasonable doubts. The world's great hope is here. The future of humanity - at least for that cycle in which we are now revolving - depends mainly upon the manner in which we deal with our great trust. The good old times! Where and when were those good old times? says Byron. "All times when old are good," "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools But neither fools says the great master of morals and humanity. nor sages, neither individuals nor nations, have any other light to guide them along the track which all must tread, save that long, glimmering vista of yesterdays which grows so swiftly fainter and fainter as the present fades into the past. And I believe it possible to discover a law out of all this apparently chaotic whirl and bustle, this tangled skein of human affairs, as it spins itself through the centuries. That law is Progress, - slow, confused, contradictory, but ceaseless development, intellectual and moral, of the human race. It is of Human Progress that I speak to-night. It is of Progress that I find a startling result when I survey the spectacle which the American Present displays. This nation stands on the point towards which other people are moving, the starting-point, not the goal. It has put itself—or rather destiny has placed it more immediately than other nations in subordination to the law governing all bodies political as inexorably as Kepler's law controls the motions of the planets. The law is Progress; the result, Democracy. Sydney Smith once alluded, if I remember rightly, to a person who allowed himself to speak disrespectfully of the equator. I have a strong objection to be suspected of flattering the equator. Yet were it not for that little angle of 23° 27' 26", which it is good enough to make with the plane of the ecliptic, the history of this earth and of "all which it inherit "1 would have been essentially modified, even if it had not been altogether a blank. Out of the obliquity of the equator has come forth our civilization. It was long ago observed by one of the most thoughtful writers that ever dealt with human history, John von Herder, that it was to the gradual shading away of zones and alternation of seasons that the vigor and variety of mankind were attributable. For the present, by the man of I have asked where and when were the good old times? This earth of ours has been spinning about in space, great philosophers tell us, some few hundred millions of years. We are not very familiar with our predecessors on this continent. the oldest inhabitant must be represented here Natchez, whose bones were unearthed not long ago under the Mississippi bluffs in strata which were said to argue him to be at least one hundred thousand years old. Yet he is a mere modern, a parvenu 2 on this planet, if we are to trust illustrious teachers of science, compared with the men whose bones and whose implements have been found in high mountain-valleys and gravelpits of Europe; while these again are thought by the same authorities to be descendants of races which flourished many thousands of years before, and whose relics science is confidently expecting to discover, although the icy sea had once ingulfed them and their dwelling-places. We of to-day have no filial interest in the man of Natchez. He was no ancestor of ours, nor have he and his descendants left traces along the dreary track of their existence to induce a desire to claim relationship with them. We are Americans; but yesterday we were Europeans, Netherlanders, Saxons, Normans, Swabians, Celts; and the day before yesterday, Asiatics, Mongolians, what you will. The great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. Tempest, iv. I. |