There was a surplus of men fit for official position in America when the hour of our new appointments arrived.  There were hundreds of men competent to become ministers to England, to France, to Germany, to Russia; as competent as James Russell Lowell or Mr. Phelps.  This was all due to the affluence of American institutions, that spread the benefits of education broadcast.  I remember when Daniel Webster died, people said, “We shall have no one now to expound the constitution,” but the chief expositions of the constitution have been written and uttered since then.  There were pigmies in the old days, too.  I had a friend who, as a stenographer some years ago, made a fortune by knocking bad grammar out of the speeches of Congressmen and Senators, who were illiterate.  They said to him haughtily, “Stenographer, here are a couple of hundred dollars; fix up that speech I made this morning, and see that it gets into the Congressional Record all right.  If you can’t fix it up, write another.”

In 1885, there were plenty of women, too, who understood politics.  There were mean and silly women, of course, but there was a new race springing up of grand, splendid, competent women, with a knowledge of affairs.  The appointment of Mr. Cox as Minister to Turkey was a compliment to American literature.  In consequence of a picturesque description he gave of some closing day in a foreign country, he was facetiously nicknamed “Sunset Cox.”  I rechristened him “Sunrise Cox.”  When President Tyler appointed Washington Irving as Minister to Spain, he set an example for all time.  Men of letters put their blood into their inkstands, but the sacrifice is poorly recognised.

Some of us were faintly urging world-wide peace, but around the night sky of 1885 was the glare of many camp fires.  Never were there so many wars on the calendar at the same time.  The Soudan war, the threat of a Russo-English war and of a Franco-Chinese war, the South-American war, the Colombian war—­all the nations restless and arming.  The scarlet rash of international hatred spread over the earth, and there were many predictions.  I said then it was comparatively easy to foretell the issue of these wars—­excepting one.  I believed that the Revolutionist of Panama would be beaten; the half-breed overcome by the Canadian; that France would humble China, but that the Central American war would go on, and stop, and go on again, and stop again, until, discovering some Washington or Hamilton or Jefferson of its own, it would establish a United States of South America corresponding with the United States of North America.  The Soudan war would cease when the English Government abandoned the attempt to fix up in Egypt things unfixable.  But what would be the result of the outbreak between England and Russia was the war problem of the world.  The real question at issue was whether Europe should be dominated by the lion or the bear.