“It cannot be denied,”—­says another observer, placed on one of our national watch-towers in a foreign capital,—­“it cannot be denied that the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places, is more and more unfriendly to our cause”; “but the people,” he adds, “everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,—­that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy.”  These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—­John Lothrop Motley.

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially of British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such terms of the manner in which our struggle has been regarded.  We had, no doubt, very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at least, in a strife which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its cause, arrayed upon one side the supporters of an institution she was supposed to hate in earnest, and on the other its assailants.  We had forgotten what her own poet, one of the truest and purest of her children, had said of his countrymen, in words which might well have been spoken by the British Premier to the American Ambassador asking for some evidence of kind feeling on the part of his government: 

    “Alas I expect it not.  We found no bait
     To tempt us in thy country.  Doing good,
     Disinterested good, is not our trade.”

We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest lines.  We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why they are our enemies.  Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat, which, in spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and consecrated wrongs so long associated with its history, is still venerated as the throne.  One of these supports is the pensioned church; the second is the purchased army; the third is the long-suffering people.  Whenever the third caryatid comes to life and walks from beneath its burden, the capitals of Europe will be filled with the broken furniture of palaces.  No wonder that our ministers find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic split into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of liberty!