Here I must dismiss Mr. Fish’s letter to Mr. Moran, having, as I trust, sufficiently shown the spirit in which it was written and the strained interpretations and manifest overstatements by which it attempts to make out its case against Mr. Motley.  I will not parade the two old women, whose untimely and unseemly introduction into the dress-circle of diplomacy was hardly to have been expected of the high official whose name is at the bottom of this paper.  They prove nothing, they disprove nothing, they illustrate nothing—­except that a statesman may forget himself.  Neither will I do more than barely allude to the unfortunate reference to the death of Lord Clarendon as connected with Mr. Motley’s removal, so placidly disposed of by a sentence or two in the London “Times” of January 24, 1871.  I think we may consider ourselves ready for the next witness.

Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, Assistant Secretary of State under President Grant and Secretary Fish, wrote a letter to the New York “Herald,” under the date of January 4, 1878, since reprinted as a pamphlet and entitled “Mr. Sumner, the Alabama Claims and their Settlement.”  Mr. Sumner was never successfully attacked when living,—­except with a bludgeon,—­and his friends have more than sufficiently vindicated him since his death.  But Mr. Motley comes in for his share of animadversion in Mr. Davis’s letter.  He has nothing of importance to add to Mr. Fish’s criticisms on the interview with Lord Clarendon.  Only he brings out the head and front of Mr. Motley’s offending by italicizing three very brief passages from his conversation at this interview; not discreetly, as it seems to me, for they will not bear the strain that is put upon them.  These are the passages:—­

1. “but that such, measures must always be taken with a full view of the grave responsibilities assumed.” 2. “and as being the fountain head of the disasters which had been caused to the American people.” 3. “as the fruits of the proclamation.”

1.  It is true that nothing was said of responsibility in Mr. Motley’s instructions.  But the idea was necessarily involved in their statements.  For if, as Mr. Motley’s instructions say, the right of a power “to define its own relations,” etc., when a civil conflict has arisen in another state depends on its (the conflict’s) having “attained a sufficient complexity, magnitude, and completeness,” inasmuch as that Power has to judge whether it has or has not fulfilled these conditions, and is of course liable to judge wrong, every such act of judgment must be attended with grave responsibilities.  The instructions say that “the necessity and propriety of the original concession of belligerency by Great Britain at the time it was made have been contested and are not admitted.”  It follows beyond dispute that Great Britain may in this particular case have incurred grave responsibilities; in fact, the whole negotiations implied as much.  Perhaps Mr. Motley need not have used the word “responsibilities.”