3.  “The fruits of the proclamation” is so inconsiderable a variation on the text of the instructions, “supplemented by acts causing direct damage,” that the secretary’s hint about want of precise conformity seems hardly to have been called for.

It is important to notice this point in the instructions:  With other powers Mr. Motley was to take the position that the “recognition of the insurgents’ state of war” was made “no ground of complaint;” with Great Britain that the cause of grievance was “not so much” placed upon the issuance of this recognition as upon her conduct under, and subsequent to, such recognition.

There is no need of maintaining the exact fitness of every expression used by Mr. Motley.  But any candid person who will carefully read the government’s dispatch No. 70, dated September 25, 1869, will see that a government holding such language could find nothing in Mr. Motley’s expressions in a conversation held at his first official interview to visit with official capital punishment more than a year afterwards.  If Mr. Motley had, as it was pretended, followed Sumner, Mr. Fish had “out-Sumnered” the Senator himself.

Mr. Davis’s pamphlet would hardly be complete without a mysterious letter from an unnamed writer, whether a faithless friend, a disguised enemy, a secret emissary, or an injudicious alarmist, we have no means of judging for ourselves.  The minister appears to have been watched by somebody in London, as he was in Vienna.  This somebody wrote a private letter in which he expressed “fear and regret that Mr. Motley’s bearing in his social intercourse was throwing obstacles in the way of a future settlement.”  The charge as mentioned in Mr. Davis’s letter is hardly entitled to our attention.  Mr. Sumner considered it the work of an enemy, and the recollection of the M’Crackin letter might well have made the government cautious of listening to complaints of such a character.  This Somebody may have been one whom we should call Nobody.  We cannot help remembering how well ‘Outis’ served ‘Oduxseus’ of old, when he was puzzled to extricate himself from an embarrassing position.  ’Stat nominis umbra’ is a poor showing for authority to support an attack on a public servant exposed to every form of open and insidious abuse from those who are prejudiced against his person or his birthplace, who are jealous of his success, envious of his position, hostile to his politics, dwarfed by his reputation, or hate him by the divine right of idiosyncrasy, always liable, too, to questioning comment from well-meaning friends who happen to be suspicious or sensitive in their political or social relations.

The reported sayings of General Grant and of Mr. Fish to the correspondents who talked with them may be taken for what they are worth.  They sound naturally enough to have come from the speakers who are said to have uttered them.  I quote the most important part of the Edinburgh letter, September 11, 1877, to the New York “Herald.”  These are the words attributed to General Grant:—­