230 C. F. Adams nity of history," he would set forth England's story in so attractive a form that his volumes should displace the last novel from the work- table of the London society girl. And he did it. It is but the other day that an American naval officer suddenly appeared in the field of historical literature, and, by two volumes, sensibly modified the policy of nations. Here are precept and example. To accomplish similar results should, I hold, be the ambition of the American his- torian. Popularity he should court as a necessary means to an end ; and that he should attain popularity, he must study the art of pres- entation as much and as thoughtfully as he delves amid the original material of history. Becoming more of an artist, rhetorician and philosopher than he now is, he must be less of a pedant and color- less investigator. In a word, going back to Moses, Thucydides and Herodotus ; Tacitus, Gibbon and Voltaire ; Niebuhr, Macaulay, Carlyle, Buckle, Green, Mommsen and Froude, he must study their systems, and, avoiding the mistakes into which they fell, thought- fully accommodating himself to the conditions of the present, he must prepare to fulfil the mission before him. He will then in time devise what is so greatly needed for our political life, the distinctively American historical method of the future. Of this we have as yet had hardly the promise, and that only recently through the pages of Fiske and Mahan ; and I cannot help surmising that it is to some Eastern seed planted here in the freer environment of the more fruit- ful West that we must look for its ultimate realization. Charles Francis Adams. Appendix. The full record of J. Q. Adams's utterances on this most important subject has never been made up. (See Works of Charles Sumner, VI. 19-23, VII. 142.) Historically speaking, it is of e.xceptional signifi- cance : and, accordingly, for convenience of reference, a partial record is here presented. In 1836 Mr. Adams represented in Congress what was then the Mass- achusetts " Plymouth " district. In April of that year the issue, which, just twenty-five years later, was to result in overt civil war, was fast assum- ing shape; for on the 21st of the month, the battle of San Jacinto was fought, resulting immediately in the independence of Texas, and more remotely in its annexation to the United States and the consequent war of spoliation (1846-48) with Mexico. At the same time petitions in great number were pouring into Congress from the Northern states ask- ing for the abolition of slavery, and the prohibition of the domestic slave-trade in the District of Columbia ; the admission into the Union of Arkansas, with a constitution recognizing slavery, was also under considera- tion. In the course of a long personal letter dated April 4, 1836, written
