December 15, 1862.
. . . Mrs. Holmes, who is a judge, I can tell you (being
President of the Industrial Association), tells me that your Mary is a most
excellent worker and a most agreeable young lady. “She never stops, she goes
right ahead,”' are the precise words of Mrs. President, who always means
exactly what she says. Also Mrs. H. tells me that Mary is looking particularly
well.
As I am in the vein of saying things that ought to please
you, let me say that my heart always swells with pride, and a glitter comes
over my eyes, when I read or hear your denunciations of the enemies of liberty
at home and abroad, and your noble pleas for the great system of
self-government now on its trial in a certain sense — say, rather, now putting
our people on trial to Bee whether they are worthy of it. There were many
reasons why you might have lost your passion for a republican government. The
old civilizations welcome you as an ornament to their highest circles; at home
you of course meet in the upper political spheres much that is not to your
taste. But you remain an idealist, as all generous natures do and must. I
sometimes think it is the only absolute line of division between men — that
which separates the men who hug the actual from those who stretch their arms to
embrace the possible. I reduce my points of contact with the first class to a
minimum. When I meet them I let them talk for the most part, for there is no
profit in discussing any living question with men who have no sentiments, and
the non-idealists have none. We don't talk music to those who have no ear. Why
talk of the great human interests to men who have lost all their moral
sensibilities, or who never had any?
You know quite as well as I do that accursed undercurrent of
mercantile materialism which is trying all the time to poison the fountains of
the national conscience. You know better than I do the contortions of that
detested horde of mercenary partizans who would in a moment accept Jeff Davis,
the slave-trade, and a Southern garrison in Boston to get back their post-offices
and their custom-houses, where the bread they had so long eaten was covered
with slime, like that of their brother serpents, before it was swallowed. The
mean sympathizers with the traitors are about in the streets in many aspects:
you can generally tell the more doubtful ones by the circumstance that they
have a great budget of complaints against the government, that their memory is
exceedingly retentive of every reverse and misfortune, and that they turn the
small end of their opera-glasses toward everything that looks encouraging. I do
not think strange of this in old men — they wear their old opinions, like their
old clothes, until they are threadbare, and we need them as standards of past
thought which we may reckon our progress by, as the ship wants her stationary
log to tell her headway. But to meet young men who have breathed this American
air without taking the contagious fever of liberty, whose hands lie as cold and
flabby in yours as the fin of a fish on the morning of a victory, this is the
hardest thing to bear. Oh, if the bullets would only go to the hearts that have
no warm human blood in them! But the most generous of our youth are the price
that we must pay for the new heaven and the new earth which are to be born of
this fiery upheaval. . . .
Let us keep up our courage for our country and ourselves. It
is harder for you, I have no doubt, than for me at home, and getting the news
two or three times daily. Many things that may sound ill do not worry me long,
for I am a man of large faith, and though the devil is a personage of
remarkable talents, I think the presiding Wisdom is sure to be too much for him
in the end. We are nervous just now and easily put down; but if we are to have
a second national birth, it must be purchased by throes and agonies, harder
perhaps than we have yet endured. I think of you all very often; do remember me
and my wife (who is giving all her time to good deeds) most kindly to
your wife and daughters.
Yours always in faith
and hope,
O. W. H.
SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The
Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition,
Volume 2, p. 296-8
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