In fact, with the exception of Adams, at London, and Marsh, at Turin, we had hardly a representative abroad, either consular or diplomatic, who was a credit to the country. As the war continued, the importance of being respected in Europe became more evident, and a change took place; but the few men of respectable standing who were in foreign countries representing the United States of America were appointed on account of political pressure, and not on their merits. My colleague at Venice, Howells, one of Mr. Lincoln's most fortunate appointments, owed his position, not to his literary abilities, which were then unknown to the country at large, but to his having written a campaign life of Lincoln, a service which was always considered by the successful candidate as entitling the biographer to some appointment. A term of consular service was and is still considered the reward for campaign services, personal or vicarious, and at the next change of administration the consul was superseded by another, equally crude, and with all to learn in his business.
What the character of the Americans as well as of the government, as such, has suffered of derogation abroad from this political huckstering with public offices, no one can know who was not much abroad in the years preceding our war. Marsh was honored and beloved at Rome by both King and people, as was Adams by the Court of St. James, but the dead weight which the standing disrepute of our diplomacy imposed on both those distinguished men can hardly now be estimated. My predecessors at Rome, and the ministers before my time, had left a bad odor behind them. One of them was notorious for his devotion to a form of dissipation much and scandalously known at Naples during the reign of the Bourbons as a springtime sport, and which has since been the occasion of a noted crusade in England led by Mr. Stead. Of a minister of the United States of America found drunk in the streets of Berlin by the police, and a chargé d'affaires who, in an outbreak at Constantinople, hoisted the flag over a brothel he frequented, the memory is perhaps too old to have reached men born much later than I, but for the twenty years of my first knowledge of European matters our representation abroad was a disgrace to America.