THE MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY.
MR. HEXRY WARD BEECHER went to Great Britain already well known at home as the favorite preacher of a large parish, an ardent advocate of certain leading reforms, one of the most popular lecturers of the country, a bold, out- spoken, fertile, ready, crowd-compelling orator, whose reported sermons and speeches were fuller of catholic human- ity than of theological subtilties, and whose sympathies were of that lively sort which are apt to leap the sectarian fold and find good Christians in every denomination. He was welcomed by friendly persons on the other side of the Atlantic, partly for these merits, partly also as "the son of the celebrated Dr. Beecher" and " the brother of Mrs. Beecher Stowe." After a few months' absence he returns to America, having finished a more re- markable embassy than any envoy who has represented us in Europe since Frank- lin pleaded the cause of the young Re- public at the Court of Versailles. He kissed no royal hand, he talked with no courtly diplomatists, he was the guest of no titled legislator, he had no official existence. But through the heart of the people he reached nobles, ministers, courtiers, the throne itself. He whom the " Times " attacks, he whom " Punch " caricatures, is a power in the land. We may be very sure, that, if an American is the aim of their pensioned garroters and hired vitriol- throwers, he is an object of fear as well as of hatred, and that the assault proves his ability as well as his love of freedom and zeal for the nation to which he belongs. Mr. Beecher's European story is a short one in time, but a long one in events. He went out a lamb, a tired clergyman in need of travel ; and as such he did not strive nor cry, nor did any man hear his voice in the streets. But in the den of lions where his pathway led him he re- membered his own lion's nature, and ut- tered his voice to such effect that its echoes in the great vaulted caverns of London and Liverpool are still reaching us, as the sound of the woodman's axe is heard long after the stroke is seen, as the light of the star shines upon us many days after its departure from the source of radiance. Mr. Beecher made a single speech in Great Britain, but it was delivered piece- meal in different places. Its exordium was uttered on the ninth of October at Manchester, and its peroration was pro- nounced on the twentieth of the same month in Exeter Hall. He has himself furnished us an analysis of the train of representations and arguments of which this protracted and many-jointed oration was made up. At Manchester he at- tempted to give a history of that series of political movements, extending through half a century, the logical and inevita- ble end of which was open conflict be- tween the two opposing forces of Free- dom and Slavery. At Glasgow his dis- course seems to have been almost unpre- meditated. A meeting of one or two Temperance advocates, who had come to greet him as a brother in their cause, took on, " quite accidentally," a political character, and Mr. Beecher gratified the assembly with an address which really looks as if it had been in great measure called forth by the pressure of the mo- ment. It seems more like a conversation than a set harangue. First, he very good- humoredly defines his position on the Temperance question, and then natural- ly slides into some self-revelations, which we who know him accept as the simple expression of the man's character. This plain speaking made him at home among strangers more immediately, perhaps, than anything else he could have told them. " I am born without moral fear. I have expressed my views in any audi- ence, and it never cost me a struggle. I never could help doing it."
