THE RETROSPECT OF THE YEAR. 31 



one of those visitors who come here in a friendly mood, 

 and whose broad culture opened his mind to favorable 

 impressions of the best this country had to offer him. 

 Naturally we feel kindly towards those who accept us at 

 something near our estimate of ourselves. Mr. Kingsley 

 had for years perceived, what some of his compatriots 

 had been unable to perceive, — that there was in America 

 a social condition which would well reward the study of 

 Englishmen of understanding ; that this nation was not 

 engaged in trying to make of itself a cheap and feeble 

 copy of Great Britain, but had a conscious destiny of its 

 own, fresh and high and admirable and noble, which for 

 better or for worse we have been placed here, in the best 

 part of this western continent, to work out. During the 

 period of our Civil War and of the Reconstruction Era, 

 Mr. Kingsley filled the important Chair of Professor of 

 Modern History at Cambridge University, of which he 

 had been an alumnus. He made American History the 

 topic of his lecture course for 1862, and in announcino" 

 his purpose to do this to a friend in Deceml)er, 1861, he 

 used these words : 



" As for the American question ... I have thought 

 of nothing else for some time. For I cannot see how I 

 can be a Professor of past modern history without the 

 most careful study of the history which is enacting itself 

 around me . . . So strongly do I feel the impor- 

 tance of this crisis, that I mean to give, as my public 

 lectures next October term, the History of the American 

 States." In 1866 he was seconding the movement of a 

 Liverpool gentleman of large views and means for the 

 endowment at Cambridge of a Professorship of Ameri- 

 can History — a distinctly American Lectureship which 

 was to be filled by an American selected and endorsed l)y 

 the authorities of Harvard. 



