THE LATE CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS.
[To rev Eorros or Tex ..Sercrwrox:1 SIR,—The Spectator of last Saturday contains a long review of that moat valuable letter of Charles Francis Adams to Lord Newton which you published on November 7th, and which will have gone into a thousand scrapbooks of the Great War. On Sunday Mr. Adams died. It is neither possible nor perhaps desirable to attract contemporary thought in this crisis even to a personality so interesting as Adams. But those to whom the Washington homes of Charles Francis Adams in Mama- chusetts Avenue and of Henry Adams in Lafayette Square have been open for the past quarter of a century will turn the page of the history of that capital with great regret. Adams was the great-grandson of the second President and the grandson of the sixth. In intellectual attainments be reached the very highest standard of our time, and with this there went a courage amounting to recklessness—as who should say: " We have done our duty by the Republic; why should we at least follow the opportuniems of modern politics ? " The writer was in America during the difficult days of the Boer War. A monograph by Charles Francis Adams supplied Boston, his native city, and from Boston all the intellectuals of the United States, with the arguments for a wise decision. A very few years later the Committee of the Centennial Celebration for General Robert E. Lee discovered in Adams the perfect interpreter for that splendid Southern "rebel."—I
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