Preface to the Australian Edition.

The elequent and forcible defence of Democracy by the eminent American historian and statesman John Lothrop Motley, here reprinted for the benefit of Australian renders, has already had a very wide circulation both in America and England. It is, beyond question, the ablest exposition of the fundamental ideas and principles of genuine Democracy that has been published within the living generation. Nor are its force and value for readers here lessened by the circumstance that the author deals with his subject somewhat alter the manner of his countrymen. The argument for American democracy is, almost to the letter, the argument for Australian democracy. What the one country has become, the other is fast becoming. Both alike are under the irresistible spell and power of a "manifest destiny." A perusal of De Tocqueville's famous book cannot fail to leave upon the mind of any intelligent Australian a strong conviction of the similarity between the general conditions of American society, as that keen and philosophic observer noted five-and-thirty years ago, and those of the society around him. The political and social progress of the Great 'Western Republic thus becomes, so to speak, a mirror in which Australians may see reflected the future progress of their own country. Hence there is for them a special interest in every exposition that comes to them, bearing any weight of authority, of the true character and tendencies of American democracy. And if there be one of the citizens of that Republic whose claim to be heard in defence of the political institutions of his country stands supreme and indisputable, that citizen is certainly John Lothrop Motley. The claim has been well proved by the publication of the grandest historical work yet written by any American pen, and also by the ablest statement^* in defence of the Republican party and its policy throughout the great Civil War, that has ever appeared. The claim, moreover, has been acknowledged and fitly rewarded by Mr. Motley's grateful fellow-countrymen, in his appointment to the coveted office of Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

As the historian of the noble struggles, long-sustained, and finally triumphant, of a democratic republic against a monarchical despotism of the most oppressive and hateful character, Mr. Motley stands unexcelled amongst historical writers in the English tongue. The publication of his first work, the Rise of the Dutch Republic, placed him at once in the foremost rank of living historians. It would scarcely be too high merit to award him, to say that his writings combine all the brilliancy and movement of Lord Macaulay's best manner with all the fidelity of Froude. His vivid pages glow and burn with the genuine fire of Thucydides, and they present pictures of the era as faithful to fact and nature as the pages of Tacitus. No man who loves knowledge for its own sake, can say that he knows all that history at its best is capable of achieving in illuminating the mind and stirring the heart, until he has followed throughout Motley's splendid volumes, the glorious story of the self-devoted patriotism, the unconquerable bravery, the high inspired heroism, of the founders of the Dutch Republic, diaries Lamb characteristically suggested to his friend Manning, when the latter was proposing to take a voyage to China, to "read a few romances to coal down his imagination." The same suggestion might be made in sober earnest to a reader who has just laid down the last volume of the History of the United Netherlands. Romance pales into colourless commonplace beside such a story of real life as there is evolved in that masterly work and its predecessor. The wand of the great magician himself who conjured up the marvellous scenes of chivalry in Ivan hoe is less potent,—as truth is always grander than fiction,—than the pen which records in imperishable English the course of the Inquisition in Holland, the bloody rule of the merciless Alva, the siege of Antwerp, the battle of Nieuport, the leaguer of Ostend, the heroic life and glorious death of William the Silent, warrior, statesman, patriot, and martyr.