Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/58

 He is perhaps the first thoroughly competent Englishman who has ever seen and described the men. manners, and institutions of the United States as they really are, and not as they are wont to appear to the jaundiced e^e of national jealousy and aristocratic aversion. The American Republic is substantially Sir Charles's "Greater Britain," to which he foresees the hegemony of the English-speaking race is ultimately destined to fall. He believes in the possibility of one omnipotent, all-embracing federation of English-speaking men, of which the United States shall at once supply both the nucleus and the model.

In the study of foreign affairs he has taken nothing for granted. Every thing he has examined on the spot and verified with his own eyes. As Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and mouthpiece of the Government in that department of state in the House of Commons, Sir Charles inspires universal confidence. Like Mr. Gladstone, he is an untiring toiler, and from the first he has worked on the most profitable lines. Whether as law-student, traveller, author, journalist, or politician, whatever he has done, he has done faithfully and well. Every recess he shuns delights, and spends laborious holidays at his romantic provincial retreat at La Sainte Campagne, near Toulon, in digesting materials for a magnum opus, "The History of the Present Century."

He is personally a total abstainer, though opposed to the Permissive Bill, and is in all things a pattern of method and regularity of habits.

At Cambridge he was a finished oarsman. He is likewise a vigorous long-distance walker, a good marksman, and a deft fencer.