Prescott's detachment with regard to politics was partly due, no doubt, to the nature of the life he led, which kept him isolated from the bustle of the world about him; yet it was probably due still more to a lack of combativeness in his nature. Motley once said of him that he lacked the capacity for _sæva indignatio_. This remark was called forth by Prescott's tolerant view of Philip II. of Spain, who was in Motley's eyes little better than a monster. One might fairly, however, give it a wider application, and we must regard it as an undeniable defect in Prescott that nothing external could strike fire from him. Thus, when his intimate friend Sumner had been brutally assaulted in the Senate chamber by the Southern bully, Brooks, Prescott wrote to him: "You have escaped the crown of martyrdom by a narrow chance, and have got all the honours, which are almost as dangerous to one's head as a gutta-percha cane." There is a tameness about this sentence which one would scarcely notice had Sumner merely received a black eye, but which offends one's sense of fitness when we recall that Sumner had been beaten into insensibility, and that he never fully recovered from the attack. Again, when, in 1854, Boston was all ablaze over the capture of a fugitive slave, when the city was filled with troops and muskets were levelled at the populace, Prescott merely remarked to an English correspondent: "It is a disagreeable business." To be sure, he also said, "It made my blood boil," but the general tone of the letter shows that his blood must have boiled at a very low temperature. Nevertheless, he seems to have been somewhat stirred by the exciting struggle which took place over Kansas between the Free-Soil forces and the partisans of slavery. Hence, in 1856, he cast his vote for Frémont, the first Republican candidate for the Presidency. But, as a rule, the politics of the sixteenth century were his most serious concern, and in the very year in which he voted for Frémont, he wrote: "I belong to the sixteenth century and am quite out of place when I sleep elsewhere." It was this feeling which led him to decline a tempting invitation to write a history of the modern conquest of Mexico by the American army under General Scott. The offer came to him in 1847; and both the theme itself and the terms in which the offer was made might well have attracted one whose face was set less resolutely toward the historic past. His comment was characteristic. "I had rather not meddle with heroes who have not been under ground two centuries at least." It is interesting to note that the subject which Prescott then rejected has never been adequately treated; and that the brilliant exploits of Scott in Mexico still await a worthy chronicler.