Mr. Cleveland in the White House—Mr. Bayard in the Department of
State—Queer Appointments to Office—The One-Party Power—The End of North
and South Sectionalism
I
The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was set
forth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kind
of prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He was a
sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked back
affectionately upon the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poor
school-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the
House he and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their
friendship when both of them had reached the Senate.
I inherited Mr. Blaine’s desk in the Ways and Means Committee room. In
one of the drawers of this he had left a parcel of forgotten papers,
which I returned to him. He made a joke of the secrets they covered and
the fortunate circumstance that they had fallen into the hands of a
friend and not of an enemy.
No man of his time could hold a candle to Mr. Blaine in what we call
magnetism—that is, in manly charm, supported by facility and brain
power. Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party leadership before
his time. He made a good third to them. I never knew Mr. Clay, but with
Judge Douglas I was well acquainted, and the difference between him and
Mr. Blaine in leadership might be called negligible.
Both were intellectually aggressive and individually amiable. They at
least seemed to love their fellow men. Each had been tried by many
adventures. Each had gone, as it were, “through the flint mill.” Born
to good conditions—Mr. Blaine sprang from aristocratic forebears—each
knew by early albeit brief experience the seamy side of life; as each,
like Clay, nursed a consuming passion for the presidency. Neither had
been made for a subaltern, and they chafed under the subaltern yoke to
which fate had condemned them.