Mr. Blaine reached home weary in body, but fresh in spirit, from the
great political war in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, just
in time to cast his ballot the last time for Abraham Lincoln. He had
stumped his own state from “Kittery to Houlton,” which are the extreme
points in Maine, and had put in about fifty speeches in the other
states,--between one and two hundred in all. He had confidence in the
result, for he had been near the people and got their temper and knew
the purpose of their sovereign will in the matter, and so it came, but
with it the reflection that they were only about five years off from
the Dred Scott decision, and every free state but one voting solid
in the electoral college for the great abolition president, Abraham
Lincoln.
How dark and infamous, and mysterious, too, looked the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise; the war with Mexico; the Kansas and Nebraska
bill; the proposition to purchase Cuba for purposes of slavery, and
all the political paltroonery and truckling of honored public men, the
trimmers and time-servers!
But what ruin strewed the pathway to such triumph! There was not a
slave in all the land now, according to the proclamation, emphatically
endorsed, and the rebellion well-nigh crushed. The effort had been,
it is thought, for the South to hold out until after the presidential
election, and hope for the defeat of Mr. Lincoln. The war was over six
months after his re-election.
In less than a month after election day, Mr. Blaine was in his seat
in congress (December 5th), and there, also, with a knowledge of the
fact that not only had Mr. Lincoln been re-elected president, but he
himself, also, had been re-elected to congress, for the election took
place a year before each term expired. How could he be otherwise than
happy regarding the political outlook of either himself or the nation.
He need have little thought for himself; he had surely caught at the
flood that tide which leads on to greatness. He was not a coming man,
but one who had already come. His record of the former session had made
him more widely known, and known in a larger sense. Indeed, he was
every way a larger man; beloved at home, respected and admired abroad
in other states, and where his great life-work had so auspiciously
begun--in congress.
The principle of evolution was at work upon him in its only true sense,
just as it operates in tree and flower, where heaven and earth in all
their vital forces are made tributary to Nature’s laws of unfolding in
the deep processes of growth upward to perfection.
There had been a wondrous involution from centuries of great history,
according to subtle, silent laws of hereditary inheritance, in very
blood and life, of tone, and quality, and temper, and now there is
evolved, evoked, just that of power which tells of kinship with those
who have gone before.
It should not cause surprise that Nature keeps her treasures, or that
the right, the good, the true, live to confront the wrong, the false,
the bad, with just those elements of a nobler life that no power can
resist.