CHAPTER VII._The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

LEADER AND STATESMAN.

As a politician, General Garfield was peculiar. In fact, he was scarcely

a politician at all. The title of this chapter tells what he was. While

he was in Europe the inflation cry was raised. Greenbacks were good. The

Government printing-presses were idle. Why not put the presses at work

making more greenbacks? There were plenty of worthy, industrious men,

who were poor. Why not have money enough to place every one in

comfortable circumstances? What a capital idea! Why had no one thought

of it before? The West, and particularly Ohio, laughed aloud with

pleasure at the new fountain of wealth which had been right under the

people’s noses all the time, and no one ever suspected it. In order to

make things even all around, it was the thing to do to make the

bondholders take greenbacks instead of gold for their bonds. If they

objected, no matter; they could stand it. Ohio Republicans took up this

battle cry. General Garfield’s constituents were for inflation with all

their hearts. As for himself he had, in March, 1866, declared for hard

money, and for the payment of the bonds in gold. Congressmen have to go

to the country every two years, so that the popular sentiment may be

constantly represented in the Lower House of Congress. Garfield had been

reëlected three times. To secure another election, most men would have

found their political opinions, about election time, gradually coming

around to those of the people. Read the following extract from a letter

by General Garfield to his confidential friend, Hinsdale, written March

8, 1868:

“_The State convention at Columbus has committed itself to some

financial doctrines that, if I understand them, I can not and will

not indorse. If my constituents approve them, they can not approve

me._ Before many weeks my immediate political future will be

decided. I care less about the result than I have ever cared

before.”

How is that for independence?

But the private letter was only the preface to an expression of the same

thing in public. When General Garfield came home his friends found that

he was immovable on the financial question. A short time before the

nominating convention he was about to return to Washington. Some friends

at Jefferson arranged to give him a reception on the eve of his

departure. There was to be some speech-making. His friends had urged him

to let the financial question alone. The welcoming address contained

some broad hints. The speaker hinted at the greenback platform, and

delicately intimated that General Garfield’s return was conditioned upon

his indorsement of the platform. Then the thunderer let fly. Garfield

took up the question of finance, and, in the boldest terms, denounced

the party platform as dishonest and despicable. He declared that if a

life-time of office were offered him, with the understanding that he was

to support the platform, he would refuse it at once. Then he took

himself off to Washington. When the time for the convention came he was

renominated, and a short time later elected.

It is impossible to even sketch the varied activities of the man from

this time on, in Congress. His voluminous reports, his comprehensive

debates on every leading subject, his immense and varied committee work,

comprise a vast field, the very outline of which would surpass the

limits of this work. No subject of national importance escaped his

attention. Reconstruction, pensions, navigation, tariff, internal

improvements, the census, education, the Indian question, corporations,

the currency, national banks, public expenditures, civil service reform,

railways, civil rights, polygamy, the Chinese—these are only a few of

the great subjects which he mastered. His speeches are incomparable for

their profound learning, their exhaustive research, their glowing

rhetoric. They might serve as text-books upon the great governmental

problems of the age. In looking over the record of the proceedings in

Congress at this period, one can but be impressed with the marked

superiority of his efforts over those of the large majority of his

compeers. However worthy the utterances of these latter may be viewed

alone, they are dwarfed by the forced comparison with the productions of

his majestic mind. These speeches mark the man as a carefully trained

intellectual giant, perfectly at home and a terror in the field of

debate. They are of inestimable value now, as giving his intellectual

biography.

On December 14, 1868, he introduced a bill “To strengthen the public

credit.” This subsequently became a part of the great bill making our

bonds payable in gold. Around this fortification of the public credit,

for ten years, political warfare raged the fiercest, but the rampart was

never taken; and, in 1879, when resumption was accomplished, the law

still remained on the statute book. Every attempt to repeal it was

fought by Garfield on the principles of political science, and his name

must be placed with those of Grant and Sherman on this question.

February 26, 1869, General Garfield, as Chairman of the Military

Committee, made the monster report upon the reorganization of the army.

It contains one hundred and thirty-seven printed pages. The stupendous

problem of readjusting the armies of the republic to a peace footing,

had occupied Garfield for years. His report was the result of

examinations of all the leading army officers. It contained the history

of each department of the army. It illuminated all the dark corners, the

secret channels, the hidden chambers of corruption which had been

constructed in the military policy of the country, and was the product

of enormous labor.

In the spring of 1869 General Garfield introduced a resolution for the

appointment of a committee to examine into the necessities for

legislation upon the subject of the ninth census, to be taken the

following year. He was appointed chairman. His speeches on the great

subject of statistics are most characteristic. They are wholly out of

the rut of Congressional speeches. They show Garfield in the light of a

political scientist. Nothing could more strikingly prove the enormous

reach of his mind. He showed himself abreast of the scientific thought

of the age. Volume after volume of the _Congressional Globe_ will be

searched in vain to find speeches from any other man which even

approximate these studies in the region of social science. Nowhere in or

out of Congress can be found so succinct and admirable a statement of

the importance of statistics. Here is an extract from his first speech,

made April 6, 1869:

“This is the age of statistics, Mr. Speaker. The word ‘statistics’

itself did not exist until 1749, whence we date the beginning of a

new science on which modern legislation must be based, in order to

be permanent. The treatise of Achenwall, the German philosopher who

originated the word, laid the foundation of many of the greatest

reforms in modern legislation. Statistics are state facts, facts for

the consideration of statesmen, such as they may not neglect with

safety. It has been truly said that ‘statistics are history in

repose; history is statistics in motion.’ If we neglect the one, we

shall deserve to be neglected by the other. The legislator without

statistics is like the mariner at sea without the compass. Nothing

can safely be committed to his guidance. A question of fearful

importance, the well-being of this Republic, has agitated this House

for many weeks. It is this: Are our rich men growing richer, and our

poor growing poorer? And how can this most vital question be

settled, except by the most careful and honest examination of the

facts? Who can doubt that the next census will reveal to us more

important truths concerning the situation of our people than any

census ever taken by any nation? By what standard could we measure

the value of a complete, perfect record of the condition of the

people of this country, and such facts as should exhibit their

burdens and their strength? Who doubts that it would be a document

of inestimable value to the legislator and the nation? How to

achieve it, how to accomplish it, is the great question.

“We are near the end of a decade that has been full of earthquakes,

and amid the tumult we have lost our reckoning. We do not yet

comprehend the stupendous changes through which we have passed, nor

can we until the whole field is resurveyed. If a thousand volcanoes

had been bursting beneath the ocean, the mariner would need new

charts before he could safely sail the seas again. We are soon to

set out on our next decade with a thousand new elements thrown in

upon us by the war. The way is trackless. Who shall pilot us? The

war repealed a part of our venerable census law. One schedule was

devoted to slaves. Thank God! it is useless now. Old things have

passed away, and a multitude of new things are to be here recorded;

and not only the things to be taken, but the manner of taking them,

requires a thorough remodeling at our hands. If this Congress does

not worthily meet the demands of this great occasion, every member

must bear no small share of the odium that justly attaches to men

who fail to discharge duties of momentous importance, which once

neglected can never be performed.”

On December 16, 1867, General Garfield made a second speech on the

subject, so elaborate and remarkable, so unlike any thing to be found

elsewhere in all the annals of the American Congress, that we yield

large space to it. The latter part of the speech relates to the defects

of the old law, and the advantages of the proposed new one:

“The modern census is so closely related to the science of

statistics that no general discussion of it is possible without

considering the principles on which statistical science rests and

the objects which it proposes to reach.

“The science of statistics is of recent date, and, like many of its

sister sciences, owes its origin to the best and freest impulses of

modern civilization. The enumerations of inhabitants and the

appraisements of property made by some of the nations of antiquity

were practical means employed sometimes to distribute political

power, but more frequently to adjust the burdens of war, but no

attempt was made among them to classify the facts obtained so as to

make them the basis of scientific induction. The thought of studying

these facts to ascertain the wants of society had not then dawned

upon the human mind, and, of course, there was not a science of

statistics in this modern sense.

“It is never easy to fix the precise date of the birth of any

science, but we may safely say that statistics did not enter its

scientific phase before 1749, when it received from Professor

Achenwall, of Göttingen, not only its name, but the first

comprehensive statement of its principles. Without pausing to trace

the stages of its growth, some of the results of the cultivation of

statistics in the spirit and methods of science may be stated as

germane to this discussion:

“1. It has developed the truth that society is an organism, whose

elements and forces conform to laws as constant and pervasive as

those which govern the material universe; and that the study of

these laws will enable man to ameliorate his condition, to

emancipate himself from the cruel dominion of superstition, and from

countless evils which were once thought beyond his control, and will

make him the master rather than the slave of nature. Mankind have

been slow to believe that order reigns in the universe—that the

world is a cosmos and not a chaos.

“The assertion of the reign of law has been stubbornly resisted at

every step. The divinities of heathen superstition still linger in

one form or another in the faith of the ignorant, and even

intelligent men shrink from the contemplation of one supreme will

acting regularly, not fortuitously, through laws beautiful and

simple rather than through a fitful and capricious system of

intervention.

“Lecky tells us that in the early ages it was believed that the

motion of the heavenly bodies, as well as atmospheric changes, was

affected by angels. In the Talmud, a special angel was assigned to

every star and every element, and similar notions were general

throughout the Middle Ages.

“The scientific spirit has cast out the demons, and presented us

with nature clothed and in her right mind and living under the reign

of law. It has given us, for the sorceries of the alchemist, the

beautiful laws of chemistry; for the dreams of the astrologer, the

sublime truths of astronomy; for the wild visions of cosmogony, the

monumental records of geology; for the anarchy of diabolism, the

laws of God. But more stubborn still has been the resistance against

every attempt to assert the reign of law in the realm of society. In

that struggle, statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has

poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and

pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.

“We no longer hope to predict the career and destiny of a human

being by studying the conjunction of planets that presided at his

birth. We study rather the laws of life within him, and the elements

and forces of nature and society around him. We no longer attribute

the untimely death of infants wholly to the sin of Adam, for we know

it is the result of bad nursing and ignorance. We are beginning to

acknowledge that—

“‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

Governments are only beginning to recognize these truths.

“In 1853 the Presbytery of Edinburgh petitioned the British ministry

to appoint a day of national fasting and prayer, in order to stay

the ravages of cholera in Scotland. Lord Palmerston, the Home

Secretary, replied in a letter which a century before no British

statesman would have dared to write. He told the clergy of Scotland

that: ‘The plague being already upon them, activity was preferable

to humiliation; that the causes of disease should be removed by

improving the abodes of the poor, and cleansing them from those

sources of contagion which would infallibly breed pestilence and be

fruitful in death in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a

united but inactive nation.’ Henry Thomas Buckle expressed the

belief that this letter will be quoted in future ages as a striking

illustration of the progress of enlightened public opinion. But that

further progress is possible is seen in the fact that within the

last three years an English bishop has attributed the rinderpest to

the Oxford essays and the writings of Colenso.

“In these remarks I disclaim any reference to the dominion of the

Creator over his spiritual universe, and the high and sacred duty of

all his intelligent creatures to reverence and worship him. I speak

solely of those laws that relate to the physical, intellectual, and

social life of man.

“2. The development of statistics is causing history to be

rewritten. Till recently the historian studied nations in the

aggregate, and gave us only the story of princes, dynasties, sieges,

and battles. Of the people themselves—the great social body with

life, growth, sources, elements, and laws of its own—he told us

nothing. Now statistical inquiry leads him into the hovels, homes,

workshops, mines, fields, prisons, hospitals, and all places where

human nature displays its weakness and its strength. In these

explorations he discovers the seeds of national growth and decay,

and thus becomes the prophet of his generation.

“Without the aid of statistics, that most masterly chapter of human

history, the third of Macaulay’s first volume, could never have been

written.

“3. Statistical science is indispensable to modern statesmanship. In

legislation as in physical science it is beginning to be understood

that we can control terrestrial forces only by obeying their laws.

The legislator must formulate in his statues not only the national

will, but also those great laws of social life revealed by

statistics. He must study society rather than black-letter learning.

He must learn the truth ‘that society usually prepares the crime,

and the criminal is only the instrument that accomplishes it;’ that

statesmanship consists rather in removing causes than in punishing

or evading results.

“Light is itself a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses

that grow in the darkness disappear like owls and bats before the

light of day. For example, who can doubt that before many months the

press of this country will burn down the whipping-posts of Delaware

as effectually as the mirrors of Archimedes burned the Roman ships

in the harbor of Syracuse?

“I know of no writer who has exhibited the importance of this

science to statesmanship so fully and so ably as Sir George Cornwall

Lewis, in his treatise _On the Methods of Observation and Reasoning

on Politics_.

“After showing that politics is now taking its place among the

sciences, and as a science its superstructure rests on observed and

classified facts, he says of the registration of political facts,

which consists of history and statistics, that ‘it may be considered

as the entrance and propylæa to politics. It furnishes the materials

upon which the artificer operates, which he hews into shape and

builds up into a symmetrical structure.’

“In a subsequent chapter, he portrays the importance of statistics

to the practical statesman in this strong and lucid language:

“‘He can hardly take a single safe step without consulting them.

Whether he be framing a plan of finance, or considering the

operation of an existing tax, or following the variations of trade,

or studying the public health, or examining the effects of a

criminal law, his conclusions ought to be guided by statistical

data.’—Vol. i, p. 134.

“Napoleon, with that wonderful vision vouchsafed to genius, saw the

importance of this science when he said:

“‘Statistics is the budget of things; and without a budget there is

no public safety.’

“We may not, perhaps, go as far as Goethe did, and declare that

‘figures govern the world;’ but we can fully agree with him that

‘they show how it is governed.’

“Baron Quetelet, of Belgium, one of the ripest scholars and

profoundest students of statistical science, concludes his latest

chapter of scientific results in these words:

“‘One of the principal results of civilization is to reduce more and

more the limits within which the different elements of society

fluctuate. The more intelligence increases the more these limits are

reduced, and the nearer we approach the beautiful and the good. The

perfectibility of the human species results as a necessary

consequence of all our researches. Physical defects and

monstrosities are gradually disappearing; the frequency and severity

of diseases are resisted more successfully by the progress of

medical science; the moral qualities of man are proving themselves

not less capable of improvement; and the more we advance, the less

we shall have need to fear those great political convulsions and

wars and their attendant results, which are the scourges of

mankind.’

“It should be added that the growing importance of political

science, as well as its recent origin, is exhibited in the fact that

nearly every modern nation has established within the last half

century a bureau of general statistics for the uses of statesmanship

and science. In the thirty states of Europe they are now assiduously

cultivating the science. Not one of their central bureaus was fully

organized before the year 1800.

“The chief instrument of American statistics is the census, which

should accomplish a two-fold object. It should serve the country by

making a full and accurate exhibit of the elements of national life

and strength, and it should serve the science of statistics by so

exhibiting general results that they may be compared with similar

data obtained by other nations.

“In the light of its national uses and its relations to social

science, let us consider the origin and development of the American

census.

“During the colonial period, several enumerations of the inhabitants

of the Colonies were made by the order of the British Board of

Trade; but no general concerted attempt was made to take a census

until after the opening of the Revolutionary War. As illustrating

the practical difficulty of census-taking at that time, a passage in

a letter, written in 1715 to the Lords of Trade, by Hunter, the

colonial governor of New York, may be interesting:

“‘The superstition of this people is so unsurmountable that I

believe I shall never be able to obtain a complete list of the

number of inhabitants of this province.’—_New York Colonial MSS._,

vol. v, p. 459.

“He then suggests a computation, based upon returns of militia and

of freemen, afterward the women and children, and then the servants

and slaves.

“William Burnet, colonial governor of New Jersey, to the Lords of

Trade, June 26, 1726, after mentioning returns made in 1723, says:

“‘I would have then ordered the like accounts to be taken in New

Jersey, but I was advised it might make the people uneasy, they

being generally of a New England extraction, and thereby

enthusiasts; and that they would take it for a repetition of the

same sin that David committed in numbering the people, and might

bring on the like judgments. This notion put me off from it at the

time, but since your lordships desire it, I will give the orders to

the sheriffs, that it may be done as soon as may be.’

“That this sentiment has not wholly disappeared, may be seen from

the following: At a public meeting held on the evening of November

12, 1867, in this city, pending the taking of the census of the

District of Columbia by the Department of Education and the

municipal authorities, a speaker, whose name is given in the

reported proceedings, said:

“‘I regard the whole matter as illegal. Taking the census is an

important matter. In the Bible we are told David ordered Joab to

take the census when he had no authority to do so, and Joab was

punished for it.’ He thought these parties, the Metropolitan police,

should be enjoined from asking questions, and he advised those who

had not returned the blank, not to fill it up or answer a single

question.

“As early as 1775 the Continental Congress resolved that certain of

the burdens of the war should be distributed among the Colonies,

‘according to the number of inhabitants of all ages, including

negroes and mulattoes, in each colony;’ and also recommended to the

several colonial conventions, councils, or committees of safety, to

ascertain the number of inhabitants in each colony, and to make

returns to Congress as soon as possible. Such responses as were made

to this recommendation, were probably of no great value, and are

almost wholly lost.

“The Articles of Confederation, as reported by John Dickinson, in

July, 1776, provided for a triennial enumeration of the inhabitants

of the States, such enumeration to be the basis of adjusting the

‘charges of war and all other expenses that should be incurred for

the common defense or general welfare.’ The eighth of the articles,

as they were finally adopted, provided that these charges and

expenses should be defrayed out of a common treasury, to be supplied

by the several States in ‘proportion to the value of land within

each State granted to or surveyed for any person; and such land and

the buildings and improvements thereon shall be estimated according

to such mode as the United States, in Congress assembled, shall from

time to time direct and appoint.’

“The ninth article gave Congress the authority ‘to agree upon the

numbers of land forces, and to make requisitions from each of its

quota in proportion to the number of white inhabitants in such

State.’ These articles, unquestionably contemplated a national

census, to include a valuation of land and an enumeration of

population, but they led to no substantial results. When the blanks

in the revenue report of 1783 were filled, the committee reported

that they had been compelled to estimate the population of all the

States except New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and

Maryland.

“The next step is to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The

charter of Government, framed by that body, provided for a national

census to be taken decennially. Moreau de Jonnés, a distinguished

French writer on statistics, in his ‘Elements de Statistique,’

refers to the constitutional provision in the following elevated

language:

“‘The United States presents in its history a phenomenon which has

no parallel. It is that of a people who instituted the statistics of

their country on the very day when they formed their Government, and

who regulated in the same instrument the census of their citizens,

their civil and political rights, and the destinies of the country.’

“De Jonnés considers the American census the more remarkable because

it was instituted at so early a date by a people very jealous of

their liberties; and he gives emphasis to his statement by referring

to the heavy penalties imposed by the first law of Congress to carry

these provisions into effect.

“It must be confessed, however, that the American founders looked

only to practical ends. A careful search through the ‘Madison

Papers’ has failed to show that any member of the Convention

considered the census in its scientific bearings. But they gave us

an instrument by which those ends can be reached. ‘They builded

wiser than they knew.’

“In pursuance of the requirements of the Constitution, an act

providing for an enumeration of the inhabitants of the United States

was passed March 1, 1790.

“As illustrating the growth of the American census, it is worth

observing that the report of the first census was an octavo pamphlet

of fifty-two pages, and that of 1800, a folio of seventy-eight

pages.

“On the 23d of January, 1800, a memorial of the American

Philosophical Society, signed by Thomas Jefferson as its President,

was laid before the Senate. In this remarkable paper, written in the

spirit and interest of science, the memorialists prayed that the

sphere of the census might be greatly extended; but it does not

appear to have made any impression on the Senate, for no trace of it

is found in the annals of Congress.

[Illustration: THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON.—THE SCENE OF GARFIELD’S

LABORS FOR SIXTEEN YEARS.]

“The results attained by the first six censuses were meager for the

purposes of science. That of 1790 embraced population only, its

single schedule containing six inquiries. That of 1800 had only a

population schedule with fourteen inquiries. In 1810, an attempt was

made to superadd statistics of manufactures, but the results were of

no value. In 1820 the statistics of manufactures were again

worthless. In 1830 the attempt to take them was abandoned. In 1840

there were schedules of population and manufactures, and some

inquiries relating to education and employment.

“The law of May 23, 1850, under which the seventh and eighth

censuses were taken, marks an important era in the history of

American statistics. This law owes many of its wisest provisions and

much of the success of its execution to Mr. Joseph C. G. Kennedy,

under whose intelligent superintendence the chief work of the last

census was accomplished. This law marks the transition of the

American census from the merely practical to the scientific phase.

The system thus originated needs correction to make it conform to

the later results of statistical science and to the wants of the

American people. Nevertheless, it deserves the high commendations

passed upon it by some of the most eminent statisticians and

publicists of the Old World.”

In continuing his speech, General Garfield considered the defects in the

method of taking the census. Among the many improvements suggested are

the following:

“The war has left us so many mutilated men, that a record should be

made of those who have lost a limb or have been otherwise disabled,

and the committee have added an inquiry to show the state of public

health and the prevalence of some of the principal diseases. Dr.

Jarvis, of Massachusetts, one of the highest living authorities on

vital statistics, in a masterly paper presented to the committee,

urged the importance of measuring as accurately as possible the

effective physical strength of the people.

“It is not generally known how large a proportion of each nation is

wholly or partially unfitted by physical disability for

self-support. The statistics of France show that, in 1851, in a

population of less than thirty-six millions, the deaf, dumb, blind,

deformed, idiotic, and those otherwise mutilated or disabled,

amounted to almost two millions. We thus see that in a country of

the highest civilization the effective strength of its population is

reduced one-eighteenth by physical defects. What general would

venture to conduct a campaign without ascertaining the physical

qualities of his soldiers as well as the number on his rolls? In

this great industrial battle, which this nation is now fighting, we

ought to take every available means to ascertain the effective

strength of the country.”

Farther on he says:

“An inquiry was also added in regard to dwellings, so as to exhibit

the several principal materials for construction, as wood, brick,

stone, etc., and the value of each. Few things indicate more fully

the condition of the people than the houses they occupy. The average

home is not an imperfect picture of the wealth, comfort, refinement,

and civilization of the average citizen.”

The next paragraph is devoted to the question of determining the number

of voters. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution reduced a

State’s representation in Congress to the measure of its votes. This was

thought at the time to refer merely to the States where negroes were not

allowed to vote, but Garfield found that in all the States, there were

_eighty restrictions in the right to vote, besides color_ and crime,

ranging all the way from residence to education and character.

Under the topic of agricultural products, he said:

“It is believed that the schedule thus amended will enable us to

ascertain the elements of those wonderful forces which have made our

country the granary of the civilized world; will exhibit also the

defects of our agricultural methods, and stimulate our farmers to

adopt those means which have doubled the agricultural products of

England since the days of the Stuarts, and have more than doubled

the comforts of her people. The extent of that great progress can be

seen in such facts as these: that ‘in the reign of Henry VII. fresh

meat was never eaten even by the gentleman attendant on a great

earl, except during the short interval between midsummer and

Michaelmas,’ because no adequate means were known of fattening

cattle in the winter, or even of preventing the death of one-fifth

of their whole number each year; that Catharine, queen of Charles

II. sent to Flanders for her salad, which the wretched gardening of

England did not sufficiently provide.”

Under the head of corporation statistics, he makes the following

significant statement:

“Now that the great question of human slavery is removed from the

arena of American politics, I am persuaded that the next great

question to be confronted, _will be that of corporations, and their

relation to the interests of the people and to the national life.

The fear is now entertained by many of our best men, that the

National and State legislatures of the Union, in creating these vast

corporations, have evoked a spirit which may escape and defy their

control and which may wield a power greater than legislatures

themselves._ The rapidity with which railroad corporations have been

consolidated and placed within the power of a few men, during the

past year, is not the least alarming manifestation of this power.

Without here discussing the right of Congress to legislate on all

the matters suggested in this direction, the committee have provided

in this bill to arm the census office with the power to demand from

these corporations a statement of the elements of which they are

composed and an exhibit of their transactions.”

The learning, the philosophic and advanced views, the masterly grouping

of social phenomena throughout this speech are absolutely novel and

unique in the wilderness of Congressional oratory. After all the wealth

of industry and thought expended on the subject, the bill failed to pass

the Senate, so that the ninth census had to be taken under the old law.

The body of the bill, however, eventually became the law under which the

unequaled census of 1880 was taken.

As we advance through the multitude of General Garfield’s congressional

speeches, selecting here and there some typical extract, his report on

“Black Friday” attracts attention. Every one remembers the gold panic of

September 24, 1869. It was the greatest financial conspiracy known to

history. Wall Street, the scene of innumerable frauds, snares,

conspiracies, and panics, never saw any thing to compare with the

historic “Black Friday.” The House of Representatives appointed the

Committee of Banking and Currency of which General Garfield had been

made chairman at the opening of the Forty-First Congress, to investigate

the causes of that financial convulsion. He went to New York, _incog._,

managed to get into the private room of the Gold Board, where the matter

was undergoing a secret investigation. Here General Garfield made notes,

and got his clue. When he could stay no longer, he left a clever

substitute. Each witness was attached as he left the building and

hurried down to Washington before he could be primed. General Garfield’s

examination of the witnesses was adroit and successful. The taciturn and

self-poised Gould, the wily and exuberant Jim Fisk, alike were compelled

to lay open the full details of the scheme. General Garfield’s report,

made March 1,1870, goes to the bottom of this the darkest conspiracy

ever planned. It reads like a novel, and contains the material for a

whole library of fiction. Some idea of the foul plot may be had from the

following summary and extracts:

BLACK FRIDAY.

“On the first of September, 1868, the price of gold was one hundred

and forty-five. During the autumn and winter it continued to

decline, interrupted only by occasional fluctuations, till in March,

1869, it touched one hundred and thirty and one-fourth (its lowest

point for three years), and continued near that rate until the

middle of April, the earliest period to which the evidence taken by

the committee refers. At that time, Mr. Jay Gould, president of the

Erie Railroad Company, bought seven millions of gold, and put up the

price from one hundred and thirty-two to one hundred and forty.

Other brokers followed his example, and by the twentieth of May had

put up the price to one hundred and forty-four and seven-eighths,

from which point, in spite of speculation, it continued to decline,

and on the last day of July stood at one hundred and thirty-six.

“The first indication of a concerted movement on the part of those

who were prominent in the panic of September was an effort to secure

the appointment of some person who should be subservient to their

schemes, as Assistant Treasurer at New York, in place of Mr. H. H.

Van Dyck, who resigned in the month of June. In this effort Mr.

Gould and Mr. A. R. Corbin, a brother-in-law of President Grant,

appear to have been closely and intimately connected. If the

testimony of the witnesses is to be believed, Mr. Corbin suggested

the name of his stepson-in-law, Robert B. Catherwood, and Mr. Gould

joined in the suggestion.

“On what grounds Mr. Catherwood declined to be a candidate does not

appear. The parties next turned their attention to General

Butterfield, and, both before and after his appointment, claimed to

be his supporters. Gould and Catherwood testify that Corbin claimed

to have secured the appointment, though Corbin swears that he made

no recommendation in the case. General Butterfield was appointed

Assistant Treasurer, and entered upon the duties of that office on

the first of July. It is, however, proper to state that the

committee has no evidence that General Butterfield was in any way

cognizant of the corrupt schemes which led the conspirators to

desire his appointment, nor that their recommendations had any

weight in securing it. In addition to these efforts, the

conspirators resolved to discover, if possible, the purposes of the

President and the Secretary of the Treasury in regard to the sales

of gold. The first attempt in this direction, as exhibited in the

evidence, was made on the 15th of June, when the President was on

board one of Messrs. Fisk and Gould’s Fall River steamers, on his

way to Boston. At nine o’clock in the evening, supper was served on

board, and the presence at the table of such men as Cyrus W. Field,

with several leading citizens of New York and Boston, was sufficient

to prevent any suspicion that this occasion was to be used for the

benefit of private speculation; but the testimony of Fisk and Gould

indicates clearly the purpose they had in view. Fisk says:

“‘On our passage over to Boston with General Grant, we endeavored to

ascertain what his position in regard to finances was. We went down

to supper about nine o’clock, intending, while we were there, to

have this thing pretty thoroughly talked up, and, if possible, to

relieve him from any idea of putting the price of gold down.’”

“Mr. Gould’s account is as follows:

“‘At this supper the question came up about the state of the

country, the crops, prospects ahead, etc. The President was a

listener; the other gentlemen were discussing; some were in favor of

Boutwell’s selling gold, and some opposed to it. After they had all

interchanged views, some one asked the President what his view was.

He remarked that he thought there was a certain amount of

fictitiousness about the prosperity of the country, and that the

bubble might as well be tapped in one way as another. We supposed,

from that conversation, that the President was a contractionist. His

remark struck across us like a wet blanket.’

“It appears that these skillfully-contrived efforts elicited from

the President but one remark, and this opened a gloomy prospect for

the speculators. Upon their return to New York, Fisk and Gould

determined to bring a great pressure upon the administration, to

prevent, if possible, a further decline in gold, which would

certainly interfere with their purposes of speculation. This was to

be effected by facts and arguments presented in the name of the

country and its business interests; and a financial theory was

agreed upon, which, on its face, would appeal to the business

interests of the country, and enlist in its support many patriotic

citizens, but would, if adopted, incidentally enable the

conspirators to make their speculations eminently successful. That

theory was, that the business interests of the country required an

advance in the price of gold; that, in order to move the fall crops

and secure the foreign market for our grain, it was necessary that

gold should be put up to 145. According to Mr. Jay Gould, this

theory, for the benefit of American trade and commerce, was

suggested by Mr. James McHenry, a prominent English financier, who

furnished Mr. Gould the data with which to advocate it.”

This plan was tried vigorously. Hired newspapers filled their editorial

pages with arguments. Every mail brought pamphlets, papers, memorials,

arguments, etc., to the silent President. Wherever he turned, some one

was at hand to pour into his ear a plea for the poor country. If the

Government would sell no gold, the conspirators would have the market in

their own hands. Men having contracts to furnish gold would have to buy

of them at any price. There was no word from Grant, but the conspirators

continued to buy up gold. Gould took in a partner:

“Fisk was told that Corbin had enlisted the interests of persons

high in authority, that the President, Mrs. Grant, General Porter,

and General Butterfield were corruptly interested in the movement,

and that the Secretary of the Treasury had been forbidden to sell

gold. Though these declarations were wickedly false, as the evidence

abundantly shows, yet the compounded villainy presented by Gould and

Corbin was too tempting a bait for Fisk to resist. He joined the

movement at once, and brought to its aid all the force of his

magnetic and infectious enthusiasm. The malign influence which

Catiline wielded over the reckless and abandoned youth of Rome,

finds a fitting parallel in the power which Fisk carried into Wall

Street, when, followed by the thugs of Erie and the debauchees of

the Opera House, he swept into the gold-room and defied both the

Street and the Treasury. Indeed, the whole gold movement is not an

unworthy copy of that great conspiracy to lay Rome in ashes and

deluge its streets in blood, for the purpose of enriching those who

were to apply the torch and wield the dagger.

“With the great revenue of the Erie Railway Company at their

command, and having converted the Tenth National Bank into a

manufactory of certified checks to be used as cash at their

pleasure, they terrified all opponents by the gigantic power of

their combination, and amazed and dazzled the dissolute gamblers of

Wall Street by declaring that they had in league with them the chief

officers of the National Government.

“They gradually pushed the price of gold from one hundred and

thirty-five and one-half, where it stood on the morning of the

thirteenth of September, until, on the evening of Wednesday, the

twenty-second, they held it firm at one hundred and forty and

one-half.

“The conspirators had bought sixty millions of gold up to that date.

Every thing depended on Grant’s preventing the sale of gold by the

Treasury. Brother-in-law Corbin was to manage that. Every cent

advance in gold added $15,000 to Corbin’s profit. On the 17th, it

was determined to have Corbin write a long letter to the President.

“The letter contained no reference to the private speculation of

Corbin, but urged the President not to interfere in the fight then

going on between the bulls and bears, nor to allow the Secretary of

the Treasury to do so by any sales of gold. The letter also repeated

the old arguments in regard to transportation of the crops.

“While Corbin was writing it, Gould called upon Fisk to furnish his

most faithful servant to carry the letter. W. O. Chapin was

designated as the messenger, and early on the following morning went

to Mr. Corbin’s house and received it, together with a note to

General Porter. He was instructed to proceed with all possible

haste, and telegraph Fisk as soon as the letter was delivered. He

reached Pittsburgh a little after midnight, and, proceeding at once

by carriage to Washington, Pennsylvania, thirty miles distant,

delivered the letter to the President, and, after waiting some time,

asked if there was any answer. The President told him there was no

answer, and he hurried away to the nearest telegraph office and sent

to Mr. Fisk this dispatch: ‘Letters delivered all right,’ and then

returned to New York. Mr. Fisk appears to have interpreted the ‘all

right’ of the dispatch as an answer to the doctrine of the Corbin

letter, and says he proceeded in his enormous purchases upon that

supposition. This letter, which Corbin had led his co-conspirators

to trust as their safeguard against interference from Mr. Boutwell,

finally proved their ruin. Its effect was the very reverse of what

they anticipated. The letter would have been like hundreds of other

letters received by the President, if it had not been for the fact

that it was sent by a special messenger from New York to Washington,

Pennsylvania, the messenger having to take a carriage and ride some

twenty-eight miles from Pittsburgh. This letter, sent in that way,

urging a certain policy on the administration, taken in connection

with some rumors that had got into the newspapers at that time as to

Mr. Corbin’s having become a great bull in gold, excited the

President’s suspicions, and he believed that Mr. Corbin must have a

pecuniary interest in those speculations; that he was not actuated

simply by a desire to see a certain policy carried out for the

benefit of the administration. Feeling in that way, he suggested to

Mrs. Grant to say, in a letter she was writing to Mrs. Corbin, that

rumors had reached her that Mr. Corbin was connected with

speculators in New York, and that she hoped that if this was so he

would disengage himself from them at once; that he (the President)

was very much distressed at such rumors. She wrote a letter that

evening. It was received in New York on the evening of Wednesday,

the twenty-second. Late that night Mr. Gould called at Corbin’s

house. Corbin disclosed the contents of the letter, and they sat

down to consider its significance. This letter created the utmost

alarm in the minds of both of these conspirators. The picture of

these two men that night, as presented in the evidence, is a

remarkable one. Shut up in the library, near midnight, Corbin was

bending over the table and straining with dim eyes to decipher and

read the contents of a letter, written in pencil, to his wife, while

the great gold gambler, looking over his shoulder, caught with his

sharper vision every word.”

Corbin tried to get Gould to buy him out, so as to tell the President he

had no interest in the market. Gould, too, plotted to save himself by

ruining his co-conspirators. They held a meeting. Gould secretly sold to

Fisk and his associates. The latter, of course, had no idea that it was

Gould they were buying out. The meeting resolved to force gold up to 160

on the next day (“Black Friday”), publish a list of all firms who had

contracts to furnish gold, offer to settle with them at the price named

before three o’clock, but threatening higher prices to all who delayed:

“While this desperate work was going on in New York, its alarming

and ruinous effects were reaching and paralyzing the business of the

whole country, and carrying terror and ruin to thousands. Business

men everywhere, from Boston to San Francisco, read disaster in every

new bulletin. The price of gold fluctuated so rapidly that the

telegraphic indicators could not keep pace with its movement. The

complicated mechanism of these indicators is moved by the electric

current carried over telegraphic wires directly from the gold-room,

and it is in evidence that in many instances these wires were melted

or burned off in the efforts of the operators to keep up with the

news.

“The President returned from Pennsylvania to Washington on Thursday,

the twenty-third, and that evening had a consultation with the

Secretary of the Treasury concerning the condition of the gold

market. The testimony of Mr. Boutwell shows that both the President

and himself concurred in the opinion that they should, if possible,

avoid any interference on the part of the Government in a contest

where both parties were struggling for private gain; but both agreed

that if the price of gold should be forced still higher, so as to

threaten a general financial panic, it would be their duty to

interfere and protect the business interests of the country. The

next morning the price advanced rapidly, and telegrams poured into

Washington from all parts of the country, exhibiting the general

alarm, and urging the Government to interfere, and, if possible,

prevent a financial crisis.”

At 11:42 A. M. came the crack of doom.

TREASURY DEPARTMENT, September 24, 1869.

“_Daniel Butterfield, Assistant Treasurer, United States, New York_:

“Sell four millions (4,000,000) gold to-morrow, and buy four

millions (4,000,000) bonds.

GEORGE S. BOUTWELL, Sec’y Treasury.

“Charge to Department. Sent 11:42 A. M.”

“Within the space of fifteen minutes the price fell from one hundred

and sixty to one hundred and thirty-three, and in the language of

one of the witnesses, half of Wall Street was involved in ruin.

“It was not without difficulty that the conspirators escaped from

the fury of their victims and took refuge in their up-town

stronghold—the office of the Erie Railroad Company.

“During the day and morning previous, the conspirators had succeeded

in forcing many settlements at rates ruinous to their victims.”

On March 14, 1870, General Garfield spoke on the subject of the civil

service. The speech abounded in details, and was pointed with references

to classes of salaries which were too high. On April 1st of the same

session, he delivered a great speech on the tariff question. It was

characterized by its conservative avoidance of extremes, and will stand

as the best expression of modern scholarship, practical statesmanship on

this most important public question. It is probable that there can

nowhere be found an argument on the subject of the tariff which more

nearly approaches perfect legislative wisdom.

In 1870, the total amount of national bank circulation being limited by

law to $300,000,000 and largely absorbed in the East, a cry arose in the

South and West against this injustice. General Garfield drew up and

presented a bill which became a law, increasing the limit $54,000,000,

and providing for the cancellation of the surplus of notes in States

having more than their quota, as fast as the Southern and Western

States, having less than their quota, organized national banks and

commenced to issue currency. It was a just measure, and was exactly in

the line of future legislation, but the Western and Southern States had

no capital to invest for banking purposes, and consequently availed

themselves but slightly of the opportunity. The measure, however, was of

a character to allay public clamor, demonstrate the folly of the outcry

against the existing law, and facilitate the progress toward resumption.

It was the forerunner of the law, removing all limit to national bank

circulation, and making the volume of the currency adjustable to the

demand. General Garfield’s great speech on the bill, delivered June 7,

1870, has been the inexhaustible quiver from which most of the arrows of

financial discussion have since been drawn by all smaller marksmen. A

second speech on the same subject on June 15th, was but little its

inferior.

The last day of the Forty-First Congress witnessed a remarkable attempt

of the Senate to encroach upon the constitutional prerogative of the

House to originate all bills for raising revenues, the claim being that

the measure was one to _reduce_ revenue instead of _raising_ it. It was

a bill to abolish the income tax. Garfield favored the reduction, but an

encroachment which might become a dangerous precedent had to be

resisted. His argument covered the vast field of the history of the

House of Commons, the debates of the Constitutional Convention, and the

precedents of Congress. His conclusions were:

_First._—That the exclusive right of the House of Commons of Great

Britain to originate money bills, is so old that the date of its

origin is unknown; it has always been regarded as one of the

strongest bulwarks of British freedom against usurpation of the King

and of the House of Lords, and has been guarded with the most

jealous care; that in the many contests which have arisen on this

subject between the Lords and Commons, during the last three hundred

years, the Commons have never given way, but have rather enlarged

than diminished their jurisdiction of this subject; and that since

the year 1678, the Lords have conceded, with scarcely a struggle,

that the Commons had the exclusive right to originate, not only

bills for raising revenue, but for decreasing it; not only for

imposing, but also for repealing taxes; and that the same exclusive

right extended also to all general appropriations of money.

_Second._—The clause of our Constitution, now under debate, was

borrowed from this feature of the British Constitution, and was

intended to have the same force and effect in all respects as the

corresponding clause of the British Constitution, with this single

exception, that our Senate is permitted to offer amendments, as the

House of Lords is not.

_Third._—In addition to the influence of the British example, was

the further fact, that this clause was placed in our Constitution to

counterbalance some special privileges granted to the Senate. It was

the compensating weight thrown into the scale to make the two

branches of Congress equal in authority and power. It was first put

into the Constitution to compensate the large States for the

advantages given to the small States in allowing them an equal

representation in the Senate; and, when subsequently it was thrown

out of the original draft, it came near unhinging the whole plan.

“It was reinserted in the last great compromise of the Constitution,

to offset the exclusive right of the Senate to ratify treaties,

confirm appointments, and try impeachments. The construction given

to it by the members of the Constitutional Convention, is the same

which this House now contends for. The same construction was

asserted broadly and fully, by the First Congress, many of the

members of which were framers of the Constitution. It has been

asserted again and again, in the various Congresses, from the First

till now; and, though the Senate has often attempted to invade this

privilege of the House, yet in no instance has the House surrendered

its right whenever that right has been openly challenged; and,

finally, whenever a contest has arisen, many leading Senators have

sustained the right of the House as now contended for.

* * * * *

“Again, if the Senate may throw their whole weight, political and

moral, into the scale in favor of the repeal or reduction of one

class of taxes, they may thereby compel the House to originate

bills, to impose new taxes, or increase old ones to make up the

deficiency caused by the repeal begun in the Senate, and thus

accomplish by indirection, what the Constitution plainly prohibits.

What Mr. Seward said in 1856, of the encroachment of the Senate, is

still more strikingly true to-day.

“The tendency of the Senate is constantly to encroach,—not only upon

the jurisdiction of the House, but upon the rights of the Chief

Executive of the nation. The power of confirming appointments is

rapidly becoming a means by which the Senate dictates appointments.

The Constitution gives to the President the initiative in

appointments, as it gives to the House the initiative in revenue

legislation. Evidences are not wanting that both these rights are

every year subjected to new invasions. If, in the past, the

Executive has been compelled to give way to the pressure, and has,

in some degree yielded his constitutional rights, it is all the more

necessary that this House stand firm, and yield no jot or tittle of

that great right intrusted to us for the protection of the people.”

This speech was absolutely conclusive on the question, and must take its

place with all the immortal arguments and efforts put forth in the past

to preserve the rights of the popular branch of national legislature.

February 20, 1871, General Garfield delivered a powerful speech against

the McGarraghan claim, one of the many jobs of which Congress was the

victim.

General Garfield was by this time recognized as the highest authority on

the intricate subjects of finance, revenue, and expenditure, in the

House. It will be seen that these topics fall within the general head of

political economy, “the dismal science.” Of these he was the

acknowledged master. Accordingly, at the beginning of the Forty-Second

Congress, in 1871, Garfield was made chairman of the Committee of

Appropriations. It is probable that in this capacity he never had an

equal. Something must be said of his work.

In order to master the great subject of public expenditures, he studied

the history of those of European nations. He read the “budget speeches”

of the English chancellors of the exchequer for a long period. He

refreshed his German, and studied French, in order to read the best

works in the world on the subjects, the highest authorities being in

those languages. He examined the British and French appropriations for a

long period. After an exhaustive study of the history of foreign

nations, he commenced with our own country at the time of the

Revolution. Charles Sumner was the greatest reader, and had the longest

book list at the Congressional Library of any man in Washington. The

library records show that General Garfield’s list was next to Sumner’s,

being but slightly below it. After Sumner’s death, the man who was

second became first. This gathering of facts was followed by wide

inductions. National expenditures were found by him to be subject to a

law as fixed as that of gravitation. There was a proportion between

population, area of country, and the necessary outlay for public

expenses, which was fixed. Any thing beyond this was waste. No covering

could hide official robbery from the reach of such a detective as the

establishment of this law. Every miscreant left a tell-tale track.

The results of his studies were embodied in an elaborate speech on

January 22, 1872, in the introduction of his appropriation bill. The

close study of political economy, however, did not divert him from other

questions. He kept himself thoroughly versed on every question of public

importance and was always equal to every demand.

On April 4, 1871, he delivered a speech in opposition to a Republican

bill for the enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the time it

brought down upon him the censure of his party. But he was firm. There

could be no doubt of his loyalty to the nation, and his distrust of the

malignant South. But he was too conservative for the war leaders and

politicians. A compromise was effected, with which, however, his

opponents were much dissatisfied.

Another notable speech was made on the bill to establish an educational

fund from the proceeds of the sale of public lands. The speech abounded

in citations from English, French, and German authorities on the subject

of education. One doctrine enunciated was that matters of education

belong to the State governments, not to the nation; that Congress made

no claim to interfere in the method, but only to assist in the work.

In the summer of 1872, General Garfield undertook a delicate mission to

the Flat-Head Indians. Their removal was required by the Government. But

the noble red man refused to stir an inch from his ancestral

hunting-grounds. Garfield’s mission was to be the last pacific effort.

He was successful when the department had given up hope in any resource

but war.

On his return from the West, General Garfield found the Credit Mobilier

scandal looming up like a cyclone in the Congressional sky. Living a

life of study, research, and thought, of spotless character and the

purest intention, he was inexpressibly pained. A private letter of

December 31, 1872, to his bosom friend Hinsdale, is indicative of his

feelings:

“The Credit Mobilier scandal has given me much pain. As I told you

last fall, I feared it would turn and that the company itself was a

bad thing. So I think it will, and perhaps some members of Congress

were conscientiously parties to its plans. It has been a new form of

trial for me to see my name flying the rounds of the press in

connection with the basest of crimes. It is not enough for one to

know that his heart and motives have been pure and true, if he is

not sure but that good men here and there, who do not know him, will

set him down among the lowest men of doubtful morality. There is

nothing in my relation to the case for which the tenderest

conscience of the most scrupulous honor can blame me. It is

fortunate that I never fully concluded to accept the offer made me;

but it grieves me greatly to have been negotiating with a man who

had so little sense of truth and honor as to use his proposals for a

purpose in a way now apparent to me. I shall go before the

committee, and in due time before the House, with a full statement

of all that is essential to the case, so far as I am concerned. You

and I are now nearly in middle life, and have not yet become soured

and shriveled with the wear and tear of life. Let us pray to be

delivered from that condition where life and nature have no fresh,

sweet sensations for us.”

His correspondence at this time with President Hinsdale, in which he

uncovers his secret heart, is full of expressions of disgust with

politics, “where ten years of honest toil goes for naught in the face of

one vote,” as he says. Once he declares: “Were it not for the Credit

Mobilier, I believe I would resign.” How plainly his character appears

in the following little extract:

“You know that I have always said that my whole public life was an

experiment to determine whether an intelligent people would sustain

a man in acting sensibly on each proposition that arose, and in

doing nothing for mere show or for demagogical effect. I do not now

remember that I ever cast a vote of that latter sort. Perhaps it is

true that the demagogue will succeed when honorable statesmanship

will fail. If so, public life is the hollowest of all shams.”

In another letter to Colonel Rockwell, he speaks from his heart:

“I think of you as away, and in an elysium of quiet and peace, where

I should love to be, out of the storm and in the sunshine of love

and books. Do not think from the above that I am despondent. There

is life and hope and fight in your old friend yet.”

It is hardly possible to understand the tortures which his sensitive

nature underwent at this time. To an honest man the worst pain comes

from the poisoned dagger of mistrust. At a later day, General Garfield

was to make his defense to his constituents.

During this plague of heart and brain, there was no remission of the

enormous activity in the chosen field of finance, revenue, and

expenditure. But we can only plant foot upon the mountain peaks as we

pass over the Alps of General Garfield’s Congressional labors. March 5,

1874, he delivered another great speech on “Revenues and Public

Expenditures.”

On April 8, 1874, the first great “inflation” bill, by which the effects

of the terrible panic of 1873 were to be relieved or cured, came up for

discussion. General Garfield exhausted history in his opposition to the

bill. It must be remembered that his constituents were clamoring for the

passage of this bill which was to make money plenty. Taking his

political life in his hand, he fought it with all his power. As in 1866,

1868, 1869, 1870, and 1871, so, in 1874, he said that “next to the great

achievements of the nation in putting down the rebellion, destroying its

cause, and reuniting the Republic on the principle of liberty and equal

rights to all, is the task of paying the fabulous expenses of the war,

the funding of the debt, the maintenance of public credit, and the

launching of the nation on its career of prosperity.” The speech

contains citations of authority against inflation and irredeemable paper

currency from John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Franklin, R. H. Lee,

Washington, Adams, Peletiah Webster, Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson,

Madison, Webster, Gonge, Calhoun, and Chase. The reader will remember

that the measure passed the House and the Senate by overwhelming

majorities, but was struck dead by the veto of President Grant.

On June 23, 1874, General Garfield spoke at length on the subject of

appropriations for the year. In this address, as in all others upon this

topic, he handled figures and statistics with the greatest skill and

familiarity. The House had come to rely upon his annual speech on this

subject for its information on the expenses of the Government.

Almost at the same time he delivered a speech on the Railway Problem.

The pending question was upon making certain appropriations for River,

Harbor, and Canal Surveys, as a preliminary to cheaper transportation.

General Garfield endeavored to have a similar commission organized on

the Railway question. He felt that any investigation of cheap

transportation was lame which did not include “the greatest of our

modern means of transportation, the Railway.” We quote a part of his

discussion, which must be of interest to every reader:

THE RAILWAY PROBLEM.

“We are so involved in the events and movements of society that we

do not stop to realize—what is undeniably true—that during the last

forty years all modern societies have entered upon a period of

change, more marked, more pervading, more radical than any that has

occurred during the last three hundred years. In saying this, I do

not forget our own political and military history, nor the French

Revolution of 1793. The changes now taking place have been wrought,

and are being wrought, mainly, almost wholly, by a single mechanical

contrivance, the steam locomotive. There are many persons now living

who well remember the day when Andrew Jackson, after four weeks of

toilsome travel from his home in Tennessee, reached Washington and

took his first oath of office as President of the United States. On

that day, the railway locomotive did not exist. During that year,

Henry Clay was struggling to make his name immortal by linking it

with the then vast project of building a national road—a

turnpike—from the national capital to the banks of the Mississippi.

“In the autumn of that very year George Stephenson ran his first

experimental locomotive, the ‘Rocket,’ from Manchester to Liverpool

and back. The rumble of its wheels, redoubled a million times, is

echoing to-day on every continent.

“In 1870, there were about 125,000 miles of railroad on the two

hemispheres, constructed at a cost of little less than $100,000 per

mile, and representing nearly $12,000,000,000 of invested capital.

“A parliamentary commission found that during the year 1866 the

railway cars of Great Britain carried an average of 850,000

passengers per day; and during that year the work done by their

8,125 locomotives would have required for its performance three and

a half million horses and nearly two million men.

“What have our people done for the locomotive, and what has it done

for us? To the United States, with its vast territorial area, the

railroad was a vital necessity.

“Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that ‘the United States

was a giant without bones.’ Since that time our gristle has been

rapidly hardening. Sixty-seven thousand miles of iron track is a

tolerable skeleton, even for a giant. When this new power appeared,

our people everywhere felt the necessity of setting it to work; and

individuals, cities, States, and the nation lavished their resources

without stint to make a pathway for it. Fortunes were sunk under

almost every mile of our earlier roads in the effort to capture and

utilize this new power. If the State did not head the subscription

for a new road, it usually came to the rescue before the work was

completed.

“The lands given by the States and by the national Government to aid

in the construction of railroads, reach an aggregate of nearly two

hundred and fifty million acres—a territory equal to nine times the

area of Ohio. With these vast resources we have made paths for the

steam giant; and to-day nearly a quarter of a million of our

business and working men are in his immediate service. Such a power

naturally attracts to its enterprise the brightest and strongest

intellects. It would be difficult to find in any other profession so

large a proportion of men possessed of a high order of business

ability as those who construct, manage, and operate our railroads.

“The American people have done much for the locomotive; and it has

done much for them. We have already seen that it has greatly

reduced, if not wholly destroyed, the danger that the Government

will fall to pieces by its own weight. The railroad has not only

brought our people and their industries together, but it has carried

civilization into the wilderness, has built up States and

Territories, which but for its power would have remained deserts for

a century to come. ‘Abroad and at home,’ as Mr. Adams tersely

declares, ‘it has equally nationalized people and cosmopolized

nations.’ It has played a most important part in the recent movement

for the unification and preservation of nations.

“It enabled us to do what the old military science had pronounced

impossible—to conquer a revolted population of eleven millions,

occupying a territory one-fifth as large as the continent of Europe.

In an able essay on the railway system, Mr. Charles F. Adams, Jr.,

has pointed out some of the remarkable achievements of the railroad

in our recent history. For example, a single railroad track enabled

Sherman to maintain eighty thousand fighting men three hundred miles

beyond his base of supplies. Another line, in a space of seven days,

brought a reinforcement of two fully-equipped army corps around a

circuit of thirteen hundred miles, to strengthen an army at a

threatened point. He calls attention to the still more striking fact

that for ten years past, with fifteen hundred millions of our

indebtedness abroad, an enormous debt at home, unparalleled public

expenditures, and a depreciated paper currency, in defiance of all

past experience, we have been steadily conquering our difficulties,

have escaped the predicted collapse, and are promptly meeting our

engagements; because, through energetic railroad development, the

country has been producing real wealth, as no country has produced

it before. Finally, he sums up the case by declaring that the

locomotive has ‘dragged the country through its difficulties in

spite of itself.’

“In discussing this theme, we must not make an indiscriminate attack

upon corporations. The corporation limited to its proper uses is one

of the most valuable of the many useful creations of law. One class

of corporations has played a most important and conspicuous part in

securing the liberties of mankind. It was the municipal

corporations—the free cities and chartered towns—that preserved and

developed the spirit of freedom during the darkness of the Middle

Ages, and powerfully aided in the overthrow of the feudal system.

The charters of London and of the lesser cities and towns of England

made the most effective resistance to the tyranny of Charles II. and

the judicial savagery of Jeffries. The spirit of the free town and

the chartered colony taught our own fathers how to win their

independence. The New England township was the political unit which

formed the basis of most of our states.

“This class of corporations have been most useful, and almost always

safe, because they have been kept constantly within the control of

the community for whose benefit they were created. The State has

never surrendered the power of amending their charters.

“Under the name of private corporations organizations have grown up,

not for the perpetuation of a great charity, like a college or

hospital, not to enable a company of citizens more conveniently to

carry on a private industry, but a class of corporations unknown to

the early law writers has arisen, and to them have been committed

the vast powers of the railroad and the telegraph, the great

instruments by which modern communities live, move, and have their

being.

“Since the dawn of history, the great thoroughfares have belonged to

the people, have been known as the king’s highways or the public

highways, and have been open to the free use of all, on payment of a

small uniform tax or toll to keep them in repair. But now the most

perfect and by far the most important roads known to mankind are

owned and managed as private property by a comparatively small

number of private citizens.

“In all its uses the railroad is the most public of all our roads;

and in all the objects to which its work relates, the railway

corporation is as public as any organization can be. But in the

start it was labeled a private corporation; and, so far as its legal

status is concerned, it is now grouped with eleemosynary

institutions and private charities, and enjoys similar immunities

and exemptions. It remains to be seen how long the community will

suffer itself to be the victim of an abstract definition.

“It will be readily conceded that a corporation is strictly and

really private when it is authorized to carry on such a business as

a private citizen may carry on. But when the State has delegated to

a corporation the sovereign right of eminent domain, the right to

take from the private citizen, without his consent, a portion of his

real estate, to build its structure across farm, garden, and lawn,

into and through, over or under, the blocks, squares, streets,

churches, and dwellings of incorporated cities and towns, across

navigable rivers, and over and along public highways, it requires a

stretch of the common imagination and much refinement and subtlety

of the law to maintain the old fiction that such an organization is

not a public corporation.

“In view of the facts already set forth, the question returns, what

is likely to be the effect of railway and other similar combinations

upon our community and our political institutions? Is it true, as

asserted by the British writer quoted above, that the state must

soon recapture and control the railroads, or be captured and

subjugated by them? Or do the phenomena we are witnessing indicate

that general breaking-up of the social and political order of modern

nations so confidently predicted by a class of philosophers whose

opinions have hitherto made but little impression on the public

mind?

“The analogy between the industrial condition of society at the

present time and the feudalism of the Middle Ages is both striking

and instructive.

“In the darkness and chaos of that period the feudal system was the

first important step toward the organization of modern nations.

Powerful chiefs and barons intrenched themselves in castles, and in

return for submission and service gave to their vassals rude

protection and ruder laws. But as the feudal chiefs grew in power

and wealth they became the oppressors of their people, taxed and

robbed them at will, and finally in their arrogance, defied the

kings and emperors of the mediæval states. From their castles,

planted on the great thoroughfares, they practiced the most

capricious extortions on commerce and travel, and thus gave to

modern language the phrase, ‘levy black-mail.’

“The consolidation of our great industrial and commercial companies,

the power they wield and the relations they sustain to the state and

to the industry of the people, do not fall far short of Fourier’s

definition of commercial or industrial feudalism. The modern barons,

more powerful than their military prototypes, own our greatest

highways and levy tribute at will upon all our vast industries. And

as the old feudalism was finally controlled and subordinated only by

the combined efforts of the kings and the people of the free cities

and towns, so our modern feudalism can be subordinated to the public

good only by the great body of the people, acting through the

government by wise and just laws.

“I shall not now enter upon the discussion of methods by which this

grand work of adjustment may be accomplished. But I refuse to

believe that the genius and energy which have developed these

tremendous forces will fail to make them, not the masters, but the

faithful servants of society.”

This chapter has so far been devoted to General Garfield’s public life

during this period. One would think that what has been recounted

occupied all his time and powers. Not so. With his political and

financial studies he kept up his literary life. On June 29, 1869, he

delivered an oration, before the Commercial College in Washington City,

on the “Elements of Success.” We select a few thought-flowers from the

blooming garden of the address. At the outset he said:

“I feel a profounder reverence for a boy than a man. I never meet a

ragged boy on the street without feeling that I owe him a salute,

for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his

shabby coat. When I meet you in the full flush of mature life, I see

nearly all there is of you; but among these boys are the great men

of the future—the heroes of the next generation, the philosophers,

the statesmen, the philanthropists, the great reformers and molders

of the next age. Therefore, I say, there is a peculiar charm to me

in the exhibitions of young people engaged in the business of

education.”...

Speaking of the modern college curriculum, he said:

“The prevailing system was established at a time when the learning

of the world was in Latin and Greek; when, if a man would learn

arithmetic, he must first learn Latin; and if he would learn the

history and geography of his own country, he could acquire that

knowledge only through the Latin language. Of course, in those days

it was necessary to lay the foundation of learning in a knowledge of

the learned languages. The universities of Europe, from which our

colleges were copied, were founded before the modern languages were

born. The leading languages of Europe are scarcely six hundred years

old. The reasons for a course of study then are not good now. The

old necessities have passed away. We now have strong and noble

living languages, rich in literature, replete with high and earnest

thought,—the language of science, religion, and liberty,—and yet we

bid our children feed their spirits on the life of dead ages,

instead of the inspiring life and vigor of our own times.

“The present Chancellor of the British Exchequer, the Right

Honorable Robert Lowe, one of the brightest minds in that kingdom,

said, in a recent address before the venerable University of

Edinburgh: ‘I was a few months ago in Paris, and two graduates of

Oxford went with me to get our dinner at a restaurant, and if the

white-aproned waiter had not been better educated than all three of

us, we might have starved to death. We could not ask for our dinner

in his language, but fortunately he could ask us in our own language

what we wanted.’ There was one test of the insufficiency of modern

education....

“Let me beg you, in the outset of your career, to dismiss from your

minds all idea of succeeding by luck. There is no more common

thought among young people than that foolish one that by-and-by

something will turn up by which they will suddenly achieve fame or

fortune. No, young gentlemen; things don’t turn up in this world

unless somebody turns them up. Inertia is one of the indispensable

laws of matter, and things lie flat where they are until by some

intelligent spirit (for nothing but spirit makes motion in this

world) they are endowed with activity and life. Luck is an _ignis

fatuus_. You may follow it to ruin, but not to success. The great

Napoleon, who believed in his destiny, followed it until he saw his

star go down in blackest night, when the Old Guard perished round

him, and Waterloo was lost. A pound of pluck is worth a ton of

luck....

“Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify; but nine times out of

ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed

overboard, and compelled to sink or swim for himself. In all my

acquaintance I have never known one to be drowned who was worth

saving. This would not be wholly true in any country but one of

political equality like ours. The editor of one of the leading

magazines of England told me, not many months ago, a fact startling

enough in itself, but of great significance to a poor man. He told

me that he had never yet known, in all his experience, a single boy

of the class of farm-laborers (not those who own farms, but mere

farm-laborers) who had ever risen above his class. Boys from the

manufacturing and commercial classes had risen frequently, but from

the farm-labor class he had never known one.

“The reason is this: in the aristocracies of the Old World, wealth

and society are built up like the strata of rock which compose the

crust of the earth. If a boy be born in the lowest stratum of life,

it is almost impossible for him to rise through this hard crust into

the higher ranks; but in this country it is not so. The strata of

our society resembles rather the ocean, where every drop, even the

lowest, is free to mingle with all others, and may shine at last on

the crest of the highest wave.”

His correspondence is full of glimpses of literary life. At one time he

breaks into glee over a new book. At another he solemnly urges the

necessity of his friend Hinsdale and himself mastering French and

German. Again he sighs for more time to read, and, with the reader’s

inconsistency, gives an elaborate criticism of some book he had just

finished. Once he says:

“I can’t see that John Stuart Mill ever came to comprehend human

life as a reality from the actual course of human affairs beginning

with Greek life down to our own. Men and women were always, with

him, more or less of the nature of abstractions; while, with his

enormous mass of books, he learned a wonderful power of analysis,

for which he was by nature surprisingly fitted. But his education

was narrow just where his own mind was originally deficient. He was

educated solely through books; for his father was never a companion.

His brothers and sisters bored him. He had no playfellows, _and of

his mother not a word is said in his autobiography_.”

The last fact mentioned must have seemed remarkable to Garfield. In

another letter, he says:

“Permit me to transcribe a metrical version which I made the other

day of the third ode of Horace’s first book. It is still in the

rough.”

And then he actually gives a full translation of the poem: “To the Ship

which carried Virgil to Athens.” At the close, he naively says: “I can

better most of the verses.” Every peep of his private life has an

exquisite charm. It perpetually surprises one with its frankness, its

simplicity, and artless affection. In Homer’s _Iliad_, the great Hector,

clad in dazzling armor and helmet, stoops to kiss his child before going

forth to mortal combat. But the child drew back, afraid of his strange

and terrible aspect. Swiftly the father removed the panoply of war, and

then stooped to the child to be received with outstretched arms. In the

fierce arena of debate we see Garfield clad with the stern helmet and

buckler of battle. But in his private life he laid aside the armor, and

stood forth in all the beauty of a grand, simple, and affectionate

nature.

During the period covered by this chapter his home remained at Hiram,

Ohio, where he spent his vacations from Congress. Here he lived in a

very modest manner, keeping neither carriage nor horse, and borrowing or

hiring when he desired to be conveyed to the railroad station, four

miles off.

Mr. Frederick E. Warren, an attorney of Cincinnati, Ohio, was a student

at Hiram College from 1869 to 1875. During this time he became

acquainted with General Garfield. Of his impressions and acquaintance he

furnishes a vivacious narrative. He says:

“General Garfield’s return home was always an event with the college

boys, by whom he was greatly admired and beloved. My earliest

impressions of him, as he came one morning striding up the old plank

walk that stretched across the college campus, realized all that I

had heard spoken of him as to his appearance and bearing. Even God

had seemed to set his seal upon him, ‘to give the world assurance of

a _man_.’ Subsequent acquaintance merely ripened this impression.

None of us required a formal introduction to him. The boys and he

instinctively knew each other. He took the stranger cordially by the

hand, gave him a kindly and encouraging word, and made him feel at

once that he was his _friend_, and you may rest assured that the boy

was forever _his_.

“We learned much from the General’s ‘talks,’ as he styled them.

Whenever at home, he regularly attended the chapel exercises each

morning. As soon as the religious services were concluded, he

invariably was called upon to say something; to give us a ‘talk.’ He

never failed to respond. His remarks were usually brief, but

delightfully instructive, and there was a freshness and novelty

which characterized them that I have never met with in any other

public speaker or teacher.

“On one occasion, when going to chapel, he saw a horse-shoe lying at

the side of the path, which he picked up, and carried along with

him. After prayer, when asked, as usual, to say something to us (I

must sorrowfully confess that a majority of the boys were impatient

of prayers when the General was about), he produced the horse-shoe,

and proceeded to explain its history and use from the remotest

period, in so entertaining a manner that I am sure that no one who

was present has ever forgotten it. At another time he delivered a

similar off-hand lecture upon the hammer, suggested by one he had

found somewhere about the college premises. In all he said to the

students he was eminently practical, and it seemed to us that he

could convey more information in fifteen minutes’ talk than the

combined faculty could have done in an hour.

“The general effect of these frequent brief discourses can readily

be imagined. The more thoughtful vacated the playground, and

gathered in groups about the boarding places, to discuss some

question of interest suggested by the General, or retired to their

rooms for reading and reflection upon the subject, inspired with a

renewed love of knowledge, and desire for improvement.

“His application to business and study was extraordinary. It

appeared to make no difference at what hour of the day or night one

called upon him, he would be found in his library at work. If there

was a ‘night owl’ _par excellence_ in Hiram College from the winter

of 1869 until the winter of 1875, it was myself, yet however late

the hour I retired might be, I had but to look three doors westward

to see the light still burning in General Garfield’s window, and he

was nearly always up with the sun. It was often asked if he ever

slept.

“_Apropos_ of this, I am able to recall a very agreeable incident,

and one highly characteristic of the man. I was reading late one

night Momssen’s ‘History of Rome,’ and several times came across the

word ‘symmachy,’ which I failed to find in the English dictionary.

Somewhat puzzled with its frequent recurrence, and seeing that the

General was still up, I decided, although it was two o’clock in the

morning, to call upon him for the meaning of the word. I found him

hard at work, and after excusing myself for the interruption,

explained the object of my unseasonable visit. He immediately

replied: ‘It is coined from the Greek, a frequent practice with

Momssen;’ and taking from a book-case a Greek lexicon, he quickly

furnished me with the information I was in quest of. He then

insisted upon my sitting down, and for a couple of hours entertained

me with an account of a recent trip to Europe.

“Leaving this topic, he returned to Momssen, whom he pronounced

eccentric and tedious, and indulged in a lengthy and learned

comparison between him and Niebuhr.

“I noticed upon his shelves a copy of Bryant’s translation of Homer.

He complained that the book-seller had sent him an imperfect copy,

there being one hundred and ninety lines at the beginning of the

first volume omitted through the carelessness of the binder. He

repeated some of the omitted lines, and spoke of them in terms of

high critical eulogy. It was quite daylight before he allowed me to

depart.

“The General was very peculiar in the discipline of his children.

One evening an agent for a Babcock Fire Extinguisher was exhibiting

the machine on a pile of lighted tarred boxes, on the public square,

in the presence of a large crowd, among them General Garfield and

his little son Jim, who is a chip off the old block, as the saying

is. A gentleman accidentally stepped on the boy’s foot. He did not

yell, as most boys might have done under such a pressure, but

savagely sprang at the gentleman and dealt him a blow with his fist

somewhere in the region of the abdomen, about as high as he could

reach. The father observed it, and immediately had the crowd open

and ordered the fireman to turn the hose upon Jim, which was done,

and the boy was extinguished in less than a minute.

“When he was in Washington, and we wanted—as frequently happened—any

public documents or any facts to aid us in our society debates,

which were not accessible from any other source, all we had to do

was to write to the General for them, and it was flattering to us

how promptly he complied with these requests.

“While apparently of the most amiable temper, he taught us the duty

of self-defense, and the right to resist aggression. He was not by

any means a non-combatant, and when aroused must have borne some

resemblance to an enraged lion. I understand he entered the war as a

soldier with extraordinary zeal, and the country knows with what

gallantry he fought its battles. He was naturally a belligerent, but

discipline, the habitual practice of self-command, and a strong

religious sense, enabled him to keep this warlike disposition under

perfect control. He was an excellent boxer and fencer, a good shot

with both rifle and pistol, and took a lively interest in all manly

exercises. He was a skillful croquet player, and enlivened the game

with constant conversation, which made it a most agreeable pastime

to the other players and lookers on.”

Can biography anywhere present a more simple, manly nature? Is there a

better sign of it than to be beloved by college boys?

In Washington, up to 1869, he boarded a part of the time, and lived in a

rented house for the remainder. In that year he built the comfortable

residence on the corner of Thirteenth and I Streets, opposite Franklin

Square, which he continued to occupy till his election to the

Presidency. The whole house overflowed with books, but the library was

the most characteristic room. General Garfield’s reading was in special

fields of investigation. At one time he explored and studied the entire

subject of Goethe and his contemporaries and critics. Horace was also

the subject of enormous study. Of all that he read he made elaborate

notes. He made a whole library of scrap books, all perfectly indexed.

The habit was begun on his first entrance into public life. These were

supplemented by prodigious diaries. Probably no man ever left such a

complete record of his intellectual life upon paper. In addition to all

this, he kept a series of labeled drawers, in which were filed away

newspaper cuttings, items, pamphlets, and documents. This collection was

most carefully classified and indexed by subjects. It is easy to see why

Garfield was known as the best posted and readiest man in Congress. His

marvelous memory and splendid system enabled him, on short notice, to

open the drawer containing all the material on almost any subject, and

equip himself in an hour for battle. No encyclopedia could compare in

value with this collection to its owner. It made Garfield absolutely

terrible in debate. A charge would be made, a historical reference

indicated by some poorly-posted antagonist; at the next session Garfield

was on hand with the documents to overwhelm his opponent.

Among the many literary and other miscellaneous addresses delivered

during this period, was one of November 25, 1870, before the Army of the

Cumberland, on the “Life and Character of George H. Thomas,” and one on

“The Future of the Republic,” delivered July 2d, 1873, before the

students of Hudson College. From the former we give extracts, although

to give any thing less than the entire address is spoliation. As an

argument defending Thomas from Robert E. Lee’s charge of disloyalty, it

is overwhelming. Garfield loved Thomas as a brother; and with the dead

hero for a theme, the orator rose to the loftiest heights. Among his

opening remarks were the following:

“There are now living not less than two hundred thousand men who

served under the eye of General Thomas; who saw him in sunshine and

storm—on the march, in the fight, and on the field when the victory

had been won. Enshrined in the hearts of all these, are enduring

images and most precious memories of their commander and friend. Who

shall collect and unite into one worthy picture, the bold outlines,

the innumerable lights and shadows which make up the life and

character of our great leader? Who shall condense into a single hour

the record of a life which forms so large a chapter of the Nation’s

history, and whose fame fills and overfills a hemisphere? No line

can be omitted, no false stroke made, no imperfect sketching done,

which you, his soldiers, will not instantly detect and deplore. I

know that each of you here present sees him in memory at this

moment, as we often saw him in life; erect and strong, like a tower

of solid masonry; his broad, square shoulders and massive head; his

abundant hair and full beard of light brown, sprinkled with silver;

his broad forehead, full face, and features that would appear

colossal, but for their perfect harmony of proportion; his clear

complexion, with just enough color to assure you of robust health

and a well-regulated life; his face lighted up by an eye which was

cold gray to his enemies, but warm, deep blue to his friends; not a

man of iron, but of live oak. His attitude, form, and features, all

assured you of inflexible firmness, of inexpugnable strength; while

his welcoming smile set every feature aglow with a kindness that won

your manliest affection. If thus in memory you see his form and

features, even more vividly do you remember the qualities of his

mind and heart. His body was the fitting type of his intellect and

character; and you saw both his intellect and character tried, again

and again, in the fiery furnace of war, and by other tests not less

searching. Thus, comrades, you see him; and your memories supply a

thousand details which complete and adorn the picture.”

In closing what might be called more particularly the biographical

portion of the address he said:

“Thomas’s life is a notable illustration of the virtue and power of

hard work; and in the last analysis the power to do hard work is

only another name for talent. Professor Church, one of his

instructors at West Point, says of his student life, that ‘he never

allowed any thing to escape a thorough examination, and left nothing

behind that he did not fully comprehend.’ And so it was in the army.

To him a battle was neither an earthquake nor a volcano, nor a chaos

of brave men and frantic horses, involved in vast explosions of

gunpowder. It was rather a calm, rational concentration of force

against force. It was a question of lines and positions; of weight

of metal and strength of battalions. He knew that the elements and

forces which bring victory are not created on the battle-field, but

must be patiently elaborated in the quiet of the camp, by the

perfect organization and outfit of his army. His remark to a captain

of artillery, while inspecting a battery, is worth remembering, for

it exhibits his theory of success: ‘Keep every thing in order, for

the fate of a battle may turn on a buckle or a linch-pin.’ He

understood so thoroughly the condition of his army, and its

equipment, that when the hour of trial came, he knew how great a

pressure it could stand, and how hard a blow it could strike.

“His character was as grand and as simple as a colossal pillar of

chiseled granite. Every step of his career as a soldier was marked

by the most loyal and unhesitating obedience to law—to the laws of

his government and to the commands of his superiors. The obedience

which he rendered to those above him he rigidly required of those

under his command.

“His influence over his troops grew steadily and constantly. He won

his ascendancy over them, neither by artifice nor by any one act of

special daring, but he gradually filled them with his own spirit,

until their confidence in him knew no bounds. His power as a

commander was developed slowly and silently; not like volcanic land

lifted from the sea by sudden and violent upheaval, but rather like

a coral island, where each increment is a growth—an act of life and

work.

“Power exhibits itself under two distinct forms—strength and

force—each possessing peculiar qualities, and each perfect in its

own sphere. Strength is typified by the oak, the rock, the mountain.

Force embodies itself in the cataract, the tempest, the thunderbolt.

The great tragic poet of Greece, in describing the punishment of

Prometheus for rebellion against Jupiter, represented Vulcan

descending from heaven, attended by two mighty spirits, Strength and

Force, by whose aid he held and bound Prometheus to the rock.

“In subduing our great rebellion, the Republic called to its aid men

who represented many forms of great excellence and power. A very few

of our commanders possessed more force than Thomas—more genius for

planning and executing bold and daring enterprises; but, in my

judgment, no other was so complete in embodiment and incarnation of

strength—the strength that resists, maintains, and endures. His

power was not that of the cataract which leaps in fury down the

chasm, but rather that of the river, broad and deep, whose current

is steady, silent, and irresistible.”

From the peroration the following is taken:

“The language applied to the Iron Duke, by the historian of the

Peninsular War, might also be mistaken for a description of Thomas.

Napier says:

“‘He held his army in hand, keeping it, with unmitigated labor,

always in a fit state to march or to fight.... Sometimes he was

indebted to fortune, sometimes to his natural genius, always to his

untiring industry; for he was emphatically a painstaking man.’

“The language of Lord Brougham, addressed to Wellington, is a

fitting description of Thomas:

“‘Mighty captain! who never advanced except to cover his arms with

glory; mightier captain! who never retreated except to eclipse the

glory of his advance.’

“If I remember correctly, no enemy was ever able to fight Thomas out

of any position he undertook to hold.

“On the whole, I can not doubt that the most fitting parallel to

General Thomas is found in our greatest American, the man who was

‘first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his

countrymen.’ The personal resemblance of General Thomas to

Washington was often the subject of remark. Even at West Point,

Rosecrans was accustomed to call him General Washington. He

resembled Washington in the gravity and dignity of his character; in

the solidity of his judgment; in the careful accuracy of all his

transactions; in his incorruptible integrity, and in his extreme,

but unaffected, modesty....

“But his career is ended. Struck dead at his post of duty, a

bereaved nation bore his honored dust across the continent and laid

it to rest on the banks of the Hudson, amidst the tears and grief of

millions. The nation stood at his grave as a mourner. No one knew

until he was dead how strong was his hold on the hearts of the

American people. Every citizen felt that a pillar of state had

fallen; that a great and true and pure man had passed from earth.

“There are no fitting words in which I may speak of the loss which

every member of this society has sustained in his death.

“The general of the army has beautifully said, in his order

announcing the death of Thomas:

“‘Though he leaves no child to bear his name, the _Old Army of the

Cumberland_, numbered by tens of thousands, called him father, and

will weep for him in tears of manly grief.’

“To us, his comrades, he has left the rich legacy of his friendship.

To his country and to mankind, he has left his character and his

fame as a priceless and everlasting possession.

“‘O iron nerve to true occasion true!

O fallen at length that tower of strength

Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew!’

... ‘His work is done;

But while the races of mankind endure,

Let his great example stand

Colossal seen of every land,

And keep the soldier firm, the statesman pure,

Till in all lands and through all human story,

The path of Duty be the way to Glory.’”

The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death. · 第 7 / 18 章