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