IX
It was, of course, for a young correspondent who hod an eager curiosity about life, an interesting experience to go on a journey like that, and it was with delight that, one snowy morning in the late autumn of that year, I left Chicago to go on a little trip down through Indiana with James G. Blaine. He was the secretary of state in President Harrison’s cabinet, a position in which, as it turned out, he was unhappy, as most men are apt to be in public positions, though a sort of cruel and evil fascination will not let them give up the vain pursuit of them, vainest perhaps when they are won. WhenI reached the station that morning, Mr. Blaine was already there, walking up and down the platform arm in arm with his son Emmons. He was a gray man, dressed in gray clothes, with spats made of the cloth of his habit, and there was about him an air of vague sadness, which in his high countenance became almost a pain, though just then, in the companionship of the son he loved, there was, for a little while, the expression of a mild happiness, maybe a solace. His face was of a grayish, almost luminous pallor, and his silver hair and beard were in the same key. William Walter Phelps, then our minister to Germany, was traveling with him, and on our way down to South Bend the constant entrance of plain citizens from the other coaches into our car filled Mr. Phelps with a kind of wonder. Commercial travelers, farmers, all sorts and conditions of men, entered and introduced themselves to Mr. Blaine, and he sat and talked with them all in that simplicity which marks the manners, even if it has departed the spirit of the republic.
“It is a remarkable sight you are witnessing,” said Mr. Phelps to us reporters, “a sight you could witness in no other country in the world. There is the premier of a great government, and yet the commonest man may approach him without ceremony, and talk to him as though he were nobody.”
Fresh from his life at a foreign court, he was viewing events from that foreign point of view, perhaps thinking just then in European sequences, and since there was such simplicity, it was not hard for any of us to have conversation with our premier.Mr. Blaine had just come from Ohio where he had been speaking in McKinley’s district, and he understood the political situation so perfectly that he said, in the frankness of a conversation that was not to be reported, that McKinley was certain to be defeated; indeed he foresaw, though it required no very great vision to do that, the reverse that was to overtake his party in the congressional elections.
With my interest in the tariff question, which then seemed to me so fundamental, I did not lose the opportunity to ask Mr. Blaine about his reciprocity project: but after a while the conversation turned to more personal subjects. When he learned that I was from Ohio, he asked me suddenly if I could name the counties that formed the several congressional districts of the state. I could not, of course, do that, and I supposed no one in the world could do it or ever wish to do it; but he could, and with a naïve pride in the accomplishment he did, and then astounded me by saying that he could almost match the feat with any state in the Union.
It was the only enthusiasm the poor man showed all that day, and when we reached South Bend, there was acontretempsthat might have afforded Mr. Phelps further food for reflection on the lack of ceremony in America. When the premier stepped off the train into the wet mass of snow that covered the dirty platform of the ugly little station, there was nowhere to be seen any evidence of a reception for the distinguished guest. There was an old hack, or ’bus, one of those rattling, shambling, moth-eaten vehicles that await the incoming train at every smalltown in our land, with a team of forlorn horses depressed by the weather or by life, but there was no committee of eminent citizens, no band, nothing. The scene was bare and bleak and cold, and the premier was plainly disgusted.
He stood there a moment and looked about him undecided, while Mr. Phelps with sympathetic concern displayed great willingness to serve, but was as helpless as his chief. The American sovereigns who were loafing by the station shed looked on with the reticent detachment which characterizes the rural American. And then the train slowly pulled out and left us, and Mr. Blaine cast at it a glance of longing and of reproach, as though in its sundering of the last tie with the world of comfort, he had suffered the final indignity. There seemed to be no course other than to take the ’bus, when suddenly a committee rushed up, out of breath and out of countenance, and with a chorus of apologies explained that they had met the wrong train, or gone to another station, and so bore the premier off in triumph to dine at some rich man’s house.
The day seemed to grow worse as it progressed, as days ill begun have a way of doing, and when the premier in the afternoon appeared at the meeting he was to address, his spirits had not improved, and even if they had, the meeting was one to depress the spirits of any man. It assembled in a barren hall, a kind of skating rink, or something of the sort, that would have served better for a boxing match. The audience was small, and standing about in the mud and slush they had “tramped in,” to use our midwesternphrase, they displayed that bucolic indifference which can daunt the most exuberant speaker. It was in no way worthy of the man, and Mr. Blaine spoke with evident difficulty, and so wholly lacked spirit and enthusiasm that it was impossible for him to warm up to his subject. The speech was of that perfunctory sort which such an atmosphere compels, one of those speeches the speaker drags out, a word at a time, and is glad to be done with, and Mr. Blaine bore with his fates a little while, and then almost abruptly closed. He spoke on the tariff issue, and in defense of the McKinley Bill, and in marshaling the evidences of our glory and prosperity, all of which he attributed to the direct influence of the protective tariff system, he mentioned the number of miles of railroad that had been built, and even the increase in the nation’s population! The speech and the occasion afforded an opportunity to a newspaper of the opposition, which in those days of silly partizanship, was not to be overlooked. I went back to the little hotel and wrote my story, and since I had all the while in my mind not only partizan advantage, but the smiles that would break out on the countenances of Charlie Seymour and Peter Dunne and the other boys gathered in the Whitechapel Club I did not minimise the effect of all those babies who had come to life as a result of the protective tariff, nor all those ironical difficulties the day had heaped upon the great man. It was not, perhaps, quite fair, nor quite nice, but it was as fair and as nice as newspaper ethics and political etiquette—if there are such things—require,and Mr. Blaine himself most have had some consciousness of his partial failure, some dissatisfaction with his effort, for I was just about to put my story on the wire at six o’clock when he appeared, with his rich host, and asked for me. I talked to him through the little wicket of the telegraph office, and the conversation began inauspiciously by the rich man’s peremptorily commanding me to let him see my stuff; he wished, he said, to “look it over”! I was not as patient with his presumption then as I think I could be now, for I had not learned that it was the factory system that produces such types, men who bully the women at home and the women and clerks and operatives in their shops, and I denied him the right, of course. He became very angry, and blustered through the little window, while the operator, an old telegrapher I had known in Toledo, sat behind me waiting to send the story clicking into Chicago onThe Herald’swire. After the rich man had exhausted himself, Mr. Blaine took his place at the window and in a mild and calm manner, asked me for my copy, saying that he was not well, and that he had made some slips in his speech which he did not care to have go to the country. It was those unfortunate or fortunate babies of the protective tariff system, and he said that the correspondent of a press association had agreed to make the excisions if I would do so, and he would consider it a favor if I would oblige him.
The charm of his manner had been on me all that day, and I had been feeling sorry for him all day,too, and I was sorrier for him then than ever, and half ashamed of some of the things I had written, but I explained to him that I had been sent by my paper in the hope that he might say something to the disadvantage of his own cause, and that my duty was to report, at least, what he had said. It was one of the hardest “noes” I ever had to say, and at last as he turned away, I regretted, perhaps more than he, and certainly more than he ever knew, that I could not let him revise his speech—since that is what most of us desire to do with most of our speeches.
When that campaign ended in the overthrow of the Republican majority in Congress, and I was sent to interview Ben Butterworth on the result, he said, in his humorous way: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He was not altogether cast down by the result; in his place in Congress as a representative from a Cincinnati district he had risen to denounce the tariff, and so had his consolation. To me it seemed as if the people had at last entered the promised land, that that was the day the Lord had made for his people, but Mr. Butterworth could point out that our government was not so democratic as the British government, for instance, since it was not so responsive to the people’s will. Over there, of course, after such a reverse the government would have retired, and a new one would have been formed, but here the existing administration would remain in power two years longer, and then, even if it lost in the presidential election over a year must elapse beforea new Congress would convene, so that the millennium was postponed a good three years at least.