IV.

"I especially mention Brigadier-General Garfield, ever active, prudent and sagacious. I feel much indebted to him for both counsel and assistance in the administration of this army. He possesses the energy and the instinct of a great commander."

We must leave to soldiers and to military historians to assign then relative historic importance to the movements of the war. But we may safely trust the popular judgment which pronounces Garfield's role at Chickamauga one of the most conspicuous instances of personal heroism, and the Kentucky campaign a most brilliant example of fertility of resource, combined audacity and prudence, sound military judgment, and success against great odds. We may safely trust, too, the judgment of the accomplished historian, who pronounces his report in favor of the advance that ended with the battle of Chickamuauga "the ablest military document submitted by a chief of staff to his superior during the war." We may accept, also, the award of Lincoln, who made him major-general for his brilliant service at Chickamauga, and the confidence of Thomas, who offered him the command of an army corps. Great as was his capacity for military service, the judgment of Abraham Lincoln did not err, when it summoned him to the field of labor where his greatest laurels were won. It is the fashion, in some quarters, to lament the decay of statesmanship, and to make comparisons, by no means complimentary, between persons now entrusted with the conduct of public affairs, and their predecessors. We may at least find consolation in the knowledge that when any of our companions die they do not failto receive full justice from the hearts of the people.

Suppose any of the statesmen who preceded the war, or some intelligent and not unfriendly foreign observer—some De Tocqueville or Macaulay—to look forward with Garfield to the duties which confronted him when he entered Congress in 1863. With what despair, in the light of all past experience, would he have contemplated the future. How insignificant the difficulties which beset the men of the preceding seventy years compared with those which have crowded the seventeen which were to follow. How marvellous the success the American people have achieved in dealing with these difficulties compared with that which attended the statesmanship of the times of Webster and Clay and Calhoun, giants as they were. The greatness of these men is not likely to be under-valued anywhere, least of all in Massachusetts. They contributed each in his own way those masterly discussions of the great principles by which the Constitution must be interpreted, and the economic laws on which material prosperity depends, which will abide as perpetual forces so long as the republic shall endure. Mr Webster, especially, aided in establishing in the jurisprudence of the country the great judgments, which, on the one hand, asserted for the national government its most necessary and beneficent powers, and, on the other hand, have protected property and libertyfrom invasion. He uttered in the Senate the immortal argument which convinced the American people of the unity of the republic and the supremacy and indestructibility of the national authority. It has been well said that the cannon of the nation were shotted with the reply to Hayne. But the only important and permanent measure with which the name of Webster is connected is the Ashburton treaty—an achievement of diplomacy of little consequence in comparison with those which obtained from the great powers of Europe the relinquishment of the doctrine of perpetual allegiance, or with the Alabama treaty of 1871. Mr. Clay's life was identified with two great policies—the protection of American industry and the compromise between slavery and freedom in their strife for control of the Territories. When he died the free-trade tariff of 1844 was the law of the land, and within two years the Missouri compromise was repealed. Mr Calhoun has left behind him the memory of a stainless life, great intellectual power and a lost cause.

To each generation is committed its peculiar task. To these men it was given to wake the infant republic to a sense of its own great destiny, and to teach it the laws of its being, by which it must live or bear no life. To the men of our time the abstract theories, which were only debated in other days, have come as practical realities, demandingprompt and final decision on questions where error is fatal. From the time of Jay's treaty no such problem has presented itself to American diplomacy as that which the war left as its legacy. The strongest power on earth, accustomed, in dealing with other nations, to take counsel only of her pride and her strength, had inflicted on us vast injury, of which the honor of this country seemed pledged to insist on reparation, which England conceived hers equally pledged to deny. But in domestic affairs, the difficulties were even greater. For six of the sixteen years that followed the death of Lincoln, the President was not in political accord with either house of Congress. For four others the house was of different politics from President and Senate. During the whole time the dominant party had to encounter a zealous and able opposition, and to submit its measures to a people having apparently the strongest inducements to go wrong. The rights of capital were to be determined by the votes of labor, debtors to fix the value of their payments to their creditors, a people under no constraint but their own sense of duty to determine whether they would continue to bear the weight of a vast debt, the policy of dealing with the conquered to be decided at the close of a long war by the votes of the conquerors, among whom every other family was in mourning for its dead, finance and currency with their subtleties,surpassing the subtleties of metaphysics to be made clear to the apprehension of plain men; business to be recalled from the dizzy and dangerous heights of speculation to moderate gains and safe laws; great public ways connecting distant oceans to be built; commerce to be diverted into unaccustomed channels; the mouth of the Mississippi to be opened; a great banking system to be devised and put in operation, such as was never known before, alike comprehensive and safe, through whose veins and arteries credit, the life-blood of trade should ebb and flow in the remotest extremities of the land; four millions of people to be raised from slavery to citizenship; millions more to be welcomed from foreign lands; a disputed presidential succession to be settled, after an election contest in which the country seemed turned into two hostile camps, by a tribunal for which the founders of the government had made no provision; all this to be accomplished under the restraints of a written Constitution.

When this list has been enumerated the eulogy of Garfield the statesman has been spoken. There is scarcely one of these questions, certainly not more than one or two, which he did not anticipate, carefully and thoroughly study for himself before it arose, and to which he did not contribute an original argument, unsurpassed in persuasive force. Undoubtedly there were others whohad more to do with marshalling the political forces of the house. But almost from the time he entered it he was the leader of its best thought. He was ever serious, grave, addressing himself only to the reason and conscience of his auditors.

He lived in a State whose people were evenly divided in politics, and on whose decision, as it swayed alternately from side to side, the fate of the country often seemed to depend. You will search his speeches in vain for an appeal to a base motive or an evil passion. Many men who are called great political leaders are really nothing but great political followers. They study the currents of a public sentiment which other men form. They use as instruments opinions which they never espoused till they became popular. General Garfield always consulted with great care the temper of the house in the conduct of measures which were under his charge. But he was remarkably independent in forming his judgments, and inflexible in adhering to them on all great essential questions. His great friend and commander, General Thomas, whose stubborn courage saved the day in the great battle for the possession of Tennessee, was well-called the "rock of Chickamauga." In the greater battle in 1876 for the nation's honor, Garfield well deserved to be called the "rock of Ohio." Everything he did and said manifested the serious, reverent love of excellent.He had occasion often to seek to win to his opinions masses of men composed largely of illiterate persons. No man ever heard from his lips a sneer at scholarship. At the same time, he never made the scholar's mistake of undervaluing the greatness of the history of his own country, or the quality of his own people.

The limits of this discourse do not permit me to enter into the detail of the variety and extent of his service in debate, in legislation, and in discussions before the people. I could detain you until midnight were I to recount from my own memory the great labors of the twelve years that it was my privilege to share with him in the public service, for four of which I sat almost by his side. Everybody who had a new thought brought it to him for hospitable welcome. Did science or scholarship need anything of the government, Garfield was the man to whom they came. While charged with the duty of supervising the details of present legislation he was always foreseeing and preparing for the future. In the closing years of the war, while chairman of the committee of military affairs, he was studying finance. Later he had prepared himself to deal with the defects in the civil service. I do not think the legislation of the next twenty years will more than reach the ground which he had already occupied in his advanced thought.

General Garfield gave evidence of vast powersof oratory on some very memorable occasions. But he made almost no use of them as a means of persuading the people to conclusions where great public interests were at stake. Sincerity, directness, full and perfect understanding of his subject, clear logic, manly dignity, simple and apt illustration, marked all his discourse. But on a few great occasions, such as that in New York, when the people were moved almost to frenzy by the assassination of Lincoln, or in the storm which moved the great human ocean at the convention at Chicago, he showed that he could touch with a master's hands the chords of that mighty instrument—

"Such as raisedTo height of noblest temper heroes old,Arming to battle, and instead of rageDeliberate valor breathed, firm and unmovedWith dread of death to flight or foul retreat;Nor wanting power to mitigate and suageWith solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chaseAnguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and painFrom mortal or immortal minds."

When General Garfield took the oath of office as President, he seemed to those who knew him best, though in his fiftieth year, still in the prime of a splendid and vigorous youth. He was still growing. We hoped for him eight years of brilliant administration, and then, in some form or place of service, an old age like that of Adams, whom, in variety of equipment, alone of our Presidentshe resembled. What was best and purest and loftiest in the aspiration of America seemed at last to have laid its hand on the helm. Under its beneficent rule we hoped, as our country entered on its new career of peace and prosperity, a nobler liberty, a better friendship, a purer justice, a more lasting brotherhood. But he was called to a sublimer destiny. He had ascended along and up the heights of service, of success, of greatness, of glory; ever raised by the people to higher ranks for gallant and meritorious conduct on each field, until by their suffrages he stood foremost among men of the foremost among nations. But in the days of his sickness and death he became the perpetual witness and example how much greater than the achievements of legislative halls, or the deeds of the field of battle, are the household virtues and simple family affections which all men have within their reach; how much greater than the lessons of the college or the camp, or the congress, are the lessons learned at mother's knees. The honors paid to Garfield are the protest of a better age and a better generation against the vulgar heroisms of the past. Go through their mausoleums and under their triumphal arches, and see how the names inscribed there shrink and shrivel compared with that of this Christian soldier, whose chiefest virtues, after all, are of the fireside and the family circle, and of the dying bed. Here thehero of America becomes the hero of humanity.

We are justified, then, in saying of this man that he has been tried and tested in every mode by which the quality of a human heart and the capacity of a human intellect can be disclosed; by adversity, by prosperity, by poverty, by wealth, by leadership in deliberative assemblies, and in the perilous edge of battle, by the height of power and of fame. The essay was to be completed by the certain and visible approach of death. As he comes out into the sunlight, more and more clearly does his country behold a greatness and symmetry which she is to see in their true and full proportions only when he lies in the repose of death.

"As sometimes in a dead man's face,To those that watch it more and more,A likeness, hardly seen before,Comes out, to some one of his race,So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,I see thee what thou art, and knowThy likeness to the wise below,Thy kindred with the great of old."

"As sometimes in a dead man's face,To those that watch it more and more,A likeness, hardly seen before,Comes out, to some one of his race,

So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,I see thee what thou art, and knowThy likeness to the wise below,Thy kindred with the great of old."

Let us not boast at the funeral of our dead. Such a temper would be doubly odious in the presence of such expressions of hearty sympathy from governments of every form. But we should be unfaithful to ourselves if in asking for this man a place in the world's gallery of illustrious names we did not declare that we offer him as an example ofthe products of Freedom. With steady and even step he walked from the log-cabin and the canal-path to the school, to the college, to the battle-field, to the halls of legislation, to the White House, to the chamber of death. The ear in which the voices of his countrymen, hailing him at the pinnacle of human glory had scarcely died out, heard the voice of the dread archangel, and his countenance did not change. Is not that country worth dying for whose peasantry are of such a strain? Is not the Constitution worth standing by under whose forms Freedom calls such men to her high places? Is not the Union worth saving which gives all of us the property of countrymen in such a fame?

Mr. President: For the second time in this generation the great departments of the Government of the United States are assembled in the Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a murdered President. Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in which the passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical termination of his great life added but another to the lengthened succession of horrors which had marked so many lintels with the blood of the first born. Garfield was slain in a day of peace, when brother had been reconciled to brother, and when anger and hate had been banished from the land. "Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited where such example was last to have been looked for, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate. Let him draw, rather, a decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon; not so much anexample of human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character."

From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth till the uprising against Charles First, about twenty thousand emigrants came from Old England to New England. As they came in pursuit of intellectual freedom and ecclesiastical independence rather than for worldly honor and profit, the emigration naturally ceased when the contest for religious liberty began in earnest at home. The man who struck his most effective blow for freedom of conscience by sailing for the colonies in 1620 would have been accounted a deserter to leave after 1640. The opportunity had then come on the soil of England for that great contest which established the authority of Parliament, gave religious freedom to the people, sent Charles to the block, and committed to the hands of Oliver Cromwell the Supreme Executive authority of England. The English emigration was never renewed, and from these twenty thousand men with a small emigration from Scotland and from France are descended the vast numbers who have New England blood in their veins.

In 1685 the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. scattered to other countries fourhundred thousand Protestants, who were among the most intelligent and enterprising of French subjects—merchants of capital, skilled manufacturers and handicraftsmen, superior at the time to all others in Europe. A considerable number of these Huguenot French came to America, a few landed in New England and became honorably prominent in its history. Their names have in large part become anglicized, or have disappeared, but their blood is traceable in many of the most reputable families, and their fame is perpetuated in honorable memorials and useful institutions.

From these two sources, the English-Puritan and the French-Huguenot, came the late President—his father, Abram Garfield, being descended from the one, and his mother, Eliza Ballou, from the other.

It was good stock on both sides—none better, none braver, none truer. There was in it an inheritance of courage, of manliness, of imperishable love of liberty, of undying adherence to principle. Garfield was proud of his blood, and, with as much satisfaction as if he were a British nobleman reading his stately ancestral record in Burke's Peerage, he spoke of himself as ninth in descent from those who would not endure the oppression of the Stuarts, and seventh in descent from the brave French Protestants who refused to submit to tyranny even from the Grand Monarque.

General Garfield delighted to dwell on these traits, and, during his only visit to England, he busied himself in discovering every trace of his forefathers in parish registries and on ancient army rolls. Sitting with a friend in the gallery of the House of Commons one night after a long day's labor in this field of research, he said with evident elation that in every war in which for three centuries patriots of English blood had struck sturdy blows for constitutional government and human liberty, his family had been represented. They were at Marston Moor, at Naseby, and at Preston, they were at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga and at Monmouth, and in his own person had battled for the same great cause in the war which preserved the Union of the States.

Losing his father before he was two years old, the early life of Garfield was one of privation, but its poverty has been made indelicately and unjustly prominent. Thousands of readers have imagined him as the ragged, starving child, whose reality too often greets the eye in the squalid sections of our large cities. General Garfield's infancy and youth had none of their destitution, none of their pitiful features appealing to the tender heart and to the open hand of charity. He was a poor boy in the same sense in which Henry Clay was a poor boy; in which Andrew Jackson was a poor boy; in which Daniel Webster was a poor boy: in thesense in which a large majority of the eminent men of America in all generations, have been poor boys. Before a great multitude of men, in a public speech, Mr Webster bore this testimony;

"It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin raised amid the snowdrifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that when the smoke rose first from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and incidents which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode."

With the requisite change of scene, the same words would aptly portray the early days of Garfield. The poverty of the frontier, where all are engaged in a common struggle, and where a common sympathy and hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty; different in kind, different in influence and effect, from that conscious and humiliating indigence which is every day forced to contrast itself with neighboring wealth, on which it feels a sense of grindingdependence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed no poverty. It is but the beginning of wealth, and has the boundless possibilities of the future always opening before it. No man ever grew up in the agricultural regions of the West, where a house-raising, or even a corn-husking, is matter of common interest and helpfulness, with any other feeling than that of broad-minded, generous independence. This honorable independence marked the youth of Garfield, as it marks the youth of millions of the best blood and brain now training for the future citizenship and future government of the republic. Garfield was born heir to land, to the title of free-holder, which has been the patent and passport of self-respect with the Anglo Saxon race ever since Hengist and Horsa landed on the shores of England. His adventure on the canal—an alternative between that and the deck of a Lake Erie schooner—was a farmer boy's device for earning money, just as the New England lad begins a possibly greater career by sailing before the mast on a coasting vessel or on a merchantman bound to the farther India or to the China Seas.

No manly man feels anything of shame in looking back to early struggles with adverse circumstances, and no man feels a worthier pride than when he has conquered the obstacles to his progress. But no one of noble mould desires to belooked upon as having occupied a menial position, as having been repressed by a feeling of inferiority, or as having suffered the evils of poverty until relief was found at the hand of charity. General Garfield's youth presented no hardships which family love and family energy did not overcome, subjected him to no privations which he did not cheerfully accept, and left no memories save those which were recalled with delight, and transmitted with profit and with pride.

Garfield's early opportunities for securing an education were extremely limited, and yet were sufficient to develop in him an intense desire to learn. He could read at three years of age, and each winter he had the advantage of the district school. He read all the books to be found within the circle of his acquaintance; some of them he got by heart. While yet in childhood he was a constant student of the Bible, and became familiar with its literature. The dignity and earnestness of his speech in his maturer life gave evidence of this early training. At eighteen years of age he was able to teach school, and thenceforward his ambition was to obtain a college education. To this end he bent all his efforts, working in the harvest field, at the carpenter's bench, and, in the winter season, teaching the common schools of the neighborhood. While thus laboriously occupied he found time to prosecute his studies, and was sosuccessful that at twenty-two years of age he was able to enter the junior class at Williams College, then under the presidency of the venerable and honored Mark Hopkins, who, in the fullness of his powers, survives the eminent pupil to whom he was of inestimable service.

The history of Garfield's life to this period, presents no novel features. He had undoubtedly shown perseverance, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, and ambition, qualities, which, be it said for the honor of our country, are everywhere to be found among the young men of America. But from his graduation at Williams onward, to the hour of his tragical death, Garfield's career was eminent and exceptional. Slowly working through his educational period, receiving his diploma when twenty-four years of age, he seemed as one bound to spring into conspicuous and brilliant success. Within six years he was successively president of a college, State Senator of Ohio, major-general of the army of the United States, and Representative elect to the National Congress. A combination of honors so varied, so elevated, within a period so brief and to a man so young, is without precedent or parallel in the history of the country.

Garfield's army life was begun with no other military knowledge than such as he had hastily gained from books in the few months preceding his march to the field. Stepping from civil life tothe head of a regiment, the first order he received when ready to cross the Ohio was to assume command of a brigade, and to operate as an independent force in Eastern Kentucky. His immediate duty was to check the advance of Humphrey Marshall, who was marching down the Big Sandy with the intention of occupying, in connection with other confederate forces, the entire territory of Kentucky, and of precipitating the State into secession. This was at the close of the year 1861. Seldom, if ever, has a young college professor been thrown into a more embarrassing and discouraging position. He knew just enough of military science, as he expressed it himself, to measure the extent of his ignorance, and with a handful of men he was marching, in rough winter weather, into a strange country, among a hostile population, to confront a largely superior force under the command of a distinguished graduate of West Point, who had seen active and important service in two preceding wars.

The result of the campaign is matter of history. The skill, the endurance, the extraordinary energy shown by Garfield, the courage he imparted to his men, raw and untried as himself, the measures he adopted to increase his force and to create in the enemy's mind exaggerated estimates of his numbers, bore perfect fruit in the routing of Marshall, the capture of his camp, the dispersion of hisforce, and the emancipation of an important territory from the control of the rebellion. Coming at the close of a long series of disasters to the Union arms, Garfield's victory had an unusual and extraneous importance, and in the popular judgment elevated the young commander to the rank of a military hero. With less than two thousand men in his entire command, with a mobilized force of only eleven hundred, without cannon, he had met an army of five thousand and defeated them—driving Marshall's forces successively from two strongholds of their own selection, fortified with abundant artillery. Major-General Buell, commanding the Department of the Ohio, an experienced and able soldier of the regular army, published an order of thanks and congratulation on the brilliant result of the Big Sandy campaign, which would have turned the head of a less cool and sensible man than Garfield. Buell declared that his services had called into action the highest qualities of a soldier, and President Lincoln supplemented these words of praise by the more substantial reward of a brigadier-general's commission, to bear date from the day of his decisive victory over Marshall.

The subsequent military career of Garfield fully sustained its brilliant beginning. With his new commission he was assigned to the command of a brigade in the Army of the Ohio, and took partin the second and decisive day's fight in the great battle of Shiloh. The remainder of the year 1862 was not especially eventful to Garfield, as it was not to the armies with which he was serving. His practical sense was called into exercise in completing the task assigned him by General Buell, of reconstructing bridges and reëstablishing lines of railway communication for the army. His occupation in this useful but not brilliant field was varied by service on courts-martial of importance, in which department of duty he won a valuable reputation attracting the notice and securing the approval of the able and eminent Judge Advocate General of the Army. That of itself was warrant to honorable fame; for among the great men who in those trying days gave themselves, with entire devotion, to the service of their country, one who brought to that service the ripest learning, the most fervid eloquence, the most varied attainments, who labored with modesty and shunned applause, who, in the day of triumph, sat reserved and silent and grateful—as Francis Deak in the hour of Hungary's deliverance—was Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, who, in his honorable retirement, enjoys the respect and veneration of all who love the Union of the States.

Early in 1863 Garfield was assigned to the highly important and responsible post of chief of staff to General Rosecrans, then at the headof the Army of the Cumberland. Perhaps in a great military campaign no subordinate officer requires sounder judgment and quicker knowledge of men than the chief of staff to the commanding general. An indiscreet man in such a position can sow more discord, breed more jealousy, and disseminate more strife, than any other officer in the entire organization. When General Garfield assumed his new duties, he found various troubles already well developed and seriously effecting the value and efficiency of the Army of the Cumberland. The energy, the impartiality, and the tact with which he sought to allay these dissensions, and to discharge the duties of his new and trying position, will always remain one of the most striking proofs of his great versatility. His military duties closed on the memorable field of Chickamauga, a field which, however disastrous to the Union arms, gave to him the occasion of winning imperishable laurels. The very rare distinction was accorded him of a great promotion for his bravery on a field that was lost. President Lincoln appointed him a major-general in the army of the United States for gallant and meritorious conduct in the battle of Chickamauga.

The Army of the Cumberland was reorganized under the command of General Thomas, who promptly offered Garfield one of its divisions. He was extremely desirous to accept the position,but was embarrassed by the fact that he had, a year before, been elected to Congress, and the time when he must take his seat was drawing near. He preferred to remain in the military service, and had within his own breast the largest confidence of success in the wider field which his new rank opened to him. Balancing the argument on the one side and the other, anxious to determine what was for the best, desirous above all things to do his patriotic duty, he was decisively influenced by the advice of President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton, both of whom assured him that he could, at that time, be of especial value in the House of Representatives. He resigned his commission of major-general on the fifth day of December, 1863, and took his seat in the House of Representatives on the seventh. He had served two years and four months in the army, and had just completed his thirty-second year.

The Thirty-eighth Congress is preëminently entitled in history to the designation of the War Congress. It was elected while the war was flagrant, and every member was chosen upon the issues involved in the continuance of the struggle. The Thirty seventh Congress had, indeed, legislated to a large extent on war measures, but it was chosen before any one believed that secession of the States would be actually attempted. The magnitude of the work which fell upon its successorwas unprecedented, both in respect to the vast sums of money raised for the support of the army and navy, and of the new and extraordinary powers of legislation which it was forced to exercise. Only twenty-four States were represented, and one hundred and eighty-two members were upon its roll. Among these were many distinguished party leaders on both sides, veterans in the public service, with established reputations for ability, and with that skill which comes only from parliamentary experience. Into this assemblage of men Garfield entered without special preparation, and it might almost be said unexpectedly. The question of taking command of a division of troops under General Thomas or taking his seat in Congress, was kept open till the last moment, so late, indeed, that the resignation of his military commission and his appearance in the House were almost contemporaneous. He wore the uniform of a major-general of the United States army on Saturday, and on Monday in civilian's dress he answered to the roll-call as a Representative in Congress from the State of Ohio.

He was especially fortunate in the constituency which elected him. Descended almost entirely from New England stock, the men of the Ashtabula district were intensely radical on all questions relating to human rights. Well-educated, thrifty, thoroughly intelligent in affairs, acutely discerningof character, not quick to bestow confidence, and slow to withdraw it, they were at once the most helpful and most exacting of supporters. Their tenacious trust in men in whom they have once confided, is illustrated by the unparalleled fact that Elisha Whittlesey, Joshua R. Giddings and James A. Garfield represented the district for fifty-four years.

There is no test of a man's ability in any department of public life more severe than service in the House of Representatives; there is no place where so little deference is paid to reputation previously acquired, or to eminence won outside; no place where so little consideration is shown for the feelings or the failures of beginners. What a man gains in the House, he gains by sheer force of his own character, and if he loses and falls back he must expect no mercy, and will receive no sympathy. It is a field in which the survival of the strongest is the recognized rule, and where no pretense can deceive and no glamour can mislead. The real man is discovered, his worth is impartially weighed, his rank is irreversibly decreed.

With possibly a single exception, Garfield was the youngest member in the House when he entered, and was but seven years from his college graduation. But he had not been in his seat sixty days before his ability was recognized and his place conceded. He stepped to the front with theconfidence of one who belonged there. The House was crowded with strong men of both parties; nineteen of them have since been transferred to the Senate, and many of them have served with distinction in the gubernatorial chairs of their respective States, and on foreign missions of great consequence; but among them all none grew so rapidly, none so firmly as Garfield. As is said by Trevelyan of his parliamentary hero, Garfield succeeded "because all the world in concert could not have kept him in the background, and because when once in the front he played his part with a prompt intrepidity and a commanding ease that were but the outward symptoms of the immense reserves of energy, on which it was his power to draw." Indeed the apparently reserved force which Garfield possessed, was one of his great characteristics. He never did so well but that it seemed he could easily have done better. He never expended so much strength but that he seemed to be holding additional power to call. This is one of the happiest and rarest distinctions of an effective debater, and often counts for as much in persuading an assembly as the eloquent and elaborate argument.

The great measure of Garfield's fame was filled by his service in the House of Representatives. His military life, illustrated by honorable performance, and rich in promise, was, as he himselffelt, prematurely terminated, and necessarily incomplete. Speculation as to what he might have done in a field where the great prizes are so few, cannot be profitable. It is sufficient to say that as a soldier he did his duty bravely; he did it intelligently; he won an enviable fame, and he retired from the service without blot or breath against him. As a lawyer, though admirably equipped for the profession, he can scarcely be said to have entered on its practice. The few efforts he made at the bar were distinguished by the same high order of talent which he exhibited on every field where he was put to the test, and if a man may be accepted as a competent judge of his own capacity and adaptations, the law was the profession to which Garfield should have devoted himself. But fate ordained otherwise, and his reputation in history will rest largely upon his service in the House of Representatives. That service was exceptionally long. He was nine times consecutively chosen to the House, an honor enjoyed by not more than six other Representatives of the more than five thousand who have been elected from the organization of the government until this hour.

As a parliamentary orator, as a debater on an issue squarely joined, where the position had been chosen and the ground laid out, Garfield must be assigned a very high rank. More, perhaps, thanany man with whom he was associated in public life, he gave careful and systematic study to public questions, and he came to every discussion in which he took part, with elaborate and complete preparation. He was a steady and indefatigable worker. Those who imagine that talent or genius can supply the place or achieve the results of labor, can find no encouragement in Garfield's life. In preliminary work he was apt, rapid, and skillful. He possessed in a high degree the power of readily absorbing ideas and facts, and, like Dr. Johnson, had the art of getting from a book all that was of value in it, by a reading apparently so quick and cursory that it seemed like a mere glance at the table of contents. He was a preëminently fair and candid man in debate, took no petty advantages, stooped to no unworthy methods, avoided personal allusions, rarely appealed to prejudice, did not seek to inflame passion. He had a quicker eye for the strong point of his adversary than for his weak point, and on his own side he so marshaled his weighty arguments as to make his hearers forget any possible lack in the complete strength of his position. He had a habit of stating his opponent's side with such amplitude of fairness and such liberality of concession that his followers often complained that he was giving his case away. But never in his prolonged participation in the proceedings of the House did he givehis case away or fail, in the judgment of competent and impartial listeners, to gain the mastery.

These characteristics, which marked Garfield as a great debater, did not, however, make him a great parliamentary leader. A parliamentary leader, as that term is understood wherever free representative government exists, is necessarily and very strictly the organ of his party. An ardent American defined the instinctive warmth of patriotism when he offered the toast, "Our country, always right, but right or wrong, our country." The parliamentary leader who has a body of followers that will do and dare and die for the cause, is one who believes his party always right, but right or wrong, is for his party. No more important or exacting duty devolves upon him than the selection of the field and the time for contest. He must know not merely how to strike, but where to strike and when to strike. He often skillfully avoids the strength of his opponent's position and scatters confusion in his ranks by attacking an exposed point when really the righteousness of the cause and the strength of logical intrenchment are against him. He conquers often both against the right and the heavy battalions; as when young Charles Fox, in the days of his toryism, carried the House of Commons against justice, against its immemorial rights, against his own convictions, if, indeed, at thatperiod Fox had convictions, and, in the interest of a corrupt administration, in obedience to a tyrannical sovereign, drove Wilkes from the seat to which the electors of Middlesex had chosen him, and installed Luttrell, in defiance, not merely of law but of public decency. For an achievement of that kind Garfield was disqualified—disqualified by the texture of his mind, by the honesty of his heart, by his conscience, and by every instinct and aspiration of his nature.

The three most destinguished parliamentary leaders hitherto developed in this country are Mr. Clay, Mr. Douglass, and Mr. Thaddeus Stevens. Each was a man of consummate ability, of great earnestness, of intense personality, differing widely, each from the others, and yet with a signal trait in common—the power to command. In the give and take of daily discussion, in the art of controling and consolidating reluctant and refractory followers; in the skill to overcome all forms of opposition, and to meet, with competency and courage the varying phases of unlooked-for assault or unsuspected defection, it would be difficult to rank with these a fourth name in all our Congressional history. But of those Mr. Clay was the greatest. It would, perhaps, be impossible to find in the parliamentary annals of the world a parallel to Mr. Clay, in 1841, when, at sixty-four years of age, he took the control of the Whigparty from the President who had received their suffrages, against the power of Webster in the Cabinet, against the eloquence of Choate in the Senate, against the Herculean efforts of Caleb Cushing and Henry A. Wise in the House. In unshared leadership, in the pride and plentitude of power, he hurled against John Tyler with deepest scorn the mass of that conquering column which had swept over the land in 1840, and drove his administration to seek shelter behind the lines of his political foes. Mr. Douglas achieved a victory scarcely less wonderful, when, in 1854, against the secret desires of a strong administration, against the wise counsel of the older chiefs, against the conservative instincts and even the moral sense of the country, he forced a reluctant Congress into a repeal of the Missouri compromise. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens in his contests from 1865 to 1868, actually advanced his parliamentary leadership into Congress, tied the hands of the President, and governed the country by its own will, leaving only perfunctory duties to be discharged by the Executive. With two hundred millions of patronage in his hands at the opening of the contest, aided by the active force of Seward in the Cabinet and the moral power of Chase on the Bench, Andrew Johnson could not command the support of one-third in either House against the parliamentary uprising of which Thaddeus Stevens wasthe animating spirit and the unquestioned leader.

From these three great men Garfield differed radically; differed in the quality of his mind, in temperament, in the form and phase of ambition. He could not do what they did, but he could do what they could not, and in the breadth of his Congressional work he left that which will longer exert a potential influence among men, and which, measured by the severe test of posthumous criticism, will secure a more enduring and more enviable fame.

Those unfamiliar with Garfield's industry, and ignorant of the details of his work, may, in some degree, measure them by the annals of Congress. No one of the generation of public men to which he belonged has contributed so much that will be valuable for future reference. His speeches are numerous, many of them brilliant, all of them well studied, carefully phrased, and exhaustive of the subject under consideration. Collected from the scattered pages of ninety royal octavo volumes ofCongressional Record, they would present an invaluable compendium of the political history of the most important era through which the national government has ever passed. When the history of this period shall be impartially written, when war legislation, measures of reconstruction, protection of human rights, amendments to the Constitution, maintenance of public credit, stepstoward specie resumption, true theories of revenue may be reviewed, unsurrounded by prejudice and disconnected from partisanism, the speeches of Garfield will be estimated at their true value, and will be found to comprise a vast magazine of fact and argument, of clear analysis and sound conclusion. Indeed, if no other authority were accessible, his speeches in the House of Representatives from December, 1863, to June, 1880, would give a well-connected history and complete defence of the important legislation of the seventeen eventful years that constitute his parliamentary life. Far beyond that, his speeches would be found to forecast many great measures yet to be completed—measures which he knew were beyond the public opinion of the hour, but which he confidently believed would secure popular approval within the period of his own lifetime, and by the aid of his own efforts.

Differing, as Garfield does, from the brilliant parliamentary leaders, it is not easy to find his counterpart anywhere in the record of American public life. He, perhaps, more nearly resembles Mr. Seward in his supreme faith in the all-conquering power of a principle. He had the love of learning, and the patient industry of investigation to which John Quincy Adams owes his prominence and his Presidency. He had some of those ponderous elements of mind which distinguished Mr. Webster, and which, indeed, in all our publiclife, have left the great Massachusetts senator without an intellectual peer.

In English parliamentary history, as in our own, the leaders in the House of Commons present points of essential difference from Garfield. But some of his methods recall the best features in the strong, independent course of Sir Robert Peel, and striking resemblances are discernible in that most promising of modern conservatives, who died two early for his country and his fame, the Lord George Bentick. He had all of Burke's love for the sublime and the beautiful, with, possibly, something of his superabundance; and in his faith and his magnanimity, in his power of statement, in his subtle analysis, in his faultless logic, in his love of literature, in his wealth and world of illustration, one is reminded of that great English statesman of to-day, who, confronted with obstacles that would daunt any but the dauntless, reviled by those whom he would relieve as bitterly as by those whose supposed rights he is forced to invade, still labors with serene courage for the amelioration of Ireland, and for the honor of the English name.

Garfield's nomination to the Presidency, while not predicted or anticipated, was not a surprise to the country. His prominence in Congress, his solid qualities, his wide reputation, strengthened by his then recent election as Senator from Ohio, kept him in the public eye as a man occupying thevery highest rank among those entitled to be called statesmen. It was not mere chance that brought him this high honor. "We must," says Mr. Emerson, "reckon success a constitutional trait. If Eric is in robust health and has slept well and is at the top of his condition, and thirty years old at his departure from Greenland, he will steer west, and his ships will reach Newfoundland. But take Eric out and put in a stronger and bolder man, and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles farther, and reach Labrador and New England. There is no chance in results."

As a candidate, Garfield steadily grew in popular favor. He was met with a storm of detraction at the very hour of his nomination, and it continued, with increasing volume and momentum, until the close of his victorious campaign:

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