His integrity, his common-sense, his courage, his unequalled experience, are the qualities offered to his country. The only argument, the only one that the wit of man or the stress of politics has devised is one that would dumbfounder Solomon, because he thought there was nothing new under 5 the sun. Having tried Grant twice and found him faithful, we are told that we must not, even after an interval of years, trust him again. My countrymen! my countrymen what stultification does not such a fallacy involve! The American people exclude Jefferson Davis from public trust. Why? 10 why? because he was the arch traitor and would-be destroyer; and now the same people are asked to ostracize Grant and not to trust him. Why? why? I repeat: because he was the arch-preserver of his country, and because, not only in war, but twice as civil magistrate, he gave his high- 15 est, noblest efforts to the republic. Is this an electioneering juggle, or is it hypocrisy's masquerade? There is no field of human activity, responsibility, or reason, in which rational beings object to an agent because he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting. There is, I say, no depart- 20 ment of human reason in which sane men reject an agent because he has had experience making him exceptionally competent and fit. From the man who shoes your horse to the lawyer who tries your cause, the officer who manages your railway or your mill, the doctor into whose hands you 25 give your life, or the minister who seeks to save your soul, what man do you reject because by his works you have known him and found him faithful and fit? What makes the Presidential office an exception to all things else in the common sense to be applied in selecting its incumbent? 30 Who dares who dares to put fetters on that free choice and judgment which is the birthright of the American people? Can it be said that Grant has used official power and place to perpetuate his term? He has no place, and official power has not been used for him. Without patronage and 35 without emissaries, without committees, without bureaus, Gefutation. without telegraph wires running from his house to this Convention, or running from his house anywhere else, this man is the candidate whose friends have never threatened to bolt unless this Convention did as they said. He is a Republi5 can who never wavers. He and his friends stand by the creed and the candidate of the Republican party. They hold the rightful rule of the majority as the very essence of their faith, and they mean to uphold that faith against not only the common enemy, but against the charlatans, jay10 hawkers, tramps, and guerillas - the men who deploy between the lines, and forage now on one side and then on the other. This Convention is master of a supreme opportunity. It can name the next President. It can make sure of his election. It can make sure not only of 15 his election, but of his certain and peaceful inauguration. More than all, it can break that power which dominates and mildews the South. It can overthrow an organization whose very existence is a standing protest against progress. The purpose of the Democratic party is spoils. Its very /20 hope of existence is a solid South. Its success is a menace to order and prosperity. I say this Convention can overthrow that power. It can dissolve and emancipate a solid South. It can speed the nation in a career of grandeur eclipsing all past achievements. 25 Gentlemen, we have only to listen above the din and look beyond the dust of an hour to behold the Republican party advancing with its ensigns resplendent with illustrious achievements, marching to certain and lasting victory with its greatest Marshal at its head. Brad Ginqualto Modery American Gatory" pr 3-40. 130 B. Early life 17 Actual duti III. Closing Days II. J. G. BLAINE. The Life and Character of James Abram Garfield. A Memorial Address delivered before both houses of Congress, at their request, in the hall of the House of Representatives, February 27, 1882. [The day had been dedicated by Congress for memorial services throughout the country to the late President. Mr. Blaine-had for years been a close friend of President Garfield, and in his Cabinet was Secretary of State.] MR. PRESIDENT: For the second time in this generation 5 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. "Who- 15 ever 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 20 smooth-faced, bloodless demon; not so much an example 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 25 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 5 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, I 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 15 who have New England blood in their veins. In 1685 the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. scattered to other countries four hundred thousand Protestants, who were among the most intelligent and enterprising of French subjects - merchants of capital, 20 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 anglicised, 25 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, 30 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 35 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 5 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 10 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 15 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. 20 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 25 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 30 a poor boy; in which Daniel Webster was a poor boy; in the sense 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: 35 "It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but |