Part 17

“With the growth of new states and the resulting changes in the centres of population, new interests are developed, rival to the old, but by no means hostile; diverse, but not antagonistic. Nay, rather are all these interests in harmony, and _the true science of just government is to give to each its full and fair play, oppressing none by undue exaction, favoring none by undue privilege_.

“It is this great lesson which our daily experience is teaching, binding us together more closely, making our mutual dependence more manifest, and causing us to feel that, whether we live in the North or in the South, in the East or in the West, we have indeed but ‘one country, one constitution, one destiny.’”

Few addresses so brief breathe a spirit of broader statesmanship, or loftier ideal of civil government. Two years before this, in 1871, he had been charged by General Butler with having presidential aspirations, and surely he was able to manifest the true conception of a just and righteous government, “oppressing none by undue exaction, favoring none by undue privilege,” which is apparently the exact outcome--a sort of paraphrase of Lincoln’s words, “With malice toward none, with charity toward all.”

Many who had participated in the Rebellion, having had their political disabilities removed by the vote of two-thirds of each House of congress, came forward and took the special oath provided for them by act of July 11, 1868.

Mr. Blaine seldom, if ever, leaves the chair to participate in debate when questions of a political nature are pending, so that he may hold himself aloof for fair ruling in all of his decisions.

The position of speaker is, in many respects, a thankless one. When party spirit runs high, as it does at times, like the tide of battle, in the great debates, men are swept on by their sympathies, as barks are tossed in ocean-storms, and under the influence of their most powerful prejudices they are driven to rash and unwarrantable conclusions regarding the justice of any ruling, to conjectures the most unfair and wanton regarding motive, and as in the case of Mr. Blaine, to the most stupendous efforts at political assassination.

But it was not until the days of his speakership were over, and the people at home had expressed their confidence in him and their love and admiration for him, by electing him to congress for the seventh time consecutively, that the storm struck him. It had been gathering long. Its animus was enmity, its bulk was hate, its dark, frowning exterior was streaked with the lurid lightnings of a baleful jealousy; muttering thunders like the deep growlings of exasperation were heard oft, but feared not.

The solid South had marched its rebel brigadiers by the score into the arena of national questioning and discussion, where for twelve years he had stood intrepid as the founders of the Republic. No man was more at home upon that field than he,--none more familiar with the men, the methods, and the measures that had triumphed there,--and few have been more victorious in the great ends for which he strove, few readier to challenge the coming of any man, to know his rights, his mission, and his weight. He was, of all men, the most unconquerable by those who plead for measures subversive of any great or minor end for which the war was fought.

He had gained the credit of the fourteenth amendment, and had been identified with all. He was simply bent upon resistance, the most powerful he could command, against all encroachments of the bad and false, and to show no favor toward any feature for which rebellion fought. Fair, honorable, just,--none could be more so.

When speaker of the House, he was informed one day that a prominent correspondent of a leading paper, who had maligned and vilified him shockingly, was on the floor, and at once he said, “Invite him up here,” and he gave him a seat by his side, within the speaker’s desk, and placed at the disposal of the man the information of public importance at his command. The fellow was amazed, and went away and wrote how kindly he had been treated by the great-hearted man of noble impulses, after he had so roundly abused him.

There is nothing vindictive about him, nothing despicable. He is severe, herculean, desperate for the right, and will win in every battle that commands the forces of his being, if victory be achievable. But he honors strong, square men, who have convictions and dare proclaim them; but petty, mean, ignoble souls are first despised, then pitied.

But the day of his betrayal came, the day of rebel wrath; and he met the stroke before the nation’s gaze, and was vindicated before the world.

A business correspondence, it had been said he had burned. He said, “No, there it is, and I will read it to the House,” and he read it. What business firm, it has been asked, would like to have their correspondence regarding any great business interest, read to those who are filled with all manner of suspicions, and so have it misjudged, misinterpreted, and misapplied? And then, to show the temper of those with whom he dealt, a cablegram from Europe vindicating him, was for two days suppressed by the chairman of the congressional committee, before whom he stood, and who failed to convict him by any document at their command. The scene at that time, and their discomfiture, is thus described by an eye-witness:--

“His management of his own case when the Mulligan letters came out was worthy of any general who ever set a squadron in the field. For nearly fifteen years I have looked down from the galleries of the House and Senate, and I never saw, and never expect to see, and never have read of such a scene, where the grandeur of human effort was better illustrated, than when this great orator rushed down the aisle, and, in the very face of Proctor Knott, charged him with suppressing a telegram favorable to Blaine. The whole floor and all the galleries were wild with excitement. Men yelled and cheered, women waved their handkerchiefs and went off into hysterics, and the floor was little less than a mob.”

About this time, Hon. Lot M. Morrill, of his state, was transferred from the senate to the cabinet of President Grant, and as a partial justification, General Connor, the governor of Maine at this time, appointed him to represent Maine in the United States senate in place of Mr. Morrill. The official note was as follows:--

“AUGUSTA, Maine, July 9, 1876.

“TO HON. MILTON SAYLOR, _Speaker of the House of Representatives, Washington, D. C._:

“Having tendered to the Hon. James G. Blaine the appointment of senator in congress, he has placed in my hands his resignation as representative from the third district of Maine, to take effect Monday, July 10, 1876.

“SELDON CONNOR, “_Governor of Maine_.”

When the legislature of his state met, he came before them and placed himself under a thorough investigation at their hands. And as Ex-Gov. A. P. Morrill says, “They made thorough work of it.” A man to come forth from such an ordeal unscathed, and without the smell of fire on his garments, must be right and not wrong,--or else he is the veriest scoundrel, guilty, deeply so, and competent for bribes, and they, the legislature of Maine, who virtually tried him, hopelessly corrupt. But, no! this cannot be; and so he was vindicated, and triumphantly elected by them to the highest trust within their gift, to wear the honors of a Morrill and a Fessenden.

And yet again do they elect him for a full term of years. And then the royal Garfield, the nation’s loved and honored president, knowing all, and knowing him most intimately for seventeen years or more, takes him into his cabinet, trustingly, and for the nation’s good.

Can victory be grander, or triumph more complete, endorsement more honorable, or vindication more just, or a verdict be more patient, thorough, or exhaustive of evidence! What man in all the land, traduced and vilified just as Washington, Lincoln, and Garfield were, wears prouder badges of endorsement from congress, governor, legislature, senate, and conventions by the score! What man that bears credentials of his character as trophies of higher worth, from judges of sounder mind, and lives more unimpeachable? Answer, ye who can!

XV.

UNITED STATES SENATOR.

It was generally understood in Maine that the Hon. Lot M. Morrill was serving his last term in the United States senate, and that Mr. Blaine was to be his successor; so that when Mr. Morrill was advanced to the secretaryship of the treasury in General Grant’s cabinet, it occasioned no surprise that Governor Connor appointed Mr. Blaine to the senate in his stead. He was just recovering from the partial sunstroke which felled him to the pavement while on his way to church, on a Sabbath morning, with Miss Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), just prior to the Cincinnati Convention, and soon after his victory over Proctor Knott, during his persecution in the House. Next to the nomination at Cincinnati, nothing of a political nature could have been more grateful to him than this high honor from the governor of his state, in accordance, as the governor himself says, with the expectation of the people. Coming, as it did, at an ill and weary time, it must have greatly refreshed and revived his spirits, to have new and larger evidence of the esteem and endorsement of those to whose interests his life was devoted.

On July 12, 1876, he took his seat as the colleague of Hannibal Hamlin in the senate. He is placed at once as chairman on the committee on rules, and on the committee on appropriations, and on naval affairs, besides on a select committee “on the levees on the Mississippi River.” This, for a senatorial start, was quite honorable to his judgment and ability.

There are many old traditions and customs, which amount to laws, so far as assigning positions of responsibility to new members is concerned, but there is no law which prevents a new member from taking the most advanced position possible by virtue of his wisdom and knowledge, and his ability in debate.

He could not well become entangled in the meshes of an intricate network of rules and regulations, which Butler, in acknowledging Mr. Blaine’s superior knowledge of in the House, had said he knew nothing about,--Blaine knew it all. His position made it necessary that he should, and now he was made chief in this department in the new branch of legislation to which he had succeeded. So he could not be held or hampered by any difficulty of this kind. Moreover, his acquaintance was well-nigh universal among the members, and some of them knew him a little better than they could have wished. He was also familiar with the methods and measures of the senate, having frequently been on joint committees with them during his early terms of service in the lower House, and then the general subjects of appropriations, naval, military, judiciary, manufactures, commerce, foreign affairs, finance, pension affairs, etc., these were the subjects with which he was accustomed to deal during all of his years in congress.

He was at home, and coming into the senate on the wave of popular excitement, which was of the same broad and sweeping character that surrounded Henry Clay, and which came so near giving him the nomination for the presidency then, he was not only at home in all his feelings of political association and public duty, but exceedingly prominent as well,--the one man of worth above all others, though the last to enter there.

He had no need to take front rank; he was there already, and gave himself to his work, not as a defeated man,--they had played but one inning then,--but as a victor, enjoying his promotion well, from the lower to the upper house of congress. He was nearing the goal, taking the honors by the way, just as Garfield did, but unlike him, tarrying in the senate to enjoy them. It was a good place to be; grand enough to command the lives, in all their richness and maturity, of Sumner, Webster, Choate, of Hamlin, Fessenden, and Clay, of Wilson, Edmunds, Dawes, and galaxies by the score, representing every state in the Union. Great lights from every department of life shone there: scholars, teachers, authors, successful generals; culture, refinement, and every excellence.

Mr. Blaine brought with him from the House, his old spirit of freeness, and general adaptability and service. He had not come in to rest, be shelved, or fossilized. His old habit of thoroughness was on him still; he was not the man to change at six and forty years of age. He must still touch top, bottom, and sides of every question with which he dealt, and so he did.

He loved the truths of history, and took them whole, entire, lacking nothing, and not in a garbled form. This of course caused facts and figures to strike with telling power upon many a man’s coat of mail, or cause the shield to tremble with the power of his stroke. But he was there without apology, to do the strong, decisive work which marked the history of his life. He loved the state of his adoption, and the time had come when the pride of her glory should appear.

The old House of Representatives had been devoted, as a gallery of art, to portraits and statues of the great men of the nation. Two were to be selected by each state from the record of their leading men.

The statue of William King, the first governor of Maine, in 1820 and 1821, was presented with speeches in the senate by both Mr. Hamlin and Mr. Blaine. In reciting briefly the history of Mr. King, Mr. Blaine relied wholly upon Massachusetts authority, and he added, “To have given anything like a sketch of Governor King’s life without giving his conflict with Massachusetts, touching the separation of Maine and her erection into an independent state, would have been like writing the life of Abraham Lincoln without mentioning the great Rebellion, which, as president of the United States, he was so largely instrumental in suppressing.”

These words he uttered in vindication of himself from certain restrictions placed upon him, and he closed by saying “that he notified the senators from Massachusetts that he should feel compelled to narrate those portions of Mr. King’s history that brought him in conflict with the parent state.”

In less than a month after the statue of Governor King was placed in the national gallery, by a unanimous vote of the senate, Mr. Blaine was before that body with a speech of his usual force and energy, upon the absorbing question of hard money. The subject had been discussed in the House, and their action sent to the senate, and Mr. Blaine had offered a substitute for their bill, which contained three very simple provisions, as he said, viz.:--

1. “That the dollar shall contain four hundred and twenty-five grains of standard silver, shall have unlimited coinage, and be an unlimited legal tender.

2. “That all the profits of coinage shall go to the government, and not to the operator in silver bullion.

3. “That silver dollars or silver bullion, assayed and mint-stamped, may be deposited with the assistant treasurer at New York, for which coin-certificates may be issued, the same in denomination as United States notes, not below ten dollars, and that these shall be redeemable on demand in coin or bullion, thus furnishing a paper-circulation based on an actual deposit of precious metal, giving us notes as valuable as those of the Bank of England and doing away at once with the dreaded inconvenience of silver on account of bulk and weight.”

He cites an exclusively gold nation like England, which, while it may have some massive fortunes, shows also the most hopeless and helpless poverty in the humblest walks of life. But France, a gold-and-silver nation, while it can exhibit no such fortunes as England boasts, presents “a people who, with silver savings, can pay a war indemnity that would have beggared the gold-bankers of London, and to which the peasantry of England could not have contributed a pound sterling in gold, nor a single shilling in silver.”

Mr. Blaine’s sense of justice, and national honor, and national pride were injured by making a dollar which, in effect, was not a dollar,--was not worth a hundred cents.

“Consider, further,” he says, “what injustice would be done to every holder of a legal-tender or national-bank note. That vast volume of paper-money--over seven hundred millions of dollars--is now worth between ninety-eight and ninety-nine cents on the dollar in gold coin. The holders of it, who are indeed our entire population, from the poorest to the wealthiest, have been promised, from the hour of its issue, that the paper-money would one day be as good as gold. To pay silver for the greenback is a full compliance with this promise and this obligation, provided the silver is made as it always has been hitherto, as good as gold. To make our silver coin even three per cent. less valuable than gold, inflicts at once a loss of more than twenty millions of dollars on the holders of our paper-money. To make a silver dollar worth but ninety-two cents, precipitates on the same class a loss of well-nigh sixty millions of dollars. For whatever the value of the silver dollar is, the whole paper issue of the country will sink to its standard when its coinage is authorized and its circulation becomes general in the channels of trade.

“Some one in conversation with Commodore Vanderbilt during one of the many freight competitions of the trunk lines, said, ‘Why, the Canadian road has not sufficient carrying capacity to compete with your great line!’

“‘That is true,’ replied the Commodore, ‘but they can fix a rate and force us down to it.’

“Were congress to pass a law to-day, declaring that every legal-tender note and every national-bank note shall hereafter pass for only ninety-six or ninety-seven cents on the dollar, there is not a constituency in the United States that would re-elect a man that should support it, and in many districts the representative would be lucky if he escaped with merely a minority vote.”

Mr. Blaine’s sympathies in this discussion were with the people, and although he had passed out of that popular branch of congress, as it is called, most nearly connected with them, he could not in any sense be divorced from them, and so, although before men of great wealth, his plea was for the laboring class,--for those who made the country strong and rich,--and so in continuing his speech he pleaded for them; and it will bring them nearer to him to-day to recall his strong and earnest words, which, even in the staid and formal senate, with its infinite courtesies and conservative venerations, has a heart to smile, and good cheer sufficient to applaud, as they did this close of his hard-money speech. These were his final utterances:--

“The effect of paying the labor of this country in silver coin of full value, as compared with irredeemable paper,--or as compared, even, with silver of inferior value,--will make itself felt in a single generation to the extent of tens of millions--perhaps hundreds of millions--in the aggregate savings which represent consolidated capital. It is the instinct of man from the savage to the scholar--developed in childhood, and remaining with age--to value the metals which in all tongues are called precious.

“Excessive paper-money leads to extravagance, to waste, and to want, as we painfully witness on all sides to-day. And in the midst of the proof of its demoralizing and destructive effect, we hear it proclaimed in the halls of congress, that ‘the people demand cheap money.’ I deny it. I declare such a phrase to be a total misapprehension--a total misinterpretation of the popular wish. The people do not demand cheap money. They demand an abundance of good money, which is an entirely different thing. They do not want a single gold standard that will exclude silver, and benefit those already rich. They do not want an inferior silver standard that will drive out gold, and not help those already poor. They want both metals, in full value, in equal honor, in whatever abundance the bountiful earth will yield them to the searching eye of science, and to the hard hand of labor.

“The two metals have existed side by side in harmonious, honorable companionship, as money, ever since intelligent trade was known among men. It is well-nigh forty centuries since ‘Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth--four hundred shekels of silver--current money with the merchant.’ Since that time nations have risen and fallen, races have disappeared, dialects and languages have been forgotten, arts have been lost, treasures have perished, continents have been discovered, islands have been sunk in the sea, and through all these ages, and through all these changes, silver and gold have reigned supreme as the representatives of value--as the media of exchange. The dethronement of each has been attempted in turn, and sometimes the dethronement of both; but always in vain! And we are here to-day, deliberating anew over the problem which comes down to us from Abraham’s time--_the weight of the silver_ that shall be ‘current money with the merchant.’”

As Mr. Blaine resumed his seat, it is said, in brackets, there was protracted applause; and so much was there that the vice-president, William A. Wheeler, of New York, felt compelled to say, “Order! The chair assuming that the galleries are ignorant of the laws of the senate, gives notice that if applause is repeated they will be promptly cleared.”

This cannot fail to suggest the fact beyond a doubt, that he had lost none of his old-time fervor, and that he proposed to allow no right of the people to slip from them, so long as he held place and power in their interest, and had a voice to lift in their defence.

The great business of congress is done by committees, as is well known, and their reports are discussed, amended, and acted upon, endorsed or rejected.

Mr. Blaine’s committee on appropriations was one of the most difficult. Demands are almost innumerable, and to act intelligently requires a large knowledge of every department of the government; of the military, the great postal lines and offices, and the new ones being built, custom-houses, forts, arsenals, navy-yards, etc.; and this work must be done by the committees, working not early, but late.

He was specially fitted for the committee on naval affairs, as he had gone over the whole question of ship-building and shipping while in the House.

We find him actuated by the same feelings of humanity and carefulness, as actuated him years before, but now more conspicuously, because in a larger, loftier sphere.

He presents bills for the relief of the families of those who perished on the United States dredge-boat “McAlister”; to enlarge the power and duties of the board of health in the District of Columbia; to amend the Pacific Railroad act by creating a sinking-fund. He moved to investigate charges against Senator M. C. Butler, of South Carolina.

We find Mr. Blaine showing an appreciation for that old soldier of the Republic, in the Mexican war and the war of the Rebellion, Hon. James Shields, of Missouri, by presenting a bill to make him a major-general. General Shields had a bullet through his body in Mexico, at Buena Vista, and a silk handkerchief drawn through his body in the track of the wound, and now he is honored as an old man; but he does not live long to enjoy it. He was a hardy, heroic, faithful man and soldier, and worthy of the repeated honors conferred upon him by his state and by the nation. It was a generous impulse of a kindly heart that prompted this honor in the senate for the aged soldier.

The bureau of engraving and printing was remembered by him in a bill to provide that department with a fire-proof building.