By that bedside, the people saw the chief of their nation with bowed head, shedding tears for that lost love who had shared with him his joys and sorrows, his hopes and disappointments, ambitions, and his failures. No tenderer sympathy or kindlier feeling ever filled and moved the hearts of the American people than that felt for that good husband, good patriot, good citizen, Benjamin Harrison. He was bereft of a helpmate who by his side had fought the battle of life, the early struggles in Indianapolis when he was a young lawyer, hewing his way through the forest of difficulties, which, like the forests of Africa that surrounded Stanley, in American life present themselves before the struggling, ambitious men of our land. And when, at last, bursting through the maze and underbrush of obstacles, like Stanley, he came upon the open plain of success, her voice had been first to join his in a prayer of thanksgiving. The bowed head of the aged chieftain of the nation, upon whom the heavy hand of sorrow had been laid, was an object to occasion even the most partisan political opponent to pause and shed one sympathetic tear. How full must his mind have been of the recollection of the hours anxiously spent by this loving American wife and mother, while he was exposed to hourly danger in defence of the American Union. How each sad hour must have been recalled to him, and how slight had been the recompense, accorded in the harvest of time to the faithful heart that had beat in rhythmic accord with his.
BENJAMIN HARRISON.
President of the United States, 1889-93.
The sympathy of the nation was deep, broad, and strong; and had Benjamin Harrison represented anything else but what the people knew was the aristocratic party, on the flood-tide of that sympathy he would have been carried into office by an overwhelming majority. Let those who would excuse their own errors and the errors of their class, let the would-be astute politician and the abashed assumed barons ascribe the defeat of the Republican party to the lack of personal magnetism of their candidate, but the great heart of the people will feel that that charge was as false as the claim of the “Four Hundred” to social superiority.
Benjamin Harrison will long be remembered as an exemplary President, if patriotism and the performance of those pledges made to the people who elected him, entitle a President to remembrance. Great as we all recognize the personal magnetism of that magnificent statesman, James G. Blaine, to be, it could not have exerted the influence over the minds of the masses that the death of Mrs. Harrison in the White House did. Death robbed the President of the position of the First Man in the Nation. He became at once the husband, the father, and the man; and had the issue been alone to be decided by personal magnetism, sympathy of the people, the outburst of approval and approbation would have been in favor of Benjamin Harrison. But he and the party whom he represents, justly or unjustly, had become accursed with the crime of “caste” in our country. He was defeated by those who, to a man, bowed their heads in sorrow with him, and shed tears of sympathy at his great loss as a fellow-man and citizen, but could not give him their votes as representing what to them became the party of sham, affected, foreign aristocracy.
Another picture that rises simultaneously before the eyes of the masses as representing those queens in America, to whom more ready homage is paid than was ever accorded to a coronet or crown, is our Frances Cleveland. Ours, because the “Common People” claim her, as only an ordinary, sweet, lovely, modest American woman.