“Come in, Mr. Brand,” he always addressed me by prefixing “Mr.” to my Christian name. “Come in,” he called in his hearty voice. “We are just storming a castle.”
He lived on to the century’s end, with a sort of gusto in life that never failed, I think, until that day when he attended the funeral of the last of his old contemporaries, General John M. McClernand, that fierce old warrior who had quarreled with Grant and lived on in Springfield until he could fight no more with anyone. Senator Palmer came home from his funeral amused by the fact that McClernand had been buried in the full uniform of a major-general, which he had not worn, I suppose, since Vicksburg. When some member of Senator Palmer’s household asked him if he should like to be buried in his uniform, he shook his head against it, but added:
“It was all right for Mac; it was like him.”
But the end was in his thoughts; Oglesby was gone, and now McClernand as the last of the men with whom he had fought in the great crisis, and he went, pretty soon after that, himself. He had participated in two great revolutionary epochs of his nation, going through the one and penetrating though not so far into the second, a long span of life and experience.
It was perhaps natural that he should not have divined the implications of the second phase as clearly as he did those of the first; and though he had helped to inaugurate the new movement, the latest urge toward democracy in this land, he could not go so far. He was young in ’56 and old in ’96, and as we grow old we grow conservative, whether we would or not, and much, I suppose, in the same way.
XII
Senator Palmer’s victory in 1891, however, had raised the hopes of the Illinois Democracy for 1892, and it was early in that year that I came to know one of the most daring pioneers of the neo-democratic movement in America, and the most courageous spirit of our times.
It was on a cold raw morning that I met Joseph P. Mahony, then a Democratic member of the State Senate, who said:
“Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the next governor of Illinois.”
It was the time of year when one was meeting the next governor of Illinois in most of the hotel corridors, or men who were trying to look like potential governors of Illinois, so that such a remark was not to be taken too literally; but I went, and after ascending to an upper floor of a narrow little building in Adams Street, we entered a suite of law offices, and there in a very much crowded, a very much littered and a rather dingy little private room, at an odd little walnut desk, sat John P. Altgeld.