Answer or answer not, ’tis all the same,
He lays me on and makes me bear the blame.”[160]
Another scholarly translator gives to this description of the Presidential quarrel another form, which is also applicable:—
“If that be deemed a quarrel, where, Heaven knows,
He only gives and I receive the blows;
Across my path he strides and bids me Stand!—
I bow obsequious to the dread command.”[161]
If the latter verse is not entirely true in my case, something must be pardoned to that Liberty in which I was born.
Men take their places in history according to their deeds. The flattery of life is then superseded by the truthful record, and rulers do not escape judgment. Louis the Tenth of France has the designation of Le Hutin, or “The Quarreller,” by which he is known in the long line of French kings. And so in the long line of American Chief-Magistrates has our President vindicated for himself the same title. He must wear it. The French monarch was younger than our President; but there are other points in his life which are not without parallel. According to a contemporary chronicle, he was “well disposed, but not very attentive to the needs of the kingdom”;[162] and then again it was his rare fortune to sign one of the greatest ordinances of French history, declaring that “according to the Law of Nature every one must be born free”;[163] but the Quarreller was in no respect author of this illustrious act, and was moved to its adoption by considerations of personal advantage. It will be for impartial History to determine if our Quarreller, who treated his great office as a personal perquisite, and all his life long was against that Enfranchisement to which he put his name, does not fall into the same category.