As the car containing Garfield and Governor Foster of Ohio, entered the depot at Cleveland, a salute of a thousand guns was fired. A procession of the militia and the Garfield clubs accompanied them to the Kennard House, and among the transparencies borne by the crowd was one with the happy inscription:—
"Ohio's senator, Ohio's Major-General, Ohio's President. The true favorite son of Ohio is the favorite son of the Union. He who at the age of sixteen steered a canal-boat will steer the ship of state at fifty."
Garfield had promised to deliver an address at the commencement exercises of Hiram College.
The morning after his arrival in Cleveland, therefore, he left as quietly as possible for the little town, where thirty years before he had held the humble position of college janitor.
"I have sought but one office in my life," he said one day to a friend, "and that was the office of janitor at Hiram Institute."
As he approached the college grounds the students came out in a body to greet him. It was a touching scene, and his beautiful address to them is given in full, in the latter part of the volume.[B] With all his honors he never forgot this place so "full of memories."
After a short stay at Hiram, he went on to his home in Mentor, to take a few days' rest before returning to Washington.
His address to the enthusiastic crowds that gathered around him when he reached the Capitol, is so full of his peculiar magnetic power that we give it entire:—
"Fellow-Citizens:—While I have looked upon this great array, I believe I have gotten a new idea of the majesty of the American people.
"When I reflect that whenever you find sovereign power, every reverent heart on this earth bows before it, and when I remember that here for a hundred years we have denied the sovereignty of any man, and in place of it we have asserted the sovereignty of all in place of one, I see before me so vast a concourse it is easy for me to imagine that were the rest of the American people gathered here to-night, every man would stand uncovered, all in unsandalled feet in presence of the majesty of the only sovereign power in this Government under Almighty God.