Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

The friendship of Mr. Blaine never waned. He was true as steel. And when the honors of the nation, who had honored him, were in Garfield’s hands, the chiefest and the best were for his first best friend, whom he called to the highest place in his cabinet,—the premier of the nation. This was no mere compliment. It was an official act. The success of his administration, which was his greatest care, depended largely upon his secretary of state. He must be clean as well as competent,—a king in skill and scholarship, as well as brother, friend. It must then have been an act of his best judgment, as well as an expression of regard. And yet it was as well respect for the millions, represented by the large and strong delegations who voted for him with such strength of purpose for five-and-thirty times.

Four months, less two days, he sat at his right hand in the highest counsels of the country, a wise, and honored, and trusted man. He could not have been there had not Garfield known him,—but he did know him through and through, and because he knew him so thoroughly and well, he placed the keeping of the nation’s wisdom, integrity, and honor before the world, and in the great world abroad, into his hands.

“The heart is wiser than the head,” and knows more deeply into life and character, than simple, abstract thought can penetrate. It receives and knows the whole man as a whole, knows him as a person in his every element of personality in reason, conscience, affections, will; knows him by the touch of moral reason, for pure intellect may act alone comparatively in abstract questions, of metaphysical thought, but the heart never. The true enlightenment is here. It is the abode of motive, purpose, plan,—out of it are the issues of life itself.

We are ignorant of those we hate, as the South was of the North before the war, and hence her braggart boasts. But those whom we know deeply, fully, truly, we love deeply, fully, truly. Love lights the path of reason, when it carries the whole reason with it, and furnishes by reciprocal acts of confidence data for its guidance. And thus we love our way into each other’s lives, while reason thus enlightened, helps us on.

It was thus with these great men of the nation’s hope, her honor, and her trust. They sat, they stood, they walked, they talked together, their great hearts open as the day, shining full upon each other. And as they shone thus on each other’s life, there was a blending, and so a mutual life, an interlacing, twining, locking, and so a unity.

Every walk in life furnishes its friendships; and the greater the walk may be, the greater are the friendships; for the greater the affinities, the broader the sympathies, the purer, sweeter, more supreme the life; for the true life is never isolated, but unstarved in every part. The king has his queen, the Czar his Czarina. Only the small-souled men are shrunken hearted, while large, capacious spirits take in worlds.

Perhaps the country never possessed two men at the same time who had more friends of the solid and reliable sort than these men, who admired and loved to honor, and honored because they loved, and this because they lived out their splendid natures before their countrymen, hating every mean thing, loving and praising the good. They were not dark, unfathomable mysteries, enigmas, puzzles, problems, staring at you, unsolved, and daring you to the thankless task, and promising but the gloom of deeper shadows; you felt you knew them. They did not stand aloof, daring you mount up to them, but coming down, they sat beside you, and made you feel akin, and not blush out your feelings of a doomed inferiority; and this great-heartedness, beating responsive to the strong, warm touch of nature, made them friends.

Garfield did not live to draw the picture of his Blaine, but Blaine has lived to draw the picture of his Garfield.

“It is not easy,” he says, “to find his counterpart anywhere in the record of American public life. He, perhaps, more nearly resembles Mr. Seward in his supreme faith in the all-conquering power of a principle. He had the love of learning, and patient industry of investigation to which John Quincy Adams owes his prominence, and his presidency. He had some of those ponderous elements of mind which distinguished Mr. Webster, and which, indeed, in all our public life, have left the great Massachusetts senator without an intellectual peer.

“Some of his methods recall the best features in the strong, independent course of Sir Robert Peel, to whom he had striking resemblance in the type of his mind and the habit of his speech. He had all of Burke’s love for the sublime and the beautiful, with, possibly, something of his superabundance. In his faith and his magnanimity; in his power of statement and subtle analysis; in his faultless logic, and his love of literature; in his wealth and mode of illustration, one is reminded of that great English statesman of to-day,—Gladstone.”