Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

And yet, though flushed with victory from other fields, the echo of the people’s cheers still ringing in his heart, and their laurels unfaded on his brow, he feels, he knows there is a lack of that strength and fulness which have ever been to him the harbingers of victory.

How many have run through congress much as they ran for congress, because they took it for granted that preparation for a law office or a stump speech was preparation for congress; just as many a deluded theorist has drifted from college out into life, dreaming that preparation for a senior examination was preparation for the competition of life.

There was ever a charm to Mr. Blaine about the study of character. Gov. Abner Coburn was Mr. Blaine’s ideal of a business man. He loved anything large and grand in human nature, and anybody good and true, and Abner Coburn,—as a man of great ability, of great wealth and liberality, giving away fifty thousand dollars at a time, and withal a noble Christian gentleman,—was to him among the best and worthiest.

He loved characters if at all remarkable for hard common sense, and so he loved to meet and talk with one Miles Standish, from way up in Somerset county, at Flagstaff Plantation. Plantations abound in the state of Maine. There are twenty-five of them in Aroostook county, which is said to be as large as the state of Massachusetts. These plantations are a mild form of government, rather below the usual township organization, and yet covering a township of land six miles square.

This Mr. Standish used frequently to come to Augusta, and it was a pleasant hour for Mr. Blaine to meet him. He was human nature in crude state, or in the original package. Unspoiled by art, or science, or philosophy, and yet full of quaint, original ideas, and quainter forms of expression. He was never in a hurry when he met him, and yet it was not for sport or fun at his expense, but for the boldness of his personality, and the rocky-like substance of his character.

This was a great part of his effort in life to understand men, to know them, and a high authority has defined just this as common sense. To know a man, says the distinguished scholar referred to, is knowledge, but to know men, that is common sense. It lets one out of a thousand blunders and into a thousand secrets; it gives one the science of character-building, as one may have the science of architecture. It is a study of the higher sciences, such as moral and mental, in their original sources.

Right here is the open letter of Mr. Blaine’s career. First, he knows the strong points, and then he knows the weak points, and he has his man every time, for he certainly has a key that will unlock him, only let him know what one to use. And it is not a matter of artful, politic chicanery, and legerdemain. He simply studies the individual, and then with ease of manner and a wise, discriminating grace of diction, adapts or adjusts himself to them. Thomas Carlyle would use a hurricane, it is said, to waft a feather; Mr. Blaine would never.

And again Carlyle employed the weight of his mighty genius to emphasize the sumless worth of a man, and yet he did not have common sense sufficient to treat half who called upon him with common civility. What avails this solemn prating, impoverishing the lexicon and wearying genius to express a cynical, over-wrought view of man in his high-born greatness, if, when Ralph Waldo Emerson crosses the Atlantic and calls upon him with compliments of the highest order, he receives only replies that sting, and burn, and rankle?

Exactly the reverse of Carlyle has been the method of Mr. Blaine. Men have been his glory, his study, and delight. This was his first work in Augusta, his first work in the state legislature, his first work in congress. And not their names alone, but their political history, their pedigree,—all about them. They must all be weighed and measured, sized and classified. And he must know himself as well, and how far he can reach, and how firm he can grasp, and how much he can lift. He uses only the powers of his personality, and these must all be toned and tempered anew.

He has gone to congress to stay, and not to experiment, but for the work of life. He carries with him just the power to get the power which he shall need,—the seed-corn for the large, abundant harvest. But he must work and cultivate, and this he knows right well how to do, and so he does and will. It is his purpose, and that purpose is fixed.