Right well he knows that there is no power that causes growth like contact with strong, determined personalities,—intelligent, conscientious, affectionate, purposeful. It is mind that makes mind grow, that plants the seeds and brings on the harvest by the shining of its light; and so heart by getting into heart, expands it and causes growth, and conscience rouses conscience, and will awakens will, and all cause growth. He has not forgotten those lifts out of childhood almost into manhood, when the great faces of Jackson, Harrison, and Clay shone upon him, and now he is the friend and confident of the great Lincoln, and they are to be within an evening’s call, and the great men of the nation are there and will soon be etched, photographed, or painted, and hung up within the gallery of his large soul.
X.
ENTERING CONGRESS.
IT is said that life in Washington is a liberal education, social life in particular, but public life as well. The great interests of the nation center there, and all nations are represented there. Life is intense in all respects. Victors gather there from all fields of contest. They are at their best, and have multitudes to cheer them on, or cry them down, if they fail or falter. The door of prosperity to the country hinges there; defective legislation closes it, and mars the delicately balanced confidence in the business world. It is the nation’s higher school of politics, or rather university, with all its great departments. Graduates from all the state academies are there, taking observations of the nation and the world, discussing all live questions, following out great lines of thought, fixing policies, framing laws and enacting them. The arts and sciences flourish there, scholars congregate from all parts of the land. To them it is a place of mighty interests; institutions and libraries abound, history is manufactured day by day. Strong men in pride and power are in their glory there.
Society is like a myriad-sided palace, with many a gate of entrance and of exit, but all most deftly closed except to bearer of the keys,—a palace filled with light of knowledge, and resplendent with beauty; the goal of every clique and clan the nation over, where all the aristocracies of the Republic may glow and shine and shine and glow, and all the courtiers of all the nations mingle in magnificent and pompous array. Guards are at every door. Passports are in demand.
At twelve o’clock, the 7th of December, 1863, Mr. Blaine was in his seat. His heart beat high, his hopes were great. Earnest faces of determined men were all about him. The administration had a clear working majority, but there could scarcely have been seventeen Democrats from New York to fourteen Union Republicans, had not one hundred and fifty thousand men been at the front from that state, and not permitted to vote until the presidential election. And so with Lincoln’s own state of Illinois, which just before the war gave him such a great majority, now sends nine Democrats to five Union Republicans to congress, and has over one hundred thousand men in the field.
In the Pennsylvania delegation the result is similar, though the administration is endorsed by six thousand two hundred and thirty-one majority,—which would have been vastly increased if her one hundred thousand soldiers had been permitted to vote, as they were a year or two later.
Out of figures sent from the field then were shown to be five thousand two hundred and sixty-seven Republican votes in a total ballot of seven thousand one hundred and twenty-two, in over thirty organizations; but most of these were from Iowa, a state with such Republican majorities that when Mr. Blaine was urged to speak there during the campaign of 1876, replied,