It made all respect him the more, and beside, that was his speech. It was his way of getting error out of the mind and truth in. It does not do much good to shoot off a quantity of powder out doors. It will make a big flash and smoke and noise, but what of that; put it in a cannon behind a ball and give it aim, and then touch it off, and there will be execution.
Mr. Blaine’s method of getting the light into the people was by getting the dark out; like the Dutchman who put a window into his barn to let the dark out, but the same process that let the dark out, let the light in.
He had gotten this colloquial style, it may be in congress, or in Yankee land where they “raise questions.” It is a part of a real live Yankee’s life-work to ask questions. This is his birthright, an inheritance of the soil.
But the practice is very prevalent in congress, where there are a great many lawyers who are skilled in questioning witnesses, and it is a habit with them, carried from their practice in the courts to the halls of legislation; and it is a very convenient and serviceable habit, as the record of proceedings clearly shows.
It may be recalled that the campaign of 1864 was prosecuted so effectually that while McClellan received twenty-one electoral votes, only one of the eighteen free states voting thus honored him, namely: New Jersey,—Kentucky and Delaware joining with her.
The real triumph to Mr. Lincoln was in New York, and we close this chapter by giving it in Mr. Blaine’s own words, for it had attracted his special attention. Horatio Seymour and Reuben E. Fenton were respectively the Democratic and Republican candidates for Governor of New York:—
“Governor Seymour’s speech in the Democratic convention at Chicago, Aug. 29, 1864, had been an indictment of the most malignant type against the administration. The president felt that he was himself wholly wrong, or Governor Seymour was wholly wrong, and the people of New York were to decide which. They rendered their verdict in the election of Reuben E. Fenton to the governorship by a majority of thousands over Mr. Seymour. Without that result Mr. Lincoln’s triumph would have been incomplete. The victory in the nation,” he adds, “was the most complete ever achieved in an election that was seriously contested.”
