“That is true,” said Mr. Blaine.
“Whether this loss of confidence be based upon facts of his character, or measures of his public policy, or upon suspicion or prejudice merely, I do not propose now to inquire. The great fact is, the people of the country everywhere have lost confidence in the wisdom, if not in the honesty, of his administration.”
Mr. Blaine. “The gentleman will allow me to inquire whether he thinks that our staying here will restore confidence in the president.”
“No, Sir.”
Mr. Blaine held the floor under a certain rule of congress, and gave his time to others as they desired to discuss the question, but at the end was firm as a rock. His mind was unchanged, and from this and other instances the truth appears, that as he used only facts, figures, testimony, experience, written or related evidence of a personal character, and that he could not be gainsaid, and was never metaphysical, a priori, or theorizing in his discussions, so nothing but facts or figures, something tangible and real, influenced him. The sailing of an eagle might be very beautiful, and elicit feelings of admiration and sublimity, but it did not influence his judgment.
Only the kind of arguments he used to influence other minds would influence his,—and when his mind was made up, it was from just these sources of evidence that are so convincing, so incontrovertible, giving strength to the mind, and putting granite under the feet of the man.
As one has said, “I believed, therefore have I spoken”; so with him, he believed, and therefore spoke. No surface-current, only the deep under-current, moved him.
Mr. Blaine has great accuracy in the use of language, and although off-hand and often under peculiarly distracting circumstances, one who followed him quite closely through his various utterances, did not discover a grammatical mistake until near the end of the fortieth congress, and that was possibly a mistake of the printer, and very slight in itself, using “to” for “at” in the phrase “strike at the senate committee clerks more than it does to ours.”
Congress adjourned on the 30th of March until the 21st of November, unless a quorum was present the 3d of July, and if so a session would be held. A brief session of two weeks was held, but Mr. Blaine was not there. He and Elihu B. Washburne and another congressman were in Europe. It was Mr. Blaine’s first trip. Liverpool was visited, and commercial interests were studied. Imagination seldom furnishes right impressions. No one about whom we have heard ever looks as we expected he was going to. It always gets great men too large on the outside, and enormous cities either too large or too small, as the case may be. Liverpool was immense; it has to be so. Almost limitless is England’s foreign trade. What men they must have been to make their island so important as to compel the commerce of the world to visit them! It was wonderful; the ships and cargoes for all of India, for Egypt, for all of Europe, for Australia, for America, and the Indies, for Mexico, China and Japan.
It was indeed a study for him whose mind must find the merits of every subject. It was not simply a matter of landing safely and boarding a train for London. The war was but two years over. The Alabama was not forgotten, nor all of England’s mischief. Ships and shipping in all their construction and competition had been the study of years to him, and to take in those busy scenes upon the Mersey and the Clyde, was but the reading of a new book to one familiar with the language.