It did not make me bitter. I realized that the peculiar faith which we had accepted was responsible for our peculiar suffering. I saw that we were working out our human destiny; and if that destiny was not of God, but merely the issue of human impulsion, still our only prospect of success would come of our bearing with experience patiently to make us strong.
When I went back to Mr. Hewitt, to tell him of my success, I consulted with him upon the best way of approaching Mr. Cleveland. And he was not encouraging. In his opinion of the President, he had, as I could see, the impatient resentment which a quick-minded, nervous, small-bodied man has for the big, slow one whose mental operations are stubbornly deliberate and leisurely. And he was obviously irritated by the President's continual assumption that he was better than his party. "He's honest," he said, "by right of original discovery of what honesty is. No one can question his honesty. But as soon as he discovers a better thing than he knew previously, he announces it as if it were the discovery of a new planet. It may have been a commonplace for a generation. That doesn't signify. He announces it with such ponderosity that the world believes it's as prodigious as his sentences!"
As for my own mission: I would have to be persistent, patient, and—lucky. "You'll have to be lucky, if you intend to persuade him to acquire any information. He's been so successful in instructing mankind that it's hard to get him to see he doesn't know all he ought to know about a public question. But he's honest and he's courageous. If you can convince him that your view is right, he'll carry but the conviction in spite of everything. In fact he'll be all the better pleased if it requires fearlessness and defiance of general sentimentality to carry it out."
He gave me a letter to Mr. William C. Whitney, then Secretary of the Navy, explaining my purpose in coming to Washington, and asking him to obtain for me an interview with President Cleveland without using Mr. Hewitt's name. Then he shook hands with me, and wished me success. "I have the faith," he said, "that is without hope."
That expressed my own feeling. The faith that was without hope!
Chapter III. Without A Country
So I came to Washington. So I entered the capital of the government that commanded my allegiance and inspired my fear. I wonder whether another American ever saw that city with such eyes of envy, of aspiration, of wistful pride, of daunted admiration. Here were all the consecrations of a nation's memories, and they thrilled me, even while they pierced me with the sense that I was not, and might well despair of ever being, a citizen of their glory. Here were the monuments of patriotism in Statuary Hall, erected to the men whose histories had been the inspiration of my boyhood; and I remember how I stood before them, conscious that I was now almost an outlaw from their communion of splendor. I remember how I saw, with an indescribable conflict of feelings, the ranked graves of the soldiers in the cemetery at Arlington, and recollected that this very ground had been taken from General Lee, that heroic opponent of Federal authority—and read the tablet, "How sleep the brave who sink to rest by all their country's wishes bless'd,"—and bowed in spirit to the nation's benediction upon the men who had upheld its power. I was awed by a prodigious sense of the majesty of that power. I saw with fear its immovability to the struggles of our handful of people. And at night, walking under the trees of Lafayette Park, with all the odors of the southern Spring among the leaves, I looked at the lighted front of the White House and realized that behind the curtains of those quiet windows sat the ruler who held the almost absolute right of life and death over our community—as if it were the palace of a Czar that I must soon enter, with a petition for clemency, which he might refuse to entertain!
When I had been in Washington, four years before, as secretary to Delegate John T. Caine of Utah, I had felt a younger assurance that our resistance would slowly wear out the Federal authority and carry us through to statehood. Four years of disaster had starved out that hope. The proposition had been established that Congress had supreme control over the territories; and there was no virtue either in our religious assumption of warrant to speak for God, or in our plea of inherent constitutional right to manage our own affairs. Thirty years earlier, my father had been elected Senator from the proposed state of Utah, and he had been rejected. In thirty years so little progress had been made! The way that was yet to travel seemed very long and very dark.
Out of this mood of despondence I had to lift myself by an act of will. There, Washington itself helped me against itself. I made a pilgrimage of courage to its commemorations of courage, and drew an inspiration of hope from its monuments to the achievements of its past. And particularly I went to the house in which my father had lived when he had had his part in the statesman life of the capital, and animated my resolution with the thought that I must succeed in order that he might be restored in public honor.