Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

I am not sure that modesty or disinterestedness has much place in the matter of the acceptance of high political office. We often hear a gentleman say: "I am not fit to be Judge; I am not fit to be Governor, or Senator, or member of Congress. I think other men are better qualified, and I will not consent to stand in their way." This is often said with the utmost sincerity. But anybody who acts on such a feeling ought to remember that if he accept the office, it will not be filled by a worse man than he; if he accept the office, it being a political office, he is sure that the office will be filled by a man who will desire to accomplish, and will do his best to accomplish, the things he thinks for the public good. He should also remember, so far as the matter of ability is concerned, that other men are likely to be much better judges of his capacity than he is himself. If men are likely often to overrate their own capacity, they are also very often likely to underrate it.

Let me not be understood as commending the miserable self- seeking which too often leads men to urge their own claims without regard to the public interests. A man who is his own candidate is commonly a very bad candidate for his party.

One vote, more than once, would have saved the country from what I think its wretched policy in regard to the Philippine Islands. There was just one vote to spare when the Spanish Treaty was ratified. One Senator waited before voting until the roll-call was over and the list of the votes read by the clerk, before the finally voted for the treaty. He said he did not wish to butt his head against the sentiment of his State if he could do no good; but if his vote would defeat it, he should vote against it. If there had been one less vote, his vote would have defeated it. The Treaty would have been lost, in my opinion, if Senator Gray, one of the Commissioners who made it, who earnestly protested against it, but afterward supported it, had not been a member of the Commission. The resolution of Mr. Bacon, declaring our purpose to recognize the independence of the Philippine people, if they desired it, was lost also by a single vote. The Philippine Treaty would have been lost but for Mr. Bryan's personal interposition in its behalf. It would have been defeated, in my judgment, if Speaker Reed, a man second in influence and in power in this country to President McKinley alone, had seen it to be his duty to remain in public life, and lead the fight against it.

So I think it is rarely safe for a man who is in political life for public, and not for personal ends, and who values the political principles which he professes, to decline any position of power, either from modesty, doubt of his own ability, or from a desire to be generous to other men.

My twenty years' service on the Committee on the Judiciary, so far as it is worth narrating, will appear in the account of the various legal and Constitutional questions which it affected.

CHAPTER VIII THE RIVER AND HARBOR BILL

I have throughout my whole public political life acted upon my own judgment. I have done what I thought for the public interest without much troubling myself about public opinion. I always took a good deal of pride in a saying of Roger Sherman's. He was asked if he did not think some vote of his would be very much disapproved in Connecticut, to which he replied that he knew but one way to ascertain the public opinion of Connecticut; that was to ascertain what was right. When he had found that out, he was quite sure that it would meet the approval of Connecticut. That in general has been in my judgment absolutely and literally true of Massachusetts. It has required no courage for any representative of hers to do what he thought was right. She is apt to select to speak for her, certainly those she sends to the United States Senate, in whose choice the whole Commonwealth has a part, men who are in general of the same way of thinking, and governed by the same principles as are the majority of her people. When she has chosen them she expects them to act according to their best judgement, and not to be thinking about popularity. She likes independence better than obsequiousness. The one thing the people of Massachusetts will not forgive in a public servant is that he should act against his own honest judgment to please them. I am speaking of her sober, second thought. Her people, like the rest of mankind, are liable to waves of emotion and of prejudice. This is true the world over. It is as true of good men as of bad men, of educated as of ignorant men, whenever they are to act in large masses. Alexander Hamilton said that if every Athenian citizen had been a Socrates, still every Athenian assembly would have been a mob. So I claim no credit that I have voted and spoken as I thought, always without stopping to consider whether public opinion would support me.

The only serious temptation I have ever had in my public life came to me in the summer of 1882, when the measure known as the River and Harbor Bill was pending. The bill provided for an expenditure of about eighteen million dollars. Of this a little more than four million was for the execution of a scheme for the improvement of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which had been recommended by President Arthur in a special message. All the other appropriations put together were a little less than fourteen million dollars. The bill passed both Houses. President Arthur vetoed it, alleging as a reason that the measure was extravagant; that the public works provided for in it were of local interest, not for the advantage of international or interstate commerce; and that it had got through by a system of log-rolling, the friends of bad schemes in one State joining with the friends of bad schemes in another, making common cause to support the bill. He added that in that way, the more objectionable the measure, the more support it would get. The press of the country, almost without exception, supported the President. The reasons which applied to each improvement were not well understood by the public. So the conductors of the newspapers naturally supposed the President to be in the right in his facts. The Democratic newspapers were eager to attack Republican measures. Where there were factions in the Republican Party, the Republican papers of one faction were ready to attack the men who belonged to the other. The independent newspapers welcomed any opportunity to support their theory that American public life was rotten and corrupt. So when the question came up whether the bill should pass notwithstanding the objections of the President, there was a storm of indignation throughout the country against the men who supported it.

But the committees who had supported it and who had reported it, and who knew its merits, and the men who had voted for it in either House of Congress, could not well stultify themselves by changing their votes, although some of them did. I was situated very fortunately in that respect. I had been absent on a visit to Massachusetts when the bill passed. So I was not on record for it. I had given it no great attention. The special duties which had been assigned to me related to other subjects. So when the measure came up in the Senate I had only an opinion founded on my general knowledge of the needs of the country and the public policy, that it was all right. My reelection was coming on. I was to have a serious contest, if I were a candidate, with the supporters of General Butler, then very powerful in the State. He, in fact, was elected Governor in the election then approaching. My first thoughts were that I was fortunate to have escaped this rock. But when the vote came on I said to myself: "This measure is right. Is my father's son to sneak home to Massachusetts, having voted against a bill that is clearly righteous and just, because he is afraid of public sentiment?" Senator McMillan, the Chairman of the Committee who had charge of the bill, just before my name was called, asked me how I meant to vote. I told him I should vote for the bill, because I believed it to be right, but that it would lose me the support of every newspaper in Massachusetts that had been friendly to me before. I voted accordingly. The vote was met by a storm of indignation from one end of Massachusetts to the other, in which every Republican newspaper in the State, so far as I know, united. The Springfield Republican and the Boston Herald, as will well be believed, were in glory. The conduct of no pick- pocket or bank robber could have been held up to public indignation and contempt in severer language than the supporters of that bill. A classmate of mine, an eminent man of letters, a gentleman of great personal worth, addressed a young ladies' school, or some similar body in Western Massachusetts, on the subject of the decay of public virtue as exemplified by me. He declared that I had separated myself from the best elements in the State.

The measure was passed over the President's veto. But it cost the Republican Party its majority in the House of Representatives. A large number of the member of the House who had voted for it lost their seats. If the question of my reelection had come on within a few weeks thereafter, I doubt whether I should have got forty votes in the whole Legislature. If I had flinched or apologized, I should have been destroyed. But I stood to my guns. I wrote a letter to the people of Massachusetts in which I took up case by case each provision of the bill, and showed how important it was for the interest of commerce between the States, or with foreign countries, and how well it justified the moderate expenditure. I pointed out that the bill had been, in proportion to the resources of the Government, less in amount than those John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster had formerly advocated; that Mr. Webster, with the single exception of his service for preserving the Union, prided himself on his support of this policy of public improvement more than on anything else in his life, and had made more speeches on that subject than on any other. Mr. Adams claimed to be the author of the policy of internal improvements. So that it was a Massachusetts policy, and a Massachusetts doctrine. I asked the people of Massachusetts to consider whether they could reasonably expect to get their living by manufacture, to which nearly the whole State was devoted, bringing their raw material and their fuel and their iron and coal and cotton and wool from across the continent, and then carrying the manufactured article back again to be sold at the very places where the material came from, in competition with States like Pennsylvania and New York and Ohio and Indiana, unless the cost of transportation was, so far as possible, annihilated.