In a word Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the White House he so much desired. Though but sixty-one years of age, his race was run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full of inspiration to his countrymen and died not in vain, “our later Franklin” fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.
Chapter the Twelfth
The Ideal in Public Life—Politicians, Statesmen and Philosophers—The Disputed Presidency in 1876—The Personality and Character of Mr. Tilden—His Election and Exclusion by a Partisan Tribunal
I
The soul of journalism is disinterestedness. But neither as a principle nor an asset had this been generally discovered fifty years ago. Most of my younger life I was accused of ulterior motives of political ambition, whereas I had seen too much of preferment not to abhor it. To me, as to my father, office has seemed ever a badge of servitude. For a long time, indeed, I nursed the delusions of the ideal. The love of the ideal has not in my old age quite deserted me. But I have seen the claim of it so much abused that when a public man calls it for a witness I begin to suspect his sincerity.
A virile old friend of mine—who lived in Texas, though he went there from Rhode Island—used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is the state of man. “Sir,” he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I were personally accountable, “you are emasculating the human species. You are changing men into women and women into men. You are teaching everybody to read, nobody to think; and do you know where you will end, sir? Extermination, sir—extermination! On the north side of the North Pole there is another world peopled by giants; ten thousand millions at the very least; every giant of them a hundred feet high. Now about the time you have reduced your universe to complete effeminacy some fool with a pick-axe will break through the thin partition—the mere ice curtain—separating these giants from us, and then they will sweep through and swoop down and swallow you, sir, and the likes of you, with your topsy-turvy civilization, your boasted literature and science and art!”
This old friend of mine had a sure recipe for success in public life. “Whenever you get up to make a speech,” said he, “begin by proclaiming yourself the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and end by intimating that you are the bravest;” and then with the charming inconsistency of the dreamer he would add: “If there be anything on this earth that I despise it is bluster.”
Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he, too, in his way was an idealist, and for all his oddity a man of intellectual integrity, a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and illustrations, but true to his convictions of right and duty, as Emerson would have had him be. For was it not Emerson who exclaimed, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds?”
II
In spite of our good Woodrow and our lamented Theodore I have quite made up my mind that there is no such thing as the ideal in public life, construing public life to refer to political transactions. The ideal may exist in art and letters, and sometimes very young men imagine that it exists in very young women. But here we must draw the line. As society is constituted the ideal has no place, not even standing room, in the arena of civics.