“I do not know what it is, but I know that it is there,” was Mr. Manning’s reply.
“My political intuitions are infallible,” said Governor Tilden, after a single interview with Mr. Cleveland; “and I am of opinion that this man is of somewhat coarse mental fibre and disposition, but of great force and stubbornly honest in his convictions.”
“His name should be Petros,” Mr. Blaine once said of Mr. Cleveland, “for when he has once formed opinions he stands upon them with the firmness of a granite foundation.”
It would be possible to quote many similar opinions uttered by able men who have had opportunity to see and study Mr. Cleveland. Some of these opinions do not wholly compliment Cleveland’s mental powers. But all of the opinions, whether uttered by political friends or enemies, have this in common: they express amazement, not so much at the swift successes of his career, as for that mystic personal quality which has made him able to hold the politicians of his party in the hollow of his hand, to defy political conventionalities, to break down machines, and, above all, to gain the confidence of the American people. This personal quality, which has given him these victories, he seems to have furnished no hint of in his childhood or youth. Before he came to his majority he must have led an unimpressive life, for those who knew him in those early days have no anecdote to tell of him which suggests that anything he did or said was of uncommon quality.
GROVER CLEVELAND. FROM THE LATEST PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY PACK BROTHERS OF NEW YORK.
The Buffalo bar at that time was a brilliant one. The leaders of it were men of great ambition. It would have been impossible for a young man, and especially for a young Democrat, to have gained influence with those men had there not been even then some personal quality which won their respect; and Mr. Cleveland gained a great measure of respect while he was still a very young man, and he seems to have been able to form close and permanent intimacies with young men whose advantage in beginning life had been much greater than his. He passed swiftly from the ranks of the poor law-student to the companionship of such men.
When young Bissell, fresh from his successful career at Yale College, blessed with some wealth, and possessing all the advantages which gentle social relations give, returned to Buffalo from his college life, one of his closest intimacies was developed with Grover Cleveland. Mr. Folsom, one of the brightest men at the Buffalo bar, must have been early impressed by this quality of Cleveland’s, for he took the young man into partnership, and before Cleveland was thirty years of age he had established, with men of intellectual power, a standing not due to unusual mental gifts, but to this same personal quality which has made him conspicuous above other Americans for the past twelve years.
In 1884, after Mr. Cleveland’s nomination for the presidency, President Arthur was asked if he knew the man whom the Democratic party had nominated.
“I know him slightly, and have heard much of him,” was the President’s reply. “I know that he is a good companion among the rather worldly men at the Buffalo bar, or was when he was there; but I also know this of him: he is a man of splendid moral fibre, and I have been told that his fidelity to his convictions and professional duties is regarded by his associates at the Buffalo bar as something wonderful. I do not think that he is a man of strong, original mind, but he is the faithfullest man to what he believes to be right and his duty that his party has—at least in New York State.”