Most of the rich men of this time were devoting their
means to making Senators. The legislatures were
manufacturing a new brand, and turning them out made
to order. Many of us were surprised at how little
timber, and what poor quality, was needed to make
a Senator in 1881. The nation used to make them
out of stout, tall oaks. Many of those new ones
were made of willow, and others out of crooked sticks.
In most cases the strong men defeated each other,
and weak substitutes were put in. The forthcoming
Congress was to be one of commonplace men. The
strong men had to stay at home, and the accidents
took their places in the government. Still there
were leaders, North and South.
My old friend Senator Brown of Georgia was one of
the leaders of the South. He spoke vehemently
in Congress in the cause of education. Only a
few months before he had given, out of his private
purse, forty thousand dollars to a Baptist college.
He was a man who talked and urged a hearty union of
feeling between the North and the South. He always
hoped to abolish sectional feeling by one grand movement
for the financial, educational, and moral welfare
of the Nation. It was my urgent wish that President
Garfield should invite Senator Brown to a place in
his Cabinet, although the Senator would probably have
refused the honour, for there was no better place
to serve the American people than in the American
Senate.
During the first week in February, 1881, the world
hovered over the death-bed of Thomas Carlyle.
He was the great enemy of all sorts of cant, philosophical
or religious. He was for half a century the great
literary iconoclast. Daily bulletins of the sick-bed
were published world-wide. There was no easy
chair in his study, no soft divans. It was just
a place to work, and to stay at work. I once saw
a private letter, written by Carlyle to Thomas Chalmers.
The first part of it was devoted to a eulogy of Chalmers,
the latter part descriptive of his own religious doubts.
He never wrote anything finer. It was beautiful,
grand, glorious, melancholy.
Thomas Carlyle started with the idea that the intellect
was all, the body nothing but an adjunct, an appendage.
He would spur the intellect to costly energies, and
send the body supperless to bed. After years of
doubts and fears I learned that towards the end he
returned to the simplicities of the Gospel.
While this great thinker of the whole of life was
sinking into his last earthly sleep, the men in the
parliament of his nation were squabbling about future
ambitions. Thirty-five Irish members were forcibly
ejected. Neither Beaconsfield nor Gladstone could
solve the Irish question. Nor do I believe it
will ever be solved to the satisfaction of Ireland.
But a greater calamity than those came upon us; in
the summer of this year President Garfield was assassinated
in Washington.
