end of the war, he would doubtless have risen to the very highest honours of that stirring epoch.  But President Lincoln was very anxious that Garfield should come into the Congress, where his presence would greatly strengthen the President’s hands; and with a generous self-denial which well bespeaks his thorough loyalty, Garfield gave up his military post and accepted a place in the House of Representatives.  He took his seat in December, 1863.

For seventeen years, General Garfield sat in the general legislature of the United States as one of the members for Ohio.  During all that time, he distinguished himself most honourably as the fearless advocate of honest government, and the pronounced enemy of those underhand dodges and wire-pulling machinery which are too often the disgrace of American politics.  He was opposed to all corruption and chicanery, especially to the bad system of rewarding political supporters with places under Government, which has long been the chief blot upon American republican institutions.  As a person of stalwart honesty and singleness of purpose, he made himself respected by both sides alike.  Politically speaking, different men will judge very differently of Garfield’s acts in the House of Representatives.  Englishmen especially cannot fail to remark that his attitude towards ourselves was almost always one of latent hostility; but it is impossible for anybody to deny that his conduct was uniformly guided by high principle, and a constant deference to what he regarded as the right course of action.

In 1880, when General Garfield had already risen to be the acknowledged leader of the House of Representatives, his Ohio supporters put him in nomination for the upper chamber, the Senate.  They wished Garfield to come down to the state capital and canvas for support; but this the General would not hear of.  “I never asked for any place yet,” he said, “except the post of bell-ringer and general sweeper at the Hiram Institute, and I won’t ask for one now.”  But at least, his friends urged, he would be on the spot to encourage and confer with his partisans.  No, Garfield answered; if they wished to elect him they must elect him in his absence; he would avoid all appearance, even, of angling for office.  The result was that all the other candidates withdrew, and Garfield was elected by acclamation.

After the election he went down to Ohio and delivered a speech to his constituents, a part of which strikingly illustrates the courage and independence of the backwoods schoolmaster.  “During the twenty years that I have been in public life,” he said, “almost eighteen of it in the Congress of the United States, I have tried to do one thing.  Whether I was mistaken or otherwise, it has been the plan of my life to follow my conviction, at whatever personal cost to myself.  I have represented for many years a district in Congress whose approbation I greatly desired; but though it may seem, perhaps, a little egotistical to say it, I yet desired still more the approbation of one person, and his name was Garfield.  He is the only man that I am compelled to sleep with, and eat with, and live with, and die with; and if I could not have his approbation I should have bad companionship.”