Not many of them were great orators or widely known as profound students of politics in its historical and comparative aspects. A few, like Blaine, Hoar, and Conkling, studied the classic oratory of the older generation and sought to apply to the controverted issues of the hour that studious, orderly, and sustained eloquence which had adorned the debates of earlier years; but the major portion cultivated only the arts of management and negotiation. Few of them seem to have given any thought to the lessons to be learned from European politics. On the contrary, they apparently joined with the multitude in the assumption that we had everything to teach Europe and nothing to learn. Bismarck was to them, if we may judge from their spoken words, simply a great politician and the hero of a war; the writings of German economists, Wagner and Schmoller, appear never to have penetrated their studies. That they foresaw in the seventies and eighties the turn that politics was destined to take is nowhere evident. They commanded respect and admiration for their practical achievements; but it is questionable whether the names of more than two or three will be known a century hence, save to the antiquarian. Of this group, Roscoe Conkling was undoubtedly typical, just as Marcus A. Hanna represented the dominant politicians of a later time. He was an able lawyer and an orator of some quality, but of no permanent fame. He took his seat in the Senate in 1867 and according to his biographer "during the remainder of his life his legal practice was chiefly connected with corporations that were litigants in the district and circuit courts of the United States,"[13]--the judges of which courts he was, as Senator, instrumental in appointing. His practice was lucrative for his day, amounting to some $50,000 a year.[14] He counted among his clients the first great capitalists of the country. When he was forced to retire from New York politics, "the first person who came to see him on business was Mr. Jay Gould, who waited upon him early one morning at his hotel."[15] He was counsel for Mr. Collis P. Huntington in his contest against the state legislation which railway interests deemed unjust and unconstitutional.[16] He was among the keen group of legal thinkers who invoked and extended the principle of the Fourteenth Amendment to cover all the varieties of legislation affecting corporate interests adversely.[17]