McCormick went into politics, too, with the same conscientious abandon with which he plunged into business and religion. He was a Democrat of the Jeffersonian type. One of his keenest pleasures was to go to the Senate and listen to its debates. He was not a fluent speaker himself, but he delighted in the orations of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He believed in politics. He thought it a public danger that the strong and competent men of the republic should willingly permit men of little ability and low character to manage public affairs. In fact, he was almost as much a pathfinder and pioneer in this matter as he had been in matters of business, but without the same measure of success. Politics, he found, was not like business. Its successes depended not upon your own efforts, but upon the votes of the majority. What McCormick tried to do as a citizen and a patriot was the one heroic failure of his life. He ran for office on several occasions, but he was never elected. He was not the sort of man who gets elected. He stood for his whole party at a time when the average politician was standing only for himself. He talked of "fundamental principles" while the other leaders, for the most part, were thinking of salaries. He gave up his time and his money as freely for politics as he did for religion; but he was out of his element. He was too sincere, too simple, too intent upon a larger view of public questions. He could never talk the flexible language of diplomacy nor suit his theme to the prejudice of his listeners. Usually, to the political managers and delegates with whom he felt it his duty to co-operate, he was like a man from another world. They could never understand him, and tolerated his leadership mainly because of his generous contributions. Again and again he astonished them by developing a party speech into a sermon on national righteousness, or by speaking nobly of a political opponent. On one memorable occasion, for instance, in the white-hot passion of the Hayes-Tilden controversy, and after he had lavished time and money in support of Tilden, he sprang to his feet in a Democratic convention and amazed the delegates by saying: "Mr. Hayes is not a Democrat, but he is too patriotic and honest to suit his party managers and we must sustain him so far as he is right." He was one of the first Americans who rose above sectional interests and party loyalties, and surveyed his country as a whole. No other man of his day, either in or out of public office, was so free from local prejudices and so intensely national in his beliefs and sympathies. He refused to stamp himself with the label of the North or of the South. He had been reared in the one and matured in the other. And in the ominous days before the Civil War he strove like a beneficent giant to make the wrangling partisans listen to the voice of reason and arbitration. [Illustration: THE REAPER IN HEAVY GRAIN]