When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: “Now we are even. History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once. Turn about may be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it.” So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was to be President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination for the governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in the State convention sure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have carried the State as Cleveland did, and Slocum, not Cleveland, would have been the Chief Magistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleveland through. But in his case, as in many another, Providence “got there” in fulfilment of a decree of Destiny. Chapter the Nineteenth Mr. Cleveland in the White House—Mr. Bayard in the Department of State—Queer Appointments to Office—The One-Party Power—The End of North and South Sectionalism I The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was set forth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kind of prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He was a sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked back affectionately upon the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poor school-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the House he and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their friendship when both of them had reached the Senate. I inherited Mr. Blaine’s desk in the Ways and Means Committee room. In one of the drawers of this he had left a parcel of forgotten papers, which I returned to him. He made a joke of the secrets they covered and the fortunate circumstance that they had fallen into the hands of a friend and not of an enemy. No man of his time could hold a candle to Mr. Blaine in what we call magnetism—that is, in manly charm, supported by facility and brain power. Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party leadership before his time. He made a good third to them. I never knew Mr. Clay, but with Judge Douglas I was well acquainted, and the difference between him and Mr. Blaine in leadership might be called negligible. Both were intellectually aggressive and individually amiable. They at least seemed to love their fellow men. Each had been tried by many adventures. Each had gone, as it were, “through the flint mill.” Born to good conditions—Mr. Blaine sprang from aristocratic forebears—each knew by early albeit brief experience the seamy side of life; as each, like Clay, nursed a consuming passion for the presidency. Neither had been made for a subaltern, and they chafed under the subaltern yoke to which fate had condemned them. II