The Presidential contest of 1876 brought into the national political arena the strongest personality developed by the Republican party, with the single exception of Abraham Lincoln. James G. Blaine was admittedly the Henry Clay of the Republican party, and both were equally idolized and equally fated. The Republican party had men of profounder intellect than Blaine, but no one who so completed the circle of all the qualities of a popular leader, including masterly ability as a disputant. Like Clay, he was idolized by his friends and most bitterly defamed by his foes, and both were twice defeated by their party for Presidential nominations when the party was successful, and both nominated only to suffer defeat. With an intimate knowledge of the public men of the last half century, I regard Blaine as the most magnetic man I have ever met. His greeting to friend and stranger was always generous without gush, and at once brought all who had any communication with him into apparently the closest relations. He remembered names of the humblest and most distant of his acquaintances; always knew something of their communities and their interests. It was not the art of a demagogue, but the natural impulse of a big-hearted, big-brained enthusiast, and Blaine was an enthusiast in everything that enlisted his interest. When, in addition to these charming personal qualities, he possessed every attribute of a great popular orator, it is not difficult to understand why Blaine became the favorite of the people. Like all who have reached any measure of distinction in that line, he had bitter and malignant foes, and he could well have said of himself, as Clay once did when overcome by an exhibition of the generosity of his friends, who had paid a note that greatly embarrassed him: “Never had man such friends and such enemies as Henry Clay.” The chief difference between Clay and Blaine was in the fact that the masses did not know Clay from personal contact, while the masses well knew Blaine, and saw him as he was in his every-day life as well as in his great achievements in politics and statesmanship. In another respect Blaine differed widely from Clay. Blaine was a fatalist, and from 1876, when he was first defeated for the Republican nomination for President in Cincinnati, until his name was last presented to the Republican National Convention in 1892, he was oppressed, profoundly oppressed, with the belief that he never could be President; while Clay hoped to realize the great dream of his life, and confidently expected his election to the Presidency until his final defeat in the Philadelphia convention of 1848. [Illustration: RUTHERFORD B. HAYES]