Blaine committed many serious blunders during the campaign of 1884. He and Cleveland were both made the targets of flagrant scandals, and when the Cleveland scandal was sent to Blaine in the early part of the contest, instead of peremptorily forbidding its use as a campaign factor, as would have been most wise, he sent it to his national committee, and it was given publicity. The Blaine scandal was sent to Cleveland early in the fight, and he at once gave notice to those in charge of his campaign that any personal scandals against Blaine should not have the sanction of the Democratic organization. Blaine never would have committed such a mistake if he had been managing a Presidential campaign for another, and had he been such responsible manager, he never would have permitted a libel suit to be instituted against a newspaper publisher for any scandal, however false and malignant. He was a man of intense earnestness, and the intensity of his interest in his own election for the Presidency unbalanced his judgment and made him often the creature of impulse when he should have been most dispassionate and philosophical. The scandals did not affect a thousand votes out of the many millions cast for President, and Blaine suffered vastly more than Cleveland, because he dignified the scandal against himself by legal proceedings for defamation. The fact that he voluntarily discontinued the suit after the election is the best evidence of the error committed against himself. Charles A. Dana, then editor of the New York _Sun_, became estranged from Mr. Cleveland the year before the Presidential election of 1884. He had earnestly supported Cleveland for Governor in 1882, but when a movement was made by Mr. Manning to organize the State for Cleveland in 1884 Dana was implacable in his opposition. I met him several times before Cleveland was nominated, and he always discussed the question with an unusual degree of acrimony. He believed that Cleveland was not available; that he was unworthy of the position, and that if nominated he would be overwhelmingly defeated. He gave me no reason for his changed relations with Cleveland, and I did not learn the true cause until after Cleveland had been elected President. Soon after Cleveland’s nomination I was spending a few days at Saratoga, and was watching Dana’s paper with much interest, for he was very much disgruntled. He did not at first declare himself aggressively against Cleveland’s election, but one morning at Saratoga, in taking up the Sun, I found one of Dana’s terrible deliverances against Cleveland, that left no possible chance for a reconciliation. I telegraphed to Mr. Dana and asked him to meet me at his office at three o’clock that afternoon, and called there on my way home. Mr. Dana had gone too far to recede, but I tried to temper his bitterness, as I thought it would do great harm, not only to Cleveland, but to his own newspaper as well, then one of the most prosperous in the country.