"Garfield was indeed a great man. This will be the judgment of those who knew him personally and of history. This tragedy prevents the corroboration of that judgment by results; for he had but just entered upon the work for which his preparation and development had fitted him and has finished nothing but a life of great promise and expectation. His growth has been a wonderful study to those who were by his side during its progress. It was constant to the last moment. The last year had turned it into an altogether new and untried channel. It had been begun and carried on until that time in quite a different direction. He had never had executive experience, and a modesty and distrust, rare in minds conscious of great power, led him to hesitate and shrink from what was before him. His first remark to a long-tried friend on taking his hand after the Chicago convention was this: 'I fear I am no man for this place; I have felt that I could reasonably count on six years more of labor and study and growth in the new and larger opportunity already secured to me in my accustomed field, but this is an untried sphere to me, and I dread the experiment.' The short time he has been permitted, however, to labor in this new field has yet been long enough to bring out great qualities and high purposes that the nation can ill spare. He was conscious of great powers carefully trained, but he lacked confidence to take hold of new things. His mind did not work quickly, though it did surely. Always feeling the ground under every step he took, he never ventured his foot where he could not, by some process of reasoning, however slow, satisfy himself that he knew what was under him. Hence the man who was a great leader in battle, and of unflinching personal courage, and better fitted than any contemporary to demonstrate and defend a political principle, had not yet come to be a safe political leader in a sudden emergency, where there is no time for logic or processes of reasoning, but action must follow instinct and first impression. At such times he distrusted himself and left to others, with not a tithe of his real power, the guidance of political movements. As free from political as from personal guile, he was too confiding and open-hearted to be safe in the hands of men less scrupulous and less selfish.