The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield: Twentieth President of the United States, Including Full and Accurate Details of His Eventful Administration, Assassination, Last Hours, Death, Etc., Together with Notable Extracts from His Speeches and LettersBrown, E. E. (Emma Elizabeth)
History
The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield: Twentieth President of the United States, Including Full and Accurate Details of His Eventful Administration, Assassination, Last Hours, Death, Etc., Together with Notable Extracts from His Speeches and Letters
Brown, E. E. (Emma Elizabeth)
Garfield, James A. (James Abram), 1831-1881; Presidents -- United States -- Biography
give his case away or fail, in the judgment of competent and impartial
listeners, to gain the mastery.
These characteristics, which marked Garfield as a great debater, did
not, however, make him a great parliamentary leader. A parliamentary
leader, as that term is understood wherever free representative
government exists, is necessarily and very strictly the organ of his
party. An ardent American defined the instinctive warmth of patriotism
when he offered the toast, "Our country, always right, but right or
wrong, our country." The parliamentary leader who has a body of
followers that will do and dare and die for the cause, is one who
believes his party always right, but right or wrong, is for his party.
No more important or exacting duty devolves upon him than the selection
of the field and the time for contest. He must know not merely how to
strike, but where to strike and when to strike. He often skillfully
avoids the strength of his opponent's position and scatters confusion in
his ranks by attacking an exposed point when really the righteousness of
the cause and the strength of logical intrenchment are against him. He
conquers often both against the right and the heavy battalions; as when
young Charles Fox, in the days of his toryism, carried the House of
Commons against justice, against its immemorial rights, against his own
convictions, if, indeed, at that period Fox had convictions, and, in
the interest of a corrupt administration, in obedience to a tyrannical
sovereign, drove Wilkes from the seat to which the electors of Middlesex
had chosen him, and installed Luttrell, in defiance, not merely of law
but of public decency. For an achievement of that kind Garfield was
disqualified--disqualified by the texture of his mind, by the honesty of
his heart, by his conscience, and by every instinct and aspiration of
his nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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