"If any of the scheming corporations or corrupt rings that have done so much to disgrace the country by their attempts to control its legislation, have ever found in me a conscious supporter or ally in any dishonorable scheme, they are at full liberty to disclose it. In the discussion of the many grave and difficult questions of public policy which have occupied the thoughts of the nation during the last twelve years, I have borne some part; and I confidently appeal to the public records for a vindication of my conduct." A writer in the Cincinnati _Enquirer_ at this time thus described Garfield:-- "With as honest a heart as ever beat, above the competitions of sordid ambition, General Garfield has yet so little of the worldly wise in him that he is poor, and yet has been accused of dishonesty. He has no capacity for investment, nor the rapid solution of wealth, nor profound respect for the penny in and out of pound, and still, is neither careless, improvident, nor dependent. The great consuming passion to equal richer people, and live finely, and extend his social power, are as foreign to him as scheming or cheating. But he is not a suspicious nor a high-mettled man, and so he is taken in sometimes, partly from his obliging, un-refusing disposition. Men who were scheming imposed upon him as upon Grant and other crude-eyed men of affairs. The people of his district, however, who are quick to punish public venality or defection, heard him in his defence, and kept him in Congress and held up his hand." Side by side with this testimony, listen to Garfield's own words in the Ohio Senate just after his election:-- "During the twenty years I have been in the public service (almost eighteen of it in the Congress of the United States), I have tried to do one thing. I have represented, for many years a district in Congress whose approbation I greatly desired, but, though it may seem perhaps a little egotistical to say it, I yet desired still more the approbation of one person, and his name is Garfield. He is the only man that I am compelled to sleep with, and eat with, and die with, and, if I could not have his approbation, I should have bad companionship." The following sonnet, from an anonymous pen, appeared about this time in the Washington _Evening Star_:-- TO JAMES A. GARFIELD. "Thou who didst ride on Chickamauga's day, All solitary, down the fiery line, And saw the ranks of battle rusty shine, Where grand old Thomas held them from dismay, Regret not now, while meaner factions play Their brief campaigns against the best of men; For those spent balls of slander have their way, And thou shalt see the victory again. Weary and ragged, though the broken lines Of party reel, and thine own honor bleeds, That mole is blind that Garfield undermines! That shot falls short that hired slander speeds! That man will live whose place the state assigns, And whose high mind the mighty nation needs!"