er council, and Hayes was
permitted to take his seat. It is the only instance in a national
election where the will of the people at the polls has been defied and
overridden.

Hayes was a sincere and honest man, and he felt keenly the cloud which
the manner of his election cast over his administration. He was never
popular with his party, and no doubt he felt that the debt he owed it
for getting him his seat was a doubtful one. His administration was
noteworthy principally because he destroyed the last vestiges of
carpet-bag government in the South, and left the southern states to work
out their own destiny unhampered. He was not even considered for a
renomination, and spent the remainder of his life quietly in his Ohio
home.

Hayes's successor was another so-called "dark horse," that is, a man of
minor importance, whose nomination, was due to the fact that the party
leaders could not agree upon any of the more prominent candidates. They
were Grant, Blaine and John Sherman, and after thirty-five ballots, it
was evident that a "dark horse" must be found. The choice fell upon
James Abram Garfield, who was not prominent enough to have made any
enemies, and who was as astonished as was the country at large when it
heard the news.

Garfield was born in Ohio in 1831, in a little log cabin and to a
position in the world not greatly different to Lincoln's. While laboring
at various rough trades, he succeeded in preparing himself for college,
worked his way through, got into politics, served through the Civil War,
and later for eighteen years in Congress, where he made a creditable but
by no means brilliant record. He was elected President by a small
majority, and enraged the many enemies of James G. Blaine by selecting
that astute politician as his secretary of state. One of these, a
rattle-brained New Yorker named Charles J. Guiteau, approached the
President on July 2, 1881, as he was waiting at a railroad station in
Washington, about to start on a journey, and shot him through the body.
Death followed, after a painful struggle, two months later.

Obscure, in a sense, as Garfield had been, the man who succeeded him was
immeasurably more so. Chester Alan Arthur was a successful New York
lawyer, who had dabbled in politics and held some minor appointive
offices, his selection as Vice-President being due to the desire of the
Republican managers to throw a sop to the Empire State. His
administration, however, while marked by