the Governors of the various States were all
guests of the hotel. Not only did great men stay there, but they did
things there. It was at the Peabody dinner at the Fifth Avenue that the
movement to nominate Grant for President started. In 1880, after his
nomination, Garfield, at the solicitation of Arthur, came all the way
from Mentor to meet Roscoe Conkling. But the haughty and powerful
Conkling would not see him. If the hotel had not been the recognized
shelter of visiting Republican statesmen in New York it is reasonably
certain that Tilden, instead of Hayes, would have occupied the White
House from 1877 to 1881, for it was there that a rescue of the
Republican candidate was set on foot in 1876 after he had been given up
as lost. In one of the parlours of the hotel the ill-advised Dr. S.A.
Burchard doomed Blaine to defeat when he said: "We are Republicans, and
we do not intend to leave our party to identify ourselves with a party
whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion."

Today it would be hard to find a hotel below Forty-second Street that
still continues on what is known as the American plan. But when the
Fifth Avenue was young that system of prices was supposed to embody the
national spirit of democracy. Yet the idea had its wise critics, who
found in it a certain injustice. For example there was an editorial on
the subject, apropos of the Fifth Avenue, in the issue of October 1,
1859, soon after the hotel was opened, which ran, in part: "In the first
place, what can be more preposterous than to establish a fixed rate of
fare at hotels? Big, fat, bloated, blustering Guzzle goes to the Astor
House for a week, and, in virtue of his standing and his paunch, gets a
room near the dining saloon--a large, airy room looking on the Park,
with lounge, arm-chairs, pier-glasses, Brussels carpet, and other
furniture, all rich and luxurious; at dinner he eats _pate de fois gras_
and woodcock, at supper he has elaborate little dishes which exercise an
experienced cook for an hour or two, at breakfast he has salmon at fifty
cents a pound, for all of which Guzzle pays two dollars and a half a
day. The Rev. John Jones has a cup of weak tea for his breakfast, a
slice of beef for his dinner, and a room under the tiles, and pays the
same two dollars and a half." Perhaps there was a little exaggeration in
the Harper editorial. But judge of Guzzle's opportunities from the
following menu of the first dinner served by the