nked
themselves with rejected ideas and principles have themselves also been
rejected. Calhoun has been made an exception to this rule, for reasons
so obvious that they need not be rehearsed.

A Series of Great Failures presents fine opportunities, which will some
day attract some enterprising editor; but that is not the undertaking
here in hand. If the men who guided and the men who failed to guide the
movement and progress of the country were to stand side by side in this
series its size would be increased by at least one third, but probably
not so its value. Yet the failures have held out some temptations which
it has been difficult to resist. For example, there was Governor
Hutchinson, whose life has since been written by the same gentleman who
in this series has admirably presented his great antagonist, Samuel
Adams. There was much to be said in favor of setting the two portraits,
done by the same hand, side by side. It must be remembered that the
cause for the disaffected colonists is argued by the writers in this
series in the old-fashioned way,--that is to say, upon the fundamental
theory that Great Britain was foully wrong and her cis-Atlantic subjects
nobly right. A life of Hutchinson would have furnished an opportunity
for showing that, as an unmodified proposition, this is very far from
being correct. The time has come when efforts to state the quarrel
fairly for both parties are not altogether refused a hearing in the
United States. Nevertheless the admission of Hutchinson for this purpose
would have entailed too many consequences. The colonists _did_ secede
and _did_ establish independence; their action and their success
constitute the history of the country; and the leaders of their movement
are the persons whose portraits are properly hung in this gallery. The
obstructionists, leaders of the defeated party, who failed to control
our national destiny, must find room elsewhere. In the same way, Stephen
A. Douglas has been left outside the door. Able, distinguished,
influential, it was yet his misfortune to represent ideas and policies
which the people decisively condemned. Sufficient knowledge of these
ideas and policies is obtained from the lives of those who opposed and
triumphed over them. The history of non-success needs not the elaborate
presentation of a biography of the defeated leader in a series of
statesmen. The work of Douglas was discredited; it does not remain as an
active surviving influence,