revent
efficiency. While they assumed to have soared above practical politics
and to abhor the ways of the "toughs" in championing candidates, they
subordinated their own usefulness to a sentiment that was limited to
a senator--Mr. Edmunds. It was clear at an early hour that the
nomination of Mr. Edmunds was impossible. He was put into the combat
by Governor Long with a splendid speech, and the mellow eloquence of
George William Curtis was for him, and Carl Schurz was a counsellor
who upheld the banner of the lawyer statesman of Vermont. The
conclusion was to stick to Edmunds; and they stuck until the last, and
frittered away their influence. They were in such shape they might,
by going in force, at a well-selected time and in a dramatic way, have
carried the convention with them. They could not, however, get their
own consent to go for Logan, or Arthur, or either of the Shermans; and
so Blaine was overruled and nominated.

He did a wonderful work in the campaign, and was himself apparently
satisfied at last that his apprehensions as to New York had been
unwarranted. Still his words came back to me often during the heat of
the summer and the fierce contest. "I cannot carry New York; we shall
lose it, perhaps by just a little--but we shall lose it;" and so we
did. As the vote was counted the plurality of Mr. Cleveland over Mr.
Blaine in the decisive State was one thousand and forty-seven. Gail
Hamilton says, in her "Life of Blaine," of the New York election, that
there was a plurality claimed on election day for Cleveland of
fifty thousand, and "the next day the figures came down to seventeen
thousand; then to twelve thousand; the next day to five thousand, and
at length dwindled to four hundred and fifty-six." The election was on
the 4th, and it was nearly two weeks before a decision was announced.
General Butler "openly proclaimed that the New York vote for himself
was counted to Cleveland." The "just a little" by which Blaine was
beaten was on the face of the returns one thousand and forty-seven,
and John Y. McKane was ten years afterward convicted of frauds that
were perpetrated as he willed, that amounted to thousands. There was
a fraud capacity in the machines of many times the plurality by which
Blaine was defeated, and there never was a rational doubt that it was
exerted. A change of six hundred votes would have given the Plumed
Knight the Presidency, and outside the Solid South he had a popular
majority, "leavi