and the retirement of the Secretary from the
Cabinet, he turned to writing history "as a resource," and his great
work is of permanent value to the country, while his Garfield oration
is one of the masterpieces of the highest rank; and there came
straight from his brain two far-flashing ideas--that of the union
of American nations, and to protect the policy of protection with
reciprocity--and in the two there is the manifestation of that
crowning glory of public life which enters the luminous atmosphere
of immortality--statesmanship. That he had not the opportunity of the
execution of these policies--of guiding and shaping their triumph--was
not his fault but his fate. Their time may be coming but slowly,
yet it surely will come. His zeal in behalf of making the protective
principle irresistible by associating it intimately with reciprocity,
was so strong that he grew impatient when others were tedious in
comprehension; and there was a story of his concluding a sharp
admonition to the laborers on the tariff schedules by "smashing his
new silk hat on a steam-heater in the committee-room." He was asked by
a friend who rode out with him to see the statue that he thought the
most accurate and impressive of all the likenesses of Lincoln and was
fond of driving to see, located in a park east of the Capitol--that
by Story--whether he had "smashed a new silk hat" on a steam-heater
on behalf of reciprocity; and he softly responded, "It was not a new
hat."

That Mr. Blaine was keenly disappointed when defeated for the
Presidency at Cincinnati, there is no doubt; and that he began then to
see that it was not his destiny to be President, is certain.

There is a great contrast in his favor in his manner of bearing this
disappointment with that of Clay and Webster under somewhat similar
circumstances. Clay was furious at the nomination of General William
Henry Harrison, and greeted with unmeasured denunciation those
responsible for that judicious act; and Webster was bitter when Taylor
and Scott were nominated in the first instance, but came, after a
time, grandly out of the clouds. It is an interesting coincidence that
Webster when Secretary of State was a candidate for the Presidential
nomination against his chief, President Fillmore, and died, on the
24th of October, 1852, a few months after Scott's triumph at Baltimore
and a few days before the popular election of Pierce. The enduring
memory of Mr. Blaine appeared in the last