In Mr. Conkling's Ithaca speech (1878), he argued the question with great ability and force. He had a sledge-hammer way which broke down all opposition, and he exulted in it. One of his favorite tactics, which greatly amused his auditors, was to lead some prominent gainsayer in his audience to interrupt him, whereupon, in the blandest way possible, he would invite him to come forward, urge him to present his views, even help him to do so, and then, having gradually entangled him in his own sophistries and made him ridiculous, the senator would come down upon him with arguments--cogent, pithy, sarcastic--much like the fist of a giant upon a mosquito.
In whatever town Mr. Conkling argued the question of the national banks, that subject ceased to be a factor in politics: it was settled; his attacks upon the anti-bank demagogues annihilated their arguments among thinking men, and his sarcasm made them ridiculous among unthinking men. This was the sort of thing which he did best. While utterly deficient in constructive power, his destructive force was great indeed, and in this campaign it was applied, as it was not always applied, for the advantage of the country.
The other great speaker in the campaign was General James A. Garfield, then a member of the House of Repre-sentatives. My acquaintance with him had begun several years before at Syracuse, when my old school friend, his college mate, Charles Elliot Fitch, brought him into my library. My collection of books was even at that date very large, and Garfield, being delighted with it, soon revealed his scholarly qualities. It happened that not long before this I had bought in London several hundred volumes from the library left by the historian Buckle, very many of them bearing copious annotations in his own hand. Garfield had read Buckle's ``History of Civilization in England''
with especial interest, and when I presented to him and discussed with him some of these annotated volumes, there began a friendly relation between us which ended only with his life.
I also met him under less favorable circumstances.
Happening to be in Washington at the revelation of the Crdit Mobilier operations, I found him in the House of Representatives, and evidently in the depths of suffering.
An effort was making to connect him with the scandal, and while everything I know of him convinces me that he was not dishonest, he had certainly been imprudent. This he felt, and he asked me, in an almost heart-broken tone, if I really believed that this had forever destroyed his influence in the country. I answered that I believed nothing of the kind; that if he came out in a straightforward, manly way, without any of the prevarication which had so greatly harmed some others, he would not be injured, and the result showed that this advice was good.
On our arrival at the great hall in Ithaca (October 28, 1878), we found floor and stage packed in every part.
Never had a speaker a better audience. There were present very many men of all parties anxious to hear the currency question honestly discussed, and among them many of the more thoughtful sort misled by the idea that a wrong had been done to the country in the restoration of the currency to a sound basis; and there was an enormous attendance of students from the university.
As Garfield began he showed the effects of fatigue from the many speeches he had been making for weeks,--morning, noon, and night; but soon he threw himself heartily into the subject, and of all the thousands of political speeches I have heard it was the most effective. It was eloquent, but it was far more than that; it was HONESTLYargumentative; there was no sophistry of any sort; every subject was taken up fairly and every point dealt with thoroughly. One could see the supports of the Greenback party vanishing as he went on. His manner was the very opposite of Mr. Conkling's: it was kindly, hearty, as of neighbor with neighbor,--indeed, every person present, even if greenbacker or demagogue, must have said within himself, ``This man is a friend arguing with friends; he makes me his friend, and now speaks to me as such.''
The main line of his argument finished, there came something even finer; for, inspired by the presence of the great mass of students, he ended his speech with an especial appeal to them. Taking as his test the noted passage in the letter written by Macaulay to Henry Randall, the biographer of Jefferson,--the letter in which Macaulay prophesied destruction to the American Republic when poverty should pinch and discontent be wide-spread in the country, --he appealed to these young men to see to it that this prophecy should not come true; he asked them to follow in this, as in similar questions, their reason and not their prejudices, and from this he went on with a statement of the motives which ought to govern them and the line they ought to pursue in the effort to redeem their country.
Never was speech more successful. It carried the entire audience, and left in that region hardly a shred of the greenback theory. When the election took place it was observed that in those districts where Conkling and Garfield had spoken, the greenback heresy was annihilated, while in other districts which had been counted as absolutely sure for the Republican party, and to which, therefore, these orators had not been sent, there was a great increase in the vote for currency inflation.
I have often alluded to this result as an answer to those who say that speaking produces no real effect on the convictions of men regarding party matters. Some speaking does not, but there is a kind of speaking which does, and of this were these two masterpieces, so different from each other in matter and manner, and yet converging upon the same points, intellectual and moral.
