XI.

JAMES A. GARFIELD.

IN his memorial oration on Garfield, Blaine quoted the words in which Webster described the place where the elder members of the Webster family were born-"a log cabin raised amid the snow-drifts of New Hampshire." The orator then said: "With requisite change of scene, the same words would aptly portray the early days of Garfield. The poverty of the frontier, where all are engaged in a common struggle, and where a common sympathy and hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty-different in kind, different in influence and effect-from that conscious and humiliating indigence which is every day forced to contrast itself with neighboring wealth on which it feels a sense of grinding dependence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed no poverty; it is but the beginning of wealth, and has the boundless possibilities of the future always opening before it."

When Garfield was elected United States Senator from Ohio, in January, 1880, President. Hinsdale, of Hiram College, Ohio, made an address to the students of the institution appropriate to the occasion when so much honor had

been conferred upon one who, as he said, “had been bell-ringer and president" of that college. In the course of his remarks President Hinsdale said: "General Garfield once rang the school-bell when a student here. That did not make him the man he is. Convince me that it did and I will hang up a bell in every tree in the campus and set you all to ringing. Thomas Corwin when a boy drove a wagon, and became the head of the Treasury; Thomas Ewing boiled salt, and became a Senator; Henry Clay rode a horse to the mill from the Slashes, and he became the Great Commoner of the West. But it was not the wagon, nor the salt, nor the horse that made these men great. These are interesting facts in the lives of these illustrious men. They show that in our country it has been and still is possible for young men of ability, energy, and determined purpose to rise above lowly conditions and win places of usefulness and honor. Poverty may be a good school; straitened circumstances may develop power and character; but the principal conditions for success are in the man and not in his surroundings."

The simple fact is that American history, even in recent years, is full of examples of personal vicissitudes that are dramatic in their sharp contrasts, and Garfield's career was so compact with these that after he had passed through the earlier days of his training he rapidly ascended through several important successive stages. Within six months he was successively president of a college, State Senator of Ohio, a major-gen

eral of the Army of the United States, and Representative to the national Congress. As his eulogist has said, “ a combination of honors so varied, so elevated, within a period so brief, and to a man so young, is without precedent or parallel in the history of the country." Garfield's mother was left a widow while he was yet an infant. She was a woman of unusual energy, faith, and courage. She declared that her children should not be separated, and she kept them at home. together until they were able to take care of themselves. As President Hinsdale, in the address above quoted, says of young Garfield, his life did not materially differ from the lives of his neighbors' boys." He chopped wood, and so did they; he hoed, and so did they; he carried butter to the store in a little pail, and so did they. Other families that had not lost their heads naturally shot ahead of the Garfields in property, but such differences counted for far less then than they do now." While yet a lad, the desire of the youngster to earn a little money led him to become a boatman on the Ohio Canal, which passed within a short distance of the Garfield farm. He discharged the humble duties of his place with so much fidelity and diligence that he attracted the attention of his superiors and was promoted to the loftier position of steersman of a barge.

After about eighteen months of this sort of labor, laying by as much as he could of his small earnings, he took a step forward and shipped as sailor on one of the schooners plying on Lake

Erie. Illness compelled him to relinquish this mode of life, and he returned home and confided to his mother his ambitious plans for the future. He had already acquired an elementary knowledge of common branches of education, and now resolved to build a loftier structure for himself. With the small savings that were within his reach, and by his mother's assistance, he began course of study at an obscure institution in a small country village not far from Orange, O.

Young Garfield and his room-mate, too poor to pay their board in the village, rented a room in an old frame building not far from the academy and there did their own cooking and house-keeping in the most primitive way while they imbibed elements of knowledge at the Pierian spring which gushed forth in the Geauga Academy. But the future President had a stout heart and a determined will, and he applied himself with honest and faithful toil to the task which he had set before him. He found work among the car

penters of the village, and spent his mornings, evenings, and Saturdays in the shops, where willing hands were held out to give the boy a lift along his rugged road. During the winter he taught a district school, and thus added a little to his income. And so for several years, teaching in the winter, working at the carpenter's bench at odd times, and attending the academy during the fall and spring terms, he was able to secure the training necessary for a higher collegiate course. He was a tall, muscular, fair-haired country lad, browned by wind and exposure, sound in every fibre of his body, a strong athlete, a good student, and a great favorite with his associates.

In the fall of 1854 Garfield was admitted to the junior class of Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., his previous studies having been sufficiently thorough to enable him to skip the freshman and sophomore courses. It is a matter of record that the polished young students among whom he was now thrown were disposed to look somewhat contemptuously on the rough Ohio carpenter and farmer's boy who had ventured into their company. Rude remarks and ruder treatment he bore with patience, high-spirited though he was; and without regarding the slights and taunts that were occasionally tossed at him, he devoted himself with energy to his studies, and very speedily acquired a reputation for scholarship far above that of any of his fellowstudents. When he graduated, in 1856, he carried off the honors of his class in metaphysics, a distinction of great merit. Three years later (in