votes: "I will tell you, first of all others, the policy which I intend to adopt, and that is to make the matter a business engagement between the people of the state and myself, in which the obligation on my side is to perform the duties assigned me with an eye single to the interests of my employers. I shall have no ideas of reëlection or higher political preferment in my head, but be very thankful and happy if I can well serve one term as the people's Governor." As the people's governor Cleveland had fulfilled his pledge-guarding the public money against appropriations for partisan or sectarian purposes, courageously vetoing unwise legislation in the face of popular clamor, and consistently supporting measures for the reform of the civil service, the welfare of labor, and the improvement of municipal government. Two weeks after Cleveland's nomination a convention of more than five hundred independent Republicans, representing sixteen states, met at New York, and, condemning Blaine as "an unfit leader, shown by his own words and his acknowledged acts to be unworthy of respect and confidence," issued a call for all the friends of reform to vote for Cleveland, whose name was "a synonym of political courage and honesty." Not all the men who had opposed Blaine's nomination bolted the ticket. Lodge, Roosevelt, Andrew D. White, Hamilton Fish, and Senator Edmunds himself gave it grudging support. But a host of influential Republican writers and speakers (including Carl Schurz, T. W. Higginson, Josiah Quincy, Henry Ward Beecher, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel Bowles, and Presidents Eliot and Seelye of Harvard and Amherst) worked for Cleveland;1 and Republican and independent papers, like the Boston Advertiser, the Philadelphia Record, the Chicago News, and the New York Times, Herald, Post, and Telegram, gave him their support.

Since neither of the parties could make an honest appeal to

1 The Republican supporters of Cleveland were called "Mugwumps," an Indian word meaning "big chief." This epithet was first used by the Indianapolis Sentinel in the Liberal Republican campagn of 1872, but it did not become a common term in our political vocabulary until it was applied to the Cleveland Republicans by the New York Sun (which supported the Anti-Monopoly candidate, Benjamin F. Butler, in 1884).

the country on its record on the issues before President Arthur's congresses, and since the platforms of both were equally noncommittal on all subjects except mutual condemnation, the campaign degenerated into an exhibition of personal abuse, which the New York Nation said was "worthy of the stairways of a tenement house." The past behavior of both candidates was examined in its minutest details for evidences of scandal, and dragged before the public in nauseating accusations and innuendoes. Not even the sanctities of personal religion and domestic life were spared. Blaine was coarsely cartooned as the "tattooed man," decorated with worthless railroad bonds, fraudulent contracts, and compromising letters. Cleveland was pictured as a sot and a libertine, a vulgar politician transferred from the back parlor of a Buffalo saloon to the executive mansion at Albany.' Blaine's elements of strength lay in his personal popularity, his presumed acceptability to the Irish and the labor vote, the unbroken control of the executive by the Republicans for a quarter of a century, and the belief that Butler's candidacy (which was rumored to be subsidized by Republican funds) would draw heavily from the Democratic vote. Cleveland was under the further handicap of complete inexperience in national politics, never having sat in either House of Congress or held a Federal office. Moreover, he was exceedingly unpopular with Tammany Hall for his support of reforms in the government of New York City, and had given offense to many interests by his veto messages as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York.

But all Blaine's advantages were offset by the suspicions of

1 Unfortunately one of the charges against Cleveland, relating to a longforgotten liaison with a married woman of Buffalo, was true, and was frankly acknowledged by the candidate. The confession caused some consternation among the independents, who were supporting Cleveland, until the tension was removed by the incontrovertible argument of a gentleman from Buffalo that, since Cleveland seemed to have been remiss in his private life and Blaine's public career was open to suspicion, the obvious course of wisdom would be to retain the former in public office where he had been so conspicuously faithful, and relegate the latter to private life for which he was so eminently fitted by his domestic virtues!

his integrity which had defeated him for the nomination in 1876 and had dogged his political footsteps ever since. The story of the transactions with the Union Pacific and the Little Rock and Fort Smith railroads rose like Banquo's ghost and would not down. Many years earlier, while a member of the House, Blaine had written a number of letters to Warren Fisher, Jr., of Boston, who was connected with the Little Rock and Fort Smith, expressing gratitude for being "admitted to participation" in certain enterprises, in his "present state of crippled and deranged finances," and promising in return that he would not be a "deadhead" in the business. When the Democratic House ordered its Committee on the Judiciary to make an investigation of the matter, just before the meeting of the national convention of 1876, and James Mulligan, a former bookkeeper for Fisher, testified that letters from Blaine to Fisher were in his possession, Blaine, much perturbed lest the letters should be produced in evidence, "borrowed" them from Mulligan and refused to return them as he had promised that he would. It is true that Blaine read the letters (or such parts of them as he wished), with comments, from his desk in the House a few days later, while "inviting the confidence" of forty-four million of his countrymen. But this dramatic gesture of selfjustification, though it had carried the House off its feet, did not satisfy the forty-four million of Blaine's innocence; neither did the perusal of the letters in cold print as they appeared in the Congressional Record.

Now, eight years later, the Mugwump managers republished the Mulligan letters (with the addition of a new lot furnished by Mulligan and Fisher) and scattered them broadcast over the land. To counteract the attack on his record by the magnetism of his personal appeal, Blaine made a speaking-tour through Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois during the last month of the campaign, and had the satisfaction of helping the Republicans carry the "October state" of Ohio by more than 11,000 plurality. He returned to New York, tired and overwrought, to meet with an experience which probably cost him the election. A group of clergymen gathered at the Fifth Avenue Hotel

on the afternoon of October 29 to pledge him their support. The spokesman, Reverend S. D. Burchard of Maine, had the effrontery to refer to the Democrats as "the party of rum, Romanism, and rebellion." If Blaine heard the remark, he made a fatal mistake in not rebuking Burchard in his response. The insulting alliteration (insulting even to Blaine himself, since his mother was a Roman Catholic and his sister a Mother Superior in a convent) was featured by the anti-Blaine press and justly resented by every Catholic voter in the state. The same evening Blaine gave further cause for criticism by attending a "millionaires' dinner" at Delmonico's, and hobnobbing with such conspicuous representatives of predatory wealth as Jay Gould, Russell Sage, H. H. Rogers, and P. D. Armour.

On election night, November 4, it was known that Cleveland had carried the doubtful states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Indiana, together with the solid South, giving him 183 electoral votes. The 182 votes of all the other states, except New York, were secure for Blaine. For three or four days the votes of New York, which were to decide the election, hung in the balance, until the completed returns showed that the Cleveland electors had won by the narrow plurality of 1149 votes out of a total poll of 1,127,169. The defeat of Blaine was attributed to various causes-the Mugwump revolt, the Burchard incident, the Mulligan letters, the last flicker of Stalwart revenge in Conkling's refusal to support his old rival,' the commercial depression and "panic" of 1884, and the bad weather on election day. Blaine himself, though "quite serene over the result," attributed his defeat directly to the misfortune that "the Lord sent upon us an Ass in the shape of a Preacher, and a rainstorm to lessen our vote in New York," and indirectly to the lawless defiance of the South in suppressing the negro Republican vote. That Blaine was weaker than his party was shown by the fact that the Republicans gained 18 seats in the House, reducing the Democratic majority to 45, and retained their control of the Senate by a slightly increased margin (41 to 35).

1 When urged to take the stump for Blaine, Conkling had replied with quiet sarcasm, "You know I don't engage in criminal practice."

The election of the first Democratic president since Buchanan was an event of marked significance in our history. It meant that the party which had been under the persistent reproach of disloyalty to the Union since the Civil War was to be given the opportunity to prove the baselessness of the suspicion; it meant the substitution of the more healthy rivalry of two great parties for the strife of factions within a single party, confirmed in a long tenure of power; it meant that the South was to be admitted to a real partnership in the government by executive recognition in the distribution of the patronage; it meant, in a word, that the cycle of reconstruction had run its full course, and that henceforth a truly united country would be free to give its belated attention to the pressing problems of economic legislation.

CLEVELAND'S PATH OF THORNS

Frustration was the keynote of Cleveland's administration, as it had been of Arthur's. The new president, though amply endowed with courage and initiative, found himself thwarted at every point of his program of reform. The Democratic party was still widely suspected of hostility to the whole body of reconstruction legislation; and where the rumor that the fruits of the war would be sacrificed failed to rouse opposition, the big business interests, fearing an executive bent on a drastic reduction of the tariff, predicted disaster. Serious labor troubles, culminating in strikes and riots almost as violent as those of 1877, brought their inevitable embarrassment upon the administration. Moreover, President Cleveland was hopelessly at variance with his Democratic House on the question of reform in taxation, the currency, and the civil service, while a Republican Senate confronted him with hostile defiance through his entire term. The Democrats were in office, but not in power. Cleveland was the elected president, but not the accepted leader of the country. The Republicans made the advent of a Democratic president in 1885 the text for the same dismal prophecies of national ruin that the Federalists had indulged in on the advent of a Republican president in 1801.