friends have the bitter memory of him, perhaps in the last campaign in which he might engage, advocating the defeat of the grand old Republican party for which he had done so much in years past. Mr. Beecher heeded none of these letters, and all of us who believed in him felt that his course was certainly taken after conscientious and earnest deliberation. He was mistaken in his judgment of Mr. Blaine, and I cannot help believing that, if he had lived to witness the wise, conservative, statesmanlike course of Mr. Blaine while in charge of the State Department during the Harrison administration, he would have admitted that he had misjudged him, for no one was quicker to correct an error than Mr. Beecher."

Believing earnestly that Cleveland would make a safe and honest President, discerning in him those qualities which have given him such phenomenal success as a political leader, and believing, after honest and careful inquiry that Mr. Cleveland had been maliciously slandered as to his private life, Henry Ward Beecher entered with great zeal into the campaign. That zeal was inspired by some of the strongest feelings and bitterest memories of his life. "When in the gloomy night of my own suffering, I sounded. every depth of sorrow, I vowed that if God would bring the day-star of Hope, I would never suffer brother, friend, or neighbor to go unfriended should a like serpent seek to crush him. That oath I will regard now, because I know the bitterness of venomous lies. I will stand against infamous lies which seek to sting to death an upright man and magistrate. Men counsel me to prudence lest I stir again my own griefs. No, I will not be prudent. If I refuse to in

terpose the shield of well-placed confidence between Governor Cleveland and the swarm of liars that nuzzle in the mud or sling arrows from ambush, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth and my right hand forget its cunning. I will imitate the noble example set by Plymouth Church in the day of my calamity. They were not ashamed of my bonds. They stood by me with God-sent loyalty. It was a heroic deed. They have set my duty before me and I will imitate their example."'

The campaign of 1884 was one of unparalleled personal bitterness. The friends who knew Mr. Blaine most intimately felt that the conduct of some of his opponents was an outrage on that chivalrous, patriotic, and high-minded statesman. The Hon. Nelson Dingley, Jr., has written: "The unjust and bitter criticism and personal defamation to which he was subjected in some quarters from the time it became known in 1876 that he was an aspirant for the Presidency, seemed like a burlesque to those who intimately knew Mr. Blaine, who understood the perfect purity and integrity of his private life, the nobility of his aims and purposes, and the magnanimity and kindness of his nature.""

During that acrimonious campaign of 1884, many of Mr. Beecher's truest friends regretted that, while manifesting such a noble and chivalrous sympathy for one of the maligned candidates, he had only bitter and depreciative words for the other candidate who, as they believed, was equally worthy and patriotic, and even more fiercely maligned. It seemed to

1" Biography," p. 578. 2 The Independent, February 2, 1893.

them strange that, while Mr. Blaine was forced, after having been vindicated in the judgment of his peers, to fight for all that makes life dear and sacred, and also that, when the chief hold that his enemies had over him came from his own private letters, Mr. Beecher, with his similar past experience, appeared to have forgotten for the time both charity and magnanimity.

Since 1884, Cleveland and Blaine have risen higher and higher in the esteem of their countrymen. Political friends and foes alike applauded Mr. Blaine's grand career in the Department of State, and mourned his death as that of the most inspiring and thoroughly American leader since Lincoln. Beecher's failure to appreciate what was great and noble in Mr. Blaine is only another evidence of that poor judgment of men which sometimes had brought him into sorest personal trouble. But it should be remembered by the most ardent friends of the Plumed Knight that, however extravagant Mr. Beecher's denunciations of Mr. Blaine may have been, they were surpassed on an earlier occasion by Mr. Beecher's condemnation of himself. Some of Mr. Blaine's misfortunes, like Beecher's, arose from intimate association with unworthy friends, and it would have only been charitable in the great preacher to have remembered that when Mr. Blaine's conduct was officially investigated his brave and manly explanation was at that time generally accepted, even by bitter foes, as ample vindication.

Remembering the safe course which Mr. Cleveland has pursued, it is hard to-day to realize how deep and wide-spread was the alarm over his possible election, and how fierce was the antagonism to Mr. Beecher on the part of many of his friends in 1884.

Plymouth Church was threatened with disruption. Nearly all the members sided against their pastor. As usual in the great crises of his life, Mr. Beecher was repeatedly informed that he had ruined himself and his influence. It required all his stubborn courage, backed by a thorough conviction that he was right, to take and maintain the position which he assumed, outside of the Republican ranks. It is not too much to say that, in the even balance of voters in the State of New York, it was Mr. Beecher's influence that brought defeat to the party which included most of his warmest friends. Many of his former supporters were so indignant that they professed to believe all that his enemies had ever said against him! He went to his death unforgiven by them.

Calmer judgments will prevail. The bitterness of personal partisanship will give way to truer estimates both of the Pulpit Thunderer and of the Plumed Knight. Whatever his mistakes, his services to Liberty will keep green for ever the laurel on the grave of the one, and, standing by the tomb of the other, men will recall that, whatever his faults, he was buried, amid a Nation's proud tears, in an honored sepulchre; that he was the American who taught his countrymen to believe in themselves and their imperial destiny, and that, as the pioneer and chief promoter of commercial relations and international

friendship among the peoples of the Western Hemisphere, he holds the same historic position toward the Greater America that Chatham held, more than a century ago, toward the Greater Britain.

CHAPTER XLIII.

LAST VIEW OF THE OLD BATTLEFIELD.

IT was the good fortune of Mr. Beecher, both in America and in England, to be a messenger of peace and good will as well as an apostle of righteousness. Having fought with English mobs in 1863, it was his lot twenty-four years later to know all of the delights of a royal English welcome.

It was through the urgent persuasions of Mr. James B. Pond, his lecture-agent, that Henry Ward Beecher was induced to make this final visit to "Our Old Home." Accompanied by Mrs. Beecher, he sailed in the Etruria on the 19th of June, 1886, and three thousand people from Plymouth Church, full of loyal enthusiasm, went down the harbor to give him a loving farewell.

For four days he suffered from his usual sickness, but on his birthday, the 24th of June, when he was seventy-three years of age, he was able to appear on deck and was showered with birthday cards and letters which had been reserved for that time.

Landing in Liverpool, he spent a quiet Sunday unrecognized in a great congregation. On the following day he heard a very powerful and luminous speech on the Home-Rule question by Mr. Gladstone.