BEST SELECTIONS

MR.

NUMBER 10.

*

EULOGY ON GARFIELD.

Abridged.

R. PRESIDENT,-For the second time in this generation the great departments of the Government of the United States are assembled in the Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a murdered President. Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in which the passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical termination of his great life added but another to the lengthened succession of horrors which had marked so many lintels with the blood of the firstborn. Garfield was slain in a day of peace, when brother had been reconciled to brother, and when anger and hate had been banished from the land. "Whosoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of Murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited where such example was last to have been looked for, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate. Let him draw, rather, a decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character."

Losing his father before he was two years old, the early life of Garfield was one of privation; but its pov

erty has been made indelicately and unjustly prominent. Thousands of readers have imagined him as the ragged, starving child, whose reality too often greets the eye in the squalid sections of our large cities. Gen. Garfield's infancy and youth had none of their destitution, none of their pitiful features, appealing to the tender heart and to the open hand of charity. He was a poor boy in the same sense in which Henry Clay was a poor boy; in which Andrew Jackson was a poor boy; in which Daniel Webster was a poor boy; in the sense in which a large majority of the eminent men of America in all generations have been poor boys.

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.

No manly man feels anything of shame in looking back to early struggles with adverse circumstances, and no man feels a worthier pride than when he has conquered the obstacies to his progress. But no one of noble mould desires to be looked upon as having occupied a menial position, as having been repressed by a feeling of inferiority, or as having suffered the evils of poverty until relief was found at the hand of charity.

Garfield's early opportunities for securing an education were extremely limited, and yet were sufficient to de

velop in him an intense desire to learn. The history of Garfield's life to this period presents no novel features. He had undoubtedly shown perseverance, self-reliance, self-sacrifice and ambition-qualities which, be it said for the honor of our country, are everywhere to be found among the young men of America. But from his graduation at Williams onward, to the hour of his tragical death, Garfield's career was eminent and exceptional. Slowly working through his educational period, receiving his diploma when twenty-four years of age, he seemed at one bound to spring into conspicuous and brilliant success. Within six years he was successively president of a college, State senator of Ohio, major-general of the Army of the United States, and representative elect to the National Congress. 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 army life was begun with no other military knowledge than such as he had hastily gained from books in the few months preceding his march to the field. Stepping from civil life to the head of a regiment, the first order he received when ready to cross the Ohio was to assume command of a brigade, and to operate as an independent force in Eastern Kentucky.

The result of the campaign is matter of history. The skill, the endurance, the extraordinary energy shown by Garfield, the courage he imparted to his men, raw and untried as himself, the measures he adopted to increase his force and to create in the enemy's mind exaggerated estimates of his numbers, bore perfect fruit in the routing of Marshall, the capture of his camp, the dispersion of his force and the emancipation of an important terri

tory from the control of the rebellion. With less than two thousand men in his entire command, with a mobil ized force of only eleven hundred, without cannon, he had met an army of five thousand and defeated them— driving Marshall's forces successively from two strongholds of their own selection, fortified with abundant artillery. Major-Gen. Buell, commanding the Department of the Ohio, an experienced and able soldier of the regular army, published an order of thanks and congratulation on the brilliant result of the Big Sandy campaign, which would have turned the head of a less cool and sensible man than Garfield. Buell declared that his services had called into action the highest qualities of a soldier; and President Lincoln supplemented these words of praise by the more substantial reward of a brigadiergeneral's commission, to bear date from the day of his decisive victory over Marshall.

The Army of the Cumberland was re-organized under the command of Gen. Thomas, who promptly offered Garfield one of its divisions. He was extremely desirous to accept the position, but was embarrassed by the fact that he had, a year before, been elected to Congress, and the time when he must take his seat was drawing near. He preferred to remain in the military service, and had within his own breast the largest confidence of success in the wider field which his new rank opened to him. Balancing the arguments on the one side and the other, anxious to determine what was for the best, desirous above all things to do his patriotic duty, he was decisively influenced by the advice of President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton, both of whom assured him that he could at that time be of especial value in the House of Representatives. He resigned his commission of major