This Sunday afternoon Mr. Ratcliffe’s object was to arrange the little manoeuvre about Carson of Pennsylvania, which had disturbed him in church. His efforts were crowned with success. Krebs accepted Carson and promised to bring him forward at ten minutes’ notice, should the emergency arise.
Ratcliffe was a great statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was marvellous. No other man in politics, indeed no other man who had ever been in politics in this country, could—his admirers said—have brought together so many hostile interests and made so fantastic a combination. Some men went so far as to maintain that he would “rope in the President himself before the old man had time to swap knives with him.” The beauty of his work consisted in the skill with which he evaded questions of principle. As he wisely said, the issue now involved was not one of principle but of power. The fate of that noble party to which they all belonged, and which had a record that could never be forgotten, depended on their letting principle alone. Their principle must be the want of principles. There were indeed individuals who said in reply that Ratcliffe had made promises which never could be carried out, and there were almost superhuman elements of discord in the combination, but as Ratcliffe shrewdly rejoined, he only wanted it to last a week, and he guessed his promises would hold it up for that time.
Such was the situation when on Monday afternoon the President-elect arrived in Washington, and the comedy began. The new President was, almost as much as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Pierce, an unknown quantity in political mathematics. In the national convention of the party, nine months before, after some dozens of fruitless ballots in which Ratcliffe wanted but three votes of a majority, his opponents had done what he was now doing; they had laid aside their principles and set up for their candidate a plain Indiana farmer, whose political experience was limited to stump-speaking in his native State, and to one term as Governor. They had pitched upon him, not because they thought him competent, but because they hoped by doing so to detach Indiana from Ratcliffe’s following, and they were so successful that within fifteen minutes Ratcliffe’s friends were routed, and the Presidency had fallen upon this new political Buddha.
He had begun his career as a stonecutter in a quarry, and was, not unreasonably, proud of the fact. During the campaign this incident had, of course, filled a large space in the public mind, or, more exactly, in the public eye. “The Stonecutter of the Wabash,” he was sometimes called; at others “the Hoosier Quarryman,” but his favourite appellation was “Old Granite,” although this last endearing name, owing to an unfortunate similarity of sound, was seized upon by his opponents, and distorted into “Old Granny.” He had been painted on many thousand yards of cotton sheeting, either with a terrific sledgehammer, smashing the skulls (which figured as paving-stones) of his political opponents, or splitting by gigantic blows a huge rock typical of the opposing party. His opponents in their turn had paraded illuminations representing the Quarryman in the garb of a State’s-prison convict breaking the heads of Ratcliffe and other well-known political leaders with a very feeble hammer, or as “Old Granny” in pauper’s rags, hopelessly repairing with the same heads the impossible roads which typified the ill-conditioned and miry ways of his party. But these violations of decency and good sense were universally reproved by the virtuous; and it was remarked with satisfaction that the purest and most highly cultivated newspaper editors on his side, without excepting those of Boston itself, agreed with one voice that the Stonecutter was a noble type of man, perhaps the very noblest that had appeared to adorn this country since the incomparable Washington.
That he was honest, all admitted; that is to say, all who voted for him. This is a general characteristic of all new presidents. He himself took great
