TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD.
THE death of President Garfield, though more or less ex- pected for the last few days, yet came upon the English world with something of a shock. The over-careful reticence of the surgeons, who were anxious not to alarm the patient, and their steady concealment of the most dangerous facts—the existence of blood-poisoning, the weakening of the pulse, and
the daily increasing emaciation, which reached such a point that before death the President, a man of large build, had legs like a child of ten—had, together with the patient's iron constitution and immovable fortitude, created an impression that in the protracted struggle, Death might not be victor. "Wounded men who mean dying," it was said, "do not fight on for months." Although, therefore, the bulletins had for a few days markedly changed in tone, that was popularly at- tributed to Mr. Blaine's departure, and the final result brought with it something of the pain of a fractured hope, as well as of wounded sympathy. This sympathy was, in Great Britain, not merely " widespread," it was universal, and it was real, with a reality not always present when Kings die. It was visible in classes on which political events make little impression. "I cannot think," said an old lady who had read every telegram from Long Branch, " what makes me cly," crying the while as for a friend. It is not false, though it is rhetorical, to say that, owing to the new facilities of intercommunication, the eighty-three millions of white persons who now think in English stood around the President's bed, and that among them there were not five hundred who would not have made some sacrifice to aid him in his struggle. The fact is a mar- vellous one, and one that may yet affect the history of the world, but it is not inexplicable. All Englishmen, apart alto- gether from the direct influence an American President may have upon their future, are keenly interested in the only Englishman who reigns by election; at heart solicitous that an office which half of them feel must one day exist in England also, should never be lowered by its possessor. There is more of pain in the English bitterness when men like Andrew Johnson arrive at the Presidency, than Amelicans suspect. This permanent interest was deepened to the uttermost by the circumstances, by the English horror of assassination, as an unfair as well as cruel crime ; by admiration of the temper of the American people, revealed in that instantaneous hush of the factions which followed Guiteau's act ; and above all, by the strong regard—almost love—which arose towards the sufferer himself. General Garfield was unknown here before his wound, except as a man who had risen from nothing, and who wished that public debts should be paid ; but before he died, it was recognised that the Union had elected a second President of the Lincoln type, a strong man with a con- science and a will ; a man with a character firm and serious, though lit up by flashes of that humour, half-kindly and half- grim, which marks the best men of the West. Englishmen read with twitching lips how the President had asked, after one of his relapses, "How many more stations am I to stop at r—leaving the terminus an open question—and how he had written that he must, in all acts, have first the approbation of James A. Garfield, for to eat, and drink, and sleep all through life with a man you disapproved was unendurable. It is strange that it should be so, for no English statesman has ever been in the least that kind of man ; but it is so. Eng- lishmen recognise and prefer the Lincoln type as clearly as their kinsmen do, and have more loyalty for a Lincoln or Garfield than for an English President like Madison, or a suc- cessful soldier like Grant,—one more proof, among many, of the ultimate identity of the two peoples. The duration of the fight with death gave time for knowledge to grow, till the country papers were full of biographies and stories, till men on railways, when they opened their newspapers, turned first to "see how the President was getting on," and till even the cast-iron rigidity of the English Liturgy was made in hundreds of churches to give way to a prayer for an American labourer who had become the Presi- dent. Americans may not understand how much that signi- fies, but the public prayer for a foreign ruler, offered in so many parishes last Sunday—and how absurd the word "foreign" looks !—is unique in the history of the English Church. English feeling, so often in such cases conventional, is in this case true.
It is too early yet to decide how this great misfortune will affect the politics of the Union. Perhaps the effect will be far less than is, in the excitement of the moment, expected. The general political system of the United States is too firmly poised for any individual loss to shake it, else Mr. Lincoln's death would have produced ruinous consequences ; and it is as vain to construct the idea of a President from the reality of a Vice-President, as to deduce a King from an Heir-Apparent.. The drug is mixed in another solvent. Mr. Arthur's record is very different from that of General Garfield, being substan- tially that of a professional wire-puller ; but Mr. Arthur the politician bound to carry New York in Mr. Conkling's interest,. and Mr. Arthur President of the United States, may be very different persons. He may be too weak for the post, and then it will be a Grant Administration, without responsibility resting in General Grant ; for it is General Grant who lends to. Mr. Conkling all the influence the latter possesses outside New- York, but we rather doubt that result. The" Stalwart" faction was killed by Guiteau's bullet, the Grant party was sorely wounded, and the American Constitution has this advantage, —that it brings personal responsibility strongly, almost pain-
fully, home to the President. I must decide in the end," said Mr. Lincoln ; and no American forgets that the Cabinet" consists of men appointed and removed at the President's will, and responsible to him alone. Even weak men dislike inter- ference in their freeholds. If Mr. Arthur hopes for no second nomination, he will follow his own devices ; and if he has any ambition, his object will be to win the Union, and not New York ; and the Union has pronounced, on evidence not to be mistaken by a man who has passed a life in studying voters' opinion, in favour of General Gaifield's views. We see it stated that Mr. Arthur has been mixed up with Fenians, but in New York the Irish vote was all-important, and in the Union there is only one important rote, that of the four-fifths of the population who were born on American soil. The new- President is of Irish origin, but Irish of Ulster, and it is not towards Socialism, especially as applied to land, that the millions of American freeholders seriously incline. There may be personal changes, though Mr. Blaine has much influence, and the reform of the Civil Service—which, it must be remembered, would not affect any appointments, such as those- of the Judges, made by individual States—may be delayed for three years more; but the broad policy of the Republic is guidea by an opinion singularly steady, and certainly not at present inimical to Great Britain. Stocks rose when the death was announced, and though that only means that suspense, with its depressing action, is over, it also signifies that the new President has no sympathy with the secret friends of repudiation, and is not expected to embark on any novel and dangerous adventure. It is a defect in the American
Constitution, or rather in its working, that it admits of an accidental President ; but a Peer in England who stood as a candidate on the hustings would not have the usual politics of a Peer, and President Arthur now seeks the suffrage, not of New Yorkers, but of a nation which always regards eleva- tion to the White House as a sort of baptism, and judges a President not by his previous conduct., but by what he shows himself there. A President's first Message is for him the beginning of a new biography.
Previous page
