be so greatly indebted again to a successful general. In case we
should be so, and he should be one of General Sherman's successors, it
may be reasonably doubted if, with General Grant's experience before his
eyes, he will give up the assured life position of General-in-Chief for
the temporary honors and troubles of the Presidential chair. It is not
necessary to be a blind admirer of General Grant, or a member of the
party which made him twice President, to do him the justice of admitting
that his resignation of the office which he won with such eclat, and
held with such general honor, the world over, was a sacrifice to the
good of the Union for which he fought. He had for life a position
equally honorable with that of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and
more striking in its distinction. He had no superior but the President
of the United States; not a certain man, but the incumbent of the office
for the time being. He might, and probably would, have seen a succession
of such men rise, and pass into powerless privacy, while he maintained
his high position. He gave up this permanent distinction, with its
well-assured emoluments, at what we must admit that he regarded as the
call of duty, of patriotism. And now he is, so to speak, a nobody.
Admitting all the errors that have been charged against him--and he
doubtless committed many--admitting even that the party which he
represented is hostile to the best interests of the country (we do not
say that it is so, for we speak for no party and in no political
interest in these pages)--the spectacle of the passage of such a man
into absolute public insignificance, without any public care or public
thought for his future, is a very impressive one, and one not in all
respects admirable. As his career was possible only in this country, so
also was the close of it. The government, the people of no other great
nation, would drop a man who had done what he did, and held the
positions which he held, into an unprovided, obscure future, putting him
off, like an old shoe. Once the victorious commander of an army of half
a million of men, a man whose name was in the mouths of all the
civilized world, for eight years the ruler, with more than kingly power,
of a nation of forty millions, and a country which stretched from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, and which covered the temperate zone in a
continent, he has been remitted again, as far as the nation is
concerned, into his former unimporta