e and fall with the temperature
about them. But they are powerful and prevailing forces,
with a sound judgment and practical common sense that understands
just how high the people can be lifted, and where the man
who is looking not chiefly at the future but largely to see
what is the best thing that can be done in the present should
desist from unavailing effort. Such a man was John Sherman,
for whom the open grave is now waiting at Mansfield. For
nearly fifty years he has been a conspicuous figure and a
great leader in the party which has controlled the Government.
Of course, in a republic it can be claimed for no man that
he controlled the course of history. And also, of course,
it is not possible while the events are fresh to assign to
any one man accurately his due share in the credit for what
is done, especially in legislative bodies, where matters
are settled in secret council often before the debate begins
and almost always before the vote is taken.

"But there are some things we can say of Mr. Sherman without
fear of challenge now and without fear of any record that
may hereafter leap to light.

"He filled always the highest places. He sat at the seat
of power. His countrymen always listened for his voice and
frequently listened for his voice more eagerly than for that
of any other man. He became a Republican leader almost immediately
after he took his seat in the House of Representatives in
1855. He was candidate for Speaker before the war, at the
time when the Republican Party achieved its first distinct
and unequivocal national success, unless we except the election
of General Banks, who had himself been elected partly by Know-
Nothing votes. Mr. Sherman failed of an election. But the
contest left him the single preeminent figure in the House
of Representatives--a preeminence which he maintained in his
long service in the Senate, in the Treasury, and down to within
a few years of his death.

"He was a man of inflexible honesty, inflexible courage,
inflexible love of country. He was never a man of great
eloquence, or greatly marked by that indefinable quality
called genius. But in him sound judgment and common sense,
better than genius, better than eloquence, always prevailed,
and sometimes seemed to rise to sublimity which genius never
attains. His inflexible courage and his clear vision manifested
themselves in the very darkest period of our history, when
hope seemed at times to have gon