so as to prevent the taking of a ballot after he had placed James
G. Blaine in nomination, he replied: ]

All I can say is, that I heard such a story the day after the
convention, but I do not know whether or not it is true. I have
always believed, that if a vote had been taken that evening, Blaine
would have been nominated, possibly not as the effect of my speech,
but the night gave time for trafficking, and that is always dangerous
in a convention. I believed then that Blaine ought to have been
nominated, and that it would have been a very wise thing for the
party to have done. That he was not the candidate was due partly
to accident and partly to political traffic, but that is one of
the bygones, and I believe there is an old saying to the effect
that even the gods have no mastery over the past.

_Question_. Do you think that eloquence is potent in a convention
to set aside the practical work of politics and politicians?

_Answer_. I think that all the eloquence in the world cannot affect
a trade if the parties to the contract stand firm, and when people
have made a political trade they are not the kind of people to be
affected by eloquence. The practical work of the world has very
little to do with eloquence. There are a great many thousand stone
masons to one sculptor, and houses and walls are not constructed
by sculptors, but by masons. The daily wants of the world are
supplied by the practical workers, by men of talent, not by men of
genius, although in the world of invention, genius has done more,
it may be, than the workers themselves. I fancy the machinery now
in the world does the work of many hundreds of millions; that there
is machinery enough now to do several times the work that could be
done by all the men, women and children of the earth. The genius
who invented the reaper did more work and will do more work in the
harvest field than thousands of millions of men, and the same may
be said of the great engines that drive the locomotives and the
ships. All these marvelous machines were made by men of genius,
but they are not the men who in fact do the work.

[This led the Colonel to pay a brilliant tribute to the great
orators of ancient and modern times, the peer of all of them being
Cicero. He dissected and defined oratory and eloquence, and
explained with picturesque figures, wherein the difference between
them lay. As he mentioned the magnetism of public speakers, he was
asked as to