a
century. With such a man as a candidate the country may well
congratulate itself that if he proves to be the choice of the majority
he will, by his ability and experience, bring as great renown to the
office as any of his predecessors, and that under his guidance the
material prosperity and intellectual growth of the nation will be such
as to gain for his administration great popular favor, the admiration of
his friends, and the respect of all nations.

James Gillespie Blaine, the nominee of the Republican party for
President of the United States, was born on January 31, 1830, in
Washington County, in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, in West
Brownsville, a village on the west bank of the Monongahela. Here Neil
Gillespie, before the British army left America at the close of the
Revolution, had established his family, purchasing the land of the
Indians. Nearly twenty years later the Blaines came from Carlisle,
seeking investment and development in this new West, and the father of
James G. Blaine, who had left Carlisle when a child, married the
daughter of Neil Gillespie the second.

The first of the Blaine family of whom much is known was Colonel Ephraim
Blaine, who lived at Chester, and in the Revolution was purveyor-general
of the Pennsylvania troops, and incidentally of the whole Revolutionary
array. He married Rebekah Galbraith in 1765. Elaine is a well-known
Scotch name. Galbraith and Gillespie are Scotch-Irish; in fact, the
ancestors of James G. Blaine were nearly all Scotch and Irish. It is a
circumstance worthy of comment that Blaine comes from a stock which has
furnished the United States with many of her ablest public men, notably
among them being Andrew Jackson and Horace Greeley.

Colonel Ephraim Blaine had two sons named Robert and James, and each of
these sons named his son for Colonel Ephraim Blaine. Old Ephraim Blaine
did not leave his property to his sons, but to these two grandsons, (1)
Ephraim, who remained in Carlisle, and (2) Ephraim Lyon Blaine, who grew
up in western Pennsylvania. Ephraim Lyon Blaine was named for his
mother, Miss Lyon, the daughter of Samuel Lyon from about Carlisle.
Ephraim Lyon Blaine married Miss Gillespie, a devout member of the Roman
Catholic Church, but most of their seven children--five boys and two
girls--adhered to the traditional faith of the Blaines. The second of
these sons, James Gillespie Blaine, is the subject of this sketch. He
would have inherited lar