ffered him, earnestly invoking Mr. Elaine to
support his brother, John Sherman.

This would seem clear refutation that Mr. Blaine was party to his own
nomination that year. It assuredly reveals keen political instinct and
foresight. The capital prize in the national lottery was not for him.

I did not meet him until two years later, when he gave me a minute
account of what had happened immediately thereafter; the swing around
the circle; Belshazzar's feast, as a fatal New York banquet was called;
the far-famed Burchard incident. "I did not hear the words, 'Rum,
Romanism and Rebellion,'" he told me, "else, as you must know, I would
have fittingly disposed of them."

I said: "Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster,
Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an
assured election, you will die before the day of election. If you
survive the day and are elected, you'll die before the 4th of March." He
smiled grimly and replied: "It really looks that way."

My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominated
Mr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote would
scarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end of
it would have had some advantage--certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland's
nearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly few
hundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who ran
as an independent labor candidate, were actually counted for Cleveland.

When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: "Now we are
even. History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once.
Turn about may be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it."

So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was
to be President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination
for the governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in the State
convention sure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have
carried the State as Cleveland did, and Slocum, not Cleveland, would
have been the Chief Magistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to
pull Cleveland through. But in his case, as in many another, Providence
"got there" in fulfilment of a decree of Destiny.

Chapter the Nineteenth

Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of
State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of
North and So