sooner was the good man in
power than politics struggled to pull him down to make room for the
knaves. When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, the _Sentinel_ of Boston
wrote the obituary of the American nation. I quote it as a literary
scrap of the past:

"MONUMENTAL INSCRIPTION--expired yesterday, regretted by all good men,
THE FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES, aged
12 years. This Monumental Inscription to the virtues and the services of
the deceased is raised by the Sentinel of Boston."

It might have been a recent editorial. Van Buren was always cartooned as
a fox or a rat. Horace Greeley told me once that he had not had a sound
sleep for fifteen years, and he was finally put to death by American
politics. The cartoons of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Cleveland during their
election battle, as compared to those of fifty years before, were
seraphic as the themes of Raphael. It was not necessary to go so far
back for precedent. The game had not changed. The building of our new
Raymond Street jail in Brooklyn, in 1886, was a game which the
politicians played, called "money, money, who has got the money?"
Suddenly there was an arraignment in the courts. Mr. Jaehne was
incarcerated in Sing Sing for bribery. Twenty-five New York aldermen
were accused. Nineteen of them were saloon keepers. There was a fearful
indifference to the illiteracy of our leaders in 1886. It threatened the
national intelligence of the future.

In the rhapsody of May, however, in the resurrection of the superlative
beauties of spring, we forgot our human deficiencies. In the first week
of lilacs, the Americanised flower of Persia, we aspired to the breadth
and height and the heaven of our gardens. The generous lilac, like a
great purple sea of loveliness, swept over us in the full tide of
spring. It was the forerunner of joy; joy of fish in the brooks, of
insects in the air, of cattle in the fields, of wings to the sky.
Sunshine, shaken from the sacred robes of God! Spring, the spiritual
essence of heaven and physical beauty come to earth in many forms--in
the rose, in the hawthorn white and scarlet, in the passion flower. In
this season of transition we hear the murmurings of heaven. There were
spring poets in 1886, as there had been in all ages.

Love and marriage came over the country like a divine opiate, inspired,
I believe, by that love story in the White House, which culminated on
June 2, 1886, in the wedding of Mr. and M