dreams. Mr. Blaine's
accredited friends felt that things had gone too far to permit a
change to be contemplated. They were half mad at Blaine for his
Sherman and Lincoln proposal, which was confidentially in the air,
regarding it as not favorable to themselves. They said they could
carry the country more certainly with Blaine than Sherman, for Sherman
was an uncertain political quantity, and might turn out to be almost
the devil himself. Some of them said he would proclaim martial law and
annihilate the Constitution! They were sure the force of the celebrity
of General Sherman in a campaign had been overestimated by Blaine, who
had the caprice and high color in his imagination that produce
schemes too fine for success. In a word, Sherman and Lincoln were not
practical politicians. Blaine's idea was not politics, but poetry.
What they wanted was the magnetism and magic of Blaine. The country
was at any rate safely in the hands of the Republican party. They had
nearly lost the election because they had not nominated Blaine eight
years before, and won with Garfield because he was a Blaine man. The
wisdom of the Republican politicians was thus against Blaine's ticket
so far as it was known; and those favorable to President Arthur, John
Sherman, John A. Logan, and George F. Edmunds did not give the least
credit to the statement that Blaine did not want the nomination. His
rumored objection to making the race--of course the real reasons
were not known--was regarded as a mere "play" in politics, if not
altogether fantastic; and they pursued their own courses heedless of
the real conditions. There was a singular complication of errors of
judgment in the Blaine opposition. The friends of Arthur took the
complimentary resolutions from a majority of the States to mean his
nomination. In truth, the significance of that unanimity was quite
otherwise. Ohio was not solid for Sherman. It is a State that has been
very hard to manage in national conventions--was so in the time when
Chase was the Republican leader--divided in '60, nominating Lincoln,
and rarely presented a front without a flaw for a national candidate.
The energy of Logan's friends was not sufficiently supported to give
confidence. The reformers by profession and of prominence were for
Edmunds; and they were a body of men who had force, if judiciously
applied, to have carried the convention, provided they divested
themselves of the peculiarities of extreme elevation that p