case away, or fail in the judgment of competent and impartial
listeners to gain the mastery.

"These characteristics, which marked Garfield as a great debater, did
not, however, make him a great parliamentary leader. A parliamentary
leader, as that term is understood wherever free representative
government exists, is necessarily and very strictly the organ of his
party. An ardent American defined the instinctive warmth of patriotism
when he offered the toast, 'Our country, always right; but right or
wrong, our country.' The parliamentary leader who has a body of
followers that will do and dare and die for the cause, is one who
believes his party always right, but right or wrong, is for his party.
No more important or exacting duty devolves upon him than the selection
of the field and the time for contest. He must know not merely how to
strike, but where to strike and when to strike. He often skillfully
avoids the strength of his opponent's position, and scatters confusion
in his ranks by attacking an exposed point when really the righteousness
of the cause and the strength of logical intrenchment are against him.
He conquers often both against the right and the heavy battalions; as
when young Charles Fox, in the days of his Toryism, carried the House of
Commons against justice, against its immemorial rights, against his own
convictions, if, indeed, at that period Fox had convictions, and, in the
interest of a corrupt administration, in obedience to a tyrannical
sovereign, drove Wilkes from the seat to which the electors of Middlesex
had chosen him, and installed Luttrell, in defiance not merely of law
but of public decency. For an achievement of that kind Garfield was
disqualified--disqualified by the texture of his mind, by the honesty of
his heart, by his conscience, and by every instinct and aspiration of
his nature.

"The three most distinguished parliamentary leaders hitherto developed
in this country are Mr. Clay, Mr. Douglas, and Mr. Thaddeus Stevens.
They were all men of consummate ability, of great earnestness, of
intense personality, differing widely each from the others, and yet with
a signal trait in common--the power to command. In the give-and-take of
daily discussion, in the art of controlling and consolidating reluctant
and refractory followers, in the skill to overcome all forms of
opposition, and to meet with competency and courage the varying phases
of unlooked-for assault or unsuspected defection, i