t would be difficult
to rank with these a fourth name in all our Congressional history. But
of these Mr. Clay was the greatest. It would, perhaps, be impossible to
find in the parliamental annals of the world a parallel to Mr. Clay, in
1841, when at sixty-four years of age he took the control of the Whig
party from the President who had received their suffrages, against the
power of Webster in the Cabinet, against the eloquence of Choate in the
Senate, against the herculean efforts of Caleb Cushing and Henry A. Wise
in the House. In unshared leadership, in the pride and plentitude of
power, he hurled against John Tyler, with deepest scorn the mass of that
conquering column which had swept over the land in 1840, and drove his
administration to seek shelter behind the lines of its political foes.
Mr. Douglas achieved a victory scarcely less wonderful, when in 1854,
against the secret desires of a strong administration, against the wise
counsel of the older chiefs, against the conservative instincts, and
even the moral sense of the country, he forced a reluctant Congress into
a repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Mr. Stevens, in his contests from
1865 to 1868, actually advanced his parliamentary leadership until
Congress tied the hands of the President and governed the country by its
own will, leaving only perfunctory duties to be discharged by the
Executive. With two hundred millions of patronage in his hands at the
opening of the contest, aided by the active force of Seward in the
Cabinet, and the moral power of Chase on the bench, Andrew Johnson could
not command the support of one-third in either House against the
parliamentary uprising of which Thaddeus Stevens was the animating
spirit and the unquestioned leader.

"From these three great men Garfield differed radically, differed in the
quality of his mind, in temperament, in the form and phase of ambition.
He could not do what they did, but he could do what they could not, and
in the breadth of his Congressional work he left that which will longer
exert a potential influence among men, and which, measured by the severe
test of posthumous criticism, will secure a more enduring and more
enviable fame.

"Those unfamiliar with Garfield's industry, and ignorant of the details
of his work may, in some degree, measure them by the annals of Congress.
No one of the generation of public men to which he belonged has
contributed so much that will prove valuable for future refere