in it, and I felt obliged to speak to him about it. So finding him alone in his library one day, I expressed our great pleasure in having for a home such a beautiful and comfortable house and then at last, after considerable hesitancy, I referred to the water in the cellar. Without a moment's hesitation and with a sober face he said: "Well, my dear fellow, what did you expect, champagne?" And no one ever had a kindlier neighbor. Nor have I ever known a man who was more considerate and less demanding in his relationships or more tender in his treatment of those near to him or more chivalrous. I remember particularly his gentle ways with the children and especially his own. One day in an illness which kept him in his room, I found him in play with his boy Richard, for whom he had made a boat out of a cucumber with matches for masts, and was sailing it in a foot-bath. On another day during the same illness he had himself made a waterwheel for the boy, which he had rigged up so that it was spinning under a stream of running water. Another memory is of his patient, gentle treatment of the same boy when, on the way home in the twilight of a summer's day of fishing up in New Hampshire, the lad had in sleepy carelessness lost a valuable reel of still more valued associations, for it was one that some old friend of Mr. Cleveland's had given him. These are petty incidents, but they tell more of the real inward man than the public deeds and utterances in which he did not permit his own feelings to enter. He was incapable of any brutal or cruel thing, however brusque his manner in the presence of injustice or deceit and however unyielding he was in the maintenance of a position once he had reached a conclusion. So deep in his nature was kindliness that his resolution and courage in not permitting this disposition to control his public decisions are the more to be praised. He was "firm with the powerful" and "gentle with the weak," but he was inexorable with the dishonest, the perverse, the self-seeking. He was like Lincoln in the processes by which he arrived at decisions, for Lincoln said of himself that in "handling a thought" he was never easy "till he had bounded it North and bounded it South and bounded it East and bounded it West." Mr. Cleveland bounded a subject on all sides before he reached a conclusion; then he was immovable, whatever the effect might be upon his personal or political fortunes. To be true to his conclusion was a moral obligation which was to him unescapable. In fact, he would never think of abandoning it even if there were opportunities for escape. He had been intrusted with an idea, which was as sacred to him as a financial trust. The office was nothing to him. Fidelity to what he conceived to be the right course for his country was everything. What seemed to many to be pure obstinacy was but honesty-trueness to himself, which forbade his being false to any man. And his honesty was not a cloistered virtue. It was an aggressive honesty that evaded no responsibility, asked no quarter, sought no shelter of dubiety in the minds of the public. All who knew him would say with one who knew him intimately through all his years of political stress and strain: "He was the honestest man I ever knew." This, I know, did not get for him a better fame than Aristides had for all his justness. He had, like Aristides, his period of political banishment and, like Aristides, he hoped that no crisis would ever overtake the people that should compel them to remember him; but he was called back, as was the ancient Greek statesman (who deemed it right that the good citizen should base his confidence on serviceable and just conduct, but for the sake of general safety was willing to make his chiefest foe the most famous of men), and finally he resembled Aristides in that he was free of ambition-a freedom which "is no slight requisite," as Plutarch said in comparing him with Cato Major, "for the gentleness which should mark a statesman." His famous Hawaiian message, which in face of a "manifest destiny" doctrine insisted that there was such a thing as international morality, that there should not be one law for the strong nation and another for the weak, and that even by indirection a strong power may not with impunity despoil a weak one of its territory, was but a mature expression of an innate sense of honesty and justice which showed itself in him as a boy in Fayetteville, when he insisted upon returning the egg that a neighbor's hen daily laid on the Cleveland side of the fence. There was never any equivocation or periphrasis. He went straight toward his objective. The style of his addresses and documents was often criticised as being out of character with his simple Saxon, straightforward way in going at things. But my explanation as an auditor on whom he tried out his addresses in his later years is that this manner of expression was due to his conscientious effort to state with utmost clearness and fulness and with every shade of accuracy the made less strenuous the toil of man and beast. Perhaps, according to the new standards of honorable mention I have suggested, it may not be thought amiss to recall the fact that I laid out and constructed it." It turned out to be of easier grade than the old winding road. It is now the "Grover Cleveland Memorial Road," with a monumental wall the length of it. It suggests his way of doing things for his beloved democracy. His life was indeed as a straight road up a hill. His writings in a semi-serious mood are among the most delightful of essays, especially those on fishing and shooting. I have even one unique composition of his Who site with grace and Another stanza of the autograph poem referred to on page 339. truth in regard to any question as he saw it. That is why he drew so heavily upon the Latin vocabulary. He had to use it in order to be more than roughly accurate. But his purpose was never devious. Up in New Hampshire there is one monument to this characteristic of his nature. After the death of Ruth from diphtheria, he wished for the family's sake to spend the following summer away from Gray Gables. He asked me to find a place if I could in New Hampshire where my family was to be. This led later to his purchase of a farm for a permanent summer home there. Close to the house there passed a winding road of steep grade. It was one of his first tasks to build a new road straight up the hill. This he gave to the town, and it is now used instead of the old road. At an old-homeweek gathering in the town he said to his neighbors: "I anticipate there will be (a hundred years hence) a highway climbing, with easy grade, the steep on Stevenson Hill, which for a century will have in verse, written in rhyme of nine or ten stanzas, cataloguing in an amusing way my own shortcomings as a fisherman, for I fished with him enough to disclose all the shortcomings that there are, and yet he tolerated me for many delightful days. This was, so far as I knew, the only poem he ever wrote, except a quatrain in Latin. Best of all was his essay, “A Defense of Fishermen," which has a humor all of its own. My acquaintance with Presidents goes back to President Harrison, at whose side I sat at my first great public dinner. I knew the great heart of McKinley, the world-appealing genius of Roosevelt, the judicial mind of Taft, touched by a wonderful kindliness and good nature, and the penetrating intellect of Wilson; but in sheer strength of character, in clear discernment of right and wrong, in moral fibre, in upright doing, and in downright courage, Mr. Cleveland was second to none of these. He was every inch a President and a man. He had, to be sure, Mrs. Cleveland on the Grover Cleveland Memorial Road at Tamworth, N. H., 1910. one law of the world," and he built on the deep basis of democratic humanity. Modest as he was about his own abilities and attainments, he yet would have stood unabashed in the presence of the greatest of all history. He was often puzzled by the subtleties of those who used words profusely or vaguely, but he was never confused by real issues. He was not, as one has said, either a demigod or a demagogue, but he had the qualities out of which the ancients did create their Titans and demigods. And he was as far from being a demagogue as noonday is from midnight. He is best characterized by those who were his political opponents. It was Mr. Taft, then President, now Chief Justice, portance of emphasizing the rule of the people can never become so great, that we can afford to forget those principles that are illustrated in the life-work of Grover Cleveland as Mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York better than in any other public servant this State has ever had." It was Elihu Root, then United States Senator, who said that, whether one agreed with his views or not, it was "impossible not to find inspiration in the example of a man who could not wait for a safe re-election to do what he believed to be right," and added: "To honor him is to be lifted in spirit; to remember him is to be grateful for our country's happy fortune and to be possessed of a cheerful hope for the future of a people that can bring forth such sons." Mr. Cleveland believed in the people and their ultimate decisions. He strove "with all the honesty and intensity of his great soul" to have them go forward with him. But I think he would have appreciated most the tribute of his coachman, who was accustomed to say of him that he was the finest Democrat he had ever known (the coachman himself being a Republican); but when Mr. Cleveland died the coachman added that he was the "finest man' he had ever known-Democrat or Republican. It was this same coachman who could hardly see the street for the tears in his eyes when he drove the family carriage to the cemetery. If Richard Watson Gilder, that gentle soul through whom I came to know the kindly as well as heroic qualities of Mr. Cleveland, were alive he would be speaking of him on this ninetieth birthday anniversary and repeating the lines he wrote about him long ago: "He shrank from praise, the simple-hearted man, Every year in the village of Caldwell, N. J., where he was born in the "Manse," which has been purchased and is now kept as a memorial house, the anniversary of his birth is observed by exercises in the church of which his father was the pastor. As his centennial approaches, the whole nation should prepare to mark its growing and lasting esteem for him who his trust so courageously, patiently, and nobly fulfilled. Cleveland's View of Public Life BY JOHN G. MILBURN Former President, New York State Bar Association; Former President, Association of the Bar of the City of New York, etc. WH WHAT follows is not an attempt at an appreciation or estimate of Grover Cleveland as a lawyer, private citizen, or statesman. That is the province of the biographer or historian, and I am neither. My more modest rôle is to recall, to the extent that I can, incidents in my intercourse with him which, random and disconnected as they must be, may throw some light on the characteristics of the man and his career. There is a dramatic phase to his career which evokes a special interest, quite irrespective of his public service. To have been elected Mayor of the city of Buffalo in November, 1881, when forty-four years of age, without any previous political experience or public service of moment; Governor of the State in November, 1883, and President of the United States in November, 1884, is an unique and picturesque record which in and of itself arrests attention and curiosity. It was an amazing procession of events. The secret of it is not disclosed in its antecedents. Some day it may be more fully explored; and to such an effort these jottings may be a helpful contribution, however slight. The period between January 1, 1874, and January 1, 1882, was a definite period in Grover Cleveland's life. It was in January, 1874, when he was thirty-seven years old, that, after an absence of three years from active professional work and a somewhat desultory activity at the bar previous to that time, he and Lyman K. Bass and Wilson S. Bissell formed the firm of Bass, Cleveland & Bissell, for the practice of the law. Bass, about the same age as Cleveland, an able lawyer and prominent in Congress, soon retired, because of a serious illness which required a residence in Colorado for an indefinite period. Bissell was a young man of ability with an excellent training in one of the prominent law offices of the city. The firm soon established a varied and growing practice with an important clientage. I was admitted to the bar in April, 1874, and began my professional life in Buffalo with all the accessories of a law office, excepting clients. As a "briefless barrister" I spent much of my time in the courts watching their proceedings, and thereby met, in the course of time, the active lawyers of the bar. Grover Cleveland was one of them, though not engaged in a miscellaneous way in the trial and argument of cases. By 1877 or so our acquaintance had ripened into a friendship and ultimately an intimacy which continued during his lifetime. So much has been written about his professional standing that I shall not add to it more than to say that he was a very distinct personality at the bar, forceful, deliberate, rather slow-moving, impressive, genial; a very earnest advocate, confining himself to the main points in question without any of the arts of the rhetorician; a sound lawyer always thoroughly prepared; a dangerous opponent before either a court or a jury; and wise in council. In after years I often thought of the impressions I had formed about him at this time in seeking to reconcile them with the course his life took. For instance, it had often occurred to me that he lacked ambition to a singular degree, with respect to both his profession and public life. There seemed to be deeply rooted in him an antagonism to compelling professional demands on a large scale that would seriously interfere with his personal freedom or comfort. He never seemed to be actuated by the desire for a large or impressive practice, either for its emoluments or the enhancement of his position at the bar or in the eye of the public. Such a practice restricts a lawyer's freedom at every turn, because its demands are the first claim on his time. It requires him to come and go wherever he is needed, without regard to his personal convenience or plans. Cleveland's indifference to wealth as such is easily understood, but not so his indifference to professional eminence as evidenced by a conspicuous clientage and the representation of diversified and important interests. My only explanation to myself was that in his scheme of life professional eminence as such was not a controlling factor; but rather such a degree and amount of employment as would produce a sufficient income for all his purposes and leave him free to control fundamentally his time and efforts to his own liking. One illustration of this attitude was that he was always inclined to be impatient if the argument or trial of a case took him out of town to Rochester or Syracuse or Albany, though these are the opportunities of extending a lawyer's contact and acquaintance outside of his own bar and courts. I remember the difficulty I had in persuading him in 1881 to lead me, in the absence of my senior partner, in the trial of an important case in an adjacent county that would occupy four or five days, simply because he would have to be away from home and his usual round of life for that length of time. Another and more significant illustration is, that some time in 1880 or 1881 he was invited to be the senior counsel in the Buffalo territory of the New York Central Railroad Company and other Vanderbilt railroad interests as the head of a reorganized firm which would also be engaged in general practice. No greater opportunity could have been offered to a member of the Buffalo bar for leadership and eminence in the profession. It was an offer that an ambitious lawyer would have seized without hesitation. He gave it long and serious consideration. He asked me for my views, as my firm had an important railroad clientage with which I was in close contact. I was emphatically for acceptance, for reasons which seemed to me to be obvious and unanswerable, as it assured him association with important litigation that was not exclusively local, a much wider contact with the bar of the State, and distinction in the profession. A few days after, he told me he had declined the offer, for the reason that to accept it would restrict his personal freedom in the choice of his work and the control of his time and mode of life more than he could endure, and that it would be more to his comfort and satisfaction to continue on his present line and enjoy the independence it afforded him. It was not inertness that controlled |