All of us, the least with the greatest, let
us hope and believe shall attain immortal life at last. What was there for
Webster, what was there for Clay to quibble about? I read with a kind of
wonder, and a sickening sense of the littleness of great things, those
passages in the story of their lives where it is told how they stormed
and swore, when tidings reached them that they had been balked of their
desires.
Yet they might have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with its
lofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty done;
so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its noble
opportunities and splendid achievements. They should have emulated the
satisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an enemy was
inveighing against him, when an alleged friend spoke up and said: "You
should not talk so about the President, I assure you that he is not at all
the man you describe him to be. On the contrary, he is a man of the rarest
gifts and virtues. He has long been regarded as the greatest orator in New
England, and the greatest lawyer in New England, and surely no one of his
predecessors ever sent such state papers to Congress."
"How are you going to prove it," angrily retorted the first speaker.
"I don't need to prove it," coolly replied the second. "He admits it."
I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were President, though, on the
whole, I fancy fairly comfortable, but I am quite certain that I would not
exchange places with any of the men who have been President, and I have
known quite a number of them.
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