Marse Henry Part 29

Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly to my appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature and art and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire, when the Due de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchman rich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hotel de Ville was in ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from the Place Vendome, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it rise from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again, resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in all the universe.

There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity and regality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety, charm and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London and New York, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has been greatly exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of intoxicants is on the decline. They are, for the first time in France, stimulated partly by the alarming adulteration of French wines, rigorously applying and enforcing the pure-food laws.

As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided improvement of the vintage of the Garonne and the Champagne country. One may get a good gla.s.s of wine now without impoverishing himself. As men drink wine, and as the wine is pure, they fall away from stronger drink. I have always considered, with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excellent temperance society. That which works otherwise is the dive which too often the brewery fathers. They are drinking more beer in France--even making a fairly good beer. And then--

But gracious, this is getting upon things controversial, and if there is anything in this world that I do hybominate, it is controversy!

Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my day and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is but a moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of the new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are no more adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the crossing a ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs which have been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading to the latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers of any one of the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the appointments of the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable. It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the ladies dress for dinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky parlor where they go after dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-room for the five-o'clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely any motion at all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain lady of my very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never gone to her meals--sick from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e--until the G.o.ds ordained for her a watery, winery, flowery paradise--where the billows ceased from troubling and a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times, lodged a la Waldorf-Astoria to eat her victuals and sip her wine with perfect contentment. Coming ash.o.r.e from our last crossing a friend found her in the Red Room of that hostel just as she had been sitting the evening before on shipboard.

"Seems hardly any motion at all," she said, looking about her and fancying herself still at sea, as well she might.

Chapter the Eighteenth

The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny

I

What may be called the Grover Cleveland period of American politics began with the election of that extraordinary person--another man of destiny--to the governorship of New York. Nominated, as it were, by chance, he carried the State by an unprecedented majority. That was not because of his popularity, but that an incredible number of Republican voters refused to support their party ticket and stayed away from the polls. The Blaine-Conkling feud, inflamed by the murder of Garfield, had rent the party of Lincoln and Grant asunder. Arthur, a Conkling leader, had succeeded to the presidency.

If any human agency could have sealed the breach he might have done it.

No man, however, can achieve the impossible. The case was hopeless.

Arthur was a man of surpa.s.sing sweetness and grace. As handsome as Pierce, as affable as McKinley, he was a more experienced and dextrous politician than either. He had been put on the ticket with Garfield to placate Conkling. All sorts of stories to his discredit were told during the ensuing campaign. The Democrats made him out a tricky and typical "New York politician." In point of fact he was a many-sided, accomplished man who had a taking way of adjusting all conditions and adapting himself to all companies.

With a sister as charming and tactful as he for head of his domestic fabric, the White House bloomed again. He possessed the knack of surrounding himself with all sorts of agreeable people. Frederick Frelinghuysen was Secretary of State and Robert Lincoln, continued from the Garfield Cabinet, Secretary of War. Then there were three irresistibles: Walter Gresham, Frank Hatton and "Ben" Brewster. His home contingent--"Clint" Wheeler, "Steve" French, and "Jake" Hess--pictured as "ward heelers"--were, in reality, efficient and all-around, companionable men, capable and loyal.

I was sent by the a.s.sociated Press to Washington on a fool's errand--that is, to get an act of Congress extending copyright to the news of the a.s.sociation--and, remaining the entire session, my business to meet the official great and to make myself acceptable, I came into a certain intimacy with the Administration circle, having long had friendly relations with the President. In all my life I have never pa.s.sed so delightful and useless a winter.

Very early in the action I found that my mission involved a serious and vexed question--nothing less than the creation of a new property--and I proceeded warily. Through my uncle, Stanley Matthews, I interested the members of the Supreme Court. The Attorney General, a great lawyer and an old Philadelphia friend, was at my call and elbow. The Joint Library Committee of Congress, to which the measure must go, was with me. Yet somehow the scheme lagged.

I could not account for this. One evening at a dinner Mr. Blaine enlightened me. We sat together at table and suddenly he turned and said: "How are you getting on with your bill?" And my reply being rather halting, he continued, "You won't get a vote in either House," and he proceeded very humorously to improvise the average member's argument against it as a dangerous power, a perquisite to the great newspapers and an imposition upon the little ones. To my mind this was something more than the post-prandial levity it was meant to be.

Not long after a learned but dissolute old lawyer said to me, "You need no act of Congress to protect your news service. There are at least two, and I think four or five, English rulings that cover the case. Let me show them to you." He did so and I went no further with the business, quite agreeing with Mr. Blaine, and nothing further came of it. To a recent date the a.s.sociated Press has relied on these decisions under the common law of England. Curiously enough, quite a number of newspapers in whose actual service I was engaged, opened fire upon me and roundly abused me.

II

There appeared upon the scene in Washington toward the middle of the seventies one of those problematical characters the fiction-mongers delight in. This was John Chamberlin. During two decades "Chamberlin's,"

half clubhouse and half chophouse, was all a rendezvous.

"John" had been a gambler; first an underling and then a partner of the famous Morrissy-McGrath racing combination at Saratoga and Long Branch.

There was a time when he was literally rolling in wealth. Then he went broke--dead broke. Black Friday began it and the panic of '73 finished it. He came over to Washington and his friends got him the restaurant privileges of the House of Representatives. With this for a starting point, he was able to take the Fernando Wood residence, in the heart of the fashionable quarter, to add to it presently the adjoining dwelling of Governor Swann, of Maryland, and next to that, finally, the Blaine mansion, making a suite, as it were, elegant yet cozy. "Welcker's," erst a fashionable resort, and long the best eating-place in town, had been ruined by a scandal, and "Chamberlin's" succeeded it, having the field to itself, though, mindful of the "scandal" which had made its opportunity, ladies were barred.

There was a famous cook--Emeline Simmons--a mulatto woman, who was equally at home in French dishes and Maryland-Virginia kitchen mysteries--a very wonder with canvasback and terrapin--who later refused a great money offer to he chef at the White House--whom John was able to secure. Nothing could surpa.s.s--could equal--her preparations. The charges, like the victuals, were sky-high and tip-top. The service was handled by three "colored gentlemen," as distinguished in manners as in appearance, who were known far and wide by name and who dominated all about them, including John and his patrons.

No such place ever existed before, or will ever exist again. It was the personality of John Chamberlin, pervasive yet invisible, exhaling a silent, welcoming radiance. General Grant once said to me, "During my eight years in the White House, John Chamberlin once in a while--once in a great while--came over. He did not ask for anything. He just told me what to do, and I did it." I mentioned this to President Arthur. "Well,"

he laughingly said, "that has been my experience with John Chamberlin.

It never crosses my mind to say him 'nay.' Often I have turned this over in my thought to reach the conclusion that being a man of sound judgment and worldly knowledge, he has fully considered the case--his case and my case--leaving me no reasonable objection to interpose."

John obtained an act of Congress authorizing him to build a hotel on the Government reservation at Fortress Monroe, and another of the Virginia Legislature confirming this for the State. Then he came to me. It was at the moment when I was flourishing as "a Wall Street magnate." He said: "I want to sell this franchise to some man, or company, rich enough to carry it through. All I expect is a nest egg for Emily and the girls"--he had married the beautiful Emily Thorn, widow of George Jordan, the actor, and there were two daughters--"you are hand-and-glove with the millionaires. Won't you manage it for me?" Like Grant and Arthur, I never thought of refusing. Upon the understanding that I was to receive no commission, I agreed, first ascertaining that it was really a most valuable franchise.

I began with the Willards, in whose hotel I had grown up. They were rich and going out of business. Then I laid it before Hitchc.o.c.k and Darling, of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. They, rich like the Willards, were also retiring. Then a bright thought occurred to me. I went to the Prince Imperial of Standard Oil. "Mr. Flagler," I said, "you have hotels at St. Augustine and you have hotels at Palm Beach. Here is a halfway point between New York and Florida," and more of the same sort. "My dear friend," he answered, "every man has the right to make a fool of himself once in his life. This I have already done. Never again for me. I have put up my last dollar south of the Potomac." Then I went to the King of the transcontinental railways. "Mr. Huntington," I said, "you own a road extending from St. Louis to Newport News, having a terminal in a cornfield just out of Hampton Roads. Here is a franchise which gives you a magnificent site at Hampton Roads itself. Why not?" He gazed upon me with a blank stare--such I fancy as he usually turned upon his suppliants--and slowly replied: "I would not spend another dollar in Virginia if the Lord commanded me. In the event that some supernatural power should take the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway by the nape of the neck and the seat of the breeches and pitch it out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean it would be doing me a favor."

So I returned John his franchise marked "nothing doing." Afterward he put it in the hands of a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had no better luck with it. Finally, here and there, literally by piecemeal, he got together money enough to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had a notable opening with half of Congress there to see, and gently laid himself down and died, leaving little other than friends and debts.

III

Macaulay tells us that the dinner-table is a wondrous peacemaker, miracle worker, social solvent; and many were the quarrels composed and the plans perfected under the Chamberlin roof. It became a kind of Congressional Exchange with a close White House connection. If those old walls, which by the way are still standing, could speak, what tales they might tell, what testimonies refute, what new lights throw into the vacant corners and dark places of history!

Coming away from Chamberlin's with Mr. Blaine for an after-dinner stroll during the winter of 1883-4, referring to the approaching National Republican Convention, he said: "I do not want the nomination. In my opinion there is but one nominee the Republicans can elect this year and that is General Sherman. I have written him to tell him so and urge it upon him. In default of him the time of you people has come." He subsequently showed me this letter and General Sherman's reply. My recollection is that the General declared that he would not take the presidency if it were offered him, earnestly invoking Mr. Elaine to support his brother, John Sherman.

This would seem clear refutation that Mr. Blaine was party to his own nomination that year. It a.s.suredly reveals keen political instinct and foresight. The capital prize in the national lottery was not for him.

I did not meet him until two years later, when he gave me a minute account of what had happened immediately thereafter; the swing around the circle; Belshazzar's feast, as a fatal New York banquet was called; the far-famed Burchard incident. "I did not hear the words, 'Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,'" he told me, "else, as you must know, I would have fittingly disposed of them."

I said: "Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster, Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an a.s.sured election, you will die before the day of election. If you survive the day and are elected, you'll die before the 4th of March." He smiled grimly and replied: "It really looks that way."

My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominated Mr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote would scarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end of it would have had some advantage--certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland's nearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly few hundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who ran as an independent labor candidate, were actually counted for Cleveland.

When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: "Now we are even. History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once.

Turn about may be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it."

So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was to be President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination for the governorship of New York, General Sloc.u.m seemed in the State convention sure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have carried the State as Cleveland did, and Sloc.u.m, not Cleveland, would have been the Chief Magistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleveland through. But in his case, as in many another, Providence "got there" in fulfilment of a decree of Destiny.

Chapter the Nineteenth

Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of North and South Sectionalism

I

The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was set forth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kind of prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He was a sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked back affectionately upon the days he had pa.s.sed in Kentucky, when a poor school-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the House he and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their friendship when both of them had reached the Senate.