The
stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling
or Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value? The
statesmen of the old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars
or Lamars, were personally as honest as human nature could
produce. They trod with lofty contempt on other people's jobs,
especially when there was good in them. Yet the public thought
that Sumner and Conkling cost the country a hundred times more
than all the jobs they ever trod on; just as Lamar and the old
Southern statesmen, who were also honest in money-matters, cost
the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt worried Adams
less than it worried his friends and the public, but it affected
the whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers
discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant,
Garfield, and Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics
turned on jobs, and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin,
ruined their influence by their insistence on points of morals.
Society hesitated, wavered, oscillated between harshness and
laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the weak, and deferentially
following the strong. In spite of all such criticism, the public
nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the Presidency, and
voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for the question;
until young men were forced to see that either some new standard
must be created, or none could be upheld.
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