The two candidates were
singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of
them had no friends; the other, only enemies. Calvin Brice, who
was at that time altogether the wittiest and cleverest member of
the Senate, was in the habit of describing Mr. Cleveland in
glowing terms and at great length, as one of the loftiest natures
and noblest characters of ancient or modern time; "but," he
concluded, "in future I prefer to look on at his proceedings from
the safe summit of some neighboring hill." The same remark
applied to Mr. Harrison. In this respect, they were the greatest
of Presidents, for, whatever harm they might do their enemies,
was as nothing when compared to the mortality they inflicted on
their friends. Men fled them as though they had the evil eye. To
the American people, the two candidates and the two parties were
so evenly balanced that the scales showed hardly a perceptible
difference. Mr. Harrison was an excellent President, a man of
ability and force; perhaps the best President the Republican
Party had put forward since Lincoln's death; yet, on the whole,
Adams felt a shade of preference for President Cleveland, not so
much personally as because the Democrats represented to him the
last remnants of the eighteenth century; the survivors of Hosea
Biglow's Cornwallis; the sole remaining protestants against a
banker's Olympus which had become, for five-and-twenty years,
more and more despotic over Esop's frog-empire.
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