Part 23

Senator McDonald, of Indiana, a near friend of General Porter, and a man of rare worldly wisdom, knew better. Without consulting them he came to me.

“You are personally close to the President,” said he, “and you must know that if this bill gets to the White House he will veto it. With the Republican National Convention directly ahead he is bound to veto it. It must not be allowed to get to him; and you are the man to stop it. They will listen to you and will not listen to me.”

First of all, I went to the White House.

“Mr. President,” I said, “I want you to authorize me to tell Curtin and Slocum not to send the Fitz-John Porter bill to you.”

“Why?” he answered.

“Because,” said I, “you will have to veto it; and, with the Frelinghuysens wild for it, as well as others of your nearest friends, I am sure you don’t want to be obliged to do that. With your word to me I can stop it, and have it for the present at least held up.”

His answer was, “Go ahead.”

Then I went to the Capitol. Curtin and Slocum were in a state of mind. It was hard to make them understand or believe what I told them.

“Now, gentlemen,” I continued, “I don’t mean to argue the case. It is not debatable. I am just from the White House, and I am authorized by the President to say that if you send this bill to him he will veto it.”

That, of course, settled it. They held it up. But after the presidential election it reached Arthur, and he did veto it. Not till Cleveland came in did Porter obtain his restoration.

Curiously enough General Grant approved this. I had listened to the debate in the House—especially the masterly speech of William Walter Phelps—without attaining a clear understanding of the many points at issue. I said as much to General Grant.

“Why,” he replied, “the case is as simple as A, B, C. Let me show you.”

Then, with a pencil he traced the Second Bull Run battlefield, the location of troops, both Federal and Confederate, and the exact passage in the action which had compromised General Porter.

“If Porter had done what he was ordered to do,” he went on, “Pope and his army would have been annihilated. In point of fact Porter saved Pope’s Army.” Then he paused and added: “I did not at the outset know this. I was for a time of a different opinion and on the other side. It was Longstreet’s testimony—which had not been before the first Court of Inquiry that convicted Porter—which vindicated him and convinced me.”

Chapter the Tenth

Of Liars and Lying—Woman Suffrage and Feminism—The Professional Female—Parties, Politics, and Politicians in America

All is fair in love and war, the saying hath it. “Lord!” cried the most delightful of liars, “How this world is given to lying.” Yea, and how exigency quickens invention and promotes deceit.

Just after the war of sections I was riding in a train with Samuel Bowles, who took a great interest in things Southern. He had been impressed by a newspaper known as The Chattanooga Rebel and, as I had been its editor, put innumerable questions to me about it and its affairs. Among these he asked how great had been its circulation. Without explaining that often an entire company, in some cases an entire regiment, subscribed for a few copies, or a single copy, I answered: “I don’t know precisely, but somewhere near a hundred thousand, I take it.” Then he said: “Where did you get your press power?”

This was, of course, a poser, but it did not embarrass me in the least. I was committed, and without a moment’s thought I proceeded with an imaginary explanation which he afterward declared had been altogether satisfying. The story was too good to keep—maybe conscience pricked—and in a chummy talk later along I laughingly confessed.

“You should tell that in your dinner speech tonight,” he said. “If you tell it as you have just told it to me, it will make a hit,” and I did.

I give it as the opinion of a long life of experience and observation that the newspaper press, whatever its delinquencies, is not a common liar, but the most habitual of truth tellers. It is growing on its editorial page I fear a little vapid and colorless. But there is a general and ever-present purpose to print the facts and give the public the opportunity to reach its own conclusions.

There are liars and liars, lying and lying. It is, with a single exception, the most universal and venial of human frailties. We have at least three kinds of lying and species, or types, of liars—first, the common, ordinary, everyday liar, who lies without rime or reason, rule or compass, aim, intent or interest, in whose mind the partition between truth and falsehood has fallen down; then the sensational, imaginative liar, who has a tale to tell; and, finally, the mean, malicious liar, who would injure his neighbor.

This last is, indeed, but rare. Human nature is at its base amicable, because if nothing hinders it wants to please. All of us, however, are more or less its unconscious victims.

Competition is not alone the life of trade; it is the life of life; for each of us is in one way, or another, competitive. There is but one disinterested person in the world, the mother who whether of the human or animal kingdom, will die for her young. Yet, after all, hers, too, is a kind of selfishness.

The woman is becoming over much a professional female. It is of importance that we begin to consider her as a new species, having enjoyed her beauty long enough. Is the world on the way to organic revolution? If I were a young man I should not care to be the lover of a professional female. As an old man I have affectionate relations with a number of suffragettes, as they dare not deny; that is to say, I long ago accepted woman suffrage as inevitable, whether for good or evil, depending upon whether the woman’s movement is going to stop with suffrage or run into feminism, changing the character of woman and her relations to men and with man.

I have never made party differences the occasion of personal quarrel or estrangement. On the contrary, though I have been always called a Democrat, I have many near and dear friends among the Republicans. Politics is not war. Politics would not be war even if the politicians were consistent and honest. But there are among them so many changelings, cheats and rogues.

Then, in politics as elsewhere, circumstances alter cases. I have as a rule thought very little of parties as parties, professional politicians and party leaders, and I think less of them as I grow older. The politician and the auctioneer might be described like the lunatic, the lover and the poet, as “of imagination all compact.” One sees more mares’ nests than would fill a book; the other pure gold in pinchbeck wares; and both are out for gudgeons.

It is the habit—nay, the business—of the party speaker when he mounts the raging stump to roar his platitudes into the ears of those who have the simplicity to listen, though neither edified nor enlightened; to aver that the horse he rides is sixteen feet high; that the candidate he supports is a giant; and that he himself is no small figure of a man.