I was very anxious to keep him in his place, but at first I could not think of any way to help him, for I was a mugwump. We, the mugwumps, a little company made up of the unenslaved of both parties, the very best men to be found in the two great parties—that was our idea of it—voted sixty thousand strong for Mr. Cleveland in New York and elected him. Our principles were high and very definite. We were not a party; we had no candidates; we had no axes to grind. Our vote laid upon the man we cast it for no obligation of any kind. By our rule we could not ask for office; we could not accept office. When voting, it was our duty to vote for the best man, regardless of his party name. We had no other creed. Vote for the best man—that was creed enough.
Such being my situation, I was puzzled to know how to try to help Mason and at the same time save my mugwump purity undefiled. It was a delicate place. But presently, out of the ruck of confusions in my mind, rose a sane thought, clear and bright—to wit: since it was a mugwump’s duty to do his best to put the best man in office, necessarily it must be a mugwump’s duty to keep the best man in when he was already there. My course was easy now. It might not be quite delicate for a mugwump to approach the President directly, but I could approach him indirectly, with all delicacy, since in that case not even courtesy would require him to take notice of an application which no one could prove had ever reached him.
Yes, it was easy and simple sailing now. I could lay the matter before Ruth, in her cradle, and wait for results. I wrote the little child, and said to her all that I have just been saying about mugwump principles and the limitations which they put upon me. I explained that it would not be proper for me to apply to her father in Mr. Mason’s behalf, but I detailed to her Mr. Mason’s high and honorable record and suggested that she take the matter in her own hands and do a patriotic work, which I felt some delicacy about venturing upon myself. I asked her to forget that her father was only President of the United States, and her subject and servant: I asked her not to put her application in the form of a command, but to modify this, and give it the fictitious and pleasanter form of a mere request—that it would be no harm to let him gratify himself with the superstition that he was independent and could do as he pleased in the matter. I begged her to put stress, and plenty of it, upon the proposition that to keep Mason in his place would be a benefaction to the nation; to enlarge upon that, and keep still about all other considerations.
In due time I received a letter from the President, written with his own hand, signed by his own hand, acknowledging Ruth’s intervention and thanking me for enabling him to save to the country the services of so good and well tried a servant as Mason, and thanking me, also, for the detailed fullness of Mason’s record, which could leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that Mason was in his right place and ought to be kept there.
In the beginning of Mr. Cleveland’s second term a very strong effort to displace Mason was made, and Mason wrote me again. He was not hoping that we would succeed this time, because the assault upon his place was well organized, determined, and exceedingly powerful, but he hoped I would try again and see what I could do. I was not disturbed. It seemed to me that he did not know Mr. Cleveland or he would not be disturbed himself. I believed I knew Mr. Cleveland, and that he was not the man to budge an inch from his duty in any circumstances, and that he was a Gibraltar against whose solid bulk a whole Atlantic of assaulting politicians would dash itself in vain.
I wrote Ruth Cleveland once more. Mason remained in his place and I think he would have remained in it without Ruth’s intercession. There have been other Presidents since, but Mason’s record has protected him, and the many and powerful efforts to dislodge him have all failed. Also, he has been complimented with promotions. He was promoted from consul-general in Frankfort to consul-general at Berlin, our highest consular post in Germany. A year ago he was promoted another step—to the consul-generalship in Paris, and he holds that place yet.
Ruth, the child, remained not long on earth to help make it beautiful and to bless the home of her parents. But, little creature as she was, she did high service for her country, as I have shown, and it is right that this should be recorded and remembered.
In accordance with the suggestion made in Gilder’s letter (as copied in yesterday’s talk) I have written the following note to ex-President Cleveland:
Honored Sir:—
Your patriotic virtues have won for you the homage of half the nation and the enmity of the other half. This places your character as a citizen upon a summit as high as Washington’s. The verdict is unanimous and unassailable. The votes of both sides are necessary in cases like these, and the votes of the one side are quite as valuable as are the votes of the other. Where the votes are all in a man’s favor the verdict is against him. It is sand, and history will wash it away. But the verdict for you is rock, and will stand.
When Mr. Cleveland was a member of a very strong and prosperous firm of lawyers, in Buffalo, just before the ’seventies, he was elected to the mayoralty. Presently a formidably rich and powerful railway corporation worked an ordinance through the city government whose purpose was to take possession of a certain section of the city inhabited altogether by the poor, the helpless, and the inconsequential, and drive those people out. Mr. Cleveland vetoed the ordinance. The other members of his law firm were indignant and also terrified. To them the thing which he had done meant disaster to their business. They waited upon him and begged him to reconsider his action. He declined to do it. They insisted. He still declined. He said that his official position imposed upon him a duty which he could not honorably avoid; therefore he should be loyal to it; that the helpless situation of these inconsequential citizens made it his duty to stand by them and be their friend, since they had no other; that he was sorry if this conduct of his must bring disaster upon the firm, but that he had no choice; his duty was plain, and he would stick to the position which he had taken. They intimated that this would lose him his place in the firm. He said he did not wish to be a damage to the copartnership, therefore they could remove his name from it, and without any hard feeling on his part.
During the time that we were living in Buffalo in ’70 and ’71, Mr. Cleveland was sheriff, but I never happened to make his acquaintance, or even see him. In fact, I suppose I was not even aware of his existence. Fourteen years later, he was become the greatest man in the state. I was not living in the state at the time. He was Governor, and was about to step into the post of President of the United States. At that time I was on the public highway in company with another bandit, George W. Cable. We were robbing the public with readings from our works during four months—and in the course of time we went to Albany to levy tribute, and I said, “We ought to go and pay our respects to the Governor.”
So Cable and I went to that majestic Capitol building and stated our errand. We were shown into the Governor’s private office, and I saw Mr. Cleveland for the first time. We three stood chatting together. I was born lazy, and I comforted myself by turning the corner of a table into a sort of seat. Presently the Governor said: “Mr. Clemens, I was a fellow citizen of yours in Buffalo a good many months, a good while ago, and during those months you burst suddenly into a mighty fame, out of a previous long-continued and no doubt proper obscurity—but I was a nobody, and you wouldn’t notice me nor have anything to do with me. But now that I have become somebody, you have changed your style, and you come here to shake hands with me and be sociable. How do you explain this kind of conduct?”
“Oh,” I said, “it is very simple. Your Excellency. In Buffalo you were nothing but a sheriff. I was in society. I couldn’t afford to associate with sheriffs. But you are a Governor, now, and you are on your way to the Presidency. It is a great difference, and it makes you worth while.”
There appeared to be about sixteen doors to that spacious room. From each door a young man now emerged, and the sixteen lined up and moved forward and stood in front of the Governor with an aspect of respectful expectancy in their attitude. No one spoke for a moment. Then the Governor said: “You are dismissed, gentlemen. Your services are not required. Mr. Clemens is sitting on the bells.”
There was a cluster of sixteen bell-buttons on the corner of the table against which I had been lounging.