to be true, polled 280,000 more votes than were polled for the Republican candidate, and, according to this exhibit, the majority of the American people are hostile to the American Union-but happily it is not true. I would rather have the certificate of General U. S. Grant to attest my loyalty than that of any other living man; and he recently declared in his speech at New Orleans, and at Cairo, Ill., that "the flag of the Union is everywhere honored sincerely throughout the Southern States:" and he added, "the Past has gone forever; henceforth the Blue and the Gray will march on, shoulder to shoulder."

This sentiment was worthy of the illustrious soldier who interposed the shield of his own honor to protect the lives of his defeated and prostrate countrymen against a sanguinary policy at Washington. It was a recognition of this spirit of national reconciliation, symbolized by recent utterances of General Grant, that led an artillery company at Buford, S. C., in December last, composed chiefly of survivors of the garrison of Fort Sumter, all of them Democrats, to fire a salute of one hundred guns in honor of Grant's arrival at that ancient and historic town. General Garfield would, however, unmuffle the war-drums again, and unfurl the standards of civil strife, or at least keep alive the passions that sprung from internecine war, while Hancock's chief ambition is to see American citizens gathered together fraternally once more

under the shelter of the common mansion of the Union which he did so much to preserve.

DOES HANCOCK POSSESS GIFTS OF ADMINISTRATION?

The distinction between an executive officer and an officer of administration is sometimes difficult to define. We call the departments at Washington executive departments, and we call the President the executive, yet he is also entitled, the head of the administration, and the Constitution divides the different departments into executive, judicial and legislative. Popularly considered the head of the administration is very much like the head of an army; but it happens that a good General who can direct his forces, anticipate a battle, and check his enemy, is not always an adept in civil admin

istration.

And now you find the skilful politician baffled at every other point, defeated in his anxiety to find some salient defect in General Hancock's armor, humiliated even in his attempts to invent a convenient calumny, falling back, at last, upon the comfortable assumption that General Hancock knows nothing of civil administration; that his experience has been purely military; and that, of course, he knows nothing about the public men of the country.

If you will turn a page over and read the chapter in which I describe General Hancock at Governor's Island, and, with that in your mind, will consider

how many different communities and interests and people Hancock has been for ten years constantly associating with, you may realize that the division he superintends is in itself many times larger than the entire country over which Washington, or Jefferson, or Andrew Jackson presided, and that this immense territory in time of peace exacts not only the most delicate superintendence, but such a familiarity with every variety of thought and production, and many other relations of society and of parties, as would irresistibly inform and educate any man if he were not already welltrained and well-balanced.

One of our public speakers compares General Hancock with General Washington; and those who have seen the exactness of the book-keeping and the journal of the first President of the United States, the minuteness with which he kept his own accounts, and the care with which he regulated his business with the government, will, as they study the almost punctilious methods of General Hancock, recognize the justice of at least a part of this parallel. All sides admit and applaud the impetuous valor of General Hancock, his almost reckless disregard of his own life in battle, his singular composure on horseback in the smoke and fire and leaden rain of a fatal conflict; and yet those who have known him nearest and best freely unite in the opinion that he is also one of the most cautious and careful of business men, directing and control

ling his own affairs with remarkable ability. He has a singular eye for detail, and a keen sense of the imperious obligations he owes to his. government. Manners enter largely into administration. The gift of kindness to inferiors is so rare among leading public men absorbed in heavy duties, that to watch the affection of those connected with General · Hancock, as well in the field as in private life, in camp and in his own bureau, proves that he is a charming companion and benevolent superior. Nothing has impressed me more in this last examination of his habits than the high admiration for his character and capacity by men who are still attached to the Republican Party and have known the Democratic candidate for president. Could anything be more explicit in this connection than the words of General W. T. Sherman, his own immediate commander-in-chief, the general of the American armies?

"If you will sit down and write the best thing that can be put in language about General Hancock, as an officer and a gentleman, I will sign it without hesitation."

We are told that order is heaven's first law, and those who have seen General Hancock at the head of a great army, like those who have met him at the head of his vast division, managing it from the little island where he has his home now, will understand what weight to attach to this tribute. It is therefore admitted that General IIancock is

not only a soldier and a gentleman, that he not only makes a good administrative as well as executive officer, but it now turns out that he knows how to manage his own affairs as well, and that he does not belong to that class who grow old without taking care of their own estates. Here again he resembles General Washington, who, besides leaving the example of an unparalleled civil and military success, bequeathed to posterity a vade mecum of domestic regularity and business correctness. Surely these are the unconscious and unwritten, but nevertheless positive pledges of high administrative gifts. And when we add to them the sterling fact that he is also an honest and incorruptible man, we need no further guarantees of his fitness for the highest office in the gift of the American people. But what after all is this fresh demand for statesmanship in the Presidency? I can well understand why a statesman, after the model of Jefferson and Madison and Monroe, might be hungered for in the Presidential office at present. But modern politics seems to have lost that high ideal, and the accepted statesman of the hour is one trained to the artifices of Washington life, to the intrigues of local politics, to associations with questionable favorites, to confidential committals to reckless combinations, and to that dreadful practice, which, in the hard school of the costly luxuries of the Capital and to the guilty expenses, too often captures and kills impecunious politicians.