"
He said: "There is a celebrated river, which has been the
subject of political interest of late, and with which we
are all acquainted. It rolls its magnificent volume, clear and
pellucid, in its course; but it never reaches the ocean; it
sinks into mud and morass. And such will be the fate of
this mechanical majority. The conscience of the country is
against it. It is an old-fashioned political expedient;
it is not adapted to the circumstances which we have to encounter
in the present, and because it has no real foundation of truth
or policy, it will meet with defeat and discomfiture."
Gladstone had, what is quite rare, and what no famous American
orator that I now think of, except Choate and Evarts, have
had--a tendency to diffuse and somewhat involved speech, and
at the same time a gift of compact epigrammatic utterance
on occasions. When Mr. Evarts, who was my near relative,
and a man with whom I could take a liberty, came into the
Senate, I said to him that we should have to amend the rules
so that a motion to adjourn would be in order in the middle
of a sentence; to which he replied that he knew of nobody
in this country, who objected to long sentences, except the
criminal classes.
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