The political forces, prejudices, antagonisms, the powers of evil
around me, have been so dubiously deceiving and dark, that I do not know
now whether to have been uncompromisingly true to principle would have
done any good. Perhaps after to-day I shall know better; perhaps only now
have I become qualified to judge--a free man at last. Only in the secrecy
of my own heart--now finally removed from all the interests, ambitions,
fears, which gather about a man's public career--I do most earnestly and
humbly pray that in this one thing I did right--not to discredit myself
too utterly in the world's eyes, so that _that_, at least, might
live.
TUMULTY (_doing his best_). It _will_ live, Governor!
EX-PRES. It _may_. But in what hands have I had to leave it? To men
who have no faith in it, to men who dislike it, to men who will try
persistently, sedulously, day in, day out, to turn it back to their own
selfish ends. There, in those hands, its fate will lie--perhaps for a
generation to come. And it is only by faith in the common people, not in
their politicians, that I dare look forward and hope that the instrument--
blunt and one-sided though it be now--may yet become mighty and two-edged
and sharp, a sword in the hand of a giant--of one whose balances are those
of justice, not of power. But _I_ shan't see it, Tumulty; it won't be
in my day. If America had come in, I should! That was the keystone of my
policy: that gone, my policy has failed.
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