CHAPTER II.

THE FOUNDATION.

Great characters, like great buildings, must have strong foundations; and nothing is the result of accident, either in the kingdom of nature or the kingdom of mind. The remote causes which combine to produce great effects may not always be easily traced; and why they thus combine may not be known.

An oak is not an accident. Whatever other forces may have worked together in its production, there must have been the acorn, the soil, the moisture, the sunshine, and even the storm to produce it.

The monument on Bunker Hill was not an accident. There were the men of thought and character, the oppressions of kingdoms and empires, the sense of justice and right, the desire for freedom in the worship of God, the restraints of tyranny, the shock of battle, the banners of victory, the desire for immortality, the granite quarry, the intelligent plan, the skillful workmen, and then

"Bunker's shaft of gray."

The Declaration of American Independence was not an accident. The laws which forced it were as changeless as the laws of the Medes and Persians. "They who framed it went back, indeed, to first principles. There was some

thing philosophic and ideal in their scheme, as always there is when the general mind is deeply stirred. It was not superficial. Yet they were not undertaking to establish new theories, or to build their State upon artificial plans and abstract speculations. They were simply evolving out of the past what therein had been latent; were liberating into free exhibition and unceasing activity, a vital force older than the history of their colonization, and wide as the lands from which they came. They had the sweep of vast impulses behind them. The slow tendencies of centuries came to sudden consummation in their Declaration; and the force of its impact upon the affairs and the mind. of the world was not measured by its contents alone, but by the relation in which these stood to all vehement discussion and struggle of which it was the latest outcome. ****Neither was it a rash speculative change which was here attempted. The people, whose deputies framed our Declaration, were largely themselves descendants of Englishmen; and those who were not had lived long enough under English institutions to be impressed with their tendency and spirit. It was, therefore, only natural that even when adopting that ultimate measure which severed them from the British crown, they should retain all that had been gained in the mother land through centuries of endurance and strife. They left nothing that was good; they abolished the bad, added the needful, and developed into a rule for the continent the splendid precedents of great former occasions. They shared still the boast of Englishmen that their constitution has no single date from which its duration is to be reckoned,' and that the origin of the English law is as undiscoverable as that of the Nile.' They went back themselves for the origin of their liberties to the most ancient monuments of English freedom. Jefferson had affirmed, in 1774, that a primitive

charter of American independence lay in the fact that, as the Saxons had left their native wilds in the north of Europe, and had occupied Britain, the country which they left asserting over them no further control, nor any dependence of them upon it; so the Englishmen coming hither had formed by that act another State, over which Parliament had no rights, and in which its laws were void until accepted."

James A. Garfield was not an accidental product; and though he

"Hath reared a monument more grand

Than sculptured bronze, and loftier than the heights
Of regal pyramids in Memphian sand,

Which not the raging tempest nor the might

Of the loud North Wind shall assailing blight,

And years unnumbered nor the lapse of time "—

It was not an accident. Down deep in the solid rock the foundation of his greatness was laid; though the finished structure is the "joint product of nature and nurture," as "the result of two great forces: the initial force which the Creator gave it when he called the man into being, and the force of all the external influence and culture that mould and modify the development of a life."

Mr. Garfield, in his oration on the "Life and Character of General George H. Thomas," says: "No human life can be measured by an absolute standard. In this world all is relative. Character itself is the result of innumerable influences from without and from within, which act unceasingly through life. Who shall estimate the effect of those latent forces enfolded in the spirit of a new-born child-forces that may date back centuries and find their origin in the life, and thought, and deeds of remote ancestors-forces, the germs of which, enveloped in the awful mystery of life, have been transmitted silently from generation to generation, and never perish! All-cherishing

nature, provident and unforgetting, gathers up all these fragments, that nothing may be lost, but that all may ultimately reappear in new combinations. Each new life is thus the heir of all the ages;' the possessor of qualities which only the events of life can unfold. The problems to be solved in the study of human life and character are, therefore, these: Given, the character of a man and the conditions of life around him, what will be his career? Or, given his career and surroundings, what was his character? Or, given his character and career, of what kind were his surroundings? The relations of these three factors to each other is severely logical. From them is deduced all genuine history. Character is the chief element, for it is both a result and a cause-a result of influences and a cause of results."

There is something in the "law of heredity," and "blood will tell," though it flows through the veins of many generations. There is an old myth about the gods holding a council at the birth of every child, and determining its destiny. But the truth is the destiny is determined, so far as the element nature is concerned, long before the birth.

Another has said, "That nine-tenths of a man's genius is hereditary. The inherited portion may appear large, but it is to be remembered that only possibilities are inherited; and that not one man in a million reaches the limit of his possibilities. If the lives of the ancestors of James A. Garfield were studied, we could tell what his possibilities were; while by studying the life of Garfield himself, we see how nearly he realized those possibilities. This is the reason why biography interests itself in a man's ancestors. They furnish the key to the situation.".

It is not an easy task to trace "genealogies"; neither is it always pleasant. But it is not an unworthy undertak

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ing, if what has been stated in the foregoing is true, to make the effort to trace so far as possible the ancestry of one who, in a broader sense than most, is

"The heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time."

In his blood Garfield represented the commingled and powerful life of the people. His ancestors were English, with a slight strain, possibly, of Welsh blood in their veins. An early intermarriage united them with the German stock. For more than two centuries and a third they had been in this country. One of them had been in the Concord fight, where was fired the shot "heard round the world."

After the Revolution they removed to the interior of the great State of New York. At the beginning of this century, under the impulse which always pushes Americans westward, they removed again to Ohio, and there, through his mother, came to the boy who was afterwards to become greater than a "crowned monarch," an infusion of that Huguenot blood which has added so much of the splendid and the noble to our public history; "the blood represented by Jay and Boudinot, and Bowdoin, and the Bayards, by Laurens, and Huger, and all the others."

This undoubtedly gave him his sensibility, his tastefulness, his special courage and devotion, with not a little of his surpassing fervid eloquence.

Judge G. F. Hoar felicitously says: "Every American State has its own story of the brave and adventurous spirits who were its early settlers; the men who build commonwealths, and the men of whom commonwealths are builded. The history of the settlement of Massachusetts, of Central New York, and Ohio, is the history of the Garfield race. They were hungry for the horizon.' Of the seven generations born in America, including the President, not