Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

PROCESSION THROUGH TIE WHITE HOUSE 309
depression and my release from Colorado and sheep raising
there was born in Pennsylvania, just beyond the Delaware,
the child who as wife and companion was to make happy
the afternoon and evening years.
Two days after the 1884 election I was back at work,
writing of causes, as the files show, in this not too gloomy
fashion:
How far may the course of political events, the fortunes of
great parties and the destinies of a nation be influenced by a
single word, spoken by one fatwitted individual?
Six days before election day a Silurian or early Palmozoic
bigot, the Rev. Samuel D. Burchard by name, completed an
alliteration that swelled in his foolish mouth by presenting Mr.
Blaine as the enemy of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion."
Was there not enough in this one word Romanism to turn
the votes of two or three thousand men from Blaine to Cleveland?
But for Austin Flint, senior, would there not have been
enough in that first doctor's one shrug of his shoulders to
have turned my pathway two or three thousand parasangs
away from the course it was taking?
IV
Everybody who knows the yesterdays of American
politics is aware that the effective factor in many capital
events, such as Presidential nominations and Presidential
elections, was the bitter personal feud between Roscoe
Conkling and James G. Blaine, persistent for a score of
years and producing consequences often but dimly trace

able to the origin. This enmity prevented the nomination
of either Blaine or Conkling at the Cincinnati convention
of 1876, where both were candidates and where Mr.
Hayes became the compromise. On the seventh ballot
Blaine had lacked but twenty-eight votes of a majority.
In 1880 at Chicago Blaine's chances for the nomination