Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/152

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS

speeches are numerous, many of them brilliant, all of them well studied, carefully phrased, and exhaustive of the subject under consideration. Collected from the scattered pages of ninety royal octavo volumes of the Congressional Rec- ord, they would present an invaluable compendi- um of the political history of the most impor- tant era through which the national government has ever passed.

Differing, as Garfield does, from the brilliant parliamentary leaders, it is not easy to find his counterpart anywhere in the record of American public life. He perhaps more nearly resembles Mr. Seward in his supreme faith in the all-con- quering power of a principle. He had the love of learning and the patient industry of investi- gation to which John Quincy Adams owes his prominence and his presidency. He had some of those ponderous elements of mind which dis- tinguished Mr. Webster, and which indeed, in all our public life, have left the great IMassa- chusetts senator without an intellectual peer.

In English parliamentary history, as in our own, the leaders in the House of Commons pre- sent points of essential difference from Garfield. But some of his methods recall the best features in the strong, independent course of Sir Robert Peel, and striking resemblances are discernible in that most promising of modern Conservatives, who died too early for his country and his fame, Lord George Bentinck. He had all of Burke's love for the sublime and the beautiful, with, pos- 122

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