Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/157

 BLAINE

when the president would not gladly, for the sake of restoring harmony, have retracted any step he had taken if such retracting had merely involved consequences personal to himself. The pride of consistency, or any supposed sense of humiliation that might result from surrendering his position, had not a feather's weight with him. No man was ever less subject to such in- fluences from within or from without. But after the most anxious deliberation and the coolest sur- vey of all the circumstances, he solemnly be- lieved that the true prerogatives of the execu- tive were involved in the issue which had been raised and that he would be unfaithful to his supreme obligation if he failed to maintain, in all their vigor, the constitutional rights and dig- nities of his great office. He believed this in all the convictions of conscience when in sound and vigorous health, and he believed it in his suffer- ing and prostration in the last conscious thought which his wearied mind bestowed on the transi- tory struggles of life.

More than this need not be said. Less than this could not be said. Justice to the dead, the highest obligation that devolves upon the living, demands the declaration that in all the bearings of the subject, actual or possible, the president was content in his mind, justified in his con- science, immovable in his conclusions.

Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wan- tonness and wickedness, by the red hand of

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