always dies hard after it has long been the blood and mind of a
creed, a class, or a party. Terrible also is the blind,
remorseless sweep of a custom which may have sprung up from good
soil, not less than one spawned and nurtured in iniquity.
Frankenstein laboriously constructing his monster seems to
personify society at its immemorial task of creating
institutions; each institution as it becomes viable rends its
creator.

So the Republican Party lived on its traditions, its privileges,
its appetites, its arrogance, and it refused to be transmuted by
its youngest members. In 1876 it resorted to fraud to perpetuate
its hold on power. Unchastened in 1880, three hundred and six of
its delegates attempted through thick and thin to force the
nomination of General Grant for a third term. The chief opposing
candidate was James G. Blaine, whose unsavory reputation,
however, caused the majority of the convention which was not
pledged to Grant to repudiate Blaine and to choose Garfield as a
compromise. Then followed four years of factional bitterness in
the party, and when 1884 came round, Blaine's admirers pushed him
to the front.

Blaine himself was not a person of delicate instinct. The
repudiation which he had twice suffered by the better element of
the Republican Party, seemed only to redouble his determination
to be its candidate. He had much personal magnetism. Both in his
methods and ideals, he represented perfectly the politicians who
during the dozen years after Lincoln's death flourished at
Washington, and at every State capitol in the Union. By the luck
of a catching phrase applied to him by Robert G. Ingersoll, he