disposed of them."

I said: "Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster,
Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an assured
election, you will die before the day of election. If you survive the day
and are elected, you'll die before the 4th of March." He smiled grimly and
replied: "It really looks that way."

My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominated
Mr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote would
scarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end of
it would have had some advantage--certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland's
nearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly few
hundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who ran as
an independent labor candidate, were actually counted for Cleveland.

When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: "Now we are even.
History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once. Turn about
may be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it."

So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was to
be President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination for
the governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in the State convention
sure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have carried the State
as Cleveland did, and Slocum, not Cleveland, would have been the Chief
Magistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleveand through.
But in his case, as in many another, Providence "got there" in fulfilment
of a decree of Destiny.