Probably I should have been more leisurely in bringing my presidential plans to a focus, had I not seen how great and how near was the peril to my party. It seemed to me, not indeed a perfect or even a satisfactory, but the best available, instrument for holding the balances of order as even as might be between our country's two opposing elements of disorder--the greedy plunderers and the rapidly infuriating plundered. And I saw that no time was to be lost, if the party was not to be blown to fragments. The first mutterings of the storm were in our summary ejection from control of the House in the midway election. If the party were not to be dismembered, I must oust Goodrich, must defeat his plans for nominating Cromwell, must nominate Burbank instead. If I should succeed in electing him, I reasoned that I could through him carry out my policy of moderation and _practical_ patriotism--to yield to the powerful few a minimum of what they could compel, to give to the prostrate but potentially powerful many at least enough to keep them quiet--a stomachful. The world may have advanced; but patriotism still remains the art of restraining the arrogance of full stomachs and the anger of empty ones.
In Cromwell, Goodrich believed he had a candidate with sufficient hold upon the rank and file of the party to enable him to carry the election by the usual means--a big campaign fund properly distributed in the doubtful states. I said to Senator Scarborough of Indiana soon after Cromwell's candidacy was announced: "What do you think of Goodrich's man?"
Scarborough, though new to the Senate then, had shown himself far and away the ablest of the opposition Senators. He had as much intellect as any of them; and he had what theorists, such as he, usually lack, skill at "grand tactics"--the management of men in the mass. His one weakness--and that, from my standpoint, a great one--was a literal belief in democratic institutions and in the inspiring but in practice pernicious principle of exact equality before the law.
"Cromwell's political sponsors," was his reply, "are two as shrewd bankers as there are in New York. I have heard it said that a fitting sign for a bank would be: 'Here we do nothing for nothing for nobody.'"