Political Meeting, Hartford
It seems to me that there are things about this campaign which almost amount to inconsistencies. This language may sound violent; if it does, it is traitor to my mood. The Mugwumps are contemptuously called turncoats by the Republican speakers and journals. The charge is true: we have turned our coats; we have no denials to make, as to that. But does a man become of a necessity base because he turns his coat? And are there no Republican turncoats except the Mugwumps? Please look at the facts in the case candidly and fairly before sending us to political perdition without company.
Why are we called turncoats? Because we have changed our opinion. Changed it about what? About the greatness and righteousness of the principles of the Republican party? No, that is not changed. We believe in those principles yet; no one doubts this. What, then, is it that we have changed our opinions about? Why, about Mr. Blaine. That is the whole change. There is no other. Decidedly, we have done that, and do by no means wish to deny it. But when did we change it? Yesterday?—last week?—last summer? No—we changed it years and years ago, as far back as 1876. The vast bulk of the Republican party changed its opinion of him at the same time and in the same way. Will anybody be hardy enough to deny this? Was there more than a handful of really respectable and respectworthy Republicans on the north Atlantic seaboard who did not change their opinion of Mr. Blaine at that time? Was not the Republican atmosphere—both private and journalistic—so charged with this fact that none could fail to perceive it?
Very well. Was this multitude called turncoats at that time? Of course not. That would have been an absurdity. Was any of this multitude held in contempt at that time, and derided and execrated, for turning his Blaine coat? No one thought of such a thing. Now then, we who are called the Mugwumps, turned our coats at that time, and they have remained so turned to this day. If it is shameful to turn one’s coat once, what measure of scorn can adequately describe the man who turns it twice? If to turn one’s coat once makes one a dude, a Pharisee, a Mugwump and fool, where shall you find language rancid enough to describe a double turncoat? If to turn your coat at a time when no one can impeach either the sincerity of the act or the cleanliness of your motives in doing it, is held to be a pathetic spectacle, what sort of spectacle is it when such a coat-turner turns his coat again, and this time under quite suggestively different circumstances?—that is to say, after a nomination. Do these double turncoats exist? And who are they? They are the bulk of the Republican party; and it is hardly venturing too far to say that neither you nor I can put his finger upon a respectable member of that great multitude who can put a denial of it instantly into words and without blush or stammer. Here in Hartford they do not deny; they confess that they are double turncoats. They say they are convinced that when they formerly changed their opinion about Mr. Blaine they were wrong, and so they have changed back again. Which would seem to be an admission that to change one’s opinion and turn one’s coat is not necessarily a base thing to do, after all. Yet they call my tribe the customary hard names in their next campaign speeches just the same, without seeming to see any inconsistency or impropriety in it. Well, it is all a muddle to me. I cannot make out how it is or why it is that a single turncoat is a reptile and a double turncoat a bird of Paradise.
I easily perceive that the Republican party has deserted us, and deserted itself; but I am not able to see that we have deserted anything or anybody. As for me, I have not deserted the Republican code of principles, for I propose to vote its ticket, with the presidential exception; and I have not deserted Mr. Blaine, for as regards him I got my free papers before he bought the property.
Personally I know that two of the best known of the Hartford campaigners for Blaine did six months ago hold as uncomplimentary opinions about him as I did then and as I do today. I am told, upon what I conceive to be good authority, that the two or three other Connecticut campaigners of prominence of that ilk held opinions concerning him of that same uncomplimentary breed up to the day of the nomination. These gentlemen have turned their coats; and they now admire Blaine; and not calmly, temperately, but with a sort of ferocious rapture. In a speech the other night, one of them spoke of the author of the Mulligan letters—those strange Vassar-like exhibitions of eagerness, gushingness, timidity, secretiveness, frankness, naiveté, unsagacity, and almost incredible and impossible indiscretion—as the “first statesman of the age.” Another of them spoke of “the three great statesmen of the age, Gladstone, Bismarck and Blaine.” Doubtless this profound remark was received with applause. But suppose the gentleman had had the daring to read some of those letters first, appending the names of Bismarck and Gladstone to them; do not you candidly believe that the applause would have been missing, and that in its place there would have been a smile which you could have heard to Springfield? For no one has ever seen a Republican mass meeting that was devoid of the perception of the ludicrous.
October 1884