You do, indeed, ride a wave of fortune and favor. You are quite beyond the reach of insult, real or fancied. You could well afford to be more tolerant.
In answer to the ignorance of my service to the Democratic party, which you are at such pains to indicate--and, particularly, with reference to the sectional issue and the issue of tariff reform--I might, if I wanted to be unamiable, suggest to you a more attentive perusal of the proceedings of the three national conventions which nominated you for President.
But I purpose nothing of the sort. In the last five national conventions my efforts were decisive in framing the platform of the party. In each of them I closed the debate, moved the previous question and was sustained by the convention. In all of them, except the last, I was a maker, not a smasher. Touching what happened at Chicago, the present year, I had a right, in common with good Democrats, to be anxious; and out of that sense of anxiety alone I wrote you. I am sorry that my temerity was deemed by you intrusive and, entering a respectful protest against a ban which I cannot believe to be deserved by me, and assuring you that I shall not again trouble you in that way, I am, your obedient servant,
This ended my personal relations with Mr. Cleveland. Thereafter we did not speak as we passed by. He was a hard man to get on with. Overcredulous, though by no means excessive, in his likes, very tenacious in his dislikes, suspicious withal, he grew during his second term in the White House, exceedingly "high and mighty," suggesting somewhat the "stuffed prophet," of Mr. Dana's relentless lambasting and verifying my insistence that he posed rather as an idol to be worshiped, than a leader to be trusted and loved. He was in truth a strong man, who, sufficiently mindful of his limitations in the beginning, grew by unexampled and continued success overconfident and overconscious in his own conceit. He had a real desire to serve the country. But he was apt to think that he alone could effectively serve it. In one of our spats I remember saying to him, "You seem, Mr. President, to think you are the only pebble on the beach--the one honest and brave man in the party--hut let me assure you of my own knowledge that there are others." His answer was, "Oh, you go to ----!"