“’I made no personal reference whatever; I assailed no gentleman; I called no man’s honor in question.  My colleague from the Cleveland district (Mr. Spalding) rose and asked if I had read the bill.  I answered him, I believe, in courteous language and manner, that I had read it, and immediately on my statement to that effect he said in his place in the House, and it has gone on the record, that he did not believe I had read it; in other words, that he believed I had lied, in the presence of my peers in this House.  I felt, under such circumstances, that it would not be becoming my self-respect, or the respect I owe to the House, to continue a colloquy with any gentleman who had thus impeached my veracity and I said so.

“’It pains me very much that a gentleman of venerable age, who was in full maturity of life when I was a child, and whom I have respected since my childhood, should have taken occasion here in this place to use language so uncalled for, so ungenerous, so unjust to me, and disgraceful to himself.  I have borne with the ill-nature and bad blood of that gentleman, as many others in this House have, out of respect for his years; but no importunity of age shall shield him, or any man, from my denunciation, who is so lacking in the proprieties of this place as to be guilty of such parliamentary and personal indecency as the House has witnessed on his part.  I had hoped that before this time he would have acknowledged to me the impropriety and unjustifiableness of his conduct and apologized for the insult.  But he has not seen fit to take this course.  I leave him to his own reflections, and his conduct to the judgment of the House.’”

Those who listened to these spirited rebukes saw that the young member from Ohio would not allow himself to be snubbed or insulted with impunity, and the few who were accustomed to descend to such discourtesy took warning accordingly.  They were satisfied that Garfield, to quote a common phrase, would give them as good as they sent, and perhaps a little better.  The boy, who at sixteen, when employed on the tow-path, thrashed the bully of thirty-five for insulting him, was not likely in his manhood to submit to the insults of a Congressional bully.  He was a man to compel respect, and had that resolute and persistent character which was likely ere long to make him a leader.  So Disraeli, coughed down in his first attempt to speak before the English House of Commons, accepted the situation, but recorded the prediction that one day they would hear him.  He, too, mounted step by step till he reached the highest position in the English Government outside of royalty.  A man who is destined to be great is only strengthened by opposition, and rises in the end victorious over circumstances.

Garfield soon made it manifest that he had come to Washington to work.  He was not one to lie back and enjoy in idleness the personal consequence which his position gave him.  All his life he had been a worker, and a hard worker, from the time when he cut one hundred cords of wood, at twenty-five cents a cord, all through his experience as a canal-boy, a carpenter, a farm-worker, a janitor, a school teacher, a student, and a military commander, and now that he had taken his place in the grand council of the nation, he was not going to begin a life of self-indulgent idleness.