was changed to steel.  For three years these cables were the line on which the passengers on ferry-boats hung their jokes about swindling and political bribery.  No investigation was able to shake my respect for the integrity of Mr. Stranahan, one of the bridge trustees.  He did as much for Brooklyn as any man in it.  He was the promoter of Prospect Park, designed and planned from his head and heart.  With all the powers at my disposal I defended the bridge trustee.

There was an attempt in New York, towards the close of 1882, to present the Passion Play on the stage of a theatre.  A licence was applied for.  The artist, no matter how high in his profession, who would dare to appear in the character of the Divine Person, was fit only for the Tombs prison or Sing-Sing.  I had no objection to any man attempting the role of Judas Iscariot.  That was entirely within the limitations of stage art.  Seth Low was Mayor of Brooklyn, and Mr. Grace was Mayor of New York—­a Protestant and a Catholic—­and yet they were of one opinion on this proposed blasphemy.

I think everyone in America realised that the Democratic victory in the election of Grover Cleveland, by a majority of 190,000 votes, as Governor of New York, was a presidential prophecy.  The contest for President came up, seriously, in the spring of 1883, and the same headlines appeared in the political caucus.  Among the candidates was Benjamin F. Butler, Governor of Massachusetts.  I believed then there was not a better man in the United States for President than Chester A. Arthur.  I believed that his faithfulness and dignity in office should be honoured with the nomination.  There was some surprise occasioned when Harvard refused to confer an LL.D. on Governor Butler, a rebuke that no previous Governor of Massachusetts had suffered.  After all, the country was chiefly impressed in this event with the fact that an LL.D., or a D.D., or an F.R.S., did not make the man.  Americans were becoming very good readers of character; they could see at a glance the difference between right and wrong, but they were tolerant of both.  Much more so than I was.  There was one great fault in American character that the whole world admired; it was our love of hero-worship.  A great man was the man who did great things, no matter what that man might stand for in religion or in morals.

There was Gambetta, whose friendship for America had won the admiration of our country.  I myself admired his eloquence, his patriotism, his courage in office as Prime Minister of France; but his dying words rolled like a wintry sea over all nations, “I am lost!” Gambetta was an atheist, a man whose public indignities to womanhood were demonstrated from Paris to Berlin.  Gambetta’s patriotism for France could never atone for his atheism, and his infamy towards women.  His death, in the dawn of 1883, was a page in the world’s history turned down at the corner.