for President, since the Democratic platform was in the main an arraignment of Republican corruption and moral decay.  The campaign which followed was a bitter one; but Blaine had estranged a large portion of his party, he made a number of bad blunders, and Cleveland was elected.  The old party founded by Jefferson, which, beginning with Jefferson’s administration, had ruled the country uninterruptedly for forty years, was returned to power, and on an issue which would have delighted Jefferson’s heart.

Much to the dismay and disappointment of the politicians, the new President made no clean sweep of Republican officeholders.  He took the unheard-of ground that, in the public service, as in any other, good work merited advancement, no matter what the politics of the individual might be.  He made some changes, as a matter of course, but he was from the first sturdily in favor of civil service reform.  It is worth remarking that a Democratic President was the first to take a decided stand against the principle of “to the victors belong the spoils,” first put into practice by another Democratic President, Andrew Jackson, over fifty years before.

His stand, too, on the pension question was startling in its audacity.  The shadow of the Civil War still hung over the country; the soldiers who had served in that war had formed themselves into a great, semi-political organization, known as the Grand Army of the Republic, and worked unceasingly for increased pensions, which Congress had found itself unable to refuse.  More than that, the members of Congress were in the habit of passing hundreds of special bills, giving pensions to men whose claims had been rejected by the pension department, as not coming within the law.  Cleveland took the stand that, unless the soldier had been disabled by the war, he had no just claim to government support, and he vetoed scores of private pension bills, many of which were shown to be fraudulent.

In other ways, his remarkable strength of personality soon became apparent, and his determination to do what he thought his duty, regardless of consequences.  His message of December, 1887, fairly startled the country.  It was devoted entirely to a denunciation of the high tariff laws, a subject on which the Democratic leaders had deemed it prudent to maintain a discreet silence since the preceding election, and which many of them hoped would be forgotten by the public.  But Cleveland’s message brought the question squarely to the front, and made it the one issue of the campaign which followed.  Cleveland would have been elected but for the traitorous conduct of the leaders in New York, who had never forgiven him for the way in which, as governor, he had scourged them.  New York State was lost to him, and his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, was elected, although his popular vote fell below that of Cleveland by over a hundred thousand.