to carry on the farm for many years.  Only those who know the hard toil of a raw American township can have any idea what that really means.  A farmer’s work in America is not like a farmer’s work in England.  The man who occupies the soil is there at once his own landlord and his own labourer; and he has to contend with nature as nobody in England has had to contend with it for the last five centuries at least.  He finds the land covered with trees, which he has first to fell and sell as timber; then he must dig or burn out the stumps; clear the plot of boulders and large stones; drain it, fence it, plough it, and harrow it; build barns for the produce and sheds for the cows; in short, make his farm, instead of merely taking it.  This is labour from which many strong men shrink in dismay, especially those who have come out fresh from a civilized and fully occupied land.  For a woman and a boy, it is a task that seems almost above their utmost powers.  Nevertheless, Mrs. Garfield and her son did not fail under it.  With her own hands, the mother split up the young trees info rude triangular rails to make the rough snake fences of the country—­mere zigzags of wood laid one bit above the other; while the lad worked away bravely at sowing fall and spring wheat, hoeing Indian corn, and building a little barn for the harvest before the arrival of the long cold Ohio winter.  To such a family did the future President originally belong; and with them he must have shared those strong qualities of perseverance and industry which more than anything else at length secured his ultimate success in life.

For James Garfield’s history differs greatly in one point from that of most other famous working men, whose stories have been told in this volume.  There is no reason to believe that he was a man of exceptional or commanding intellect.  On the contrary, his mental powers appear to have been of a very respectable but quite ordinary and commonplace order.  It was not by brilliant genius that James Garfield made his way up in life; it was rather by hard work, unceasing energy, high principle, and generous enthusiasm for the cause of others.  Some of the greatest geniuses among working men, such as Burns, Tannahill, and Chatterton, though they achieved fame, and though they have enriched the world with many touching and beautiful works, must be considered to have missed success in life, so far as their own happiness was concerned, by their unsteadiness, want of self-control, or lack of fixed principle.  Garfield, on the other hand, was not a genius; but by his sterling good qualities he nevertheless achieved what cannot but be regarded as a true success, and left an honourable name behind him in the history of his country.