RUTHERFORD BIRCHARD HAYES.*

BY REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D. D., LL. D.

All

We have studied here, more than once, the lesson of some great life. In no other form does Truth present herself with so much quickening for the intellect, with so much invigoration of the will. For this reason chiefly was the Word made flesh. highest revelation to men must come through the form of a man. The story of a life worthily lived is more convincing than logic, more instructive than philosophy; it carries an element which transcends all the formularies of science; it contains within itself all that gives the moving thrill to music, and immortality to

verse.

Thrice, already, since the summer rest, have we been invited to such a sympathetic study of great lives that had suddenly ceased from among us: The editor and essayist, Curtis; our Quaker poet, Whittier; the laureate of England, Tennyson. To-night we are called together to reflect for an hour upon the meaning of a life whose sudden termination has brought to this commonwealth and this nation a great bereavement. To the people of Ohio, and especially to the people of Columbus, the death of President Hayes comes a great deal closer than that of either of the notable men whom I have named. To them our debt was large, but it was mainly intellectual. For the enriching of our minds, for the quickening of our better purposes we owed them much. But President Hayes has been our neighbor and our friend; he has walked with us by the way; he has

Rutherford B. Hayes became an interested and active member of the Ohio Archæological and Historical Society soon after its organization in 1885. In 1890 he was made a life member and at the meeting of the Society held in Chicago, Ill., October 19, 1892, he was elected a trustee and president. He served in that office till his death, January 17, 1893. Mr. Hayes regarded the Society as the agent of a most deserving and valuable work. He had many plans for the greater development and accomplishment of the purposes of the Society. His untimely death was a loss to the Society as it was to the many public organizations to which he was so unselfishly devoting his wise and noble energies.— E. O. R.

talked with us at our firesides; in our public assemblies he was a not unwonted, and always welcome presence; in a great many of the concerns in which our hearts were most engaged, he was our wise counsellor and stanch helper; the abrupt and unexpected cessation of a force like this is a real shock to our community; and the absence of such a comrade from our toil, of such a friend from our familiar circles, brings a sense of personal loss and loneliness.

I have named him the Great Commoner. This title was given first to William Pitt, in the days before he was Earl of Chatham; it was the popular tribute to a lofty spirit who was "the first to discern," as one of his biographers phrases it, "that public opinion, though generally slow to form and slow to act, is in the end the paramount power in the state; and the first to use it, not in an emergency merely, but throughout a long political career." William Pitt was the Great Commoner so long as he kept in touch with the people; no man ever had greater power in England; he was put at the head of the greatest ministry that ever ruled England, not because king or parliament wished it, but because the people would have it. Years afterward, when he suffered himself to be elevated to the peerage, he came down from his throne. The title has descended to the man who is now prime minister of England, and who has won it very much as Pitt first won it, by identifying himself with the people. Warned by the fate of Pitt, it is not at all probable that Gladstone will ever be tempted to exchange for the bauble of a peerage that place which he holds in the hearts of his countrymen.

Our own Great Commoner has won the title by the same qualities. He, too, was essentially and pre-eminently a man of the people. From the common people he rose, and he never rose above them. That persistent determination of his to walk in the ranks of Grand Army parades has been censured by some as affectation. But to President Hayes it was the simple expression of a fact which he would neither deny nor ignore. He was a plain citizen, nothing more; he would not masquerade as anything else. While he held the chief magistracy of the nation he magnified the office; when he laid it down he returned to

his place. He knew the dignity of office; he knew, also, the dignity of private citizenship.

The relations of President Hayes to the Commonwealth of Ohio are, as I have said, peculiarly intimate. He was born upon her soil; most of his education was gained in her schools; all his professional life was spent in this State; the troops that he led in the war of the rebellion were nearly all Ohio soldiers; Ohio sent him to represent her in the National Congress, and thrice made him her Governor; it was from the capital of Ohio that he was translated to the White-house at Washington; and since he laid aside the arduous burdens of government, this State has been his constant home. To multitudes in other States his great services have endeared him; but Ohio has the largest share in his renown. I think it must be allowed that he was her greatest citizen-the finest product, on the whole, of her century of history. This is a large claim, but I advance it with some confidence. When the future historian comes to test by the standards of impartial criticism, the characters and the services of the men of Ohio who have been at the front in the nineteenth century, I think that the name of Rutherford Birchard Hayes will lead all the rest. Grant and Sherman and Sheridan were greater generals; Garfield was a greater genius, and there have been greater orators and greater jurists and greater educators; but take him all in all, for an all-round man citizen, soldier, statesman, scholar, man of books, man of brains, man of affairs, husband, father, philanthropist, neighbor, friend, there is not another who will measure quite as large as the good man who has just gone.

I have named Garfield; there is a somewhat striking parallel between the origin of these two Ohio Presidents. Abram Garfield came, with a little family, from Central New York to Cuyahoga County in 1830; made a fairly prosperous beginning of a home there and suddenly died, leaving a widow with four young children, the youngest of whom, then but two years old, was to be the future President.

Rutherford Hayes, a thrifty farmer and trader of Vermont, came to Ohio in 1817 and settled in Delaware where, after five years of successful industry, he died leaving a wife and two chil