There Is No
Future Before Him To Urge Him On To Constancy; No Hope Of Other
Things Beyond, Of Greater Honors And A Wider Fame, To Keep Him
Wakeful In His Country's Cause.
He has already enrolled his name on
the list of his country's rulers, and received what reward his
country can give him.
Conscience, duty, patriotism may make him
true to his place. True to his place, in a certain degree, they
will make him. But ambition and hope of things still to come are
the moving motives of the minds of most men. Few men can allow
their energies to expand to their fullest extent in the cold
atmosphere of duty alone. The President of the States must feel
that he has reached the top of the ladder, and that he soon will
have done with life. As he goes out he is a dead man. And what can
be expected from one who is counting the last lingering hours of his
existence? "It will not be in my time," Mr. Buchanan is reported to
have said, when a friend spoke to him with warning voice of the
coming rebellion. "It will not be in my time." In the old days,
before democracy had prevailed in upsetting that system of
presidential election which the Constitution had intended to fix as
permanent, the Presidents were generally re-elected for a second
term. Of the first seven Presidents five were sent back to the
White House for a second period of four years.
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