George Graham

“ Sir Thomas Lawrence, thought there was a deal more good than bad in human nature; and certainly such men as George Graham would bear him out. Those of a contrary opinion, allege that they should be regarded as an Oasis in the desert. Leaving the point to be decided by more competent abilities, we would observe that Gray, in his far-famed elegy chaunts—
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen ”

“ Spending her time partly in Edinburgh and partly at Duntrune, Miss Graham shared the tastes of country and town. She had little of the literary lady except a liking for the society of men of letters and of art. She practised through a long life of over ninety-five years a wise charity, not only in giving alms, but also by kind acts and words, Without sparkling wit she had much quiet humour and a keen appreciation of wit in others. Mingling freely with all classes of society, she knew how to bring them together on good terms. ”

“ Graham, how is it that you know there is a God, and one — one — fit to be trusted as you trust him?"
"In no way that I can bring to bear on to the reason of another so as to produce conviction."
"Then what is to become of me?"
"I can do for you what is far better. I can persuade you to look and see whether before your own door stands not a gate — lies not a path to walk in. Entering by that gate, walking in that path, you shall yourself arrive at the conviction, which no man can give you, that there is a living love and truth at the heart of your being and pervading all that surrounds you. ”

“ He was minister of the Close meeting-house at Newcastle from 1770 till his death, 29 Jan. 1801. He married in 1759 Mary, daughter of George Johnstone of Whiteknow in Dumfriesshire. Graham was a man of liberal sentiments, and is said to have been an excellent scholar. He made a special study of mathematics in the hope of discovering a method for finding the longitude at sea, but his machinery proved a failure.
Graham wrote: 1. ‘The Worth of the Soul,’ Newcastle, 1772. 2. ‘Four Discourses on Public Vows,’ Glasgow, 1778. 3. ‘A Candid Vindication of the Secession Church,’ Newcastle, 1790. 4. ”

“ Alexander Graham, the schoolmaster, was the son of a grieve, or farm-overseer, in the north of Scotland. By straining every nerve his parents had succeeded in giving him a university education, the narrowness of whose scope was possibly favorable to the development of what genius, rare and shy, might lurk among the students. He had labored well, and had gathered a good deal from books and lectures, but far more from the mines they guided him to discover in his own nature. ”

“ Graham relied on a promise that the lords would support him, but they failed to keep it, and himself being arrested, was banished to the highlands, where he openly rebelled and a price was set on his head. Graham then tried, but failed, to incite the nobles to revolt at the parliament of Edinburgh in October 1436, but succeeded in procuring a secret promise of assistance from Atholl, the king's uncle, and Sir Robert Stewart, Atholl's grandson, a young man in great favour with the king, who had made him his chamberlain, and at Roxburgh constable of the army. ”

“ These stories were not written down till after the event, but enough was known of Sir Robert Graham to lead men to dream or to invent stories of the coming danger. In the parliament of 1435 Graham, the uncle and tutor of Malise, earl of Strathearn, whose earldom the king had seized, had taken hold of James in the presence of the three estates, and said that he arrested him in their name for his cruel conduct and illegal acts. ”

“ At length he was sufficiently recovered to walk to his grandfather’s cottage; but only now for the first time had he a notion of how far bodily condition can reach in the oppression and overclouding of the spiritual atmosphere.—“Gien I be like this,” he said to himself, “what maun the weather be like aneth yon hump o’ the laird’s!” Now also for the first time he understood what Mr Graham had meant when he told him that he only was a strong man who was strong in weakness; he only a brave man who, inhabiting trembling, yet faced his foe; he only a true man who, tempted by good, yet abstained. ”

“ Graham's worth had gained him friends in the presbytery, and he was that same week appointed to the vacant school of another parish.
There it was not long before he made the acquaintance of Griselda Campbell, who was governess in the great house of the neigborhood, and a love, not the less true that it was hopeless from the first, soon began to consume the chagrin of his failure, and substitute for it a more elevating sorrow; for how could an embodied failure, to offer whose miserable self would be an insult, dare speak of love to one before whom his whole being sank worshipping? ”

“ Judgment, which had been passed in parliament some days before, was then pronounced, by the dempster, that James Graham should be hanged for the space of three hours on a gibbet thirty feet high, that his head should be fixed on a spike in Edinburgh, his arms on the gates of Perth or Stirling, his legs on those of Glasgow and Aberdeen, and his body be interred by the hangman on the burrowmuir, unless he were previously released from excommunication by the kirk. ”

“ George Helm had cherished deep in his heart a peculiar feeling for Eleanor Clearwater since that first long talk he had with her, the only woman he had met who possessed worldly knowledge and beauty, refined and glorified by the highest civilized arts of manner and dress. ”

“ George being in a house where he heard the [274] poor Woman making a mournful complaint to one of her attornies, who gave her no comfort or satisfaction; for when she told him, she had no money to spend, or give in defence of it, the attorney went away and would hear no more of the Woman’s grievous complaint, which made George to laugh very heartily, while the poor Widow sat weeping like one distracted. Poor woman, says George, you need not think that man will speak a word for you, or any else, unless you had brought him a purse of gold to loose his tongue ”

“ His book education, which he owed mainly to the friendship of the parish schoolmaster, although nothing marvellous, or in Scotland very peculiar, had opened for him in all directions doors of thought and inquiry, but the desire of knowledge was in his case, again through the influences of Mr Graham, subservient to an almost restless yearning after the truth of things, a passion so rare that the ordinary mind can hardly master even the fact of its existence. ”

“ In a hilarious mood the Democratic machine, casting about for its sacrifice candidate, nominated George Helm—or, rather, George Helm’s whiskers.
It was a side-splitting joke. Everybody liked George. Everybody knew about his whiskers—knew him by his whiskers. It bade fair to inject that humor, so dearly beloved of the American people, into what was usually a dull campaign. The only trouble was that for the first time Helm failed to see a joke.
The night of his nomination the light in Mrs. Beaver’s tiny, stuffy attic room went out early. ”

“ Bill laughed. “Why don’t you drop politics, George? Why fool with the silly game? The people’ll never learn anything. They can always be buncoed—the asses! What did God make ’em for? To work like hell all day and then hand over most of what they’ve made to some clever chap—and thank him for taking it.”
“That used to be so,” replied Helm. “But they’re waking up, Bill. All they need is the right kind of leaders.” ”

“ Salvator, on which Pius II had conferred the power of granting degrees in theology and arts. The rector resisted, but Graham obtained its recognition. He returned to Rome on the accession of Sixtus IV, and at his instance a series of bulls were issued by that pope in the first year of his pontificate, which raised St. Andrews to the dignity of an archbishopric and made the Scottish bishops subject to its see. These bulls are dated 17 Aug. 1472. The first contains the erection of the metropolitan see, the grant of the pall and cross, and jurisdiction over the other sees of Scotland. ”

“ Perhaps you have happened to know an occasional man—or woman—whose every act and trick of manner had an inexplicable fascination. When George Helm was self-conscious, he had no more magnetism than is inseparable from intelligent, sympathetic good nature sunning in a kindly keen sense of humor. ”

“ Three years later he succeeded Kennedy, who died in July 1465, in the primacy of Scotland. Soon after his succession to St. Andrews, Graham went to Rome to avoid the enmity of the Boyds, then at the height of their power in the Scottish court, and to procure his confirmation by the pope, and he remained abroad till the fall of the Boyds in 1469. He was present as conservator in a provincial council held in Scotland in July 1470, by which an end was put to the dispute between John Lochy, the rector of the university of St. Andrews, and the college of St. ”

“ Mr Graham replied that a man ought never to be carried away by wrath, as he had so often sought to impress upon him, and not without success: but that, in the present case, as the rascal deserved it so well, he did not think he need trouble himself much. ”

“ He was in a sentimental mood about George Helm and Eleanor Clearwater. George Helm, the lean and lank, countrified new orator whom Sayler’s secret lieutenant, the Democratic state boss Hazelrigg, had discovered in the State Senate; Eleanor Clearwater, heiress to the notorious—that is, famous—lumber king and Senator, a lady to her finger tips, fond of playing with “fine ideas” of all kinds, but helplessly dependent upon the culture and the luxury that can be got only by acts which proceed from anything but “fine ideas.” ”

“ Helm,” said Branagan, with the respect a shrewd man cannot but feel in presence of an intelligence that has shown itself the superior of his. “I understand perfectly, George.”
“You probably don’t understand,” said [75] George. “But no matter. You can be boss of the machine, but you can’t be my boss. If you give me the nomination and I’m elected, I’ll not attack the—the shortcomings of my friends until I’ve settled with the crimes of my enemies. I’ll not forget that I owe you, and not the people, for the nomination. ”

“ This man, planted upon this rock-founded confidence, could not but show in his exterior the external change. But where the small fellow reveals his fleeting or trivial success in an access of swagger, the large, simple nature reveals it in the deeper absorption in the career, the lessened consciousness of self. And as George Helm’s self-consciousness had been the sole cause of his awkwardness and the chief cause of his extreme plainness, the change was most striking. ”

“ Harrison laughed at George Helm’s whiskers; but it did not, because it could not, laugh at George Helm.
But, being a shallow-pated town, Harrison fancied it was laughing at Helm himself. It is the habit of human beings to mistake clothes and whiskers and all manner of mere externals for men. Occasionally they discover their mistake. Harrison discovered its mistake.
It nominated George Helm for Circuit Judge. There were two parties in that district—as there are everywhere else—the Republican and the Democratic. ”

“ George Helm, only twenty-four years old and without money, friends or influence, might have been driven back to the farm but for that beard.
Successful men feed their egotism with such shallow and silly old proverbial stuff as, “You can’t keep a good man down,” and “A husky hog will get its nose to the trough.” But they reckon ill who leave circumstance out of account in human affairs. ”

“ You might have used the money in your politics.”
“No,” said George, working steadily away at the castle. “Money’s of no use in our kind of politics, Ellen. It’s been tried again and again. It always fails. You see, we’re trying to make everybody see that it’s to his interest to wake up and work. ”

“ His partner, George S. Nixon, looked the part of the dapper little Winnemucca bank manager and confidential State Agent of the Southern Pacific that he was before becoming Senator. He was considerably below middle weight, and above middle girth at that part of his anatomy which a political enemy once described as seat of his thoughts and the tabernacle of his aspirations. His steel-gray eyes were absolutely without expression. Newly-rich, his money and his Southern Pacific connections had gained him a toga, but he did not carry himself like a man upon whom the honors had been thrust. ”

“ Hazelrigg soon quelled that mutiny. Of all the understrappers at the beck and call of a machine boss, the orators—they upon whose lips the people hang spellbound—are the lowest, the most despised by their fellow slaves and the most brutally worked and the most meagerly paid.
As Sayler had taken the muzzle from the press of the State to make his “object lesson” thoroughly effective, in a few weeks George Helm became famous—newspaper famous—the beanstalk variety of fame, showy but perishable. Bill Desbrough came up to see him. ”

“ That winter luck favored George Helm. He did not have to break with the machine.
Senator Sayler, the representative of the plutocracy, quarreled with some of his largest clients—his bosses, they fancied themselves, until he, as astute as he was bold and cynical, showed them that he had made himself indispensable to them. He, the rich man as well as the expert and most intelligent politician; they, merely rich men, crudely buying of politicians the coveted robbers’ licenses. The quarrel grew out of the idiotic greediness of his clients. ”

“ Vain men concern themselves about likes and dislikes; sensible men, about advantages and disadvantages. It came to pass in that winter, while George Helm was teaching school up the State, and saving money for another attempt as a lawyer, Branagan and Reichman fell out about the division of the graft. ”