Grover Cleveland, by Paul Raymond Audibert, Paris.

Additional information on Audibert pending.

Grover Cleveland, Twenty-Second President of the United States,(1885-1889). Born Caldwell, N. J., March 18, 1837, died Princeton, N. J., June 24, 1908. The following is quoted from the coverleaf of the engraving:

"Grover Cleveland was as completely American in his character as Lincoln. Without a college education, he prepared himself for the Bar. His life was confined to western New York. His vision of government and of society was not widened by foreign travel. He was a pure product of the village and town life of the Middle States, affected by New England ancestry and the atmosphere of a clergyman's home. His chief characteristics were simplicity and directness of thought, sturdy honesty, courage of his convictions, and plainess of speech, with a sense of public duty that has been exceeded by no stateman within my knowledge. It was so strong in him that he rarely wrote anything, whether in the form of a private or public communication, that the obligation of all men to observe the public interest was not his chief theme."***

"Mr. Cleveland was a Democrat. He was a partisan. He believed in parties, as all men must who understand the machinery essential to the success and efficiency of popular government. His impulses were all toward the merit system of appointments in the public service, and against the spoils system. He dealt with the instruments which he had, and he not infrequently was obliged, in order to accomplish greater objects, to yield to the demands of those who had no ideals, and who were impatient of anything but the use of governnment offices as a purely political reward. Every time that opportunity offered, however, and there was not some greater object in immediate view, he strengthened and assisted the movement toward the merit system."

"Mr. Clevland's political career was so short that he had a great advantage over the prominent men of his party whose records reached back into, and were governed by, the bitter quarrels of the Civil Wat. As a political quantity, his history began during the corruption and demoralization in the Republican party which were the necessary result of contined power during the war and the decade succeeding it. He represented in a scense a new Democracy, about which all the older elements rallied, both those strongly inn sympathy with his reform views, as well as those elements without much sympathy, who were anxious to secure party power."***

"Grover Cleveland earned the sincere gratitude of his countrymen and justified recurring memorial occasions like the one in which we are taking part. He was a great President, not because he was a great lawyer, not because he was a brilliant orator, not because he was a statesman of profound learning, but because he was a patriot with the highest sense of public duty, because he was a statesman of clear perceptions, of the utmost courage of his convictions, and of great plainess of speech; because he was a man of the highest character, a father and husband of the best type, and because throughout his political life he showed those rugged virtues of the public servant and citizen, the emulation of which by those who follow him will render progress of our political life toward better things a certainty."--WILLAIM HOWARD TAFT, from an Address at the Cleveland Memorial Exercises, Carnegie Hall, New York, March 18, 1909. Effective published copyright ©Mickey Cox 2002, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.