often—and, especially, let me know what the outlook is on the Pacific coast.
TO JAMES A. GARFIELD
My dear Garfield: Yesterday I received your telegram asking me to go to Cleveland to speak. I shall certainly do so with pleasure and to-day telegraphed to Mr. Chas. O. Evarts, the secretary of the Campaign Committee, to that effect.
Now a word on the campaign as it has developed itself during the last two months. Since my return from the West I have received some strong impressions in that respect from numerous letters and conversations. They were most pointedly summed up in a few words spoken by a New York business man whom I met here yesterday. He is a man of standing and influence in his circle, has always voted the Republican ticket when voting at all and may be taken as a fair representative of a large class. “At first,” he said, “it looked as if the election of General Garfield would give us another sober, quiet, clean, businesslike Administration, uncontrolled by extreme partisan influences, like the present Administration. But for several weeks the old talk and cries of sectional warfare and bloody shirt, etc., have been uppermost again, as is said, with the full approval of Mr. Garfield. Now if that, as well as the old patronage business, is to be the spirit and character of Mr. Garfield's Administration, there are a great many of us who think we might as well try a change, for four years of sectional quarrel may and probably will have a disturbing effect upon the business affairs of the country, and unsettle everything.” I find similar apprehensions expressed in many letters I receive, particularly also from Germans. Of course it is unjust to
