GOVERNOR, 1903
sought it as the reward for long and efficient political service. In each case the effort was a dreary waste. It came to me without the lifting of a finger, the expenditure of a dime or the utterance of a sigh.
It would be the expression of a superficial thought to say that this outcome was the result of accident. In the play of forces and the working of the laws of nature there is no such thing as accident. Men are like the trees. Many of them perish early, but if they once get rooted in the ground, then they grow. Men gather strength and facility by that which they do, and if a man can do anything well he is presently in demand. To every man certain opportunities come in the course of his life. Fortune occasionally knocks at his door. The difference in men is that some see and listen, and to others, failing to heed, she comes no more. I was a judge, but something more than a judge. I bore a part in the affairs of the city and the state beyond the performance of my mere professional duties. Through the years I had been slowly collecting the out-of-the-way books relating to the state and these gave me information which other men did not possess, utilized in papers and addresses until I had come to be a representative and even a champion of its cause in literature and history. For instance, July 16, 1902, the State of New York dedicated its State Park at Stony Point and invited me to deliver the oration. It was a hot day, there was a great crowd with much noise, a sufficiently long programme, in the course of which Governor Odell made an impromptu address, and as a result my formal paper was not listened to with eagerness, but it was a careful study of the event and of Wayne's relation to it and it has had a permanent effect. And now the time had come when the politicians of the state in an emergency needed a man of a type different from that of the ordinary partisan. The politician, upon the whole, does his work on a somewhat higher plane and with a little more regard for its appearance than does the business or pro-
