Mornings on Horseback

Thus began the Bulloch line in America, the annals of which, by Mittie’s time, included one noted

A man who will steal for me will steal from me." Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal.

I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.

It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.

To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was a though he was in league with them.

All American citizens, whether born here or elsewhere, whether of one creed or another, stand on the same footing; we welcome every honest immigrant no matter from what country he comes, provided only that he leaves off his former nationality, and remains neither Celt nor Saxon, neither Frenchman nor German, but becomes an American, desirous of fulfilling in good faith the duties of American citizenship.

Look up and not down; look out and not in; look forward and not back, and lend a hand.

In New York the Seligmans were major backers of the immensely profitable Pioneer Cattle Company, and Poultney Bigelow’s father, the diplomat John Bigelow, was another of those tied into Teschemacher & DeBillier.

Cultivate a hopeful disposition, he told them. Accept the love of others and you will be

My life has been a gamble. I have lived for pleasure only. I have never done anything I disliked when I could possibly avoid it. . . . I hoped against hope that something would turn up and pull me through. It was the hope of a gambler.

It may be,” he told Bamie, “that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty-one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty-nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.

All that gives me most pleasure in the retrospect,” he preached to his older son, “is connected with others, an evidence that we are not placed here to live exclusively for ourselves.

It had been a fair fight, and while he found Blaine repellent, there was something about stalking off, quitting the game because he lost, that was even more repellent, quite apart from whatever personal ambition he harbored. He had no sentimental attachment to majority rule. “It may be,” he told Bamie, “that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty-one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty-nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.” But voice of God, devil, fool, whatever it was, he must abide by it, both out of some fundamental sense of fair play and out of plain determination to have a stake in political power. If he bolted, he knew, he would be finished, out of politics except in some chance or peripheral fashion. He would be an outsider, devoid of that “inside influence” he knew to be essential if he was ever to accomplish anything. He had arrived at the point where he must decide whether he was to be a “mornin’ glory” or the real thing.

I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking.

Their party, for all its failings, its scandals and fallen idols, was still the party of Lincoln, the party that saved the Union, freed the slaves, restored the national credit. Even to so sensitive a moralist as George William Curtis it remained “the party of the best instincts, of the highest desires of the American people.” Many men were Republicans as they were church elders or lodge brothers. It was as if one belonged to an order. Their loyalties, their faith and pride in party, were often deeper, more vital to their self-respect and sense of worth than they could express.