Presidential Courtesy and the Press
By Editor
President Cleveland has taken a good deal to heart the license in which the public press indulges. We confess that the press should be a great deal milder and more courteous than it is; but the President may congratulate himself that he is free from such thoroughgoing personalities as were inflicted upon his predecessor, James Madison. In Madison's day, "a lady famed for her beauty and the luxuriance of her hair, drove to the door of the President's house, and let down her long tresses, and, holding them up, exclaimed that she hoped to live to see the time when they should be wound into a rope to hang the President with." And when in 1814 the British took Washington and burned the President's house, and President Madison was compelled to flee, he wandered about in the night and in the storm seeking a place of refuge, and came to the house of a political opponent, and he and his party were actually turned away from the door into the woods. We are certain that President Cleveland need fear no repetition of the former of these instances, and we are perfectly sure that there is not a house in all the broad land whose door would not swing wide open to welcome him in sunshine, in the middle of the day, and in all the dignity of his noble office; much more would it be so in a storm, and in the night, and he seeking a place of refuge.