Excerpt from Presidents of the United States: From Pierce to McKinley In attempting to write the story of the lives of the presidents of tho latter half of the nineteenth century, several difficulties have to be faced. In the first place it is almost impossible to get trustworthy material. The lives of these great public men have been written by friends, often for party purposes, when their faults have been concealed and their mistakes made to appear as fine qualities. Time, the greatest of all critics, has not yet had the opportunity of sifting tho wheat from tho chaff in their lives. It has been my aim in this book as far as possible to let the presidents speak for themselves. Where I could I have quoted freely from their letters and speeches, and from the utterances of their immediate friends. In each case considerable space has been given to the early life of the subject under discussion. It must be an inspiration to a nation such as the United States, as it considers the men it has raised to sit in authority at Washington to guide its destinies, to know that the majority of these men have risen from the very humblest origin. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.