222 A SAGA OF THE SEAS 
Park. A resolution was adopted to present a petition to the 
President bearing the signatures of twenty-five hundred 
leading bankers and business firms of New York City. 
On the committee in charge of this petition besides Field 
were John Jacob Astor, Ethan Allen, August Belmont, W. 
M. Evarts, Wilson G. Hunt, W. H. Macy, Marshall O. Rob- 
erts, A. T. Stewart, Jonathan Sturges, Moses Taylor, and J. 
A. Agnew. Several of these men were old associates of Field. 
A delegation from the committee, including Field, took the 
petition to Washington and conferred with President Grant. 
The bill was vetoed. 
A letter received at this time from Gladstone is interesting 
as showing that, at the end of his first term as Prime Minister, 
he believed that the closing period of his life (he was then 
sixty-five) would be “‘spent in freedom from political commo- 
tion.” Little did he realize that at three later periods he 
would again be Prime Minister; that in fact he had scarcely 
begun his political career. Gladstone’s rival, Disraeli, who 
now became Prime Minister, was seventy and was also to be 
Prime Minister again at a later period. England apparently 
trained her leaders thoroughly before entrusting power to 
them. Gladstone’s letter was as follows: 
11 Carlton House Terrace, 
March 31, 1874. 
My dear Mr. Cyrus Field,-When I was about to thank you for 
your kind letter of the 10th, I received that of the 17th announc- 
ing to me the funeral of Mr. C. Sumner, and the great manifesta- 
tion of feeling which it called forth. 
His loss must be heavily felt, and his name will long be re- 
membered in connection with the abolition of slavery, which was 
wrought out in the United States by methods so wonderful and so 
remote from the general expectation. 
As respects events in this country, they have brought about for 
me a great and personally not an acceptable change. I have al- 
ways desired earnestly that the closing period of my life might be 
spent in freedom from political commotion, and I have plenty of 
