Chapter XLVIII (2)

So the best system of education is that which draws its chief support from the voluntary effort of the community, from the individual effort of citizens, and from those burdens of taxation which they voluntarily impose upon themselves.... Government shall be only a help to them, rather than a commander, in the work of education.

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I would rather be beaten in Right than succeed in Wrong.

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Present evils always seem greater than those that never come.

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Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for himself. In all my acquaintance I never knew a man to be drowned who was worth the saving.

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For the noblest man that lives there still remains a conflict.

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No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him and makes the speech.

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After the battle of Arms comes the battle of History.

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There is a fellowship among the Virtues by which one great, generous passion stimulates another.

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Growth is better than Permanence, and permanent growth is better than all.

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The principles of Ethics have not changed by the lapse of years.

* * * * *

The possession of great power no doubt carries with it a contempt for mere external show.

[From a Speech on Repealing the Salary Clause, 1873.]

One of the brightest and greatest of men I know in this nation [Louis Agassiz], a man who, perhaps, has done as much for its intellectual life as any other, told me not many months ago that he had made it the rule of his life to abandon any intellectual pursuit the moment it became commercially valuable; that others would utilize what he had discovered; that his field of work was above the line of commercial values, and when he brought down the great truths of science from the upper heights to the level of commercial values, a thousand hands would be ready to take them, and make them more valuable in the markets of the world. He entered upon his great career, not for the salary it gave him, for that was meagre compared with the pay of those in the lower walks of life; but he followed the promptings of his great nature, and worked for the love of truth and the instruction of mankind.

[Letter to B. A. Hinsdale, 1874.]

The worst days of darkness through which I have ever passed have been greatly alleviated by throwing myself with all my energy into some work relating to others.

[Speech on the Currency and the Public Faith, April 8, 1874.]

There never did exist on this earth a body of men wise enough to determine by any arbitrary rule how much currency is needed for the business of a great country. The laws of trade, the laws of credit, the laws of God impressed upon the elements of this world, are superior to all legislation; and we can enjoy the benefits of these immutable laws only by obeying them.

* * * * *

It has been demonstrated again and again that upon the artisans, the farmers, the day-laborers falls at last the dead weight of all the depreciation and loss that irredeemable paper-money carries in its train. Let this policy be carried out, and the day will surely and speedily come when the nation will clearly trace the cause of its disaster to those who deluded themselves and the people with what Jefferson fitly called "legerdemain tricks of paper-money."

[Speech on the Railway Problem, June 22, 1874.]

We are so involved in the events and movements of society that we do not stop to realize--what is undeniably true--that during the last forty years all modern societies have entered upon a period of change more marked, more pervading, more radical than any that has occurred during the last three hundred years. In saying this, I do not forget our own political and military history, nor the French Revolution of 1793. The changes now taking place have been wrought, and are being wrought, mainly, almost wholly, by a single mechanical contrivance, the steam locomotive. Imagine, if you can, what would happen if to-morrow morning the railway locomotive, and its corollary, the telegraph, were blotted from the earth. At first thought, it would seem impossible to get on at all with the feeble substitutes we should be compelled to adopt in place of these great forces. To what humble proportions mankind would be compelled to scale down the great enterprises they are now pushing forward with such ease! But were this calamity to happen, we should simply be placed where we were forty-three years ago.

There are many persons now living who well remember the day when Andrew Jackson, after four weeks of toilsome travel from his home in Tennessee, reached Washington and took his first oath of office as President of the United States. On that day the railway locomotive did not exist. During that year Henry Clay was struggling to make his name immortal by linking it with the then vast project of building a national road--a turnpike--from the national capital to the banks of the Mississippi.

In the autumn of that very year George Stephenson ran his first experimental locomotive, the "Rocket," from Manchester to Liverpool and back. The rumble of its wheels, redoubled a million times, is echoing to-day on every continent.

* * * * *

The American people have done much for the locomotive, and it has done much for them. We have already seen that it has greatly reduced, if not wholly destroyed, the danger that the government will fall to pieces by its own weight. The railroad has not only brought our people and their industries together, but it has carried civilization into the wilderness, has built up States and Territories, which, but for its power, would have remained deserts for a century to come. "Abroad and at home," as Mr. Adams tersely declares, "it has equally nationalized people and cosmopolized nations." It has played a most important part in the recent movement for the unification and preservation of nations.

It enabled us to do what the old military science had pronounced impossible--to conquer a revolted population of eleven millions, occupying a territory one-fifth as large as the continent of Europe. In an able essay on the railway system, Mr. Charles F. Adams, Jr. has pointed out some of the remarkable achievements of the railroad in our recent history. For example, a single railroad track enabled Sherman to maintain eighty thousand fighting men three hundred miles beyond his base of supplies. Another line, in a space of seven days, brought a re-enforcement of two fully equipped army corps around a circuit of thirteen hundred miles, to strengthen an army at a threatened point. He calls attention to the still more striking fact that for ten years past, with fifteen hundred millions of our indebtedness abroad, an enormous debt at home, unparalleled public expenditures, and a depreciated paper currency, in defiance of all past experience, we have been steadily conquering our difficulties, have escaped the predicted collapse, and are promptly meeting our engagements; because, through energetic railroad development, the country has been producing real wealth, as no country has produced it before. Finally, he sums up the case by declaring that the locomotive has "dragged the country through its difficulties in spite of itself."

* * * * *

In the darkness and chaos of that period, the feudal system was the first important step toward the organization of modern nations. Powerful chiefs and barons intrenched themselves in castles, and, in return for submission and service, gave to their vassals rude protection and ruder laws. But as the feudal chiefs grew in power and wealth, they became the oppressors of their people, taxed and robbed them at will, and finally, in their arrogance, defied the kings and emperors of the Mediaeval States. From their castles, planted on the great thoroughfares, they practised the most capricious extortions on commerce and travel, and thus gave to modern language the phrase, "levy blackmail."

The consolidation of our great industrial and commercial companies, the power they wield, and the relations they sustain to the State and to the industry of the people, do not fall far short of Fourier's definition of commercial or industrial feudalism. The modern barons, more powerful than their military prototypes, own our greatest highways, and levy tribute at will upon all our vast industries. And, as the old feudalism was finally controlled and subordinated only by the combined efforts of the kings and the people of the free cities and towns, so our modern feudalism can be subordinated to the public good only by the great body of the people, acting through their governments by wise and just laws.

I shall not now enter upon the discussion of methods by which this great work of adjustment may be accomplished. But I refuse to believe that the genius and energy which have developed these new and tremendous forces, will fail to make them, not the masters, but the faithful servants of society. It will be a disgrace to our age and to us, if we do not discover some method by which the public functions of these organizations may be brought into full subordination to the public, and that, too, without violence, and without unjust interference with the rights of private individuals. It will be unworthy of our age, and of us, if we make the discussion of this subject a mere warfare against men. For in these great industrial enterprises have been, and still are engaged, some of the noblest and worthiest men of our time. It is the system--its tendencies and its dangers--which society itself has produced, that we are now to confront. And these industries must not be crippled, but promoted. The evils complained of are mainly of our own making. States and communities have willingly and thoughtlessly conferred these great powers upon railways; and they must seek to rectify their own errors without injury to the industries they have encouraged.

* * * * *

It depends upon the wisdom, the culture, the self-control of our people and their representatives, to determine how wisely and how well this question shall be settled. But that it will be solved, and solved in the interest of liberty and justice, I do not doubt. And its solution will open the way to a solution of a whole chapter of similar questions that relate to the conflict between capital and labor.

[From a Speech in the House of Representatives, June, 1874.]

The division between church and state ought to be so absolute that no church property anywhere, in any State or in the nation, should be exempt from taxation; for, if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a church-tax upon the whole community.

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Occasion may be the bugle-call that summons an army to battle, but the blast of a bugle can never make soldiers or win victories.

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Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.

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We cannot study nature profoundly without bringing ourselves into communion with the spirit of art which pervades and fills the universe.

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If there be one thing upon this earth that mankind love and admire better than another, it is a brave man; it is a man who dares to look the devil in the face, and tell him he is a devil.

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It is one of the precious mysteries of sorrow, that it finds solace in unselfish thought.

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True art is but the anti-type of nature, the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility.

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In order to have any success in life, or any worthy success, you must resolve to carry into your work a fulness of knowledge; not merely a sufficiency, but more than a sufficiency.

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Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing.

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If you are not too large for the place, you are too small for it.

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What the arts are to the world of matter, literature is to the world of mind.

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Many books we can read in a railroad car, and feel a harmony between the rushing of the train and the haste of the author; but to enjoy standard works, we need the quiet of a winter evening; an easy-chair before a cheerful fire, and all the equanimity of spirits we can command.

* * * * *

He who would understand the real spirit of literature should not select authors of any one period alone, but rather go to the fountain-head, add trace the little rill as it courses along down the ages, broadening and deepening into the great ocean of thought which the men of the present are exploring.

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The true literary man is no mere gleaner, following in the rear and gathering up the fragments of the world's thought; but he goes down deep into the heart of humanity, watches its throbbings; analyzes the forces at work there; traces out, with prophetic foresight, their tendencies, and thus, standing out far beyond his age, holds up the picture of what it is and is to be.

[Letter to A. B. Hinsdale, 1876.]

I have followed this rule [as a lawyer]: whenever I have had a case, I have undertaken to work out thoroughly the principles involved in it; not for the case alone, but for the sake of comprehending thoroughly that branch of the law.

[From "Life and Character of Almeda A. Booth," June 22, 1876.]

We can study no life intelligently except in its relation to causes and results. Character is the chief element; for it is both a result and a cause--the result of all the elements and forces that combined to form it, and the chief cause of all that is accomplished by its possessor....

Every character is the joint product of nature and nurture. By the first, we mean those inborn qualities of body and mind inherited from parents, or rather from a long line of ancestors. Who shall estimate the effect of those latent forces, enfolded in the spirit of a new-born child, which may date back centuries, and find their origin in the unwritten history of remote ancestors--forces, the germs of which, enveloped in the solemn mystery of life, have been transmitted silently, from generation to generation, and never perish? All-cherishing Nature, provident and unforgetting, gathers up all these fragments that nothing may be lost, but that all may reappear in new combinations. Each new life is thus the "heir of all the ages," the possessor of qualities which only the events of life can unfold.

By the second element, nurture, culture, we designate all those influences which act upon this initial force of character, to retard or strengthen its development. There has been much discussion to determine which of these elements plays the more important part in the formation of character. The truth doubtless is, that sometimes the one and sometimes the other is the greater force; but so far as life and character are dependent upon voluntary action, the second is no doubt the element of chief importance.

[From the Same.]

Not enough attention has been paid to the marked difference between the situation and possibilities of a life developed here in the West, during the first half of the present century, and those of a life nurtured and cultivated in an old and settled community like that of New England.

Consider, for example, the measureless difference between the early surroundings of John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln. Both were possessed of great natural endowments. Adams was blessed with parents whose native force of character, and whose vigorous and thorough culture have never been surpassed by any married pair in America. Young Adams was thoroughly taught by his mother until he had completed his tenth year; and then, accompanying his father to France, he spent two years in a training-school at Paris and three years in the University at Leyden. After two years of diplomatic service, under the skilful guidance of his father's hand, he returned to America, and devoted three years to study at Harvard, where he was graduated at the age of twenty-one; and, three years later, was graduated in the law, under the foremost jurist of his time. With such parentage and such opportunities, who can wonder that by the time he reached the meridian of his life, he was a man of immense erudition, and had honored every great office in the gift of his country?

How startling the contrast, in every particular, between his early life and that of Abraham Lincoln.... Born to an inheritance of the extremest poverty, wholly unaided by his parents, surrounded by the rude forces of the wilderness, only one year at any school, never for a day master of his own time until he reached his majority, forcing his way to the profession of the law by the hardest and roughest road, and beginning its practice at twenty-eight years of age, yet, by the force of unconquerable will and persistent hard work, he attained a foremost place in his profession.

"And, moving up from high to higher,
Became, on fortune's crowning slope,
The pillar of a people's hope,
The centre of a world's desire."

[From the Same.]

It is one of the precious mysteries of sorrow, that it finds solace in unselfish work.

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A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck. Let not poverty stand as an obstacle in your way.

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Here is the volume of our laws. More sacred than the twelve tables of Rome, this rock of the law rises in monumental grandeur alike above the people and the President, above the courts, above Congress, commanding everywhere reverence and obedience to its supreme authority.

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That man makes a vital mistake who judges truth in relation to financial affairs from the changing phases of public opinion. He might as well stand on the shore of the Bay of Fundy, and from the ebb and flow of a single tide attempt to determine the general level of the sea, as to stand upon this floor, and from the current of public opinion on any one debate, judge of the general level of the public mind. It is only when long spaces along the shore of the sea are taken into account that the grand level is found from which the heights and depths are measured. And it is only when long spaces of time are considered, that we find at last that level of public opinion which we call the general judgment of mankind.

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Bad faith on the part of an individual, a city, or even a State, is a small evil in comparison with the calamities which follow bad faith on the part of a sovereign government.

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In the complex and delicately adjusted relations of modern society, confidence in promises lawfully made is the life-blood of trade and commerce. It is the vital air Labor breathes. It is the light which shines on the pathway of prosperity.

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An act of bad faith on the part of a State or municipal corporation, like poison in the blood, will transmit its curse to succeeding generations.

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We are accustomed to hear it said that the great powers of government in this country are divided into two classes; National powers and State powers. That is an incomplete classification. Our fathers carefully divided all governmental powers into three classes; one they gave to the States, another to the Nation; but the third great class, comprising the most precious of all powers, they refused to confer on the State or Nation, but reserved to themselves. This third class of powers has been almost uniformly overlooked by men who have written and discussed the American system.

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Congress must always be the exponent of the political character and culture of the people, and if the next centennial does not find us a great Nation with a great and worthy Congress, it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the Nation do not aid in controlling the political forces which are employed to select the men who shall occupy the great places of trust and power.

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There is scarcely a conceivable form of corruption or public wrong that does not at last present itself at the cashier's desk and demand money. The Legislature therefore, that stands at the cashier's desk and watches with its Argus eyes the demands for payment over the counter is most certain to see all the forms of public rascality.

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A steady and constant Revenue drawn from sources that represent the prosperity of the nation,--a Revenue that grows with the growth of national wealth, and is so adjusted to the expenditures, that a constant and considerable surplus is annually left in the Treasury above all the necessary current demands, a surplus that keeps the Treasury strong, that holds it above the fear of sudden panic, that makes it impregnable against all private combinations, that makes it a terror to all stock-jobbing and gold-gambling,--this is financial health.

[From the "Atlantic Monthly," July, 1877.]

The most alarming feature of our situation is the fact, that so many citizens of high character and solid judgment pay but little attention to the sources of political power, to the selection of those who shall make their laws.... It is precisely this neglect of the first steps in our political processes that has made possible the worst evils of our system. Corrupt and incompetent presidents, judges, and legislators can be removed, but when the fountains of political power are corrupted, when voters themselves become venal, and elections fraudulent, there is no remedy except by awakening the public conscience, and bringing to bear upon the subject the power of public opinion and the penalties of the law.... In a word, our national safety demands that the fountains of political power shall be made pure by intelligence, and kept pure by vigilance; that the best citizens shall take heed to the selection and election of the worthiest and most intelligent among them to hold seats in the national legislature; and that when the choice has been made, the continuance of their representative shall depend upon his faithfulness, his ability, and his willingness to work.

[Speech on the presentation to Congress of Carpenter's painting of President Lincoln and his Cabinet, at the time of his first reading of the Proclamation of Emancipation, January 16, 1878.]

Let us pause to consider the actors in that scene. In force of character, in thoroughness and breadth of culture, in experience of public affairs, and in national reputation, the cabinet that sat around that council-board has had no superior, perhaps no equal in our history. Seward, the finished scholar, the consummate orator, the great leader of the senate, had come to crown his career with those achievements which placed him in the first rank of modern diplomatists. Chase, with a culture and a frame of massive grandeur, stood as the rock and pillar of the public credit, the noble embodiment of the public faith. Stanton was there, a very Titan of strength, the great organizer of victory. Eminent lawyers, men of business, leaders of states, and leaders of men, completed the group.

But the man who presided over that council, who inspired and guided its determinations, was a character so unique that he stood alone, without a model in history, or a parallel among men. Born on this day, sixty-nine years ago, to an inheritance of extremest poverty, surrounded by the rude forces of the wilderness; wholly unaided by parents; only one year in any school; never, for a day, master of his own time until he reached his majority; making his way to the profession of the law by the hardest and roughest road; yet, by force of unconquerable will and persistent, patient work, he attained a foremost place in his profession,

"And, moving up from high to higher,
Became, on fortune's crowning slope,
The pillar of a people's hope,
The centre of a world's desire."

At first it was the prevailing belief that he would be only the nominal head of his administration; that its policy would be directed by the eminent statesmen he had called to his council. How erroneous this opinion was, may be seen from a single incident. Among the earliest, most difficult, and most delicate duties of his administration, was the adjustment of our relations with Great Britain. Serious complications, even hostilities, were apprehended. On the 21st day of May, 1861, the Secretary of State presented to the President his draught of a letter of instructions to Minister Adams, in which the position of the United States and the attitude of Great Britain were set forth with the clearness and force which long experience and great ability had placed at the command of the Secretary.

Upon almost every page of that original draught are erasures, additions, and marginal notes in the handwriting of Abraham Lincoln, which exhibit a sagacity, a breadth of wisdom, and a comprehension of the whole subject, impossible to be found except in a man of the very first order. And these modifications of a great state-paper were made by a man who, but three months before, had entered, for the first time, the wide theatre of executive action.

Gifted with an insight and a foresight which the ancients would have called divination, he saw, in the midst of darkness and obscurity, the logic of events, and forecast the result. From the first, in his own quaint, original way, without ostentation or offence to his associates, he was pilot and commander of his administration. He was one of the few great rulers whose wisdom increased with his power, and whose spirit grew gentler and tenderer as his triumphs were multiplied.

[From the "North American Review," May-June, 1878.]

The Secretary of War is a civil officer; one of the constitutional advisers of the President--his civil executive to direct and control military affairs, and conduct army administration for the President.... This was clearly understood in our early history, and it is worthy of note that our most eminent Secretaries of War have been civilians, who brought to the duties of the office great political and legal experience, and other high qualities of statesmanship.

Perhaps it was wise in Washington to choose as the first Secretary of War, a distinguished soldier, for the purpose of creating and setting in order the military establishment; but it may well be doubted if any subsequent appointment of a soldier to that position has been wise. In fact, most of the misadjustments between the Secretary of War and the army, so much complained of in recent years, originated with a Secretary of War who had been a soldier, and could hardly refrain from usurping the functions of command....

No very serious conflict of jurisdiction and command occurred until Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War. His early training as a soldier, his spirit of self-reliance and habits of imperious command, soon brought him into collision with General Scott, and were the occasion of a correspondence, perhaps the most acrimonious ever carried on by any prominent public man of our country.

[From a Speech at Faneuil Hall, Boston, September 11, 1878.]

The Republican party of this country has said, and it says to-day, that, forgetting all the animosities of the war, forgetting all the fierceness and the passion of it, it reaches out both its hands to the gallant men who fought us, and offers all fellowship, all comradeship, all feelings of brotherhood, on this sole condition, and on that condition they will insist forever: That in the war for the Union we were right, forever right, and that in the war against the Union they were wrong, forever wrong. We never made terms, we never will make terms, with the man who denies the everlasting rightfulness of our cause. That would be treason to the dead and injustice to the living; and on that basis alone our pacification is complete. We ask that it be realized, and we shall consider it fully realized when it is just as safe and just as honorable for a good citizen of South Carolina to be a Republican there as it is for a good citizen of Massachusetts to be a Democrat here.

[From an Address at Hiram College.]

Our great dangers are not from without. We do not live by the consent of any other nation. We must look within to find elements of danger.

[From a Speech on the Ninth Census.]

Statesmanship consists rather in removing causes than in punishing, or evading results.

[From a Speech, December 10, 1878.]

The man who wants to serve his country must put himself in the line of its leading thought, and that is the restoration of business, trade, commerce, industry, sound political economy, hard money, and the payment of all obligations; and the man who can add anything in the direction of accomplishing any of these purposes is a public benefactor.

* * * * *

The scientific spirit has cast out the Demons and presented us with Nature, clothed in her right mind and living under the reign of law. It has given us for the sorceries of the alchemist, the beautiful laws of chemistry; for the dreams of the astrologer, the sublime truths of astronomy; for the wild visions of cosmogony, the monumental records of geology; for the anarchy of diabolism, the laws of God.

* * * * *

We no longer attribute the untimely death of infants to the sin of Adam, but to bad nursing and ignorance.

* * * * *

Truth is so related and correlated that no department of her realm is wholly isolated.

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Truth is the food of the human spirit, which could not grow in its majestic proportions without clearer and more truthful views of God and his universe.

* * * * *

Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no ideas behind it is simply brutality.

* * * * *

I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost, that the characters of men are moulded and inspired by what their fathers have done; that, treasured up in American souls are all the unconscious influences of the great deeds of the Anglo-Saxon race, from Agincourt to Bunker Hill.

* * * * *

Eternity alone will reveal to the human race its debt of gratitude to the peerless and immortal name of Washington.

* * * * *

I doubt if any man equalled Samuel Adams in formulating and uttering the fierce, clear, and inexorable logic of the Revolution.

* * * * *

The last eight decades have witnessed an Empire spring up in the full panoply of lusty life, from a trackless wilderness.

* * * * *

In their struggle with the forces of nature, the ability to labor was the richest patrimony of the colonist.

* * * * *

The granite hills are not so changeless and abiding as the restless sea.

* * * * *

To him a battle was neither an earthquake, nor a volcano, nor a chaos of brave men and frantic horses involved in vast explosions of gunpowder. It was rather a calm rational combination of force against force.--_Oration on Geo. H. Thomas._

* * * * *

After the fire and blood of the battle-fields have disappeared, nowhere does war show its destroying power so certainly and so relentlessly as in the columns which represent the taxes and expenditures of the nation.

[From a Speech, June 2, 1879.]

The Resumption of Specie Payments closes the most memorable epoch in our history since the birth of the Union. Eighteen hundred and sixty-one and eighteen hundred and seventy-nine are the opposite shores of that turbulent sea whose storms so seriously threatened with shipwreck the prosperity, the honor, and the life of the nation. But the horrors and dangers of the middle-passage have at last been mastered; and out of the night and tempest the Republic has landed on the shore of this new year, bringing with it union and liberty, honor and peace.

* * * * *

Our country needs not only a national but an international currency.

* * * * *

Let us have equality of dollars before the law, so that the trinity of our political creed shall be--equal States, equal men, and equal dollars throughout the Union.

[Address, at the Memorial Meeting, in the House of Representatives, January 16, 1879.]

No page of human history is so instructive and significant as the record of those early influences which develop the character and direct the lives of eminent men. To every man of great original power, there comes in early youth, a moment of sudden discovery--of self recognition--when his own nature is revealed to himself, when he catches, for the first time, a strain of that immortal song to which his own spirit answers, and which becomes thenceforth and forever the inspiration of his life--

"Like noble music unto noble words."

More than a hundred years ago, in Strasbourg, on the Rhine, in obedience to the commands of his father, a German lad was reluctantly studying the mysteries of the civil law, but feeding his spirit as best he could upon the formal and artificial poetry of his native land, when a page of William Shakespeare met his eye, and changed the whole current of his life. Abandoning the law, he created and crowned with an immortal name the grandest epoch of German literature.

Recording his own experience, he says:

At the first touch of Shakespeare's genius, I made the glad
confession that something inspiring hovered above me.... The
first page of his that I read made me his for life; and when
I had finished a single play, I stood like one born blind,
on whom a miraculous hand bestows sight in a moment. I saw,
I felt, in the most vivid manner that my existence was
infinitely expanded.

This Old World experience of Goethe's was strikingly reproduced, though under different conditions and with different results, in the early life of Joseph Henry. You have just heard the incident worthily recounted; but let us linger over it a moment. An orphan boy of sixteen, of tough Scotch fibre, laboring for his own support at the handicraft of the jeweler, unconscious of his great power, delighted with romance and the drama, dreaming of a possible career on the stage, his attention was suddenly arrested by a single page of an humble book of science which chanced to fall into his hands. It was not the flash of a poetic vision which aroused him. It was the voice of great Nature calling her child. With quick recognition and glad reverence his spirit responded; and from that moment to the end of his long and honored life, Joseph Henry was the devoted student of science, the faithful interpreter of nature.

To those who knew his gentle spirit, it is not surprising that ever afterward he kept the little volume near him, and cherished it as the source of his first inspiration. In the maturity of his fame he recorded on its fly-leaf his gratitude. Note his words:

This book, under Providence, has exerted a remarkable
influence on my life.... It opened to me a new world of
thought and enjoyment, invested things before almost
unnoticed with the highest interest, fixed my mind on the
study of nature, and caused me to resolve, at the time of
reading it, that I would devote my life to the acquisition
of knowledge.

We have heard from his venerable associates with what resolute perseverance he trained his mind and marshalled his powers for the higher realms of science. He was the first American after Franklin who made a series of successful original experiments in electricity and magnetism. He entered the mighty line of Volta, Galvani, Oersted, Davy, and Ampere, the great exploring philosophers of the world, and added to their work a final great discovery, which made the electro-magnetic telegraph possible.

It remained only for the inventor to construct an instrument and an alphabet. Professor Henry refused to reap any pecuniary rewards from his great discovery, but gave freely to mankind what nature and science had given to him. The venerable gentleman of almost eighty years, who has just addressed us so eloquently, has portrayed the difficulties which beset the government in its attempt to determine how it should wisely and worthily execute the trust of Smithson. It was a perilous moment for the credit of America when that bequest was made. In his large catholicity of mind, Smithson did not trammel the bequest with conditions. In nine words he set forth its object--"for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." He asked and believed that America would interpret his wish aright, and with the liberal wisdom of science....

For ten years Congress wrestled with those nine words of Smithson and could not handle them. Some political philosophers of that period held that we had no constitutional authority to accept the gift at all [laughter] and proposed to send it back to England. Every conceivable proposition was made. The colleges clutched at it; the libraries wanted it; the publication societies desired to scatter it. The fortunate settlement of the question was this: that, after ten years of wrangling, Congress was wise enough to acknowledge its own ignorance, and authorized a body of men to find some one who knew how to settle it. [Applause.] And these men were wise enough to choose your great comrade to undertake the task. Sacrificing his brilliant prospects as a discoverer, he undertook the difficult work. He drafted a paper, in which he offered an interpretation of the will of Smithson, mapped out a plan which would meet the demands of science, and submitted it to the suffrage of the republic of scientific scholars. After due deliberation it received the almost unanimous approval of the scientific world. With faith and sturdy perseverance, he adhered to the plan and steadily resisted all attempts to overthrow it.

In the thirty-two years during which he administered the great trust, he never swerved from his first purpose; and he succeeded at last in realizing the ideas with which he started.

The germ of our political institutions, the primary cell
from which they were evolved, was in the New England town,
and the vital force, the informing soul of the town, was the
Town Meeting, which for all local concerns was king, lords,
and commons in all.

It is as much the duty of all good men to protect and defend
the reputation of worthy public servants as to detect public
rascals.

Political parties, like poets, are born, not made. No act of
political mechanics, however wise, can manufacture to order
and make a platform, and put a party on it which will live
and flourish.

[On the Relation of the Government to Science, February 11, 1879.]

What ought to be the relation of the National Government to science? What, if anything, ought we to do in the way of promoting science? For example, if we have the power, would it be wise for Congress to appropriate money out of the Treasury, to employ naturalists to find out all that is to be known of our American birds? Ornithology is a delightful and useful study; but would it be wise for Congress to make an appropriation for the advancement of that science? In my judgment, manifestly not. We would thereby make one favored class of men the rivals of all the ornithologists who, in their private way, following the bent of their genius, may be working out the results of science in that field. I have no doubt that an appropriation out of our Treasury for that purpose would be a positive injury to the advancement of science, just as an appropriation to establish a church would work injury to religion.

Generally, the desire of our scientific men is to be let alone to work in free competition with all the scientific men of the world; to develop their own results, and get the credit of them each for himself; not to have the Government enter the lists as the rival of private enterprise.

As a general principal, therefore, the United States ought not to interfere in matters of science, but should leave its development to the free, voluntary action of our great third estate, the people themselves.

In this non-interference theory of the Government, I do not go to the extent of saying that we should do nothing for education--for primary education. That comes under another consideration--the necessity of the nation to protect itself, and the consideration that it is cheaper and wiser to give education than to build jails. But I am speaking now of the higher sciences.

To the general principle I have stated, there are a few obvious exceptions which should be clearly understood when we legislate on the subject. In the first place, the Government should aid all sorts of scientific inquiry that are necessary to the intelligent exercise of its own functions.

For example, as we are authorized by the Constitution and compelled by necessity to build and maintain light-houses on our coast and establish fog-signals, we are bound to make all necessary scientific inquiries in reference to light and its laws, sound and its laws--to do whatever in the way of science is necessary to achieve the best results in lighting our coasts and warning our mariners of danger. So, when we are building iron-clads for our navy or casting guns for our army, we ought to know all that is scientifically possible to be known about the strength of materials and the laws of mechanics which apply to such structures. In short, wherever in exercising any of the necessary functions of the Government scientific inquiry is needed, let us make it, to the fullest extent, and at the public expense.

There is another exception to the general rule of leaving science to the voluntary action of the people. Wherever any great popular interest, affecting whole classes, possibly all classes of the community, imperatively need scientific investigation, and private enterprise cannot accomplish it, we may wisely intervene and help where the Constitution gives us authority. For example, in discovering the origin of yellow-fever and the methods of preventing its ravages, the nation should do, for the good of all, what neither the States nor individuals can accomplish. I might perhaps include in a third exception those inquiries which, in consequence of their great magnitude and cost, cannot be successfully made by private individuals. Outside these three classes of inquiries, the Government ought to keep its hands off, and leave scientific experiment and inquiry to the free competition of those bright, intelligent men whose genius leads them into the fields of research.

And I suspect, when we read the report of our commissioner to the late Paris Exposition, which shows such astonishing results, so creditable to our country, so honorable to the genius of our people, it will be found, in any final analysis of causes, that the superiority of Americans in that great Exposition resulted mainly from their superior freedom, and the greater competition between mind and mind untrammelled by Government interference; I believe it will be found we are best serving the cause of religion and science, and all those great primary rights which we did not delegate to the Congress or the States, but left the people free to enjoy and maintain them.

[Speech on the National Election.]

The great danger which threatens this country is, that our sovereign may be dethroned or destroyed by corruption. In any monarchy of the world, if the sovereign be slain or become lunatic, it is easy to put another in his place, for the sovereign is a person. But our sovereign is the whole body of voters. If you kill, or corrupt, or render lunatic our sovereign, there is no successor, no regent to take his place. The source of our sovereign's supreme danger, the point where his life is vulnerable, is at the ballot-box, where his will is declared; and if we cannot stand by that cradle of our sovereign's heir-apparent and protect it to the uttermost against all assassins and assailants, we have no government and no safety for the future.

[Remarks, in the House of Representatives, February 11, 1879, on the Life and Character of Gustave Schleicher.]

We are accustomed to say, and we have heard to-night, that he [Gustave Schleicher] was born on foreign soil. In one sense that is true; and yet in a very proper historic sense he was born in our fatherland. One of the ablest of recent historians begins his opening volume with the declaration that England is not the fatherland of the English-speaking people, but the ancient home, the real fatherland of our race, is the ancient forests of Germany. The same thought was suggested by Montesquieu long ago, when he declared in his Spirit of Laws that the British constitution came out of the woods of Germany.

To this day the Teutonic races maintain the same noble traits that Tacitus describes in his admirable history of the manners and character of the Germans. We may therefore say that the friend whose memory we honor to-night is one of the elder brethren of our race. He came to America direct from our fatherland, and not, like our own fathers, by the way of England.

We who were born and have passed all our lives in this wide New World can hardly appreciate the influences that surrounded his early life. Born on the borders of that great forest of Germany, the Odenwald, filled as it is with the memories and traditions of centuries, in which are mingled Scandinavian mythology, legends of the middle ages, romances of feudalism and chivalry, histories of barons and kings, and the struggles of a brave people for a better civilization; reared under the institutions of a strong, semi-despotic government; devoting his early life to personal culture, entering at an early age the University of Giessen, venerable with its two and a half centuries of existence, with a library of four hundred thousand volumes at his hand, with a great museum of the curiosities and mysteries of nature to study, he fed his eager spirit upon the rich culture which that Old World could give him, and at twenty-four years of age, in company with a band of thirty-seven young students, like himself, cultivated, earnest, liberty-loving almost to the verge of communism--and who of us would not be communists in a despotism?--he came to this country, attracted by one of the most wild and romantic pictures of American history, the picture of Texas as it existed near forty years ago; the country discovered by La Salle at the end of his long and perilous voyage from Quebec to the northern lakes and from the lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; the country possessed alternately by the Spanish and the French and then by Mexico; the country made memorable by such names as Blair, Houston, Albert Sidney Johnson, and Mirabeau Lamar, perhaps as adventurous and daring spirits as ever assembled on any spot of the earth; a country that achieved its freedom by heroism never surpassed, and which maintained its perilous independence for ten years in spite of border enemies and European intrigues.

It is said that a society was formed in Europe embracing in its membership men of high rank, even members of royal families, for the purpose of colonizing the new Republic of the Lone Star, and making it a dependency of Europe under their patronage; but without sharing in their designs, some twenty thousand Germans found their way to the new Republic, and among these young Schleicher came.

[From the "North American Review," March, 1879.]

The ballot was given to the negro not so much to enable him to govern others as to prevent others from misgoverning him. Suffrage is the sword and shield of our law, the best armament that liberty offers to the citizen.

[From the Same, June, 1879.]

If our republic were blotted from the earth and from the memory of mankind, and if no record of its history survived, except a copy of our revenue laws and our appropriation bills for a single year, the political philosopher would be able from these materials alone to reconstruct a large part of our history, and sketch with considerable accuracy the character and spirit of our institutions.

[Speech in Congress, on the first anniversary of Mr. Lincoln's death.]

There are times in the history of men and nations when they stand so near the veil that separates mortals and immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the breathings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite. Through such a time has this nation passed. When two hundred and fifty thousand brave spirits passed from the field of honor through that thin veil to the presence of God, and when at last its parting folds admitted the martyred President to the company of the dead heroes of the republic, the nation stood so near the veil that the whispers of God were heard by the children of men. Awe-stricken by his voice, the American people knelt in tearful reverence, and made a solemn covenant with God and each other that this nation should be saved from its enemies; that all its glories should be restored, and on the ruins of slavery and treason the temples of freedom and justice should be built, and stand forever. It remains for us, consecrated by that great event, and under that covenant with God, to keep the faith, to go forward in the great work until it shall be completed. Following the lead of that great man, and obeying the high behests of God, let us remember

"He has sounded forth his trumpet, that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat;
Be swift, my soul, to answer him; be jubilant, my feet;
For God is marching on."

Every great political party that has done this country any good has given to it some immortal ideas that have outlived all the members of that party.

[Speech at Cleveland, Ohio, October 11, 1879.--Resumption of Specie Payments.]

Now, what has been the trouble with us? 1860 was one shore of prosperity, and 1879 the other; and between these two high shores has flowed the broad, deep, dark river of fire and blood and disaster through which this nation has been compelled to wade, and in whose depths it has been almost suffocated and drowned. In the darkness of that terrible passage we carried liberty in our arms; we bore the Union on our shoulders; and we bore in our hearts and on our arms what was even better than liberty and Union--we bore the faith, and honor, and public trust of this mighty Nation. And never, until we came up out of the dark waters, out of the darkness of that terrible current, and planted our feet upon the solid shore of 1879--never, I say, till then could this country look back to the other shore and feel that its feet were on solid ground, and then look forward to the rising uplands of perpetual peace and prosperity that should know no diminution in the years to come.

[Speech at Cleveland, October 11, 1879.--Appeal to Young Men.]