X judgment is an imperfect instrument for the discovery of truth. Our intellectual vision is blurred and distorted. The best men, and the clearest sighted, are affected fearfully with intellectual blindness and astigmatism. The experience of men from the beginning tells us that there are no matters about which men are more likely to be mistaken than those which seem to them the clearest principles of morals and duty. In adopting the rule just stated, we are determining not whether the citizen will obey the dictates of his own conscience, but whether in a given case he will presume that the collective judgment of the State is more likely to be right than his own, and therefore that his conscience should require him to obey that. In my own experience I have often found that counsel that seems to me wicked and foolish has come from men whom I cannot help believing are among the wisest and best men I have ever known. It is then the duty of a good citizen to live for the Republic; and he must be ready to give life, and health, his wealth and comfort, his home, his wife and his child, for his country. The first element of patriotism and citizenship is personal character. I believe that the quality of that moral being we call the Republic is higher and better than the average quality of the individual citizen. France is something better than the individual Frenchman. Switzerland is something better than the individual Swiss. America is something far higher and nobler than the individual American. Yet the national will and desire are the result of the blending and fusing of the will and desires of millions upon millions of individual souls. In that mighty alchemy, the mean elements, the impure flux and dross, are eliminated and the pure gold or crystal remains. Yet personal quality and character largely affect and control the national quality and character. So the first great service the individual American can render to his country is the service of an honest, clean, industrious, and successful private life. If this quality be given to our citizenship all our conflicts of race, and color, and nationality, and section will, I am sure, disappear. The Englishman and the Scotsman, the Scandina vian and the Swiss take their places instantly in our social and political life. There is no prejudice against them. No man denies them their full right of citizenship, or in society. It is because the men of those races in general bring with them the simple virtues which should belong to Republican citizenship, veracity, temperance, industry, sobriety and self-respect. The Celt is unsurpassed, I am not sure but unequaled, in some of the loftiest qualities of citizenship. From the earliest periods which history records he has impressed and dominated the nations with which he has mingled, with his great qualities. He is a splendid soldier, faithful in domestic life, affectionate, generous and enterprising. When he came, over sixty years ago, he came in many instances from a condition in which he had suffered centuries of oppression. So the virtues of temperance and sobriety he learned a little later. He in that particular only repeated the experience of our own ancestors. But he has acquired, and is acquiring, them with marvelous rapidity. The prejudice against the Irishman which existed half a century ago is fast disappearing, as we come to know his moral quality and his rapid growth in civic virtue. The negro with more difficulty and delay is, in my judgment, to have a like experience. No class or race possessing these virtues will fail in a Republic to receive the full consideration to which it is entitled. But something more is needed in the vast and delicate mechanism of a self-governing state than a faultless private life. The good citizen must be educated to understand the difficult questions of Government. He must know what policy is wisest and best, and he must do his share to cause that policy to take effect in the action of the Commonwealth. The state, as I have said, is a moral and sentient being. Its conduct must be righteous and wise and brave. The good citizen must lay aside every thought of private advantage, and devote himself, and all that he has, life, property, and the best service of intellect and soul to its welfare. So far in our history there has been little need of spur, or stimulant, to obtain the devoted service of the citizen in war. When the country has been in peril in time of war the American youth has been ever ready, is, and ever will be ready, to respond to the call, even if the extremest sacrifice demanded. When duty whispers low, "Thou must." The youth replies, "I can." In time of peace the duty is not so well done. Many men disdain to take a share in political affairs. They do not like the equality to which they must submit. Others take part in them only to promote their own ambitions, others even for purposes of money-making, or personal gain. But in general I believe the purposes of the American people are lofty and patriotic. It is clear that the larger and more general the interest in public affairs, the purer and more patriotic purpose will be the more likely to prevail. Corruption and self-seeking, in the nature of the case, must be limited in their operation. No wealth can bribe, and no personal ambition or corrupt desire can control, the political action of a people of eighty millions where suffrage is universal. So the two things that are necessary are, first, that the whole people shall be instructed, and second, that the whole people shall be inspired to take their full share in the conduct of the state. To accomplish the first of these every man must have some leisure and opportunity to inform himself in political matters. Where brain or body is worn out by constant drudgery, occupying all the working hours of the day, the knowledge and intelligence needed for the conduct of the state become impossible. This consideration has always furnished, to my mind, the chief argument for tariff legislation and for legislation regulating hours of labor. The American workman is to govern the state. To govern the state he must have leisure and his mental faculties not exhausted by drudgery. So he must have wages sufficient to educate his children, and to give him the decencies and comforts of life essential to self-respecting citizenship, and reasonable leisure when his day's work is done. Without these, he will, if he retains his vote, be sure so to govern the state that all its other members will suffer. The good citizen, having contributed to his own country in his own person, an honest, industrious, frugal, unselfish, publicspirited character, must then take his share in the conduct of the state. This in general he can do only through the instrumentality of a party. A party is but an association of men who, agreeing in general as to what is best for the Republic, desire to secure it by combined effort, and, in order to commit the administration of the Republic to the men who on the whole they think best fitted to secure it for those purposes which can be accomplished only by acting in concert, they must act in concert. I am satisfied, on as thorough study of history and of this particular question as I have been able to make, that the best things which have been secured for liberty, good government, and the welfare of mankind, have been secured in free states by party government. The freer and nearer a pure Republic the state, the more necessary the organization of party. No man who ever left one of the great parties of this country or of any other, to become what is called Independent, ever accomplished anything considerable in the way of usefulness to his country after he did it. I may be mistaken in this opinion. But I think I can abundantly maintain it by historic examples. I do not think I have been led to it by a blind attachment to party. It is an opinion formed on the most careful reflection with my eyes wide open, and with the aid of such intellectual vision as God has given me. The good citizen, having determined with what party he will act at any particular time, must consult with his party associates, and must be present at the meetings when its policies are determined, and its candidates are chosen. If he neglects that duty by reason of fastidiousness, or indolence, or false pride, he can have very little usefulness. Attendance upon the caucus is, in general, as important as voting at the polls. Then comes the question what the good citizen shall do in the way of holding political office. He ought never to urge his own. desires upon other men, still less make claims or demands for office upon his fellow-citizens. He is the worst judge in the world of the question whether he is fit for office, or whether it will be better for the public interest that he, or that some other man, shall be selected. But if his fellow-citizens need his aid in any field of public service it must only be the superior demand and claim of his family, or those dependent upon him for support, which will justify him in disobeying the call. The consideration just stated should be of equal weight with the man who inclines to refuse public office from modesty, or from indolence, or from fear of receiving blows which men in political life must take, or of being suspected by his neighbors of low personal ambitions. If any good man be inclined to disobey a call to public service because of his belief that he is not fit for it, let him remember, as I have just said, that his opinion on that question is of small value. If he accepts a public office, of two things at least he is sure; first, the office will be honestly and cleanly administered by an incumbent who desires to do his best for the people's service and whose objects are public and not personal; next, if the office be political, the measures which he thinks best for the public service are those which will be adopted so far as one official can control the matter, and he will secure the public against any attempt to accomplish in that office what he thinks hurtful. There is surely nothing more exasperating to men who have taken and given the hard blows of political strife, who have turned their backs on the attractions of wealth, or quiet, or the comforts of home and family, to spend their lives in the service of the Republic, with no reward but the having served her, than to hear the prattle of those who live and grow rich and fat in a commonwealth, founded and builded by the toil of other men, receiving benefits from their race and rendering none, when they talk of their disdain for the roughness, and coarseness, and baseness of politics. Shakespeare has photographed so that all time shall see it the little soul of the citizen who disdains politics: "But I remember, when the fight was done, |