Historical voices

They are Americans, and every American has an equal right to challenge his share of glory in their deeds.

The West will shape our destinies because she will have more people and a greater territory, and because the whole development of the Western country is such as to make it peculiarly the exponent of all that is most vigorously and…

The great group of wealthy and powerful States about the Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri, and their tributaries, will have far more weight than any other section in deciding the fate of the Republic in the centuries that are…

Of course embers smoulder here and there; but the country at large is growing more and more to take pride in the valor, the self-devotion, the loyalty to an ideal, displayed alike by the soldiers of both sides in the Civil War.

The war with Spain was the most absolutely righteous foreign war in which any nation has engaged during the nineteenth century, and not the least of its many good features was the unity it brought about between the sons of the men who wore…

Neither our national nor our local civil life can be what it should be unless it is marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men take the…

Fellow-feeling, sympathy in the broadest sense, is the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life.

There can be no meddling with the laws of righteousness, of decency, of morality.

It is a dreadful thing that public sentiment should condone misconduct in a public man; but this is no excuse for the public man, if by his conduct he still further degrades public sentiment.

To pander to depravity inevitably means to increase the depravity.

There must be many compromises; but we can not compromise with dishonesty, with sin.

So, in our turn, we of to-day are bound to try to tread in the footsteps of those great Americans who in the past have held high ideal and have striven mightily through practical methods to realize that ideal.

He did not lose his temper at their conduct, or cease to strive for the abolition of slavery and the restoration of the Union; and whereas their conduct foreboded disaster to both causes, his efforts secured the success of both.

The fanatical antislavery people wished to hurry him into unwise, extreme, and premature action, and denounced him as compromising with the forces of evil, as being a practical politician—which he was, if practicality is held to include…

Lincoln disregarded the jibes of these men, who did their puny best to hurt the great cause for which he battled; and they never, by their pin-pricks, succeeded in diverting him from the real foe.

But, after all, he can generally be disregarded, whereas the real and dangerous foe is the corrupt politician, whom we can not afford to disregard.

We must not be diverted from our warfare with these powerful and efficient corruptionists by irritation at the vain prattlers who think they are at the head of the reform forces, whereas they are really wandering in bypaths in the rear.

Cynicism in public life is a curse, and when a man has lost the power of enthusiasm for righteousness it will be better for him and the country if he abandons public life.

It is vital that every man who is in politics, as a man ought to be, with a disinterested purpose to serve the public, should strive steadily for reform; that he should have the highest ideals.

We need men who are far-sighted and resolute; men who combine sincerity with sanity.

That species of practicability eats into the moral sense of the people like a cancer, and he who practices it can no more be excused than an editor who debauches public decency in order to sell his paper.

As soon as a politician gets to the point of thinking that in order to be “practical” he has got to be base, he has become a noxious member of the body politic.

Yet he must consider the question of expediency, in order that he may do all the good possible, for otherwise he will do none.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.