He was a man of absolute integrity, of absolute veracity, and of a tender and boundless compassion.

He was absolutely without any pretence to oratory; and yet for thirty minutes he played upon his audience as it were a pipe, and plucked out the heart of its mystery.

He is a lion among jackals; the best political organizer in the State.

Many bad men found that somehow their ambitions were nipped in the bud by a process they could hardly understand, and many good men were called into the public service in obedience to a summons from a hand the influence of which they never…

And yet, in all these services and contests he never appealed to a base passion or to a low ambition in any man.

He summoned the nobility in men, and it answered to his call.

He loved with the whole intensity of his nature, his country, his Commonwealth, and the city which was his home.

He loved the great cause of human freedom and equality with the passionate devotion which a lover feels for his mistress.

He was the most disinterested man I ever knew in public life.

He has done the work of a true man,-- Crown him, honor him, love him.

Weep over him, tears of women, Stoop, manliest brows, above him!

For the warmest of hearts is frozen, The freest of hands is still; And the gap in our picked and chosen The long years may not fill.

He forgot his own soul for others, Himself to his neighbor lending; He found the Lord in his suffering brothers, And not in the clouds descending.

John Jay said that the greatest achievements of diplomacy were often little noted by history and that their authors got, in general, little credit.

The same thing is true of successful battles with political corruption in high places, the most formidable peril to any Government and, if it be not encountered and overcome, fatal to a Republic.

A nation will survive a corrupt minister or monarch, but a corrupt people must surely and speedily perish.

But it never got so dangerous a hold upon the forces of the Government, or upon a great political party, as in the Administration of General Grant.

When I entered Congress in 1869 the corridors of the Capitol and the Committee rooms were crowded with lobbyists.

You will judge whether the public events of to-day admonish us to look well to all our securities to prevent or power to punish the great guilt of corruption in office.

We must not confound idle clamor with public opinion, or accept the accusations of scandal and malice instead of proof.

But we shall make a worse mistake if, because of the multitude of false and groundless charges against men in high office, we fail to redress substantial grievances or to deal with cases of actual guilt.

The worst evil resulting from the indiscriminate attack of an unscrupulous press upon men in public station is not that innocence suffers, but that crime escapes.

My own public life has been a very brief and insignificant one, extending little beyond the duration of a single term of Senatorial office; but in that brief period I have seen five judges of a high court of the United States driven from…

I have heard the taunt, from friendliest lips, that when the United States presented herself in the East to take part with the civilized world in generous competition in the arts of life, the only product of her institutions in which she…

He has fallen at the very gate of an honorable and eminent career, and a thousand hopes are buried in his grave.