Alexander Hamilton said that if every Athenian citizen had been a Socrates, still every Athenian assembly would have been a mob.

So I claim no credit that I have voted and spoken as I thought, always without stopping to consider whether public opinion would support me.

I told him I should vote for the bill, because I believed it to be right, but that it would lose me the support of every newspaper in Massachusetts that had been friendly to me before.

The conduct of no pick- pocket or bank robber could have been held up to public indignation and contempt in severer language than the supporters of that bill.

If I had flinched or apologized, I should have been destroyed.

I wrote a letter to the people of Massachusetts in which I took up case by case each provision of the bill, and showed how important it was for the interest of commerce between the States, or with foreign countries, and how well it…

I concluded by saying that I knew they would not come to my way of thinking that afternoon or that week, but that they were sure to come to it in the end.

But it convinced the people, and I believe it had a very great effect throughout the country, and was the means of saving the policy of internal improvements from destruction.

Clapp, of the Boston Journal, with a manliness that did him infinite credit, declared publicly in its columns that he had been all wrong, and that I was right.

They are faces into which I am neither afraid nor ashamed to look." The assembly hesitated a little between indignation at the tone of defiance, and approval of a man's standing by his convictions.

That ended the foolish outcry against the great policy of internal improvement, which has helped to make possible the marvels of our domestic commerce, one of the most wonderful creations of human history.

It is American at both ends, and throughout all the way.

I suppose a good many moralists will think that it is a very wicked thing indeed for a man to vote against his convictions on a grave public question, from a motive like this, of personal friendship.

But somehow or other, I am strongly tempted to say there are occasions in life where the meanest thing a man can do is to do perfectly right.

It would be better to say that there are occasions when the instinct is a better guide than the reason.

The hearts of the people were full of the great doctrines of liberty which Jefferson and the Fathers of our country had learned from Milton and the statesmen of the English Commonwealth.

But I could not consent to striking at men, as I have just said, because of their occupation.

In opposition to this bill I made an earnest speech showing it to be in conflict with the doctrines on which our fathers founded the Republic; with the principles of the Constitutions of nearly all the States, including that of California…

I showed also that the Chinese race had shown examples of the highest qualities of manhood, of intelligence, probity and industry.

I pointed out that this declaration was extorted from unwilling China by the demand of America; and that laborers were henceforth to be classed, in the enumeration of American public law, with paupers, lazzaroni, harlots, and persons…

Humanity, capable of infinite depths of degradation, is also capable of infinite heights of excellence.

The Chinese, like all other races, has given us its examples of both.

To rescue humanity from this degradation is, we are taught to believe, the great object of God's moral government on earth.

It is not by injustice, exclusion, caste, but by reverence for the individual soul that we can aid in this consummation.

I believe that the immortal truths of the Declaration of Independence came from the same source with the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.