George F. Hoar

Many men have accomplished a great deal of good by striving to purify it.

No man ever yet accomplished much good by abandoning his party while he continued to hold its principles.

They will not sustain a man whose counsel they think bad, however honest he may be in his own conduct, or however much he may desire to secure honesty in the conduct of others.

They will vindicate and stand by any man in the contest for honesty and uprightness, be he Democrat or Republican, so long as they believe that the ends for which he is striving are for the public good.

If a man whose principles are good will yield to an evil motive, it is not likely that the man whose principles are bad will resist it.

Let him never for any political advantage support or tolerate a corrupt man, or vote for a corrupt candidate.

Yet the lesson which these things have taught me is that the American statesman who believes that the doctrines of his party are sound should never abandon his principles or quit political life because of its corruption.

What I was able to do to resist and baffle that attempt is the most considerable part of the public service of my life, if it has been of any public service.

Perhaps the most dangerous attack upon the purity of the Government was the attempt of General Butler to get possession of the political power in Massachusetts, and ultimately that of the country.

I made, in a speech at West Newton in 1876, an earnest attack on this system, and afterward in the Senate had a good deal to do with framing the Civil Service Law, as it was called, which put an end to it.

That generation was a frugal and honest generation in the main, and they would have visited with the swiftest condemnation and punishment, every breach of public trust, whether through dishonesty or usurpation.

Let no man assert that I refer to the evils of those days as either excuse or palliation for the evils of ours.

And yet I do not scruple to affirm that not only has there been less dishonesty and maladministration in the sixteen years of Republican rule proportionally to the numbers and wealth of the people than in the first sixteen years after the…

It has been one of those periods in which all experience teaches us to expect an unusual manifestation of public corruption, of public disorder, and of evils and errors of administration.

What was said helped to arouse public attention, and the masses of the people--always pure and incorruptible--set themselves earnestly and successfully to reform the abuses.

I have seen the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the House, now a distinguished member of this court, rise in his place and demand the expulsion of four of his associates for making sale of their official privilege of…

I have seen in the State in the Union foremost in power and wealth four judges of her courts impeached for corruption, and the political administration of her chief city become a disgrace and a by- word throughout the world.

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…

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…

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Judge Hoar never doubted that the service of a clean, able, upright Circuit Court, appointed without political influence, and entirely acceptable to the public, was well worth the sacrifice.