Cuba is, in my judgment, entitled ultimately to settle for itself whether it shall be an independent State or an integral portion of the mightiest of Republics.

Yet better the excess Than the defect; better the more than less.

Four years of bloody struggle with an armed foe, who was helped at every turn by the self-styled advocates of peace, were needed in order to restore the Union; but the result has been that the peace of this continent has been effectually…

Had the short-sighted advocates of peace for the moment had their way, and secession become an actual fact, nothing could have prevented a repetition in North America of the devastating anarchic warfare that obtained for three quarters of…

But a very marked feature in the world-history of the present century has been the growing infrequency of wars between great civilized nations.

The growth of peacefulness between nations, however, has been confined strictly to those that are civilized.

It can only come when both parties to a possible quarrel feel the same spirit.

But the French continued to do their work; France expanded over Algiers, and the result was that piracy on the Mediterranean came to an end, and Algiers has thriven as never before in its history.

The Roman expanded, and he has left a memory which has profoundly influenced the history of mankind, and he has further left as the heirs of his body, and, above all, of his tongue and culture, the so-called Latin peoples of Europe and…

There are, of course, men of such low moral type, or of such ingrained cynicism, that they do not believe in the possibility of making anything better, or do not care to see things better.

There remains the great body of the people, including the entire body of those through whom the salvation of the people must ultimately be worked out.

The absence of either makes the presence of the other worthless or worse.

He must avoid both under penalty of wreckage, and it avails him nothing to have avoided one, if he founders on the other.

People are apt to speak as if in political life, public life, it ought to be a mere case of striving upward—striving toward a high peak.

What is far more serious, his power of doing useful service to the public is at an end.

But, in either case, his usefulness to the community has ceased.

The abler he is, the more dangerous he is to the community.

It is not necessary to argue its iniquity with those who have advanced any great distance beyond the brigand theory of political life.

He is not more virtuous; he is less virtuous.

Neither did he advance the cause of human freedom.

They affect for evil a certain number of decent men in one way and a certain number of equally decent men in an entirely different way.

Other decent men are so alienated by such conduct that in their turn they abandon all effort to fight for reform, believing reformers to be either hypocrites or fools.

Macaulay’s eminently sane and wholesome spirit and his knowledge of practical affairs give him a peculiar value among historians of political thought.

What he says of Scotland in the time of King James and King William is true, word for word, of civic life in New York two centuries later.

We see in New York sodden masses of voters manipulated by clever, unscrupulous, and utterly selfish masters of machine politics.