The analogues of the men whom Macaulay condemns exist in numbers in New York, and work evil in our public life for the very reason that Macaulay gives.

We need the worker in the fields of social and civic reform; the man who is keenly interested in some university settlement, some civic club or citizens’ association which is striving to elevate the standard of life.

We need upright politicians, who will take the time and trouble, and who possess the capacity, to manage caucuses, conventions, and public assemblies.

We need men who try to be their poorer brothers’ keepers to the extent of befriending them and working with them so far as they are willing; men who work in charitable associations, or, what is even better, strive to get into touch with…

We need the sound and healthy idealist; the theoretic writer, preacher, or teacher; the Emerson or Phillips Brooks, who helps to create the atmosphere of enthusiasm and practical endeavor.

In public life we need not only men who are able to work in and through their parties, but also upright, fearless, rational independents, who will deal impartial justice to all men and all parties.

When one of these professional impracticables denounces the attitude of decent men as “a hodge-podge of the ideal and the practicable,” he is amusingly unaware that he is writing his own condemnation, showing his own inability to do good…

To it more than to any other among the many causes which, in our American life, tell for religious toleration is due the impossibility of persecution of a particular creed.

The greater the share they have in directing the national life, the better it will be for all of us.

It represents the ideal toward which it would be a good thing to approximate everywhere.

Outside of college boys and politicians my first intimate associates were ranchmen, cow-punchers, and game-hunters, and I speedily became convinced that there were no other men in the country who were their equals.

Then I was thrown much with farmers, and I made up my mind that it was the farmer upon whom the foundations of the commonwealth really rested—that the farmer was the archetypical good American.

Then I happened to have dealings with certain carpenters’ unions, and grew to have a great respect for the carpenter, for the mechanic type.

Any man who has served in the Legislature realizes that the country members form, on the whole, a very sound and healthy body of legislators.

Any man who has gone about much to the county fairs in New York—almost the only place where the farm folks gather in large numbers—can not but have been struck by the high character of the average countryman.

In other words, all three grow to feel in common on certain important subjects, and this fellow-feeling has results as far-reaching as they are healthy.

He will speedily find that the fellow-feeling which at first he had to stimulate was really existent, though latent, and is capable of a very healthy growth.

Tried by this standard, the religious teachers of the community stand most honorably high.

It is probable that no other class of our citizens do anything like the amount of disinterested labor for their fellow-men.

If such people would but take the trouble to follow out the actual life of a hard-worked clergyman or priest, I think they would become a little ashamed of the tone of flippancy they are so prone to adopt when speaking about them.

He shares in and partially directs their intellectual and moral life, and is responsive to their spiritual needs.

If the community be poor and hard-working, he shares the poverty and works as hard as any one.

As fine a figure as I can call to mind is that of one such country clergyman in a poor farming community not far from the capital of the State of New York—a vigorous old man, who works on his farm six days in the week, and on the seventh…

He visits them, looks after them if they are sick, baptizes the children, comforts those in sorrow, and is ready with shrewd advice for those who need aid; in short, shows himself from week’s end to week’s end a thoroughly sincere…

The Paulist Fathers had always been among the most efficient foes of the abuses of the liquor traffic.