Great is the danger to our country from the failure among our public men to live up to the eighth commandment, from the callousness in the public which permits such shortcomings.

Yet it is not exaggeration to say that the danger is quite as great from those who year in and year out violate the ninth commandment by bearing false witness against the honest man, and who thereby degrade him and elevate the dishonest…

The public is quite as much harmed in the one case as in the other, by the one set of wrong-doers as by the other.

The sin is, of course, peculiarly revolting when coupled with hypocrisy, when it is committed in the name of morality.

But, of course, every one knows that a soldier must be more than merely honorable before he is fit to do credit to the country; and just the same thing is true of a statesman.

He must have high ideals, and the leader of public opinion in the pulpit, in the press, on the platform, or on the stump must preach high ideals.

Usually the difference is not that he is morally stronger, but that he is intellectually weaker.

This is notably true in our American life of many of those who are most pessimistic in denouncing the condition of our politics.

There remains, however, a considerable group of men who are really striving for the best, and who mistakenly, though in good faith, permit the best to be the enemy of the good.

Under very rare conditions their attitude may be right, and because it is thus right once in a hundred times they are apt to be blind to the harm they do the other ninety-nine times.

In this country especially, where what we have now to contend with is not so much any one concrete evil as a general lowering of the standards, we must remember that to keep these standards high does not at all imply that they should be…

A public man who directly or indirectly breaks the eighth commandment is just as guilty as an editor or a speaker who breaks the ninth, and it matters little whether the fault be due to venality in the one case or to morbid vanity and mean…

Compromise” is so often used in a bad sense that it is difficult to remember that properly it merely describes the process of reaching an agreement.

Again, an honest politician is entirely justified in promising on the stump that he will make no compromise on any question of right and wrong.

No decent politician need compromise in any way save as Washington and Lincoln did.

The man who makes such a promise may be a well-meaning but unbalanced enthusiast, or he may be merely a designing demagogue.

So much for the men who by their demands for the impossible encourage the promise of the impossible, whether in the domain of economic legislation or of legislation which has for its object the promotion of morality.

The Greeks were famous athletes, and as long as their athletic training had a normal place in their lives, it was a good thing.

They tend to make it almost as much of a fetich as, in the last century, the French and German nobles made the chase of the stag, when they carried hunting and game-preserving to a point which was ruinous to the national life.

To take these exceptions as examples would be as unsafe as it would be to advocate blindness because some blind men have won undying honor by triumphing over their physical infirmity and accomplishing great results in the world.

It is wise to obey the homely old adage, “Work while you work; play while you play.

If he can once get to a proper understanding of things, he will have a far more hearty contempt for the boy who has begun a course of feeble dissipation, or who is untruthful, or mean, or dishonest, or cruel, than this boy and his fellows…

This boy is afterward thrown on his own resources, amid wholesome surroundings, and is forced to work hard among boys and men who are real boys and real men doing real work.

I do not mean that he must love only the negative virtues; I mean he must love the positive virtues also.

The “bombs enveloped in petroleum” had no existence save in the brains of the Spaniards and their more credulous sympathizers.