[From a Speech, December 10, 1878.]
The man who wants to serve his country must put himself in the line of its leading thought, and that is the restoration of business, trade, commerce, industry, sound political economy, hard money, and the payment of all obligations; and the man who can add anything in the direction of accomplishing any of these purposes is a public benefactor.
The scientific spirit has cast out the Demons and presented us with Nature, clothed in her right mind and living under the reign of law. It has given us for the sorceries of the alchemist, the beautiful laws of chemistry; for the dreams of the astrologer, the sublime truths of astronomy; for the wild visions of cosmogony, the monumental records of geology; for the anarchy of diabolism, the laws of God.
We no longer attribute the untimely death of infants to the sin of Adam, but to bad nursing and ignorance.
Truth is so related and correlated that no department of her realm is wholly isolated.
Truth is the food of the human spirit, which could not grow in its majestic proportions without clearer and more truthful views of God and his universe.
Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no ideas behind it is simply brutality.
I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost, that the characters of men are moulded and inspired by what their fathers have done; that, treasured up in American souls are all the unconscious influences of the great deeds of the Anglo-Saxon race, from Agincourt to Bunker Hill.
Eternity alone will reveal to the human race its debt of gratitude to the peerless and immortal name of Washington.
I doubt if any man equalled Samuel Adams in formulating and uttering the fierce, clear, and inexorable logic of the Revolution.
The last eight decades have witnessed an Empire spring up in the full panoply of lusty life, from a trackless wilderness.
In their struggle with the forces of nature, the ability to labor was the richest patrimony of the colonist.
The granite hills are not so changeless and abiding as the restless sea.
To him a battle was neither an earthquake, nor a volcano, nor a chaos of brave men and frantic horses involved in vast explosions of gunpowder. It was rather a calm rational combination of force against force.—Oration on Geo. H. Thomas.
After the fire and blood of the battle-fields have disappeared, nowhere does war show its destroying power so certainly and so relentlessly as in the columns which represent the taxes and expenditures of the nation.