How startling the contrast, in every particular, between his early life and that of Abraham Lincoln.... Born to an inheritance of the extremest poverty, wholly unaided by his parents, surrounded by the rude forces of the wilderness, only one year at any school, never for a day master of his own time until he reached his majority, forcing his way to the profession of the law by the hardest and roughest road, and beginning its practice at twenty-eight years of age, yet, by the force of unconquerable will and persistent hard work, he attained a foremost place in his profession.
"And, moving up from high to higher,
Became, on fortune's crowning slope,
The pillar of a people's hope,
The centre of a world's desire."
[From the Same.]
It is one of the precious mysteries of sorrow, that it finds solace in unselfish work.
A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck. Let not poverty stand as an obstacle in your way.
Here is the volume of our laws. More sacred than the twelve tables of Rome, this rock of the law rises in monumental grandeur alike above the people and the President, above the courts, above Congress, commanding everywhere reverence and obedience to its supreme authority.
That man makes a vital mistake who judges truth in relation to financial affairs from the changing phases of public opinion. He might as well stand on the shore of the Bay of Fundy, and from the ebb and flow of a single tide attempt to determine the general level of the sea, as to stand upon this floor, and from the current of public opinion on any one debate, judge of the general level of the public mind. It is only when long spaces along the shore of the sea are taken into account that the grand level is found from which the heights and depths are measured. And it is only when long spaces of time are considered, that we find at last that level of public opinion which we call the general judgment of mankind.