moderate powers, unaided by anything whatever except culture and
goodness, may achieve, even when these powers are displayed amidst the
competition and jealousies of public life.

A hundred years hence what difference will it make whether you were rich
or poor, a peer or a peasant? But what difference may it not make
whether you did what was right or what was wrong?

At a large dinner-party given by Lord Stratford after the Crimean War,
it was proposed that every one should write on a slip of paper the name
which appeared most likely to descend to posterity with renown. When the
papers were opened everyone of them contained the name of Florence
Nightingale.

Professor Blackie, of the University of Edinburgh, said to a class of
young men: "Money is not needful; power is not needful; liberty is not
needful; even health is not the one thing needful; but character alone
is that which can truly save us, and if we are not saved in this sense,
we certainly must be damned." It has been said that "when poverty is
your inheritance, virtue must be your capital."

"Hence it was," said Franklin, speaking of the influence of his known
integrity of character, "that I had so much weight with my
fellow-citizens. I was but a bad speaker, never eloquent, subject to
much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in language, and
yet I generally carried my point."

When a man's character is gone, all is gone. All peace of mind, all
complacency in himself is fled forever. He despises himself. He is
despised by his fellow-men. Within is shame and remorse; without neglect
and reproach. He is of necessity a miserable and useless man; he is so
even though he be clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously
every day. It is better to be poor; it is better to be reduced to
beggary; it is better to be cast into prison, or condemned to perpetual
slavery, than to be destitute of a good name or endure the pains and the
evils of a conscious worthlessness of character.

The time is soon coming when, by the common consent of mankind, it will
be esteemed more honorable to have been John Pounds, putting new and
beautiful souls into the ragged children of the neighborhood while he
mended his father's shoes, than to have sat upon the British throne. The
time now is when, if Queen Victoria, in one of her magnificent
progresses through her realms, were to meet that more than American
queen, Miss Dix, in her "circumnavigation of charity"