ng whose noble and high-minded people a better and more
fastidious habit has prevailed.

The lesson which I have learned in life, which is impressed
on me daily, and more deeply as I grow old, is the lesson
of Good Will and Good Hope. I believe that to-day is better
than yesterday, and that to-morrow will be better than to-
day. I believe that in spite of so many errors and wrongs
and even crimes, my countrymen of all classes desire what
is good, and not what is evil. I repeat what I said to the
State Convention of Massachusetts after the death of President
McKinley:

"When I first came to manhood and began to take part in public
affairs, that greatest of crimes, human slavery, was entrenched
everywhere in power in this Republic. Congress and Supreme
Court, Commerce and Trade and Social Life alike submitted
to its imperious and arrogant sway. Mr. Webster declared
that there was no North, and that the South went clear up
to the Canada line. The hope of many wise and conservative
and, as I now believe, patriotic men, of saving this country
from being rent into fragments was in leaving to slavery forever
the great territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific,
in the Fugitive Slave Law, a law under which freemen were
taken from the soil of Massachusetts to be delivered into
perpetual bondage, and in the judgment of the Supreme Court
which declared it as the lesson of our history that the Negro
had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.

"Last week at Dartmouth, at the great celebration in honor
of Daniel Webster, that famous college gave the highest honor
in its power to a Negro, amid the applause of the brilliant
assembly. And there was no applause more earnest or hearty
than that of the successor of Taney, the Democratic Chief
Justice of the United States. I know that the people of that
race are still the victims of outrages which all good men
deplore. But I also believe that the rising sense of justice
and of manhood in the South is already finding expression
in indignant remonstrance from the lips of governors and preachers,
and that the justice and manhood of the South will surely
make their way.

"Ah, Fellow Citizens, amid the sorrow and the mourning and
the tears, amid the horror and the disappointment and the
baffled hope, there comes to us from the open grave of William
McKinley a voice of good omen! What pride and love must we
feel for the republic that calls such men to her high