with great
modesty I claim--and with some timidity--that he has no right to
slander me--that is all.

I claim that every man and wife are equal, except that she has a right
to be protected; that there is nothing like the democracy of the home
and the republicism of the fire-side, and that a man should study to
make his wife's life one perpetual poem of joy; that there should be
nothing but kindness and goodness; and then I say that children should
be governed by love, by kindness, by tenderness, and by the sympathy of
love, kindness and tenderness. That is the religion I have got, and it
is good enough for me whether it suits anybody else in the world or
not. I think it is altogether more important to believe in my wife than
it is to believe in the master; I think it is altogether more important
to love my children than the twelve apostles--that is my doctrine. I
may be wrong, but that is it. I think more of the living than I do of
the dead. This world is for the living. The grave is not a throne,
and a corpse is not a king. The living have a right to control this
world. I think a good deal more of today than I do of yesterday, and I
think more of tomorrow than I do of this day; because it is nearly
gone--that is the way I feel, and this my creed. The time to be happy
is now; the way to be happy is to make somebody else happy; and the
place to be happy is here. I never will consent to drink skim milk
here with the promise of cream somewhere else.

Now, my friends, I have some excuses to offer for the race to which I
belong. In the first place, this world is not very well adapted to
raising good people; there is but one-quarter of it land to start with;
it is three times as well adapted to fish-culture as it is to man, and
of that one-quarter there is but a small belt where they raise men of
genius. There is one strip from which all the men and women of genius
come. When you go too far north yon find no brain; when you go too far
south you find no genius, and there never has been a high degree of
civilization except where there is winter. I say that winter is the
father and mother of the fireside, the family of nations; and around
that fireside blossom the fruits of our race. In a country where they
don't need any bed-clothes except the clouds, revolution is the normal
condition not much civilization there. When in the winter I go by a
house where the curtain is a little bit drawn, and I look in there and