TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL MEETING. i'65 



is a very, very important one, and your responsibility be- 

 comes greatly increased by tbe importance of your position 

 in that matter. If your voice is going- to be the first voice 

 on the subject, you have got to take a great deal of care to 

 see to it that your voice, and your cultivation of public opin- 

 ion, is well founded and authoritative. It must be trust- 

 worthy. Otherwise there will be trouble ahead. When you 

 reduce any ordinary system of government that we have had 

 any experience with, either national, state or city, to its last 

 terms, you will discover that it depends almost entirely upon 

 public opinion, and in that public opinion you have your due 

 share in building up. Public opinion is a curious thing. So 

 long as just government depends upon the consent of the 

 governed, it is a fundamental thing in the mind of the gov- 

 ernment which we enjoy. It is curious, therefore, I say, and 

 is a very difficult thing to define. Public opinion is com- 

 posed of the emotions, the secrets, the ambitions, and the 

 desires of all the people that live in a given community. 

 When in your town, or when in Hartford, or the state of 

 Connecticut, the public opinion is built up by some such kind 

 of composite ; it is composed of a moral and intellectual col- 

 lection of individual views and opinions, right or wrong, of 

 all the ambitions of individuals composing the community, 

 whether they are worthy or unworthy, and it rises and falls 

 like the tide under every popular fancy. Some very brave 

 men have been overwhelmed because they have tried for 

 a time to be guided by it. Every man who lives in a com- 

 munity has a life to lead, work to do, and troubles of his 

 own. He has but one life to lead, and that life you can re- 

 gard as a sort of thread in the woof of the whole, and when 

 you weave together all the different lives in the different 

 communities, you get what may be called community life, 

 though every man and woman will have but one thread to 

 spin and must take care of that thread that it be not weak, 

 but strong, because if a weak thread gets into the web it 

 will mar the strength and beauty of the fabric that you call 

 community life. That idea of individual responsibility has 



