26 



to give your constant and poworfiil support to tliose principles 

 of sobriety and of wholesome and U])rig1it living, which you 

 yourselves should have formed. 



There are counsels appropriate to the men of your occupa- 

 tion in all times. In pressing them, therefore, upon your 

 attention to-day 1 shall incur no risk of giving offence to any, 

 as if only narrow and invidious applications were intended ; — 

 a thing as distasteful to me as it would be contrary to all the 

 proprieties of this occasion. There is nothing to be said in 

 which patriotic men of eveiy party and association may not 

 fully concur. 



That there is a tendency among us to recklessness and 

 extravagance in expenditure and to an ostentatious style of 

 living, that there is an undue haste to be rich, or a distempered 

 anxiety to gain the means of gratifying expensive tastes, that 

 there is with many an unscrupulousness as to the methods to 

 be taken for acquiring money, that these practices have affected 

 the public service, so that frauds abound and the suspicion or 

 the reality of corruption is on every hand, that these evils have 

 increased of late, and worst of all, that we are in danger of 

 becoming accustomed to them, so that they will be endured 

 with too much of patience ; this it may be presumed no one 

 will deny. 



It would be strange, too, if these mischievous personal habits 

 into which many men in public and private life have fallen did 

 not, to some degree, infect the management of distinctively 

 political aflairs. Yet it is not true that we have fallen upon 

 the worst of times in this respect. Nor need we believe, as I 

 do not, that the leading political men of our day are sinners 

 above all that have gone in their places before them, or above 

 all other men. But at all times the temptation is strong to an 

 overheated and unscrupulous pressing of partisan ends ; and 

 men are apt to lose sight in their zeal of the fact that the 

 public interest they propose to serve involves the rights and 

 welfare of the members of every opposing party as well as their 

 own. This goes, so far, to strike at the fundamental idea of 

 republicanism in government, which is that of a commonwealth 

 for all. 



