I sometimes feel that I have trenched a little on your province, Brother Bristol, and on that of your brethren, by preaching. But whenever I speak of the wrongdoing of a man of wealth or of a man of poverty, poor man or rich man, I always want to try to couple together the fact that wrongdoing is wrong just as much in one case as in the other, with the fact that right is just as much right in one case as in the other. I want the plain people of this country, I want all of us who do not have great wealth, to remember that in our own interest, and because it is right, we must be just as scrupulous in doing justice to the man of great wealth as in exacting justice from him. Wrongdoing is confined to no class. Good and evil are to be found among both rich and poor, and in drawing the line among our fellows we must draw it on conduct and not on worldly possessions. Woe to this country if we ever get to judging men by anything save their worth as men, without regard to their fortune in life. In other words, my plea is that you draw the line on conduct and not on worldly possessions. In the abstract most of us will admit this. It is a rather more difficult proposition in the concrete. We can act upon such doctrines only if we really have knowledge of, and sympathy with, one another. If both the wage-worker and the capitalist are able to enter each into the other’s life, to meet him so as to get into genuine sympathy with him, most of the misunderstanding between them will disappear and its place will be taken by a judgment broader, juster, more kindly, and more generous; for each will find in the other the same essential human attributes that exist in himself. It was President McKinley’s peculiar glory that in actual practice he realized this as it is given to but few men to realize it; that his broad and deep sympathies made him feel a genuine sense of oneness with all his fellow-Americans, whatever their station or work in life, so that to his soul they were all joined with him in a great brotherly democracy of the spirit. It is not given to many of us in our lives actually to realize this attitude to the extent that he did; but we can at least have it before us as the goal of our endeavor, and by so doing we shall pay honor better than in any other way to the memory of the dead President whose services in life we this day commemorate. [Illustration] Transcriber’s Notes: ――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). ――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected. ――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved. ――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.