If any critic think this book lacking in dignity, or wisdom, or modesty, it is hoped that it may, by way of offset, make up for it in sincerity. I have so far lived in the world without secrets. If my countrymen, or the people of Massachusetts, have trusted me, they have fully known what they were doing. "They had eyes and chose me." I have never lifted any finger or spoken a word to any man to secure or to promote my own election to any office. I do not mean to criticise other men who advance their honorable ambition for public service or exert themselves to get office for which they think themselves fit. It was the "high Roman fashion." It has been the fashion in England always. English gentlemen do not disdain a personal solicitation for political support, and think no harm in it, to which no American gentleman would for a moment stoop. It has been the custom in other parts of the country almost from the beginning of the Government. But what I think a better custom has prevailed in Massachusetts. I arrogate to myself no virtue in this respect. I only say that it has been my supreme good fortune to be the son of a Commonwealth among 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.