Barnum, remantled in the esteem of Success, was received by the large audience of his fellow citizens with an enthusiasm that caused him to experience deep emotion. He told them the sad story of his clock debts, and how, with admirable foresight, he had in the days of his prosperity made over to his wife some of his property, including the lease to the Museum. Concerning this piece of sagacity, Barnum added the following footnote when he reprinted his speech in the autobiography: “I was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars when as a matter of love I transferred a portion to my wife, little dreaming that it would be needed during my lifetime.” Mr. Barnum did for love what so many men do as a precautionary measure of business. He told his audiences how his family had lived frugally, although the value of the Museum lease was more than $80,000, so that his debts could be paid and his real estate repurchased. “The Christian name of my wife,” he said, “is Charity. I may well acknowledge, therefore, that I am not only a proper ‘subject of charity,’ but that ‘without Charity I am nothing.’ But, ladies and gentlemen, while Charity thus labored in my behalf, Faith and Hope were not idle. I have been anything but indolent during the last four years.” Then he told of his accomplishments in Europe. “Many people,” said Barnum, “have wondered that a man considered so acute as myself should have been deluded into embarrassments like mine, and not a few have declared, in short meter, that ‘Barnum was a fool.’ I can only reply that I never made pretensions to the sharpness of a pawnbroker, and I hope I shall never so entirely lose confidence in human nature as to consider every man a scamp by instinct, or a rogue by necessity. ‘It is better to be deceived sometimes than to distrust always,’ says Lord Bacon, and I agree with him.” Assuredly, all was for the best, said Barnum. The very factory which he had built for his defunct clock company was now a thriving sewing-machine manufactory “filled with intelligent New England mechanics.” Barnum’s speech concluded with a reiteration of the Museum policy, which, he assured his audience, would remain the same as it always had been under his management: “The dramas introduced in the Lecture Room will never contain a profane expression or a vulgar allusion; on the contrary, their tendency will always be to encourage virtue and frown upon vice.” He sent free tickets to clergymen and editors, assuring them in a circular letter of the same policy, and asking that after an inspection of the Museum they would kindly recommend it to their friends, for he desired “to enlist the influence of the intelligent and educated.” Much verse commemorated the return of Barnum, including one woman’s “A Health to Barnum,” which ended: “Here’s health and luck to Barnum! An _Elba_ he has seen, And never may his map of life Display a _St. Helene_!”