Listen to me. Bad as it is to be afflicted with physical leprosy, moral leprosy is ten thousand times worse. I don't care if you are the richest man in the town, the biggest taxpayer in the county, the biggest politician in the district, or in the state. I don't care a rap if you carry the political vote of Pennsylvania in your vest pocket, and if you can change the vote from Democratic to Republican in the convention--if after your worldly career is closed my text would make you a fitting epitaph for your tombstone and obituary notice in the papers, then what difference would it make what you had done--"he was a leper." He was a great politician--but "He was a leper." What difference would it make? I'll tell you, I was never more interested in my life than in reading the story of an old Confederate colonel who was a stickler for martial discipline. One day he had a trifling case of insubordination. He ordered his men to halt, and he had the offender shot. They dug the grave and he gave the command to march, and they had stopped just three minutes by the clock. At the close of the war they made him chief of police of a Southern city, and he was so vile and corrupt that the people arose and ordered his dismissal. Then a great earthquake swept over the city, and the people rushed from their homes and thousands of people crowded the streets and there was great excitement. Some asked, "Where is the colonel?" and they said, "You will find him in one of two or three places." So they searched and found him in a den of infamy. He was so drunk that he didn't realize the danger he was in. They led him out, then put him upon a snow white-horse, put his spurs on his boots and his regimentals on; they pinned a star on his breast and put a cockade on his hat, and said to him: "Colonel, we command you as mayor of the city to quell this riot. You have supreme authority." He rode out among the people to quell the riot, dug his spurs into the white side of the horse and the crimson flowed out, and he rode in and out among the surging mass of humanity. He rode out among the people with commands here, torrents of obscenity there, and in twenty-five minutes the stillness of death reigned in city squares, so marvelously did they fear him, so wonderful was his power over men. He then rode out, dismounted, took off his cockade, tore the star from his breast and threw it down, threw off his regimentals, took off his sword; then he staggered back to the house of infamy, where three months later he died, away from his wife, away from virtue, away from morality, his name synonymous with all that is vile. What difference did it make that he had power over men when you might sum up his life in the words, "But he was a leper." What difference did it make?