He was elected in that last campaign for the fourth time, but he did
not live very long. He had never, it seemed to me, been quite the same
after the day when he had that experience of insult which he did not
resent. “Draw the sting,” he used to counsel us when, in our campaign
harangues, we became bitter, or sarcastic, or merely smart. He had
supreme reliance on the simple truth, on the power of reasonableness.
He never reviled again; he never sought to even scores. When he died
the only wounds he left in human hearts were because he was no more.
They understood him at last, those who had scoffed and sneered and
abused and vilified, and I, who had had the immense privilege of his
friendship, and thought I knew him,--when I stood that July afternoon,
on the veranda of his home, beside his bier to speak at his funeral,
and looked out over the thousands who were gathered on the wide lawn
before his home,--I realized that I, too, had not wholly understood him.
I know not how many thousands were there; they were standing on the
lawns in a mass that extended across the street and into the yards
on the farther side. Down to the corner, and into the side streets,
they were packed, and they stood in long lines all the way out to the
cemetery. In that crowd there were all sorts of that one sort he knew
as humanity without distinction,--judges, and women of prominence
and women whom he alone would have included in humanity, there were
thieves, and prize-fighters,--and they all stood there with the tears
streaming down their faces.
There is no monument to Golden Rule Jones in Toledo; and since St.
Gaudens is gone I know of no one who could conceive him in marble
or in bronze. There is not a public building which he erected, no
reminder of him which the eye can see or the hands touch. But his name
is spoken here a thousand times a day, and always with the reverence
that marks the passage of a great man upon the earth. And I am sure
that his influence did not end here. Did not a letter come from Yasnaya
Polyana in the handwriting of the great Tolstoy, who somehow had heard
of this noble and simple soul who was, in his own way, trying the same
experiment of life which the great Russian was making?
XXV
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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