I have chosen Taft and Wood simply as instances of what other men by the hundred have done, Americans who have graduated from no college, Americans who have graduated from our different colleges, and especially by practically all those Americans who have graduated from the two great typical American institutions of learning—West Point and Annapolis. Taft and Wood and their fellows are spending or have spent the best years of their prime in doing a work which means to them pecuniary loss, at the best a bare livelihood while they are doing it, and are doing it gladly because they realize the truth that the highest privilege that can be given to any American is the privilege of serving his country, his fellow-Americans. As I am speaking to an audience with proper ideals, when I say that Taft and Wood have done all this service to their pecuniary loss I am holding them up not for pity but for admiration. Every man, every woman here should feel it incumbent upon him or her to welcome with joy the chance to render service to the country, service to our people at large, and to accept the rendering of the service as in itself ample repayment therefor. Do not misunderstand me. The average man, the average woman must earn his or her living in one way or another, and I most emphatically do not advise any one to decline to do the humdrum, every-day duties because there may come a chance for the display of heroism. I ask of you the straightforward, earnest, performance of duty in all the little things that come up day by day in business, in domestic life, in every way, and then when the opportunity comes, if you have thus done your duty in the lesser things, I know you will rise level to the heroic needs. AT BANQUET OF THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 14, 1903 _Mr. Toastmaster, and you, my Fellow-Members of the Union League Club_: No one can too strongly insist upon the elementary fact that you can not build the superstructure of public virtue save on private virtue. The sum of the parts is the whole, and if we wish to make that whole, the State, the representative and exponent and symbol of decency, it must be so made through the decency, public and private, of the average citizen.