It is absolutely essential if we are to have the proper standard of public life that promise shall be square with performance. A lie is no more to be excused in politics than out of politics. A promise is as binding on the stump as off the stump; and there are two facets to that crystal. In the first place, the man who makes a promise which he does not intend to keep and does not try to keep should rightly be adjudged to have forfeited in some degree what should be every man’s most precious possession—his honor. On the other hand, the public that exacts a promise which ought not to be kept, or which can not be kept, is by just so much forfeiting its right to self-government. There is no surer way of destroying the capacity for self-government in a people than to accustom that people to demanding the impossible or the improper from its public men. No man fit to be a public man will promise either the impossible or the improper; and if the demand is made that he shall do so it means putting a premium upon the unfit in public life. There is the same sound reason for distrusting the man who promises too much in public that there is for distrusting the man who promises too much in private business. The one indispensable thing for us to keep is a high standard of character for the average American citizen. AT CARSON CITY, NEVADA, MAY 19, 1903 _Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, and you, my Fellow-Citizens_: It has been a great pleasure to be introduced in the more than kind words the Governor has used, because the Governor has been a genuine pioneer. Here in this great Western country, the country which is what it is purely because the pioneers who came here had iron in their veins, because they were able to conquer plain and mountain, and to make the wilderness blossom, we are not to be excused if we do not see to it that the generation that comes after us is trained to have the sum of the fundamental qualities which enabled their fathers to succeed. I want to say one special word to-day here in Carson City on a subject in which all of our people from the Atlantic to the Pacific take an interest, but which affects in especial the people of the States of the great plains and mountains and affects no State more than it does Nevada—the question of irrigation. Now, as I say, I do not regard that as in any way merely a question of the Rocky Mountain States, of the great plains States, because anything which tends for the well-being of any portion of the Union is therefore for the well-being of all of it, and it was for that reason that I felt warranted in appealing to the people of the seaboard States on the Atlantic, to the people of the States of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley, to say that it was their duty to help in bringing about a scheme of national irrigation, because the interest of any part of this country is the interest of all of it; and no man is a really good American who fails to grasp that fact.