This is the first and will be the only time during my Presidency that I shall ever introduce a speaker to an audience; and I am more than glad to do it in this instance, because if there is one book which I should like to have read as a tract, and also, what is not invariably true of tracts, as an interesting tract, by all our people, it is “The Simple Life,” written by Mr. Wagner. There are other books which he has written from which we can gain great good, but I know of no other book written of recent years anywhere, here or abroad, which contains so much that we of America ought to take to our hearts as is contained in “The Simple Life.” I like the book because it does not merely preach to the rich, and does not merely preach to the poor. It is a very easy thing to address a section of the community in reprobation of the forms of vice to which it is not prone. What we need to have impressed upon us is that it is not usually the root principle of the vice that varies with variation in social conditions, but that it is the manifestation of the vice that varies; and Mr. Wagner has well brought out the great fundamental truth that the brutal arrogance of a rich man who looks down upon a poor man because he is poor, and the brutal envy and hatred felt by a poor man toward a rich man merely because he is rich, are at bottom twin manifestations of the same vice. They are simply different sides of the same shield. The arrogance that looks down in the one case, the envy that hates in the other, are really exhibitions of the same mean, base, and unlovely spirit which happens in one case to be in different surroundings from what it is in the other case. The kind of man who would be arrogant in one case is precisely the kind of man who would be envious and filled with hatred in the other. The ideal should be the just, the generous, the broad-minded man who is as incapable of arrogance if rich as he is of malignant envy and hatred if poor. No republic can permanently exist when it becomes a republic of classes, where the man feels not the interest of the whole people, but the interest of the particular class to which he belongs, or fancies that he belongs, as being of prime importance. In antiquity, republics failed as they did because they tended to become either a republic of the few who exploited the many, or a republic of the many who plundered the few, and in either case the end of the republic was inevitable; just as much so in one case as in the other, and no more so in one case than in the other. We can keep this Republic true to the principles of those who founded, and of those who afterward preserved it, we can keep it a Republic at all, only by remembering that we must live up to the theory of its founders, to the theory, of treating each man on his worth as a man; neither holding it for nor against him that he occupies any particular station in life, so long as he does his duty fairly and well by his fellows and by the Nation as a whole.