Let me say one word on something entirely different, suggested by our talk here to-day. In speaking over with several of the gentlemen round about me their experiences in the Georgia Legislature and some of my experiences in the New York Legislature, the thing that struck me the most was the truth of Abraham Lincoln’s saying that “there is a deal of human nature in mankind.” The enemies we have to fight, the friends upon whom we have to rely, are substantially the same, in whatever part of the Union we live. We have to war against the same evil tendencies in our own souls; we have to strive to give expression to the same aspirations toward righteousness, toward honor. In doing this there are two things that are necessary above all others. In the first place, the fearless condemnation of what is wrong; the standing up for what is decent, for what is straight; the refusing to palter with the eternal principles of truth; refusing to pardon any man who for any reason lapses from the law that teaches that the man who is to be of service must obey the great rule of truth, of courage, and of honor. In the second place, to remember that second only in iniquity, second only in the injury done to the Republic, to the wrong of the man who acts corruptly, comes the wrong of the man who wantonly accuses the honest man of corruption. Thief is an ugly name, because it denotes an ugly thing; liar is as ugly a name as thief and as little to be desired by any right-thinking man; and either to steal or to lie marks the man as unfit for association with decent men and an enemy of all that is best and most upright in our political life. Too often we have seen public sentiment condoning the acts both of the thief and the liar (I am using ugly words, gentlemen, and I am using them because I wish to denote in the sharpest and in the most ugly fashion ugly attributes), when these acts are shifted a little so that they can be hidden under other names. The man who in political life, the man who in business life, by chicanery or by corruption in any shape or form, does or achieves what could not be done or achieved save by or through chicanery or corruption, stands on the same level with the man who in court is convicted of theft. The man who on no grounds, or on insufficient grounds, attacks the honest and upright man, whether in public or private life, as corrupt; who seeks to persuade men to believe that he is corrupt; who accuses him of corruption; this man stands on the same evil eminence of infamy with the corruptionist himself; and he is himself the greatest ally of the corruptionist he professes to denounce. The Republic will go down, our democratic institutions will be a failure, if the moral sense of the people grows so blunted that they will accept anything else, whether brilliancy or loyalty of party service, or any other deed or quality, as an offset to corruption. The minute that there arises a question of corruption in public life, if