I have heard people speak of his political life, especially of late years, as if it were a great riddle; and, in eulogies on him since his death, I find men speaking as if he underwent some great revulsion of character when Fort Sumter was attacked in 1861. I think there is no such mystery about it. The secret--if secret it is to be called--of his politics was blazoned in almost every speech he ever made, if people could only train themselves to think that a public man really believes what he says. It was this, that at heart he believed in the people. He believed they had virtue enough and good sense enough to carry them through any difficulty they would ever get into. He did not believe in total depravity. He did not, therefore, believe in theirs. And when he had any appeal to make to the people, he appealed to their supposed virtue, and not to their supposed vices,--he spoke to their good sense, and not to their folly. Mr. Emerson says somewhere, that he gave people no new thoughts. I do not think this is true. It is, however, very certain that he gave them no _buncombe_. He believed in them, in their good sense, and in their average virtue. He knew that everything depended on them. He was eager to educate the people, therefore, and all the people. He did not believe it possible to educate any of them too well. And if you had asked him, the day he died, what had been the central idea of his life, he would have said it was the education of the people. His life was full of it. His speeches were full of it. Nothing so provoked him as any snobbism which wanted to hinder it. When he was President of the College,--I think in 1848,--there was a black boy in the High School at Cambridge, fitting for college. Some gentlemen in Alabama, who had sons there, or on their way there, wrote to Mr. Everett to remonstrate against the boy's entering. He replied, that the College was endowed to educate all comers; that, if the black boy could pass his examination, as he hoped he could, he would be admitted; and that, if, as they seemed to suppose, all the white students withdrew, the College would then be conducted on its endowments for the black boy alone. And that was no exceptional reply. It was his way of looking at such things.