Truth is the food of the human spirit, which could not grow in its majestic proportions without clearer and more truthful views of God and his universe. * * * * * Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no ideas behind it is simply brutality. * * * * * I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost, that the characters of men are moulded and inspired by what their fathers have done; that, treasured up in American souls are all the unconscious influences of the great deeds of the Anglo-Saxon race, from Agincourt to Bunker Hill. * * * * * Eternity alone will reveal to the human race its debt of gratitude to the peerless and immortal name of Washington. * * * * * I doubt if any man equalled Samuel Adams in formulating and uttering the fierce, clear, and inexorable logic of the Revolution. * * * * * The last eight decades have witnessed an Empire spring up in the full panoply of lusty life, from a trackless wilderness. * * * * * In their struggle with the forces of nature, the ability to labor was the richest patrimony of the colonist. * * * * * The granite hills are not so changeless and abiding as the restless sea. * * * * * To him a battle was neither an earthquake, nor a volcano, nor a chaos of brave men and frantic horses involved in vast explosions of gunpowder. It was rather a calm rational combination of force against force.--_Oration on Geo. H. Thomas._ * * * * * After the fire and blood of the battle-fields have disappeared, nowhere does war show its destroying power so certainly and so relentlessly as in the columns which represent the taxes and expenditures of the nation. [From a Speech, June 2, 1879.] The Resumption of Specie Payments closes the most memorable epoch in our history since the birth of the Union. Eighteen hundred and sixty-one and eighteen hundred and seventy-nine are the opposite shores of that turbulent sea whose storms so seriously threatened with shipwreck the prosperity, the honor, and the life of the nation. But the horrors and dangers of the middle-passage have at last been mastered; and out of the night and tempest the Republic has landed on the shore of this new year, bringing with it union and liberty, honor and peace. * * * * * Our country needs not only a national but an international currency. * * * * * Let us have equality of dollars before the law, so that the trinity of our political creed shall be--equal States, equal men, and equal dollars throughout the Union. [Address, at the Memorial Meeting, in the House of Representatives, January 16, 1879.]