It is one of the most beneficent results of American institutions that we have ceased to speak of poverty and hardship, and the necessity for hard and humble toil as disadvantages to a spirit endowed by nature with the capacity for generous ambitions. In a society where labor is honorable, and where every place in social or public life is open to merit, early poverty is no more a disadvantage than a gymnasium to an athlete, or drill and discipline to a soldier. General Garfield was never ashamed of his origin. He "Did not change, but kept in lofty place The wisdom which adversity had bred." The humblest friend of his boyhood was ever welcome to him when he sat in the highest seats, where Honor was sitting by his side. The poorest laborer was sure of the sympathy of one who had known all the bitterness of want and the sweetness of bread earned by the sweat of the brow. He was ever the simple, plain, modest gentleman. When he met a common soldier it was not the general or military hero that met him, but the comrade. When he met the scholar, it was not the learned man, or the college president, but the learner. It was fitting that he who found open the road through every gradation of public honor, from the log cabin to the Presidency, simply at the price of deserving it, should have answered in the same speech the sophistries of communism and the sinister forebodings of Lord Macaulay. "Here," he said, "society is not fixed in horizontal layers, like the crust of the earth, but as a great New England man said years ago, it is rather like the ocean, broad, deep, grand, open, and so free in all its parts that every drop that mingles with the yellow sand at the bottom, may ride through all the waters, till it gleams in the sunshine on the crest of the highest waves. So it is here in our free society, permeated with the light of American freedom. There is no American boy, however poor, however humble, orphan though he may be, that, if he have a clear head, a true heart, a strong arm, he may not rise through all the grades of society, and become the crown, the glory, the pillar of the State. Here there is no need for the Old World war between capital and labor. Here is no need of the explosion of social order predicted by Macaulay."