Garfield's ambition for the success of his administration was high. With strong caution and conservatism in his nature, he was in no danger of attempting rash experiments, or of resorting to the empiricism of statesmanship. But he believed that renewed and closer attention should be given to questions affecting the material interests and commercial prospects of fifty millions of people. He believed that our continental relations, extensive and undeveloped as they are, involved responsibility, and could be cultivated into profitable friendship or be abandoned to harmful indifference or lasting enmity. He believed, with equal confidence, that an essential forerunner to a new era of national progress must be a feeling of contentment in every section of the Union, and a generous belief that the benefits and burdens of government would be common to all. Himself a conspicuous illustration of what ability and ambition may do under Republican institutions, he loved his country with a passion of patriotic devotion, and every waking thought was given to her advancement. He was an American in all his aspirations, and he looked to the destiny and influence of the United States with the philosophic composure of Jefferson and the demonstrative confidence of John Adams. The political events which disturbed the President's serenity, for many weeks before that fateful day in July, form an important chapter in his career, and, in his own judgment, involved questions of principle and of right which are vitally essential to the constitutional administration of the federal government. It would be out of place here and now to speak the language of controversy; but the events referred to, however they may continue to be a source of contention with others, have become, so far as Garfield is concerned, as much a matter of history as his heroism at Chickamauga, or his illustrious service in the House. Detail is not needful, and personal antagonism shall not be rekindled by any word uttered to-day. The motives of those opposing him are not to be here adversely interpreted nor their course harshly characterized. But of the dead President this is to be said, and said because his own speech is forever silenced and he can be no more heard except through the fidelity and the love of surviving friends. From the beginning to the end of the controversy he so much deplored, the President was never for one moment actuated by any motive of gain to himself or of loss to others. Least of all men did he harbor revenge; rarely did he even show resentment, and malice was not in his nature. He was congenially employed only in the exchange of good offices and the doing of kindly deeds. There was not an hour, from the beginning of the trouble till the fatal shot entered his body, when the President would not gladly, for the sake of restoring harmony, have retraced any step he had taken, if such retracing had merely involved consequences personal to himself.