The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States: Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.Ridpath, John Clark
History
The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States: Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.
Ridpath, John Clark
Garfield, James A. (James Abram), 1831-1881
“Having thus gained the knowledge which is necessary to life,
health, industry, and citizenship, the student is prepared to enter
a wider and grander field of thought. If he desires that large and
liberal culture which will call into activity all his powers, and
make the most of the material God has given him, he must study
deeply and earnestly the intellectual, the moral, the religious, and
the æsthetic nature of man; his relations to nature, to civilization
past and present; and, above all, his relations to God. These should
occupy, nearly, if not fully, half the time of his college course.
In connection with the philosophy of the mind, he should study
logic, the pure mathematics, and the general laws of thought. In
connection with moral philosophy, he should study political and
social ethics—a science so little known either in colleges or
Congresses. Prominent among all the rest, should be his study of the
wonderful history of the human race, in its slow and toilsome march
across the centuries—now buried in ignorance, superstition, and
crime; now rising to the sublimity of heroism and catching a glimpse
of a better destiny; now turning remorselessly away from, and
leaving to perish, empires and civilizations in which it had
invested its faith and courage and boundless energy for a thousand
years, and, plunging into the forests of Germany, Gaul, and Britain,
to build for itself new empires better fitted for its new
aspirations; and, at last, crossing three thousand miles of unknown
sea, and building in the wilderness of a new hemisphere its latest
and proudest monuments.”
When the Fortieth Congress met, in December of 1867, Mr. Garfield was,
contrary to his wishes, taken off the Committee on Ways and Means and
made Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs. In the line of this
work he pursued some very important investigations of both military and
political character.
Among his most important speeches, in this connection, were that on the
“Military Control of the Rebel States” made in February, 1867 (during
the Thirty-Ninth Congress), and that delivered January 17, 1868, on the
then all-absorbing theme, “Reconstruction.”
In the conflict between President Johnson and the majority in Congress,
about the government of the late rebel States, Mr. Garfield was, of
course, sternly opposed to that outrageous policy of the President,
whose main object seemed to be the undoing of all the beneficial results
of the war.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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