He was very human and intensely American, and this knit a bond between him and the American people which nothing could ever break. And then he had yet one more attraction, not so impressive, perhaps, as the others, but none the less very important and very captivating. He never by any chance bored the American people. They might laugh at him or laugh with him, they might like what he said or dislike it, they might agree with him or disagree with him, but they were never wearied of him, and he never failed to interest them. He was never heavy, laborious, or dull. If he had made any effort to be always interesting and entertaining he would have failed and been tiresome. He was unfailingly attractive, because he was always perfectly natural and his own unconscious self. And so all these things combined to give him his hold upon the American people, not only upon their minds, but upon their hearts and their instincts, which nothing could ever weaken, and which made him one of the most remarkable, as he was one of the strongest, characters that the history of popular government can show. He was also--and this is very revealing and explanatory, too, of his vast popularity--a man of ideals. He did not expose them daily on the roadside with language fluttering about them like the Thibetan who ties his slip of paper to the prayer wheel whirling in the wind. He kept his ideals to himself until the hour of fulfillment arrived. Some of them were the dreams of boyhood, from which he never departed, and which I have seen him carry out shyly and yet thoroughly and with intense personal satisfaction. He had a touch of the knight errant in his daily life, although he would never have admitted it; but it was there. It was not visible in the medieval form of shining armor and dazzling tournaments, but in the never-ceasing effort to help the poor and the oppressed, to defend and protect women and children, to right the wronged and succor the downtrodden Passing by on the other side was not a mode of travel through life ever possible to him; and yet he was as far distant from the professional philanthropist as could well be imagined, for all he tried to do to help his fellow men he regarded as part of the day's work to be done and not talked about. No man ever prized sentiment or hated sentimentality more than he. He preached unceasingly the familiar morals which lie at the bottom of both family and public life. The blood of some ancestral Scotch covenanter or of some Dutch reformed preacher facing the tyranny of Philip of Spain was in his veins, and with his large opportunities and his vast audiences he was always ready to appeal for justice and righteousness. But his own personal ideals he never attempted to thrust upon the world until the day came when they were to be translated into realities of action.