Excerpt from An Address on the Life and Character of James Abram Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States: Delivered September 27th, 1881, (the Day Appointed for Mourning and Humiliation, ) at Grace Methodist Episcopal Church

It is one of the peculiar features Of our political equality, that no boy, however humble his birth, however narrowing and depressing the circumstances by which he may be sur rounded, and however little aid he may receive from others, need feel that there is any insuperable necessity for his con tinuance in obscurity. TO be free to lift up one's eyes and see the shining portal Of the Temple of Fame, to be able to long for the strength to mount up to it, and the courage to enter it, constitute, after all, half the battle. The boy who has felt stirring within him the yearning, the deep longing to be something and to do something and to know everything, has already half conquered the world.' But he must hunger for knowledge - thirst for honor. If he act persistently, in keep ing with such aspirations and motions of his soul, pausing neither on the one hand to listen to the alluring temptations Of vice, nor on the other to satisfy merely sordid greed, but determined to dedicate himself to a life work Of noble effort and distinction, will keep before him the great maxims and principles by whose informing and unfolding vitalization, others have wooed and won a two-fold immortality, before he has overstepped his half of a century he will be able to reach the coveted summit where others have carved their names, and, standing on the very loftiest heights of Opportunity, he can turn and ask others, less fortunate, to behold in him the actual fruition Of beneficent laws; to confess that his success is only signal proof Of what may be accomplished by a free man in a land Where every man is something in himself, with greater facility and certainty than in those societies amid which rank and precedence and importunity are usually prerequisites to the earning of a brilliant celebrity, and an introduction to public consideration, in the halls Of Parliament or Assembly.

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