Benjamin Harrison

“ If it is said that these communities must work out this problem for themselves, we have a right to ask whether they are at work upon it. Do they suggest any solution? When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law? When is that equality of influence which our form of government was intended to secure to the electors to be restored? This generation should courageously face these grave questions, and not leave them as a heritage of woe to the next. ”

“ This Government can never be wrecked by the treason or fault of those who for the time are placed in public position so long as the people are true to the principles of the Government and to the flag. [Applause.] Set your love upon the flag and that which it represents. Be ready, if occasion should call, to defend it, as my brave comrades did in the time of its greatest peril. Honor it in peace, cherish your loyal institutions, civil and educational; maintain social order in your community, let every one have respect for the rights and privileges of others while asserting his own. ”

“ The people of every State have here their representatives. Surely I do not misinterpret the spirit of the occasion when I assume that the whole body of the people covenant with me and with each other to-day to support and defend the Constitution and the Union of the States, to yield willing obedience to all the laws and each to every other citizen his equal civil and political rights. ”

“ No man can traverse this country, as I have done, from the Potomac to the Golden Gate and from the Golden Gate to the cities that open on Puget Sound, to the great North Sea, and can look into the faces of these people that come from every pursuit, without feeling that this Government, raised upon the bulwark of patriotism, is, by God's goodness, a perpetual institution. The patriotism of our people, their unselfish love for the flag, the great good-nature with which they lay aside all sharp party divisions and come together under one banner, is very gratifying to us all. ”

“ I greet you to-day, comrades, with a loving heart. God grant that these later days—for years are increasing with us all—may be full of sunshine, full of the respect of your neighbors, full of prosperity, and crowned at last with the full blessing of immortality.
To these little ones now enjoying the beneficent provisions which your State has made for their care and education I give the most affectionate greeting. The children of this land are the light and the life of our households. They are in the family what the blossoms are in the orchard and garden. ”

“ We are one people absolutely. We follow not men, but institutions. We are happy in the fact that though men may live or die, come or go, we still have that toward which the American citizen turns with confidence and veneration—this great Union of the States devised so happily by our fathers. General Garfield, when Mr. Lincoln was stricken down by the foul hand of an assassin, and when that great wave of dismay and grief swept over the land, standing in a busy thoroughfare of New York, could say: "The Government at Washington still lives." It is dependent upon no man. ”

“ We cherish the history of our party and are proud of its high achievements; they stir the enthusiasm of the young and crown those who were early in its ranks with well-deserved laurels. The success of the Republican party has always been identified with the glory of the flag and the unity of the Government. There has been nothing in the history or principles of our party out of line with revolutionary memories or with the enlightened statesmanship of the framers of our Constitution. Those principles are greater than men, lasting as truth, and sure of final vindication and triumph. ”

“ I am very certain that there is no class whose confidence and respect I more highly prize or more earnestly covet than that of the soldiers who, in the great war from 1861 to 1865, upheld the loved banner of our country and brought it home in honor. The comradeship of the war will never end until our lives end. The fires in which our friendship was riveted and welded were too hot for the bond ever to be broken. We sympathize with each other in the glory of the common cause for which we fought. We went, not as partisans, but as patriots, into the strife which involved the national life. ”

“ Without distinction of party, without taking note of the many existing differences of opinion, we are all glad to do all in our power to promote the dignity and prosperity of the country we love. We cannot love it too much; we cannot be too careful that all our influence is on the side of good government and of American interests. We do not wish ill to any other nation or people in the world, but they must excuse us if we regard our own fellow-citizens as having the highest claim on our regard. We will promote such measures as look to our own interests. [Cheers.] ”

“ In this magnificent parade which we have seen to-day of the survivors of the Massachusetts regiments in the war for the Union, and in this magnificent parade of the Sons of Veterans, coming on now to take the fathers' place in civil life and to stand as they were in their day as bulwarks of the Nation's defence, we have seen a magnificent evidence of what Massachusetts has done in defence of the Union and of the flag, and in these young men sure promise of what she would do again if the exigencies should call upon her to give her blood in a similar cause. ”

“ Look into these faces; see the evidences of contentment, thrift, prosperity, and intelligence that we read in all these faces. They have come by general summons from all these homes, of village, city, and farm, and here they are to-day the strength and rock of our security as a Nation; the people who furnished an invincible army when its flag was in danger; the people upon whose enlightened consciences and God-fearing hearts this country may rest with unguarded hope. ”

“ If we could follow the track of these intelligent men and women who have gone out from the New England States into the West and South; if we could trace those strong, yet slender and hard-to-be-discovered, threads of influence which they have started in the communities to which they went; if we could know how they have impressed on the minds of the pupils brought under their care the great lessons of self-respect and love for free institutions and social order,—we should have a higher thought than we have yet had of the power and dignity of these pioneers of education. [Cheers.] ”

“ The life of Abraham Lincoln teaches more useful lessons than any other character in American history. Washington stands remote from us. We think of him as dignified and reserved, but we think of Lincoln as one whose tender touch the children, the poor—all classes of our people—felt at their firesides and loved. The love of our people is drawn to him because he had such a great heart—such a human heart. ”

“ You are Indianians, some of you by birth; some of you, like me, by choice. You are Republicans; you have opposed always the doctrine of State's rights; you have believed and gloried in the great citizenship that embraces all the people of all the States. You believe that this Government is not a confederation to be dissolved at the will of any member of it, but a Nation having the inherent right, by arms, if need be, to perpetuate its beneficent existence. ”

“ Here may I not ask you to carry those inscriptions that now hang on the walls into your homes, into the schools of your city, into all of your great institutions where children are gathered, and teach them that the eye of the young and the old should look upon that flag as one of the familiar glories of every American? Have we not learned that no stocks and bonds, nor land, is our country? It is a spiritual thought that is in our minds—it is the flag and what it stands for; it is the fireside and the home ”

“ If I were to select a watchword that I would have every young man write above his door and on his heart, it would be that good word "Fidelity." I know of no better. The man who meets every obligation to the family, to society, to the State, to his country, and his God, to the very best measure of his strength and ability, cannot fail of that assurance and quietness that comes of a good conscience, and will seldom fail of the approval of his fellow-men, and will never fail of the reward which is promised to faithfulness. ”

“ On the bloody fields of Kansas, Republicans died for their creed, and since then we have put in that book the sacred memory of our immortal leader who has been mentioned here to-night—Abraham Lincoln—who died for his faith and devotion to the principles of human liberty and constitutional union. And there have followed it a great army of men who have died by reason of the fact that they adhered to the political creed that we loved. It is the only party in this land which in the past has been proscribed and persecuted to death for its allegiance to the principles of human liberty. ”

“ Our Government will not fail to go on in this increased career of development, in population, in wealth, in intelligence, in morality, so long as we hold up everywhere in the local communities and in the Nation this great thought that every man shall keep the law which secures him in his own rights, and shall not trample upon the rights of another. Let us divide upon tariff and finance, but let there never be a division among the American people upon this question, that nowhere shall the law be overturned in the interests of anybody. ”

“ My countrymen, we are confronted by this condition of things in America to-day; a government by the majority, expressed by an equal and a free ballot, is not only threatened, but it has been overturned. Why is it to-day that we have legislation threatening the industries of this country? Why is it that the paralyzing shadow of free trade falls upon the manufactures and upon the homes of our laboring classes? It is because the laboring vote in the Southern States is suppressed. ”

“ We are here citizens of a great, prosperous, magnificent Nation. We have common interests. We are here charged with the common duties to perpetuate, if we can, the prosperity and to maintain the honor of this great Republic. [Applause.] We are here to-night in the enjoyment of free government. We are here in the individual possession of better opportunities of development, of a larger prosperity, and of more individual comfort than are possessed by any other people in the world. ”

“ Education was early in the thought of the framers of our Constitution as one of the best, if not the only guarantee of their perpetuation. Washington, as well as the founders of the venerable and useful institution, appreciated and expressed his interest in the establishment of institutions of learning. How shall one be a safe citizen when citizens are rulers who are not intelligent? How shall he understand those great questions which his suffrage must adjudge without thorough intellectual culture in his youth? ”

“ Turn your faces to the morning, for the sun is lightening the hilltops; there is coming to our country a great growth, an extraordinary development, and you are to be full participants in it all. While other nations of the world have reached a climax in their home development, and are struggling to parcel out remote regions of the earth that their commerce may be extended, we have here prodigious resources that are yet to be touched by the finger of development, and we have the power, if we will, to put our flag again on the sea and to share in the world's commerce. ”

“ We see to-day how worthy the land was for which our comrades died, and for which you, my comrades, offered your lives, in its great development and its increasing population, in its multiplying homes, where plenty and prosperity, the love of God and social order, and all good things abide. In this great Nation, striding on in wealth and prosperity to the very first place among the nations of the earth; in this land, in truth as well as in theory the land of the free, we see that which was worthy of the utmost sacrifice of the truest men. [Prolonged Cheers.] ”

“ That exception was the central thought and vital principle that was at stake in the campaign. One marvels at his versatility in adapting himself to every occasion, whether he was addressing a delegation of miners, of comrades in war, or of children from the public schools; we admire the lofty thoughts and the delicious humor; but while he might soften in tender, playful greeting of children, or live again with his comrades the old life of tent and field, he never for one moment forgot the great principle whose banner he had been chosen to uphold. ”

“ Can the old Whigs, who so reverently received from the lips of Clay the gospel of protection, much longer support a revenue policy that they know to be inimical to our national interests? If when Kentucky was a slave State she found a protective tariff promoted the prosperity of her people, what greater things will the same policy not do for her as a free State? She has now opened her hospitable doors to skilled labor; her coal and metals and hemp invite its transforming touch. Why should she not speedily find great manufacturing cities spring up in her beautiful valleys? ”

“ If the dignity as well as the prestige and influence of the United States are not to be wholly sacrificed, we must protect those who, in foreign ports, display the flag or wear the colors of this Government against insult, brutality, and death inflicted in resentment of the acts of their Government, and not for any fault of their own. It has been my desire in every way to cultivate friendly and intimate relations with all the governments of this hemisphere. We do not covet their territory; we desire their peace and prosperity. ”

“ I welcome you here to this State as those who come to settle among us under new conditions of industrial and domestic life, to bring into our factories and our homes this new fuel from which we hope so much, not only in the promotion of domestic comfort and economy, but in the advancement of our manufacturing institutions. Your calling is one requiring high skill and intelligence and great fidelity. The agent with which you deal is an admirable servant but a dangerous master, and through carelessness may bring a peril instead of a blessing into our households and into our communities. ”

“ Rejoicing in the peace that pervades our land, proud of institutions which have for more than a hundred years witnessed their adequacy to give peace and security at home and to preserve our National honor abroad, rejoicing in the great increase of material wealth which is flowing in upon us, may we not on these great lines of enterprise, lifting ourselves now to newer and larger thoughts of what this country may be, enter upon these opening avenues of trade and influence upon which are the beckoning invitations of friendly peoples? ”