udges of what are but
faults on the surface of a man, and what are vices that are the man
himself. The truth about others will out sooner or later; what most
concerns you in the meanwhile is to know the truth about yourselves.
While always trying to think fairly, and even generously about others,
have you the right to think well of yourselves? "It is above all
things necessary," said the late President Garfield, "that in every
action I should have the good opinion of James Garfield; for to eat,
and drink, and sleep, and awake with one whom you despise, though that
one be yourself, is an intolerable thought, and what must it be as a
life experience?"

This is his way of saying that, as he puts it, above all things he must
be able to respect himself; and therefore there must be no double
existence, no secret sin, no side streets off the open thoroughfare of
his life, which he preferred to visit when it was dark--for, although
his neighbours and friends might not know about them, James Garfield
would know about them, and to be this creature whom you despise was
Garfield's idea of what every rightly ordered man should think of with
loathing. It is the word of wise old Polonius over again--

"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Let a man have the right to respect himself, and he has that which can
take the sting out of his disappointments and the tyranny of victory
out of his failures. He may be no great success, as the world
appreciates success. He may not make much show at money-getting; the
position he fills may not excite much envy. Whether or not he achieves
this order of success will be all the same fourscore years hence.
These things, seen and temporal, will be past and forgotten, but that
which he makes himself in the use of them will remain, and that will
_not_ be all the same whatever it is.

I myself have been through a hard mill. I know what it is to have to
struggle for self-respect over the toil by which I earned my bread. I
have been counted as just a "hand" among a few hundred others, of
importance only so far as it affected the cost of a certain production.
But I say it advisedly, and speaking out of years which have left their
mark, I would rather have this experience to the finish of my mortal
days and all the way, and at the end be able to look my soul in the
face and say: "There is no shadow bet