go down to
future generations, for wherever the church is destroyed you are making
room for asylums and prisons. With the martyred Garfield, I, too, believe
that our great national danger is not from without.

It may be presumptuous in me to proffer so many suggestions to you who
have been living in a world from which I have been exiled for twenty-five
years. I may have formed a wrong conception of some things, but you will
be charitable enough to forgive my errors.

I hope to be of some assistance to mankind and will dedicate my future
life to unmask every wrong in my power and aid civilization to rise
against further persecution. I want to be the drum-major of a peace
brigade, who would rather have the good will of his fellow creatures than
shoulder straps from any corporate power.

One of the lessons impressed upon me by my life experience is the power of
that which we call personal influence, the power of one mind or character
over another.

Society is an aggregate of units. The units are related. No one lives or
acts alone, independently of another. Personal influence plays its part
in the relations we sustain to each other.

Do you ask me to define what I mean by personal influence? It is the sum
total of what a man is, and its effect upon another. Some one has said,
"Every man is what God made him," and some are considerably more so. That
which we call character is the sum total of all his tendencies, habits,
appetite and passions. The terms character and reputation are too often
confused. Character is what you really are; reputation is what some one
else would have you.

Every man has something of good in him. Probably none of us can say that
we are all goodness.

I have noticed that when a man claims to be all goodness, that claim alone
does not make his credit any better in business, or at the bank. If a man
is good, the world has a way of finding out his qualities. Most men are
willing to admit, at least to themselves, that their qualities are
somewhat mixed. I do not believe that the good people of the world are
all bunched up in one corner and the bad ones in another. Christ's
parable of the wheat and the tares explains that to my satisfaction.
There is goodness in all men, and sermons even in stones. But goodness
and badness is apt to run in streaks. Man, to use the language of
another, is a queer combination of cheek and perversity, insolence, pride,
impudence, vanity, jealousy,