ver whose ruins the ever-alert adversary
clambers to success.

So I say to you to-night, Mr. President and gentlemen of the convention,
let us leave to the newspapers the expression of what we call earnest
convictions--convictions that arise up in after years to belt us across
the face and eyes. Let injudicious young men talk about that kind of
groceries, but the wary self-made politician who succeeds does not do
that way.

It seems odd to me that young men will go on year after year trying to
attain distinction by giving utterance to opinions when they can see for
themselves that we do not want such men for any place whatever, from
juryman to congressman.

If you examine my record for the last session, for instance, you will
not find that I spent the day pounding my desk with an autograph album
and filling the air with violent utterances pro or con and then sat up
nights to get myself interviewed by the disturbing elements of the
press. No, sir!

I am not a disturber, a radical or a disrupter!

At Washington I am a healer and at home in my ward I am also a heeler!

What America wants to-day is not so much a larger number of high-browed
men who will get up on their hind feet and call on heaven to paralyze
their right arms before they will do a wrong act, or ask to have their
tongues nailed to the ridge-pole of their mouths rather than utter a
false or dangerous doctrine. That was customary when the country was new
and infested with bears; when men carried their guns to church with them
and drank bay rum as a beverage.

These remarks made good pieces for boys to speak, but they will not do
now. What this country needs is a congress about as equally balanced as
possible politically, so that when one side walks up and smells of an
appropriation the other can growl in a low tone of voice, from December
till dog-days. In this way by a pleasing system of postponements,
previous questions, points of order, reference to committees, laying on
the table, and general oblivion, a great deal may be evaded, and people
at home who do not closely read and remember the Congressional Record
will not know who was to blame.

Judicious inertness and a gentle air of evasion will do much to prevent
party dissension. I have done that way, and I look for the same old
majority that we had at the former election.

I often wonder if Daniel Webster would have the nerve to get up and talk
as freely about things now as he used to when poli