which they honor him, and for which, besides, a
grateful race enshrines him in its heart of hearts. For he preferred to
suffer affliction with the Black Battalion and to suffer defeat for the
Senatorship rather than enjoy power and office as the price of his
desertion of the cause of those helpless men.

No man can give as much as Senator Foraker has given to a just cause,
give as generously, as unselfishly, gloriously as he has given of his
very self in this "Brownsville" case and lose that which is best
striving for in life. He may lose place in the Government and power as
a political leader. But what are these but the ephemera of man's fevered
existence and strivings here below? "What shadows we are," Burke said on
a memorable occasion in his contest for a seat in Parliament, "and what
shadows we pursue." Office, power, popularity; what are they but shadows
of passing clouds which a breath blows to us and a breath blows from us
again. No man loses anything in reality when he loses such fleeting,
such shadowy possessions. But if for the sake of them he loses truth,
justice, goodness, his love of the right and his hatred of the wrong,
his sympathy for the oppressed, his passion to help God's little ones,
such a man has bartered away his soul, the immortal part of him for a
rood of grass, which to-day flourisheth and to-morrow withereth and is
cast into the oven of all transitory and perishable possessions.

How many men who now hold seats in the United States Senate or the House
of Representatives do we even know the names of? How many of all that
long procession of them who have been passing for more than a century
though those halls of power have we so much as heard the names of? They
have filed through those stately chambers to dusty death and oblivion,
and the places which knew them once know them no more forever. A few
names only are remembered among all the multitude of them, not because
of the places they occupied or the power they wielded, but because while
in those houses they chose the better part--chose not to busy themselves
with shadows, with the things which perish, but seized and held fast to
the eternal verities of justice and freedom and human brotherhood. The
vast majority of them magnified their brief authority and neglected the
opportunity which their offices offered them to link their names and
official lives with some noble movement or measure for the betterment of
their kind, for the lifting up