ssional
drunkards. Henry Wilson seated at a banquet with senators and presidents
and foreign ministers, the nearest he ever came to taking their
expensive brandies and wines was to say, "No, sir, I thank you; I never
indulge." He never drank the health of other people in any thing that
hurt his own. He never was more vehement than in flinging his
thunderbolts of scorn against the decanter and the dram-shop. What a
rebuke it is for men in high and exposed positions in this country who
say, "We can not be in our positions without drinking." If Henry Wilson,
under the gaze of senators and presidents, could say No, certainly you
under the jeers of your commercial associates ought to be able to say
No. Henry Wilson also conquered all temptations to political corruption.
He died comparatively a poor man, when he might have filled his own
pockets and the pockets of his friends if he had only consented to go
into some of the infamous opportunities which tempted our public men.
_Credit Mobilier_, which took down so many senators and representatives,
touched him, but glanced off, leaving him uncontaminated in the opinion
of all fair-minded men. He steered clear of the "Lobby," that maelstrom
which has swallowed up so many strong political crafts. The bribing
railroad schemes that ran over half of our public men always left him on
the right side of the track. With opportunities to have made millions of
dollars by the surrender of good principles, he never made a cent. Along
by the coasts strewn with the hulks of political adventurers he voyaged
without loss of rudder or spar. We were not surprised at his funeral
honors. If there ever was a man after death fit to lie on Abraham
Lincoln's catafalque, and near the marble representation of Alexander
Hamilton, and under Crawford's splendid statue of Freedom, with a
sheathed sword in her hand and a wreath of stars on her brow, and to be
carried out amid the acclamation and conclamation of a grateful people,
that man was Henry Wilson.

The ministers did not at his obsequies have a hard time to make out a
good case as to his future destiny, as in one case where a clergyman in
offering consolation as to the departure of a man who had been very
eminent, but went down through intemperance till he died in a snow-bank,
his rum-jug beside him. At the obsequies of that unfortunate, the
officiating pastor declared that the departed was a good Greek and Latin
scholar. We have had United States sen