Political life is a graveyard of broken hearts. Daniel Webster died of a
broken heart at Marshfield. Under the highest monument in Kentucky lies
Henry Clay, dead of a broken heart. So died Henry Wilson, at Natick,
Mass.; William H. Seward at Auburn, N.Y.; Salmon P. Chase, in
Cincinnati. So died Chester A. Arthur, honoured, but worried.

The election of Abram S. Hewitt as mayor of New York in 1886 restored
the confidence of the best people. Behind him was a record absolutely
beyond criticism, before him a great Christian opportunity. We made the
mistake, however, of ignoring the great influence upon our civic
prosperity of the business impulse of the West. We in New York and
Brooklyn were a self-satisfied community, unmindful of our dependence
upon the rest of the American continent. My Western trips were my
recreation. An occasional lecture tour accomplished for me what
yachting or baseball does for others. My congregation understood this,
and never complained of my absence. They realised that all things for me
turned into sermons. No man sufficiently appreciates his home unless
sometimes he goes away from it. It made me realise what a number of
splendid men and women there were in the world Man as a whole is a great
success; woman, taking her all in all, is a great achievement, and the
reason children die is because they are too lovely to stay out of
paradise.

Three weeks in the West brought me back to Brooklyn supremely
optimistic. There was more business in the markets than men could attend
to. Times had changed. In Cincinnati once I was perplexed by the
difference in clock time. They have city time and railroad time there. I
asked a gentleman about it.

"Tell me, how many kinds of time have you here?" I asked. "Three kinds,"
he replied, "city time, railroad time, and hard time."

There was no "hard time" at the close of 1886. The small rate of
interest we had been compelled to take for money had been a good thing.
It had enlivened investments in building factories and starting great
enterprises. The 2 per cent. per month interest was dead. The fact that
a few small fish dared to swim through Wall Street, only to be gobbled
up, did not stop the rising tide of national welfare. We were going
ahead, gaining, profiting even by the lives of those who were leaving us
behind.

The loss of the Rev. J. Hyatt Smith restored the symbol and triumph of
self-sacrifice. In the most exact sense of the word he was a genius. He