Silhouettes of My Contemporaries

Perhaps I have been exceptionally fortunate, but I have sketched honestly and as well as I know how, the portraits of men as I have known them. All politicians are not like Presidents Hayes and Roosevelt, nor all reformers like Gough and Booker Washington, nor all preachers like Brooks and Beecher. But America is rich in such men as these. If he is greatest who serves his fellowmen the best, then I do not believe that any other country has produced in a century and a half as many great men as America has produced. Depressed and discouraged as we are apt to be by the flood of filth and falsehood, of corruption and crime, which the daily paper offers us for our daily food, it is well sometimes to stop, take a quieter and less partial view, and realize the right we have as Americans for pride in our past and for HOPE in our future. LYMAN ABBOTT.