I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not be a fool, which, if I may judge by the exhibitions around me, is a matter of no small dif… - James A. Garfield

The great Carlyle has said that the best gift God ever gave to man was an eye that could really see; I venture to add that an equally rare and not less important gift is the courage to tell what one sees.

Today, after eighteen years of defeat, the book of your domination is again opened, and your first act awakens every unhappy memory, and threatens to destroy the confidence which your professions of patriotism inspired. You turned down a leaf of the history that recorded your last act of power in 1861, and you have now signalized your return to power by beginning a second chapter at the same page, not this time by a heroic act that declares war on the battlefield, but you say, if all the legislative powers of the government do not consent to let you tear certain laws out of the statute-book, you will not shoot our government to death as you tried to do in the first chapter, but you declare that if we do not consent against our will, if you cannot coerce an independent branch of this government, against its will, to allow you to tear from the statute-books some laws put there by “there by the will of the people, you will starve the government to death.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.