Do not let any one, in the light of Henry Wilson’s career, be discouraged.  Rittenhouse conquered his poverty; John Milton overcame his blindness; Robert Hall overleaped his sickness; and plane and hammer, and adze and pickax, and crowbar and yardstick, and shoe-last have routed many an army of opposition and oppression.  Let every disheartened man look at two pictures—­Henry Wilson teaching fifteen hours a day at five dollars a week to get his education, and Henry Wilson under the admiring gaze of Christendom at the national capital.  He was one of the few men who maintained his integrity against violent temptations.  The tides of political life all set toward dissipation.  The congressional burying-ground at Washington holds the bones of many congressional 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.