Especially do we find this true in our municipalities.  In some, the government instead of being in the hands of those who would make it such in truth, those who would make it serve the interests it is designed to serve, it is in the hands of those who are there purely for self, little whelps, those who will resort to any means to secure their ends, at times even to honorable means, should they seem to serve best the particular purpose in hand.  We have but to look around us to see that this is true.  The miserable, filthy, and deplorable condition of affairs the Lexow Committee in its investigations not so long ago laid bare to public gaze had its root in what?  In the fact that the offices in that great municipality have been and are filled by men who are there to serve in the highest degree the public welfare or by men who are there purely for self-aggrandizement?  But let us pass on.  This degraded condition of affairs exists not only in this great city, but there are scarcely any that are free from it entirely.  Matters are not always to continue thus, however.  The American people will learn by and by what they ought fully to realize to-day—­that the moment the honest people, the citizens, in distinction from the barnacles, mass themselves and stay massed, the notorious, filthy political rings cannot stand before them for a period of even twenty-four hours. The right, the good, the true, is all-powerful, and will inevitably conquer sooner or later when brought to the front. Such is the history of civilization.

Let our public offices—­municipal, state, and federal—­be filled with men who are in love with the human kind, large men, men whose lives are founded upon this great law of service, and we will then have them filled with statesmen.  Never let this glorious word be disgraced, degraded, by applying it to the little, self-centred whelps who are unable to get beyond the politician stage.  Then enter public life; but enter it as a man, not as a barnacle:  enter it as a statesman, not as a politician.

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Is it your ambition to become a great preacher, or better yet, with the same meaning, a great teacher? Then remember that the greatest of the world have been those who have given themselves in thorough self-devotion and service to their fellow-men, who have given themselves so thoroughly to all they have come in contact with that there has been no room for self.  They have not been seekers after fame, or men who have thought so much of their own particular dogmatic ways of thinking as to spend the greater part of their time in discussing dogma, creed, theology, in order, as is so generally true in cases of this kind, to prove that the ego you see before you is right in his particular ways of thinking, and that his chief ambition is to have this fact clearly understood,—­an abomination, I verily believe, in the sight of God himself, whose children in the mean time are starving, are dying for the bread of life, and an abomination I am sure, in the sight of the great majority of mankind.  Let us be thankful, however, for mankind is finding less use for such year by year, and the time will soon come when they will scarcely be tolerated at all.