But I am glad, in confirmation of my own estimate, to quote at length the eloquent words of Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, in his address before the Grand Army of the Republic.  He says of Garfield: 

“In America and Europe he is recognized as an illustrious example of the results of free institutions.  His career shows what can be accomplished where all avenues are open and exertion is untrammeled.  Our annals afford no such incentive to youth as does his life, and it will become one of the republic’s household stories.  No boy in poverty almost hopeless, thirsting for knowledge, meets an obstacle which Garfield did not experience and overcome.  No youth despairing in darkness feels a gloom which he did not dispel.  No young man filled with honorable ambition can encounter a difficulty which he did not meet and surmount.  For centuries to come great men will trace their rise from humble origins to the inspirations of that lad who learned to read by the light of a pine-knot in a log-cabin; who, ragged and barefooted, trudged along the tow-path of the canal, and without money or affluent relations, without friends or assistance, by faith in himself and in God, became the most scholarly and best equipped statesman of his time, one of the foremost soldiers of his country, the best debater in the strongest of deliberative bodies, the leader of his party, and the Chief Magistrate of fifty millions of people before he was fifty years of age.

“We are not here to question the ways of Providence.  Our prayers were not answered as we desired, though the volume and fervor of our importunity seemed resistless; but already, behind the partially lifted veil, we see the fruits of the sacrifice.  Old wounds are healed and fierce feuds forgotten.  Vengeance and passion which have survived the best statesmanship of twenty years are dispelled by a common sorrow.  Love follows sympathy.  Over this open grave the cypress and willow are indissolubly united, and into it are buried all sectional differences and hatreds.  The North and the South rise from bended knees to embrace in the brotherhood of a common people and reunited country.  Not this alone, but the humanity of the civilized world has been quickened and elevated, and the English-speaking people are nearer to-day in peace and unity than ever before.  There is no language in which petitions have not arisen for Garfield’s life, and no clime where tears have not fallen for his death.  The Queen of the proudest of nations, for the first time in our recollections, brushes aside the formalities of diplomacy, and, descending from the throne, speaks for her own and the hearts of all her people, in the cable, to the afflicted wife, which says:  ’Myself and my children mourn with you.’