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.
The ministers did not at his obsequies have a hard time to make out a
good case as to his future destiny, as in one case where a clergyman in
offering consolation as to the departure of a man who had been very
eminent, but went down through intemperance till he died in a snow-bank,
his rum-jug beside him. At the obsequies of that unfortunate, the
officiating pastor declared that the departed was a good Greek and Latin
scholar. We have had United States senators who used the name of God
rhetorically, and talked grandly about virtue and religion, when at that
moment they were so drunk they could scarcely stand up.
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