If you think too much about being
reelected, it is very difficult to be worth reelecting. You are so apt
to forget that the comparatively small number of persons, numerous as
they seem to be when they swarm, who come to Washington to ask for
things, do not constitute an important proportion of the population of
the country, that it is constantly necessary to come away from
Washington and renew one's contact with the people who do not swarm
there, who do not ask for anything, but who do trust you without their
personal counsel to do your duty. Unless a man gets these contacts he
grows weaker and weaker. He needs them as Hercules needed the touch of
mother earth. If you lift him up too high or he lifts himself too high,
he loses the contact and therefore loses the inspiration.
I love to think of those plain men, however far from plain their dress
sometimes was, who assembled in this hall. One is startled to think of
the variety of costume and color which would now occur if we were let
loose upon the fashions of that age. Men's lack of taste is largely
concealed now by the limitations of fashion. Yet these men, who
sometimes dressed like the peacock, were, nevertheless, of the ordinary
flight of their time.
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