From his boyhood up he lived in direct and vigorous contact
with men and things, not as in older States and easier conditions with
words and theories; and both his moral convictions and his intellectual
pinions gathered from that contact a supreme degree of that character by
which men knew him, that character which is the most distinctive
possession of the best American nature, that almost indescribable
quality which we call in general clearness or truth, and which appears
in the physical structure as health, in the moral constitution as
honesty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of
active life as practicalness. This one character, with many sides, all
shaped by the same essential force and testifying to the same inner
influences, was what was powerful in him and decreed for him the life he
was to live and the death he was to die. We must take no smaller view
than this of what he was. Even his physical conditions are not to be
forgotten in making up his character. We make too little always of the
physical; certainly we make too little of it here if we lose out of
sight the strength and muscular activity, the power of doing and
enduring, which the backwoods-boy inherited from generations of
hard-living ancestors, and appropriated for his own by a long discipline
of bodily toil. He brought to the solution of the question of labor in
this country not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in sympathy with
labor, full of the culture of labor, bearing witness to the dignity and
excellence of work in every muscle that work had toughened and every
sense that work had made clear and true.
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