Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. III.djvu/206

 168 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS Bethany was too friendly in opinion to slavery; and most significant of all the reasons he gave that, as he had inherited by birth and association a strong bias toward the religious views there in culcated, he thought especially to examine other faiths. Entering Williams in the autumn of 1854, he was duly graduated with the highest honors in the class of 1856. His classmates unite with Pres ident Hopkins in testifying that in college he was warm-hearted, large-minded, and possessed of great earnestness of purpose and a singular poise of judgment. All speak, too, of his modest and unassuming manners. But, outside of these and other like qualities, such as industry, perseverance, courage, and conscientiousness, Garfield had ex hibited up to this time no signs of the superiority that was to make him a conspicuous figure. But the effects of twenty-five years of most varied dis cipline, cheerfully accepted and faithfully used, begin now to show themselves, and to give to his tory one of its most striking examples of what education the education of books and of circum stances can accomplish. Garfield was not born, but made; and he made himself by persistent, strenuous, conscientious study and work. In the next six years he was a college president, a state senator, a major-general in the National army, and a representative-elect to the National congress.