Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/208

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS

free from party bickering and party strifo. Hence, also, there can be no foundation for that cry, so insidiously raised that this bill should be passed at once, because uncertainty is worse than any bill can possibly be. Were this bill to pass both branches to-day, uncertainty would reign just the same.

It is often said that the truth is the simplest. That is so, after you understand the truth, but when you do not a lie is far simpler. When Copernicus discovered the theory of the universe it took centuries for men to believe it. The Ptol- maic theory was so simple that anybody by using his eyes could see the sun rise in the east and set in the west just like the moon, and to- day most men accept the Copernican theory, not on their own understanding, but on the general belief of mankind.

I shall not, therefore, in what I have to say, be able — being, as I hope, on the side of truth • — to rival the charming simplicity of the gentle- men opposite, or, like them, to compress the uni- verse into the nutshell of a speech. I regret this the less because I know that many a philos- opher has put the world into a nutshell only to find that the nutshell contained a world in which nobody ever lived, or moved, or had his being, and consequently a world which was of no human account.

Whether the universal sentiment in favor of protection as applied to every country is sound or not, I do not stop to discuss. Whether it is 176

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