CHAUNCEY MITCHELL DEPEW.
From "Oration at the Unveiling of the Bartholdi Statue."
* * * * *
With consciences satisfied with the discharge of duty, no consequences
can harm you. There is no evil that we can not either face or fly from,
but the consciousness of duty disregarded. A sense of duty pursues us
ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the
wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty
performed, or duty violated, is still with us, for our happiness or our
misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the
light our obligations are yet with us. We can not escape their power, nor
fly from their presence. They are with us in this life, will be with us
at its close; and in that scene of inconceivable solemnity, which lies
yet further onward, we shall still find ourselves surrounded by the
consciousness of duty, to pain us wherever it has been violated, and
to console us so far as God may have given us grace to perform it.
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