Friends, I confess I find myself in a peculiar circumstance — for I am told this "message" shall travel faster than any horse, any locomotive, perhaps even faster than the average congressman changes his position on a matter of principle.

I have heard tell that in your age, a man may carry in his breast pocket a device that contains the sum total of human knowledge, and yet he chiefly uses it to watch small moving pictures of cats in improbable situations. I will not pretend I would not do the same.

They say you are divided — that your neighbors seem like strangers, your countrymen like enemies. I know something of that. I sat at a desk in a house that was itself divided, and I will tell you what I told myself on the worst of those nights: hold on. Not because the morning is guaranteed to be better, but because you cannot find out if you do not stay to see it.

I was not a remarkable man. I was a tall, melancholy one, with a good wife, an unfortunate hat, and a fondness for a joke when the sorrow got too heavy to carry upright. If I am remembered as anything more than that, it is only because I refused, on a handful of days that mattered, to do the convenient thing.

You will have such days. I hope you are inconvenient in all the right ways.