"Will you be honest, if I buy you?" asked a would-be buyer of a young negro, in the old days of human traffic. "I will be honest, whether you buy me or not," replied the slave.
We hear much about honesty as the best policy. It is recommended even by those who say that they have tried both ways, and ought to know. Yet to be honest anyway, whatever comes of it, is the first thought of everyone who carried his manhood into his business.
“Veritas” is engraved upon the buildings and gates of Harvard University, — "The Truth." Now that the college yard is enclosed by a park fence on every side, this legend from a great Hebrew poet is placed above a principal entrance: — "Open ye the gates that the righteous nation which keepeth truth may enter in." No self-respecting gate upon the globe will open willingly to those who do not keep the truth — "truth in the inward parts," as Hebrew sages used to say, — truth in conscience and life.
Edward Everett Hale relates that, when he was at Harvard, he had the good fortune to be a pupil of Benjamin Pierce for four years. "I shall not forget," he says, "nor will any of the twenty young men who surrounded me, the experience we had one day when someone had undertaken to copy at the blackboard some memoranda which he had made at home, and which he had privately introduced into the class-room.
Edward Everett Hale