There is no telling, by the time this reaches your eyes, what twists and turns the life of President Clinton may have taken. But as I write this the names Willey and Lewinsky are still on the lips of most water-cooler conversationalists.
I was reading about our first president, George Washington, himself no saint, when I came across a letter that Washington wrote to his nephew in 1793. I was especially taken with its first line: “Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be tried before you give them your confidence.”
Here’s some more of it: “True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation. Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse; remembering always the estimation of the widow’s mite, that it is not everyone that asketh that deserveth charity; all, however, are worthy of the inquiry, or the deserving may suffer.
“Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men, any more than fine feathers make fine birds.”
