[Frontispiece: v1. Jpg]SENATOR GEORGE F. HOAR From a photograph taken in 1897 _Copyright, 1897, by H. Schervee, Worcester, Mass. _

[Title page]AUTOBIOGRAPHYOF SEVENTY YEARS

BYGEORGE F. HOAR

WITH PORTRAITS

VOLUME I. 

NEW YORKCHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS1903

[Dedication]TOMY WIFE AND CHILDRENTHIS RECORD OF A LIFE WHICHTHEY HAVE MADE HAPPYIS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

[Table of Contents]CONTENTS

CHAPTER IINTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER IIROGER SHERMAN AND HIS FAMILY

CHAPTER IIISAMUEL HOAR

CHAPTER IVBOYHOOD IN CONCORD

CHAPTER VFAMOUS CONCORD MEN

CHAPTER VIFARM AND SCHOOL

CHAPTER VIIHARVARD SIXTY YEARS AGO

CHAPTER VIII1849 TO 1850--FOUNDATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY--DANIEL WEBSTER

CHAPTER IXLIFE IN WORCESTER

CHAPTER XPOLITICAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS FROM 1848 TO 1869

CHAPTER XITHE KNOW NOTHING PARTY AND ITS OVERTHROW

CHAPTER XIIELECTION TO CONGRESS

CHAPTER XIIISUMNER AND WILSON

CHAPTER XIVPERSONALITIES IN DEBATE

CHAPTER XVTHE NATIONAL HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN 1869

CHAPTER XVIPOLITICAL CONDITION IN 1869

CHAPTER XVIIRECONSTRUCTION

CHAPTER XVIIICOMMITTEE SERVICE IN THE HOUSE

CHAPTER XIXSALMON P. CHASE

CHAPTER XXADIN THAYER

CHAPTER XXIPOLITICAL CORRUPTION

CHAPTER XXIICREDIT MOBILIER

CHAPTER XXIIITHE SANBORN CONTRACTS

CHAPTER XXIVBENJAMIN F. BUTLER

CHAPTER XXVBELKNAP IMPEACHMENT

CHAPTER XXVIELECTORAL COMMISSION

CHAPTER XXVIIFOUR NATIONAL CONVENTIONS, 1876

CHAPTER XXVIIIFOUR NATIONAL CONVENTIONS, 1880

CHAPTER XXIXFOUR NATIONAL CONVENTIONS, 1884

CHAPTER XXXFOUR NATIONAL CONVENTIONS, 1888

CHAPTER XXXISATURDAY CLUB

CHAPTER XXXIITHE WORCESTER FIRE SOCIETY

APPENDIX I. 

APPENDIX II. 

[Text]AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SEVENTY YEARS

CHAPTER IINTRODUCTORY

Everybody who reads this book through will wonder that a manwho ought to be able to tell so much has really told so little. 

I have known personally and quite intimately, or have knownintelligent and trustworthy persons who have known personallyand quite intimately, many men who have had a great sharein the history of this country and in its literature for ahundred and thirty years. 

In my younger days there were among my kindred and near friendspersons who knew the great actors of the Revolutionary timeand the time which followed till I came to manhood myself. But I did not know enough to ask questions. If I had, andhad recorded the answers, I could write a very large partof the political and literary history of the United States. I never kept a diary, except for a few and brief periods. So for what I have to say, I must trust to my memory. I haveno doubt that after these volumes are published, there willcome up in my mind matter enough to make a dozen better ones. 

I invoke for this book that kindly judgment of my countrymenwhich has attended everything I have done in my life so far. I have tried to guard against the dangers and the besettinginfirmities of men who write their own biography. An autobiography, as the word implies, will be egotistical. An old man's autobiographyis pretty certain to be garrulous. If the writer set forththerein his own ideals, he is likely to be judged by them, even when he may fall far short of them. Men are likely tothink that he claims or pretends to have lived up to them, however painfully conscious he may be that they are only dreamswhich even if he have done his best have had little realityfor him. 

There is another danger for a man who tells the story ofgreat transactions, in which he has taken part, whether legislative, executive, military, or political, or any other, in whichthe combined action of many persons was required for the result. He is apt to claim, consciously or unconsciously, that hehimself brought the whole thing about. 

"Papa, " said the little boy to the veteran of the Civil War, "Did anybody help you to put down the Rebellion?"

This peril specially besets narrators in their old age. Iam afraid I can hardly escape it. 

I once heard General George H. Thomas relate to a brilliantcompany at a supper party, among whom were Chief Justice Chase, General Eaton, Commissary General in two wars, Senator Trumbull, William M. Evarts, Joseph Henry, John Sherman, his brotherthe General, and several other gentlemen of equal distinction, the story of the battles of Nashville and Franklin. The storywas full of dramatic interest. Yet no one who heard it wouldhave known that the speaker himself had taken part in thegreat achievement, until, just at the end, he said of theBattle of Nashville that he thought of sending a detachmentto cut off Hood's army at a ford by which he escaped afterthey were defeated, but he concluded that it was not safeto spare that force from immediate use in the battle. "IfI had done it, " he added, with great simplicity, "I shouldhave captured his whole army. There is where I made my mistake. "

The recollections of the actors in important political transactionsare doubtless of great historic value. But I ought to sayfrankly that my experience has taught me that the memory ofmen, even of good and true men, as to matters in which theyhave been personal actors, is frequently most dangerous andmisleading. I could recount many curious stories which havebeen told me by friends who have been writers of history andbiography, of the contradictory statements they have receivedfrom the best men in regard to scenes in which they have beenpresent. 

If any critic think this book lacking in dignity, or wisdom, or modesty, it is hoped that it may, by way of offset, makeup for it in sincerity. I have so far lived in the worldwithout secrets. If my countrymen, or the people of Massachusetts, have trusted me, they have fully known what they were doing. "They had eyes and chose me. "

I have never lifted any finger or spoken a word to any manto secure or to promote my own election to any office. Ido not mean to criticise other men who advance their honorableambition for public service or exert themselves to get officefor which they think themselves fit. It was the "high Romanfashion. " It has been the fashion in England always. Englishgentlemen do not disdain a personal solicitation for politicalsupport, and think no harm in it, to which no American gentlemanwould for a moment stoop. 

It has been the custom in other parts of the country almostfrom the beginning of the Government. But what I think abetter custom has prevailed in Massachusetts. I arrogateto myself no virtue in this respect. I only say that it hasbeen my supreme good fortune to be the son of a Commonwealthamong whose noble and high-minded people a better and morefastidious habit has prevailed. 

The lesson which I have learned in life, which is impressedon me daily, and more deeply as I grow old, is the lessonof Good Will and Good Hope. I believe that to-day is betterthan yesterday, and that to-morrow will be better than to-day. I believe that in spite of so many errors and wrongsand even crimes, my countrymen of all classes desire whatis good, and not what is evil. I repeat what I said to theState Convention of Massachusetts after the death of PresidentMcKinley:

"When I first came to manhood and began to take part in publicaffairs, that greatest of crimes, human slavery, was entrenchedeverywhere in power in this Republic. Congress and SupremeCourt, Commerce and Trade and Social Life alike submittedto its imperious and arrogant sway. Mr. Webster declaredthat there was no North, and that the South went clear upto the Canada line. The hope of many wise and conservativeand, as I now believe, patriotic men, of saving this countryfrom being rent into fragments was in leaving to slavery foreverthe great territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific, in the Fugitive Slave Law, a law under which freemen weretaken from the soil of Massachusetts to be delivered intoperpetual bondage, and in the judgment of the Supreme Courtwhich declared it as the lesson of our history that the Negrohad no rights that a white man was bound to respect. 

"Last week at Dartmouth, at the great celebration in honorof Daniel Webster, that famous college gave the highest honorin its power to a Negro, amid the applause of the brilliantassembly. And there was no applause more earnest or heartythan that of the successor of Taney, the Democratic ChiefJustice of the United States. I know that the people of thatrace are still the victims of outrages which all good mendeplore. But I also believe that the rising sense of justiceand of manhood in the South is already finding expressionin indignant remonstrance from the lips of governors and preachers, and that the justice and manhood of the South will surelymake their way. 

"Ah, Fellow Citizens, amid the sorrow and the mourning andthe tears, amid the horror and the disappointment and thebaffled hope, there comes to us from the open grave of WilliamMcKinley a voice of good omen! What pride and love must wefeel for the republic that calls such men to her high places?What hope and confidence in the future of a people, whereall men and all women of all parties and sections, of allfaiths and creeds, of all classes and conditions, are readyto respond as ours have responded to the emotion of a mightylove. 

"You and I are Republicans. You and I are men of the North. Most of us are Protestants in religion. We are men of nativebirth. Yet if every Republican were to-day to fall in hisplace, as William McKinley has fallen, I believe our countrymenof the other party, in spite of what we deem their errors, would take the Republic and bear on the flag to liberty andglory. I believe if every Protestant were to be strickendown by a lightning-stroke, that our brethren of the Catholicfaith would still carry on the Republic in the spirit of atrue and liberal freedom. I believe if every man of nativebirth within our borders were to die this day, the men offoreign birth, who have come here to seek homes and libertyunder the shadow of the Republic, would carry it on in God'sappointed way. I believe if every man of the North were todie, the new and chastened South, with the virtues it hascherished from the beginning, with its courage and its constancy, would take the country and bear it on to the achievement ofits lofty destiny. The Anarchist must slay 75, 000, 000 Americansbefore he can slay the Republic. 

"Of course there would be mistakes. Of course there wouldbe disappointments and grievous errors. Of course there wouldbe many things for which the lovers of liberty would mourn. But America would survive them all, and the nation our fathersplanted would endure in perennial life. 

"William McKinley has fallen in high place. The spirit ofAnarchy, always the servant of the spirit of Despotism, aimedits shaft at him, and his life for this world is over. Butthere comes from his fresh grave a voice of lofty triumph:'Be of good cheer. It is God's way. '"

I account it my supreme good fortune that my public lifehas been spent in the service of Massachusetts. No man canknow better than I do how unworthy I have been of a placein the great line of public men who have adorned her historyfor nearly three hundred years. What a succession it hasbeen. What royal house, what empire or monarchy, can showa catalogue like that of the men whom in every generationshe has called to high places--Bradford, and Winthrop, andSir Henry Vane, Leverett, and Sam Adams and John Adams andhis illustrious son, and Cabot and Dexter, Webster and Everettand Sumner and Andrew. Nothing better can be said in praiseof either than that they have been worthy of her, and shehas been worthy of them. They have given her always braveand honest service, brave and honest counsel. She has neverasked of them obsequiousness, or flattery, or even obedienceto her will, unless it had the approval of their own judgmentand conscience. That relation has been alike most honorableand most advantageous to both sides. They have never beenafraid to trust the people and they have never been afraidto withstand the people. They knew well the great secretof all statesmanship, that he that withstands the people onfit occasions is commonly the man who trusts them most andalways in the end the man they trust most. 

CHAPTER IIROGER SHERMAN AND HIS FAMILY

My mother, who died in 1866, at the age of eighty-three, was the daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut. Her fatherdied when she was ten years old. She lived in her mother'shouse, opposite the College in New Haven, until her marriagein 1812. New Haven was one of the capital cities of New England. Its society had the special attraction which belonged to theseat of a famous college. Her mother's house was visitedby the survivors of the great period of the Revolution andthe framing of the Constitution, whom her father had knownduring an eminent public service of nearly forty years. 

My mother was the most perfect democrat, in the best senseof the word, that I ever knew. It was a democracy which wasthe logical result of the doctrines of the Old Testament andof the New. It recognized the dignity of the individual soul, without regard to the accident of birth or wealth or poweror color of the skin. If she were in the company of a Queen, it would never have occurred to her that they did not meetas equals. And if the Queen were a woman of sense, and knewher, it would never occur to the Queen. The poorest peoplein the town, the paupers in the poorhouse, thought of heras a personal friend to whom they could turn for sympathyand help. No long before her death, an old black woman diedin the poorhouse. She died in the night. An old man whohad been a town pauper a good part of his life sat up withher and ministered to her wants as well as he could. Justbefore she died, the old woman thanked him for his kindness. She told him she should like to give him something to showher gratitude, but that she had nothing in the world; butshe thought that if he would go to Mrs. Hoar and ask herto give him a dollar, as a favor to her she would do it. Thedraft on the bank of kindness was duly honored. And I thinkthe legacy was valued as highly by her who paid it as if ithad been a costly gem or a work of art from an emperor's gallery. 

Mr. Calhoun was very intimate in my grandmother's householdwhen he was in college, and always inquired with great interestafter the young ladies of the family when he met anybody whoknew them. He had a special liking for my mother, who wasabout his own age, and always inquired for her. 

William M. Evarts visited Washington in his youth and calledupon Mr. Calhoun, who received him with great consideration, went with him in person to see the President and what wasworth seeing in Washington. Mr. Calhoun spoke in the highestterms of Roger Sherman to Mr. Evarts, said that he regardedhim as one of the greatest of our statesmen, and that he hadseen the true interests of the South when Southern statesmenwere blind to them. This Mr. Calhoun afterward said in aspeech in the Senate, including, however, Mr. Paterson ofNew Jersey and Oliver Ellsworth in his eulogy. 

The story of Roger Sherman's life has never been told at length. There is an excellent memoir of him in Sanderson's "Livesof the Signers, " written by Jeremiah Evarts, with the assistanceof the late Governor and Senator Roger S. Baldwin of Connecticut. But when that was written the correspondence of the greatactors of his time, and indeed the journals of the ContinentalCongress and the Constitutional Convention and the MadisonPapers, were none of them accessible to the public. 

An excellent though brief memoir of Mr. Sherman was publisheda few years ago by L. H. Boutell, Esq. , of Chicago. Mr. Shermanwas a man who seemed to care nothing for fame. He was contentto cause great things to be done for his country, and carednothing for the pride and glory of having done them. Thepersonal pronoun I is seldom found in any speech or writingof his. He had a large share in the public events that ledto the Revolution, in the conduct of the War, in the proceedingsof the Continental Congress, in the framing of the Constitution, in securing its adoption by Connecticut, and in the actionof the House and Senate in Washington's first Administration. He was also for many years Judge of the highest court of hisState. He was a man of indefatigable industry. An accomplishedlady employed to make investigations in the public archivesof the Department of State, reported that she did not seehow he could ever have gone to bed. 

He had a most affectionate and tender heart. He was veryfond of his family and friends. Although reserved and silentin ordinary company, he was very agreeable in conversation, and had a delightful wit. Some of the very greatest men ofhis time have left on record their estimate of his greatness. 

Thomas Jefferson said of him: "There is old Roger Sherman, who never said a foolish thing in his life. "

Theodore Sedgwick said: "He was a man of the selectest wisdom. His influence was such that no measure, or part of a measurewhich he advocated, ever failed to pass. "

Fisher Ames said that if he were absent through a debateand came in before the vote was taken he always voted withRoger Sherman, as he always voted right. 

Patrick Henry said that the first men in the ContinentalCongress were Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Roger Sherman, and, later in life, that Roger Sherman and George Mason werethe greatest statesmen he ever knew. This statement, publishedin the life of Mason, was carefully verified for me by myfriend, the late William Wirt Henry, grandson and biographerof Patrick Henry, as appears by a letter from him in my possession. *

[Footnote]*I attach a passage from Mr. William Wirt Henry's letter, datedDecember 28, 1892. 

"I am glad to be able to say that you may rely on the correctnessof the passage at page 221 of Howe's Historical Collections of Va. Giving Patrick Henry's estimate of Roger Sherman. It was furnishedthe author by my father and though a youth I well remember Mr. Howe'svisit to Red Hill, my father's residence. My father, John Henry, was about three years of age when his father died, but his motherlong survived Patrick Henry, as did several of his older children. From his mother, brothers and sisters my father learned manypersonal reminiscences of his father and his exceptionallyretentive memory enabled him to relate them accurately. I haveoften heard him relate the reminiscences given on that page byMr. Howe. "[End of Footnote]

John Adams, in a letter to his wife, speaks of Sherman as"That old Puritan, as honest as an angel, and as firm inthe cause of Independence as Mt. Atlas. "

But perhaps the most remarkable testimony to his character, one almost unexampled in the history of public men, is thatpaid to him by Oliver Ellsworth, himself one of the greatestmen of his time, --Chief Justice of the United States, Envoyto France, leader in the Senate for the first twelve yearsof the Constitution, and author of the Judiciary Act. Hehad been on the Bench of the Superior Court of Connecticut, with Mr. Sherman, for many years. They served together inthe Continental Congress, and in the Senate of the UnitedStates. They were together members of the Convention thatframed the Constitution, and of the State Convention in Connecticutthat adopted it. Chief Justice Ellsworth told John Adamsthat he had made Mr. Sherman his model in his youth. Mr. Adams adds: "Indeed I never knew two men more alike, exceptthat the Chief Justice had the advantage of a liberal education, and somewhat more extensive reading. Mr. Sherman was bornin the State of Massachusetts, and was one of the strongestand soundest pillars of the Revolution. " It would be hardto find another case of life-long and intimate companionshipbetween two public men where such a declaration by eitherof the other would not seem ludicrous. 

He was the only person who signed all four of the great StatePapers, to which the signatures of the delegates of the differentColonies were attached:

 The Association of 1774; The Articles of Confederation; The Declaration of Independence, and The Constitution of the United States. 

Robert Morris signed three of them. 

His tenacity, the independence of his judgment, and his influenceover the great men with whom he was associated, is shown byfour striking instances among many others where he succeededin impressing his opinion on his associates. 

_First:_ It is well known that the dispute between the largeStates, who desired to have their votes in the National Legislaturecounted in proportion to numbers, and the small States, whodesired to vote by States as equals, a dispute which nearlywrecked the attempt to frame a Constitution of the UnitedStates, arose in the Continental Congress, and gave rise togreat controversy there when the Articles of Confederationwere framed. Mr. Sherman was one of the Committee that framedthose Articles, as he was afterward one of the Committee whoreported the Declaration of Independence. 

John Adams writes in his diary, that Mr. Sherman, in Committeeof the Whole, moved August 1, 1776, that the vote be takenboth ways, once according to numbers, and a second time, whenthe States should vote as equals. 

This was, in substance, so far as the arrangement of politicalpower was concerned, the plan of the Constitution. In theConstitutional Convention, Mr. Sherman first moved this plan, known as the Connecticut Compromise, and made the first argumentin its support, to which his colleague, Oliver Ellsworth, afterward gave the weight of his powerful influence. TheConvention afterward, almost in despair of any settlementof this vexed question, referred the matter to a grand committee, on which Mr. Ellsworth was originally named. But he withdrewfrom the committee, and Mr. Sherman took his place. Mr. Sherman had the parliamentary charge of the matter from thebeginning, and at the close of the Convention, moved the provisionthat no State should be deprived of its equal vote withoutits consent. 

When Mr. Sherman's known tenacity, and his influence overthe great men with whom he was associated, testified to byso many of them, is borne in mind, it seems there can be nodoubt that he is entitled to the chief credit of carryingout the scheme which he himself devised, and which, yearsbefore the Convention met, he himself first moved in theContinental Congress for which he made the first argument, and which was reported from the committee of which he wasa member, representing the State which gave the name to theCompromise. His motion, which was adopted, that no Stateshould be deprived of its equal vote in the Senate withoutits consent, made the equality secure. *

[Footnote]* See Boutell's "Life of Roger Sherman, " Lodge's "Flying Frigate, --Address on Ellsworth, " Proceedings Am. Ant. Soc. , October, 1902. [End of Footnote]

_Second:_ In 1774, when Mr. Adams was on his way to theContinental Congress in Philadelphia, he records in his diarythat he met Roger Sherman at New Haven, who, he says, "isa solid and sensible man. " Mr. Sherman said to him that hethought the Massachusetts patriots, especially Mr. Otis, in his argument for the Writs of Assistance, had given upthe whole case when they admitted that Parliament had thepower to legislate for the Colonies under any circumstanceswhatever. He lived to join in the report from the committee, and to sign the Declaration of Independence, which put thecase on his ground. The Declaration of Independence doesnot recognize Parliament at all, except indirectly, when itsays the King "has combined with others" to do the wrongswhich are complained of. 

_Third:_ In 1752 the whole country was overrun with papermoney. Mr. Sherman published in that year a little pamphlet, entitled, "A Caveat Against Injustice, or An Inquiry Intothe Evil Consequences of a Fluctuating Medium of Exchange. "He stated with great clearness and force the arguments which, unhappily, we have been compelled to repeat more than oncein later generations. He denounced paper money as "a cheat, vexation, and snare, a medium whereby we are continually cheatingand wronging one another in our dealings and commerce. " Headds, "So long as we import so much more foreign goods thanare necessary, and keep so many merchants and traders employedto procure and deal them out to us: a great part of whichwe might as well make among ourselves; and another great partof which we had much better be without, especially the spiritousliquors, of which vast quantities are consumed in the colonyevery year, unnecessarily, to the great destruction of estates, morals, healths and even the lives of many of the inhabitants, --I say, so long as these things are so, we shall spend a greatpart of our labor and substance for that which will not profitus. Whereas, if these things were reformed, the provisionsand other commodities which we might have to export yearly, and which other governments are dependent upon us for, wouldprocure us gold and silver abundantly sufficient for a mediumof trade. And we might be as independent, flourishing andhappy a colony as any in the British Dominions. "

He lived to move in the Convention, and to procure its insertionin the Constitution, the clause that no State should makeanything but gold and silver legal tender. 

_Fourth:_ Mr. Sherman took his seat in the Federal ConventionMay 30, 1787. Mr. Randolph's resolution, submitted on the29th day of May, being before the Convention the next day, included the proposition that the National Legislature oughtto be empowered to enjoy the legislative rights vested inCongress by the confederation, "and moreover to legislatein all cases in which the separate States are incompetent, "--the question being whether the clause authorizing Congressto legislate in all cases in which the separate States areincompetent should be retained, every State in the Conventionvoted Aye, except Connecticut. Connecticut was divided. Ellsworthvoted Aye, and Sherman, No. 

Mr. Sherman lived, not only to sign a Constitution of limitedpowers, but himself to support the Tenth Article of Amendmentthereto, which is as follows:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the Statesrespectively, or to the people. " The words "or to the people"were moved by Mr. Sherman after the original article was reported. So he saw clearly in the beginning, what no other member saw, the two great American principles, first that the NationalGovernment should be a Government of limited and delegatedpowers, and next, that there is a domain of legislation whichthe people have not delegated either to the National Governmentor to the States, and upon which no legislative power mayrightfully enter. 

I surely am not mistaken in thinking that even without theother services of a life devoted to the public, these fourcontributions to the Constitutional history of the countryentitle Mr. Sherman to an honorable place in the gratefulmemory of his countrymen, and vindicate the tributes whichI have cited from his illustrious contemporaries. 

My grandmother, the daughter of Benjamin Prescott of Salem, was a woman of great intelligence and a great beauty in hertime. She was once taken out to dinner by General Washingtonwhen he was President. Madam Hancock, whose husband had beenPresident of the Continental Congress and Governor of Massachusetts, complained to General Washington's Secretary, Mr. Lear, thatthat honor belonged to her. The Secretary told General Washington, the next day, what she said. The General answered that itwas his privilege to give his arm to the handsomest womanin the room. Whether the reply was communicated to Mrs. Hancock, or whether she was comforted by it, does not appear. GeneralWashington had been a guest at my grandfather's house in mymother's childhood, and she had sat on his knee. She wasthen six years old. But she always remembered the occasionvery vividly. 

My grandfather was a friend of Lafayette, who mentions himin one of his letters, the original of which is in my possession. One of my mother's brothers, Lt. Colonel Isaac Sherman, ledthe advance at Princeton, and was himself intimate with Washingtonand Lafayette. He was a very brave officer and commandeda Connecticut regiment at the storming of Stony Point. Heis honorably mentioned in Gen. Wayne's report of the action. Washington alludes to him in one of his letters to Lafayette, as one of his friends whom Lafayette will be glad to see ifhe will visit this country once more. There is, in the StateDepartment, an amusing correspondence between Col. Shermanand Gen. Wayne, in which he complains that Mad Anthony doesgreat injustice in his report to the soldiers from other Statesthan Pennsylvania. Mad Anthony was mad at the letter. Butafter a rather significant request from Gen. Washington, he repaired the wrong. 

Another of her brothers who died at the age of eighty-eight, when I was thirty years old, and at whose house I was oftena visitor, spent three weeks as Washington's guest at MountVernon. Old Deacon Beers of New Haven, whom I knew in hisold age, was one of the guard who had Andre in custody. Duringhis captivity, Andre made a pen-and-ink likeness of himself, which he gave to Deacon Beers. It is now in the possessionof Yale College. 

I had from my mother the story of General Washington takingChief Justice Ellsworth's twin children, one on each knee, and reciting to them the ballad of the Derbyshire Ram. Thistradition has remained in the Ellsworth family. I have confirmedit by inquiry of the Rev. Mr. Wood, a grandson of Oliver Ellsworth, who died in Washington a few years ago. 

Besides the uncle to whom I allude, who died in 1856, JudgeSimeon Baldwin, who married two of my aunts, died in 1851, aged ninety. He was a Member of Congress in 1803-5, and wasan intimate friend of Chancellor Kent, who was his classmateand chum in Yale, and was intimate with the Federalist leadersof the Hamilton party. I several times made visits in hishousehold before his death. President Jeremiah Day, anotheruncle by marriage, was at the head of Yale for thirty years. He died in 1867, at the age of 94. 

My mother's sister, Mrs. Jeremiah Evarts, was born January28, 1774, and died in 1851, at the age of seventy-seven. Sheknew intimately many famous men and women of the Revolutionaryperiod. Her husband was an intimate friend of John Jay. Shehad a great deal of the sprightly wit for which her son, William, was so famous. She was at home at the time of Washington'svisit, then a child eleven years old, and opened the doorfor him when he took his leave. The General, who was veryfond of children, put his hand on her head and said, "My littlelady, I wish you a better office. " She dropped a courtesyand answered, quick as lightning, "Yes, sir; to let you in. "

Mrs. Evarts was a woman not only of sprightly wit, but ofgreat beauty. She liked to tell in her old age of a dinnerwhich John Hancock gave for her father and her, in Boston, when she was a girl. She described her dress with greatminuteness, and added naively, "Didn't I look pretty?"

My mother, who was married in 1812, knew very intimately manyof her father's and mother's old friends who had been distinguishedin the public service in the Revolutionary period and theAdministration of Washington and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. She knew very well the family of John Jay. He and his wifewere visitors at my grandmother's after their return fromSpain. My mother was intimate in the household of OliverEllsworth as in a second home. His children were her playmates. She was also very intimate indeed with the family of SenatorHillhouse, whose daughter Mary was one of her dearest friends. 

Senator Hillhouse held a very high place in the public lifeof Connecticut in his day. He was one of the friends of Hamilton, and one of the group of Federal statesmen of whom Hamiltonwas the leader. He was United States Senator for Connecticutfrom 1796 to 1810. 

After she became a young lady, my mother, with Fanny Ellsworth, afterward Mrs. Wood, and Mary Hillhouse, daughter of the Senator, established a school to teach young colored children to readand sew. The colored people in New Haven were in a sad conditionin those days. The law of the State made it a penal offenceto teach a colored child to read. These girls violated thelaw. The public authorities interfered and threatened themwith prosecution. But the young women were resolute. Theyinsisted that they were performing a religious duty, and declaredthat they should disobey the law and take the consequences. A good deal of sympathy was aroused in their behalf. TheNew Haven authorities had to face the question whether theywould imprison the daughter of a Signer of the Declarationof Independence, who had affixed his signature to the greataffirmation that all men are created equal, the daughters oftwo Framers of the Constitution, and the daughter of JamesHillhouse, then the foremost citizen of Connecticut, forteaching little children to read the Bible. They gave up theattempt. The school kept on and flourished. President Dwightraised a considerable fund for it by a course of lectures, and it continued down to within my own recollection. Whatbecame of the fund which was raised for its support I cannottell. 

Jeremiah Evarts was born February 13, 1781. He died May 10, 1831. He was the founder and Secretary of the American Boardof Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He was one of thethirteen men who met in Samuel Dexter's office in 1812, toinaugurate the Temperance Reformation. The habit of excessivedrinking was then almost universal in this country. Liquorsand wines were freely used on social occasions, at weddingsand at funerals. The clergyman staggered home from his roundof pastoral calls, and the bearers partook of brandy or ginor rum in the room adjoining that where the coffin was placedready for the funeral. A gentleman present said it was utterlyimpracticable to try and wean the American people from the habit ofdrinking. Jeremiah Evarts answered, "It is right, thereforepracticable. "

He was a Puritan of the old school. He made a vigorous butineffectual attempt in Connecticut to enforce the Sundaylaws. His death was caused by his exertions in resistingthe removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia, a removalaccomplished in violation of the Constitution and of publicfaith. The Supreme Court of the United States declared thelaw of Georgia unconstitutional. But Georgia defied the mandateof the Court, and it was never executed. The missionary agentwas imprisoned and died of his confinement. Mr. Evarts said, "There is a court that has power to execute its judgments. "

I told this story to Horace Maynard, an eminent member ofCongress and a member of the Cabinet. Mr. Maynard said, "Therewas never a prophecy more terribly accomplished. The territoryfrom which those Indians were unlawfully removed was the sceneof the Battle of Missionary Ridge, which is not far from thegrave of Worcester, the missionary who died in prison. Thatland was fairly drenched with blood and honeycombed with graves. "

Mr. Evarts edited the _Panoplist, _ a very able magazine whichpowerfully defended the old theology against the Unitarianmovement, then at its height. 

A well-known writer, Rev. Leonard W. Bacon, published a shorttime ago a sketch entitled, "The Greater Evarts, " in whichhe contrasted the career of Jeremiah Evarts with that of hisbrilliant and delightful son. Whether that judgment shallstand we may know when the question is settled, which is tobe answered in every generation, whether martyrdom be a failure. 

Among the inmates of my grandfather's household in my mother'schildhood and youth was Roger Minott Sherman. He was theson of the Reverend Josiah Sherman, my grandfather's brother, a clergyman of Woburn, Massachusetts, where Roger Minott wasborn. His father died in 1789. My grandfather took the boyinto his household and educated him and treated him as a son, and just before his death gave him his watch, which is nowin the possession of a son of General Sherman. 

Roger Minott Sherman was unquestionably the ablest lawyerin New England who never obtained distinction in politicallife, and, with the exception of Daniel Webster and JeremiahMason and Rufus Choate, the ablest New England ever produced. *

[Footnote]* See Appendix. [End of Footnote]

Roger Minott Sherman's father died in 1789. The widow wroteto some of her friends to see what assistance could be obtainedto enable her son to continue his studies at Yale. It wasapparently in response to this appeal that Mr. Sherman wrotethe following letter to his nephew. 

NEW YORK, April 28, 1790. 

_Dear Nephew, _--I would have you continue your studies andremain at my house as you have done hitherto. I hope youwill be provided for so as to complete your education at College, and lay a foundation for future usefulness. When I returnhome I shall take such further order respecting it as maybe proper. I shall afford you as much assistance as undermy circumstances may be prudent. 

 I am your affectionate uncle, ROGER SHERMAN. 

Mr. Sherman died a year after his nephew graduated; but beforehe died he doubtless saw the promise of that distinguishedcareer which added new lustre to the Sherman name. 

It is a rather remarkable fact that my mother had such closerelations to so many eminent lawyers. Her father, thoughhis public duties prevented him from practising law very long, was a very great lawyer and judge. Her brother-in-law, JudgeBaldwin, was an eminent Judge of the Connecticut Supreme Court. Her cousin, Roger Minott Sherman, as has just been said, wasan inmate of her father's household in her childhood, andwas to her as a brother. She had, after his mother's death, the care of Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, her nephew, whowas for many years at the head of the Connecticut Bar. Toher nephew, William M. Evarts, my father's house was as anotherhome in his boyhood. He was the leading advocate of his time. Her son, E. R. Hoar, was Attorney General of the UnitedStates. And her husband was in his day one of the foremostadvocates of Massachusetts. So, with a little alteration, the Greek epitaph of the woman who was the daughter, wife, sister and mother of princes, might apply to her, if, as I liketo think, a first-rate American lawyer is entitled to as muchrespect as a petty Greek prince. 

CHAPTER IIISAMUEL HOAR

I was born in Concord August 29, 1826. My grandfather, twogreat-grandfathers, and three of my father's uncles were atConcord Bridge in the Lincoln Company, of which my grandfather, Samuel Hoar, whom I well remember, was lieutenant, on the19th of April, 1775. The deposition of my great-grandfather, John Hoar, with a few others, relating to the events of thatday, was taken by the patriots and sent to England by a fast-sailing ship, which reached London before the official newsof the battle at Concord came from the British commander. John had previously been a soldier in the old French War andwas a prisoner among the Indians for three months. His lifewas not a very conspicuous one. He had been a Selectman ofLexington, dwelling in the part of the town afterward incorporatedwith Lincoln. There is in existence a document manumittinghis slave, which, I am happy to say, is the only existingevidence that any ancestor of mine ever owned one. 

My father's grandfather, on the mother's side, was ColonelAbijah Peirce, of Lincoln. He was prominent in MiddlesexCounty from a time preceding the Revolutionary War down tohis death. He was one of the Committee of the Town who hadcharge of corresponding with other towns and with the Committeeof Safety in Boston. The day before the battle at ConcordBridge, he had been chosen Colonel of a regiment of MinuteMen. But he had not got his commission, taken the oath, orgot his equipments. So he went into the battle as a privatein the company in which his son-in-law was lieutenant, armedwith nothing but a cane. After the first volley was exchangedhe crossed the bridge and took the cartridge-box and musketof one of the two British soldiers who were killed, whichhe used during the day. The gun was preserved for a longtime in his family, and came to my grandfather, after hisdeath. It was the first trophy of the Revolutionary War takenin battle. Such things, however, were not prized in thosedays as they are now. One of my uncles lent the musket toone of his neighbors for the celebration of the taking ofCornwallis, and it never was brought back. We would giveits weight in gold to get it back. 

I will put on record two stories about Colonel Peirce, whichhave something of a superstitious quality in them. I haveno doubt of their truth, as they come from persons absolutelytruthful and not superstitious or credulous themselves. 

When Colonel Peirce was seventy years old, he told his wifeand my aunt, her granddaughter, from whom I heard the story, who was then a grown-up young woman, that he was going outto the barn and going up to the high beams. In those daysthe farmers' barns had the hay in bays on each side, and overthe floor in the middle rails were laid across from one sideto the other, on which corn-stalks, for bedding the cattle, and other light things were put. They urged him not to go, and said an old man like him should not take such risks; towhich he replied by dancing a hornpipe in the room in theirpresence, showing something of that exhilaration of spiritwhich the Scotch called being "fey" and which they regardas a presage of approaching misfortune. He went out, andwithin a few minutes fell from the high beams down to thefloor and was instantly killed. 

The other story is that a little while before this happenedhe said that he thought he saw the dim and misty figure ofa ship pass slowly from one side of the barn to the other, under the roof. 

A like story is told of Abraham Lincoln; that he used tosee a vision of a ship before any great event, and that itcame to him the night before he died. 

I asked Mr. Secretary Hay about the Lincoln anecdote and givehis reply. 

DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON, April 18, 1903. 

_Dear Senator Hoar:_

You will find on page 281 of Volume 10 of "The Life of Lincoln, "by Nicolay and Hay, all I know about the story. 

General Grant, in an interview with the President, on the14th of April--the day he was shot--expressed some anxietyas to the news from Sherman. "The President answered himin that singular vein of poetic mysticism, which, though constantlyheld in check by his strong common sense, formed a remarkableelement in his character. He assured Grant that the newswould come soon and come favorable, for he had last nighthad his usual dream which preceded great events. He seemedto be, he said, in a singular and indescribable vessel, butalways the same, moving with great rapidity towards a darkand indefinite shore. He had had this dream before Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg and Vicksburg. "

The story is also found in George Eliot's Life (Vol. 3, 113), as related by Charles Dickens on the authority of Stanton, with characteristic amplifications. 

 Yours faithfully, JOHN HAY. The Honorable George F. Hoar United States Senate

My father, Samuel Hoar of Concord, was born in 1778 and diedin 1856. He was one of the most eminent lawyers at the MassachusettsBar. To this statement I can give better testimony than myown, in the following letter from the Honorable Eben F. Stone, late member of Congress from the Essex District. 

WASHINGTON 9 March, '84. 

_My dear Mr. Hoar:_

When I was a law student, I dined at Ipswich in our county, with the Judges of the Supreme Court and the members of theEssex Bar, who then had a room and a table by themselves. The conversation took a professional turn, and a good dealwas said about Mr. Choate's great skill and success as anadvocate. Judge Shaw then remarked that, sitting at nisiprius in different parts of the State, he had had an opportunityto compare the different lawyers who were distinguished fortheir success with juries, and that there was no man in theState, in his opinion, who had so much influence with a juryas Sam Hoar of Concord. This he ascribed not simply to hislegal ability, but largely to the confidence the people hadin his integrity and moral character. 

 Yours truly, E. F. STONE. 

Mr. Hoar was associated with Mr. Webster in the defence ofJudge Prescott when he was impeached before the Senate ofMassachusetts. He encountered Webster, and Choate, and JeremiahMason, and John Davis, and the elder Marcus Morton, and othergiants of the Bar, in many a hard battle. Mr. Webster makesaffectionate reference to him in a letter to my brother, nowin existence. He was a member of the Harrisburg Conventionwhich nominated General Harrison for the Presidency in 1839. He represented Concord in the Massachusetts Convention toRevise the Constitution, in 1820, in which convention hisfather, Samuel Hoar, represented Lincoln. When he first roseto speak in that body, John Adams said, "That young man remindsme of my old friend, Roger Sherman. " He was a Federalist, afterward a Whig, and in the last years of his life a Republican. 

Mr. Hoar succeeded Edward Everett as Representative in Congressfrom the Middlesex District in 1835. He served there buta single term. He made one speech, a Constitutional argumentin support of the power of Congress to abolish slavery inthe District of Columbia. He also took rather a prominentpart in a discussion in which the Whig members complainedof one of the rulings of the Democratic speaker. 

His service was not long enough to gain for him any considerablenational distinction. But that he made a good impressionon the House appears from an extract of a letter I latelyreceived from my classmate, Rev. Walter Mitchell, the authorof the spirited and famous poem, "Tacking Ship off Fire Island. "He says: "I heard your uncle, Mr. Eliot, say that when yourfather went to Congress the Southern members said, 'Wherehas this man been all his life, and why have we never heardof him? With us a man of his ability would be known all overthe South. '"

My father retired from active practice at the Bar shortlyafter his return from Congress in 1837. In 1844 an eventoccurred which contributed largely to the bitter feelingbetween the two sections of the country, which brought on theCivil War. 

As is well known, under the laws of South Carolina, coloredseamen on ships that went into the port of Charleston wereimprisoned during the stay of the ship, and sold to pay theirjail fees if the ship went off and left them, or if the feeswere not paid. 

The Legislature of Massachusetts directed the Governor toemploy counsel to test the constitutionality of these laws. No Southern lawyer of sufficient ability and distinction couldbe found who would undertake the duty. The Governor foundit difficult to procure counsel who were in active practice. Mr. Hoar was led by a strong sense of duty to leave his retirementin his old age and undertake the delicate and dangerous mission. When he arrived in South Carolina and made known his errand, the people of the State, especially of the city of Charleston, were deeply excited. The Legislature passed angry resolutions, directing the Governor to expel from the State, "the Northernemissary" whose presence was deemed an insult. The mob ofCharleston threatened to destroy the hotel where Mr. Hoarwas staying. He was urged to leave the city, which he firmlyand steadfastly refused to do. The mob were quieted by theassurances of leading gentlemen that Mr. Hoar would be removed. A deputation of seventy principal citizens waited upon himat his hotel and requested him to consent to depart. Hehad already declined the urgent request of Dr. Whittredge, an eminent physician, to withdraw and take refuge at hisplantation, saying he was too old to run and could not goback to Massachusetts if he had returned without an attemptto discharge his duty. The committee told him that theyhad assured the people that he should be removed, and thathe must choose between stepping voluntarily into a carriageand being taken to the boat, or being dragged by force. Hethen, and not until then, said he would go. He was taken bythe committee to the boat, which sailed for Wilmington. 

It has generally been said that Mr. Hoar was driven fromCharleston by a mob. This I suppose to be technically true. But it is not true in the popular sense of the words. Thecommittee of seventy, although they had no purpose of personalviolence, other than to place one old gentleman in a carriageand take him to a boat, were, of course, in every legal sensea mob. But when that committee waited upon him the personaldanger was over. 

A solitary negative vote against the resolve of the Legislaturedirecting Mr. Hoar to be expelled was cast by C. S. Memmenger, afterward Secretary of the Treasury of the Southern Confederacy. He is said to have been a Union man in 1832. 

I was told by General Hurlburt of Illinois, a distinguishedofficer in the Civil War, and member of the national Houseof Representatives, that at the time of my father's missionto South Carolina, he was a law student in the office ofJames L. Petigru. Mr. Petigru, as is well known, was a Unionman during the Civil War. Such, however, was the respectfor his great ability and character that he was permittedto live in Charleston throughout the War. It is said thaton one occasion while this strife was going on, a strangerin Charleston met Mr. Petigru in the street and asked himthe way to the Insane Hospital. To this the old man answeredby pointing north, south, east and west, and said, "You willfind the Insane Hospital in every direction here. "

According to General Hurlburt, Mr. Petigru had quietly organizeda company of young men whom he could trust, who were ready, under his lead, to rescue Mr. Hoar and insure his personalsafety if he were attacked by the mob. 

John Quincy Adams says in his diary, speaking of the transaction:"I approved the whole of his conduct. " Governor Briggs, incommunicating the facts to the Legislature, says in a specialmessage: "The conduct of Mr. Hoar under the circumstancesseems to have been marked by that prudence, firmness and wisdomwhich have distinguished his character through his life. "Mr. Emerson says, in a letter dated December 17, 1844:

"Mr. Hoar has just come home from Carolina, and gave me thismorning a narrative of his visit. He had behaved admirablywell, I judge, and there were fine heroic points in his story. One expression struck me, which, he said, he regretted a littleafterward, as it might sound a little vapouring. A gentlemanwho was very much his friend called him into a private roomto say that the danger from the populace had increased tosuch a degree that he must now insist on Mr. Hoar's leavingthe city at once, and he showed him where he might procurea carriage and where he might safely stop on the way to hisplantation, which he would reach the next morning. Mr. Hoarthanked him but told him again that he could not and wouldnot go, and that he had rather his broken skull should becarried to Massachusetts by somebody else, than to carry ithome safe himself whilst his duty required him to remain. The newspapers say, following the Charleston papers, thathe consented to depart: this he did not, but in every instancerefused, --to the Sheriff, and acting Mayor, to his friends, andto the committee of the S. C. Association, and only wentwhen they came in crowds with carriages to conduct him tothe boat, and go he must, --then he got into the coach himself, not thinking it proper to be dragged. "

I add this letter from Dr. Edward Everett Hale. 

39 HIGHLAND ST. , ROXBURY, MASS. , Mar. 13, 1884. 

_Dear Hoar:_

Thank you very much for your memoir of your father. I wasin Washington the day he and your sister came home from Charleston. I remember that Grinnell told me the news--and my first realfeeling _in life_ that there must be a war, was when Grinnellsaid on the Avenue: "I do not know but we may as well headthe thing off now--and fight it out. " The first public intelligencethe North had of the matter was in my letter to the _DailyAdvertiser, _ which was reprinted in New York, their own correspondentsnot knowing of the expulsion. 

 Always yours, EDW. E. HALE. 

I have Dr. Vedder's permission to publish the accompanyingcorrespondence, which so happily turns into a means of delightfulreconciliation what has been so long, but can be no longer, a painful memory. I was received in Charleston with the delightfulhospitality of which no other people in the world so fullyunderstand the secret. 

CHARLESTON, S. C. , Oct. 20, 1898. THE HONORABLE GEORGE F. HOAR. 

_Dear Sir:_

We have a New England Society in Charleston which is now seventy-six years old. It has had a notable history, Daniel Websterhaving been among its annual orators. Its Forefathers' Anniversaryis the social and literary event of our year. I write toextend the warm greeting of the Society to yourself, and theearnest request that you will be our guest at the banqueton Forefathers' Day Dec. 22, and speak to the sentiment--"The Day we Celebrate, " or any other that you would prefer. Of course, it will be our privilege to make your coming whollywithout cost to yourself. May I venture to urge that yourpresence with us will have a beautiful significance in itsrelation to the good feeling which so happily obtains in allour land, and a past event which associates your honored Father'sname so memorably and sadly with our City? Charleston wouldfain give the honored Son a welcome which shall obliteratethe past. 

 Hoping for a favorable and early reply, I remain, Yours with great respect, CHARLES S. VEDDER, _President. _

WORCESTER, MASS. , October 26, 1898. 

_My Dear Sir:_

I am sure you will not doubt that I feel myself highly honoredby your invitation in behalf of the New England Society ofCharleston, as I am deeply touched and gratified by what yousay in the letter which conveys it. I thank God that I havelived to behold this day, and that my eyes have been sparedto see the people of the whole country united again in affectionas in the early time. 

I hope and expect to be able to attend your banquet nextForefathers' Day. I will do so if the condition of the publicbusiness shall permit. I have the charge of the business ofthe Committee on the Judiciary, two of whose important membersare now absent in Paris, and it is of course possible thatsome of the great questions which are before us may requireconstant attendance in their places of all the Senators duringthe next session without the possibility of interruption fora Christmas holiday. Subject to that possibility, I willaccept your invitation, and am, with high regard, Faithfully yours, GEO. F. HOAR. 

In 1850, after he had withdrawn from professional and publiclife, being then seventy-two years old, Mr. Hoar was sentto the House of Representatives, by the town of Concord, tooppose the removal of the courts from Concord. He was successfulin the opposition. He had, during the winter, an opportunityto render a very important service to Harvard College. Therewas a vigorous and dangerous attempt to abolish the existingCorporation, and transfer the property and control of theCollege to a board of fifteen persons, to be chosen by theLegislature by joint ballot, one third to go out of officeevery second year. This measure was recommended in an elaboratereport by Mr. Boutwell, an influential member of the House, chosen Governor at the next election, and advocated by HenryWilson, afterward Senator and Vice-President, and by othergentlemen of great influence. All the members of the Corporationwere Whigs in politics and Unitarians, a sect containing avery small proportion of the people of the State. The projectto take the College from their control was very popular. TheHouse listened willingly to the able arguments with whichthe measure was introduced, and before Mr. Hoar spoke itsopinion was unmistakable for the bill. He argued that themeasure was in conflict with the Constitution of the UnitedStates, and defended the College with great earnestness fromthe charge that it had "failed to answer the just expectationsof the public. " The Boston _Daily Atlas, _ edited by GeneralSchouler, then a member of the House, said the next day ofthis speech: "The argument of Mr. Hoar was of transcendentexcellence, and had a most overpowering effect upon the House. We regret that no report was made of it. It is a pity thatso much learning, argument and eloquence should be lost. "

This speech caused a revolution in the opinion of the body. The measure was referred to the next General Court. Mr. Hoarwas employed by the Corporation as counsel to appear beforethe Legislature the next winter in its behalf. But the measurewas never heard of afterward. Dr. Walker said of this occurrence, after his sententious fashion: "Other men have served theCollege; Samuel Hoar saved it. "

The Board of Overseers, who have visitorial powers over theCollege, and whose concurrence is necessary to the electionor appointment of officers, Professors and members of theCorporation, and who included for a long time the Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, and members of the Senate, had alwaysbeen held to be the representative of the Commonwealth, althoughthe members of the body who were not members _ex-officio_were elected by the Board itself. 

A bill passed in 1851, to which no objection was made, vestedthe election of this body in the Legislature. But after afew years' trial, that was abandoned, and the members of theOverseers are now chosen by the Alumni of the College. 

I shall speak in a later chapter of the foundation of theFree Soil Party. The call for the Convention held at Worcesteron the 28th of June, 1848, addressed to all persons opposedto the election of Cass and Taylor, written by his son, E. R. Hoar, was headed by Mr. Hoar. He presided over the meeting, and delegates were elected to a National Convention to beheld at Buffalo, which nominated Van Buren and Adams for Presidentand Vice-President. This was the origin of the Republicanparty. 

After 1848, Mr. Hoar did not relax his efforts to bring abouta union of all parties in the North, in opposition to furtherencroachments of the slave power. In accomplishing this end, his age, the regard in which he was held by all classes ofpeople, his known disinterestedness and independence, fittedhim to exert a large influence. The Free Soil movement hadled to the formation of a party in Massachusetts, small innumbers, but zealous, active, in earnest, containing manyable leaders, eloquent orators, and vigorous writers. Theyhad sent Charles Allen to the lower House of Congress, andSumner and Rantoul to the Senate. But they had apparentlymade little impression on the national strength of eitherof the old parties. 

In 1854, the passage of the measure known as the Kansas-Nebraska Bill afforded a new opportunity. A meeting of citizensof Concord appointed a committee, of which Mr. Hoar was Chairman, and A. G. Fay, Secretary, who called a meeting of prominentpersons from different parts of the State to meet at the AmericanHouse in Boston, to take measures for forming a new partyand calling a State Convention. This Convention was heldat Worcester on the 7th of September, and formed a party underthe name of Republican, and nominated candidates for Stateoffices. Its meeting has been claimed to be the foundationof the Republican party of Massachusetts, and its twenty-fifth anniversary was celebrated accordingly in 1879. Butit effected little more than to change the name of the FreeSoil party. Few Whigs or Democrats united to the movement. A secret organization called Americans, or Know-Nothings, swept the Commonwealth like a wave, electing all the Stateofficers, and, with scarcely an exception, the entire Legislature. 

The candidate for Governor nominated by the Republicans atWorcester, himself joined the Know-Nothings, and labored todefeat his own election. 

The next year the attempt was more successful. On the 10thof August, 1855, a meeting without distinction of party washeld at Chapman Hall, in Boston, which was addressed by Mr. Hoar, George Bliss, Franklin Dexter, William Brigham, LymanBeecher, Richard H. Dana, Jr. , Charles F. Adams, Henry Wilson, Stephen C. Phillips, and others. On the 30th of the samemonth, a meeting of conference committees was held, representingthe American or Know-Nothing party, the Know-Somethings, anantislavery organization which had held a National Conventionat Cleveland in June, and the Chapman Hall Convention. Thisconference appointed a committee of twenty-six to call a StateConvention, at the head of which they placed Mr. Hoar. ThisState Convention was held at Worcester, nominated JuliusRockwell for Governor, and the organization which it createdhas constituted the Republican party of Massachusetts to thepresent day. 

The part taken in calling this Convention, and in promotingthe union which gave it birth, was Mr. Hoar's last importantpublic service. His failing health prevented his taking anactive share in the Presidential campaign of 1856. 

I prefer, in putting on record this brief estimate of a characterwhich has been to me the principal object of reverence andhonor in my life, to use the language of others, and notmy own. From many tributes to my father's character, frompersons more impartial than I can be, I have selected twoor three. 

I cannot quote at length Ralph Waldo Emerson's sketches ofMr. Hoar, who was his near neighbor and intimate personalfriend for many years. They are noble and faithful as portraitsof Van Dyke or Titian. One of them is a speech made in Concordtown-meeting on the third day of November, 1856, the day afterMr. Hoar's death. The other was contributed to the _UnitarianMonthly Religious Magazine, _ then edited by Rev. Dr. Huntington, afterward Bishop of New York. Mr. Emerson says in one ofthem: "His head, with singular grace in its lines, had aresemblance to the bust of Dante. He retained to the lastthe erectness of his tall but slender form, and not less thefull strength of his mind. Such was, in old age, the beautyof his person and carriage, as if his mind radiated, and madethe same impression of probity on all beholders. "

He ends with this quatrain:

 With beams December planets dart, His cold eye truth and conduct scanned; July was in his sunny heart, October in his liberal hand. 

The following is from a letter of Sherman Day, a man whosereputation for wisdom and integrity is among the treasuresof California:

"BERKELEY, 23d May, 1884. HON. GEO. FRISBIE HOAR, U. S. Senate, Washington, D. C. 

_My Dear Sir:_

"I was very much gratified to receive, some weeks since, a copy of your biographical sketch of your venerable father. It was the more precious to me because it awakened memoriesof my own early life; while it recalls the tall, the gentleand dignified figure and courteous demeanor of your fatherin his prime of life. I can remember being at your father'swedding at my grandmother's house when I was about 6-1/2years old. Several years before you were born, I was atthe Phillips Academy at Andover, and used occasionally tospend a vacation with my beloved aunt, who was a sort ofmother to me in my earliest childhood. It was at her homethat I first read Washington Irving's Sketch Book, then justappearing in separate numbers. I believe the book belongedto a law student of your father's, as your father had notyet taken to the reading of romances. 

"My memory extends back to the organization of the ConstitutionalConvention of 1820. I well remember the venerable figureof John Adams, as he took the seat of honor at the right handof the president, and I remember the sonorous voice of JosiahQuincy, the Secretary. I was staying at the house of Mr. Evarts, and remember your father's dining there, and discussingthe deportment and characteristics of several of the moreprominent members. Among them was the tall member from Worcester, Levi Lincoln, conspicuous by his drab overcoat, by his frequentspeaking, and by his constantly moving about among the members. The member who made the most lasting impression on my memorywas Daniel Webster. He was not yet forty years old, stalwart, black haired and black eyed, with a somewhat swarthy complexion;his manly beauty and his eloquence being alike objects ofadmiration. He had not attained that stoutness which hisform assumed in later years. I could illustrate his appearancebetter to your brother, Edward, by asking him to recall DonPablo de la Guerra of Santa Barbara, whom I deemed a verygood type, _in appearance, _ of Webster in the Convention of1820. "

George William Curtis came to know Mr. Hoar very well duringhis own life in Concord. He and his brother, Burrill, werealmost daily visitors at our house:

WEST NEW BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND, N. Y. , March 19, 1884. 

_My dear Mr. Hoar:_

I thank you very much for a copy of your sketch of your fatherwhich vividly recalls him to me as I remember him in my Concorddays long ago. I recollect that when I saw in Paris Couture'sfamous picture of the Decadence of the Romans, it was yourfather that I thought of as I saw the figures of the olderRomans gazing reproachfully upon the revels. So he may havefelt of his country as he died. 

 With great regard, very truly yours, GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

The following is from J. Evarts Greene, formerly editor ofthe Worcester _Spy, _ and one of the ablest members of hisprofession in New England:

WORCESTER, Mar. 10, 1884. 

_My dear Mr. Hoar:_

I want to thank you especially for the copy of the Memoirof your father, which I received to-day. I am exceedinglyglad to have it on your account and his. He is the most venerablefigure in my memory. He was always spoken of in our familywith the highest respect, and few things have ever gratifiedme so much as his kindness to me on the occasion of my lastvisit to Concord during his lifetime. It was in 1850, I think, while I was in college and about fifteen years old. I hadalways held him in awe as the greatest and wisest man withinmy knowledge, and should have no more have thought of familiarconversation with him than with the Pope. But his grave andkindly courtesy, as he sat down with me after supper, thoughit did not quite put me at my ease, gave me courage to talkmore freely than I had ever thought possible; and while myveneration for him was not diminished, I felt that there wasno one now on earth that I need be afraid of. 

 Faithfully yours, J. EVARTS GREENE. The Hon. Geo. F. Hoar. 

The following letter is from Professor Thatcher, the eminentLatin Professor of Yale:

NEW HAVEN, 14th March, 1884. HONORABLE GEORGE F. HOAR. 

_My dear Senator:_

I write simply but cordially to thank you for the copy ofyour venerated Father's Memoir which you have been so kindas to send to your cousin, Elizabeth. I have read it withthe delight which must be common to all who read it. A lifeso qualified with the selectest traits of a great and gentlesoul, so substantial with continual but full and unembarrassedlabor, and so constantly influential for elevated and beneficentends, with nothing discoverable in it to check its great driftand power, --such a life is an almost unequalled gift of Godto such a community as his. There is a rare charm in thenarrative, and one cannot help rejoicing that you have beenable to gather together the recorded judgments of so manymen whose judgments are worthy to be recorded, I am, ever, Very truly yours, THOMAS A. THATCHER. 

SENATE, WASHINGTON, March 9, 1884. 

_My dear Mr. Hoar:_

I thank you very much for a copy of the Memoir of your father. It is a tribute to his worth and fame worthy of him and ofyourself. I hardly know which most to admire, the characterit portrays, or the filial piety it evinces. 

It brings back very vividly the venerable form and the lovelycharacter I met and revered in the Massachusetts Legislaturewhen I was a young man, and have ever since held among thesafest and best of the land. Permit me to count it my ownbest fortune that I can subscribe myself the colleague andfriend of the son and biographer of Samuel Hoar. 

 Truly yours, H. L. DAWES. The Honorable Geo. F. Hoar, Senate. 

HONORABLE GEO. F. HOAR

_Dear Sir_

Thanks for the "Memoir of Samuel Hoar, by his Son, GeorgeF. Hoar. "

For years the character of this true man, as a noble, courageous, self-sacrificing and independent American citizen has commandedmy profound admiration and respect, and I am greatly pleasedto become more familiar with his life. Fortunately the factsof it need no ornamentation or partial painting by the Son, for the modesty of the latter would never have responded toany such necessity. 

 I am, Very truly, Yours, etc. WM. P. FRYE. 

LEICESTER, March 13/84. 

_Dear Mr. Hoar:_

I cannot too much thank you for sending me the memoir--tho'so brief and exceedingly temperate--of your father. 

He was one of the few men who kept Massachusetts and New Englandfrom rushing down the steep place and perishing in the waters, as the herd of swine was doing, --a son worthy of the Fathersof New England. I think of him as a kind of tall pillar, on a foundation of such granite solidity as to quiet all fearsof possible moving therefrom. He was an example--and becameby his S. Carolina mission a conspicuous one; by his attitudeand demeanor, opposing the whole moral power of the Northto the despotic and insolent assumptions of Slavery. 

 Yours very truly, SAML MAY. 

My father, in everything that related to his own conduct, was controlled by a more than Puritan austerity. He seemedto live for nothing but duty. Yet he was a man of strongaffections, unlike what is generally deemed to be the characterof the Puritan. He was gentle, tolerant, kindly and affectionate. He had all his life a large professional income. But he neverseemed to care for money. In that respect he was like onewho dwelt by the side of a pond, ready to dip up and to giveits waters to any man who might thirst. He never wasted money, or spent it for any self-indulgence. But he was ready toshare it with any deserving object. Starr King said of himthat "he lived all the beatitudes daily. "

Mr. Hoar was, I suppose, beyond all question, the highestauthority in New England, indeed in the whole country, onthe difficult and abstruse questions belonging to the law ofwater privileges and running streams. He was declared tobe such by the late Judge Benjamin R. Curtis. The great Locksand Canals Company was organized and all the arrangementsfor the ownership, management and control of the water-powerof Lowell were made under his advice and direction. The samemethods have been followed in substance at Lawrence and Woonsocketand other manufacturing places. 

He preserved his vigor of body until he entered his seventy-seventh year, taking walks of five or six miles without fatigue. About that time he took a severe cold at a neighbor's funeral. An illness followed which seriously impaired his strength. He died, November 2, 1856, two days before the Presidentialelection. 

He was six feet three inches in height, erect, with finegray hair, blue eyes, of graceful and dignified deportment, and of great courtesy, especially to women and children. 

He held a few simple beliefs with undoubting faith. He submittedhimself to the rule of life which followed from these, andrigorously exacted obedience to it from all for whom he wasresponsible. He accepted the exposition of Christian doctrinegiven by Dr. Channing. The Massachusetts Constitution of1780 seemed to him a nearly perfect system of government. He earnestly resisted, in the Convention of 1820, the abolitionof the property qualification for voters, and of the obligationof all citizens to be taxed for the support of religious worship. He took early and deep interest in the temperance reform, and gave much time, labor, and money to promote it. "Thestrength and beauty of the man, " says Mr. Emerson, "lay inthe natural goodness and justice of his mind, which in manhoodand in old age, after dealing all his life with weighty privateand public interests, left an infantile innocence of whichwe have no second or third example, --the strength of a chiefunited to the modesty of a child. He returned from the courtsand Congresses to sit down with unaltered humility, in thechurch, or in the town-house, on the plain wooden bench, where Honor came and sat down beside him. He was a man inwhom so rare a spirit of justice visibly dwelt, that, if onehad met him in a cabin or in a court, he must still seem apublic man answering as a sovereign state to sovereign state;and might easily suggest Milton's picture of John Bradshaw, --'that he was a consul from whom the fasces did not departwith the year, but in private seemed ever sitting in judgmenton kings. '"

But he would have liked better than anything else what wassaid of him in his official report by the President of theCollege he loved with that deep affection which her childrenfelt for her in his time. President Walker closes his annualreport of December 31, 1856, as follows: "The undersignedcould not conclude his report without allusion to the recentlamented death of the Honorable Samuel Hoar, a distinguishedand justly influential member of this board, --venerable alikefor his age and his virtues, --a devoted friend of the Collegewhich he has been able to serve in a thousand ways by thewisdom of his counsels and the weight of his character. "

Mr. Hoar was naturally conservative, as would be expectedas an old Federalist who was educated at Harvard in the beginningof the nineteenth century. His rules of public and privateconduct were strict and austere. He applied them more strictlyto himself than to others. His classmates in college usedto call him Cato. He favored the suppression of the saleand use of intoxicating liquors, and desired that the wholeforce of the State should be brought to bear to accomplishthat end. He was the inveterate foe of oppression, and inhis later years, opposed every compromise with slavery. Buthe had no sympathy with reforms which seemed to him to bedevised merely as political instruments to advance the fortunesof persons or parties. 

He had a huge respect for John Quincy Adams, a respect whichI have good reason to know was reciprocated. But he was byno means Mr. Adams's blind follower. The ex-President, I thinkabout the year 1832, published a pamphlet in which he savagelyattacked the Masonic Order. He met Mr. Hoar in Boston andasked him what he thought of it. Mr. Hoar answered: "Itseems to me, Mr. Adams, there is but one thing in the worldsillier than Masonry. That is Anti-Masonry. "

Mr. Hoar used to relate with some amusement a dialogue hehad with a shrewd and witty old lawyer named Josiah Adams, who shared the old Federalist dislike of his namesake, JohnQuincy Adams. My father was talking quite earnestly in agathering of Middlesex lawyers and said: "I believe John QuincyAdams means to be a Christian. " "When?" inquired Josiah. 

But I cannot draw the portraiture of this noble and statelyfigure. George Herbert did it perfectly, long ago, in hispoem, "Constancy. "

Old Dr. Lyman Beecher, the foremost champion in his day ofthe old Orthodoxy, spent his life in combating what he deemedthe pestilent Unitarian heresy. He was the most famous preacherin the country. Mr. Hoar was a pillar of Unitarianism. Yetthe Doctor came to know and honor his old antagonist. Heread in the Boston papers, late Saturday evening, that Mr. Hoar was dying at Concord. Early Sunday morning before daybreakhe started, with his son-in-law, Professor Stowe, and drovetwenty miles to Concord. He got there just after Mr. Hoar'sdeath. He asked to go into the chamber where his old friendlay. My sister said: "Father would have been glad to seeyou, if he were alive. " The Doctor gazed a moment, and thensaid: "He's passed safe over, I haven't a doubt of it. Hewas an Israelite indeed, in whom there was no guile. "

CHAPTER IVBOYHOOD IN CONCORD

I have never got over being a boy. It does not seem likelythat I ever shall. I have to-day, at the age of three scoreand sixteen, less sense of my own dignity than I had whenat sixteen I walked for the first time into the College Chapelat Harvard, clad as the statute required, in a "black or black-mixed coat, with buttons of the same color, " and the admiringworld, with its eyes on the venerable freshman, seemed tome to be saying to itself, "Ecce caudam!" Behold the tail!

Most men are apt to exaggerate the merits of their birthplace. But I think everybody who knew the town will agree with methat there never was in the world a better example of a pureand beautiful democracy, in the highest sense of the term, than the town of Concord from 1826 to the close of the war. If there were any aristocracy, it was an aristocracy of personalworth. There was little wealth and little poverty. Therewere no costly dwellings and no hovels. There was no prideof wealth or of family. The richest man in town took an interestin the affairs of the poorest as in those of a kinsman. Itnever occurred to the poorest that he must, for that reason, doff his hat to any man. 

The population was permanent, I suppose, as could have beenfound in any spot in Europe. Ninety-three of the inhabitantsof the town, in 1654, signed a paper pledging their personsand estates to support the General Court in the contest withKing Charles II. For the preservation of the Charter. Fourteenof their descendants, bearing the same names, were presentat the Centennial Celebration in 1885, dwelling on the landwhich their ancestors occupied nearly 230 years before. Therewere 23 others whose descendants of the same name were dwellingat the time of the Centennial within the original limits ofthe town. A good many others were represented by female descendants. So that at least 50 of the 93 signers of the paper were representedin the assembly. A list of the names of the principal inhabitantsof the town to-day would contain the names of a large numberof the principal inhabitants of any generation since itsfoundation. 

They were of good English stock. Many of them were of gentleblood and entitled to bear coat armor at home. It is interestingto observe how little the character of the gentleman and gentlewomanin our New England people is affected by the pursuit, forgenerations, of humble occupations, which in other countriesare deemed degrading. Our ancestors, during nearly two centuriesof poverty which followed the first settlement, turned theirhands to the humblest ways of getting a livelihood, becameshoemakers, or blacksmiths or tailors, or did the hardestand most menial and rudest work of the farm, shoveled gravelor chopped wood, without any of the effect on their characterwhich would be likely to be felt from the permanent pursuitof such an occupation in England or Germany. It was likea fishing party or a hunting party in the woods. When thenecessity was over, and the man or the boy in any generationgot a college education, or was called to take part in publicaffairs, he rose at once and easily to the demands of an exaltedstation. What is true of New England people in this respectis, I suppose, true of the whole country. 

I wrote, a few years ago, an account of so much of my boyhoodas elapsed before I went to college. Through the kindnessof the proprietors of _The Youth's Companion, _ I am permittedto print it here. I think, on the whole, that is better thanto undertake to tell the story in other phraseology adaptedto maturer readers. Indeed, I am not sure that the best examplesof good English are not to be found in books written for children. When we have to tell a story to a small boy or girl, we avoidlittle pomposities, and seek for the plainest, clearest andmost direct phrase. 

I believe that boys nowadays are more manly and mature thanthey were in my time. Perhaps this is partly because theboys show more gravity in my presence, now I am an old man, than they did when I was a boy myself. But in giving an accountof the life of a boy sixty years ago, I must describe it asI saw it, even if it appear altogether childish and undignified. 

The life and character of a country are determined in a largedegree by the sports of its boys. The Duke of Wellingtonused to say that the victory at Waterloo was won on the playing-fields at Eton. That is the best people where the boys aremanly and where the men have a good deal of the boy in them. 

Perhaps all my younger readers do not know how much that makesup, not only the luxury, but the comfort of life, has firstcome in within the memory of persons now living. The householdlife of my childhood was not much better in those respectsthan that of a well-to-do Roman or Greek. It had not improveda great deal for two thousand years. There were no house-warming furnaces, and stoves were almost unknown. There wereno double windows, and the houses were warmed by open fires. There were no matches. 

There were no water-pipes in the houses, and no provisionwas made for discharging sewage. There were no railroads, telegraphs or telephones. Letter postage to New York fromBoston was twenty-five cents. None of the modern agriculturalmachinery then existed, not even good modern plows. Cropswere planted by hand and cultivated with the hoe and spade. Vegetables were dug with the hoe, and hay and grain cut withthe sickle or scythe. There were no ice-houses. The useof ice for keeping provisions or cooling water was unknown. 

My father was well-to-do, and his household lived certainlyas well as any family in the town of Concord, where I wasborn. I have no doubt a Roman boy two hundred years beforeChrist, or an Athenian boy four hundred years before Christ, lived quite as well as I did, if not better. 

The boy got up in the morning and dressed himself in a roominto which the cold air came through the cracks in the window. If the temperature were twenty degrees below zero outside, it was very little higher inside. If he were big enough tomake the fires, he made his way down-stairs in the dark ofa winter morning and found, if the fire had been properly rakedup the night before, a few coals in the ashes in the kitchenfireplace. The last person who went to bed the night beforehad done exactly what Homer describes as the practice in Ulysses'stime, when he tells us that Ulysses covered himself with leavesafter he was washed ashore in Phaiakia:

"He lay down in the midst, heaping the fallen leaves above, as a man hides a brand in a dark bed of ashes, at some outlyingfarm where neighbors are not near, hoarding a seed of fireto save his seeking elsewhere. "

But first he must get a light. Matches are not yet invented. So he takes from the shelf over the mantelpiece an old tinor brass candlestick with a piece of tallow candle in it, and with the tongs takes a coal from the ashes, and holdsthe candle wick against the coal and gives a few puffs withhis breath. If he have good luck, he lights the wick, probablyafter many failures. 

My mother had a very entertaining story connected with theold-fashioned way of getting a light. Old Jeremiah Mason, who was probably the greatest lawyer we ever had in New England, unless we except Daniel Webster, studied law in my uncle'soffice and shared a room in his house with another law student. One April Fool's day the two young gentlemen went out latein the afternoon, and my aunt, a young unmarried girl wholived with her sister, and another girl, went into the roomand took the old half-burnt candle out of the candlestick, cut a piece of turnip to resemble it, cut out a little piecelike a wick at the end, blackened it with ink, and put itin the candlestick. 

When Mr. Mason came in in the dark, he took a coal up withthe tongs and put it against the wick, and puffed and puffed, until after a long and vexatious trial he discovered whatwas the matter. He said nothing but waited for his chum tocome in, who went through the same trial. When they discoveredthe hoax they framed an elaborate complaint in legal jargonagainst the two roguish girls, and brought them to trial beforea young lawyer of their acquaintance. The young ladies werefound guilty and sentenced to pay as a fine a bowl of eggnog. 

After getting his candle lighted, the boy takes dry kindling, which has been gathered the night before, and starts a fire. The next thing is to get some water. He is lucky if the waterin the old cast-iron kettle which hangs on the crane in thefireplace be not frozen. As soon as the fire is started hegoes outdoors to thaw out the pump, if they have a woodenpump. But that is all frozen up, and he has to get some hotwater from this kettle to pour down over the piston till hecan thaw it out. Sometimes he would have an old-fashionedwell, sunk too low in the ground for the frost to reach it, and could get water with the old oaken bucket. 

He brings in from out-of-doors a pail or two of water. Ifthere has been a snow-storm the night before he has to shovela path to the wood-shed, where he can get the day's supplyof wood from outside, and then from the doors of the houseout to the street. Meantime the woman whose duty it is toget breakfast makes her appearance. 

The wooden pump, which took the place of the old well in manydooryards, was considered a great invention. We all lookedwith huge respect upon Sanford Adams of Concord, who inventedit, and was known all over the country. 

He was quite original in his way. The story used to be toldof him that he called at my father's house one day to getsome advice as to a matter of law. Father was at dinnerand went to the door himself. Mr. Adams stated his case ina word or two as he stood on the door-step, to which fathergave him his answer, the whole conversation not lasting morethan two minutes. 

He asked Mr. Hoar what he should pay, and father said, "Fivedollars. " Mr. Adams paid it at once, and father said, "Bythe way, there is a little trouble with my pump. It doesnot draw. Will you just look at it?" So Mr. Adams wentaround the corner of the shed, moved the handle of the pump, and put his hand down and fixed a little spigot which wasin the side, which had got loose, and the pump worked perfectly. Father said, "Thank you, sir. " To which Adams replied: "Itwill be five dollars, Mr. Hoar, " and father gave him backthe same bill he had just taken. 

I am afraid the sympathy of the people who told the storywas with the pump-maker and not with the lawyer. 

The great kitchen fireplace presented a very cheerful appearancecompared with the black range or stove of to-day. It wasfrom six to eight or ten feet wide, with a great chimney. In many houses you could stand on the hearth and look up thechimney and see the stars on a winter night. Across the fireplacehung an iron crane, which swung on a hinge or pivot, fromwhich hung a large number of what were called pothooks andtrammels. From these were suspended the great kettles andlittle kettles and the griddles and pots and boilers for thecooking processes. 

The roasting was done in a big "tin kitchen, " which stoodbefore the fire, in which meats or poultry were held by alarge iron spit, which pierced them and which could be revolvedto present one side after the other to the blaze. Sometimesthere was a little clockwork which turned the spit automatically, but usually it was turned round from time to time by the cook. As you know, they used to have in England little dogs calledturnspits, trained to turn a wheel for this purpose. A littledoor in the rear of this tin kitchen gave access for bastingthe meat. In the large trough at the bottom the gravy wascaught. 

No boy of that day will think there is any flavor like thatof roast turkey and chicken or of the doughnuts and pancakesor griddle-cakes which were cooked by these open fires. 

By the side of the fireplace, with a flue entering the chimney, was a great brick oven, big enough to bake all the breadneeded by a large family for a week or ten days. The ovenwas heated by a brisk fire made of birch or maple or somevery rapidly burning wood. When the coals were taken out, the bread was put in, and the oven was shut with two irondoors. The baking-day was commonly Saturday. 

When the bread was taken out Saturday afternoon it was usualto put in a large pot of beans for the Sunday dinner. Theywere left there all night and the oven was opened in the morningand enough came out for breakfast, when there was put intothe oven a pot of Indian pudding, which was left with therest of the beans for the Sunday dinner. 

The parlor fire was a very beautiful sight, with the biglogs and the sparkling walnut or oak wood blazing up. Someof the housekeepers of that time had a good deal of skillin arranging the wood in a fireplace so as to make of ita beautiful piece of architecture. Lowell describes theseold fires very well in his ballad, "The Courtin'":

 A fireplace filled the room's one side With half a cord o'wood in-- There warn't no stoves (till comfort died) To bake ye to a puddin'. 

 The wannut logs shot sparkles out Towards the pootiest, bless her! An' leetle flames danced all about The chiny on the dresser. 

 Agin' the chimbley crooknecks hung, An' in amongst 'em rusted The old queen's arm thet Gran'ther Young Fetched back from Concord busted. 

We did not have fireplaces quite as large as this in my father'shouse, although they were common in the farmers' houses roundabout. 

In the coldest weather the heat did not come out a greatway from the hearth, and the whole family gathered closeabout the fire to keep warm. It was regarded as a greatbreach of good manners to go between any person and the fire. The fireplace was the centre of the household, and was regardedas the type and symbol of the home. The boys all understoodthe force of the line:

 Strike for your altars and your fires!

I wonder if any of my readers nowadays would be stirred byan appeal to strike for his furnace or his air-tight stove. 

Sunday was kept with Jewish strictness. The boys were notallowed to go out-of-doors except to church. They couldnot play at any game or talk about matters not pertainingto religion. They were not permitted to read any books exceptsuch as were "good for Sunday. " There were very few religiousstory-books in those days, and what we had were of a drearykind; so the boy's time hung heavy on his hands. 

"Pilgrim's Progress, " with its rude prints, was, however, a great resource. We conned it over and over again, and knewit by heart. An elder brother of mine who was very precociouswas extremely fond of it, especially of the picture of thefight between Apollyon and Christian, where the fiend withhis head covered with stiff, sharp bristles "straddled clearacross the road, " to stop Christian in his way. Old Dr. LymanBeecher, who had his stiff gray hair cropped short all overhis head, made a call at our house one afternoon. While hewas waiting for my mother to come down, the little fellowcame into the room and took a look up at the doctor, and thentrotted round to the other side and looked up at him again. He said, "I think, sir, you look like Apollyon. "

The doctor was infinitely amused at being compared to thepersonage of whom, in his own opinion and that of a good manyother good people, he was then the most distinguished livingantagonist. 

The church was an old-fashioned wooden building, painted yellow, of Dutch architecture, with galleries on three sides, andon the fourth a pulpit with a great sounding-board over it, into which the minister got by quite a high flight of stairs. Just below the pulpit was the deacons' seat, where the fourdeacons sat in a row. The pews were old-fashioned square, high pews, reaching up almost to the top of the head of aboy ten years old when he was standing up. 

The seats were without cushions and with hinges. When thepeople stood up for prayer the seats were turned up for greaterconvenience of standing, and when the prayer ended they camedown all over the church with a slam, like a small cannonade. 

One Sunday, in the middle of the sermon, the old minister, Doctor Ripley, stood up in the pulpit and said in a loudvoice, "Simeon, come here. Take your hat and come here. "Simeon was a small boy who lived in the doctor's family andsat in the gallery. We boys all supposed that Simeon hadbeen playing in church, or had committed some terrible offencefor which he was to be punished in sight of the whole congregation. 

Simeon came down trembling and abashed, and the doctor toldhim to go home as fast as he could and get the ThanksgivingProclamation. The doctor filled up the time as well he couldwith an enormously long prayer, until the boy got back. Simeonconfessed to some of the boys that he had been engaged insome mischief just before he was called, and he was terriblyafraid the doctor had caught him. 

This old church with its tower, yellow spire, old clock andweathercock, seems to me as I look back on it to have beena very attractive piece of architecture. It was that churchwhich suggested to Emerson the leading thought in one ofhis most famous poems, "The Problem. "

In those days, when people were to be married the law requirednotice to be given of their intention by proclaiming it aloudin the church three Sundays in succession. So just beforethe service began, the old town clerk would get up and proclaim:"There is a marriage intended between Mr. John Brown of thistown and Miss Sarah Smith of Sudbury, " and there was greatcuriosity in the congregation to hear the announcement. Thetown clerk in my boyhood had been a wealthy old bachelor forwhom the young ladies had set their caps in vain for two generations. One day he astonished the congregation by proclaiming: "Thereis a marriage intended between Dr. Abiel Keywood"--whichwas his own name--"and Miss Lucy P. Fay, both of Concord. "That was before I can remember, as his boys were about myage. 

Doctor Ripley, the minister in Concord, was an old man whohad been settled there during the Revolutionary War and wasover the parish sixty-two years. He was an excellent preacherand scholar, and his kindly despotism was submitted to bythe whole town. His way of pronouncing would sound very queernow, though it was common then. I well remember his readingthe lines of the hymn--

 Let every critter jine To praise the eternal God. 

Scattered about the church were the good gray heads of manysurvivors of the Revolution--the men who had been at the bridgeon the 19th of April, and who made the first armed resistanceto the British power. They were very striking and venerablefigures, with their queues and knee-breeches and shoes withshining buckles. Men were more particular about their apparelin those days than we are now. They had great statelinessof behavior, and admitted of little familiarity. 

They had heard John Buttrick's order to fire, which markedthe moment when our country was born. The order was givento British subjects. It was obeyed by American citizens. Among them was old Master Blood, who saw a ball strike thewater when the British fired their first volley. I heardmany of the old men tell their stories of the Battle of Concord, and of the capture of Burgoyne. 

I lay down on the grass one summer afternoon, when old AmosBaker of Lincoln, who was in the Lincoln Company on the 19thof April, told me the whole story. He was very indignantat the claim that the Acton men marched first to attack theBritish because the others hesitated. He said, "It was becausethey had bagnets [bayonets]. The rest of us hadn't no bagnets. "

One day a few years later, when I was in college, I walkedup from Cambridge to Concord, through Lexington, and had achat with old Jonathan Harrington by the roadside. He toldme he was on the Common when the British Regulars fired uponthe Lexington men. He did not tell me then the story whichhe told afterward at the great celebration at Concord in 1850. He and Amos Baker were the only survivors who were there thatday. He said he was a boy about fifteen years old on April19, 1775. He was a fifer in the company. He had been upthe greater part of the night helping get the stores out ofthe way of the British, who were expected, and went to bedabout three o'clock, very tired and sleepy. His mother cameand pounded with her fist on the door of his chamber, andsaid, "Git up, Jonathan! The Reg'lars are comin' and somethin'must be done!"

Governor Briggs repeated this anecdote in the old man's presenceat the Concord celebration in 1850. Charles Storey, a notedwit, father of the eminent lawyer, Moorfield Storey, sentup to the chair this toast: "When Jonathan Harrington gotup in the morning on April 19, 1775, a near relative and namesakeof his got up about the same time: Brother Jonathan. Buthis mother didn't call him. "

A very curious and amusing incident is said, and I have nodoubt truly, to have happened at this celebration. It showshow carefully the great orator, Edward Everett, looked outfor the striking effects in his speech. He turned in themidst of his speech to the seat where Amos Baker and JonathanHarrington sat, and addressed them. At once they both stoodup, and Mr. Everett said, with fine dramatic effect, "Sit, venerable friends. It is for us to stand in your presence. "

After the proceedings were over, old Amos Baker was heardto say to somebody, "What do you suppose Squire Everett meant?He came to us before his speech and told us to stand up whenhe spoke to us, and when we stood up he told us to sit down. "

So you will understand how few lives separate you from thetime when our country was born, and the time when all ourpeople were British subjects. 

But to come back to our old meeting-house. The windows rattledin the winter, and the cold wind came in through the cracks. There was a stove which was rather a modern innovation; butit did little to temper the coldness of a day in midwinter. We used to carry to church a little foot-stove with a littletin pan in it, which we filled with coal from the stove inthe meeting-house, and the ladies of the family would passit round to each other to keep their toes from freezing; butthe boys did not get much benefit from it. 

They had good schools in Concord, and the boys generallywere good scholars and read good books. So whenever theythought fit they could use as good language as anybody; buttheir speech with one another was in the racy, pithy Yankeedialect, which Lowell has made immortal in the "Biglow Papers. "It was not always grammatical, but as well adapted for conveyingwit and humor and shrewd sense as the Scotch of Burns. 

The boys knew very well how to take the conceit or vanityout of their comrades. In the summer days all the boys ofthe village used to gather at a place on the river, known asThayer's swimming-place, about half a mile from the townpump, which was the centre from which all distances weremeasured in those days. There was a little gravel beachwhere you could wade out a rod or two, and then for a rodor two the water was over the boy's head. It then becameshallow again near the opposite bank. So it was a capitalplace to learn to swim. 

After they came out, the boys would sit down on the bankand have a sort of boys' exchange, in which all matters ofinterest were talked over, and a great deal of good-naturedchaff was exchanged. Any newcomer had to pass through anordeal of this character, in which his temper and qualitywere thoroughly tried. I remember now an occasion whichmust have happened when I was not more than eight or tenyears old, when a rather awkward-looking greenhorn had comedown from New Hampshire and made his appearance at the swimming-place. The boys, one after another, tried him by puttingmocking questions or attempting to humbug him with some largestory. He received it all with patience and good nature untilone remark seemed to sting him from his propriety. He turnedwith great dignity upon the offender, and said, "Was thatyou that spoke, or was it a punkin busted?" We all thoughtthat it was well said, and took him into high favor. 

I suppose the outdoor winter sports have not changed muchsince my childhood. The sluggish Concord River used to overflowits banks and cover the broad meadows for miles, where wefound excellent skating, and where the water would be onlya foot or two in depth. The boys could skate for ten milesto Billerica and ten miles back, hardly going over deep water, except at the bridges, the whole way. 

Sleigh-riding was not then what it is now. There were afew large sleighs owned in the town which would hold thirtyor forty persons, and once or twice in the winter the boysand girls would take a ride to some neighboring town whenthe sleighing was good. 

The indoor games were marbles, checkers, backgammon, dominoes, hunt-the-slipper, blind-man's-buff, and in some houses, wherethey were not too strict, they played cards. High-low-jack, sometimes called all-fours or seven-up, everlasting and oldmaid were the chief games of cards. Most of these games havecome down from a very early antiquity. 

The summer outdoor games were mumble-the-peg, high-spy, snap-the-whip, a rather dangerous performance, in which a longrow of boys, with the biggest boy at one end, and taperingdown to the smallest at the other end, would run over a fieldor open space until suddenly the big boy would stop, turnhalf around, and stand still and hold fast with all his might. The result was that the boy next to him had to move a verylittle distance, but the little fellow at the end was compelledto describe a half-circle with great rapidity, and was sometimeshurled across the field, and brought up with a heavy fall. There were thread-the-needle, hunt-the-red-lion and football, played very much as it is now, except with less system anddiscipline, and various games of ball. These games of ballwere much less scientific and difficult than the modern games. Chief were four-old-cat, three-old-cat, two-old-cat and base. 

We had fewer studies at our school than now. The boy whodid not go to college learned to read and write, perhapsan elementary history of the United States, and arithmetic, and occasionally made some little progress in algebra. OnSaturdays we used to "speak pieces. " Our favorites weresome spirited lyric, like "Scots Wha Hae" or Pierpont's "Stand, the ground's your own, my braves, " "The boy stood on the burningdeck, " and "Bernardo del Carpio. " Sometimes, though not often, some comic piece was chosen, like Jack Downing's "Tax on OldBachelors. "

Those who fitted for college added Latin and Greek to thesestudies. The children were sent to school earlier than isthe present fashion, and had long school hours and few vacations. There were four vacations in the year, of a week each, andthree days at Thanksgiving time. Little account was madeof Christmas. The fashion of Christmas presents was almostwholly unknown. The boys used to be allowed to go out ofschool to study in the warm summer days, and would find someplace in a field, and sometimes up in the belfry of the littleschoolhouse. I remember studying Caesar there with GeorgeBrooks, afterward judge, and reading with him an account ofsome battle where Caesar barely escaped being killed, on whichBrooks's comment was "I wish to thunder he had been!"

I am afraid the boys did not respect the property of theowners of the neighboring apple orchards, as undoubtedlythe better-trained boys of modern times do now. We understoodthe law to be that all apples that grew on the branches extendingover the highway were public property, and I am afraid thatwhen the owner was not about we were not very particular asto the boundary line. This seems to have been a trait ofboy nature for generations. You know Sidney Smith's accountof the habit of boys at his school to rob a neighboring orchard, until the farmer bought a large, savage bulldog for his protection. Some of the big boys told Sidney that if a boy would get downon his hands and knees and go backward toward the dog thedog would be frightened, and he could get the apples. Hetried the experiment unsuccessfully, and with the result thatconcluded, as he says, that "it makes no difference to a bulldogwhich end of a boy he gets hold of, if he only gets a goodhold. "

The discipline of the schoolmaster in those days was prettysevere. For slight offences the boys were deprived of theirrecess or compelled to study for an hour after the schoolwas dismissed. The chief weapon of torture was the ferule, to the efficacy of which I can testify from much personalknowledge. The master had in his desk, however, a cowhidefor gross cases. I do not remember knowing how that feltfrom personal experience, but I remember very well seeingit applied occasionally to the big boys. 

In the infant schools, which were kept by women, of coursethe discipline was not expected to be so severe. The schoolmistressin those days wore what was called a busk--a flat piece oflancewood, hornbeam, or some other like tough and elasticwood, thrust into a sort of pocket or sheath in her dress, which came up almost to the chin and came down below the waist. This was intended to preserve the straightness and grace ofher figure. When the small boy misbehaved, the schoolma'amwould unsheath this weapon, and for some time thereafter theculprit found sitting down exceedingly uncomfortable. 

Sometimes the sole of the schoolmistress's slipper answeredthe same purpose, and sometimes a stick from some neighboringbirch-tree. It all came to pretty much the same thing inthe end. The schoolmistress knew well how to accomplish herpurpose. There was a diversity of gifts but the same spirit. 

We were put to school much earlier than children are nowand were more advanced in our studies on the whole. I beganto study Latin on my sixth birthday. When I was nine yearsold I was studying Greek, and had read several books of Virgil. We were not very thorough Latin scholars, even when we enteredcollege, but could translate Virgil and Cicero and Caesarand easy Greek like Xenophon. 

The boys occasionally formed military companies and playedsoldier, but these did not, so far as I remember, last verylong. There was also a company of Indians, who dressed inlong white shirts, with pieces of red flannel sewn on them. They had wooden spears. That was more successful, and lastedsome time. 

They were exceedingly fond of seeing the real soldiers. Therewere two full companies in Concord, the artillery and thelight infantry. The artillery had two cannon captured fromthe British, which had been presented to the company by thelegislature in honor of April 19, 1775. When these two companiesparaded, they were followed by an admiring train of smallboys all day long, if the boys could get out of school. Iremember on one occasion there was a great rivalry betweenthe companies, and one of them got the famous Brigade Bandfrom Boston, and the other an equally famous band, calledthe Boston Brass Band, in which Edward Kendall, the greatmusician, was the player on the bugle. A very great day indeedwas the muster-day, when sometimes an entire brigade wouldbe called out for drill. These muster-days happened threeor four times in my boyhood in Concord. 

But the great day of all was what was called "Cornwallis, "which was the anniversary of the capture of Cornwallis atYorktown. There were organized companies in uniform representingthe British army and an equally large number of volunteers, generally in old-fashioned dress, and with such muskets andother accoutrements as they could pick up, who representedthe American army. There was a parade and a sham fight whichended as all such fights, whether sham or real, should end, in a victory for the Americans, and Cornwallis and his troopswere paraded, captive and ignominious. I quite agree withHosea Biglow when he says, "There is a fun to a Cornwallis, though; I aint agoin' to deny it. "

The boys cared little for politics, though they used to professthe faith of their fathers; but every boy sometimes imaginedhimself a soldier, and his highest conception of glory wasto "lick the British. " I remember walking home from schoolwith a squad of little fellows at the time Andrew Jacksonissued his famous message, when he threatened war if the Frenchdid not pay us our debt. We discussed the situation withgreat gravity, and concluded that if the French beat us, weshould have a king to rule over us. 

Besides the two military companies, there was another calledthe "Old Shad. " The law required every able-bodied man ofmilitary age to turn out for military training and inspectionon the last Wednesday in May; they turned out just to savethe penalty of the law, and used to dress in old clothes, and their awkward evolutions were the object of great scornto the small boy of the time. 

The streets of Concord were made lively by the stage-coachesand numerous teams. There were four taverns in the town, all well patronized, with numerous sleeping-rooms. Two ofthem had large halls for dancing. A great many balls weregiven, to which persons came from the neighboring towns. 

There was an excellent fiddler named John Wesson, who continuedto give the benefit of his talent to all parties, public andprivate, down to the time of the war, when he said he wouldnot play a dancing tune till the boys came home. He diedsoon after, and I do not know whether his music was ever heardagain. These taverns were crowded with guests. One principalroute for stages and teams to New Hampshire, Vermont and Canadapassed through Concord. 

There were several lines of stages, one from Lowell to Framingham, and two at least from Boston. The number of passengers, whichnow are all carried by rail, was so large that extras werefrequently necessary. The teams were very often more thanthe barns of the taverns in the town could accommodate, andon summer nights the wagons would extend for long distancesalong the village street with horses tied behind them. 

The sound of the toddy stick was hardly interrupted in thebarroom inside from morning till night. The temperance reformhad not made great headway in my youthful days. It was notuncommon to see farmers, bearing names highly respected inthe town, lying drunk by the roadside on a summer afternoon, or staggering along the streets. The unpainted farmhousesand barns had their broken windows stuffed with old hats orgarments. I have heard Nathan Brooks, who delivered the firsttemperance lecture in the town, at the request of the selectmen, say that after it was over he and the selectmen and some ofthe principal citizens went over to the tavern, and each tooka mug of flip. 

There were great quantities of huckleberries in the pasturesabout Concord, and the sweet high blackberries abounded bythe roadside. There were plenty of chestnuts in the woods, and the walnut, or pig-nut, also abounded; so that berryingand nutting were favorite pastimes. 

When I was a small boy a party of us went down to Walden woods, afterward so famous as the residence of Henry Thoreau. Therewas an old fellow named Tommy Wyman, who lived in a hut nearthe pond, who did not like the idea of having the huckleberry-fields near him invaded by the boys. He told us it was notsafe for us to go there. He said there was an Indian doctorin the woods who caught small boys and cut out their liversto make medicine. We were terribly frightened, and all wenthome in a hurry. 

When we got near the town, we met old John Thoreau, with hisson Henry, and I remember his amusement when I told him thestory. He said, "If I meet him, I will run this key downhis throat, " producing a key from his pocket. We reportedthe occurrence at the village store, but were unable to exciteany interest in the subject. 

Thanksgiving was then, as it is and ought to be now, thegreat day of the year. All the children were at home. Theambition of the head of the house was to get the largestturkey that money could buy. No Thanksgiving dinner wasquite complete unless there were a baby on hand belongingto some branch of the family, no bigger than the turkey. The preparation for Thanksgiving was very interesting tothe small boy mind. A boiled or roasted turkey, a pair ofchickens, chicken pie, wonderful cranberry sauce, a plumpudding, and all manner of apple pies, mince pies, squashpies, pumpkin pies, and nuts, raisins, figs and noble applesmade part of the feast. I suppose Thanksgiving customs havechanged less than most others, except in one particular. I do not believe there is a small boy's stomach in this generationthat can hold a tenth part of what used to go into mine, notonly on Thanksgiving day, but on the days before and after. The raisins were to be picked over, the nuts and citron gotready, when Thanksgiving was coming on, of all which we tookabundant tolls. The cold and warmed-over dishes lasted throughthe rest of the week. I do not know what the Jewish festivalor the old Roman banquets might have been, but they couldnot have equalled a New England Thanksgiving week in a housein the country. 

The doctor in those days was a terror to the small boy. Thehorrible and nasty castor oil, ipecac and calomel, and thesalts and senna, sulphur and molasses taken three morningsin succession and then missed three mornings, were worse thanany sickness. Of the last I speak only from hearsay, notfrom personal knowledge. Then the cupping and bleeding werefearful things to go through or look upon. We had none ofthe sweet patent medicines that the children now cry for, and none of the smooth capsules or the pleasant comfits thatturn medicine into confectionery nowadays. 

The boys were not allowed in most families to read novels, even on week-days. My father had a great dislike of fictionof all sorts, and for a good while would not tolerate anynovels in the house; but one winter day he went to Pepperell, in the northern part of the county, to try a case before asheriff's jury. About the time the case got through therecame up a sudden and violent snowstorm, which blocked up theroad with deep drifts so that he could not get home for twoor three days. He had to stay at a small country tavern, and the time hung very heavily on his hands. 

He asked the landlord if he had any books. The only onehe could find was a first volume of Scott's "Redgauntlet, "which was just then being published in Boston by a booksellernamed Parker, in what was called Parker's revised edition. Father read it with infinite delight. His eyes were openedto the excellence of Scott. He got home the next day atabout noon, and immediately sent one of the children downto the circulating library to get the second volume. Hesubscribed to Parker's edition, and was a great lover of Scottever after. 

We were permitted, however, to read the "Tales of a Grandfather. "I hope if any boy reads this book he will read the "Talesof a Grandfather, " especially the parts which give the historyof Scotland. It is a most interesting and noble story. Ican remember now how the tears ran down my cheeks as I readScott's description of finding the bones of Robert Bruce inthe old abbey at Dunfermline:

"As the church would not hold half the numbers, the peoplewere allowed to pass through it one after another, that eachone, the poorest as well as the richest, might see all thatremained of the great king, Robert Bruce. Many people shedtears; for there was the wasted skull which once was the head, that thought so wisely and boldly for his country's deliverance;and there was the dry bone which had once been the sturdyarm that killed Sir Henry de Bohun, between the two armies, at a single blow on the evening before the Battle of Bannockburn. "

I account it one of the chief blessings of my life that myboyhood was spent in the pure, noble and simple society ofthe people of Concord. I am afraid I did not do it muchcredit then. Old Dr. Bartlett, one of the worthiest andkindliest of men, but who always uttered what was in hisheart, said after my two oldest brothers and I had grownup, that Samuel Hoar's boys used to be the three biggestrascals in Concord, but they all seemed to have turned outpretty well. I have so far kept this statement strictly fromthe knowledge of the Democratic papers. But I suppose itis too late to do any harm now. 

CHAPTER VFAMOUS CONCORD MEN

There were in Concord in my boyhood three writers who afterwardbecame very famous indeed--Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau. Mr. Lowell said that these three names shine among all othersin American literature as the three blazing stars in the beltof Orion shine in the sky. 

The town is represented in the beautiful building of theCongressional Library at Washington by busts of Emerson andHawthorne on the outside front of the building; by Emerson'sname on the mosaic ceiling in the entrance pavilion, and bythree sentences from his writings inscribed on the walls. There are two out of eight such busts. It is also representedby two figures, a symbolic Statue of History, and a bronzeStatue of Herodotus, both by Daniel Chester French, the sculptor, a Concord man. 

Emerson came to live in Concord in the summer of 1835. Althoughhe was born in Boston and went to school there, he belongedto the town by virtue of his descent from a race of Concordministers who held the pulpit, with very brief intervals, from 1635 to 1841. But I do not think his influence uponthe town was very great for the first fifteen or twenty yearsof his life there. Indeed, I think he would have said thatthe town had more influence upon him than he had upon it. The Concord people, like the general public, were slow incoming to know his great genius. He was highly respectedalways. But the people were at first puzzled by him. Hislife was somewhat secluded. He spent his days in study andin solitary walks. Until Mrs. Ripley came to the old manse, about 1846, Emerson had, I think, no intimate friend outsideof his own household, except my sister Elizabeth, who hadbeen betrothed to his brother Charles, and was as a sisterto Emerson until her death in 1878. A good many allusionsto her will be found in his life and in his letters to Carlyle. After she died and shortly before his own death he appearedat my brother's house one day with a manuscript which he hadhanded to the Judge. He had gone over his diary for a greatmany years and extracted and copied everything in it whichrelated to her. 

He used to read lectures to the Lyceum, and in reading hisbooks now I find a great many passages which I remember tohave heard him read in my youthful days. In one of his lecturesupon Plato, he said that he turned everything to the use ofhis philosophy, that "wife, children and friends were allground into paint"--alluding to Washington Allston's storyof the Paint King who married a lovely maiden that he mightmake paint of the beautiful color of her cheeks. 

A worthy farmer's wife in the audience took this literally, and left the room in high dudgeon. She said she thoughtWaldo Emerson might be in better business than holding upto the people of Concord the example of a wicked man who groundhis wife and children into paint. 

In Emerson's later days he was undoubtedly a powerful educationalinfluence in the town. He was a man of much public spirit. In his philosophy his "soul was like a star and dwelt apart. "

But he had a heart full of human affections. He loved thetown. He loved his country. He loved his family. He lovedhis neighbors and friends. He could be stirred deeply onfit occasions by righteous indignation. Some of the menwho frequented the tavern, posted in the barroom a scurrilouslibel upon old Dr. Bartlett, the venerable physician, whohad incurred their hostility by his zeal in enforcing theprohibitory laws. Emerson heard of it and repaired to thespot and tore down the offensive paper with his own hand. After Wendell Phillips made an equally scurrilous attackon Judge Hoar, Emerson refused to take his hand. 

In his lament for his beautiful boy he uttered the voice ofparental sorrow in immortal accents. In the poems, "In Memoriam, "and in "The Dirge, " he records how lonely the lovely ConcordValley is to him since his brothers are gone as he wandersthere in the long sunny afternoon:

 Harken to you pine warbler, Singing aloft in the tree! Hearest thou, O, traveller, What he singeth to me?

 Not unless God made sharp thine ear With sorrow such as mine, Out of that delicate lay couldst thou Its heavy tale divine. 

But I think that the life of his younger brother Charles, though he died so early, was felt as an even greater force inConcord than that of Waldo. 

I hope I may be pardoned if I put on record here a slightand imperfect tribute to the memory of Charles Emerson, whowas betrothed to my eldest sister. It is nearly seventyyears ago. Yet the sweet and tender romance is still freshin my heart. He was a descendant of a race of Concord clergymen, including Peter Bulkeley, the founder of the town. He wasborn in Boston, but spent much of his youth in Concord inthe household of Dr. Ripley, who was the second husband ofthe grandmother of the Emersons. He studied law partly atCambridge Law School, partly in Daniel Webster's office inBoston, and afterward with my father in Concord. When myfather took his seat in Congress, in 1835, Emerson succeededto his office, and if he had lived would have succeeded tohis practice. Waldo Emerson had left it on record that hewas led to choose Concord as a dwelling-place to be near hisbrother. Waldo's house had been enlarged to make room forCharles and his bride under the same roof. The house wasready and the wedding near at hand when, in riding from Bostonto Concord on top of the stage, Charles took a violent cold, which was followed by pleurisy and death. He was of a verysociable nature, knew all the town people, lectured beforethe Lyceum, had a class in the Sunday-school and used to speakin the Lyceum debates. He had a very pleasant wit. He wason the committee for the celebration of the settlement ofthe town in 1835, at the end of two hundred years, and aboutthe same time was on a committee to attend the celebrationat Acton, where the people claimed for themselves all theglory of the Concord Fight. He had thought it likely theActon people would ask him to speak. But they did not. Ashe was riding back in the chaise, he said if they had askedhim to speak, he had it in mind to give as a toast, "The blessedMemory of the Pilgrim Fathers, who first landed at Acton. "

He was especially fond of boys, and they of him. When hedied, every schoolboy thought he had lost a friend. Onehad a knife and another a book or a picture which he prized, and another a pair of skates which Charles Emerson had givenhim. It may be a fond exaggeration, but I think he was themost brilliant intellect ever born in Massachusetts. 

Mr. Webster, who was consulted as to where Emerson shouldsettle, said, "Settle! Let him settle anywhere. Let himsettle in the midst of the back woods of Maine, the clientswill throng after him. " Mr. Everett delivered an eloquenteulogy after his death, at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Harvard. 

Dr. Holmes' exquisite tribute in his Phi Beta poems is wellknown:

 Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now, The first young laurels on they pallid brow, O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down In graceful folds the academic gown, On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought, And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye, Too bright to live, --but Oh! too fair to die. 

Dr. Holmes also says in his last tribute to Waldo:

"Of Charles Chauncey, the youngest brother, I knew somethingin my college days. A beautiful, high-souled, pure, exquisitelydelicate nature in a slight but finely wrought mortal frame, he was for me the very ideal of an embodied celestial intelligence. I may venture to mention a trivial circumstance, because itpoints to the character of his favorite reading, which waslikely to be guided by the same tastes as his brother's, andmay have been specially directed by him. Coming into my roomone day, he took up a copy of Hazlitt's British Poets. Heopened it to the poem of Andrew Marvell's, entitled, 'TheNymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn, ' which he readto me with delight irradiating his expressive features. Thelines remained with me, or many of them, from that hour, --

 Had it lived long, it would have been Lilies without, roses within. 

"I felt as many have felt after being with his brother, RalphWaldo, that I had entertained an angel visitant. The fawnof Marvell's imagination survives in my memory as the fittingimage to recall this beautiful youth; a soul glowing likethe rose of morning with enthusiasm, a character white asthe lilies in its purity. "

The late Samuel May, who was in the class after Emerson'sat Harvard, told me that the impression his character andperson made upon the students of his time was so great thatwhen he passed through the college yard, everybody turnedto look after him, as in later days men looked after Websterwhen he passed down State Street. 

The Rev. Joseph H. Cross, now (1903) still living, the oldestgraduate of Harvard, was his classmate. I received this letterfrom him a few years ago:

66 BRADFORD ST. , LAWRENCE, January 8, 1897. HON. G. F. HOAR, _Dear Sir:_

Yours of 5th inst. Is before me; and I am glad to remembermy classmate Emerson and answer your inquiries. I knew thathe studied law in your Honored Father's office, and was betrothedto your eldest sister. 

Your first inquiry is "as to his looks. " He was above mediumheight, well proportioned and straight as an arrow, brownhair and clear blue eyes, with fair complexion and handsomefeatures. "His scholarship and talents, " both of the highestorder. The class regarded him as the first and best scholar, dignified and refined in manners, courteous and amiable inspirit. He had great influence in his own class, and wasmuch esteemed and beloved by all. I think the impressionhe made upon all who knew him was that of a classical scholarand a perfect gentleman. 

Dr. Channing said when he died that all New England mournedhis loss. 

Although Charles was seven years the younger, his brotherWaldo speaks of him as his own master and teacher. The followingletter was written by Waldo to his aunt Mary just after Charles'sdeath. A part of it is printed in Cabot's Biography. Waldoand my sister, Elizabeth, heard of the extremity of his danger, and were on their way to see him, but arrived too late tofind him alive. 

"12 May. 

"You have already heard that E. And I arrived too late tosee Charles. He died on Monday afternoon, immediately afterreturning from a ride with Mother. He got out of the coachalone, walked up the steps and into the house without assistance, then sat down upon the stairs, fainted and never recovered. Yesterday afternoon we attended his funeral, and that is theend on this side Heaven, of his extraordinary promise, theunion of such shining gifts, --grace and genius, and senseand virtue. What a loss is this to us all--to Elizabeth andMother and you and me. In him I have lost all my society. I sought no other and formed my habits to live with him. Ideferred to him on so many questions and trusted him morethan myself, that I feel as if I had lost the best part ofmyself. In him were the foundations of so solid a confidenceand friendship that all the years of life leaned upon him. His genius too was a fountain inexhaustible of thoughts andkept me ever curious and expectant. Nothing was too great, nothing too beautiful for his grasp or his expression, andas brilliant as his power of illustration was, he stuck likea mathematician to his truth and never added a syllable fordisplay. I cannot tell you how much I have valued his conversationfor these last two or three years, and he has never stoppedgrowing, but has ripened from month to month. Indeed, theweight of his thoughts and the fresh and various forms inwhich he constantly clothed them has made Shakespeare moreconceivable to me, as Shakespeare was almost the only geniuswhom he wholly loved. His taste was unerring. What he calledgood was good, but so severe was it that very few works andvery few men could satisfy him, and this because his standardwas a pure ideal beauty and he never forgot himself so faras to accept any lower actual one in lieu of it. But I mustnot begin yet to enumerate his perfections. I shall not knowwhere to stop, and what would be bare truth to me would soundon paper like the fondest exaggeration. 

"I mourn for the Commonwealth, which has lost before it yethad learned his name the promise of his eloquence and rarepublic gifts. He blessed himself that he had been bred frominfancy as it were in the public eye, and he looked forwardto the debates in the Senate on great political questionsas to his fit and native element. And with reason, for inextempore debate his speech was music, and the precision, the flow and the elegance of his discourse equally excellent. Familiar as I was with his powers, when a year ago I firstheard him take part in a debate, he surprised me with hissuccess. He spoke so well that he was impatient of writingas not being a fit medium for him. I never shall hear suchspeaking as his, for his memory was a garden of immortalflowers, and all his reading came up to him as he talked, toclear, elevate and decorate the subject of his present thought. But I shall never have done describing, as I see well I shallnever cease grieving as long as I am on the earth that hehas left it. It seems no longer worth living in, if whateverdelights us in it departs. He has quitted forever the apparent, the partial. He has gone to make acquaintance with the real, the good, the divine, and to find mates and co-operators suchas we could not offer him. "

Charles Emerson entered with zeal and sympathy into the dailylife of the people of Concord. He delivered a few lectures, which were quite celebrated. Some of his manuscripts arein existence, and there is a boyish essay or two in the _HarvardMagazine, _ one on Conversation and one on Friendship, whichshow a singular charm and simplicity of style. He wrote theepitaph on the tomb of Professor Ashmun at Mount Auburn, anda tribute to his friend, James Jackson, Jr. , which is preservedin Jackson's memoir by his father. 

Miss Martineau, in a chapter of her autobiography writtenin 1836, describes the feeling in Boston in regard to theopposition to slavery, which seems now incredible even tothose who remember it. She says:

"The Emersons, for the adored Charles Emerson was living then, were not men to join an association for any object . . . . Butat the time of the hubbub against me in Boston, Charles Emersonstood alone of a large company in defence of free thoughtand speech, and declared that he had rather see Boston inashes than that I or anybody should be debarred in any wayfrom perfectly free speech. "

Robert C. Winthrop, who was Charles Emerson's intimate friendin boyhood, wrote for the _Advertizer_ a beautiful obituarynotice. He says: "Emerson was eminently a man of genius. We know not that in his riper years he ever wrote a line ofpoetry, but no one could have listened to him, either in privateor public without feeling that he had a poet's power; whilehis prose composition was of so pure and finished a styleas to show plainly that close perusal of the English Classicsin which he so much delighted . . . . One opinion which Mr. Emerson had early formed, and which had he been spared tomature life might have contributed much to his eminence may, in the sad event which has occurred, have contracted the circleof his fame . . . . He had formed in his own mind a standardof education far beyond that which can be completed, evenby the most faithful application, within the ordinary roundsof school and college--an education in which every man mustbe mainly his own master. In the work of this enlarged self-education he was engaged, and, until it was finished, he shrunkfrom the appearance of attempting to instruct others. Hehad in him all the elements which would have insured the successof early efforts at display--a fluent speech, a fine elocution, quick conception, a brilliant fancy. But his ambition, . . . While it aspired to a lofty eminence, was content to see thateminence still in the distance. " Mr. Winthrop adds, "Principle, unyielding and uncompromising principle, was the very breathof his soul, and pervaded and animated his whole intellectualsystem . . . . He openly professed what he believed, and he actedup to his professions. He not only held conscience the guideof his life, but he took care to school and discipline thatconscience so that its dictates should always conform to truth, to duty, to the laws of God. He was an honorable, high-minded, virtuous man--a sincere and devout Christian . . . . He hasfallen at the very gate of an honorable and eminent career, and a thousand hopes are buried in his grave. "

A few years before Mr. Winthrop died I met him in Cambridge, at the Peabody Museum, of which we were both trustees. Thetrustees were gathered in their room waiting for the meetingto be called to order. Mr. Winthrop was talking about hiscollege days. I asked him how it happened that there wereso many distinguished persons, in various departments of excellence, who were graduated from Harvard about his time, in his classand in the few classes following and preceding. I said thatsometimes there would be several orators, or eminent men ofscience, or eminent classical scholars, or eminent teachers, graduated about the same time, and their excellence wouldbe attributed to some one instructor; but that in his timethere seemed to be a crop of great men in all departmentsof life--in natural history, in the pulpit, the bar, in oratory, in literature, and in public life. Mr. Winthrop rose tohis feet from this chair and brought his hand down with greatemphasis on the table as he answered: "It was the influenceof Charles Emerson, Sir. "

Charles Emerson delivered just before his death a very beautifuland impressive lecture on Socrates. It was long rememberedby the people of Concord. It is said that they who heardit never forgot his beautiful figure and glowing countenanceas he ended a passage of great eloquence at the close of thelecture with the words, "God for thee has done His part. Do thine. "

Mr. Hawthorne had published some short stories which had alreadymade his name quite celebrated, but his great fame was stillto be gained. He was poor and had a good deal of difficultyin gaining a decent living for himself and his young wife. I will not undertake to repeat the story of his life whichHawthorne has told so beautifully in his "Mosses from an OldManse. " I knew Mrs. Hawthorne very well indeed. She wasa great friend of my oldest sister and used to visit my father'shouse when I was a boy, before she was married. It was owingto that circumstance that the Hawthornes came to live in Concord. She was quite fond of me. I used to get strawberries andwild flowers for her, and she did me great honor to draw myportrait, which now, fortunately or unfortunately, is lost. I went up to the house while they were absent on their weddingjourney when I was a boy of fourteen or fifteen to help putthings in order for the reception of the young couple. 

The furniture was very cheap; a good deal of it was madeof common maple. But Mrs. Hawthorne, who was an artist, had decorated it by drawings and paintings on the backs ofthe chairs and on the bureaus and bedsteads. On the headboardof her bed was a beautiful copy, painted by herself, of Guido'sAurora, with its exquisite light figures and horses and youthsand maidens flying through the air. 

I never knew Hawthorne except as a stately figure, whom Isaw sometimes in Concord streets and sometimes in his ownhome. He rarely, if ever, opened his lips in my hearing. He was always very silent, hardly spoke in the presence ofany visitor with whom he was not very intimate. So far asI know he never visited at the houses of his neighbors andnever went to town-meeting. The latter was a deadly sin inthe eyes of his democratic neighbors. Mr. Emerson inducedhim, one evening, to be one of a small company at his house. But Hawthorne kept silent and at last went to the window andlooked out at the stars. One of the ladies said to the personnext her: "How well he rides his horses of the night. " Hewas very fond of long walks, and of rowing on the river withThoreau and Ellery Channing. 

The Old Manse was built in 1759 by the Rev. Daniel Blissfor his daughter Phoebe on her marriage to the Rev. WilliamEmerson. She was grandmother of Waldo Emerson. Her secondhusband was the Rev. Dr. Ripley. 

I knew Henry Thoreau very intimately. I went to school withhim when I was a little boy and he was a big one. AfterwardI was a scholar in his school. 

He was very fond of small boys, and used to take them outwith him in his boat, and make bows and arrows for them, andtake part in their games. He liked also to get a number ofthe little chaps of a Saturday afternoon and take them outin his boat, or for a long walk in the woods. 

He knew the best places to find huckleberries and blackberriesand chestnuts and lilies and cardinal and other rare flowers. We used to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys calledthe soldiers the "trainers, " and he had a long, measured strideand an erect carriage which made him seem something like asoldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the beakof a parrot. 

His real name was David Henry Thoreau, although he changedthe order of his first two names afterward. He was a greatfinder of Indian arrow-heads, spear-heads, pestles, and otherstone implements which the Indians had left behind them, ofwhich there was great abundance in the Concord fields andmeadows. 

He knew the rare forest birds and all the ways of birds andwild animals. Naturalists commonly know birds and beastsand wild flowers as a surgeon who has dissected the humanbody, or perhaps sometimes a painter who has made picturesof them knows men and women. But he knew birds and beastsas one boy knows another--all their delightful little habitsand fashions. He had the most wonderful good fortune. Weused to say that if anything happened in the deep woods whichonly came about once in a hundred years, Henry Thoreau wouldbe sure to be on the spot at the time and know the whole story. 

 It seemed that Nature could not raise A plant in any secret place, In quaking bog or snowy hill, Beneath the grass that shades the rill, Under the snow, between the rocks, In damp fields known to bird and fox, But he would come in the very hour It opened in its virgin bower, As if a sunbeam showed the place, And tell its long-descended race. It seemed as if the breezes brought him; It seemed as if the sparrows taught him; As if by secret sight he knew Where, in the far fields, the orchis grew. Many haps fall in the field Seldom seen by wishful eyes, But all her shows did Nature yield, To please and win this pilgrim wise. He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodcock's evening hymn; He found the tawny thrushes' broods; And the shy hawk did wait for him; What others did at distance hear, And guessed within the thicket's gloom, Was shown to this philosopher, And at his bidding seemed to come. 

These lines fit Henry Thoreau exactly. Most people thinkEmerson had him in mind when he wrote them. But as a matterof fact, they were written before he knew Henry Thoreau. 

I wonder how many know the woodcock's evening hymn. I haveknown many sportsmen and naturalists who never heard it orheard of it. When the female is on her nest the male woodcockflies straight up into the sky, folds his wings and fallsdown through the air, coming down within a foot or two ofthe nest from which he ascended, pouring out a beautiful song, which he never sings at any other time. He is said to beone of the best and sweetest of our song birds. 

It is a singular fact that Emerson did not know Henry Thoreauuntil after Thoreau had been some years out of college. Henrywalked to Boston, eighteen miles, to hear one of Emerson'slectures, and walked home again in the night after the lecturewas over. Emerson heard of it, and invited him to come tohis house and hear the lectures read there, which he did. People used to say that Thoreau imitated Emerson, and Lowellhas made this charge in his satire, "A Fable for Critics";

 There comes ----, for instance; to see him's rare sport, Tread in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short. 

I think there is nothing in it. Thoreau's style is certainlyfresh and original. His tastes and thoughts are his own. His peculiarities of bearing and behavior came to him naturallyfrom his ancestors of the isle of Guernsey. 

I retained his friendship to his death. I have taken manya long walk with him. I used to go down to see him in thewinter days in my vacations in his hut near Walden. He wascapital company. He was a capital guide in the wood. Heliked to take out the boys in his boat. He was fond of discoursing. I do not think he was vain. But he liked to do his thinkingout loud, and expected that you should be an auditor ratherthan a companion. 

I have heard Thoreau say in private a good many things whichafterward appeared in his writings. One day when we werewalking, he leaned his back against a rail fence and discoursedof the shortness of the time since the date fixed for thecreation, measured by human lives. "Why, " he said, "sixtyold women like Nabby Kettle" (a very old woman in Concord), "taking hold of hands, would span the whole of it. " He repeatsthis in one of his books, adding, "They would be but a smalltea-party, but their gossip would make universal history. "

Another man who was famous as a writer went to school andafterward tended store in Concord in my childhood. This wasGeorge H. Derby, better known as John Phoenix. He was alsovery fond of small boys. I remember his making me what Ithought a wonderful and beautiful work of art, by taking asheet of stiff paper of what was called elephant foolscap, and folding it into a very small square, and then with a penknifecutting out small figures of birds and beasts. When the sheetwas opened again these were repeated all over the sheet, andmade it appear like a piece of handsome lace. 

He did not get along very well with his employer, who wasa snug and avaricious person. He would go to Boston oncea week to make his purchases, leaving Derby in charge of thestore. Derby would lie down at full length on the counter, get a novel, and was then very unwilling to be disturbed towait on customers. If a little girl came in with a tin kettleto get some molasses, he would say the molasses was all out, and they would have some more next week. So the employerfound that some of his customers were a good deal annoyed. 

Another rather famous writer who lived in Concord in my timewas Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. He used to talk to the childrenin the Sunday-school, and occasionally would gather them togetherin the evening for a long discourse. I am ashamed to saythat we thought Mr. Alcott rather stupid. He did not makeany converts to his theories among the boys. 

He once told us that it was wicked to eat animal food; thatthe animal had the same right to his life that we had to ours, and we had no right to destroy the lives of any of God'screatures for our own purposes. He lived only on vegetablefood, as he told us. But he had on at the time a very comfortablepair of calfskin boots, and the boys could not reconcile hisnotion that it was wicked to kill animals to eat, with killinganimals that he might wear their hides. When such inconsistencieswere pointed out to him he gave a look of mild rebuke at theaudacious offender, and went on with his discourse as if nothinghad happened. 

The people who do not think very much of Alcott ought tospeak with a god deal of modesty when they remember how highlyEmerson valued him, and how sure was Emerson's judgment; butcertainly nobody will attribute to Alcott much of the logicalfaculty. Emerson told me once:

"I got together some people a little while ago to meet Alcottand hear him converse. I wanted them to know what a rarefellow he was. But we did not get along very well. PoorAlcott had a hard time. Theodore Parker came all stuck fullof knives. He wound himself round Alcott like an anaconda;you could hear poor Alcott's bones crunch. "

Margaret Fuller used to visit Concord a good deal, and atone time boarded in the village for several months. 

She was very peculiar in her ways, and made people whom shedid not like feel very uncomfortable in her presence. Shewas not generally popular, although the persons who knew herbest valued her genius highly. But old Doctor Bartlett, avery excellent and kind old doctor, though rather gruff inmanner, could not abide her. 

About midnight one very dark, stormy night the doctor wascalled out of bed by a sharp knocking at the door. He gotup and put his head out of the window, and said, "Who's there?What do you want?" He was answered by a voice in the darknessbelow, "Doctor, how much camphire can anybody take by mistakewithout its killing them?" To which the reply was, "Who'staken it?" And the answer was "Margaret Fuller. " The doctoranswered in great wrath, as he slammed down the window, andreturned to bed: "A peck. "

William Ellery Channing, the poet, was a constant visitorof my sister, and later of my brother Edward. He was a moodyand solitary person, except in the company of a few closefriends who testified to the charming and delightful qualityof his companionship. I suppose his poems will outlast agreat many greater reputations. But they will always findvery few readers in any generation. 

Channing visited my elder sister almost every day or eveningfor a good while, but rarely remained more than two or threeminutes if he found anybody else in the room. 

George William Curtis, afterward the famous orator, and hisbrother, Burrill, occupied for a year or two a small farmhouseor hut, with one or two rooms in it, in Concord, on the Lincolnroad. They had been at Brook Farm and came to Concord, Isuppose attracted by Emerson. They came to my father's houseduring their stay there every afternoon, and their call wasas much a regular incident of the day as any stated meal. Each of them was a boy of a very pleasant and delightful nature. I think if George Curtis had dwelt almost anywhere but inNew York city, he would have been a very powerful influencein the public life of his generation. But he did not findany congenial associates in the men in New York who had anycapacity to effect much good. His pure and lofty counselfell unheeded upon the ears of his near neighbors, and thepeople of Massachusetts did not listen very patiently to lectureson political purity or reform in civil service from New Yorkcity. 

I never maintained any considerable intimacy with Curtis, although I have a few letters from him, expressing his regardfor some of my kindred or his interest and sympathy in somethingI had said or done. These I value exceedingly. One of thevery last articles he wrote for _Harper's Weekly, _ writtenjust before his death, contains a far too kind estimate ofmy public service. 

The Concord quality has come down with its people from thefirst settlement. The town was founded by Peter Bulkeley. He was a clergyman at Odell in Bedfordshire, where the churchover which he was settled is still standing. He was a gentlemanof good family and of a considerable estate which he spentfor the benefit of the people whom he led into the wilderness. He encountered the hostility of Laud and, to use the phraseof that time, was "silenced for non-conformity. " With MajorSimon Willard, he made a bargain with the Indians, just toboth parties, and with which both parties were perfectly satisfied, which rendered the name of Concord so appropriate, althoughin fact the name was given to the settlement before the companyleft Boston. That pulpit was occupied by Bulkeley and hisdescendants either by blood or marriage, from 1635 to 1696;from 1738 to 1841; and from 1882 to 1893. 

I was able some forty years ago to settle in Concord a matterwhich had puzzled English historians, as to the legitimacyof the famous statesman and Chief Justice, Oliver St. John. Lord Campbell, in his "Lives of the Chief Justices, " says:"It is a curious circumstance that there should be a disputeabout the parentage of such a distinguished individual, whoflourished so recently. Lord Clarendon, who knew him intimatelyfrom his youth, who practised with him in the Court of King'sBench, who sat in the House of Commons with him, and who wasboth associated with him and opposed to him in party strife, repeatedly represents him as illegitimate; and states thathe was 'a natural son of the house of Bolingbroke. ' Lord Bacon'saccount of his origin is equivocal--calling him 'a gentlemanas it seems of an ancient house and name. ' By genealogistsand heralds a legitimate pedigree is assigned to him, deducinghis descent in the right male line from William St. John, who came in with the Conqueror; but some of them describehim as the son of Sir John St. John, of Lydiard Tregose inWiltshire, and others as the son of Oliver St. John of Cagshoein Bedfordshire, and they differ equally respecting his mother. Lord Clarendon could hardly be mistaken on such a point, and I cannot help suspecting that the contrary assertionsproceed from a desire to remove the bar sinister from theshield of a Chief Justice. "

Lord Campbell has had diligent search made in the archivesof Oxford and Lincoln's Inn, but does not find anything tochange his opinion. 

Fortunately we are able to settle the question about whichLord Campbell and Lord Bacon and Lord Clarendon were misled, in Old Concord. Peter Bulkeley was the uncle of Oliver St. John. He speaks of him in his will, and leaves him his Bible. Bulkeley's Gospel-Covenant, a book the substance of whichwas originally preached to his congregation, is dedicatedto Oliver St. John. In the Epistle Dedicatory, he speaksof the pious and godly lives of St. John's parents, and alludesto the dying words of St. John's father as something whichhe and St. John had heard, but which was not known to othermen. "I speak a mystery to others but not unto your Lordship. "

So it is quite clear that St. John could not have been bornout of wedlock, and the son of a man who had seduced thesister of this eminent and pious clergyman. 

In Noble's "Memoirs of the Cromwell Family, " published aboutseventy-five years after the death of St. John, he is saidto be the son of Oliver St. John of Cagshoe in Bedfordshire. 

When the "Lives of the Chief Justices" was first published, I wrote to Lord Campbell, telling him these facts, and receivedthe following letter in reply:

LONDON, July 9th, 1861. 

_Sir_

I thank you very sincerely for your interesting letter ofDecember 13th, respecting Lord Chief Justice St. John. Ithink you establish his legitimacy quite satisfactorily andin any future edition of my Lives of the Chief Justices Ishall certainly avail myself of your researches. 

 I have the honor to be Sir Your obliged and obedient Servant CAMPBELL. 

 The Honorable Geo. F. Hoar. 

Something of Bulkeley's character may be gathered from thisextract from the Gospel-Covenant, which Mr. Emerson, who washis descendant, loved to quote. Think of these words, utteredto his little congregation in the wilderness; the only companyof white men in the Western Hemisphere who dwelt away fromtide-water:

"And for ourselves, the people of New England, wee shouldin a speciall manner, labour to shine forth in holinesseabove other people; we have that plenty and abundance ofordinances and meanes of grace as few people enjoy the like;wee are as a City set upon a hill, in the open view of allthe earth, the eyes of the world are upon us, because weeprofesse ourselves to be a people in Covenant with God, andtherefore not only the Lord our God, with whom we have madeCovenant, but heaven and earth, Angels and men, that are witnessesof our profession, will cry shame upon us, if we walk contraryto the Covenant which we have professed to walk in; if weopen the mouthes of men against our profession, by reasonof the scandalousnesse of our lives, wee (of all men) shallhave the greater sinne. 

"To conclude, let us study so to walk, that this may be ourexcellency and dignity among the Nations of the world, amongwhich we live; That they may be constrained to say of us, onely this people is wise, an holy and blessed people: thatall that see us, may see and know that the name of the Lordis called upon us: and that we are the seed which the Lordhath blessed. Deut. 28. 10 Esay. 61. 9. There is no peoplebut will strive to excell in something: what can we excellin if not in holinesse? If we look to number, we are thefewest; If to strength, we are the weakest; If to wealthand riches, we are the poorest of all the people of God throughoutthe whole world, we cannot excell (nor so much as equall)other people in these things; and if we come short in graceand holiness too, we are the most despicable people underheaven; our worldy dignitie is gone, if we lose the gloryof grace too, then is the glory wholly departed from our Israel, and we are become vile; strive we therefore herein to excell, and suffer not this crown to be taken away from us: Be wea holy people, so shall we be honorable before God and preciousin the eyes of his Saints. "

To these eminent Concord authors should be added the nameof William S. Robinson. He was one of the brightest and wittiestmen of his time. He very seldom had praise for anybody, althoughfor a few of his old Anti-Slavery friends he had a huge liking. When I was a little boy he was in a newspaper office in Concord, where he got most of his education. Afterward he was associatedwith William Schouler in editing the Lowell _Courier, _ a Whigpaper. When Schouler became editor of the _Atlas, _ Robinsonsucceeded to the paper. But when the Free Soil movementcame in, he would not flinch or abate a jot in his radicalAnti-Slavery principles, which were not very agreeable tothe proprietors of the cotton mills in Lowell, who dependedboth for their material and their market largely upon theSouth. Sumner described their alliance with their Southerncustomers as an alliance between the Lords of the Loom andthe Lords of the Lash. So Robinson was compelled to giveup his paper, in doing which he voluntarily embraced povertyinstead of a certain and lucrative employment. He startedan Anti-Slavery weekly paper in Lowell known as the Lowell_American. _ That afforded him a bare and difficult livingfor a few years. After the Anti-Slavery people got into powerhe was made Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Then he began to write his famous letters to the Springfield_Republican, _ which he signed Warrington. They were fullof wit and wisdom and displayed great knowledge of the bestEnglish literature. He made many enemies and finally, bya concert among them, was turned out of office. He lost hishealth not long after, and died prematurely. 

He was quite unsparing in his attacks on anybody who offendedhim, or against whom he took a dislike; and he seemed to dislikeeverybody whom he did not know. It was said of him that, like the rain of Heaven, he "fell alike on the just and onthe unjust. " He attacked some of the most venerable and worthycitizens of the Commonwealth without any apparent reason. He used to call Chief Justice Chapman, one of the worthiestand kindest of men, Chief Justice Wheelgrease. He had a controversyin his paper of long standing with a man named Piper, a pompousand self-important little personage, who edited the Fitchburg_Reveille. _ That was a Whig paper which circulated in thecountry towns where Robinson's paper was chiefly taken. Hemade poor Piper's life unhappy. One of the issues of hispaper contained a life of Piper. It begun by saying thatPiper began life as the driver of a fish-cart in Marblehead, and that he was discharged by his employer on account of thediffuseness of his style. He quoted with great effect onOtis P. Lord the toast given by the Court Jester of ArchbishopLaud's time: "Great Laud be to God, and Little Lord to theDevil. "

When he was clerk of the House of Representatives there wasa story in the newspapers that he was preparing a treatiseon Parliamentary law. He published a letter denying the statement. But he added, that if he did write such a treatise, he shouldsum it up in one sentence: "Never have an ass in the chair. "

I was associated with him one day on the Committee on Resolutionsof the Republican State Convention, held in Worcester. TheCommittee went over to my office to consult. While we weretalking together Robinson broke out with his accustomed objurgationslevelled at several very worthy and excellent men. I said:"William, it is fortunate that you did not live in the Revolutionarytime. How you would have hated General Washington. " He replied, with a smile that indicated the gratification he would havehad if he could have got at him: "He was an old humbug, wasn'the?"

But Robinson was always on the righteous side of any questioninvolving righteousness. He was kind, generous, absolutelydisinterested, and a great and beneficent power in the Commonwealth. 

CHAPTER VIFARM AND SCHOOL

I spent my life in Concord until I entered college exceptone year when I lived on a farm in Lincoln. There I hadan opportunity to see at its best the character of the NewEngland farmer, a character which has impressed itself sostrongly and so beneficently on our history. Deacon JamesFarrar, for whom I worked, was, I believe, the fifth in descentfrom George Farrar, one of the founders of the town of Lincoln. All these generations dwelt on the same farm and under thesame roof. An ancient forest came to a point not far fromthe house. That, with a large river meadow and some fertileupland fields, made up the farm. In every generation oneor more of the family had gone to college and had become eminentin professional life, while one of them had stayed at homeand carried on the farm. An uncle of the Deacon with whomI lived was Timothy Farrar of New Ipswich, an eminent judgewho died considerably more than a hundred years old, and whowas the oldest graduate of Harvard. Deacon James's own brotherwas Professor John Farrar of Harvard, a famous mathematicianin his day, thought by his pupils to be the most eloquentman of his time, although Webster and Everett and Channingwere his cotemporaries. It was a healthy and simple lifeof plain living and high thinking. But I think I got moregood out of it in learning how the best intelligence of theState of Massachusetts was likely to judge of the questionsof morals and duty than I got afterward from my four yearsin college. Two of the Deacon's sons succeeded him on thefarm. One was his successor in his office in the church. Another son, George Farrar, graduated at Amherst where hewas cotemporary with Dr. Storrs and Henry Ward Beecher. Hedied a few years after his admission to the Bar. But he hadalready given proof that he would, if he had lived, have takenrank among the foremost at the Bar in Massachusetts. 

Before entering college I was for about six months a pupilof Mrs. Sarah Ripley of Waltham. She removed to Concord withher husband afterward. She was one of the most wonderfulscholars of her time, or indeed of any time. President Everettsaid she could fill any professor's chair at Harvard. Shewas an admirable mathematician. She read the "Mecanique Celeste"of Laplace in the original without the aid of Dr. Bowditch'stranslation. She was a fine German and Italian scholar. Shehad a great fondness for Greek literature, especially forPlato and AEschylus. She was an accomplished naturalist. She was simple as a child, an admirable wife and mother, performingperfectly all the commonest duties of the household. Theauthorities of Harvard used to send boys to her who were rusticatedfor some offence. She would keep them along in all theirstudies, in most cases better instructed than they would havebeen if they had stayed in Cambridge. I remember her nowwith the strongest feeling of reverence, affection and gratitude. In that I say what every other pupil of hers would say. Ido not think she ever knew how much her boys loved her. 

In 1876 the Directors of the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphiatook steps to have the lives of three or four of the foremostwomen of the century that had just passed written as the bestexamples of American womanhood for our first century. Mrs. Schuyler was selected from New York, Mrs. Livermore fromNew Hampshire, and Mrs. Randolph from Virginia. Mrs. Ripleywas chosen as the representative of Massachusetts. If anybodydoubt the capacity of the intellect of woman to rival thatof man in any calling requiring the highest intellectual capacity, without in the least forfeiting any quality of a delicatewomanhood, let him read the "Life of Sarah Ripley. "

After her death Mr. Emerson wrote the following notice ofher. It is not found in his collected works. 

"Died in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 26th of July, 1867, Mrs. Sarah Alden Ripley, aged seventy-four years. The deathof this lady, widely known and beloved, will be sincerelydeplored by many persons scattered in distant parts of thecountry, who have known her rare accomplishments and the singularloveliness of her character. A lineal descendant of the firstgovernor of Plymouth Colony, she was happily born and bred. Her father, Gamaliel Bradford, was a sea-captain of markedability, with heroic traits which old men will still remember, and though a man of action yet adding a taste for letters. Her brothers, younger than herself, were scholars, but herown taste for study was even more decided. At a time whenperhaps no other young woman read Greek, she acquired thelanguage with ease and read Plato, --adding soon the advantageof German commentators. 

"After her marriage, when her husband, the well-known clergymanof Waltham, received boys in his house to be fitted for college, she assumed the advanced instruction in Greek and Latin, anddid not fail to turn it to account by extending her studiesin both languages. It soon happened that students from Cambridgewere put under her private instruction and oversight. Ifthe young men shared her delight in the book, she was interestedat once to lead them to higher steps and more difficult butnot less engaging authors, and they soon learned to prizethe new world of thought and history thus opened. Her bestpupils became her lasting friends. She became one of thebest Greek scholars in the country, and continued, in herlatest years, the habit of reading Homer, the tragedians, and Plato. But her studies took a wide range in mathematics, in natural philosophy, in psychology, in theology, as wellas in ancient and modern literature. She had always a keenear open to whatever new facts astronomy, chemistry, of thetheories of light and heat had to furnish. Any knowledge, all knowledge was welcome. Her stores increased day by day. She was absolutely without pedantry. Nobody ever heard ofher learning until a necessity came for its use, and thennothing could be more simple than her solution of the problemproposed to her. The most intellectual gladly conversed withone whose knowledge, however rich and varied, was always withher only the means of new acquisition. Meantime her mindwas purely receptive. She had no ambition to propound a theory, or to write her own name on any book, or plant, or opinion. Her delight in books was not tainted by any wish to shine, or any appetite for praise or influence. She seldom and unwillinglyused a pen, and only for necessity or affection. 

"But this wide and successful study was, during all the hoursof middle life, only the work of hours stolen from sleep, or was combined with some household task which occupied thehands and left the eyes free. She was faithful to all theduties of wife and mother in a well-ordered and eminentlyhospitable household, wherein she was dearly loved, and where

 'her heart Life's lowliest duties on itself did lay. '

"She was not only the most amiable, but the tenderest ofwomen, wholly sincere, thoughtful for others, and, thoughcareless of appearances, submitting with docility to thebetter arrangements with which her children or friends insistedon supplementing her own negligence of dress; for her ownpart indulging her children in the greatest freedom, assuredthat their own reflection, as it opened, would supply allneeded checks. She was absolutely without appetite for luxury, or display, or praise, or influence, with entire indifferenceto trifles. Not long before her marriage, one of her intimatefriends in the city, whose family were removing, proposedto her to go with her to the new house, and, taking some articlesin her own hand, by way of trial artfully put into her handa broom, whilst she kept her in free conversation on somespeculative points, and this she faithfully carried acrossBoston Common, from Summer Street to Hancock Street, withouthesitation or remark. 

"Though entirely domestic in her habit and inclination, shewas everywhere a welcome visitor, and a favorite of society, when she rarely entered it. The elegance of her tastes recommendedher to the elegant, who were swift to distinguish her as theyfound her simple manners faultless. With her singular simplicityand purity, such as society could not spoil, nor much affect, she was only entertained by it, and really went into it aschildren into a theatre, --to be diverted, --while her readysympathy enjoyed whatever beauty of person, manners, or ornamentit had to show. If there was conversation, if there werethought or learning, her interest was commanded, and she gaveherself up to the happiness of the hour. 

"As she advanced in life, her personal beauty, not remarkedin her youth, drew the notice of all, and age brought no faultbut the brief decay and eclipse of her intellectual powers. "

In 1833, three years before Emerson wrote "Nature, " Mrs. Ripleysaid of him: "We regard him still, more than ever, as theapostle of the Eternal Reason. We do not like to hear thecrows, as Pindar says, caw at the bird of Jove. "*

[Footnote]* On the stone which marks Mrs. Ripley's grave in the beautifulcemetery at Concord, her children placed an inscription containinga part of the passage with which Tacitus ends his Life of Agricola. "It was a passage which was specially dear to her, " says herbiographer; "many of her friends will recall the fine glow offeeling with which she read or quoted it; and to these it willalways be associated with her memory. I cannot better close thisimperfect sketch of her life than by giving the whole of it: ofno one was it ever more worthily spoken than of her. The wordsenclosed in brackets are those which are on her gravestone. "

"Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, noncum corpore exstinguunter magnae animae; (placide quescas, nosque, domum tuam, ab tuarum voces, quas neque lugeri neque plangi fasest: admiratione te potius, temporalibus laudibus, et, si naturasuppedit, similitudine decoremus. ) Is verus honos, ea conjunctissimicujusque pietas. Id filiae quoque uxorique praeceperim, sicpatris, sic mariti memoriam venerari, ut omnia facta dictaqueejus secum revlvant; famamque ac figuram animi magis quamcorporis complectantur: non quia intercedendum putem imaginibus, quae marmore aut aere finguntur, sed ut vultus hominum, ita simulacravultus imbecilla ne mortalia sunt, forma mentis aeterna, quamtenere et exprimere non per alienam materiam et artem, sed tuisipse moribus posis. Quidquid ex Agricola amavimus, quidquid miratisumus, manet mansurumque est in animis hominum, in aeternitatetemporum, fama rerum. Nam multos veterum, velut inglorios etignobiles oblivio obruet: Agricola posteritati narratus etsuperstes erit. "[End of Footnote]

CHAPTER VIIHARVARD SIXTY YEARS AGO

I do not think Harvard College had changed very much whenI entered it on my sixteenth birthday in the year 1842 eitherin manners, character of students or teachers, or the courseof instruction, for nearly a century. There were some elementarylectures and recitations in astronomy and mechanics. Therewas a short course of lectures on chemistry, accompanied byexhibiting a few experiments. But the students had no opportunityfor laboratory work. There was a delightful course of instructionfrom Dr. Walker in ethics and metaphysics. The college hadrejected the old Calvinistic creed of New England and substitutedin its stead the strict Unitarianism of Dr. Ware and AndrewsNorton, --a creed in its substance hardly more tolerant orliberal than that which it had supplanted. There was alsosome instruction in modern languages, --German, French andItalian, --all of very slight value. But the substance ofthe instruction consisted in learning to translate rathereasy Latin and Greek, writing Latin, and courses in algebraand geometry not very far advanced. 

The conditions of admission were quite easy. They were suchas a boy of fourteen of good capacity, who could read andwrite the English language and had gone through some simplebook of arithmetic, could easily master in two years. Therewere three or four schools were the boys were pretty wellfitted, so that they could translate Cicero and Virgil, Neposand Sallust and Caesar and Xenophon and Homer. The BostonLatin School, the Roxbury Latin School, Phillips Academy atExeter and Phillips Academy at Andover and Mrs. Ripley'sschool at Waltham were the best schools for this purpose. The boys from the Boston Latin School generally took theirplaces at the head of the class when they entered. Next camethe best scholars from the other schools I have named. Butthe bulk of the pupils were very poorly fitted. 

There was, as it seems to me in looking back, little instructionof much value. The good scholars and the bad went to therecitation together. The good ones lost the hour, and thepoor scholars got the benefit of hearing the good ones recite. Their mistakes were corrected by the professor. They handedin written exercises in Latin and Greek which were examinedby the instructor and the faults corrected, and returned. There were, during the last three years, declamations oncea month, where the boy recited some piece of prose or poetryin the presence of the class, but got very little instructionor criticism from the professor. Then, in the last threeyears, English themes were required. The subjects were givenout by Professor Channing, himself a most accomplished andadmirable scholar in his line. He seemed to choose his subjectswith a view of taxing the ingenuity of the boy to find anythingto say about them instead of taking something which the boyknew about and devoting himself to improve his English stylein expressing his thought. Channing was a good critic. Hispublished lectures on rhetoric and oratory, now almost whollyforgotten, remind one of Matthew Arnold in their delicateand discriminating touch. He had a face and figure somethinglike that of Punch in the frontispiece of that magazine. Hismethod was to take the themes which the boys handed in oneweek, look them over himself, then, a week after, meet theclass, call the boys in succession to sit down in a chairby the side of his table, read out passages from the theme, and ridicule them before the others. It was a terrible ordealfor a bashful or awkward boy. Those of a more robust nature, or whose performance had nothing ridiculous in it, profitedby the discipline. But it certainly took all the starch andcourage out of me. I never sat down to write my theme withoutfancying that grinning and scornful countenance looking atmy work. So I used to write as few sentences as I thoughtwould answer so that I should not be punished for failureto bring in any theme at all, and never attempted to do mybest. 

But the Faculty themselves were certainly an assemblage ofvery able men. Making all the allowance for the point ofview, and that I was then a youth looking at my elders whohad become famous, and that I am now looking as an old manat young men, I still think there can be no comparison betweenthe college administrators of fifty years ago and those ofto-day. It was then the policy of the college to call intoits service great men who had achieved eminent distinctionin the world without. It is now its policy to select forits service promising youth, in the hope that they will becomegreat. Perhaps the last method is the best where it succeeds. But the effect of failure is most mischievous. PresidentsQuincy, Everett, Walker and Sparks administered in successionthe office of President during my connection with the AcademicDepartment and the Law School, although Dr. Walker's inaugurationwas not until later. Each of them in his own way was amongthe first men of his time. Quincy had been an eminent statesman, a famous orator, and a most successful mayor of Boston. EdwardEverett had been in his early youth one of the most famouspulpit orators of the country, afterward a distinguishedMember of Congress, Governor of the Commonwealth, Ministerto England, and Senator of the United States. He was a consummateorator, on whose lips thousands and thousands of his countrymenhad hung entranced. He was, what is less generally rememberednow, perhaps the ablest and most accomplished diplomatistever in the public service of the United States. Jared Sparkswas a profound student of history, somewhat dull as a narrator, but of unerring historic judgment. I suppose he would beplaced by all our writers of history with great unanimityat the head of American historic investigators. James Walkerwas a great preacher and a profound thinker. In the judgmentof his hearers, young and old, he was probably deemed nearlyor quite the foremost of American preachers. 

That I may not be supposed to imply any disparagement of thepresent accomplished head of Harvard, let me say that whileeach of the men I have named had done a great work in lifeand achieved a great fame before he came to the Presidency, President Eliot has, in my opinion, achieved an equal fameand performed an equal work since he came to it. 

A like policy prevailed in those days in the choice of instructorsin the Law School. Judge Story, the senior professor, diedjust before I graduated from the College. His fame as a juristwas known throughout Europe. He was undoubtedly the mostlearned judge in the United States. Chief Justice Marshalland Chief Justice Shaw of Massachusetts doubtless excelledhim in intellectual vigor. Chancellor Kent rivalled him asa writer upon law. But he had no other rival among judgesor commentators in this country, --few anywhere. He was unquestionably, at the time of his death, the most famous teacher of law inthe civilized world. His associate professor, Greenleaf, was an admirable lawyer, who, before he went to Harvard, hadhad a great practice in Maine, and made some good argumentsin the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Story wassucceeded by Chief Justice Joel Parker of New Hampshire, avery eminent jurist, who was saturated with the old learningof special pleading and real property. He would have beena fit associate for Coke or Saunders, and would have heldhis own anywhere with either. 

There was nothing in the teaching of Latin or Greek to inspirethe student with any love of Greek or Latin literature. Theprofessor never pointed out its beauties or illustrated thetext in any way. The students, in succession, were calledupon to construe a few lines, reading one or two Greek wordsand then giving their English equivalents. The time of thegood scholar was taken up in hearing the recitation of thepoor scholar and so very largely wasted. I had four or fivepersons in my class who became afterward eminent classicalscholars. I do not believe that when we graduated there weremore than four men in the class who could write a decent Latinsentence without the laborious use of grammar and dictionary. I doubt whether there was more than one, certainly there werenot more than three, who could do the same thing in Greek. I do not suppose there was a man in the class who could havespoken either language with ease. 

Yet, somehow, the graduates of Harvard got a good intellectualtraining from the University. The rough country boy, if hehad it in him, came out at his graduation a gentleman in behaviorand in character. He was able to take hold of life with greatvigor. The average age of graduation I suppose was twenty. Not more than three years were spent in studying a profession. In some few cases, the graduate got a little money by teachingfor a year. But the graduates of Harvard College and HarvardLaw School were apt to take quite rapidly the high placesof the profession. That was true then much more than it isnow. 

There were many persons who graduated before my time or shortlyafterward whose high place in the public life of the Commonwealthand of the country was assured before they were thirty yearsold. Edward Everett was called to the pulpit of Brattle StreetChurch at the age of nineteen. He succeeded in that pulpitJoseph Stevens Buckminster, who was himself settled over thatimportant parish at the age of twenty-one and was a wonderfulpulpit orator. Edward Everett preached a sermon when he wastwenty-four years old before a large audience in the RepresentativesChamber at Washington which was heard with breathless silence. Rufus King said it was the best sermon he ever heard, andHarrison Gray Otis was affected to tears. Benjamin R. Curtiswas admitted to the bar in Boston when he was twenty-two yearsold and shortly after was retained in a very important case. It is said that an old deputy sheriff, who had just heardCurtis's opening argument, was met in the street and askedif anything was going on in court. "Going on?" was the reply. "There's a young chap named Curtis up there has just openeda case so that all Hell can't close it. " I suppose EdwardEverett Hale and James Freeman Clarke were almost as famousin the pulpit when they were twenty-five or twenty-six yearsold as they ever were afterward. I might extend the catalogueindefinitely. Where is there to be found to-day at the NewEngland bar or in the New England pulpit a man under thirtyof whom it can be said that his place among the great menof his profession is assured? It will not do to say in answerto this that it takes a greater man in this generation tofill such a place than it took in other days. That is nottrue. The men of those generations have left their work behindthem. It does not suffer in comparison with that of theirsuccessors. There was something in the college training ofthat day, imperfect as were its instruments, and slender aswere its resources, from which more intellectual strengthin the pupil was begotten than there is in the college trainingof the present generation. I will not undertake to accountfor it. But I think it was due in large part to the personalityof the instructors. A youth who contemplated with a nearand intimate knowledge the large manhood of Josiah Quincy;who listened to the eloquence of James Walker, or heard hisexpositions of the principal systems of ethics or metaphysics;or who sat at the feet of Judge Story, as he poured forththe lessons of jurisprudence in a clear and inexhaustiblestream, caught an inspiration which transfigured the verysoul of the pupil. 

Josiah Quincy, "old Quin" as we loved to call him, was a verysimple and a very high character. He was born in Boston, February 4, 1772, just before the Revolutionary War. It wassaid, I have no doubt truly, that the nurse who attended hismother at his birth went from that house to the wife of Copley, the painter, when her son, Lord Lyndhurst, was born. Copleywas a Tory, though a patriot and an ardent lover of his country. His departure from Boston made Lord Lyndhurst an Englishman. Quincy entered early into politics. He was a candidate forCongress in the last century before he was twenty-five yearsold. I heard him say once that the Democrats called for acradle to rock the Federal candidate. He was a good typeof the old Massachusetts Federalist, --brave, manly, sincere, of a broad and courageous statesmanship, but distrustful ofthe people and not understanding their temper. He made somevery powerful speeches in the House of Representatives, attackingthe greed and office-seeking of that time. His eloquencewas something of the style of the famous Irish orators. Oneof his passages describing the office-seekers tumbling overeach other like pigs to a trough will be long remembered. He hated Jefferson and moved his impeachment in the Houseof Representatives, --a motion for which he got no vote buthis own. He retired disgusted from National public life, became Mayor of Boston, an office which he filled with muchdistinction, and then was called to the Presidency of Harvard, mainly because of his business capacity. The finances ofthe University were then in a sad condition. He put themon an excellent footing. He was very fond of the boys andthey of him, although he was rough and hasty in his manners. While I was in college (although I happened to be at homethat day and did not see the affair) some of the boys hadgot into some serious rows in Boston one Saturday. They hadundertaken to wear the Oxford cap and gown. They were ridiculedby the populace in Boston, and a good many fights were theconsequence. They were driven from the streets, and in theafternoon a lot of roughs took hold of a long rope, as ifthey belonged to an engine company, ran out to Cambridge acrossthe bridge, and proposed to attack the college buildings. Old Quin gathered the students together at the gate and toldthe boys to keep within the yard and not to attack anybodyunless they were attacked, but to permit none of those mento come within the gate. The old fellow was ready to headthe students and a fight was expected. But the police gathered, and finally the Boston roughs were persuaded to depart inpeace. 

The old gentleman's heart always warmed to the son of an oldFederalist. I had to visit his study a good many times, Iregret to say, to receive some well-deserved admonitions. But the interview always ended in an inquiry after my fatherand some jolly, or at least kindly utterance about myself. One of my classmates gave an account in rhyme of one of theseinterviews which I wish I could repeat. I can only remembertwo lines:

 Quin deigned a grin, perforce, And Hoar a roar, of course. 

He died in 1864 at the age of ninety-two, preserving to thelast his mental vigor and his ardent interest in public affairs. During the darkest period of the War he never lost his hopeor faith. He fell on the ice and broke his hip a little whilebefore his death. He was treated by the somewhat savagemethod of the surgery of the time. Dr. George E. Ellis, from whom I had the story, went to see him one day at hishouse on Park Street and found the old man lying on his bedwith a weight hanging from his foot, which projected overthe bed, to keep the bones in their place and the musclesfrom contracting. He said to Mr. Quincy's daughter: "Youhave been shut up here a long time. Now go and take a walkround the Common and let me stay with your father. " Miss Quincywent out and the old man kept Dr. Ellis so full of interestby his cheerful and lively talk that he never once thoughtto ask him how he was getting along. When Miss Quincy returned, he took his leave and had got downstairs when the omissionoccurred to him. He went back to the chamber and said toMr. Quincy: "I forgot to ask you how your leg is. " The oldfellow brought his hand down with a slap upon the limb andsaid: "Damn the leg. I want to see this business settled. "

When Felton was inaugurated as President, Gov. Banks in performinghis part of the ceremony of presenting the charter and thekeys to the new officer alluded in his somewhat grandiloquentway to four of Felton's predecessors, Everett, Sparks, Walkerand Quincy, who were upon the stage. Speaking of Quincy hesaid: "He would be reckoned among honorable men, though theirnumber were reduced to that of the mouths of the Nile or thegates of Thebes. "

Felton, the Greek professor, was the heartiest and jolliestof men. He was certainly one of the best examples of a fullyrounded scholarship which this country or perhaps any countryever produced. He gave before the Lowell Institute a courseof lectures on Greece Ancient and Modern, into which is compressedlearning enough to fill a large encyclopaedia. He also editedtwo or three Greek plays and an edition of Homer, which wasextensively used as a text-book. 

Professor Felton was a very impulsive man, though of greatdignity and propriety in his general bearing. He had sometheories of his own as to the matter of pure and correctEnglish and was very much disgusted if anybody transgressedthem. His brother, John Felton, of the class of 1847, afterwardthe foremost lawyer on the Pacific Coast, was altogether thebest and most brilliant scholar in his class. He was reportedto the Faculty just before his graduation for the offenceof swearing in the College Yard, an offence which was punishedby what was called a public admonition which involved a considerableloss of rank and a letter to the parent or guardian of theoffender. The Faculty, in consideration of John Felton'sexcellent scholarship, instead of the ordinary punishmentdirected that Professor Felton should admonish his brotherof his fault in private. The professor was some eighteenor twenty years the elder and respected by his brother ratheras a father than as a brother. He sent for John to his studyand told him the nature of the complaint, and proceeded: "Icannot tell you how mortified I am that my brother, in whosecharacter and scholarship I had taken so much pride, who stoodso high in his class, should have been reported to the Facultyfor this vulgar and wicked offence. " John said, with greatcontrition: "I am exceedingly sorry. It was under circumstancesof great provocation. I have never been guilty of such athing before. I never in my life have been addicted to profanity. ""Damnation, John, " interposed the professor, "how often haveI told you the word is profaneness and not profanity?" Itis needless to say that the sermon ended at that point. 

But the most interesting single figure in the Harvard Facultyin my day was James Walker. He was a man of quiet dignity, and of modest bearing. He appeared rather awkward when hewalked, as if there were some want of strength in the feetor ankles. He heard the classes in my time in Jouffroy andCousin and in Butler's "Analogy. " His method was to requirethe boy to get into his mind some account of a system or specialcourse of reasoning of the author and to state it at considerablelength in his own language. I think all that I got out ofcollege that was of much use to me came from this trainingin James Walker's recitation-room, except that I think I gotsome capacity for cross-examining witnesses which was veryuseful to me afterward from reading Plato's dialogues andgetting familiar with Socrates's method of reducing a sophistad absurdum. But Dr. Walker's throne was the pulpit of theCollege Chapel. He used to preach four Sundays in each ofthe two terms. He had a beautiful head, a deep but clearvoice, a deliberate manner and a power of emphasizing hisweighty thoughts which I have never seen surpassed by anyorator. He had a small and beautiful hand of which it issaid, though such a thing is hard to believe of him, he wassomewhat vain. But his only gesture was to bring very infrequentlythe back of his hand down upon the cushion of the pulpit beforehim. The ticking of the clock in the College Chapel was inaudiblewhen the chapel was empty. But it ticked out clear and loudupon the strained ears of the auditors who were waiting inthe pauses of his sentences. I can remember his sermons now. They are admirable to read, although, like other eloquence, their life and sprit is lost without the effect of speech. There was one on the text, "Thou shalt say no, " which no hearer, I venture to say, ever forgot to the day of his death. Therewas another, on the control of the thoughts, from the text, "Leading into captivity every thought. " This made a deep impressionon the students. I seem to hear the tones of his voice now. The Doctor described with a terrific effect the thinking overin imagination scenes of vice by the youth who seemed tothe world outside to fall suddenly from virtue. He saidthere was no such thing as a sudden fall from virtue. Thescene had been enacted in thought and the man had becomerotten before the time of the outward act. 

"Sometimes the novice in crime thinks himself ready to actwhen he is not; as appears from his hesitancy and reluctancewhen the moment for action arrives. If, however, this unexpectedrecoil of his nature does not induce him to change his purposealtogether, he knows but too well how to supply the defectin training for sin. If we could look into his heart, weshould find him at his accursed rehearsals again. A few morelessons, and the blush and the shudder will pass away, neverto return. "

This is tame enough in the recital. But I dare say thereare old men who will read these pages to whom it will bringback the never-forgotten scenes of more than fifty years ago. The Doctor had a great gift of sententious speech, not onlyin his written discourses, but in his ordinary conversation orhis instruction from the professor's chair. He was speakingone day of Combe and of something disrespectful he had saidabout the English metaphysicians. "What does Mr. Combe mean?"said the Doctor. "I make no apology for the English metaphysicians. They have made their mistakes. They have their shortcomings. But they are surely entitled to the common privilege of Englishmen--to be judged by their peers. " He was speaking one day ofsome rulers who had tried to check the rising tide of somereform by persecuting its leaders. "Fools!" said the Doctor. "They thought if they could but wring the neck of the crowingcock it would never be day. "

One of the delightful characters and humorists connectedwith Harvard was Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, tutorin Greek. He was a native of Thessaly, born near Mount Pelionand educated in the convent of the Greek Church on Mount Sinai. It is said, although such instances are rare, that he wasof the purest Greek blood. At any rate, his face and headwere of the Greek type. He was a man of wonderful learning, --I dare say the best Greek scholar of his generation, whetherin Europe or America. He was a very simple-hearted personin dealing with ordinary affairs. But his conversation andhis instruction in the class-room were full of wit and sense. He used to tell a story, whether of his father or his grandfatherI am not sure, that one night very late he was sitting inhis warehouse alone when two men entered and told him theywere come to kill him. He asked them why they wished to killhim, and they told him that they had been hired by an enemyof his. "Well, " said the old man, "what are you to be paid?"They told him the sum. He said: "I will give you twice asmuch to kill him. " Accordingly they accepted the offer andwent away, leaving the old fellow alive, kept their bargainwith him and killed his enemy. 

Sophocles had a great love of little children and a curiouslove of chickens which he treated as pets and liked to tameand to play with, squatting down on the ground among themas if he were a rooster himself. It is said that during hislast sickness the doctor directed that he should have chickenbroth. He indignantly rejected it, and declared he wouldnot eat a creature that he loved. 

In what I have said about Professor Channing I am describinghim and his method in instruction faithfully as it seemedto me at the time. It is quite possible I may be wrong. Iam sure that the better scholars and the youths who were muchbetter in every way than I was at that time of my life whowere his pupils will dissent from my opinion and be shockedat what I say. So it is quite likely that I am in fault andnot he. I have read again lately his book on Rhetoric andOratory since what I said a little while ago was dedicated, and I wish to reaffirm my high opinion of the book. For fresh, racy and correct style, for clear perception and exquisiteliterary taste, it is one of the best books on the subject, as it one of the best books on any subject ever written byan American. His mistake was, in large measure, the prevalentmistake of the College in his time, --the use of ridicule andseverity instead of sympathy as a means of correcting thefaults incident to youth. It was the fault of the College, both of instructors and of the students. Dr. Walker in oneof his public addresses speaks with commendation of "the stormof merciless ridicule" which overwhelms young men who areaddicted to certain errors which he is criticising. 

The Latin professor was Charles Beck, Ph. D. He was a nativeof Heidelberg. He had been compelled to leave Prussia becauseof his love of liberty. He had studied theology, and hadpublished a treatise on gymnastics, in which he was accomplished. We read with him Terence and Plautus, the Medea of Seneca, Horace, and probably some Latin prose, which I have forgotten. He was a very learned Latin scholar. I do not know whetherhe cared anything about poetry or eloquence or the philosophyof the Roman authors or no. Certainly he did nothing to indicateto us that he had any such interest or to stimulate any suchinterest in his pupils. He was strict to harshness in dealingwith his class. The only evidence of enthusiasm I ever witnessedin Dr. Beck was this: He brought into the classroom one dayan old fat German with very dirty hands and a dirty shirt. He had a low forehead and a large head with coarse curlinghair which looked as if it had not seen a comb or brush fora quarter of a century. We looked with amazement at thisfigure. He went out before the recitation was over. ButDr. Beck said to us: "This is Dr. ----, gentlemen. He isa most admiwable scholar. " (This was the Doctor's pronunciationof the r. ) "He has wead Cicewo through every year for nearlyfifty years for the sake of settling some important questions. He has discovered that while necesse est may be used indifferentlyeither with the accusative and infinitive, or with ut withthe subjunctive, necesse ewat can only be used before ut withthe subjunctive. I should think it well worth living forto have made that discovery. "

I suppose we all thought when we graduated that Dr. Beckwas a man of harsh and cold nature. But I got acquaintedwith him later in life and found him one of the most genialand kind-hearted of men. He was a member of the Legislature. He was a Free Soiler and an Abolitionist, liberally contributingto the Sanitary Commission, and to all agencies for the benefitof the soldiers and the successful prosecution of the war. 

He came vigorously to the support of Horace Mann in his famouscontroversy with Mr. Webster. Mann had vigorously attackedWebster, and Webster in return had spoken of Mann as one ofthat class of persons known among the Romans as CaptatoresVerborum, which he supposed to mean one of those nice personswho catch up other person's words for the sake of small criticismand fault-finding. Mr. Mann replied that Webster was wrongin his Latin, and the words Captatores Verborum meant toad-eaters, or men who hang on the words of great men to praiseand flatter them, of which he found some conspicuous modernexamples among Webster's supporters. Professor Felton, theGreek professor, who was a staunch friend of Webster, attackedMann and charged him with ignorance of Latin. But Dr. Beckcame to the rescue, and his authority as a Latin scholarwas generally conceded to outweigh that of Webster and Feltonput together. 

One of the most brilliant men among the Faculty was ProfessorBenjamin Peirce. Undoubtedly he was the foremost Americanmathematician of his time. He dwelt without a companion inthe lofty domain of the higher mathematics. 

 A privacy of glorious light is thine. 

He was afterward the head of the Coast Survey. He had littlerespect for pupils who had not a genius for mathematics, and paid little attention to them. He got out an editionof Peirce's Algebra while I was in college. He distributedthe sheets among the students and would accept, instead ofa successful recitation, the discovery of a misprint on itspages. The boys generally sadly neglected his department, which was made elective, I think, after the sophomore year. At the examinations, which were held by committees appointedby the Board of Overseers, he always gave to the pupil thesame problem that had been given to him in the last precedingrecitation. So the boys were prepared to make a decent appearance. He used to dress in a very peculiar fashion, wearing a queerlittle sack and striped trousers which made him look sometimesas if he were a salesman in a Jew clothing-store. He hada remarkably clear and piercing black eye. One night oneof the students got into the belfry and attached a slenderthread to the tongue of the bell, contrived to lock the doorwhich led to the tower and carry off the key, then went tohis room in the fourth story of Massachusetts Hall and beganto toll the bell. The students and the Faculty and proctorsgathered, but nobody could explain the mysterious ringingof the bell until Peirce came upon the scene. His sharp eyeperceived the slender line and it was traced to the room wherethe roguish fellow who was doing the mischief thought himselfsecure. He was detected and punished. 

Peirce gained great fame in the scientific world by his controversywith Leverrier. Leverrier, as is well known, discovered someperturbations in the movement of the planet Herschel, nowmore commonly called Uranus, which were not accounted forby known conditions. From that he reasoned that there mustbe another planet in the neighborhood and, on turning hisglass to the point where his calculations told him the disturbingbody must be, he discovered the planet sometimes called byhis name and sometimes called Neptune. This discovery createda great sensation and a burst of admiration for the fortunatediscoverer. Peirce maintained the astounding propositionthat there was an error in Leverrier's calculations, and thatthe discovery was a fortunate accident. I believe that astronomersfinally came to his conclusion. I remember once going intoBoston in the omnibus when Peirce got in with a letter inhis hand that he had just got from abroad and saying withgreat exultation to Professor Felton, who happened to be there, "Gauss says I am right. "

I got well acquainted with Professor Peirce after I leftCollege. He used to come to Washington after I came intopublic life. I found him one of the most delightful of men. His treatise "Ideality in the Physical Sciences, " and oneor two treatises of a religious character which he published, are full of a lofty and glowing eloquence. He gave a fewlectures in mathematics to the class which, I believe, weretotally incomprehensible to every one of his listeners withthe possible exception of Child. He would take the chalkin his hand and begin in his shrill voice, "If we take, " thenhe would write an equation in algebraic characters, "thuswe have, " following it by another equation or formula. Bythe time he had got his blackboard half covered, he wouldget into an enthusiasm of delight. He would rub the legsof his pantaloons with his chalky hands and proceed on hislofty pathway, apparently unconscious of his auditors. Whathas become of all those wonderful results of genius I do notknow. He was invited to a banquet by the Harvard Alumni inNew York where he was the guest of honor. Mr. Choate expresseda grave doubt whether the professor could dine comfortablywithout a blackboard. 

John W. Webster gave lectures to the boys on chemistry andgeology which they were compelled to attend. I think thelatter the most tedious human compositions to which I everlistened. The doctor seemed a kind-hearted, fussy person. He was known to the students by the sobriquet of Sky-rocketJack, owing to his great interest in having some fireworksat the illumination when President Everett was inaugurated. There was no person among the Faculty at Cambridge who seemedless likely to commit such a bloody and cruel crime as thatfor which he was executed. The only thing that I know whichindicated insensibility was that when he was lecturing oneday in chemistry he told us that in performing the experimentwhich he was then showing us a year or two before with somehighly explosive gas a copper vessel had burst and a partof it had been thrown with great violence into the back ofthe bench where a row of students were sitting, but fortunatelythe student who sat in that place was absent that day andnobody was hurt. He added drily: "The President sent forme and told me I must be more careful. He said I should feelvery badly indeed if I had killed one of the students. AndI should. "

There was nothing in my time equivalent to what used to becalled a rebellion in the older days, and I believe no suchevent has occurred for the last fifty years. The nearestto it was a case which arose in the senior class when I wasa freshman. One of the seniors, who was a rather dull-wittedbut well-meaning youth, concluded that it was his duty toinform the Faculty of offences committed by his classmates, a proceeding it is needless to say contrary to all the boys'sentiments as to honorable conduct. Some windows had beenbroken, including his. He informed the Faculty of the personwho had broken them, who was rusticated for a short time aspunishment. The next day being Saturday, this informer, dressedup in his best, was starting for Boston, when he was seizedby six of his classmates and held under the College pump untilhe received a sound ducking. He seized the finger of oneof them with his teeth and bit it severely, though it was protectedsomewhat by a ring. He complained of five of the six, whowere forthwith suspended until the next Commencement, losing, of course, their rank in the class and their chances for takingpart in the Commencement exercises. One of them, of whomhe omitted to tell, was much disturbed by the omission anddemanded of the informer why he left him out. He said thathe had rather a pity for him, as he had already been suspendedonce and he supposed the new offence would lead to his beingexpelled. Whereupon he said, "I will give you some reasonto tell of me, " and proceeded to administer a sound caning. That was at once reported to the Faculty. The offender wasexpelled, and criminal proceedings had which resulted in afine. 

We had some delightful lectures from Longfellow on the literatureof the Middle Ages. He read us some of his own original poemsand some beautiful translations. All the substance of theselectures I think is to be found in his book entitled "ThePoets and Poetry of the Middle Ages. " I do not see that wegained anything of solid instruction by having them read tous that we could not have got as well by reading them. Wehad also a course of lectures from Jared Sparks on Americanhistory. They were generally dull and heavy, but occasionallymade intensely interesting when he described some stirringevent of the Revolutionary War. We hung breathless on hisaccount of the treason of Arnold and its detection and theclass burst out into applause when he ended, --a thing thelike of which never happened in any time in College. Therewas a little smattering of instruction in modern languages, but it was not of much value. We had a French professor namedViau whom the boys tormented unmercifully. He spoke Englishvery imperfectly, and his ludicrous mistakes destroyed allhis dignity and rendered it impossible to maintain any disciplinein the class. He would break out occasionally in despair, "Young zhentlemen, you do not respect me and I have not givenyou any reason to. " A usual punishment for misconduct in thosedays was to deduct a certain number of the marks which determinedrank from the scale of the offending student. M. Viau usedto hold over us this threat, which, I believe, he never executed, "Young zhentlemen, I shall be obliged to deduce from you. "

He was followed by the Comte de la Porte, a gentleman in bearingand of a good deal of dignity. The Count was asked one dayby Nat Perry, a member of the class from New Hampshire whowas very proud of his native State and always boasting ofthe exploits in war and peace of the people of New Hampshire, what sort of a French scholar M. Viau, his predecessor, was. The Count replied: "He was not a fit teacher for young gentlemen. He was an ignorant person from the Provinces. He did nothave the Parisian accent. He did not know the French languagein its purity. It would be as if somebody were to undertaketo teach English who came from New Hampshire or some suchplace. " The Count said this in entire innocence. It wasreceived with a roar of laughter by the class, and the indignationand wrath of Perry may well be imagined. 

Another instructor in modern languages was Dr. Bachi. Hewas a very accomplished gentleman. His translations of Italianpoetry, especially of Dante and Tasso, were exquisite. Itwas like hearing a sweet and soft music to hear him read hisbeloved poets, and he had a singular gift of getting holdof the most sweet and mellifluous English words for his rendering. "And he did open his mouth, and from it there did come outwords sweeter than honey. " He once translated to us a passagein the Inferno where the damned are suspended, head downwards, with the burning flames resting upon the soles of their feet. "Ah, " exclaimed Bachi, "they do curl up their toes. "

My class is not one of the very famous classes of the College. Certainly it does not equal the class of 1802 or the classof 1829. But I think it was, on the whole, very considerablyabove the average. In it were several persons who becameeminent scholars and teachers, and some who have been eminentin other walks of life. I think, on the whole, its two mostdistinguished members, entitled to hold a greater place thanany others in the memory of future generations, were Dr. CalvinEllis, Dean of the Medical Faculty of Harvard, who died in1883, and Judge Nathan Webb, of the United States DistrictCourt of Maine, who died in 1902. Neither of these had veryhigh rank in the class. The first half of the class usedto have parts assigned at Commencement in those days. Ellis'spart was very nearly the lowest of the first half. Webb'swas higher. Webb entered college very young. He was quitesmall in his stature and was known all though college as "littleWebb. " He grew to a stature of about six feet after he leftcollege. He did, I believe, some very hard work indeed inhis senior year. Although universally liked and respectedby his classmates, he was not regarded as among the eminentscholars. Ellis performed all his duties in College very fairlybut did not seem to care much for rank or for scholarshipuntil, in the senior year, some lectures on anatomy were deliveredby old Dr. John C. Warren. Ellis was filled with enthusiasm, as were some of the other members of the class. He and Igot a skull somewhere and studied bones, processes, and sutures, both meaning to be physicians. My zeal lasted but a few weeks. Ellis's never abated until his death. He was at the headof his profession in the country in his own department, becameDean of the Harvard Medical School, and was loved and reveredby his numerous pupils as by the members of his profession. He was one of the most simple-hearted, affectionate, spotlessand lovable of men. He died of a lingering and painful disease, never losing his courage and patience, or his devoted interestin science. Webb was exceedingly fond of his home, not beingvery ambitious of higher office, but content to dischargeably and faithfully and to the universal satisfaction of theprofession and the public, the duty of the important placehe held. I have seen a good many public men from Maine ofboth parties. They all unite in this estimate of Judge Webb. There is no doubt that if he had been willing he would longago have been made Judge of the Circuit Court, and then ifthe seat on the Supreme Court of the United States held byMr. Justice Gray of the New England Circuit had become vacant, I suppose he would have been called from the Circuit Bench tothat Court by almost universal consent. 

Three persons, Child, Lane and Short, all very distinguishedscholars in after life, took their place at the head of theclass in the beginning. Two of them held the same place whenthey graduated. Short was outstripped by Edwin Moses Bigelow, who is now living, a lawyer, in Boston. He entered collegefrom the country not so well fitted when he entered as mostof the class. But he made his way by an indefatigable diligenceuntil he graduated with great distinction, the third scholar, going a little above Short. 

Child was a man of great genius. He seems to me now, as Ilook back upon him, to have been as great a man at seventeenwhen he entered college, as he was when he died. He was thebest writer, the best speaker and the best mathematician, the most accomplished person in his knowledge of general literaturein the class, --indeed, I suppose, in college, --in his day. He was probably equalled, and I dare say more lately excelled, by Lane as a Latin scholar, and by Short as a Greek scholar. He was a great favorite with the class. He spent his lifein the service of the College. He was tutor for a short timeand soon succeeded Channing as Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. He became one of the most eminent scholars in the countryin early English literature and language. He edited a collectionof ballads, Little & Brown's edition of the British Poets, and was a thorough student of Shakespeare and Chaucer. Tothe elucidation of the text of Chaucer he made some admirablecontributions. He was shy and diffident, full of kindnesstoward persons whom he knew and to children, and of sympathywith persons who were in sorrow, but whimsical, grotesque, and apt to take strong prejudices against persons whom hedid not know. I suppose some of the best of our Americanmen of letters of late years would have submitted their productionsto the criticism of Child as to a master. 

Next to him stood Lane, the learned Latin scholar. I donot believe that anybody ever went through Harvard Collegewho performed four years of such constant and strenuous labor. What he did in his vacations I do not know, but there wasno minute lost in the term time. It is said that he nevermissed attendance on morning and evening prayers but once. The class were determined that Lane should not go throughcollege without missing prayers once. So one night a cordwas fastened to the handle of his door and attached to therail of the staircase. But Lane succeeded in wrenching openthe door and got to morning prayers in time. He was the monitor, whose duty it was to mark the students who were absent fromprayers and who were punished for absence by a deductionfrom their rank and, if the absences were frequent enough, by a more severe penalty. The next time the measures weremore effective. Lane's chum, Ellis, was in the conspiracy. The students bored holes carefully into the door and intothe jamb by the side and took a quantity of hinges and screwedthem carefully on to the door and the jamb. When Lane gotready to start for prayers in the morning, he found it impossibleto open the door. As soon as he discovered what was the trouble, he seized his hatchet and undertook to cut his way out. Hischum, Ellis, who had remained quietly in bed, sprang outof bed and placed his back against the door and declaredthat the door of his room should not be hewn down in thatmanner. Lane was obliged to desist. He however took hismonitor's book, marked himself and his chum absent, and submitted. There were a good many such pranks played by the boys in thosedays, in the spirit of a harmless and good-natured mischief. I do not know whether the College has improved in the particularor no. I do not think anybody in my day would have defacedthe statue of John Harvard. 

Whether Lane will go farther down on the path to immortalityas the author of the admirable Latin Grammar to which he gaveso much of his life or as author of the song, "The Lone FishBall, " posterity alone will determine. 

Charles Short, the third of the three whom I named as standingat the head of the class, became President of Kenyon Collegeand afterward Professor of Latin in Columbia College. Hewas one of the committee to prepare the revised version ofthe Scriptures, and contributed largely to the Harpers' excellentLatin Dictionary. 

Another of our famous scholars was Fitzedward Hall, who diedlately in England. He was a very respectable scholar in theordinary college studies, but he attained no special distinctionin them as compared with the others whom I have mentioned. He became, however, quite early, interested in Arabic andother Oriental languages, a study which he pursued, I think, without the help of an instructor. He had a very remarkablecareer. After graduating, he sailed for the East Indies witha view to pursue there the study of the Oriental languagesand literature. He took with him letters of introductionto influential persons in Calcutta, and, of course, a sufficientsupply of funds. But the vessel on which he was a passengerwas wrecked as it approached the shore. He got ashore withdifficulty, drenched with sea-water, having lost his lettersof introduction and of credit, and with no resources but afew coins which happened to be in his pockets. He knew nobodyin Calcutta. He disliked very much to present himself tothe persons to whom he had been commended by his friends inAmerica in that sorry plight with the possibility that hemight be suspected of being an impostor. Accordingly, hedetermined that he would take care of himself. He walkedabout the street to see what he could find to do. As he wentalong he saw the sign of the _Oriental Quarterly Review. _He went in and inquired for the editor and asked him if hewould accept an article. The editor said that he would considerit if it were brought in. Hall then went out and found abookstore. Going in he spied a copy of Griswold's "Poetsand Poetry of America. " With a pencil and some sheets of paper, he wrote an article on American literature, filled up withpretty copious extracts. He took it to the editor of the_Review_ who paid him for it, I think five pounds, and toldhim that he should be happy to have him make other contributions. Hall supported himself by writing for that review and someother periodicals published by the same concern until he couldsend home, get new letters of introduction and credit andsupport himself as a gentleman. He spent three years in Calcuttastudying Hindostanee and Persian, and afterward, Bengaleeand Sanscrit. Later he removed to Benares, where he was appointedto a tutorship in the Government College. Then he becameprofessor and afterward Inspector of Schools for Ajmere andMairwara. He was in a besieged fort for seven months duringthe Indian Mutiny. He received the degree of D. C. L. FromOxford in 1860. He went to London afterward to promote theelection of Max Mueller as professor at Oxford. While therehe was himself made professor of Sanscrit and of Indian jurisprudencein London University. I saw him in England, I think in 1871, when he was librarian of the great library of the East IndiaCompany, having in charge not only a vast library, but thearchives of the East India Company going back beyond the timeof Cromwell. He showed me many interesting letters and documentsin manuscript of Cromwell, Nelson and other famous persons. Professor Edward B. Whitney once told me that with the exceptionof Max Mueller he considered Hall the foremost Oriental scholarin the world. I suppose Hall would have said the same ofProfessor Whitney. 

Hall maintained his sturdy Americanism throughout his longlife in England. He was ready at all times to do battle, in public or in private, when his countrymen were attacked. I think, in many cases, if he had been at home, he would haveattacked the same things with which the Englishmen found fault. He could not bear Ruskin. He thought he, himself, as an Americanhad to endure much contempt and injury from Englishmen becauseof Ruskin's bitter and contemptuous speech. But when we considerthat he was an American we must admit that England treatedhim very well. He had, I suppose, the most welcome admissionto all their scientific journals. In his time he was employedon the very best and most important work done in Englandin his line. He was professor of Hindostanee and of Hindoolaw and Indian jurisprudence in King's College in London, also of the Sanscrit language and literature, and Indianhistory and geography. In April, 1865, he was made Librarianof the India Office, having in his charge the best collectionof Oriental manuscripts in the world, twenty thousand innumber. 

While the catalogues of the libraries show a large numberof books published under his name, he said that the greaterpart of his work had been anonymous. 

In 1893 he wrote to a London magazine: "Although I have livedaway from America upwards of forty-six years, I feel to thishour, that in writing English I am writing a foreign language. "

Next in rank to Child, Lane, Bigelow and Short was Judge Soule. Next to him came George Cheyne Shattuck Choate, one of thewell-known family of brothers of that name, sons of a Salemphysician. Choate became a physician himself. He was atthe head of the Massachusetts Institution for the Insane atTrenton. He afterward had an establishment of his own nearNew York, where Horace Greeley was under his care. I sawlittle of him after we graduated. But he was nearly or quiteat the head of his department in the country. It is saidthat his testimony in court involving questions of medicaljurisprudence was wonderful for its beauty, its precisionand its profound analysis. 

But I am inclined to think that the one member of our classwhose fame will last to remote posterity, a fame which hewill owe to a single poem, is Walter Mitchell. He was avery bright and accomplished person in college and a greatfavorite with his friends. He studied law, but afterwarddetermined to become a clergyman and took orders in the EpiscopalChurch. I have never heard him preach, but I have no doubtfrom his distinction as a writer and scholar in college thathe is an excellent preacher. But his poem of the sea entitled"Tacking the Ship off Fire Island" is one of the most spiritedand perfect of its kind in literature. You can hear the windblow and feel the salt in your hair as you read it. I onceheard it read by Richard Dana to the Phi Beta Kappa Societyat Harvard, and again by that most accomplished elocutionist, E. Harlow Russell. I never read it or hear it without a renewedadmiration. 

But the brightest, raciest, wittiest, liveliest, spunkiest ofall the youths was Daniel Sargent Curtis, one of the raceof that name so well known in Boston for excellence in variousdepartments. Curtis was the son, I believe, of Thomas B. Curtis, the merchant, a nephew of Charles P. Curtis, theeminent lawyer, and a cousin of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis. I do not know what he would not have made of himself if hehad cultivated his great literary capacity. Certainly ifhe had performed the promise of his boyhood he would havebeen one of the foremost men in American literature. Hestudied law but pretty soon became a banker. Soon afterhe took up his residence in Italy, where I suppose he isliving now. He produced some serious poetry which he readto some college societies. I hope for the credit of the classand for the country and his name he may have done somethingin later years which will be given to the world. It is said, I know not how truly, that he was for many years a near neighborand intimate friend of Browning. When he was in college andin the Law School the boys used to enliven all social gatheringsby repeating his good jests as, in later years, the lawyersdid those of Rufus Choate, or the people in public life inWashington still later, those of Evarts. Such things losenine-tenths of their flavor in the repetition and nine partsof the other tenth when they are put in writing. Curtis wasquite small in stature but he was plucky as a gamecock, anda little dandyish in his dress. It is said that when he wasa freshman, the boys at the Cambridge High School, a goodmany of whom were much bigger than he was, undertook to throwsnowballs at him one day as he went by. Whereupon Curtismarched up to the biggest boy and told him if another snowballwere thrown at him he would thrash him and he might pass itover to the boy who did it. The result was that Curtis wasnot troubled again. 

You could not attack or rally him without some bright reply. Horace Gray, afterward the judge, went shooting one day andmet Curtis as he was coming back with his gun over West BostonBridge. Curtis asked him if he had shot anything. Gray said, "No, nothing but a hawk in Watertown. I stopped at the Museumas I came by, and gave it to Agassiz. " "I suppose Agassizsaid 'Accipter, '" said Curtis. 

When Professor Greenleaf resigned his place at the Dane LawSchool, much to the regret of the students, it was proposedto secure a likeness of him for the lecture room. There wassome discussion whether it should be a bust or a picture, and if a bust what should be the material. Curtis said: "Bettermake it Verd Antique. That means Old Green. "

Dr. Beck once required his class each to bring a Latin epigram. Dan Curtis, who was not very fond of work unless it was inthe line of his own tastes, sent in the following:

 Fugiunt. Qui fugiunt? Galli; tunc moriar contentus. 

"What is that, Curtis?" said the Doctor. "Dying words ofWolfe, sir, " replied Curtis. "Ah, " said the Doctor withgreat satisfaction. He thought it was Wolf the famous Greekscholar, and thought the epigram highly to Curtis's credit. 

I have still in my memory a very bright poem of his. I donot think I ever saw or read it written or in print. ButI remember hearing it read in one of the college clubs morethan fifty years ago. He has Longfellow's style very happily, including the dropping from a bright and sometimes a sublimeline to one which is flat and commonplace, as for instancein the ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington. 

 Meantime without the surly cannon waited, The sky gleamed overhead. Nothing in Nature's aspect indicated That a great man was dead. 

This is Curtis's poem:

 Wrapped in musing dim and misty, Sit I by the fitful flame; And my thoughts steal down the vista Of old time, as in a dream. 

 Here the hero held his quarters, Whom America holds dear; He beloved of all her daughters, Formerly resided here. 

 Here you often might have seen him, Silvery white his reverend scalp, Frowned above a mighty chapeau Like a storm-cap o'er the Alp. 

 Up and down these rooms the hero Oftentimes would thoughtful stray, Walking now toward the window, Stalking then again away. 

 By the fireside, quaintly moulded Oft his humid boots would lie; And his queer surtout was folded On some strange old chair to dry. 

 In the yard where now before me Underclothes, wind-wafted hang Waved the banners of an army; Warriors strode with martial clang. 

 These things now are all departed, With us on the earth no more, But the chieftain, noble-hearted, Comes to visit me once more. 

 In he comes without permission, Sits him down before mine eyes, Then I tremble and demnition Curious thoughts within me rise. 

 Slow he speaks in accents solemn, Life is all an empty hum, Man, by adulation only Can'st thou ever great become. 

I ought perhaps to mention a young man of most brilliantpromise, an excellent scholar and a great favorite, who diedbefore the class graduated, on a voyage to the East Indieswhich he undertook in the hope of restoring his health, --Augustus Enoch Daniels. He left behind him one _bon mot_which is worth recording. We were translating one day oneof the choruses in AEschylus, I think in the Agamemnon, wherethe phrase occurs [Greek omitted], meaning "couches unvisitedby the wind, " which he most felicitously rendered "windlassbedsteads. " Such is the vanity of human life that it is notuncommon that some hardworking, faithful and bright scholaris remembered only for one single saying, as Hamilton in theHouse of Commons was remembered for his single speech. Anotherinstance of this is that worthy and excellent teacher of Latinand Professor of History, Henry W. Torrey. He was an instructorin college in our time, afterward left the college to teacha young ladies' school and came back again later as a Professor. I presume if any member of the class of 1846 were asked aboutTorrey he would say: "Oh, yes. He was an excellent Latinscholar, an excellent teacher in elocution and in history. But all I remember of him is that on one occasion a man whoprofessed to be learned in Egyptian antiquities advertised acourse of lectures, one of which was to be illustrated byunrolling from a mummy the bandages which had been untouchedsince its interment, many centuries before Christ. The savantclaimed to be able to read the inscription on the cloth inwhich the mummy was wrapped and declared that it was the corpseof an Egyptian princess, whose name and history he related. Having given this narrative and excited the expectation ofhis auditors, the wrappers were taken off and, alas, it turnedout to be the body of a man. The poor professor was, of course, much disconcerted and his lectures, I believe, came to a suddenending. Mr. Torrey said that 'it was undoubtedly the corpseof Spurius Mummius. '"

But no account of my class ought to omit the name of HenryWhitney. He was a universal favorite. In all the disputeswhich arose in all the divisions of sets or sections, Whitneymaintained the regard and affection of the whole class. 

After graduating he was a very successful and influentialbusiness man in Boston and was President of the Boston &Providence Railroad, which under his masterly administration, attained a very high degree of prosperity. I think he correspondedwith every member of the class, and did more to preserve andcreate a kindly class feeling than any other member. It seemedwhen he died as if half the college had died. He was a manof great refinement and scholarship, and was fond of collectingrare books. He had a great many editions of Milton whichhe liked to exhibit to his friends. He had a most delightfulwit, and was the author of some very good songs and otherhumorous poetry. 

I do not of course undertake to give sketches of all my classmates, either the living or the dead, or those who have attaineddistinction as useful and honorable members of society. Sofar as I know their career since they left college, thereis none of them of whom the class or the college need be ashamed. 

The different classes had not much intercourse with eachother unless it happened in the case of boys who came fromthe same town, or who came from the same school, until latein the college course, when the members of the Hasty PuddingClub and the Porcellian, the two principal secret societies, formed intimacies beyond their own class in the meetingsof those clubs. There were some persons in the classes nearmine, both below and above me, with whom I had an acquaintancein college which grew into a cordial friendship in the LawSchool or in later life. Perhaps, taking him all together, the most brilliant man in Harvard in my time was John Felton. He went to California and became afterward unquestionablythe greatest lawyer they have ever had on the Pacific Coast. He was in the class after mine. I knew him slightly in ourundergraduate days. But when I went to the Law School inSeptember, 1847, we boarded together in the same house. Wespeedily became intimate and used to take long walks togetherof three or four hours every day. We rambled about Watertownand Brighton and Somerville and West Cambridge and had longdiscussions about law and politics and poetry and metaphysicsand literature and our own ambitions and desires. We wereconstantly in each other's rooms, and often sat up together, sometimes until the constellations set, with the wasteful, time-consuming habits of boyhood. 

 Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights, How oft, unwearied, have we spent the nights In search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence and poetry, -- Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine. 

John came of a distinguished family. His brother Corneliuswas a famous Greek professor, one of the most striking figuresabout Cambridge. Another brother was Samuel M. Felton, themost distinguished civil engineer in the country of his time;builder of the Fitchburg railroad, afterward builder and Presidentof the Pennsylvania Railroad; the man who conceived the planof getting the New England troops into Washington by the wayof Annapolis when Baltimore was in the power of the Rebels. Another brother was quite distinguished in college in theclass of 1851. John after he graduated went to Californiaand never came back from the Pacific Coast or kept up hiscommunication with his old friends, although he received themwith great hospitality, I am told, when they went out there. I think he had a fancy that he would keep to himself untilhe could come back in some great place, like that of Senatoror Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. He wasa candidate for the Senate at one time, but was defeated bya much inferior man. He was fond of argument; never wascontented without challenging somebody and was a very toughcustomer to encounter, whatever side of a question he choseto take. He liked, however, nothing better than a sturdyresistance. To yield to him was never the way to win hisgood will. The first day when we went to live at the sameboarding-house, I got into a hot dispute with him at dinnerover the Wilmot Proviso, and the constitutional power of Congressto legislate against slavery in the territories, which wasthen a burning question. John took the Southern side of thatquestion, although I dare say he would have taken the otherif a Southerner had introduced it, and we got pretty zealouson both sides and walked home together continuing the argumentas we walked. As we separated, Felton said: "We will continuethis discussion to-morrow. Meantime, won't you look up thehistory of the matter a little?" "Yes, " said I, "and won'tyou study up a little on Whately's Logic?" The answer seemedto delight Felton, and he took me into high favor. I neverknew a man of such ready wit, although I have known a goodmany famous wits in my day. But all these things evaporatewith time. Or, if you remember them, they are vapid and tastelessin the telling, like champagne which has been uncorked fora week. We were one day discussing some question of law atthe table, and John, who had not yet begun to study law himself, put in his oar as usual, when Charles Allen, afterward Judgeof the Massachusetts Supreme Court, turned on him with someindignation. "What do you know about it, Johnny? You don'tknow what a quantum meruit is. " "If you had it, 't would killyou, " said Felton. He was invited to the dinner given bythe people of Nevada in honor of their admission as a State, and there was some discussion about a device for a Stateseal. Felton suggested that the Irish emblem would be themost appropriate, the "Lyre and shamrock. " Once after decidinga case in his favor, Mr. Justice Field said to him: "Felton, I have made great use of your brief in my opinion. " "Alwaysdo that, Judge, " said Felton. He possessed considerable capacityfor poetry, although I do not know that he cultivated it muchafter he left college. He delivered a very successful poemat Commencement, and gave the Phi Beta Kappa poem the nextyear and read some very witty verses at the Society's dinnerthe same day. He was much distressed over choosing a subject, and put off and put off writing his poem till within a fewdays of the time when it was to be delivered. And he finallyresolved, in a fit of desperation, that he would go into hisroom, shut his eyes, turn round three times and take for hissubject the first object on which they rested when he openedthem. That happened to be a horseshoe which he had pickedup in the street and hung over his fireplace for luck. Hemade a charming poem from this subject, on Superstition. Theopening lines are:

 Just over the way, with its front to the street, Up one flight of stairs, is a room snug and neat, With a prospect Mark Tapley right jolly would call;-- Two churches, one graveyard, one bulging brick wall, Where, raven-like, Science gloats over its wealth, And the skeleton grins at the lectures on health. The tree by the window has twice hailed the Spring Since we circled its trunk our last chorus to sing. Maidens laughed at our shouts, they knew better than we; And the world clanked its chains as we cried, "We are free. " On the wall hangs a Horseshoe I found in the street; 'Tis the shoe that to-day sets in motion my feet 'Tis a comfort, while Europe to freedom awoke Is peeping like chickens just free from their yolk To think Pope and Monarch their kingdoms may lose; Yet I hang my subject wherever I choose. 

He goes on in a more serious strain to sketch the historyof superstition and ends with an eloquent aspiration for aday of universal peace:

 As now my thoughts like clustering bees have clung To thee, my Horseshoe, o'er the lintel hung, The future bard, with song more richly fraught, -- Some reverenced wrong the nucleus of his thought, Some relic crown or virtuoso's gun, Some nation's banner when all earth is one, -- Back through the past in mournful strain shall wind Where demon fancies vex the darkling mind, Where light but faintly streaks the dappled sky, Nor Morn has shot his glittering shafts on high; Trembling with grief and hope, his lyre shall thrill To twilight times of blending good and ill, Where whizz of bullets, and the clanking chain, Jar on the praise of Peace and Freedom's reign. In louder strains shall burst the exulting close, That sounds the triumph o'er the struggling foes, -- The slave unbound, War's iron tongues all dumb, -- His glorious Present, our all hail To Come, All hail To Come, when East and West shall be-- While rolls between the undividing sea-- Two, like the brain, whose halves ne'er think apart, But beat and tremble to one throbbing heart!

He took what was then an unusual method of making himselfa good lawyer. That was to begin to deal with a legal principlein historic order, going back to the first case where it wasannounced and tracing it down through the reports, makingno use of text-books. That was the way the old lawyers beforeBlackstone got their training. I have been told, though thathappened after I left Cambridge, that he and Professor Langdell, the eminent teacher at Harvard who had introduced that methodwith so much success, studied together. Whether it was Felton'splan or Langdell's I do not know. 

John Felton died suddenly in May, 1877. Everybody who comesto Washington from California who is old enough speaks withpleasure of his knowledge of Felton and is full of storiesof his brilliant wit. He had probably the largest fees everreceived by an American lawyer. He is said by his biographerto have received a fee of a million dollars in one case. Hisdeath was received with universal sorrow. All the placesof business and amusement were closed and the flags displayedat half mast on the day of his funeral. 

Another rather interesting figure among the men of the classesabove me was Thomas Hill, afterward President of the College. He was a good mathematician and a good preacher. But he wasnot as successful in the Presidency as his friends hoped. The only thing I remember about him of any importance is highlyto his credit. One winter's day a little gaunt-looking andunhappy pig that had strayed away from a drove wandered intothe College Yard just as the boys were coming out of eveningprayers. The whole surface of the yard was covered with asheet of thin and very slippery ice. It was rather hard tostand up on it. The boys came across the pig, which was frightenedand attempted to run. After running a little, he would slipon the ice and slide and tumble over, and then gather himselfup again and try once more. There was a general shout anda general chase. Poor piggy strove to elude his pursuers. His own tail was a little slippery, so that if a boy caughtit he did not hold it long. The whole college, pretty much, engaged in the pursuit, which certainly seemed to be greatfun. But, on a sudden, there was a loud, angry shout froma stentorian voice as Tom Hill jumped in among the pursuers, who were just on the point of conquering the bewildered animal. "For shame. Take one of your size. " The boys saw the point, were filled with mortification, desisted, and allowed thepoor creature to go in peace. 

The boys generally boarded in the College Commons, where theycould board for $2. 25 a week on one side, and on the othercalled "starvation commons" for $1. 75 a week. In the latterthey had meat only every other day. A few of the sons ofthe wealthier families boarded in private houses where therate of board varied from $3 to $3. 50 a week. The rooms werefurnished very simply, almost always without carpets, thoughin rare instances the floors would be covered with a cheapcarpet which did not last very well under the wear and tearof boyish occupation. The students generally made their ownfires and blacked their own boots and drew their own water. But there was a family of negroes named Lewis who performedthose services for such boys as desired, at a compensationof $5 or $6 a term. The patriarch of this race was a veryinteresting old character. He was said to be one hundredyears old. He was undoubtedly very near it. One morning, just as we were coming out of the morning prayers, shortlyafter six o'clock, old Mr. Lewis drove by with a horse whichhe was said to have bought for $5, and a wagon of about thesame value. He had a load of all sorts of vegetables whichhe had raised in his little garden near where the Arsenalstood and was carrying into Boston to market. One of hisold wheels broke and the wagon came down, spilling the oldfellow himself and his load of vegetables. He lay there flaton his back, unable to get up, surrounded by turnips andsquashes and onions and potatoes, etc. As he lay with hisblack face and his white, grizzled poll, he was a most ludicrousspectacle. One of us asked him: "Why, Mr. Lewis, what isthe matter?" "Well, " he said with a mournful tone, "I laideaout to go into Boston. "

I suppose there was more turbulence and what would be calledrowdyism in my day than now. At any rate I do not hear ofsuch things very often nowadays. But it was usually of aharmless character. There were very few instances indeedof what would be called dissipation, still fewer of actualvice. The only game which was much in vogue was foot-ball. There was a little attempt to start the English game of cricketand occasionally, in the spring, an old-fashioned, simplegame which we called base was played. But the chief gamewas foot-ball, which was played from the beginning of theSeptember term until the cold weather set in, and sometimes, I believe, in the spring. It was very unlike the game as atpresent carried on. After evening prayers, which were overabout five or ten minutes after six, the boys repaired tothe foot-ball ground and ranged themselves on sides nearlyequal in number. If one side thought they were not fairlymatched they would shout, "More, more, " until enough wentover to them from the other side to make it about equal. Thenone of the best kickers gave the ball a kick toward the otherside of the field, and there was a rush and an attempt toget it past the goal. Nobody was allowed to pick up the foot-ball, or to run with it in his hand. A fast runner and goodkicker who could get the ball a little outside of the lineof his antagonists could often make great progress with itacross the field before he was intercepted. It was allowableto trip up one of the other side by thrusting the foot beforehim. But touching an opponent with the hand would have beenresented as an assault and insult. The best foot-ball playerswere not the strongest men but the swiftest runners, as arule. 

The practice of hazing freshmen during a few weeks aftertheir entering was carried on sometimes under circumstancesof a good deal of cruelty. One boy in my class was visitedby a party of sophomores, treated with a good deal of indignity, and his feelings extremely outraged. He was attacked by afever shortly afterward of which he died. During his lasthours, in his delirium, he was repeating the scenes of thisvisit to his room. His father thought that the indignitycaused his death. Another was taken out from his room inhis night clothes, tied into a chair and left on the publiccommons in the cold. It was a long time before he was discoveredand rescued. A heavy cold and a fit of sickness were the consequence. 

There was an entertaining custom of giving out what were calledmock parts when the real parts for the exhibitions or Commencementwere announced. They were read out from a second-story windowto an assemblage of students in the yard, and after the realparts had been given some mock parts were read. Usually somepeculiarity of the person to whom they were assigned was madethe object of good-natured ridicule in the selection of thesubject. For example, one boy, who was rather famous forsmoking other fellows' cigars and never having any of hisown, had assigned to him as a subject, "The Friendships ofthis Life all Smoke. "

When the parts were assigned for the Commencement, whichwere given usually to the first half of the class, there was aprocession of what was called the Navy Club and an assignmentof honors which were in the reverse order of excellence tothat observed in the regular parts. The Lord High Admiralwas supposed to be the worst scholar in the class, --if possible, one who had been rusticated twice during the college course. The laziest man in the class was Rear Admiral. Then therewas a Powder Monkey and a Coxswain, and other naval officers, who were generally famous for what used to be called demerits. The members of the class to whom parts were assigned werecalled "digs" and marched in the procession, each with a spadeon his shoulder, the first scholar, who in our class was Child, as the "dig of digs, " having a spade of huge dimensions. I believe James Russell Lowell was the Lord High Admiral inhis class. The Rear Admiral in mine was borne about on acouch or litter, supported by four men, having another onemarching by his side to carry his pipe, which he was supposedto be too lazy to put into his mouth or take out of his mouthhimself. The procession had banners bearing various devicesand went around to take leave of the President and the differentprofessors, giving them cheers at their houses. PresidentEverett, who was a serious-minded person, was much offendedby the whole proceeding. He sent for some members of theclass and remonstrated; told them he had been obliged to apologizeto his English servant-girl for such an exhibition. I believeour class was the last one which performed this harmless andhighly entertaining ceremony. 

One of my classmates, afterward a worthy physician, was atall man, older considerably than the rest of the class. Heused to wear an old-fashioned blue, straight-bodied coatwith brass buttons, a buff vest, and nankeen pantaloons whichwere said to have come down as an heirloom in his family froma remote generation. He was addicted to rather a pompousstyle of speech. He was very fond of playing the bass-viol, of which he was by no means a very skilful master. He had, as a subject for his mock part, "The Base Violation of allRules of Harmony. " One Sunday evening he had a few friendswith him who were singing psalm tunes to the accompanimentof his bass-viol. They made a prodigious noise, not at allto the liking of the proctor who had the care of the disciplineof that entry, which was in Holworthy. He went to the roomfrom which the noise issued. It was locked and he had somedifficulty in getting in. The persons assembled, insteadof maintaining their place, betook themselves to hiding placesin the inner rooms. My classmate, however, stood his groundlike a Roman and told the officer that his room was his castleand that he had no right to come in. The matter was reportedto the Faculty and the musician sent for. Instead of submittinghimself, however, he maintained very sturdily that the visitof the official to his room was an outrage which he oughtnot be asked to endure. He made quite an oration to the Faculty. Thereupon he was sentenced, more for his contumacy than forthe original offence, to suspension from the college for twoor three months. The class were very indignant and determinedto manifest their indignation in a way that should be understood. They got a chariot with six white horses which drove up tohis door in Holworthy at midday. Nearly the whole collegeassembled to see him off. He came out and took his seat insolitary state in the chariot. Some eight or ten of the classon horseback accompanied him as outriders. They drove intoBoston to the front door of the Tremont House in great state. It was just at the time the Governor-General of Canada, Ithink Lord Elgin, was expected in Boston on a great occasionin the history of the city. The waiters and landlord at theTremont House thought the English nobleman had arrived andhurried down the steps to open the door and meet him. Buthe got out of his carriage with his carpet-bag in his handand disappeared in a humble fashion round the corner. TheFaculty were very indignant and thought of disciplining severelythe members of the class who had got up the burlesque, especiallythe outriders. Edward Everett then had under considerationthe question whether he would accept the Presidency of theCollege. It was thought that if a rebellion occurred thenhe would decide against undertaking the responsibility. Sothey let the whole matter pass. 

The principal figure in this scene used to be a thorn inthe flesh of Professor Channing. He used to insert verypompous and magniloquent sentences in his themes, much toChanning's disgust. One day Channing took up a theme andheld it up and called out, X. X. Came to the chair by theProfessor's side, and the Professor read, in his shrill voice:"'The sable sons of Afric's burning coast. ' You mean negroes, I suppose. " He admitted that he did. The Professor tookhis pen and drew a line over the sentence he had read andsubstituted the word "negroes" above the line, much to X. 'smortification. 

I was guilty of one practical joke of which I have repentedall my days, but for which the poetical justice of Providenceadministered to me, many years afterward, a punishment inkind. There was a classmate who sat next to me in the recitationin the sophomore year, whom everybody knew and liked, butwho was not very much interested in study. He got along ashe best could by his native wits and such little applicationas he found absolutely necessary. One day we were recitingin Lowth's Grammar. The Bishop says that in English the substantivesingular is made plural for the most part by adding s. ProfessorChanning called up this classmate of mine, who stated thisas follows: "The author says that the distinction betweennouns in the singular and plural is that the latter end ins. " "Is that a good distinction?" asked the Professor. Myneighbor answered with great confidence, "No, sir, " as hewas well warranted in doing from the form of the question. "Can't you give us some instance of words in the singularnumber that end in s?" said the Professor. My friend, whowas considerable embarrassed, stammered, was staggered, andhesitated a moment. I whispered in his ear, "Hoss, " on whichhe, without any reflection, blurted out, "Hoss. " There wasa roar of laughter from the class, and the poor fellow satdown, much distressed at his blunder. Channing dismissedthe class, and the next day gave us a lecture. He said ouruproarious laughter had disturbed Dr. Walker's recitationin the neighboring room, "especially you, Curtis, with yourpit laugh. " I ought to have risen up instantly and avowedmyself the guilty cause of my classmate's innocent blunder. But, much to my own shame and disgrace, I did not do it. Butsome forty years afterward, I was engaged in an earnest discussionin the Senate Chamber with Butler of South Carolina, at thetime of the passage of the first Civil Service law. Butlerfavored the law and his whole bearing in the discussion wasexceedingly proper and creditable. We were talking of someprohibition, of some clause forbidding the imposing assessmentsupon office-holders for political purposes, and it was proposedto except from the prohibition voluntary contributions forproper election purposes. Butler asked me what I should considerimproper election purposes. I hesitated a moment when Millerof California, who was a man of a good deal of fun, whisperedin my ear, "Buying shotguns to shoot negroes with, " whichI, without reflecting and indeed hardly conscious of whatI was saying, repeated aloud. Butler, who was a man of highspirit, and quick temper, was furious. He came down uponme with a burst of wrath. I tried to interrupt him. Buthe was so angry that it was impossible to interrupt him andsaid something which made it seem to me impossible eitherto explain or apologize. But I regretted the transactionexceedingly, and have always considered that I was well punishedfor my joke at the expense of my unhappy classmate. 

An anecdote came down from a class before my time which Ithink ought not to be lost. One of the boys when the coldweather came on in the first term of his freshman year tookout from the college library a book which was nearly the largestand thickest volume it contained. It was the works of BishopWilliams, who I think was one of the seven bishops persecutedby James II. The book contained an exceedingly dull treatiseon theology. The youth had no special literary tastes, ofwhich anybody knew, and that was the only book he was everknown to take out. He kept it out the six weeks which wereallowed, and then renewed it, not taking it back to the libraryuntil the hot weather of the following summer. He repeatedthis in his sophomore and junior and senior years. Dr. Harris, the librarian, was very much puzzled and asked some of theboys if they could tell him why this young man kept BishopWilliams's works so constantly. None of the boys knew. Theyused to see it lying on his table, but never saw any signsof his reading it. At last one winter night late in the senioryear something happened which caused a good deal of excitement. Several of the boys who were down in the yard rushed up ingreat haste to this classmate's room. It happened to be unlocked. They got in without knocking and found him undressed withnothing on but his nightgown. His bed happened to be nearthe fire, and standing up on the edge in front of the firewas Bishop Williams's works. It turned out that he was inthe habit of thoroughly warming the book and then of puttingit in the bed before he got in himself, so that it would servethe function of a warming-pan. The young gentleman turnedout in after life to be a very distinguished Bishop himself, an eminent champion of the doctrines of the Episcopal Church, which he had doubtless acquired by absorption. 

The boys were always ready for mischief and always kind andeasily moved to sympathy. One day just before prayers therewas found on the square in front of Willard's Hotel a largeload of straw. The owner had stopped and unhitched his horsesto feed them at Willard's stable. Some mischievous boy setfire to the load and it burned with a blaze which illuminatedthe whole neighborhood. Pretty soon the owner appeared ina state of great distress; said he was a very poor man; thathe was moving his household furniture and that his beds, chairs, and all the goods he had in the world were in the cart coveredup with the straw. The boys immediately took up a subscriptionand sent the fellow off well satisfied with his sale. Itwas said he got about twice as much as the value he set onall his goods, and that about a week after he appeared withanother load of straw which he left exposed in the same placeat the same time in the afternoon. I believe that was notmolested. 

The people of Cambridge in those days were a quiet folk. The students did not go much into the society of the townunless they happened to have some kindred there. There werea great many old houses, some of which are standing now, builtbefore the Revolutionary War. Some had been occupied by oldTories. Among them was the Craigie House still standing, having been Washington's headquarters, and now more famousstill as the residence of Longfellow. There were a few oldgentlemen wandering about the streets who were survivors ofthe generation which just followed the Revolutionary War, among them Dr. Jennison, the old physician, and Dr. Popkin, the old Greek professor, of whom a delightful life was writtenby President Felton. Mr. Sales, an old Spaniard, had givenlessons in Spanish from time immemorial. He was a queer lookingold gentleman, who had his gray hair carefully dressed everyday by a barber, wearing an ancient style of dress, coveredwith snuff, but otherwise scrupulously neat. He had a curiousbend and walk, which made him seem a little like a dog walkingon his hind legs. He was very fond of the boys and theyof him. He made full allowance for the exuberance of youth. Two careless students who were driving in a sleigh ran againsthim in the street and knocked him over and injured him severely. But the old fellow would not betray their names and had nothingto say when somebody talked severely of their carelessnessbut "Oh, oh, young blood, young blood. " I never saw him inthe least disturbed or angry with anything the boys said ordid except on one occasion. Henry Whitney said, in recitingin Don Quixote, in the course of some discussion, "By Jingo, Mr. Sales. " Sales was struck with horror. He said it wasthe most horrible phrase that ever came from the lips of mortalman, and he should think the walls of the building where theywere would fall down on Whitney's head and overwhelm him. What awful and mysterious meaning the words "by Jingo" hadfor the old Spanish gentleman we never could discover. Hedeclined to give any explanation and treated the subjectas one to be avoided with horror ever after. I commend thequestion to the consideration of philologists. 

The treatment of the students in general by the authoritiesand the college was stern, austere and distant. The studentshad little social intercourse with the families or the professors, except such of them as had relatives in Cambridge, which allowedintercourse with the families of the professors. The professorsdid nothing to encourage familiarity, or even to encourageany request for help in the difficulties of study. Indeeda boy who did that fell into disfavor with his companions, and was called a fish. 

President Eliot in some speech, I think before the graduatesof the Latin School, speaking of his life as a boy, saidhe had a great respect for his little self. I cannot say thatof my young self at Harvard. My time was largely wastedin novel reading or reading books which had not much to dowith the college studies, and lounging about in my own roomor that of other students. I am not sure that the period ofgrowth from sixteen to twenty is one when it is good for ayouth to study hard. So far as my observation extends thepoor scholars who have graduated at Harvard become as usefuland eminent men in after life as the good scholars. I donot now think of any person, who has graduated first scholarsince Edward Everett, who became in after life a very greatman, although some of them have been very respectable. JudgeThomas Russell, who was first in the class before mine, wasa very successful and brilliant man, performing admirablyeverything that he undertook. He was a good judge of theSuperior Court, a good minister to Venezuela, a good advocate, and an excellent political speaker. But he never attaineda place in the world equal to that of his classmate Gray, who, if I remember right, did not have a part at Commencement. Professor Child gained great distinction in his chosen field, but, I incline to think, would have gained the same distinctionif he had devoted himself to the same pursuits and had neverentered college at all. The first scholar in the class of1843, the first class that graduated after I entered, wasHorace Binney Sargent, a brave soldier, and the author ofsome beautiful and spirited war lyrics. But there were severalof his classmates, including Thomas Hill, John Lowell andOctavius B. Frothingham, who attained much greater distinction. In the class of 1844 the first scholar was Shattuck Hartwell, a highly respectable and worthy gentleman, many years an officerin the Boston Custom House, who spent a large part of hislife fitting pupils for college, while Francis Parkman, thehistorian, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, the mathematician, andDr. John Call Dalton, the eminent physician, neither of whomhad a very high record, became distinguished in after life. Among my own classmates, as I have already said, Judge Webb, Fitzedward Hall and Calvin Ellis attained very great distinction, although no one of them stood very high in rank. In the nextclass John Felton, Judge Endicott, Judge Charles Allen, andTuckermann, the naturalist, were the persons who have beenmost famous in after life. I believe no one of them, exceptFelton who graduated the second scholar, ranked very highin college. I myself graduated with a fairly decent rank. I believe I was the nineteenth scholar in a class of sixty-six. When I graduated I looked back on my wasted four yearswith a good deal of chagrin and remorse. I set myself resolutelyto make up for lost time. I think I can fairly say that Ihave had few idle moments since. I have probably put as muchhard work into life as most men on this continent. CertainlyI have put into it all the work that my physical powers, especiallymy eyes, would permit. I studied law in Concord the firstyear after graduation. I used to get up at six o'clock inthe morning, go to the office, make a fire and read law untilbreakfast time, which was at seven in the summer and half-past in the winter. Then I went home to breakfast and gotback in about three-quarters of an hour and spent the forenoonuntil one diligently reading law. After dinner, at two o'clock, I read history until four. I spent the next two hours inwalking alone in the woods and roads of Concord and the neighboringtowns, went back to the office at seven, read a little geometryand algebra, reviewing the slender mathematics which I hadstudied in college, and then spent two hours in reading Greek. I read through Thucydides, Homer and Xenophon's Hellenicaand some other Greek books in that year. Sundays I went tochurch twice, but shut myself up in a room at home the restof the day and read a great quantity of English literature, including Milton, Spencer, Chaucer, George Herbert, South'sSermons and other English classics, reading over again Butler'sAnalogy and Jouffroy. It has been said that if a man wishto acquire a pure English style he should give his days andnights to Addison. I say that if a law student wish to acquirea vigorous and manly English style, the fit vehicle for conveyingweighty thoughts to courts or juries or popular assemblages, let him give his days and nights to Robert South. 

I spent two years at the Law School after graduating fromthe College. I cannot state too strongly my great debt toit, and to Franklin Dexter, Simon Greenleaf, Joel Parker, and Theophilus Parsons. I have no remorse for wasted hoursduring those two years. The time in a Law School is neverlikely to be wasted if the youth have in him any spark ofgenerous ambition. He sees the practical relation of whathe is learning with what he has to do in life. The Dane LawSchool was then, and I suppose it is even more true of itnow, a most admirable place for learning the science of lawand preparing for its practice. The youth breathed a legalatmosphere from morning till night all the year round. Hehad the advantage of most admirable instruction, and the resourcesof a complete library. He listened to the lectures, he studiedthe text-books, he was drilled in the recitations, he hadpractice in the moot courts and in the law clubs. He discussedpoints of law in the boarding-house and on his walks withhis companions. He came to know thoroughly the great menwho were his instructors, and to understand their mental processes, and the methods by which they had gained their success. Thetitle of old Nathan Dane to a high place on the roll of hiscountry's benefactors, and to the gratitude of the profession ofthe law, and of all lovers of jurisprudence throughout thecountry cannot be disputed. 

CHAPTER VIII1846 TO 1850. FOUNDATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. DANIEL WEBSTER. 

The foundation of the Republican party, and my personal memoriesof Daniel Webster, belong to the same period. I will nottry to separate them. 

The story I am to tell may seem trivial enough to my readers. But it is to me a very tender and sacred memory. The timewas ripe for the great movement that abolished slavery. Ifno one of the eminent men of that day had ever lived othermen would have been found in abundance for the work. If Massachusettshad failed in her duty some other State would have taken herplace. But in the Providence of God it was given to Massachusettsto lead in this great battle and it was given to these menwhom I have to name to be leaders in Massachusetts. I thankGod that it was given to my eyes to behold it. The Americanpeople have had many great affairs to deal with since thatday. They have had great trials and great triumphs. Theyhave won renown among the nations. They have grown in wealthand in power. They have subdued a mighty rebellion. Theyhave carried their flag in triumph to the ends of the earth. They have wrested the last vestige of power in this hemispherefrom an old and proud nation who once occupied the place thatEngland has since occupied and which it seems likely we areto occupy hereafter. They have resisted many strong temptationsand acquired much glory. I am afraid they have of late yieldedfor a time to one strong temptation and missed an opportunityfor still greater glory, that never will come back. But therewas something in that struggle with slavery which exaltedthe hearts of those who had a part in it, however humble, as no other political battle in history. 

 Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. 

And, surely, to be young was far nearer Heaven than Wordsworthfound France in the opening of the French Revolution. 

I became of age at just about the time when the Free SoilParty, which was the Republican party in another form, wasborn. In a very humble capacity I stood by its cradle. Itawakened in my heart in early youth all the enthusiasm ofwhich my nature was capable, an enthusiasm which from thatday to this has never grown cold. No political party in historywas ever formed for objects so great and noble. And no politicalparty in history was ever so great in the accomplishment forliberty, progress and law. 

I breathed a pure and bracing atmosphere in those days. Itwas a time of plain living and high thinking. It was a prettygood education, better than that of any university, to bea young Free Soiler in Massachusetts. I had pretty good company, not in the least due to any merit or standing of my own, butonly because the men who were enlisted for the war in thegreat political battle against slavery were bound to eachother by a tie to which no freemasonry could be compared. Samuel G. Howe used, when his duties brought him to Worcesteron his monthly visit, to spend an hour or two of an afternoonin my office. I was always welcome to an hour's conversewith Charles Allen, the man who gave the signal at Philadelphiafor breaking away from the Whig Party. Erastus Hopkins occasionallyspent a Sunday with me at my boarding house. When I wentto Boston I often spent an hour in Richard Dana's office, and was sure of a kindly greeting if I chanced to encounterSumner. The restless and ubiquitous Henry Wilson, who, ashe gathered and inspired the sentiment of the people, seemedoften to be in ten places at once, used to think it worthhis while to visit me to find out what the boys were thinkingof. In 1851 I was made Chairman of the Free Soil County Committeeof Worcester County. I do not think there was ever so gooda political organization in the country before, or that thereever has been a better one since. The Free Soilers carriedall but six, I think, of the fifty-two towns in that county. I was in correspondence with the leading men in every oneof them, and could at any time summon them to Worcester, ifthere were need. 

We acquired by the Mexican War nearly six hundred thousandsquare miles of territory. When the treaty was signed, thestruggle began between freedom and slavery for the controlof this imperial domain. No reader of the history of Massachusettswill doubt her interest in such a struggle. Three thingsstood in the way of lovers of liberty in the Commonwealth. 

 First, the old attachment to the Whig party; Second, her manufacturing interests; and Third, her devotion to Daniel Webster. 

Massachusetts was a Whig State. There were many things whichtended to give that great political organization a permanenthold on her people. Its standard of personal character wasof the highest. Its leading men--Saltonstall, Reed, Lawrence, Lincoln, Briggs, Allen, Ashmun, Choate, Winthrop, Davis, Everett, and their associates--were men whose private and public honorwas without a stain. Its political managers were not itsholders of office or its seekers of office. It containeda large body of able and influential men who wielded the powerof absolute disinterestedness. They were satisfied if theycould contribute, by counsel or labor, to the well-being ofthe State by the advancement of their cherished politicalprinciples. They asked no other reward. The Whigs were infavor of using wisely, but courageously, the forces of theNation and State to accomplish public objects for which privatepowers or municipal powers were inadequate. The Whigs desiredto develop manufacture by national protection; to foster internalimprovements and commerce by liberal grants for rivers andharbors; to endow railroads and canals for public ways bygrants of public lands and from the treasury; to maintaina sound currency; and to establish a uniform system for thecollection of debts, and for relieving debtors by a Nationalbankruptcy law. 

The Whig policy had made Massachusetts known the world overas the model Commonwealth. It had lent the State's creditto railroads. It had established asylums for the blind andinsane and deaf and dumb, and had made liberal gifts to schools. The Massachusetts courts were unsurpassed in the world. Herpoor laws were humane. All her administrative policies werewise, sound, and economical. 

They asked from the National Government only a system of protectionthat should foster home manufacture, and that they might pursuetheir commercial and manufacturing occupation in peace. 

Daniel Webster was the idol of the people. He was at thefulness of his great intellectual power. The series of speechesand professional and political achievements which began withthe oration at Plymouth in 1820 was still in progress. TheWhigs of Massachusetts disliked slavery; but they loved theUnion. Their political gospel was found in Webster's replyto Hayne and his great debates with Calhoun. It was the oneheart's desire of the youth of Massachusetts that their belovedidol and leader should be crowned with the great office ofthe Presidency. 

Mr. Webster tried to avert the conflict by voting againstthe treaty with Mexico, by which we acquired our great territoryin the far West; but in vain. The Whigs feared the overthrowof the Whig Party. The manufacturer and the merchant dreadedan estrangement that would cause the loss of their southerntrade, and with it all hope of a law that would protect theirmanufactures. 

It was in this condition of things that I cast my first votein November, 1847, shortly after I became of age. It wasfor the Whig Governor. The Whig Party was already dividedinto two sections, one known as "Cotton Whigs, " and the otheras "Conscience Whigs. " These names had been suggested ina debate in the State Senate in which Mr. Thomas G. Carey, an eminent Boston merchant, had deprecated some proposed anti-slavery resolutions by saying that they were likely to makean unfavorable impression in the South, and to be an injuryto business interests; to which Mr. E. R. Hoar of Middlesexanswered, that "he thought it quite as desirable that theLegislature should represent the conscience as the cottonof the Commonwealth. "

Both parties struggled for the possession of the Whig organization, and both parties hoped for the powerful support of Mr. Webster. The leader of the manufacturing interest was Mr. Abbott Lawrence, a successful, wealthy manufacturer of great business capacity, large generosity, and princely fortune. He had for some yearschafed under Mr. Webster's imperious and arrogant bearing. He was on terms of personal intimacy with Henry Clay, andwas understood to have inspired the resolutions of the WhigState Convention, a few years before, which by implicationcondemned Mr. Webster for remaining in President Tyler'sCabinet when his Whig colleagues resigned. But the peopleof Massachusetts stood by Webster. After the ratificationof the Ashburton Treaty, he came home to reassert his oldtitle to leadership and to receive an ovation in Faneuil Hall. In his speech he declared with a significant glance at Mr. Lawrence, then sitting upon the platform: "I am a Whig, a Massachusetts Whig, a Boston Whig, a Faneuil Hall Whig. If any man wishes to read me out of the pale of that communion, let him begin, here, now, on the spot, and we will see whogoes out first. "

The first time I remember seeing Daniel Webster was June 17, 1843, at Bunker Hill. The students of Harvard, where I wasa freshman, had a place in the procession. We marched fromCambridge to Boston, three miles and a half, and stood inour places for hours, and then marched over to Charlestown. We were tired out when the oration began. There was a littlewind which carried the sound of Mr. Webster's voice awayfrom the place where we stood; so it was hard to hear himduring the first part of his speech. He spoke slowly andwith great deliberation. There was little in the greaterpart of that weighty discourse to excite a youthful auditor;but the great thing was to look at the great orator. WaldoEmerson, who was there, said of him:

"His countenance, his figure, and his manners were all inso grand a style that he was, without effort, as superior tohis most eminent rivals as they were to the humblest. Healone of men did not disappoint the eye and the ear, butwas a fit figure in the landscape. There was the Monument, and there was Webster. He knew well that a little more orless of rhetoric signified nothing; he was only to say plainand equal things--grand things, if he had them; and if hehad them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things--andthe whole occasion was answered by his presence. "

He went almost through his weighty discourse without mucheffect upon his auditors other than that which Emerson sowell described. But the wind changed before he finished, and blew toward the other quarter where the boys stood; andhe almost lifted them from their feet as his great organ tonesrolled out his closing sentences:

"And when both we and our children shall have been consignedto the house appointed for all living, may love of countryand pride of country glow with equal fervor among those towhom our names and our blood shall have descended! And then, when honored and decrepit age shall lean against the baseof this monument, and troops of ingenuous youth shall be gatheredaround it, and when the one shall speak to the other of itsobjects, the purposes of its construction, and the great andglorious events with which it is connected, there shall risefrom every youthful breast the ejaculation, 'Thank God, Ialso--AM AN AMERICAN!'"

Mr. Webster came to Concord in the summer of 1843 as counselfor William Wyman, President of the Phoenix Bank of Charlestown, who was indicted for embezzling the funds of the bank. Thiswas one of the _causes celebres_ of the day. Wyman had beena business man of high standing. Such offences were rarein those days, and the case would have attracted great attentionwhoever had been for the defence. But the defendant's counselwere Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, Franklin Dexter, and mybrother, E. R. Hoar, a young man lately admitted to the bar. Mr. Webster, notwithstanding his great fame as a statesman, is said never to have lost his eager interest in causes inwhich he was retained. When he found himself hard pressed, he put forth all his strength. He was extremely impatientof contradiction. The adulation to which he had been so longaccustomed tended to increase a natural, and perhaps notwholly unjustifiable, haughtiness of manner. 

The Government was represented by Asahel R. Huntington, ofSalem, District Attorney for the district which included Essexand Middlesex. He was a man of great intellectual vigor, unquestioned honesty and courage, possessed of a high senseof the dignity and importance of his office, very plain spoken, and not at all likely to be overawed by any opposing counsel, whatever his fame or dignity. Yet he had a huge reverencefor Daniel Webster, whom, like the other Massachusetts Whigsof that day, he probably thought as another described him--

 The foremost living man of all the world!

The case was tried three times: The first time at Concord, the second time at Lowell, and the third time at Concord. Mr. Webster had several quite angry encounters with the courtand with the prosecuting attorney. He was once extremelydisrespectful to Judge Washburn, who replied with great mildnessthat he was sure the eminent counsel's respect for his owncharacter would be enough to prevent him from any disrespectto the court. Mr. Webster was disarmed by the quiet courtesyof the judge, and gave him no further cause for complaint. At Lowell, where Wyman was convicted, Webster saw the casegoing against him, and interrupted the charge of the judgeseveral times. At last Judge Allen, who was presiding, said:"Mr. Webster, I cannot suffer myself to be interrupted. " Mr. Webster replied: "I cannot suffer my client to be misrepresented, "To which the judge answered: "Sit down, sir. " Mr. Websterresumed his seat. When the jury went out, Judge Allen turnedto the Bar where Mr. Webster was sitting and said: "Mr. Webster. "Mr. Webster rose with the unsurpassed courtesy and grace ofmanner of which he was master, and said: "Will the court pardonme a moment?" He then proceeded to express his regret forthe zeal which had impelled him to a seeming disrespect toHis Honor, and expressed his sorrow for what had occurred;and the incident was at an end. 

At the first trial at Concord, Mr. Webster had frequent altercationswith District Attorney Huntington. In his closing argument, which is said to have been one of great power, and which hebegan by an eloquent reference to the battle of Concord Bridge, which, he said, was fought by Concord farmers that their childrenmight enjoy the blessings of an impartial administration ofjustice under the law, he said that it was unlikely that Wymancould have abstracted large sums from the bank and no traceof the money be found in his possession. He was a man ofsmall property, living simply and plainly, without extravaganthabits or anything which would have been likely to tempt himto such crime. When Huntington came to reply he said, veryroughly: "They want to know what's become of the money. I can tell you what's become of the money. Five thousanddollars to one counsel, three thousand dollars to another, two thousand to another, " waving his hand in succession towardWebster and Choate and Dexter. Such fees, though common enoughnow, seemed enormous in those days. Choate smiled in hispeculiar fashion, and said nothing; Franklin Dexter lookedup from a newspaper he was reading, and exclaimed: "This isbeneath our notice"; but Mr. Webster rose to his feet andsaid with great indignation: "Am I to sit here to hear myselfcharged with sharing the spoils with a thief?" The presidingjudge said: "The counsel for the Government will confinehimself to the evidence. " That was all. But Mr. Websterwas deeply incensed. The jury disagreed. Mr. Webster cameto the next trial prepared with an attack on Huntington, inwriting, covering many pages, denouncing his method and conduct. This he read to my brother. But Huntington who, as I havesaid, adored Webster, was unwilling to have another encounter--not in the least from any dread of his antagonist, but solelyfrom his dislike to have a quarrel with the man on earth hemost reverenced. Accordingly, Mr. Wells, the District Attorneyof Greenfield, was called in, who conducted the trial at Lowelland succeeded in getting a conviction. My brother, who wasvery fond of Huntington, took an occasion some time afterwardto tell Mr. Webster how much Huntington regretted the transaction, and how great was his feeling of reverence and attachmentfor him. Mr. Webster was placated, and afterward, when anedition of his speeches was published, sent a copy to Huntingtonwith an inscription testifying to his respect. 

The general reader may not care for the legal history ofthe trial, but it may have a certain interest for lawyers. Mr. Wyman was indicted for embezzlement of the funds of the bankunder the Revised Statutes of Massachusetts, which providedthat "if any cashier or other officer, agent or servant ofany incorporated bank shall embezzle or fraudulently convertto his own use the property of the bank, he shall be punished, "etc. It was earnestly contended that a president of a bankwas not an officer within the meaning of the statute; butthis contention was overruled by the presiding judge, whowas sustained in that view by the Supreme Court on exception. There was, however, no such offence as embezzlement knownto the common law. So a person who fraudulently convertedto his own use the property of another could only be convictedof larceny; and the offence of larceny could not be committedwhere the offender had been entrusted with the possessionof the property converted, the essence of larceny being thefelonious taking of the property from the possession of theowner. Further, nobody could be convicted of larceny excepton an indictment or complaint which set forth the time andplace of each single conversion. So, if a servant or agentappropriated the fund of his principal, the embezzlement extendingover a long period of time, and it was not possible to setforth or to prove the time, place, and circumstances of anyparticular taking, the offender could not be convicted. Thestatute to which I have just referred was intended to cureboth these difficulties; first, by making persons liable topunishment who fraudulently appropriated the property of others, notwithstanding they had come rightfully into possession; andnext, the necessity of setting forth the particular transactionwas obviated by an enactment that it should be enough toprove the embezzlement of any sum of money within six monthsof the time specified in the indictment. 

After the conviction of Wyman, the case was carried to theSupreme Court, which held that the statute making bank officersliable included bank presidents. But the court held thatthe other part of the statute, providing for the mode ofsetting forth the offence in the indictment, did not apply tobank officers; and that they could only be held on an indictmentwhich described the particular transaction, with time andplace. So the verdict of guilty against Wyman was set aside, and a new trial ordered. 

Before the new trial came on at Concord, a statute was passedby the Legislature for the purpose of meeting this very case, extending the provisions of the Revised Statutes as to themode of pleading in such cases to officers of banks. It wasclaimed and argued by Mr. Choate, with great zeal, eloquence, and learning, that this was an _ex post facto_ law, whichcould not, under the Constitution, be made applicable to transactionswhich happened before its passage. Mr. Choate argued thisquestion for several hours. The court took time for consideration, and overruled his contention. There seemed nothing for itbut to go to trial again on the facts, upon which one verdictof guilty had already been had. As they were going into thecourt-house in the morning, Mr. Choate said to Mr. Hoar, whose chief part in the trial, so far, had been finding lawbooks, hunting up authorities, and taking notes of the evidence:"You made a suggestion to me at the last trial which I didnot attend to much at the time; but I remember thinking afterwardthere was something in it. " Mr. Hoar replied: "It seems tome that Wyman cannot be convicted of embezzlement unless thefunds of the bank were entrusted to him. They must eitherhave been in his actual possession or under his control. There is nothing in the office of president which involvessuch an authority. It cannot exist unless by the expressaction of the directors, or as the result of a course ofbusiness of the bank. " The facts alleged against Wyman werethat he had authorized the discount of the notes of somefriends of his who were irresponsible, and that he had, insome way, shared the proceeds. Mr. Choate seized upon thesuggestion. The Government witnesses, who were chiefly thedirectors of the bank, were asked in cross-examination whetherthey had not consented that Mr. Wyman should have the rightto dispose of the funds of the bank, or to give him poweror authority to dispose of them. They supposed the questionwas put with the intent of making them morally, if not legally, accomplices in his guilt, or of charging them with want offidelity or gross carelessness in their office. Accordingly, each of them indignantly denied the imputation, and testifiedthat Wyman had no power or authority to authorize the discountor to meddle with the funds. When the Government case closed, the counsel asked the court to rule that as the funds werenever entrusted to the possession of Wyman he could not beconvicted of embezzlement. The court so held and directed anacquittal. This is another instance, not unusual in trialsin court, of the truth of the old rhyme, with which the readersof "Quentin Durward" are familiar;

 The page slew the boar, The peer had the gloire. 

Mr. Webster always had a strong and kindly regard for my brother. When Mr. Hoar visited Washington in 1836, Webster receivedhim with great kindness, showed him about the Capitol, andtook him to the Supreme Court, where he argued a case. Mr. Webster began by alluding very impressively to the great changeswhich had taken place in that Tribunal since he first appearedas counsel before them. He said: "No one of the judges whowere here then, remains. It has been my duty to pass uponthe question of the confirmation of every member of the Bench;and I may say that I treated your honors with entire impartiality, for I voted against every one of you. " After the argumentwas over Mr. Webster gave Mr. Hoar a very interesting sketchof the character of each of the judges, and told him the reasonswhich caused him to vote against confirmation in each case. 

The next time I saw Daniel Webster was on July 4, 1844. Hemade a call at my father's house in Concord. I was near oneof the front windows, and heard a shout from a little crowdthat had gathered in the street, and looked out just as Mr. Webster was coming up the front steps. He turned, put hishand into his bosom under his waistcoat and made a statelysalutation, and then turned and knocked on the door and wasadmitted. He was physically the most splendid specimen ofnoble manhood my eyes ever beheld. It is said, I supposetruly, that he was but a trifle over five feet nine incheshigh, and weighed one hundred and fifty-four pounds. Butthen, as on all other occasions that I saw him, I should havebeen prepared to affirm that he was over six feet high andweighed, at least, two hundred. The same glamour is saidto have attended Louis XIV. , whose majesty of bearing wassuch that it never was discovered that he was a man of shortstature until he was measured for his coffin. 

Mr. Webster was then in the very vigor of his magnificentmanhood. He stood perfectly erect. His head was finelypoised upon his shoulders. His beautiful black eyes shoneout through the caverns of his deep brows like lustrous jewels. His teeth were white and regular, and his smile when he wasin gracious mood, especially when talking to women, had anirresistible charm. I remember very little that he said. One thing was, when the backwardness or forwardness of theseason was spoken of, that there was a day--I think it wasJune 15--when, in every year vegetation was at about the samecondition of forwardness, whether the spring were early orlate. A gentleman who was in the room said: "You have thecool breezes of the sea at Marshfield?" "There, as at othersea places, " replied Mr. Webster. When he rose to go, hesaid: "I have the honor to be a member of the Young Men'sWhig Club of Boston. I must be in my place in the ranks. "

I heard him also in Faneuil Hall, in the autumn of 1844, after the elections in Maine and Pennsylvania and in theSouth had made certain the defeat of Mr. Clay. I rememberlittle that he said, except from reading the speech since. What chiefly impressed the audience was the quotation fromMilton, so well known now:

 What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, And what is else not be overcome. 

I also saw Mr. Webster at the inauguration of Edward Everettas President of Harvard, April 30, 1846. It was perhaps theproudest period of Webster's life. It was also, perhaps, the greatest day of the life of Edward Everett. Webster hadbeen Everett's great over-shadower. Gov. Everett would havebeen, but for him, the chief public man and the orator ofMassachusetts at that time. He had returned from the Courtof St. James crowned with new laurels, and had been calledto succeed Josiah Quincy as the head of the University. Bya simple but impressive inaugural ceremony the Governor hadjust invested Mr. Everett with his office, and delivered tohim the keys and the charter. Everett was stepping forwardto deliver his inaugural address when Webster, who had comeout from Boston a little late, came in upon the stage by aside door. President and orator and occasion were all forgotten. The whole assembly rose to greet him. It seemed as if thecheering and the clapping of hands and the waving of handkerchiefswould never leave off. The tears gushed down the cheeks ofwomen and young men and old. Everything was forgotten butthe one magnificent personality. When the din had subsidedsomewhat, Mr. Everett, with his never-failing readiness andgrace, said: "I would I might anticipate a little the functionof my office, and saying--_Expectatur oratio in vernacula_--call upon my illustrious friend who has just entered uponthe stage to speak for me. But I suppose that the proprietiesof the occasion require that I speak for myself. "

It is to the credit of Mr. Everett and of that other Massachusettsorator, Rufus Choate, that no tinge of jealousy or of envyever embittered in the smallest degree their hearty love andsupport of their friend. They were his pupils, his companions, his supporters, his lovers, while he lived, and were his besteulogists when he died. 

I heard another speech of his, which I think was never reported. He appeared before a Committee of the Legislature as counselfor the remonstrants against the scheme to fill up the BackBay lands. 

I do not think the employment of a Senator of the UnitedStates as counsel before the Legislature would be approvedby public opinion now. 

I do not know what year it was, but probably 1849 or 1850. He had grown old. But I learned more of the fashion of hismental operations than could be learned from his speecheson great occasions, especially after they had been revisedfor publication. He spoke with much contempt of a petitionsigned by many of the foremost merchants and business menof Boston. He described with great sarcasm the process ofcarrying about such petitions, and the relief of the personto whom they were presented on finding he was not asked togive any money. "Oh, yes, I'll sign--I'll sign. " He thenread out one after another the names of men well known andhonored in the city. He threw down the petition with contempt, and the long sheet fell and unrolled upon the floor. 

He had a singular habit, which made it wearisome to listento his ordinary speech, of groping after the most suitableword, and trying one synonym after another till he got thatwhich suited him best. "Why is it, Mr. Chairman, that therehas gathered, congregated, this great number of inhabitants, dwellers, here; that these roads, avenues, routes of travel, highways, converge, meet, come together, here? Is it notbecause we have here a sufficient, ample, safe, secure, convenient, commodious, port, harbor, haven?" Of course when the speechcame to be printed all the synonyms but the best one wouldbe left out. 

Mr. Webster seemed rather feeble at that time, and calledupon his friend Mr. William Dehon to read for him the evidenceand extracts from reports with which he had to deal. Histome was the tone of ordinary conversation, and his speech, while it would not be called hesitating, was exceedinglyslow and deliberate. I have been told by persons who heardhim in the Supreme Court in his later years that the samecharacteristic marked his arguments there, and that some ofhis passages made very little impression upon the auditors, although they seemed eloquent and powerful when they cameto be read afterward. 

His is frequently spoken of as a nervous Saxon style. Thatis a great mistake, except as to a few passages where he roseto a white heat. If any person will open a volume of hisspeeches at random, it will be found that the characteristicof his sentences is a somewhat ponderous Latinity. 

A considerable number of Democrats joined the Free Soil movementin 1848. Conspicuous among them was Marcus Morton, who hadbeen Governor and one of our ablest Supreme Court judges, and his son, afterward Chief Justice, then just rising intodistinction as a lawyer. The members of the Liberty Partyalso, who had cast votes for Birney in 1844, were ready forthe new movement. But the Free Soil Party derived its chiefstrength, both of numbers and influence, from the Whigs. TheAnti-Slavery Whigs clung to Webster almost to the last. Hehad disappointed them by opposing the resolution they offeredat the Whig State Convention, pledging the party to supportno candidate not known by his acts or declared opinions tobe opposed to the extension of slavery. But he had coupledhis opposition with a declaration of his own unalterable oppositionto that extension, and had said, speaking of those who werein favor of the declaration: "It is not their thunder. "

He declared in the Senate, as late as 1848: "My oppositionto the increase of slavery in the country, or to the increaseof slave representation in Congress, is general and universal. It has no reference to lines of latitude or points of thecompass. I shall oppose all such extension, and all suchincrease, at all times, under all circumstances, even againstall inducements, against all combinations, against all compromises. "

So the Anti-Slavery Whigs eagerly supported him as theircandidate for the Whig nomination in 1848. 

If Mr. Webster had been nominated for the Presidency in 1848, the Free Soil Party would not have come into existence thatyear. There would have been probably some increase in thenumbers of the Liberty Party; yet the Anti-Slavery Whigs ofMassachusetts would have trusted him. But the nominationof General Taylor, a Southerner, one of the largest slaveholdersin the country, whose laurels had been gained in the odiousMexican War, upon a platform silent upon the engrossing subjectof the extension of slavery, could not be borne. The temperof the Whig National Convention was exhibited in a way toirritate the lovers of freedom in Massachusetts. When someallusion was made to her expressed opinions, it was receivedwith groans and cries of "Curse Massachusetts. " But, on thewhole, the Massachusetts Whigs shared the exultant anticipationof triumph, and of regaining the power from which they hadbeen excluded since the time of John Quincy Adams, exceptfor the month of Harrison's short official life. But as theconvention was about to adjourn, intoxicated with hope andtriumph, Charles Allen, a delegate from Massachusetts, a manof slender figure, rose, and with a quiet voice declared theWhig Party dissolved. Never was a prediction received withmore derision; never was prediction more surely fulfilled. He was reinforced by Henry Wilson, afterward Vice-Presidentof the United States. 

Immediately on their return from Philadelphia, a call wascirculated for a convention to be held at Worcester of allpersons opposed to the nomination of Cass and Taylor. Thecall was written by E. R. Hoar. My father, Samuel Hoar, wasits first signer. 

This is the call. It should be preserved in a form moreenduring than the leaflet, of which I possess, perhaps, theonly copy in existence. 

"TO THE PEOPLE OF MASSACHUSETTS. 

"The Whig National Convention have nominated General Taylorfor President of the United States. In so doing they haveexceeded their just authority, and have proposed a candidatewhom no Northern Whig is bound to support. 

"HE IS NOT A WHIG, when tried by the standard of our partyorganization. He has never voted for a Whig candidate, hasdeclared that the party must not look to him as an exponentof its principles, that he would accept the nomination ofthe Democratic Party, and that he would not submit his claimsto the decision of the Whigs, acting through their regularlyconstituted Convention. 

"HE IS NOT A WHIG, if judged by the opinions he entertainsupon questions of public policy. Upon the great questionsof currency and Finance, of Internal Improvements, of Protectionto American Industry, so far from agreeing with the Whigs, he has distinctly avowed that he has formed no opinion atall. 

"HE IS NOT A WHIG, if measured by the higher standard of principle, to which the Whigs of Massachusetts and of the North havepledged themselves solemnly, deliberately, and often. Heis not opposed to the extension of Slavery over new territories, acquired, and to be acquired, by the United States. He isa Slave-holder, and has been selected because he could commandvotes which no Whig from the free States could receive. 

"To make room for him, the trusted and faithful Championsof our cause have all been set aside. 

"The Whigs of Massachusetts, by their Legislature, and intheir popular assemblies, have resolved, that oppositionto the extension of Slavery is a fundamental article in theirpolitical faith. They have spoken with scorn and upbraidingof those Northern Democrats who would sacrifice the rightsand interests of the Free States upon the altar of party subserviency. 

"The Whigs of the Legislature have recently declared to thecountry, 'that if success can attend the party, only by thesacrifice of Whig principles, or some of them, ' they didnot mean to be thus successful; that they are determined'to support a candidate who will not suffer us to be over-balanced by annexations of foreign territory, nor by thefurther extension of the institution of Slavery, which isequally repugnant to the feelings, and incompatible with thepolitical rights of the Free States'; and that they 'believeit to be the resolute purpose of the Whig people of Massachusetts, to support these sentiments, and carry into effect the designwhich they manifest. '

"Believing that the support of General Taylor's nominationis required by no obligations of party fidelity, and thatto acquiesce in it would be the abandonment of principleswhich we hold most dear, treachery to the cause of Freedom, and the utter prostration of the interests of Free Labor andthe Rights of Freemen:

"The undersigned, Whigs of Massachusetts, call upon theirfellow-citizens throughout the Commonwealth, who are opposedto the nomination of CASS and TAYLOR, to meet in Conventionat Worcester, on _Wednesday, _ the 28th day of June current, to take such steps as the occasion shall demand, in supportof the PRINCIPLES to which they are pledged, and to co-operatewith the other Free States in a Convention for this purpose. "

My first political service was folding and directing thesecirculars. The Convention was held, and Samuel Hoar presided. It was addressed by men most of whom afterward became eminentin the public service. Among them were Charles Sumner, CharlesFrancis Adams, Henry Wilson, E. R. Hoar, Edward L. Keyes, Charles Allen, Lewis D. Campbell, of Ohio, and Abraham Payne, of Rhode Island. Richard H. Dana was present, but I thinkhe did not speak. William Lloyd Garrison and Francis Jacksonwere present, but took no part whatever. I rode to Bostonin a freight car after the convention was over, late at night. Garrison and Jackson were sitting together and talking toa group of friends. Garrison seemed much delighted with theday's work, but said he heard too much talk about the likelihoodthat some of the resolutions would be popular and bring largenumbers of votes to the party. He said: "All you shouldask is, what is the rightful position? and then take it. "Among the resolutions was this:

"That Massachusetts looks to Daniel Webster to declare tothe Senate and to uphold before the country the policy ofthe Free States; that she is relieved to know that he has notendorsed the nomination of General Taylor; and that she invokeshim at this crisis to turn a deaf ear to 'optimists' and 'quietists', and to speak and act as his heart and his great mind shalllead him. "

Daniel Webster's son Fletcher was present, and heartily inaccord with the meeting; and this resolution was passed withhis full approval. It met great opposition from the men whohad come into the movement from the Liberty Party and fromthe Democratic Party. The shouts of "No, no; too late" werenearly, if not quite, equal to the expressions of approval. But the president declared that it was passed. 

Mr. Webster sulked in his tent during the summer, and at last, September 1, 1848, made a speech at Marshfield, in which hedeclared the nomination of Taylor not fit to be made, butgave it a half-hearted support. My brother, Judge E. R. Hoar, had been an enthusiastic admirer of Webster, who hadtreated him with great personal kindness; and, as I have said, he had been associated with Mr. Webster in the famous Wymantrial. Mr. Webster made a speech in the Senate in August, declaring his renewed opposition to the extension of slavery. Mr. Hoar wrote a letter expressing his satisfaction with thatspeech, and urging him to take his proper place at the headof the Northern Free Soil movement. This is Mr. Webster'sreply. It is interesting as the last anti-slavery utteranceof Daniel Webster. 

MARSHFIELD, August 23, 1848. 

_My Dear Sir:_

I am greatly obliged to you, for your kind and friendly letter. You overrate, I am sure, the value of my speech, it was quiteunpremeditated and its merit, if any, consists I presume inits directness and brevity. It mortified me to see that someof the newspaper writers speak of it as the "taking of a position";as if it contained something new for me to say. You are notone of them, my dear sir, but there are those who will notbelieve that I am an anti-slavery man unless I repeat thedeclaration once a week. I expect they will soon requirea periodical affidavit. You know, that as early as 1830 inmy speech on Foote's resolution, I drew upon me the angerof enemies, and a regret of friends by what I said againstslavery, and I hope that from that day to this my conducthas been consistent. But nobody seems to be esteemed to beworthy of confidence who is not a new convert. And if thenew convert be as yet but half converted, so much the better. This I confess a little tries one's patience. But I can assureyou in my own case, it will not either change my principlesor my conduct. 

It is utterly impossible for me to support the Buffalo nomination. I have no confidence in Mr. Van Buren, not the slightest. I would much rather trust General Taylor than Mr. Van Bureneven on this very question of slavery, for I believe thatGeneral Taylor is an honest man and I am sure he is not somuch committed on the wrong side, as I know Mr. Van Burento have been for fifteen years. I cannot concur even withmy best friends in giving the lead in a great question toa notorious opponent to the cause. Besides; there are othergreat interests of the country in which you and I hold Mr. Van Buren to be essentially wrong, and it seems to me thatin consenting to form a party under him Whigs must consentto bottom their party on one idea only, and also to adoptas the representative of that idea a head chosen on a strangeemergency from among its steadiest opposers. It gives mepain to differ from Whig friends whom I know to be as muchattached to universal liberty as I am, and they cannot bemore so. I am grieved particularly to be obliged to differin anything from yourself and your excellent father, for bothof whom I have cherished such long and affectionate regards. But I cannot see it to be my duty to join in a secession fromthe Whig Party for the purpose of putting Mr. Van Buren atthe head of the Government. I pray you to assure yourself, my dear Sir, of my continued esteem and attachment, and rememberme kindly and cordially to your father. 

 Yours, etc. , DANIEL WEBSTER

 Honorable E. Rockwood Hoar. 

Mr. Hoar had before had a somewhat interesting interviewwith Mr. Webster to the same effect. Late in the winter, before the convention at Philadelphia, some young Whigs hada dinner at the Tremont House, to concert measures to supporthis candidacy. There were forty or fifty present. Mr. Websterwas expected to speak to them, but his daughter Julia wasvery ill. He sent them a message that he would see them atthe house in Summer Street where he was staying. So whenthe dinner was half over, the party walked in procession toMr. Paige's house. As Judge Hoar described the interview, he seemed very glum. He shook hands with the young men asthey passed by him, but said very little. There was an awkwardsilence, and they were about to take leave, when the absurdityof the position struck Mr. Hoar, who was the youngest ofthe party, rather forcibly. Just then he heard Mr. Webstersay to somebody near him: "The day for eminent public menseems to have gone by. " Whereupon Hoar stepped forward andmade him a brief speech, which he began by saying that theobject of their coming together was to show that, in theiropinion, the day for eminent public men had not gone by, andsome more to the same effect. Webster waked up and his eyesflashed and sparkled. He made a speech full of vigor andfire. He spoke of his name being brought before the Whigconvention at Philadelphia, and of his fidelity to the party. He said that whether his own name should be in the judgmentof the convention suitable or the best to present to the countrythe convention would determine, and added: "If the conventionshall select anyone of our conspicuous leaders, trained andexperienced in civil affairs, of national reputation as astatesman, he will receive my hearty support. But if I amasked whether I will advise the convention at Philadelphiato nominate, or if nominated I will recommend the people tosupport for the office of President of the United States, a swearing, fighting, frontier colonel, I only say that Ishall not do it. "

Many people think that if Mr. Webster would have supportedGeneral Taylor's policy of dealing with the questions relatingto slavery it would have prevailed, and that the country wouldhave been pacified and the Civil War avoided. I do not thinkso. The forces on both sides who were bringing on that conflictwere too powerful to be subdued by the influence of any individualstatesman. The irrepressible conflict had to be fought out. But Mr. Webster's attitude not only estranged him from thesupporters of General Taylor in his own party, but, of course, made an irreparable breach between him and the anti-slaverymen who had founded the Free Soil Party. He was the chieftarget for all anti-slavery arrows from March 7, 1850, to hisdeath. 

When I was in the Harvard Law School, Mr. Webster was counselin a very interesting divorce case where Choate was upon theother side. The parties were in high social position andvery well known. Mr. Choate's client, who was the wife, wascharged with adultery. I did not hear the closing argument, but my classmates who did reported that Mr. Webster spokeof the woman with great severity and argued the case witha scriptural plainness of speech. He likened the case ofthe husband bound to an adulterous wife to the old Hebrewpunishment of fastening a living man to a corpse. "Who shalldeliver me from the body of this death?" But Judge Fletcher, who held the court, decided in favor of the wife. 

The meeting which gathered at Worcester in pursuance of theabove call, inaugurated for the first time a party for thesole object of resisting the extension of slavery. The LibertyParty, which had cast a few votes in the presidential electionof 1840, and which, in 1844, had turned the scale in New Yorkand so in the nation against Mr. Clay, was willing to supportthe candidates of other parties who were personally unobjectionableto them in this respect. But the Free Soil Party, of whichthe present Republican party is but the continuation undera change of name, determined that no person should receiveits support for any national office, who himself continuedhis association with either of the old political organizations. 

The Free Soil Party of Massachusetts cast in the presidentialelection of 1848 only about 37, 000 votes, but it includedamong its supporters almost every man in the Commonwealthold enough to take part in politics who has since acquiredany considerable national reputation. Charles Sumner whohad become known to the public as an orator and scholar bythree or four great orations, was just at the threshold ofhis brilliant career. Charles Francis Adams, who had servedrespectably but without great distinction, in each branchof the Legislature, brought to the cause his inflexible courage, his calm judgment, and the inspiration of his historic name. John A. Andrew, then a young lawyer in Boston, afterward tobecome illustrious as the greatest war Governor in the Union, devoted to the cause an eloquence stimulant and inspiringas a sermon of Paul. John G. Palfrey, then a Whig memberof Congress from the Middlesex District, discussed the greatissue in speeches singularly adapted to reach the understandingand gratify the taste of the people of Massachusetts, andin a series of essays whose vigor and compactness Junius mighthave envied, and with a moral power which Junius could neverhave reached. Anson Burlingame, afterward Minister to China, captivated large crowds with his inspiring eloquence. * SamuelG. Howe, famous in both hemispheres by his knightly servicein the cause of Greek independence, famous also by his philanthropicwork in behalf of the insane and blind, brought his greatinfluence to the party. Henry Wilson, a mechanic, whose earlytraining had been that of the shoemaker's shop, but who understoodthe path by which to reach the conscience and understandingof the workingmen of Massachusetts better than any other man, had been also a delegate to the Convention at Philadelphia, and had united with Judge Allen in denunciation of its surrenderof liberty. Stephen C. Phillips, a highly respected merchantof Salem, and formerly Whig Representative from the EssexDistrict, gave the weight of his influence in the same direction. Samuel Hoar, who had been driven from South Carolina whenhe attempted to argue the case for the imprisoned coloredseamen of Massachusetts before the courts of the United States, one of the most distinguished lawyers of the Massachusettsbar, came from this retirement in his old age to give hisservice in the same cause; of which his son, E. R. Hoar, was also a constant, untiring, and enthusiastic champion. Richard H. Dana, master of an exquisite English style, theonly Massachusetts advocate who ever encountered Rufus Choateon equal terms, threw himself into the cause with all theardor of his soul. On the Connecticut River, George Ashmun, the most powerful of the Whig champions in western Massachusetts, found more than his match in Erastus Hopkins. William Claflin, afterward Speaker, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor of Massachusetts, member of the National House of Representatives, and Chairmanof the Republican National Committee, was then in his earlyyouth. But he had already gained a competent fortune by hisbusiness sagacity. He brought to the cause his sound judgment, his warm and affectionate heart, and his liberal hand. Hewas then, as he has ever since been, identified with everygood and generous cause. His stanch friendship was then, as it has been ever since, the delight and comfort of thechampions of freedom in strife and obloquy. 

[Footnote]* Shortly after Burlingame came into active life, he made a journeyto Europe. The American Minister obtained for him a ticket ofadmission to the House of Commons. He was shown into a verycomfortable seat in the gallery. In a few minutes an officialcame and told him he must leave that seat; that the gallerywhere he was was reserved for Peers. They are very particularabout such things there. Burlingame got up to go out when anold Peer who happened to be sitting by and had heard what wassaid, interposed. "Let him stay, let him stay. He is a Peerin his own country. " "I am a Sovereign in my own country, Sir, "replied Burlingame, "and shall lose caste if I associatewith Peers. " And he went out. [End of Footnote]

Each of these men would have been amply fitted in all respectsfor the leader of a great party in State or Nation. Eachof them could have defended any cause in which he was a believer, by whatever champion assailed. They had also their alliesand associates among the representatives of the press. Amongthese were Joseph T. Buckingham, of the Boston _Courier, _then the head of the editorial fraternity in Massachusetts;John Milton Earle, the veteran editor of the Worcester _Spy;_William S. Robinson, afterward so widely known as Warrington, whose wit and keen logic will cause his name to be long preservedamong the classics of American literature. 

I have spoken of some of these men more at length elsewhere. I knew them, all but two, very intimately. I only knew JosephT. Buckingham by sight. He edited the Boston _Courier_ withgreat ability. He was a member of both Houses of the MassachusettsLegislature. He was a member of the State Senate in 1850and 1851. He left the _Courier_ in June, 1848, about thetime the Free Soil movement begun, and was not active in politicsafterward. 

I had no personal acquaintance with Charles Francis Adams. I have known his son, Charles Francis Adams, President ofthe Massachusetts Historical Society, pretty well. He inheritsa great deal of the ability and independence which belongsto his race. He would undoubtedly have taken a very highplace in the public and official life of his generation ifhe had found himself in accord with either of the great politicalparties. 

I do not think anybody, except the very intimate friendsof Charles Francis Adams, was aware of his great abilitiesuntil he manifested them amid the difficulties of the EnglishMission. They were known, however, to a few men who wereintimate with him. I was quite astonished one day when Icalled on Dr. Palfrey, at his house in Cambridge in 1852, and he told me Mr. Adams was entirely competent for the officeof President of the United States. 

Mr. Adams was rather dull as a public speaker. He was aptto announce commonplaces slowly and deliberately, as if theywere something he thought his audience was listening to forthe first time. But the influence of his historic name wasvery great. His marvellous resemblance to his father andgrandfather made a great impression. When he said at Worcesteron the 28th of June, 1848: "I say, in words to which I havea hereditary right, 'Sink or Swim, Live or Die, Survive orPerish, I give my hand and my heart to this movement, '" itseemed to the audience as if old John Adams had stepped downfrom Trumbull's picture of the Signing of the Declarationof Independence to give his benediction. *

[Footnote]* I like very much the epitaph which his sons placed over him inthe burial place at Quincy. Every word of it is true. 

THIS STONEMARKS THE GRAVE OFCHARLES FRANCIS ADAMSSON OF JOHN QUINCYAND LOUISA CATHERINE (JOHNSON)ADAMSBORN 18 AUGUST 1807 Trained from his youth in politics and letters His manhood strengthened by the convictions Which had inspired his fathers He was among the first to serve And among the most steadfast to support That new revolution Which restored the principles of liberty To public law And secured to his country The freedom of its soil During seven troubled and anxious years Minister of the United States in England afterward arbitrator at the tribunal of Geneva He failed in no task which his Government imposed Yet won the respect and confidence of two great nations Dying 21 November 1886 He left the example of high powers nobly used and the remembrance of a spotless name. [End of Footnote]

Besides these more conspicuous leaders, there was to be found, in almost every town and village in Massachusetts, some maneminent among his neighbors for purity of life, for philanthropy, and for large intelligence who was ready to join the new party. The glowing hopes and dreams and aspirations of youth wereinspirited by the muse of Whittier and Longfellow and Lowelland Bryant. The cause of free labor appealed to the strongestsympathies of the mechanics of Essex and the skilled laborersof Worcester. 

Four years afterward Daniel Webster, as he lay dying at Marshfield, said to the friend who was by his side: "The Whig candidatewill obtain but one or two States, and it is well; as a nationalparty, the Whigs are ended. "

The Whig Party retained its organization in Massachusettsuntil 1856; but its intellect and its moral power were gone. Mr. Winthrop, as appears from the excellent "Life" publishedby his son, had no sympathy with Mr. Webster's position. Mr. Webster died, a disappointed man, in the autumn of 1852. Hetook no part in political affairs in Massachusetts after 1850. Mr. Choate, who was to follow his great leader to the gravewithin a few years, transferred his allegiance to the Democrats. Mr. Everett, after a brief service in the Senate, a servicemost uncongenial to his own taste, resigned his seat in themidst of the angry conflict on the Nebraska bill, and devotedhimself to literary pursuits until, when the war broke out, he threw himself with all his zeal, power, and eloquence intothe cause of his country. 

CHAPTER IXLIFE IN WORCESTER

After leaving college I studied for a year in my brother'soffice in Concord, then for two years at the Harvard LawSchool, and afterward for four months in the office of JudgeBenjamin F. Thomas in Worcester. I was led to choose Worcesteras a place to live in chiefly for the reason that that cityand county were the stronghold of the new Anti-Slavery Party, to which cause I was devoted with all my heart and soul. Ihave never regretted the choice, and have spent my life there, except when in Washington, for considerably more than halfa century. In that time Worcester has grown from a city offifteen thousand to a city of one hundred and thirty thousandpeople. I can conceive of no life more delightful for a manof public spirit than to belong to a community like that whichcombines the youth and vigor and ambition of a western citywith the refinement and conveniences, and the pride in a noblehistory, of an old American community. It is a delight tosee it grow and a greater delight to help it grow, --to helpimprove its schools, and found its Public Library, and helplay the foundations of great institutions of learning. Worcesterhad an admirable Bar, admirable clergymen, and physiciansof great skill and eminence. Among her clergymen was EdwardEverett Hale, then in early youth, but already famous as apreacher throughout the country. There was no Unitarian pulpitwhere he was not gladly welcomed. So his congregation here, by way of exchange, heard the most famous pulpit orators ofthe country. 

Among the physicians was Dr. Joseph Sargent, a man then withouta superior in his profession in Massachusetts. The friendshipI formed with him in 1849 lasted till his death, more thanforty years afterward. 

The mechanics of Worcester were unsurpassed for their ingenuityanywhere on the face of the earth. Worcester was the centreand home of invention. Within a circle of twelve miles radiuswas the home of Blanchard, the inventor of the machine forturning irregular forms; of Elias Howe, the inventor of thesewing machine; of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cottongin, which doubled the value of every acre of cotton-producingland in the country; of Erastus B. Bigelow, the inventorof the carpet machine; of Hawes, the inventor of the envelopemachine; of Crompton and Knowles, the creators and perfectorsof the modern loom; of Ruggles, Nourse and Mason, in whoseestablishment the modern plow was brought to perfection, anda great variety of other agricultural implements inventedand improved. There were many other men whose inventive geniusand public usefulness were entitled to rank with these. Thefirst house-warming furnace was introduced here, and the secondcupola furnace was set up near by. 

These inventors and mechanics were all men of great publicspirit, proud of Worcester, of its great achievements, andits great hope. They got rich rapidly. They and their householdsmade social life most delightful. There was little prideof family or wealth. Men and women were welcomed everywhereon their merits. 

The City of Worcester was the heart of one of the foremostagricultural counties in the country. The county stood fourthamong American counties in the value of its agricultural products, and the proportion of the value of the product to the valueof the lands. It was the spot on the face of the earth wherelabor got the largest proportion of the joint product of laborand capital. The farmers made an excellent living. Theymade excellent legislators, excellent town officers, excellentjurors, and excellent clients. I have been at some time orother in my life counsel for every one of the fifty-two townsin Worcester County. I had a large clientage among the farmers. In the intimacy of that relation I got a knowledge of theinmost soul and heart of a class of men who I think constitutedwhat was best in American citizenship, a knowledge which hasbeen a great educational advantage to me and valuable in athousand ways in my public and professional life. 

From the first of December, 1849, until the fourth of March, 1869, I was diligently employed in my profession, save fora single year's service in each house of the MassachusettsLegislature. But during all that time I kept a very zealousinterest in political affairs. I was Chairman of the CountyCommittee for several years, made political speeches occasionally, presided at political meetings, always attended the caucusand was in full sympathy and constant communication with theFree Soil and Republican leaders. 

The Worcester Bar in my time afforded a delightful companionship. It was like a college class in the old days. My best andmost cordial friends were the men whom I was constantly encounteringin the courts. The leaders of the Bar when I was admittedto it, --Charles Allen, Emory Washburn, Pliny Merrick, BenjaminF. Thomas, Peter C. Bacon, --would have been great leadersat any Bar in the United States, or on any circuit in England. Study at a law school is invaluable to the youth if he isto rise in his profession; but there is no law school likea court-house when such men are conducting trials. The difficultart of cross-examination, the more difficult art of refrainingfrom cross-examination, can only be learned by watching menwho are skilled in the active conduct of trials. 

The Supreme Court of Massachusetts at that day with ChiefJustice Shaw at its head was without an equal in the countryand not surpassed by the Supreme Court of the United Statesitself. I can conceive of no life more delightful than thatof a lawyer in good health, and with good capacity, and witha sufficient clientage, spent in that manly emulation andhonorable companionship. 

The habit of giving dissenting opinions which has becomeso common both in the Supreme Court of the United Statesand of late in the Massachusetts Supreme Court did not thenexist. If there were a division on an important questionof law the statement of the result was usually "a majorityof the Court is of opinion. " That was all. I do not believeany court can long retain public confidence and respect whennearly all its opinions in important matters are accompaniedby a powerful attack on the soundness of the opinion and thecorrectness of the judgment from the Bench itself. The Reporterof the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is, I believe, authorizedto report the decisions of the court more or less at lengthat his discretion. If he would exercise that discretion byan absolute refusal to print dissenting opinions, except ina few very great and exceptional cases, he would have thethanks of the profession. It may be harder to put a stopto the practice in the Supreme Court of the United States. That will have to be done, if at all, by the good sense ofthe Judges. The recent opinions of the Court in what areknown as the Insular Cases have shocked the country and greatlydiminished the weight and authority of the tribunal. Thiswas not because of public disapproval of the opinion of theCourt. It was because upon one of the greatest questionsof Constitutional law and Constitutional liberty that everwent to judgment, there could be found no single reason forthe decision of the Court strong enough to convince any twojudges. 

The fact that I have been for nearly thirty-five years inpublic life, and likely to be, if I live, in public life a fewyears longer, is an instance of how--

 The best laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley. 

Down to the time I was admitted to the Bar, and indeed fora year later, my dream and highest ambition were to spendmy life as what is called an office lawyer, making deeds andgiving advice in small transactions. I supposed I was absolutelywithout capacity for public speaking. I expected never tobe married; perhaps to earn twelve or fifteen hundred dollarsa year, which would enable me to have a room of my own insome quiet house, and to earn enough to collect rare booksthat could be had without much cost. I can honestly say withGeorge Herbert: "I protest and I vow I even study thrift, and yet I am scarce able, with much ado, to make one halfyear's allowance shake hands with the other. And yet if abook of four or five shillings come in my way, I buy it, thoughI fast for it; yea, sometimes of ten shillings. "

But I happened one night in the autumn of 1850 to be at agreat mass meeting in the City Hall, at Worcester, whichCharles Allen was expected to address. It was the year ofthe Compromise Measures, including the Fugitive Slave Law, and of Daniel Webster's 7th of March speech. Judge Allen, as he was somewhat apt to do, came in late. A vast audiencehad gathered and were waiting. Nobody seemed ready to speak. Somebody started the cry, "Hoar! Hoar!" My father and brotherwere known as leaders in the Free Soil Party, and that I supposemade somebody call on me. I got up in my place in the middleof the hall in great confusion. There were shouts of "platform, ""platform. " I made my way to the platform, hoping only tomake my excuses and get off without being detected. But thepeople were disposed to be good-natured, and liked what Isaid. Dr. Stone, the famous stenographic reporter, was presentand took it down. It was printed in the Free Soil papers, and from that time I was in considerable demand as a publicspeaker. The coalition between the Free Soilers and Democratscarried the State of Massachusetts that year and elected SumnerSenator and Boutwell Governor. The next year Worcester failedto elect her representatives to the Legislature, which werevoted for all on one ticket and required a majority, and therewas to be a second election on the fourth Monday of November. There was a delegate convention to nominate representatives, of which I was a member. When the vote was announced, tomy surprise and consternation, I was one of the persons nominated. Nobody had said a word to me about it beforehand. That wasFriday night. I told the Convention I could not accept sucha nomination without my father's approval. I was then twenty-five years old. It was proposed that the Convention adjournuntil the next evening, and that meantime I should go downto Concord and see if I could get my father's leave. Accordinglythe Convention adjourned to see if the infant candidate couldget permission to accept. My father told me he thought thatto go to the Legislature once would be useful to me in myprofession; I should learn how laws were made, and get acquaintedwith prominent men from different parts of the State. Sohe advised me to accept, if I would make up my mind that Iwould go only for one year, and would after that stick tothe law, and would never look to politics as a professionor vocation. I accepted the nomination, was elected, andwas made Chairman of one of the Law Committees in the House. 

I declined a reelection and devoted myself to my profession, except that I served in the Massachusetts Senate one year, 1857, being nominated unexpectedly and under circumstancessomewhat like those which attended my former nomination. Iwas Chairman of the Judiciary Committee that year. I devotedall my time, day and even far into the night, to my legislativeduties. I was never absent a single day from my seat in theHouse in 1852, and was absent only one day from my seat inthe Senate, in 1857, when I had to attend to an importantlaw suit. It so happened that there was a severe snow stormthat day, which blocked up the railroads, so that there wasno quorum in the Senate. I could not myself have got to theState House, if I had tried. I suppose I may say withoutarrogance that I was the leader of the Free Soil Party ineach House when I was a member of it. In 1852 I prepared, with the help of Horace Gray, afterward Judge, who was nota member of the Legislature, the Practice Act of 1852, whichabolished the common law system of pleading, and has beenin principle that on which the Massachusetts courts have actedin civil cases ever since. I studied the English Factorylegislation, and read Macaulay's speeches on the subject. I became an earnest advocate for shortening the hours of laborby legislation. That was then called the ten-hour system. Later it has been called the eight-hour system. I made, in1852, a speech in favor of reducing the time of labor in factoriesto ten hours a day which, so far as I know, was the firstspeech in any legislative body in this country on that subject. My speech was received with great derision. The House, usuallyvery courteous and orderly, seemed unwilling to hear me through. One worthy old farmer got up in his seat and said: "Isn'tthe young man for Worcester going to let me get up in themorning and milk my caouws. "

When a member of the Senate in 1857, I was Chairman of theJudiciary Committee. I made a very earnest and carefullyprepared speech against the asserted right of the jury tojudge of the law in criminal cases. It is a popular and speciousdoctrine. But it never seemed to me to be sound. Among others, there are two reasons against it, which seem to me conclusive, and to which I have never seen a plausible answer. One isthat if the jury is to judge of the law, you will have asmany different laws as you have juries. There is no revisionof their conclusion. They are not obliged to tell, and thereis no way in which the court can know, what their opinionwas. So a man tried on one side of the court-house may beheld guilty, and another man tried on the other side of thecourt-house may be held innocent for precisely the same act. 

The other reason is that the court must always decide whatevidence shall be admitted. So if the jury are to be thejudges of the law, one authority must determine what evidencethey shall consider, and another determine what law shallbe applied to it. For instance, suppose a defendant chargedwith homicide offers to prove certain facts which as he claimsjustify the killing. The Judge says these facts do not, underthe law, justify the killing and excludes the evidence. Thatmay be the real point in the case, and the jury may believethat those facts fully justify the homicide; still they cannotbe permitted to hear them. It is preposterous to supposethat so logical and reasonable a system as the Common Lawcould ever have tolerated such an absurdity. My friend, Mr. Justice Gray of the United States Supreme Court, an admirablejudge and one of the great judges of the world, in his dissentingopinion in _Sparf et al. V. U. S. , 156, U. S. Reports, page 51, etc. , _ has little to say on this point, except thatof course there must be some authority to regulate the conductof trials. 

I declined a reelection to the Senate. I was twice nominatedfor Mayor by the Republicans of Worcester, when the electionof their candidate was sure; once by a Citizens' Convention, and once by a Committee authorized to nominate a candidate, and another year urged by prominent and influential citizensto accept such a nomination. But I preferred my profession. I never had any desire or taste for executive office, andI doubt if I had much capacity for it. 

When Charles Allen declined reelection to Congress, in 1852, I have no doubt I could have succeeded him if I had been willing, although I was but twenty-six years old, only a year pastthe Constitutional age. 

As I found myself getting a respectable place in the professionmy early ambitions were so far changed and expanded that Ihoped I might some day be appointed to the Supreme Court ofthe Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that there could be no more delightfullife for a man competent to the service than one spent indiscussing with the admirable lawyers, who have always adornedthat Bench, the great questions of jurisprudence, involvingthe rights of citizens, and the welfare of the Commonwealth, and helping to settle them by authority. This ambition wasalso disappointed. I have twice received the offer of a seaton that Bench, under circumstances which rendered it out ofthe question that I should accept it, although on both occasionsI longed exceedingly to do so. 

Shortly after I was admitted to the Bar, good fortune broughtme at once into the largest practice in the great County ofWorcester, although that Bar had always been, before and since, one of the ablest in the country. Judge Emory Washburn, afterwardGovernor and Professor of Law at Harvard, and writer on jurisprudence, had the largest practice in the Commonwealth, west of Boston, and I suppose with one exception, the largest in the Commonwealthoutside of Boston. He asked me to become his partner in June, 1852. I had then got a considerable clientage of my own. Early in 1853 he sailed for Europe, intending to return inthe fall. I was left in charge of his business during hissix months' absence, talking with the clients about casesin which he was already retained, and receiving their statementsas to cases in which they desired to retain him on his return. Before he reached home he was nominated for Governor by theWhig Convention, to which office he was elected by the Legislaturein the following January. So he had but a few weeks to attendto his law business before entering upon the office of Governor. I kept on with it, I believe without losing a single client. That winter I had extraordinarily good fortune, due I thinkvery largely to the kindly feeling of the juries toward soyoung a man attempting to undertake such great responsibilities. 

My professional life from January 1, 1850, until the 4thof March, 1869, was a life of great and incessant labor. When the court was in session I was constantly engaged injury trials. Day after day, and week after week, I had topass from one side of the court-house to the other, beingengaged in a very large part of the important actions thatwere tried in those days. The Court had long sessions. Thejudges who came from abroad were anxious to get their workdone and go back to their homes. So the Courts sat from halfpast eight or nine o'clock in the morning until six in theafternoon with an intermission of an hour, or an hour anda quarter, for dinner. The parties to the suits came fromall over Worcester County. Frequently it was impossible tosee the witnesses until the trial came on, or just before. So the lawyer had to spend his evenings and often far intothe night in seeing witnesses and making other preparationsfor the next day. General Devens and I had at one term ofthe Supreme Court held by Chief Justice Bigelow twenty trialactions. The term resulted in a serious injury to my eyesand in my being broken down with overwork. So I was compelledto go to Europe the following year for a vacation. 

But I found time somehow, as I have said, to keep up a constantand active interest in politics. I was also able to contributesomething to other things which were going on for the benefitof our growing city. I got up the first contribution forthe Free Public Library, of which I was made President. Itook a great interest in the founding of the famous WorcesterPolytechnic Institute, and I was the first person named inits Act of Incorporation. The first meeting of its Trusteeswas held in my office, and I am now the only surviving memberof that Board, in which I have retained a warm interest eversince. In 1869 I made before the Massachusetts Legislature, on a petition which was successful for a legislative grantto that school, what I believe is the first public addressever made in behalf of Technical Education in this country. I was for some time President of the Board of Trustees ofthe City Library and while President planned the excellentreading room connected with the Library, for which I obtaineda handsome endowment by personal solicitation. 

I was also Trustee of Leicester Academy. 

The Worcester Lyceum, which furnished the principal courseof lectures in the city in those days, was in the hands ofsome very worthy and conservative old Whigs. They would notpermit any politics or religion, or what was called Radicalism, either in religious or social matters, to be discussed ontheir platform. So we had to listen to very respectable andworthy, but rather dull and tame conservative gentlemen, orstay away, as we preferred. A few of the young men, of whomI was one, conspired to get possession of the Lyceum. Theyturned out in force for the election of officers, chose mePresident, and we got Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parkerand Ralph Waldo Emerson and other shining lights of a newerphilosophy, much to the indignation of the old Whig magnates. But the lectures were very successful, and at the end of myPresidency, which lasted two or three years, we had an amplebalance in our treasury. 

If I were to give an account of my professional life fortwenty years, I must make another book. It was full of interestand romance. The client in those days used to lay bare hissoul to his lawyer. Many of the cases were full of romanticinterest. The lawyer followed them as he followed the plotof an exciting novel, from the time the plaintiff first openedhis door and told his story till the time when he heard thesweetest of all sounds to a lawyer, the voice of the foremansaying: "The jury find for the plaintiff. " Next to the "yes, "of a woman, that is the sweetest sound, I think, that canfall on human ears. 

I used to have eighteen or twenty law cases at the fall termeach year. The judges gave their opinions orally in openCourt, and the old judges like Shaw and Metcalf, used to enlivenan opinion with anecdotes or quaint phrases, which lent greatinterest to the scene. If Walter Scott could have known andtold the story of the life of an old Massachusetts lawyerfrom the close of the Revolution down to the beginning ofthe Rebellion, there is nothing in the great Scotch novelswhich would have surpassed it for romance and for humor. 

I think I may fairly claim that I had a good deal to do withdeveloping the equity system in the courts of Massachusetts, and with developing the admirable Insolvency system of Massachusetts, which is substantially an equity system, from which the UnitedStates Bankruptcy statutes have been so largely copied. 

The great mass of the people of Massachusetts, Whigs and Democratsas well as Republicans, were loyal and patriotic and fullof zeal when the war broke out. A very few of the old Whigsand Democrats, who were called "Hunkers" or "Copperheads, "sympathized with the Rebellion, or if they did not, were sopossessed with hatred for the men who were putting it downthat they could find nothing to approve, but only cause forcomplaint and faultfinding. Andrew, the Governor, Sumnerand Wilson, the Senators, most of the members of Congress, most of the leaders in the Legislature and in the militaryand political activities, were of the old Free Soil Party. There was a feeling, not wholly unreasonable, that the oldWhigs had been somewhat neglected, and that their cooperationand help were received rather coldly. This feeling led tothe movement, called the People's Party, which begun at alarge public meeting in Cambridge, where my dear old friendand partner, ex-Governor Washburn, was one of the speakers. That party called a State Convention and nominated CharlesDevens for Governor. Devens had been an old Whig. He hadbecome a Republican in 1856, and had been one of the earliestto enlist in the War, in which he became afterward the mostfamous Massachusetts soldier. He was a man of spirit, veryaffectionate and generous, always ready to stand by his friends, especially if he suspected that anybody had treated them unjustly. The People's Party sent a Committee to the seat of war inSeptember, 1862. The Committee found Devens in his tent, repeated to him the plans of his old Whig friends, and inducedhim to accept the nomination of the People's Party for Governor. 

I was called to the battlefield of Antietam, where a nearkinsman of mine had been mortally wounded, just about thesame time. I entered Devens's tent just as this Committeewas leaving it with his written acceptance in their hands. I told him the other side of the story, told him how thewhole people were alive with enthusiasm, and that GovernorAndrew was doing the very best possible, and that these pettyjealousies, while there was some little reason for them, ought not to affect the public action of the people. Devensregretted very much what he had done. He told me that ifhe could recall the letter, he would do it. But it was toolate. 

Governor Andrew was triumphantly reelected, and Devens wasever after an earnest and loyal Republican. 

CHAPTER XPOLITICAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS FROM1848 TO 1869

In 1848, the Free Soil Party in Massachusetts nominated candidatesfor State officers. It was made up of Whigs, Democrats andmembers of the Liberty Party. It had made no distinct issuewith the Whig Party upon matters of State administration. Governor Briggs, the Whig Governor, was a wise and honestChief Magistrate, highly respected by all the people. Butthe Free Soil leaders wisely determined that if they wereto have a political party, they must have candidates for Stateofficers as well as National. It is impossible to organizea political party with success whose members are acting togetherin their support of one candidate and striving with all theirmight against each other when another is concerned. My fatherwas urged to be the Free Soil candidate for Governor. CharlesFrancis Adams and Edmund Jackson visited him at Concord topress it upon him as a duty. Charles Allen wrote him an earnestletter to the same effect. But he was an old friend of GovernorBriggs and disliked very much to become his antagonist. Helooked to the Whig Party for large accessions to the FreeSoil ranks. A large plurality of the people of the communitywere still devoted to that party. He doubted very much thewisdom of widening the breach between them by a conflict onother questions than that of slavery. So he refused his consent. Stephen C. Phillips, an eminent Salem merchant, and a formerMember of Congress, was nominated. The result was there wasno choice of State officers by the people, and the electionof the Whig candidates was made by the Legislature. 

The next year it occurred to the leaders of the Free Soiland Democratic Parties that they had only to unite theirforces to overthrow the Whigs. The Free Soil leaders thoughtthe effect of this would be the eventual destruction of theWhig Party at the North, --as afterward proved to be the case, --and the building up in its place of a party founded on theprinciple of opposition to the extension of slavery. So in1849 there was a coalition between the Free Soil and the DemocraticParties in some counties and towns, each supporting the candidatesof the other not specially obnoxious to them, neither partycommitting itself to the principles of the other party orwaiving its own. In the fall of the next year, 1850, thispolicy was pursued throughout the State and resulted in theelection by the Legislature of a Democratic Governor, Mr. Boutwell, and of Charles Sumner as the successor of DanielWebster in the Senate. The experiment was repeated with likesuccess in the fall of 1851. 

These two parties had little in common. They could not wellact together in State matters without some principle or purposeon which they were agreed other than mere desire for officeand opposition to the Whig Party. They found a common groundin the support of a law providing for secrecy in the ballot. There had been great complaint that the manufacturers, especiallyin Lowell, who were in general zealous Whig partisans, usedan undue influence over their workmen. It was said that aman known to be a Democrat, or a Free Soiler, was pretty likelyto get his discharge from the employ of any great manufacturingcorporation that had occasion to reduce its force, and thathe would have no chance to get an increase of wages. I donot now believe there was much foundation for this accusation. But it was believed by many people at the time. So a lawrequiring secrecy in the ballot was framed and enacted inspite of great resistance from the Whigs. This has undoubtedlyproved a good policy, and has prevailed in Massachusetts eversince, and now prevails largely throughout the country. 

But this one measure was not enough to hold together elementsotherwise so discordant. So the Democratic and Free Soilleaders agreed to call a convention to revise the Constitutionof the Commonwealth, which had remained unchanged save ina few particulars since 1780. There had been a Conventionfor that purpose in 1820, made necessary by the separationof Maine. But the old Constitution had been little altered. The concentration of the population in large towns and citieshad caused a demand for a new distribution of political power. Many people desired an elective judiciary. Others desiredthat the judges should hold office for brief terms insteadof the old tenure for life. There was a great demand forthe popular election of Sheriffs and District Attorneys, whounder the existing system were appointed by the Governor. Others desired the choice of Senators, who had before beenchosen by the several counties on a joint ticket, by singledistricts. A proposition for a Convention was submitted tothe people by the Legislature of 1851. But the people wereattached to the old Constitution. There was a special dreadof any change in the independent tenure of the judiciary. So although the coalition had a majority in the State theproposition for a Constitutional Convention was defeated. 

The scheme was renewed the next year in the Legislature of1852, of which I was a member. Several of the Free Soilers, among which I was included, were unwilling to have the mattertried again without a distinct assurance that there shouldbe no meddling with the judiciary. This assurance was givenin the report of a joint committee of the Legislature to whomthe matter was committed, consisting of the leaders of theDemocratic and Republican parties, who reported that therewas no purpose to change the judicial tenure with which thepeople were well satisfied. Accordingly I voted for it. Themeasure got a bare majority in the House which it would neverwould have had without that stipulation. The plan was submittedto the people again with a proposition that the choice ofdelegates to the Constitutional Convention should be by secretballot. The people approved the plan by a substantial majority. 

I have no doubt that the pledge above mentioned was made ingood faith and that the men who made it meant to keep it. But before the Convention met two things happened which changedthe conditions. The coalition was wrecked. There were twocauses for its overthrow. One of them was the appointmentby Governor Boutwell of Caleb Cushing to a seat on the SupremeBench of Massachusetts. General Cushing was a man of greataccomplishment, though never a great lawyer. He could collectwith wonderful industry all the facts bearing on any historicquestion and everything that had been said on either sideof any question of law. But he never had a gift of cogentargument that would convince any judge or jury. He owedhis success in life largely to the personal favor of men whoknew him and were charmed by his agreeable quality. He wasregarded by the people of Massachusetts as a man without moralconvictions and as utterly subservient to the slave power. So his appointment was a great shock to the Anti-Slavery menand made them believe that it was not safe to put politicalpower in Democratic hands. General Cushing vindicated thisopinion afterward by the letter written when he was Attorney-General in the Cabinet of President Pierce declaring thatthe Anti-Slavery movement in the North "must be crushed out, "and also by a letter written to Jefferson Davis after thebeginning of the Rebellion recommending some person to himfor some service to the Confederacy. The discovery of thisletter compelled President Grant who had been induced to nominatehim for Chief Justice to withdraw the nomination. The othercause was the passage of the bill for the prohibition of themanufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, known as the Mainelaw. This measure had passed the Legislature, containinga provision for its submission to the people. It was vetoedby Governor Boutwell. The reason assigned by him was hisobjection to the provision for its submission to the people, without the secret ballot. The referendum, a scheme by whichmen charged with political duties avoid responsibility bysubmitting to the people measures which they fear may be unpopular, --has never found much favor in Massachusetts. After manychanges of sentiment, and after passing, modifying, and repealingmany laws, the people of the Commonwealth seem to have settleddown on a policy which permits each town or city to decideby vote whether the sale of liquor shall be permitted withintheir limits. The bill was then passed, without the referenceto the people. But the measure sealed the fate of the coalition. Some of its provisions, especially that for seizing and destroyingstocks of liquor kept for sale in violation of law, were verysevere, and were held unconstitutional by the Court. Theliquor sellers, almost all of them, were Democrats. Theywould not readily submit to a law which made their callingcriminal. 

So the Whigs were restored to power by the fall electionin 1852. Their heads were turned by their success. Theydid not quite dare to repeal the law providing for a ConstitutionalConvention, but they undertook to repeal so much of it asrequired that the choice of delegates should be by secretballot. The minority resisted this repeal with all theirmight. They alleged with great reason that it was not decentfor the Legislature to repeal a provision which the peoplehas expressly approved. But their resistance was in vain, and after a long and angry struggle which stirred the peopleof the Commonwealth profoundly the provision for the secretballot was abrogated. But the result of the contest was thatthe Whigs were routed at the special election for delegatesto the Convention. That body was controlled by the Coalitionby a very large majority. Their triumph made them also losetheir heads. 

So when the Convention assembled in 1853, they disregardedthe pledges which had enabled them to get the assent of thepeople to calling the convention, and provided that the tenureof office of the Judges of the Supreme Court should be forten years only, and that the Judges of Probate should be electedby the people of the several counties once in three years. It is said, and, as I have good reason to know, very truly, that this action of the Convention was taken in consequenceof a quarrel in Court between the late Judge Merrick and GeneralButler and Mr. Josiah G. Abbott, two eminent leaders ofthe Democrats, members of the Convention. They had neitherof them agreed to the proposition to change the judicial tenure. They were absent from the convention for several days inthe trial of an important cause before Merrick, and returnedangry with the Judge and determined to do something to curbthe independent power of the Judges. The proposition wasadopted. 

These schemes were a distinct violation of the pledge whichhad been given when the Legislature submitted to the peoplethe proposition for calling the Convention. Of course itwas a fair answer to this complaint to say that the membersof the committee who made that report could in such a matterbind nobody but themselves. That was true. But I think ifthe men who signed that report, and the men who joined themin giving the assurance to the people, had been earnest andzealous in the matter it is quite likely they could have preventedthe action of the Convention. 

The scheme for a new constitution passed the Convention bya large majority and was submitted to the people. The Whigleaders, who seemed to have had all their wisdom and energytaken out of them when the Free Soilers left them, were muchalarmed by the strength of the discontent with the existingorder of things manifested by the coalition victory in theelection of the Constitutional Convention. Many of them concludedthat it would be unwise to resist the popular feeling. OneSaturday afternoon during that summer I was in the officeof Francis Wayland, a great friend of mine, long Dean of theNew Haven Law School, when Henry S. Washburn, a member ofthe Whig State Central Committee, came into Wayland's officeand told me he had just attended a meeting of the Committeethat day and that it determined to make no contest againstthe new Constitution. The Springfield _Republican, _ thena Whig journal, had an article that day, or the followingMonday, to the same effect. I was very much disturbed. Ihurried to Concord by the first train Monday morning, andsaw my brother, who was then a Judge of the Court of CommonPleas. He agreed with me in thinking that the proposed schemeof government a very bad one. He went at once to Cambridgeand saw John G. Palfrey, a very able and influential leaderof the Free Soilers. Mr. Palfrey agreed that the Constitutionought to be defeated, if possible. Judge Hoar and he satdown together and prepared a pamphlet, the Judge furnishingall the legal argument and Mr. Palfrey the rest, clothingit all in his inimitable style. It was published under Dr. Palfrey's name. Judge Hoar, being then upon the bench, didnot think it becoming to take any more public action in thematter, although he made his opinion known to all personswho cared to know it. Charles Francis Adams and Marcus Mortonalso made powerful arguments on the same side. My father, Samuel Hoar, also made several speeches against the Constitution. At this defection of so many Free Soilers the Whig leaderstook heart and made a vigorous and successful resistance. 

The result was that the people voted down the whole constitution. Several of the most eminent leaders of the Free Soilers andDemocrats separated themselves from their party and joinedthe Whigs in defeating it. Among them were Marcus Morton, formerly Governor and Judge of the Supreme Court; John G. Palfrey, who had been the Free Soil candidate for Governor;Charles Francis Adams, afterward member of Congress and Ministerto England, and Samuel Hoar. 

I was myself, at this time, an enthusiastic Free Soiler, and was, as I have said, Chairman of the Republican CountyCommittee, but I joined the rebels against the dominant feelingof my party. 

The defeat of the Constitution was aided, however, undoubtedlyby a very just and righteous proposal which was submittedto a separate vote of the people, but which had its effecton the feeling in regard to the whole scheme, to prohibitthe use of any money raised by taxation for sectarian schools. To this the Catholic clergy were opposed, and the Catholicvote, not however then very important in Massachusetts, wascast against the whole scheme. 

But the Whigs did not entirely get over the feeling thatsomething must be done to propitiate the desire for change. Accordingly they, through the Legislature, submitted to thepeople propositions for the election by the people of thecounties of Sheriffs and District Attorneys who before thattime had been appointed by the Governor. These proposalswere ratified by the people and became part of the Constitution. I have always thought the change a bad one. I think the Governorlikely to make quite as good if not a better choice of Sheriffsand District Attorneys than the people. But the objectionto the new system is this. So long as the State makes thelaws, the State, whether acting by a popular vote or throughits executive, should have the power to enforce them and selectthe instrumentalities for that purpose. Now if the particularlaw which the State enacts be unpopular in a particular county, and the people be determined to defeat it, no Sheriff or DistrictAttorney can be elected who will enforce it. That has beenshown in the case of the legislation to prohibit or regulatethe sale of intoxicating liquors in Suffolk County. Thoselaws have been always unpopular and since the change in themode of appointment of District Attorneys and Sheriffs havenot been enforced until they were modified to meet the popularobjections. This difficulty applies also to the enforcingof laws for the employment of children in factories. TheLegislature undertook to meet this difficulty by creatingofficials, called State Constables, to be appointed by theGovernor and to enforce the liquor laws and the laws regulatingchild labor. But that did not wholly cure the evil. Theofficials appointed solely to enforce a law against whichthere are strong objections in any quarter are always themselvesunpopular. The Sheriffs have been from the beginning officialsof great dignity, commanding popular respect and confidence. So if it were difficult to enforce the law the character ofthe Sheriff was a great force on its side. But in the caseof these particular laws persons of less dignity and authority, often quite obscure when they are appointed, whose whole dutyis odious to the persons to be affected by it, instead ofgiving dignity to the law tend to make it unpopular by theirattempts to enforce it. Indeed in my opinion the MassachusettsConstitution of 1780 was as nearly a perfect system of governmentas was ever devised. Some changes in it were made necessaryby the separation of Maine. I suppose the abrogation of theprovision that every man should pay a tax for the supportof public worship somewhere was demanded by a public sentimentit would have been impossible to resist, and undoubtedly theaggregation of population in the large cities and towns requireda change in the system of representation. But I think theold method of electing Senators, where it was necessary thata man should have a reputation through an entire county tobe chosen, to be better than the system of electing them bysmall single districts, and I think the slight property qualificationwas highly useful as a stimulant to saving and economy. 

It is, however, a great pity that the labors of this ConstitutionalConvention were wasted. It was a very able body of men. Withthe exception of the Convention that framed the Constitutionin the beginning, and the Convention which revised it in 1820, after the separation from Maine, I doubt whether so able abody of men ever assembled in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or, with very few exceptions indeed, in the entire country. The debates, which are preserved in three thick and almostforgotten volumes, are full of instructive and admirable essayson the theory of constitutional government. Among the memberswere Rufus Choate, Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, George N. Briggs, Marcus Morton, Marcus Morton, Jr. , Henry L. Dawes, Charles Allen, George S. Hillard, Richard H. Dana, GeorgeS. Boutwell, Otis P. Lord, Peleg Sprague, Simon Greenleaf, and Sidney Bartlett. 

There were a good many interesting incidents not, I believe, recorded in the report of the debates, which are worth preserving. 

One was a spirited reply made by George S. Hillard to BenjaminF. Butler, who had bitterly attacked Chief Justice Shaw, thenan object of profound reverence to nearly the whole peopleof the Commonwealth. Butler spoke of his harsh and roughmanner of dealing with counsel. To which Hillard replied, pointing at Butler: "While we have jackals and hyenas atthe bar, we want the old lion upon the bench, with one blowof his huge paw to bring their scalps over their eyes. "

Hillard was an accomplished and eloquent man, "of whom, " Mr. Webster said in the Senate of the United States, "the besthopes are to be entertained. " But he lacked vigor and courageto assert his own opinions against the social influences ofBoston, which were brought to bear with great severity onthe anti-slavery leaders. 

Hillard was not so fortunate in another encounter. He undertookto attack Richard H. Dana, and to reproach him for votingfor a scheme of representation which somewhat diminished theenormous political power of Boston. She elected all her representativeson one ballot, and had a power altogether disproportionateto that of the country. He said, speaking of Dana: "He shouldremember that the bread he and I both eat comes from the businessmen of Boston. He ought not, like an ungrateful child, tostrike at the hand that feeds him. " Dana replied with greatindignation, ending with the sentence: "The hand that feedsme--the hand that feeds me, sir? No hand feeds me that hasa right to control my opinions!"

A _bon mot_ of Henry Wilson is also worth putting on record. Somebody, who was speaking of the importance of the Massachusettstown meeting, said that it was not merely a place for towngovernment alone, but that it was a place where the peopleof the town met from scattered and sometimes secluded dwelling-places to cultivate each other's acquaintance, to talk overthe news of the day and all matters of public interest; andthat it was a sort of farmers' exchange, where they couldcompare notes on the state of agriculture, and even sometimesswap oxen. Governor Briggs, who had been beaten as a candidatefor reelection by the Coalition, replied to this speech andsaid, referring to the Coalition, "that the gentlemen on theother side seemed to have carried their trading and swappingof oxen into politics, and into the high offices of the state. "To which Henry Wilson answered, referring to Briggs's ownloss of his office, "that so long as the people were satisfiedwith the trade, it did not become the oxen to complain. "

Undoubtedly the ablest member of the Convention was CharlesAllen. He spoke seldom and briefly, but always with greatauthority and power. Late in the proceedings of the Conventiona rule was established limiting the speakers to thirty minuteseach. Hillard, who was one of the delegates from Boston, madea very carefully prepared speech on some pending question. Allen closed the debate, making no reference whatever to Hillard'selaborate and most eloquent argument, until he was about tosit down, when he said: "Mr. President, I believe my timeis up?" The President answered: "The gentleman from Worcesterhas two minutes more. " "Two minutes!" exclaimed Allen. "Timeenough to answer the gentleman from Boston. " And he proceededin that brief period to deal a few strokes with his keen scimitar, which effectually demolished Hillard's elaborate structure. 

There is nothing in the political excitements of recent yearswhich approaches in intensity that of the period from 1848until the breaking out of the War. The people of Massachusettsfelt the most profound interest in the great conflict betweenslavery and freedom for the possession of the vast territorybetween the Mississippi and the Pacific. But almost everyman in Massachusetts felt the Fugitive Slave Law as a personaldishonor. I think no great public calamity, not the deathof Webster, not the death of Sumner, not the loss of greatbattles during the War, brought such a sense of gloom overthe whole State as the surrender of Anthony Burns and of Sims. Worcester, where I dwelt, was the centre and stronghold ofthe anti-slavery feeling in Massachusetts. This odious statutewas, perhaps, the greatest single cause of the union of thepeople of the North in opposition to the further encroachmentsof slavery. Yet but two slaves were taken back into slaveryfrom Massachusetts by reason of its provisions. I will notundertake to tell the story of those years which will forman important chapter in the history of the country. But Ihad a special knowledge of two occurrences which are alludedto by Colonel Higginson in his charming essay entitled, "CheerfulYesterdays, " in regard to which that most delightful writerand admirable gentleman has fallen into some slight errorsof recollection. 

The first person seized under the Fugitive Slave Law was aslave named Shadrach. He was brought to trial before GeorgeT. Curtis, United States Commissioner. One of the chief complaintsagainst the Fugitive Slave Law was that it did not give theman claimed as a slave, where his liberty and that of hisposterity were at stake, the right to a jury trial which theConstitution secured in all cases of property involving morethan twenty dollars, or in all cases where he was chargedwith the slightest crime or offence. Further, the Commissionerwas to receive twice as much if the man were surrendered intoslavery as if he were discharged. Horace Mann, in one ofhis speeches, commented on this feature of the law with terribleseverity. He also pointed out that the Commissioner was nota judicial officer with an independent tenure, but only thecreature of the courts and removable at any time. He alsodwelt upon what he conceived to be the unfair dealing of theCommissioners who had presided at the trial of the threeslaves who had been tried in Massachusetts, and added: "Pilate, fellow-citizens, was at least a Judge, though he acted likea Commissioner. "

Elizur Wright, a well-known Abolitionist, editor of the _Chronotype, _was indicted in the United States Court for aiding in therescue of Shadrach. While the hearing before Geo. T. Curtison the proceedings for the rendition of Shadrach was goingon, a large number of men, chiefly negroes, made their wayinto the court-room by one door, swept through, taking thefugitive along with them, and out at the other, leaving theindignant Commissioner to telegraph to Mr. Webster in Washingtonthat he thought it was a case of levying war. I went intothe court-room during the trial of Mr. Wright, and saw seatedin the front row of the jury, wearing a face of intense gravity, my old friend Francis Bigelow, always spoken of in Concordas "Mr. Bigelow, the blacksmith. " He was a Free Soiler andhis wife a Garrison Abolitionist. His house was a stationon the underground railroad where fugitive slaves were harboredon their way to Canada. Shadrach had been put into a buggyand driven out as far as Concord, and kept over night by Bigelowat his house, and sent on his way toward the North Star thenext morning. Richard H. Dana, who was counsel for ElizurWright, asked Judge Hoar what sort of man Bigelow was. Towhich the Judge replied: "He is a thoroughly honest man, andwill decide the case according to the law and the evidenceas he believes them to be. But I think it will take a gooddeal of evidence to convince him that one man owns another. "

It is not, perhaps, pertinent to my personal recollectionsbut it may be worth while to tell my readers that TheodoreParker, Wendell Phillips, and some others were indicted afterwardfor participation in an intended rescue of Anthony Burns, another fugitive slave. The indictment was quashed by JudgeCurtis, who had probably got pretty sick of the whole thing. But Parker, while in jail awaiting trial, prepared a defence, which is printed, and which is one of the most marvellousexamples of scathing and burning denunciation to be foundin all literature. I commend it to young men as worth theirstudy. 

Some time after the Shadrach case, Asa O. Butman, a UnitedStates Deputy Marshal, who had been quite active and odiousin the arrest and extradition of Burns, came to Worcesterone Saturday afternoon, and stopped at the American TemperanceHouse. This was October 30, 1854. It was believed that hewas in search of information about some fugitive negroes whowere supposed to be in Worcester, and I suppose that to bethe fact, although it was claimed that his errand was to summonwitnesses against persons concerned in the riot which tookplace when Burns was captured. The fact of his presence becameknown in the course of the day on Sunday, and a pretty angrycrowd began to gather in the streets in the neighborhood ofthe American House. Butman learned his danger, and took refugein the City Marshal's office in the City Hall, where the policeforce of the city were gathered for his protection. No attackwas made during the night, but it was not deemed prudent tohave Butman leave his shelter. I had been to Concord to spendSunday with my kindred there. I got to Worcester at nineo'clock Monday morning, and was told at the station of thecondition of things. I went immediately to the City Hall, made my way through the crowd to the building, and was admittedto the police office by the City Marshal, who was my client, and apt to depend on me for legal advice. I found Butmanin a state of great terror. It was evident that the crowdwas too large for any police force which the little city hadin its service. Unless it should be pacified, something waslikely to happen which we should all have much regretted. I accordingly went out and addressed the crowd from the stepsof the City Hall. They listened to me respectfully enough. I was pretty well known through the city as an earnest FreeSoiler, and as sharing the public feeling of indignationagainst the delivering up of fugitives. I reminded the crowdthat my father and sister had been expelled from Charleston, S. C. , where he had gone at the risk of his life to defendMassachusetts colored sailors who were imprisoned there, andappealed to them not to give the people of South Carolinathe right to excuse their own conduct by citing the exampleof Massachusetts. There were shouts from the crowd: "Willhe promise to leave Worcester and never come back?" Butman, who was inside, terribly frightened, said he would promisenever to come to Worcester again as long as he lived. I didnot, however, repeat Butman's promise to the crowd. I thoughthe ought to go without conditions. The time approached forthe train to pass through Worcester for Boston. It went froma little wooden station near the site of the present UnionDepot, about half a mile from the City Hall. It was determined, on consultation, to take advantage of an apparently pacificmood of the crowd, and to start Butman at once for the stationin time to catch the train. I took one arm and I am quitesure Colonel Higginson took the other; a few policemen wentahead and a few behind; and we started from the back doorof the City Hall. The mob soon found what we were after andthronged around us. It has been estimated that a crowd oftwo thousand people at least surrounded Butman and his convoy. I suppose he had no friend or defender among the number. Mostof them wanted to frighten him; some of them to injure him, though not to kill him. There were a few angry negroes, Isuppose, excited and maddened by their not unnatural or unjustifiableresentment against the fellow who had been the ready and notorioustool of the slave-catchers, who would have killed him ifthey could. He was kicked several times by persons who succeededin the swaying and surging of the crowd, in getting throughhis guard, and once knocked onto his knees by a heavy blowin the back of the neck which came from a powerful negro, who had a stone in his hand which increased the force of theblow. I believe he was hit also by some missiles. He reachedthe depot almost lifeless with terror. The train was standingthere, and started just after we arrived. It was impossibleto get him into it. It was then endeavored to put him intoa buggy which was standing outside of the depot, but the owner, a young business man of Worcester, seized the bridle of hishorse and stoutly refused to allow the horse to start. Butmanwas then thrust into a hack, into which one or two other personsalso got, and the hack was driven rapidly through the crowdwith no damage but the breaking of the windows. Mr. Higginsonthought Butman was left at Westboro'; but my recollection, which is very distinct, and with which I think he now agrees, is that Lovell Baker, the City Marshal, followed with hisown horse and buggy, and took Butman from the hack after hegot a short distance out of Worcester. Butman implored himnot to leave him at the way-station, fearing that the crowdwould come down in an accommodation train, which went alsoabout that time, and waylay him there. So Baker drove himthe whole distance to Boston, forty miles. When Butman gotto the city, he was afraid that the news of the Worcesterriot might have reached Boston, and have excited the peoplethere; and, by his earnest solicitation, Baker took Butmanby unfrequented streets across the city to a place where hethought he could be concealed until the excitement abated. Baker, who died a short time ago in Worcester, aged over ninety, told me the whole story immediately on his return. 

The proceeding undoubtedly was not to be justified; but itwas a satisfaction to know that no slave-hunter came to Worcesterafter that occurrence. Five or six people--including, ifI am not mistaken, Mr. Higginson himself, certainly includingJoseph A. Howland, a well-known Abolitionist and non-resistant, and also including Martin Stowell, who was afterward indictedfor killing Batchelder, a Marshal who took part in the renditionof Burns--were complained of before the police court, andbound over to await the action of the grand jury. The grandjury returned no indictment, except against one colored man. Mr. District Attorney Aldrich was quite disgusted at this, and promptly _nol prossed_ that indictment. And so endedthe famous Butman riot. 

The Whigs were in a minority in Massachusetts after the year1848. But the constitution required a majority of all thevotes to elect a Governor; and, in the case of no choice, theGovernor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Executive Council, and the Senators from counties where there had been no electionwere chosen on joint ballot by the members elected to thetwo Houses. The Whigs were able to carry the Legislature, and in that way chose their Governor and Lieutenant Governor, elected Councillors, and filled vacancies in the Senate. Butthe Free Soil and Democratic leaders were not content to leavethe power in the hands of the Whig minority. In 1849 a fewRepresentatives and Senators were chosen to the Legislatureby a union of the Free Soil and Democratic Parties. In theautumn of 1850 this arrangement was extended through the State. The Whigs were in a minority in the Legislature, and the coalitionproceeded to elect a Democratic Governor and Lieutenant Governorand an Executive Council. In consideration of giving theseoffices to the Democrats, it was agreed that Mr. Sumner shouldbe chosen Senator. A few of the Democrats, who desired tokeep their party relations with the South, refused to agreeto this arrangement. Mr. Winthrop was the Whig candidate. The Senate, on its part, promptly elected Mr. Sumner, butthere was a long contest in the House of Representatives, extending through three months. Twenty-six ballots were cast, of which no candidate had a majority until the last. Mr. Sumner several times came within two or three votes of anelection. At last it was apparent that some member had castmore than one vote; and an order was offered by Sidney Bartlett, an eminent Whig member from Boston, requiring the membersto bring in their votes in sealed envelopes. This resultedin the choice of Sumner. 

Another contribution to Mr. Sumner's election ought not tobe forgotten. The town of Fall River was represented by Whigs;but it was a community where there was a strong anti-slaveryfeeling. A town-meeting was called by the friends of Mr. Sumner, and a motion made to instruct their representatives, according to the right of the people declared in the constitutionof Massachusetts, to vote for Sumner. An earnest and eloquentspeech in favor of the resolution was made by Robert T. Davis, a young Quaker, since a distinguished member of Congress. The resolution was carried, which Mr. Borden, one of theRepresentatives from Fall River, obeyed. The result was Sumner'selection by a single vote. 

As stated in the preceding chapter, I was a member in 1852of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, then consistingof about four hundred and twenty members. It was, I think, as admirable a body of men for the training of a public speakeras I ever knew. The members were honest. The large majoritywas made up of sensible, strong-headed country farmers, ratherslow in making up their minds, but making them up always onconsiderations of what was best for the Commonwealth. Therewas a time, when the opinion of the House seemed to be precipitatingor crystallizing, not too early in the debate and not toolate, when a vigorous and effective speech had great influence. I was made Chairman of the Committee of Probate and Chancery, the second law committee in the House; and I suppose it isnot presumptuous to say that I did as much of the hard workof the body and had as much influence in leading its actionand shaping its legislation as anybody. 

In the year 1856 I was, with Eli Thayer, sent from Worcesteras a delegate to a Convention held at Buffalo to concert measuresto help the settlers from the Free States in their contestwith slave owners led by Atchison and Stringfellow, of Missouri, for the possession of Kansas. Atchison had been Presidentpro tempore of the Senate of the United States. The slaveholders had organized a formidable body of men to drive outthe Free State settlers from the Territories, which had justbeen opened after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Wemet at Buffalo some gentlemen, among whom was Zachariah Chandler, of Michigan, then in the vigor of early manhood. We madearrangements for getting large contributions of money andarms with which the Northern emigrants were equipped, andwhich undoubtedly enabled them to maintain successfully theirresistance and establish their free State. 

CHAPTER XITHE KNOW NOTHING PARTY AND ITS OVERTHROW

The political history of Massachusetts from 1846 to 1865is, in general, the history of the share of the Commonwealthin the great National contest with Slavery; the beginningand growth of the Free Soil or Republican Party and the puttingdown of the Rebellion. The rise and dominion for three years, and the final overthrow of the Know Nothing Party is an episodewhich should not be wholly omitted, although it is an episodewhich might be omitted without injury to the sense. 

There have been, ever since the Irish immigration which begunsomewhere about 1840 down to to-day, a great many worthy peoplewho have been afraid of the Pope and the influence of Catholicismin this country, and have been exceedingly jealous of theinfluence of foreigners, especially of those of the RomanCatholic Church. Self-seeking political adventurers and demagogueshave not been slow to take advantage of this feeling for theirown purposes. They have, for some reason, always preferredto make their political movement in secret societies. TheCatholic vote had generally been cast for the Democrats, andwas supposed to be largely influenced by the Catholic clergy. It was thought that this influence had a good deal to do withdefeating Mr. Clay in 1844. A movement of this kind sweptover the country after the Presidential election of 1852. It had nearly spent its force by 1856. It made little headwayat the South, except in two or three States. There was astruggle with it in Virginia, where it was defeated by thesuperhuman energy of Henry A. Wise. The party organized forthe purpose of excluding men of foreign birth from any sharein the Government, sometimes called the American Party, wasgenerally called the Know-Nothing Party, a name which camefrom the answer each member was expected to make to any inquiryfrom an outsider, "I know nothing about it. "

This party swept Massachusetts in the autumn of 1854. Itelected in that year Governor, Lieutenant Governor, all theofficers of the State Government, every member of both Housesof the Legislature, except two from the town of Northampton, and every member of Congress. Its candidate for Governorwas Henry J. Gardner, a very skilful political organizer. He had a book in which he had the names of men in every townin the Commonwealth whom he attached to his personal fortunesby promises, or flattery, or because in some cases of theirsincere belief in the doctrine. He understood better thanany other man I ever knew the value of getting the unitedsupport of men who were without special influence, even theman who were odious or ridiculous among their own neighbors, but who united might be a very formidable force. He organizedwith great skill and success the knave-power and the donkey-power of the Commonwealth. 

But a good many Anti-Slavery men who thought the party feelingof the Whigs and Democrats was a great obstacle to their cause, joined the movement simply in order that they might get ridof the old parties, and prepare the State as with a subsoilplow for a new one. They had no belief in the proscriptivedoctrines, and were willing that men of foreign birth andCatholics should have their just rights, and expected to destroythe Know Nothing Party in its turn when it had destroyed Whiggeryand Democracy. Of these was Henry Wilson, who owed his firstelection to the Senate to the Know Nothing Legislature; andEli Thayer, who had been the organizer of the Emigrant AidSociety, and the movement for the deliverance of Kansas andNebraska. Both these gentlemen abandoned the Know NothingParty the year after its formation. Mr. Thayer was electedas a Republican to Congress in 1856, and reelected in 1858. But he separated from his political associates and espousedthe squatter sovereignty doctrines of Stephen A. Douglas. He, I have no doubt, was a sincere Anti-Slavery man. Buthe liked to do things in peculiar and original ways of hisown, and was impatient of slow and old-fashioned methods. So he got estranged from his Republican brethren, was defeatedas a candidate for Congress in 1860, took no part in publicactivities during the time of the war, became somewhat soured, and landed in the Democratic Party. I always had a greatliking for him, and deem him entitled to great public gratitudefor his services in the rescue of Kansas from what was knownas Border Ruffianism. 

Neither Charles Sumner nor Charles Allen ever tolerated theKnow Nothing movement or made any terms with it. Its proscriptivenessand its secrecy were alike repugnant to their honest, braveand liberty-loving souls. Sumner was advised, as the questionof his reelection was coming on in January, 1857, to keepsilent about Know Nothingism. He was told that the Slaveryquestion was enough for one man to deal with, and that ifhe would only hold his peace all the parties would unite inhis reelection. He answered the advice with his brave challenge. He went about the Commonwealth, denouncing the intolerantand proscriptive doctrine of the Know Nothings. He told them:"You have no real principle on which you can stand. You arenothing but a party of Gardnerites. "

Charles Allen addressed a little company, of which I wasone, in the City Hall at Worcester in the autumn of 1854, when Know Nothingism was in the height of its strength. Hesaid:

"Perhaps I am speaking too boldly, but I learned to speakboldly a long time ago. I will speak my sentiments in theface of any organization; or, if it does not show its face, though its secret mines are beneath my feet, and unseen handsready to apply the match, I will declare those sentimentsthat a freeman is bound to utter. "

The people of Massachusetts elected Gardner Governor in 1854, 1855 and 1856. But in the autumn of 1857 he was beaten underthe leadership of General Banks. The party lingered until1856 when there was an attempt to keep it alive in the Presidentialcampaign of that year when Millard Fillmore was its candidatefor the Presidency. 

But it was destroyed in the consuming fire kindled by theCivil War, and has not since been heard of by its old name. 

The proscriptive and intolerant opposition to Catholicism, especially against men of foreign birth, has shown its headoccasionally. It appeared in its most formidable shape ina secret organization known as the A. P. A. , of which I shallspeak later. It is utterly uncongenial to the spirit of trueAmericanism, and will never have any considerable permanentstrength. 

CHAPTER XIIELECTION TO CONGRESS

In the year 1868 one chapter of my life ended and a verydifferent one began. In the beginning of that year I hadno doubt that what remained of my life would be devoted tomy profession, and to discharging as well as I could theduties of good citizenship in the community to which I wasso strongly attached. But it was ordered otherwise. Mylife in Worcester came to an end, and I shall if I live tocomplete my present term in the Senate have spent thirty-eight years in the National service. 

This came from no ambition of mine. In May, 1868, I sailedfor Europe, broken down in health by hard work. During myabsence, some of the leading Republicans of the District issuedan appeal recommending me as a candidate for Congress. Therewere five or six other candidates. They were all of themmen of great popularity, with hosts of friends and supporters. Among them was John D. Baldwin, then holding the seat, a veteranin the Anti-Slavery Service, editor of the Worcester _Spy, _one of the most influential papers in New England. It hadbeen the almost unvarying custom of the people of Massachusettsto reelect an old member who had served as faithfully as Mr. Baldwin. Another candidate was Francis W. Bird, one of thefounders of the Anti-Slavery Party, and a man who had beena powerful supporter by speech and pen and wise counsel andlarge influence of the Republican Party since its foundation. He was supported by the powerful influence of Charles Sumner, then at the height of his popularity, and by Adin Thayer, the ablest political organizer in Massachusetts. Anothercandidate was Amasa Walker, the eminent writer on politicaleconomy, whose name has since been rendered still more illustriousby the brilliant public service of his son. Another was Mr. Mayhew, a successful manufacturer, of large wealth, and adeserved favorite in Milford, the second town in the District, where he resided. Another still was Lucius W. Pond, a generousand warm-hearted man, although he afterward fell from hishigh place. He was a Methodist. That denomination had alwaysbeen strong and influential in the Worcester District, andits members have always stood stanchly by the men of theirown household when candidates for political office. Mr. Pondwas also a member of the Masonic Order and of other secretassociations. I ought however to say, in justice to the MasonicFraternity, that I have never been able to see that therewas any truth whatever in the charge that the members of thatOrder deemed it their duty to support each other in politics, or when on juries. Many a client has told me with great alarmthat his opponent was a Mason, and that one or more leadingMasons were on the jury that were to try the case. I alwaysrefused to challenge a juryman on that account, and I neverfound that the man's being a Mason had the least effect inpreventing him from rendering a just verdict. I have manyintimate friends both political and personal in that Order, although I never belonged to it and never sympathized withor approved of secret societies in a Republic. 

My strength was due to the fact that I had in general thegood will of my competitors. So if any one failed to geta majority it was easy to transfer his strength to me. Perhapsalso there was a feeling, growing out of the fact that I hadhad great experience in public speaking at the Bar and inpolitical meetings, that I might be able to take a prominentpart in the debates in the House, a faculty which all my competitorslacked, except Mr. Bird. But chiefly I had the advantageof the good will of my associates in my own profession, abody whose influence is always justly very powerful and whowere all, with scarcely an exception, my close and strongfriends. I had, beside all that, a great many clients inevery town in the District who had been in the habit of trustingme with their most intimate and secret concerns, and withwhom I had formed the attachment which in those days usedto exist between counsel and client. 

I had said before I went to Europe that if nominated I wouldaccept the office. I thought it doubtful whether my strengthwould permit me to continue my professional work without interruption. I had no thought of remaining in Congress, if I were elected, more than one term, or perhaps two. Indeed I did not contemplatethe probability of a nomination as a very serious one. 

But almost before I got out of the sight of land the burdenlifted and my health came back. When I got home I was utterlysick of the whole business. But my friends had been committedto my support. They claimed that I could not withdraw honorablyafter the assurance I had given them before I went away. So, rather to my disgust, I was nominated on the first formalballot. I had not expected the result. I had gone to takea ride while the Convention was in session. So they wereobliged to wait for me. I was found with some difficultyand went in and made a brief speech which I ended by saying:"If I shall fail to satisfy you, the trust you have so freelyconferred you can as freely recall. If I shall fail to satisfymyself, I shall at least have the comfort of reflecting thatit is by your free choice that this nomination has been conferred. It has not been begged for, or bargained for, or intriguedfor, or crawled into. If elected I shall at the close ofthe term lay down the honors of the office with the same cheerfulnesswith which I now accept the nomination. "

I expected to go back to my home and my profession at theend of one term. My law practice was rapidly increasing. Professional charges in those days were exceedingly moderateas compared with the scale of prices now, and I had inheritedthe habit of charging low fees from my partner and friend, Emory Washburn. If I had the same class of clients now thatI had then, I could at the present scale of charges for professionalservice easily be earning more than fifty thousand dollarsa year, and I could earn it without going to my office inthe evening, and also take a good vacation every summer. 

My life from that time has been devoted altogether to thepublic service. I have, what is commonly expected of menwho represent Massachusetts in the Senate, delivered a goodmany literary and historical addresses, and have taken partin political campaigns, and have occasionally eked out a scantysalary by some professional work in the vacations. But Ithink I may fairly claim that I have done my share of thework of the Senate and of the House to the best of my ability. Senator Edmunds when he left the Senate was kind enough tocompliment me by saying that the whole work of the Senatewas done by six men, of whom I was one. I do not supposeMr. Edmunds meant the number six to be taken literally. Buthe is a gentleman certainly never given to flattery or emptycompliment. So I think I might call him as a witness that, in his time, so far as hard work is concerned I did my best. I am not quite so confident that he would testify to the wisdomof my course on all occasions. 

I did not, as I have said, expect when I entered to remainin public life more than one term. But I became interestedin the bill known as the National Education Bill, and acceptedanother election with a view to doing what I could to carrythat through. At the end of the next term I announced mypurpose to withdraw. But there was a very earnest letterto me signed by the principal men in the district, includingseveral gentlemen, any one of whom might very naturally haveexpected to be my successor, saying it was not for the interestof the people of the district to make a change. 

Two years after I made a formal and peremptory refusal tobe a candidate again, which was encountered by a like appeal. It was the year of what was called the Tidal Wave which sweptthe Republicans from power in the House of Representatives. It was very doubtful whether they could carry the WorcesterDistrict. The Democrats elected a majority of the Massachusettsdelegation in the National House of Representatives. I waselected by a few hundred only, although I was elected by severalthousand on former occasions. I could not very well refuseto accept the nomination at a time of great political peril. So I continued once more. At the end of that time I wroteanother peremptory refusal, and my successor was nominatedand elected. 

I have been often charged with a blind and zealous attachmentto party. The charge is sometimes made by persons who considerthat I desire to do right, but think that my understandingand intellectual faculties are guided and blinded by thatemotion. Others are not so charitable. One very self-satisfiedcritic, Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, sometimes in prose andsometimes, A screechin' out prosaic verse An' like to bust, says that I differ from my honorable colleague, Mr. Lodge, in that Mr. Lodge has no conscience, while I have a consciencebut never obey it. If any man be disposed to accept theseestimates, it is not likely that I can convince him to thecontrary by my own certificate. But I will say two things:

1. I have never in my life cast a vote or done an act inlegislation that I did not at the time believe to be right, andthat I am not now willing to avow and to defend and debatewith any champion, of sufficient importance, who desires toattack it at any time and in any presence. 

2. Whether I am right or wrong in my opinion as to the dutyof acting with and adherence to party, it is the result notof emotion or attachment or excitement, but of as cool, calculating, sober and deliberate reflection as I am able to give to anyquestion of conduct or duty. Many of the things I have donein this world which have been approved by other men, or havetended to give me any place in the respect of my countrymen, have been done in opposition, at the time, to the party towhich I belonged. But I have made that opposition withoutleaving the party. In every single instance, unless the questionof the Philippine Islands shall prove an exception, and thatis not a settled question yet, the party has come round, inthe end, to my way of thinking. I have been able by adheringto the Republican Party to accomplish, in my humble judgment, ten-fold the good that has been accomplished by men who haveten times more ability and capacity for such service, whohave left the party. 

When Governor Boutwell, the President of the Anti-ImperialistLeague, wrote me that he thought I could do more good forthat cause by staying in the Republican Party than by leavingit, and when he declared in a public interview in Boston thatof course Mr. Hoar would remain in the Republican Party, hewas right. If he had taken the same course himself, he wouldhave been a powerful help in saving his country from whathas happened. If the gentlemen who acted with him in thatway had remained Republicans, and the gentlemen who agreedwith him, who have remained Republicans, who abandoned publiclife, had kept in it, they would have saved the country fromwhat they and I deemed a grievous mistake and calamity. Therewas but one vote lacking for the defeat of the Spanish Treaty. There was but one vote lacking for the passage of the Tellerresolution. If Mr. Speaker Reed, the most powerful Republicanin the country, next to President McKinley, had stayed inthe House; if Mr. Harrison, as I earnestly desired, had comeback to the Senate; if Governor Boutwell and Mr. Adams haduttered their counsel as Republicans, the Republicans wouldhave done with the Philippine Islands what we did with Cubaand Japan. I could cite a hundred illustrations, were theyneeded, to prove what I say to be true. There was undoubtedlygreat corruption and mal-administration in the country inthe time of President Grant. Selfish men and ambitious mengot the ear of that simple and confiding President. Theystudied Grant, some of them, as the shoemaker measures thefoot of his customer. Mr. Sumner and Mr. Schurz and Mr. Trumbull and Mr. Greeley and the New York _Tribune, _ andthe Springfield _Republican, _ and the Chicago _Tribune, _ andthe St. Louis _Republican, _ and scores of other men and otherpapers left the party. They were, so long as they maintainedthat attitude, absolutely without political influence fromthat moment. When the great reforms which were attemptedwere accomplished, they were not there. The reforms wereaccomplished. But their names were wanting from the honorableroll of the men who accomplished them. President Grant himselfand President Hayes and Judge Hoar and Mr. Cox and GeneralGarfield, and others, if there are other names honorable enoughto be mentioned along with these, stayed in the RepublicanParty. They purified the administration. They accomplishedcivil service reform. They helped to achieve the independenceof American manufacture. They kept the faith. They paidthe debt. They resumed specie payment. They maintained asound currency, amid great temptation and against great odds. To this result our friends who were independent of party contributedno jot or tittle. 

Our system differs from that which prevails in England inthat it is hard to change the political power from one partyto another and hard to restore it when it is once lost. Weelect our President for four years. We elect our Senatorsfor six years. Therefore in determining whether it is yourduty to forsake a party which is wrong on some single questionyou are to decide, first, whether that question is importantenough to warrant sacrificing every other measure in whichyou agree with your party, and having every measure espousedby the other which you think bad enacted if it get control. Second, you have not only in such cases to sacrifice everyother thing you think desirable to prevent the one thing youthink undesirable, but you must decide whether, in regardto that particular matter, the party you are asked to substitutein power for your own will accomplish what you desire if itget power. For example, there are some worthy Republicanswho are free-traders. But they agree with the RepublicanParty in everything else. If you ask them to put a DemocraticPresident and Congress into power in order to get free tradethey must consider whether if they get power they will givethem free trade. Otherwise they sacrifice everything elsefor that chance and get no benefit in that respect. The Republicanfree-trader who voted for Mr. Cleveland in 1892 did not getfree trade. He got only what Mr. Cleveland denounced asa measure of infamy. In the third place you have under ourConstitutional system to determine whether the chance to accomplishwhat you want in regard to one measure warrants placing thepolitical power in hands you deem unfit, so that the party, in your judgment right on one thing, but wrong in every other, will have the fate of the country in its hands for a fouryears' term, and deal with every new and unexpected questionas it shall think fit. I was bitterly reproached for supportingMr. McKinley, and refusing to support Mr. Bryan, when I differedfrom Mr. McKinley on the great predominant question how weshould deal with the people of the Philippine Islands. Butthe men who criticised me most bitterly were some of themthe men who applauded my purpose to do so when it was firstdeclared. One of them, the President of the Anti-ImperialistLeague, wrote me a letter saying that I could be more usefulto that cause by remaining a Republican than in any otherway, and declared in a public interview that of course Mr. Hoar would remain a Republican. The Secretary of the sameorganization, after I had made a speech in which I had declaredmy purpose to continue to support Mr. McKinley, in spiteof his grievous error in this respect, wrote me a lettercrowded with the most fulsome adulation, and declared thatmy position was as lofty as that of Chatham or Burke. Icould cite many other instances to the same effect. Butwhat other men think, however respectable they may be, isof course of no importance. Every man must settle for himselfthe question of his individual duty. I could not find thatthe chance that Mr. Bryan, who had urged the adoption of theSpanish Treaty and had committed himself to the opinion thatit was right to do everything we promised to do in that Treaty, would act wisely or righteously if he were trusted with power, or that he could get his party to support him if he were disposedto do so, warranted my running the risk of the mischief hewas pledged to accomplish; still less running the risk ofgiving the government of this country to his supporters forthe next four years. There are many good men in the DemocraticParty. But the strength of that organization in 1900, asit is to-day, was in Tammany Hall, in the old Southern leaderscommitted to a policy of violence and fraud in dealing with tenmillion of our American citizens at home, aided by a fewimpracticable dreamers who were even less fitted than theDemocratic leaders to be trusted with political power. 

The Republican Party, whatever its faults, since it cameinto power in 1860 has been composed in general of what isbest in our national life. States like Massachusetts andVermont, the men of the rural districts in New York, thesurvivors and children of the men who put down the Rebellionand abolished slavery, saved the Union, and paid the debtand kept the faith, and achieved the manufacturing independenceof the country, and passed the homestead laws, are on thatside, and in general they give and will hereafter give directionto its counsels. On the other hand their antagonist has been, is, and for an indefinite time to come will be, controlledby the foreign population and the criminal classes of ourgreat cities, by Tammany Hall, and by the leaders of the solidSouth. 

I entered the House of Representatives of the United Statesat the spring session which began March 4, 1869, at the beginningof Grant's Administration. It then contained a very interestingand important group of men, the most brilliant and conspicuousof whom was, undoubtedly, Mr. James G. Blaine. The public, friends and foes, judged of him by a few striking and picturesquequalities. There has probably never been a man in our historyupon whom so few people looked with indifference. He wasborn to be loved or hated. Nobody occupied a middle groundas to him. In addition to the striking qualities which caughtthe public eye, he was a man of profound knowledge of ourpolitical history, of a sure literary taste, and of greatcapacity as an orator. He studied and worked out for himselfvery abstruse questions, on which he formed his own opinions, usually with great sagacity. How far he was affected in hisposition by the desire for public favor I will not undertaketo say. I think the constitution of his mind was such thatmatters were apt to strike him in much the same way as theywere apt to strike the majority of the people of the North, especially of the Northwest, where he was always exceedinglypopular. He maintained very friendly personal relations withsome of the more intelligent Southerners, especially withLamar. One incident in his relations with Butler was intenselyamusing. They were never on very friendly terms, though eachof them found it wise not to break with the other. When Blainewas a candidate for Speaker, to which office he was chosenin the spring session of 1869, his principal competitor wasHenry L. Dawes. Dawes's chances were considered excellentuntil Butler, who had great influence with the Southern Republicanmembers of the House, declared himself for Blaine. Butlerwas exceedingly anxious to be Chairman of the Committee ofAppropriations. This would have been an offence in the nostrilsof a large portion of the Republican Party. Mr. Dawes, learningButler's proposed defection, was beforehand with him by risingin the caucus and himself nominating Mr. Blaine. This securedBlaine's unanimous nomination. Butler, however, still pressedeagerly his own claim for the Chairmanship of the Appropriations. Blaine was altogether too shrewd to yield to that. The committeeswere not appointed until the following December. Butler suspectedsomehow that there was doubt about his getting the covetedprize. He accordingly went to the door of the Speaker's room, which was then opposite the door of the House of Representatives, by the side of the Speaker's chair. He found Blaine's messengerkeeping the door, who told him that Mr. Blaine was engagedand could not see anybody. "Very well, " said General Butler, "I will wait. " Accordingly, he took a chair and seated himselfat the door, so that he might intercept Blaine as he cameout. Blaine, learning that Butler was there, went out thewindow, round by the portico, and entered the House by anotherentrance. Somebody came along and, seeing Butler seated inthe corridor, said: "What are you about here, General?" "Waitingfor Blaine, " was the reply. "Blaine is in the chair in theHouse, " was the answer. "It isn't possible, " said Butler. "Yes, he is just announcing the committees. " Butler rushedinto the House in time to hear Mr. Dawes's name read by theClerk as the Chairman of Appropriations. He was very angry, and bided his time. They had an altercation over the billto protect the rights of the freedmen in the South, the storyof which I tell in speaking of Grant. But as the end of theCongress approached, Butler endeavored to get up an alliancebetween the Democrats and what were called the "Revenue Reformers. "There was a large number of Northwestern Republicans who weredisposed to break away from the party because of its policyof high protection. This included representatives of a goodmany States that afterward were the most loyal supportersof the tariff policy. Butler showed me one day a call hehad prepared, saying: "How do you think something like thiswould answer?" It was a call for a caucus of all personswho desired a reform in the tariff to meet to nominate acandidate for Speaker. I was never in Butler's confidence, and I suppose he showed me the paper with the expectationthat I should tell Blaine. Blaine circumvented the movementby giving assurances to the friends of revenue reform thathe would make up a Committee of Ways and Means with a majorityof persons of their way of thinking. This ended Butler'smovement. Blaine kept his word. Mr. Dawes, a high protectionist, was made Chairman, and Mr. Kelly, also a high protectionist, was second on the Committee of Ways and Means; but a majoritywere revenue reformers. The committee reported a bill whichwould have been exceedingly injurious to the protected industriesof New England. That bill was pressed and reported to theHouse from the Committee of the Whole; but the member of thecommittee who had it in charge, by some strange oversight, forgot to demand the previous question. Mr. Dawes, quickas lightning, took from his desk a bill which he had previouslyprepared, but which had been voted down by his committee, added to it a clause putting tea and coffee on the free list, and, I believe containing also one or two other items whichwere specially popular in some parts of the country, and movedthat as an amendment to the committee's bill, and himselfdemanded the previous question. The cry of a free breakfast-table was then specially popular. There were enough memberswho did not dare to vote against putting tea and coffee onthe free list to turn the scale. Dawes's amendment was adopted, the bill passed, the New England industries saved, and thetariff reformers beaten. The persons who saw only the quietand modest bearing with which Mr. Dawes conducted himselfin the Senate do not know with how much vigor, quickness ofwit, readiness and skill in debate, he conducted himself amidthe stormy sessions of the House of Representatives duringGrant's first Administration. There has never been, withinmy experience, a greater power than his on the floor of theHouse. He had mighty antagonists. There were not only veryable Democrats, like Randall and Kerr and Holman, but therewere mighty leaders among the Republicans. There was littleparty discipline. Each of them seemed bent on having hisown way and taking care of himself, and ready to trip up oroverthrow any of his rivals without mercy or remorse. Amongthem were Butler and Farnsworth and Garfield and Logan andSchenck and Kelly and Banks and Bingham and Sargent and Blaineand Poland. 

I was not in the habit of going often to the White Housewhen Grant was President. When I did, he received me alwayswith great kindness. He always seemed to be very fond ofmy brother; and I suppose that led him to receive me in amore intimate and cordial fashion than he would otherwisehave done. I was first introduced to him in the cloak-roomof the House of Representatives the Saturday evening beforehis inauguration. He came, I think, to see Mr. Boutwell, then a member of the House, afterward his Secretary of theTreasury. He came to Worcester in the summer of that year, and I went with him in a special car to Groton in the afternoon. He was not very talkative, though interested in all he saw. He expressed special delight in the appearance of the boysof the Worcester Military School, who turned out to escorthim. One of his sons, a well-grown lad, was upon the train. The general had not seen him for some time, and he sat withone arm around him, as one might with a little girl. 

It used to be thought that Grant was a man without much literarycapacity. Since the publication of his "Memoirs, " this notionhas been discarded. I can testify to his great readinessas a writer. I saw him write two messages to Congress, bothof a good deal of importance, without pause or correction, and as rapidly as his pen could fly over the paper. The firstwas the message he sent in on the adoption of the FifteenthAmendment to the Constitution. I was much interested in abill in aid of national education. I called on the Presidentwhen the last State needed had ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, and suggested to him that it might be well to send a specialmessage to Congress congratulating them on the result, andurging the policy of promoting education for the new citizens. I told him of General Washington's interest in a nationaluniversity, and what he had said about the importance ofeducation in his writings. I said I supposed he had themin his library. He said he believed he had, but he wishedI would get the books and bring them to him. I accordinglygot the books, carried them up to the White House, showedhim the passages, and Grant sat down and wrote in a few minutes, and quite rapidly, the message that was sent to Congress thenext day. The other occasion was when he sent in the messageat the time of the controversy between the House and the Senatein regard to the policy to be pursued in dealing with theoutrages in the South. The Senate had passed a bill givinga discretion to the President to take some firm measures tosuppress these disorders, and to protect the colored peopleand the Republicans of the South, and if in his judgment hethought it necessary, to suspend the writ of _habeas corpus. _This measure, which had a considerable majority in the Senate, was voted down in the House under the influence of SpeakerBlaine, Mr. Dawes, General Farnsworth, and other prominentRepublicans. During the controversy Mr. Blaine left thechair and engaged in the debate, being provoked by some thrustof Butler's. There was a lively passage at arms, in whichBlaine said he was obliged to leave the chair, as his predecessorMr. Colfax had been compelled to do, "to chastise the insolenceof the gentleman from Massachusetts. " Butler replied by somecharge against Blaine, to which Blaine, as he was walkingback to take the gavel again, shouted out: "It's a calumny. "My sympathies in the matter, so far as the measure of legislationwas concerned, were with Butler, though I had, as is wellknown, little sympathy with him in general. 

The House undertook to adjourn the session, but the Senaterefused to do so without action on the bill for the protectionof human rights at the South. While things were in this condition, I was summoned one morning into the President's room at theCapitol, where I found President Grant, his Cabinet, severalof the leading Senators, including Mr. Conkling, I thinkMr. Edmunds, Mr. Howe of Wisconsin, and I believe GeneralWilson, Judge Shellabarger of Ohio, and one or two other membersof the House. All the persons who were there were favorableto the proposed legislation, I believe. President Grant saidthat he had been asked to send in a message urging Congressto pass a law giving him larger powers for the suppressionof violence at the South; but he had sent for us to explainthe reason why he was unwilling to do it. He thought thatthe country would look with great disapprobation upon a requestto enlarge the powers of the President, and especially tosuspend the writ of _habeas corpus_ in time of peace, and that hefelt especially unwilling to subject himself to that criticismas he had not come to that office from civil life, but had beena soldier, and it might be supposed he favored military methodsof government. Several of the gentlemen present expressedrather guardedly their dissent from this view, but Grant seemedto remain firm. I kept silent, as became a person young inpublic life, until Mr. Howe and Judge Shellabarger whisperedtogether, and then came to me and said: "Mr. Hoar, you mayperhaps, be able to have some influence on him. Won't yousay something?" I then made a little speech to the President, in which I said that there was no question of the existenceof these disorders and crimes; that they would be likely tobe increased, and not diminished, especially as the electionsin the Southern States approached. He could not allow themto continue. He would be compelled, in my judgment, to interposeand go to the verge of his authority, or to leave to theirfate those people whom we were bound by every considerationof honor to protect. I asked him if he did not think itwould be better, instead of exercising a doubtful authorityof his own, acquired without legislative sanction, to obtainthe necessary authority from Congress in advance. I thoughtit much less likely to be imputed to him that he was actingin the manner of a soldier and not of a statesman if he werecareful to ask in advance the direction of the law-makingpower, and the people understood he was unwilling, even ifhe had the authority, to act without the sanction of Congress. This view produced an instant change of mind. Grant tooka pen, wrote a brief message with great rapidity, read italoud to the persons who were assembled, and sent it in thatvery day without the change of a word. It is a clear andexcellent statement. The result was that the Republican oppositionto the measure in the House was withdrawn, the two Housescame to an agreement, and adjourned without day soon afterward. 

One of the most important acts of President Grant's Administrationwas his veto of the Inflation Bill, which provided for a considerableincrease of the large volume of legal tender paper money, which at that time was not redeemed by the government. Thisveto is regarded by most persons as the turning of the cornerby the American people, and setting the face of the Governmenttoward specie payment and honest money. It was during thehard times that followed the crisis of 1873. It is said thatPresident Grant had made up his mind to sign the bill, andsat down to write out his reasons, but that he found themso unsatisfactory that he changed his mind and sent in hisveto message. I had not been disposed to believe this untilI was told, a little while ago, by Secretary Boutwell thathe had the statement that that was the fact from the lipsof Grant himself. If that be true, the President must havechanged his mind twice. When the bill was pending in theHouse of Representatives, my wife's father, a very simple-hearted and excellent merchant of Worcester, who spent seventyyears of life in business on the same spot, visited us inWashington. I took him up to see Grant. The General wasalone and, contrary to his usual custom, in a very talkativemood. He seemed to like Mr. Miller, who had a huge respectfor him, and evidently saw that we were not there for anyoffice-seeking or other personal end. He talked with greatfreedom about himself and his visit to Worcester. He expressedhis wonder that the town had grown and prospered so withoutany advantage of river or harbor or water power, or the neighborhoodof rich mines or rich wheat-fields. He then asked me howthe bill for an increased issue of green-backs was comingon in the House. I told him it seemed likely to pass. Hethen went on to express very earnestly his objection to themeasure and to the whole policy, and his dislike of irredeemablepaper. He said that it was an immense injury to all classesof the people, but that it bore heavily upon poor and ignorantmen. He said that speculators and bankers and brokers couldforesee the changes which came about from the fluctuationsof paper money and protect themselves from them, but the workingmenand poor men had no such advantages--that they were the greatestsufferers. He added a suggestion I never heard before, thatthere was in many parts of the country great loss from thecounterfeiting of paper money--a loss which fell almost whollyupon poor and ignorant men. I never in my life heard Granttalk so freely on any occasion. I never in my life, but once, saw him apparently so deeply moved. I said: "Mr. President, you know the story of old Judge Grier and the Pennsylvaniajury. " "No, " said he. "Well, " said I, "there was once ajury in Pennsylvania, when Grier was holding court, who broughtin a very unjust verdict. The judge said: 'Mr. Clerk, recordthat verdict and enter under it, "Set aside. " I will haveyou to know, Gentlemen of the Jury, that it takes thirteenmen in this court to steal a man's farm. ' It takes three powers, Mr. President, under our government to pass a law. " Grantlaughed and said: "Well, if you send it up to me, make itjust as bad as you can. " There can be no possible questionthat he then desired and meant to veto the bill. His desirethat it might be as bad as possible was that it might be moreeasy to defend his action. 

I had another exceedingly interesting conversation with thePresident on my return from New Orleans. In the winter of1875 I went to New Orleans, as Chairman of a Committee ofthe House of Representatives, to investigate and to ascertainwhich of the rival State governments had the true title. Louisianawas in a terrible condition. Sheridan was in command of theUnited States troops there, and it was only their presencethat prevented an armed and bloody revolution. The old rebelelement, as it was, had committed crimes against the freedmenand the white Republicans which make one of the foulest andbloodiest chapters in all history. Sheridan had much offendedthe white people there by his vigorous enforcement of laws, and especially by a letter in which he had spoken of themas banditti. I stopped, during my stay in New Orleans, atthe St. Charles Hotel, where Sheridan also was a guest. Whenhe came into the crowded breakfast-room every morning, therewere loud hisses and groans from nearly the whole assembledcompany. The morning papers teemed with abusive articles. The guests would take these papers, underscore some speciallysavage attack, and tell the waiter to take it to General Sheridanas he sat at table at his breakfast. The General would glanceat it with an unruffled face, and bow and smile toward thesender of the article. The whole thing made little impressionon him. No violence toward him personally was ventured upon. The night before I started on my return to Washington, GeneralSheridan called to take leave. I was much amused by the simplicityand _naivete_ with which he discussed the situation. Hesaid, among other things: "What you want to do, Mr. Hoar, when you get back to Washington, is to suspend the what-do-you-call-it. " He meant, of course, the _habeas corpus. _He knew there was some very uncomfortable thing which stoodin his way of promptly suppressing the crimes in Louisiana, where he said more men had been murdered for their politicalopinions than were slain in the Mexican War. When I got backto Washington, the President sent for me and Mr. Frye ofMaine, a member of the committee, to come to the President'sroom in the Capitol to report to him the result of our observations. During the conversation, Grant expressed what he had oftenexpressed on other occasions, his great admiration for Sheridan. He said: "I believe General Sheridan has no superior as ageneral, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal. People think he is only capable of leading an army in battle, or to do a particular thing he is told to do. But I mean, all the qualities of a commander which enable him to directover as large a territory as any two nations can cover inwar. He has judgment, prudence, foresight, and power to dealwith the dispositions needed in a great war. I entertainedthis opinion of him before he became generally known in thelate war. " I was so impressed with this generous tribute ofone great soldier to another that, as soon as the interviewwas over, I wrote it down and asked Mr. Frye to join withme in certifying to its correctness. It is now before me, and has the following certificate: "The foregoing is a correctstatement of what General Grant said to me and Mr. Frye ina conversation this morning in the President's room. February15, 1875. George F. Hoar. " "I heard the above conversation, and certify to the correctness of the above statement of it. William P. Frye. "

I heard General Grant express a like opinion of Sheridanunder circumstances perhaps even more impressive. I was aguest at a brilliant dinner-party given by Mr. Robeson, Secretaryof the Navy, where Grant, General Sherman, General Sheridan, Commodore Alden, Admiral Porter, Chief Justice Chase, Attorney-General E. R. Hoar, Lyman Trumbull, Mr. Blaine, and someother men of great distinction were present. There were abouttwenty guests. Mr. James Russell Lowell was of the company. I believe no one of that brilliant circle is now living. CommodoreAlden remarked, half in jest, to a gentleman who sat nearhim, that there was nothing he disliked more than a subordinatewho always obeyed orders. "What is that you are saying, Commodore?"said President Grant, across the table. The Commodore repeatedwhat he had said. "There is a good deal of truth in whatyou say, " said General Grant. "One of the virtues of GeneralSheridan was that he knew when to act without orders. Justbefore the surrender of Lee, General Sheridan captured somedespatches from which he learned that Lee had ordered hissupplies to a certain place. I was on the other side of theriver, where he could get no communication from me until thenext morning. General Sheridan pushed on at once withoutorders, got to the place fifteen minutes before the rebels, and captured the supplies. After the surrender was concluded, the first thing General Lee asked me for was rations for hismen. I issued to them the same provisions which Sheridanhad captured. Now if Sheridan, as most men would have done, had waited for orders from me, Lee would have got off. " Ilistened with wonder at the generous modesty which, beforethat brilliant company, could remove one of the brightestlaurels from his own brow and place it on the brow of Sheridan. 

I had another memorable conversation with Grant, not so pleasant. It revealed a capacity of intense passion which I do not knowthat he ever manifested on any other occasion. He had sentinto the Senate the nomination of William A. Simmons forthe important office of Collector of Boston. This was dueto the influence of General Butler. Mr. Sumner, whose controversywith the President is well known, was then the senior Senatorfrom Massachusetts. The nomination had been made, of course, without consulting him, with whom Grant was not on friendlyterms, and without consulting any of the members of the Houseof Representatives except Butler. There was a very earnestopposition to this nomination. I went up to the White Houseto endeavor to induce President Grant to withdraw it, buthe had gone out. I repeated my visit once or twice, but failedto find the President. The third or fourth time that I wentup, as I was coming away I saw President Grant on the otherside of Pennsylvania Avenue, walking alone on the sidewalkadjoining Lafayette Square. I suppose it was not in accordancewith etiquette to join the President when he was walking alonein the street; but I overtook him, and said: "Mr. President, I have been to the White House several times, and been unableto find you in. The business of the House is very urgentjust now, and it is difficult for me to get away again. Perhaps, therefore, you will kindly allow me to say what I have tosay here. " The President very courteously assented. I walkedalong with him, turned the corner, and walked along the sidewalkadjoining the east side of Lafayette Square, until we cameto the corner opposite the house then occupied by Sumner, which is now part of the Arlington Hotel. I told the Presidentthat I thought the Republicans of Massachusetts would be muchdissatisfied with the nomination of Simmons, and hoped itmight be withdrawn. The President replied that he thoughtit would be an injustice to the young man to do so, and thatthe opposition to him seemed to be chiefly because he wasa friend of General Butler. I combated the argument as wellas I could. The whole conversation was exceedingly quietand friendly on both sides until we turned the corner by Mr. Sumner's house, when the President, with great emphasis, andshaking his closed fist toward Sumner's house, said: "I shallnot withdraw the nomination. That man who lives up therehas abused me in a way which I never suffered from any otherman living. " I did not, of course, press the President further. But I told him I regretted very much the misunderstandingbetween him and Mr. Sumner, and took my leave. It was evidentthat in some way the President connected this nomination withthe controversy between himself and Sumner. 

I have always lamented, in common with all the friends andlovers of both these great men, that they should have so misunderstoodeach other; yet it was not unnatural. They were both honest, fearless, patriotic, and brave. Yet never were two honest, fearless, patriotic, and brave men more unlike each other. The training, the mental characteristics, the field of service, the capacities, the virtues, the foibles of each tended tomake him underestimate and misunderstand the other. The manof war, and the man of peace; the man whose duty it was towin battles and conduct campaigns, and the man who trustedto the prevalence of ideas in a remote future; the man whowielded executive power, and the man who in a fierce contestwith executive power had sought to extend the privileges, power, and authority of the Senate; the man who adhered tenaciouslyto his friends though good and evil report, and the man whosefriendships were such that evil report of personal dishonornever dared assail them; the man of little taste for letters, and the man of vast and varied learning; the man of blunt, plain ways, and the man of courtly manners; the man of fewwords, and the man who ever deemed himself sitting in a loftypulpit with a mighty sounding board, with a whole widespreadpeople for a congregation--how could they understand eachother? Grant cared little for speech-making. It sometimesseemed as if Sumner thought the Rebellion itself was put downby speeches in the Senate, and that the war was an unfortunateand most annoying, though trifling disturbance, as if a fire-engine had passed by. Sumner did injustice to Grant; Grantdid injustice to Sumner. The judgment of each was warpedand clouded, until each looked with a blood-shotten eye atthe conduct of the other. But I believe they know and honoreach other now. 

CHAPTER XIIISUMNER AND WILSON

When I took my seat on the 4th of March, 1869, the Commonwealthof Massachusetts had a position of power in both Houses ofCongress never held by any other State before or since, unlesswe except that held for a short time in early days by Virginia. Charles Sumner was beyond all question the foremost figureon the National stage, save Grant alone. He had seen thetriumph of the doctrines for which he had contended all hislife. He had more than any other man contributed to fetterthe hands of Andrew Johnson and drive him from power. HenryWilson was the most skilful political organizer in the country. Sumner was at the head of the Committee on Foreign Relations, and Wilson of that of Military Affairs. In the House HenryL. Dawes was at the head of the Committee on Appropriations, Benjamin F. Butler of the Committee on Reconstruction, WilliamB. Washburn of the Committee on Claims, Nathaniel P. Banksof the Committee on Foreign Affairs. These Committees withthe Committee on the Judiciary of which General Butler wasa member, and the Committee on Ways and Means, controlledthe policy of the House on all the great questions then interestingthe country. Samuel Hooper had the third place on the Committeeon Coinage, Weights and Measures. But he was its dominantmember and in a later Congress introduced the Bill for Reformingthe Currency, a wise and salutary measure. It is known, however, among ignorant people in some parts of the countryas "The Crime of '73. "

Sumner and Wilson are so well known to the American peoplethat it would be superfluous for me to attempt to describeeither elaborately. I have spoken of each at some lengthelsewhere. 

Charles Sumner held a place in the public life of the countrywhich no other man ever shared with him. He held a placein the public life of the world shared by very few indeed. He was an idealist. He subjected every measure to the inexorabletest of the moral law. Yet, at the same time, he was a powerfulpolitical leader, and in a time when the fate of the Republicwas decided accomplished vast practical results. Where dutyseemed to him to utter its high commands he could see no obstaclein hostile majorities, and no restraint in the limitationsof a written Constitution. It is right, therefore Constitutional, was the logical formula with which he dealt with every questionof State. We should be deaf and blind to all the lessonsof history, if we were to declare it to be safe that mentrusted with Executive or even with Legislative power shouldact on that principle. Unfortunately, humanity is so constitutedthat the benevolent despot is likely to work more mischiefeven than a malevolent despot. His example of absolute disregardof constitutional restraints will be followed by men of verydifferent motives. Yet the influence of one such man pressingand urging his companions forward in a Legislative body likethe Senate of the United States, keeping ever before the peoplethe highest ideals, inspired by the love of liberty, and everspeaking and working in the fear of God, is inestimable. 

Charles Sumner lacked that quality which enables the practicalstatesman to adjust the mechanism of complicated statutes. He had no genius for detail. It would not have been safeto trust him with Appropriation Bills, or Bills for raisingrevenue. But he was competent to deal with questions of thegreatest moment to the State. He knew what are its governingforces. He retained his hold on those forces. He directedthem. He caused sound principles of action to take effectin the Government of the State in great emergencies. He convertedthe people to his opinion. He inspired the people with loftydesires. He accomplished wise public ends by wise means. He maintained his hold on power in an important time. Hetook a prominent part in great debates and was the acknowledgedleader of one side of the question. He believed that theconscience of the people was a better guide than individualambitions. He always did the thing he could best do. Hedid the thing that most needed to be done, the thing mosteffective at the time, the thing that no other man did orcould do. He left to others to do what hundreds of otherscould do well enough. He contributed largely to the Governmentof his country, in the most trying period of our history, its motive and its direction. That is a pretty practicalcontribution to the voyage which furnishes to the steamshipits engine and its compass. His figure will abide in historylike that of St. Michael in art, an emblem of celestial purity, of celestial zeal, of celestial courage. It will go downto immortality with its foot upon the dragon of Slavery, andwith the sword of the spirit in its hand, but with a tenderlight in its eye, and a human love in its smile. Guido andRaphael conceived their "inviolable saint, "

 Invulnerable, impenetrably armed: Such high advantages his innocence Gave him above his foe; not to have sinned, Not to have disobeyed. In fight he stood Unwearied, unobnoxious to be pained By wounds. 

The Michael of the painters, as a critic of genius akin totheir own has pointed out, rests upon his prostrate foe lightas a morning cloud, no muscle strained, with unhacked swordand unruffled wings, his bright tunic and shining armor withouta rent or stain. Not so with our human champion. He hadto bear the bitterness and agony of a long and doubtful struggle, with common weapons and against terrible odds. He came outof it with soiled garments and with a mortal wound, but withouta regret and without a memory of hate. 

It was fortunate for Sumner and fortunate for the Commonwealthand the country that he had Henry Wilson for his colleague. Wilson supplied almost everything that Sumner lacked. I cannotundertake to tell the story of his useful life in the spaceat my command here. If I were to try I should do great injusticeto him and to myself. 

He was a very impressive and interesting character, of manyvirtues, of many faults. His faults he would have been thefirst to acknowledge himself. Indeed, I do not know of anyfault he had that he would not have acknowledged and lamentedin a talk with his near friend, or that he would have soughtto hide from the people. 

The motives which controlled his life from the time whenhe snatched such moments as he could from this day's workon a shoemaker's bench and studied far into the night tofit himself for citizenship, down to the time when he diedin the Vice-President's chamber--the second officer in theGovernment--and if his life and health had been spared, hevery likely would have been called to the highest place inthe Government--were public and patriotic, not personal. He was not without ambitions for himself. But they werealways subordinate in him to the love of liberty and thelove of country. He espoused the unpopular side when hestarted in life, and he stuck to it through all its unpopularity. 

He was a skilful, adroit, practised and constant politicalmanager. He knew the value of party organization, and didnot disdain the arts and diplomacies of a partisan. He carriedthem sometimes farther, in my judgment, than a scrupuloussense of honor would warrant, or than was consistent withthe noble, frank, lofty behavior which Massachusetts and theAmerican people expect of their statesmen. The most conspicuousinstance of this was his joining the Know Nothing Party, inwhose intolerance he had no belief. 

But it was done as an instrument for destroying the existingpolitical parties, which were an obstacle to freedom, andclearing the field for a new one. This object was successfullyaccomplished, and in its accomplishment Wilson had a largeshare. But it was, in my judgment, doing evil that good maycome. Wilson freely admitted this before he died, and said--I have no doubt with absolute sincerity--that he would giveten years of his life if he could blot out that one transaction. 

He was a very valuable legislator. He was the author of manyimportant measures in the war, during which he was chairmanof the Committee on Military Affairs of the Senate, and showedmuch ability in the way of practical and constructive statesmanship. I do not believe any man in the Senate in his time, not evenSumner, had more influence over his colleagues than he. 

There was not a drop of bigotry, intolerance, or personalhatred in him. As you would expect from a man who raisedhimself from the humblest to the loftiest place in the republic, he was a believer in pure manhood, without respect of personsor conditions. 

He was a powerful stump orator. He never made speeches thatwere quoted as models of eloquence or wisdom. But he knewwhat the farmer and the mechanic and the workman at his benchwere thinking of, and addressed himself always to their bestand highest thought. He was a great vote-making speaker. When Mechanics Hall, in Worcester, or the City Hall was filledto hear Henry Wilson in a close campaign, many men who enteredthe hall undecided or against him, went away to take earnestpart on his side. 

He had a good many angry political strifes. But he neverbore malice or seemed to keep angry over night. General Butleronce wrote him a letter pouring out on his head the invectiveof which he was so conspicuous a master. Wilson brought theletter into the office of a dear friend of mine in Bostonwhen I happened to be there, handed it to us to read, andobserved: "That is a cussed mean letter. " I do not thinkhe ever spoke of it or scarcely thought of it again. 

But his chief gift and faculty is one which I can hardlythink of words to describe fitly. The few of his old friendswho are left will understand what I mean. But I can hardlymake those who did not know him, or live in his time, comprehendit. That was his rare and unequalled gift of gathering anduttering the sentiment of the people. When new and doubtfulmatters of pith and moment were to be dealt with, and aftera long apparent hesitation, and backing and filling, and whatpeople who did not know him thought trembling in the balance, he would at last make up his mind, determine on his action, and strike a blow which had in it not only the vigor of hisown arm, but the whole vigor and strength of the public sentimentwhich he had gathered and which he represented. He was anubiquitous person. He would travel all over the State, spendingthe day, perhaps, in visiting forty shops and factories inthe neighborhood of Boston; then take a nine or ten o'clocktrain at night and go up to Springfield, get in there at twoor three o'clock in the morning, call up out of bed some activepolitician and tell him he had come to sleep with him; spendthe night in talking over the matter about which he was anxiousuntil six or seven o'clock in the morning (I do not believehe ever slept much, either with anybody or alone), and then, perhaps, up to Northampton or Greenfield to see some personwhom he called Tom, Dick, or Harry, but who knew the localfeeling there; and after a week or two spent in that way, never giving his own opinion, talking as if he were all thingsto all men, seeming to hesitate and hesitate and falter andbe frightened, so if you had met him and talked with him youwould have said, if you did not know him well, that therewas no more thought, nor more steadiness of purpose, or backbonein him than in an easterly cloud; but at length, when thetime came, and he had got ready, the easterly cloud seemedsuddenly to have been charged with an electric fire and aswift and resistless bolt flashed out, and the righteousjudgment of Massachusetts came from his lips. 

With all his faults, Peace be to the ashes of Henry Wilson. He was a leader and a tribune of the people. We do not seemto have such leaders now-a-days. I liked Charles Sumner better. But it was a great thing for Massachusetts, a great thing forhuman liberty, and a great thing for Charles Sumner himselfthat he had Henry Wilson as a friend and ally, a discipleand a co-worker. 

If Wilson had lived, in my opinion, it is quite likely thathe would have been the Republican candidate for the Presidencyin 1876, and would have been triumphantly elected. Therewas a very powerful movement going on all over the countryto bring that about. Wilson's hold upon the affection ofthe people everywhere was very strong indeed. 

Wilson became Vice-President of the United States, March 4, 1873. He died two years afterward. I was asked to writethe inscription for a tablet placed in the Vice-President'sRoom in the Capitol by order of the Senate in 1902. It followshere. 

IN THIS ROOMHENRY WILSONVICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATESDIED NOVEMBER 22 1875. THE SON OF A FARM LABORER, NEVER ATSCHOOL MORE THAN TWELVE MONTHS, INYOUTH A JOURNEYMAN SHOEMAKER, HERAISED HIMSELF TO THE HIGH PLACES OFFAME, HONOR AND POWER, AND BY UNWEARIEDSTUDY MADE HIMSELF AN AUTHORITY IN THEHISTORY OF HIS COUNTRY AND OF LIBERTY, AND AN ELOQUENT PUBLIC SPEAKER TOWHOM SENATE AND PEOPLE EAGERLYLISTENED. HE DEALT WITH AND CONTROLLEDVAST PUBLIC EXPENDITURE DURING A GREATCIVIL WAR, YET LIVED AND DIED POOR, ANDLEFT TO HIS GRATEFUL COUNTRYMEN THEMEMORY OF AN HONORABLE PUBLIC SERVICE, AND A GOOD NAME FAR BETTER THAN RICHES. 

CHAPTER XIVPERSONALITIES IN DEBATE

I have been, in general, enabled to avoid angry conflictsin debate or the exchange of rough personalities. My fewexperiences of that kind came from attacks on Massachusetts, which I could not well avoid resenting. The only two I nowthink of happened in my first term. In one case, Mr. S. S. Cox of New York, who was one of the principal championson the Democratic side of the House, a man noted for his wit, undertook to make an attack on the Massachusetts Puritans, and to revive the old slander that they had burned witches. I made some slight correction of what Mr. Cox had said buthe renewed the attack. I was then comparatively unknown inthe House. Mr. Cox treated me with considerable contempt, and pointing to Mr. Dawes, who had charge of the bill thenunder discussion, but who had not given any reply to Cox'sattack, said, with a contemptuous look at me: "Massachusettsdoes not send her Hector to the field, " to which I answeredthat it was not necessary to send Hector to the field whenthe attack was led by Thersites. The retort seemed to strikethe House favorably, and was printed in the papers throughoutthe country, and Cox let me and Massachusetts alone thereafter. 

I had a like encounter with Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana, who was a more formidable competitor. Mr. Voorhees made thesame charge against the people of Massachusetts of havingburned witches at the stake in the old Puritan time. It wasin a debate under the five-minute rule. After reiteratingthe old familiar slander that the State of Massachusetts inher early history had burned witches at the stake, Mr. Voorheesadded that in 1854 or 1855 the Know Nothings broke up convents, burned Catholic churches, and would have burned Catholicsand Sisters of Charity themselves at the stake within herborders, if they had dared to do so. 

I declared both of these charges to be utterly false, andsaid that no human being was ever burned at the stake inMassachusetts for the crime of witchcraft, and though at atime when the whole civilized world believed in witchcrafton the authority of certain passages in the Old Testament, the courts of Massachusetts did execute some nineteen ortwenty persons of both sexes for the alleged crime of witchcraft, it was also true that the people of Massachusetts were thefirst among men to see the error and wickedness of this course;that although late in the following century, many people werecondemned for witchcraft in England and on the Continent, the love of justice and the intelligence of Massachusettsfirst exposed that error and wickedness. 

I explained that a convent was burned in Massachusetts, notin 1854 or 1855 by the Know Nothings, but in 1836, by a mobexcited by a rumor that some terrible cruelty had been inflictedupon some young women who had been placed in a convent atCharlestown; that the criminals were arrested, tried and sentenced, and that their crime left no more stain upon the State thanany criminal act committed within the limits of any civilizedcountry. In conclusion, I said it did not become the politicalfriends of the men who had burned our soldiers alive at FortPillow, or who burned orphan asylums in New York, and hungnegroes on lamp posts, to talk of cruelties in a past age. 

This retort angered Voorhees beyond endurance, and beforeI could finish my sentence, he sprang to his feet and criedout in great anger: "Every word the gentleman says is falseand he knows it. " There was a demand that my words be takendown and that the words of Mr. Voorhees be taken down. Thatwas done. The chairman of the committee, Mr. Ingersoll, brother of the famous Robert G. Ingersoll, declared thatthe words of Mr. Voorhees were unparliamentary, and ruledthat my language was "rather pungent but not unparliamentary. "Whereupon the committee arose amid great laughter, and thetransaction ended. 

CHAPTER XVTHE NATIONAL HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN 1869

The House, when I entered it, contained many very able men. Some of them remained long enough in public life to fill alarge and prominent place in the history of the country. Othersretired early. I will mention only a few. 

I do not think his countrymen have estimated Nathaniel P. Banks at his true value. When he left office at the ripeage of seventy-five a public service ended surpassed in varietyand usefulness by that of few citizens of Massachusetts sincethe days of John Adams. He bore a great part in a great history. Men who saw him in his later life, a feeble, kindly old man, with only the remains of his stately courtesy, had littleconception of the figure of manly strength and dignity whichhe presented when he presided over the Constitutional Conventionin 1853, or took the oath of office as Governor in 1858. Heraised himself from a humble place, unaided, under the stimulantof a native and eager desire for excellence. He was alwaysregarded by the working people of Massachusetts as the typeof what was best in themselves and as the example and representativeof the great opportunity which the Republic holds out to itspoorest citizens and their children. He was a natural gentleman, always kindly and true. From this trait and not because ofa want of fidelity to his own convictions he found as warmfriends among his political opponents as among his politicalassociates. 

Gen. Banks was Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relationsin 1869. He was then beginning to lose somewhat his oratoricalpower and the splendid qualities which made him so importanta force in the history of Massachusetts and of the country. But still on fit occasions he showed all his old vigor andbrilliancy. When the delegation gave a dinner to WilliamB. Washburn on his election as Governor Banks presided. Hekept up a running stream of eloquence and wit as he introducedthe different speakers and punctuated their remarks with interjectionsof his own, which I have never known equalled, though I haveattended many like occasions. Banks was a man of humble origin. He used to be known as the Waltham Bobbin Boy. He workedin his boyhood and youth in a factory in Waltham. He hadvery early a passion for reading. When Felton was inauguratedPresident of Harvard, Banks was Governor. As is the custom, he represented the Commonwealth and inducted the new Presidentinto office. There were famous speakers at the Dinner, --Daniel Webster, old Josiah Quincy, Edward Everett, Dr. Walker, Winthrop, and Felton himself. But the Governor's speech wasthe best of the whole. He described the time of his povertyin his youth when he used to work in a mill five days in aweek, and on Saturday walk ten miles to Boston to spend theday in the Athenaeum Library and ten miles back at night. He told how he used to peer in through the gate as he passedHarvard College with an infinite longing for the treasuresof learning that were inside. That refined and fastidiousaudience was stirred by an unwonted emotion. 

The older public men of Massachusetts did not take very kindlyto Banks. He was a man of the people. He was sometimes charged, though unjustly, with being a demagogue. He sometimes erredin his judgment. But he was a man of large and comprehensivevision, of independence, and exerted his vast influence withthe people for high ends. He might justly be called, likethe negro Toussaint, L'Ouverture, --The Opener. His electionas Governor extracted the people from the mire of Know Nothingism. His election as Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representativeswas part of the first victory over the Whig Dynasty whichhad kept the State, contrary to its best traditions, in alliancewith slavery. His election as Speaker of the United StatesHouse of Representatives was the first National Republicanvictory. His taking a little slave girl on a cannon duringthe War in his march through the Shenandoah Valley was hailedthroughout the country as an omen that the War would not enduntil slavery was abolished. He rendered a special serviceto the Commonwealth and to the cause of good learning whichI think never would have been accomplished without his personalinfluence. When Agassiz had been in this country but a fewyears he seriously contemplated going back to Europe. Itwas understood that he would stay if a sufficient fund couldbe raised to enable him to prosecute his researches here andto establish a museum where his collections could be caredfor and made useful to science. There was a meeting in Bostonto see about raising the fund. The Governor was invited toattend. The gentlemen present spoke rather doubtfully ofthe prospect of success. Governor Banks was asked what hethought the Commonwealth would do. He replied: "The Commonwealthwill give a hundred thousand dollars. " The Legislature hadbeen of late years economical, not to say niggardly, in suchmatters. Governor Banks's declaration was received with entireincredulity. One gentleman present said that he was verymuch discouraged by what His Excellency had said. If hehad said some moderate sum there might have been hope thatit would be given, but it was utterly hopeless to expectthat any such extravagant sum as that would be contributedby the State. The gentleman seemed to be well warrantedin what he said. The three colleges, Harvard, Amherst andWilliams, had united in an application for one hundred thousanddollars shortly before. It was supported by the eloquenceof Edward Everett and the authority of Mark Hopkins and PresidentHitchcock. Harvard was then so poor that they had not moneyto spare when they wanted to move the pulpit from the endto the side of the Chapel. But the application was denied. Banks relied in his somewhat sonorous fashion: "You need nottrouble yourself, Sir. The Commonwealth will give a hundredthousand dollars. " And she did. This was followed by thegrant, under Banks's influence, for the endowment of the BostonInstitute of Technology, large grants to the colleges andgrants to some of the endowed schools. 

General Banks's statue should stand by the State House asone of the foremost benefactors of the great educationalinstitutions of the Commonwealth, and as an example of whata generous ambition can accomplish for the humblest childin the Republic. 

Governor Boutwell, who is still living, became a member ofPresident Grant's Cabinet in March, 1869, and remained inthe House only a day or two of the spring session which lastedabout ten days. He was succeeded in the following Decemberby George M. Brooks, who had been my friend from early boyhood. He would in my judgment have had an eminent political careerif he had remained in public life, but for his great modesty. He never seemed to value highly anything he accomplished himself. But his sympathy and praise were always called out by anythingdone by a friend. I think Brooks took much more pleasurein anything well done or well said by one of his colleaguesthan in anything of his own. He was a man of an exceedinglysweet, gracious and affectionate nature, loving as a child, yet as men of such natures often are, thoroughly manly. Hewas incapable of any meanness or conscious wrong-doing. Hehad a very pleasant and ready wit. The people of MiddlesexCounty, especially of Concord, were very fond of him, andwould have kept him in public life as long as he desired. But his heath was not good in Washington. The climate ofthe place and the bad air of the House were unfavorable. Hedid not fancy very much the strife and noise of that turbulentassembly. So he gladly accepted an appointment to the officeof Judge of Probate of Middlesex County which was absolutelysuited to him. He administered that important office to theentire satisfaction of the people until his death. I thinkGeorge Brooks's smile would be enough to console any widowin an ordinary affliction. 

William Barrett Washburn, afterward Governor and Senator, was Chairman of the Committee on Claims. 

He is one of the best recent examples of a character whoseexternal manifestations change somewhat with changing mannersand fashions, but the substance of whose quality abides andI believe will abide through many succeeding generations. He was a New England Puritan. He brought to the service ofthe people a purity of heart, a perfect integrity, an austerityof virtue which not so much rendered him superior to all temptationas made it impossible to conceive that any of the objectsof personal desire which lead public men astray could everto him even be a temptation. 

There were few stronger or clearer intellects in the publicservice. His mind moved rapidly by a very simple and directpath to a sound and correct result in the most difficultand complicated cases. The Chairmanship of the Committeeon Claims was then with two or three exceptions the mostimportant position in the House. He spoke very seldom andthen to the point, stating very perfectly the judgment ofa clear-headed and sound business man. But his opinion carriedgreat weight. He was universally respected. Every man feltsafe in following his recommendation in any matter which hehad carefully investigated. 

Congress was beset by claims to the amount of hundreds andhundreds of millions, where fraud seemed sometimes to exhaustits resources, where, in the conflict of testimony, it wasalmost impossible to determine the fact, and where the factswhen determined often presented the most novel and difficultquestions of public law and public policy. Mr. Washburn'sdealing with these cases was the very sublimity of commonsense. He very soon acquired the confidence of the Houseso completely that his judgment became its law in matterswithin the jurisdiction of his committee. I became acquaintedwith him, an acquaintance which soon ripened into cordialfriendship, when I entered the House in the spring of 1869. I think I may fairly claim that it was the result of whatI said and did that he was agreed upon by the opponents ofGeneral Butler as their candidate for Governor, and was Butler'ssuccessful antagonist. 

Beneath his plain courtesy was a firmness which Cato neversurpassed. Upon a question of morality, or freedom or righteousnessthere was never a drop of compromise in his blood. He couldnot be otherwise than the constant foe of slavery, and theconstant friend of everything which went to emancipate andelevate the slave. It was his good fortune to record hisvote in favor of all the three great amendments to the constitution, and to be the supporter, friend and trusted counsellor ofAbraham Lincoln. 

After his election to fill Sumner's unexpired term I had aletter from Adin Thayer in which he said: "Washburn hatesButler with an Evangelical hatred which you know is more intensethan a Liberal Christian can attain to. "

James Buffington was a shrewd and amusing character. He understoodthe temper of the House very well and had great influencein accomplishing anything he undertook. He prided himselfon the fact that he never missed answering to his name atroll call during his whole term of service. He understoodvery well the art of pleasing his constituents. He made ita rule, he told me, to send at least one document under hisown frank every year to every voter in his District. On oneoccasion in a hotly contested election he had four votes morein a town on Cape Cod than any other candidate. He was curiousand inquired what it meant. The Chairman of the Selectmentold him that there were four men who lived in an out-of-the-way place, who never came to town meetings and nobodyseemed to know much about them. They were a father and histhree sons, living together on the same farm. But at thatelection they appeared at the town meeting. All four votedfor Buffington and for no other candidate and disappearedat once. The Selectman asked him why he voted for Buffington. "If he knew him?" "No!" said the old fellow. "He knows me. He sends me and each of my sons a document every winter. "

Buffington was very anxious about the matter of patronageand of getting offices for all his constituents. A greatmany men applied for his support; frequently there were manyapplications for the same office. He did not like to refusethem. So he made it a rule to give all of them a letter ofrecommendation to the Departments. But he had an understandingwith the appointing clerks that if he wrote his name Buffingtonwith the g he desired that man should be appointed, but ifhe wrote it Buffinton without the g he did not wish to betaken seriously. 

Beyond all question the leader of the Massachusetts delegation, and of the House, was Henry L. Dawes. He had had a successfulcareer at the bar and in public life before his election toCongress. In Congress he made his way to the front very rapidly. No member of the House of Representatives from Massachusettsand few from any part of the Union had an influence whichcould be at all compared with his. He became in successionChairman of the two foremost Committees, that of Appropriationsand that of Ways and Means. He was a prominent candidatefor the office of Speaker when Mr. Blaine was elected andwas defeated, as I have said elsewhere, only by the adroitmanagement of Butler. 

Mr. Dawes represented the Berkshire District in the Housefor eighteen years when he declined further service there. He was then elected to the Senate where he remained eighteenyears longer, when he declined further service there. Duringthe last part of his last term he was troubled with a growingdeafness which I suppose had much to do with his decliningto enter upon the contest for another reelection. He wasregarded by the manufacturers of Massachusetts as their faithfuland powerful representative. He had several contests forhis seat in the Senate when his opponents thought they weresure of success; but they found themselves left in the minoritywhen the vote came to be taken. They never fully comprehendedwhat defeated them. They would get the support of men whowere active in caucuses and nominating conventions and supposedwith excellent reason that they were safe. But there wasin every factory village in Massachusetts some man of influenceand ability and wealth, frequently a large employer of labor, who had been in the habit of depending on Mr. Dawes for thesecurity of his most important interests, so far as they couldbe affected by legislation. They knew him and they knew thathe knew them, and their power when they chose to exert itcould not be resisted. 

Persons who saw Mr. Dawes in his later years only, when hesat quietly in his seat in the Senate, taking little part savein a few special subjects, could not realize what a power hehad been when he was the leading and strongest champion inthat great body which contained Blaine and Bingham and Butlerand Schenck and Farnsworth and Allison and Eugene Hale andGarfield. 

When Mr. Dawes left the Senate in 1893, his associates gavea banquet in his honor, at which I made the following remarks. They were, I believe, approved by the entire company. I recordthem here as my deliberate judgment:

"If there be any admirer of other forms of government whothink unfavorably of our republican fashion of selectingour rulers, I would invite him to examine the list of menwhom Massachusetts for a hundred years has chosen as herSenators of the first class. I do not claim for her anysuperiority over other Commonwealths in this respect--butcertainly she has given you of her best. She has sent men whowere worthy to be peers of the men who have represented hersister States, and if that be true, they surely have beenworthy to be peers in any Senate that was ever gathered uponearth. The line begins with Tristram Dalton, save Washingtonthe stateliest gentleman of his time, rich in every mentalaccomplishment, whose presence graced and ennobled every assemblythat he entered. Next to him comes George Cabot, the wisestatesman and accomplished merchant, beloved friend of Hamilton, trusted counsellor of Washington, whose name and lineage arerepresented at this table to-night, who shared with this successor, Benjamin Goodhue, the honor of being the first authority infinance in their generation, save Hamilton alone. 

"Then comes John Quincy Adams, who left the Senate, afteryears of illustrious public service, in 1808, but to beginanother public service of forty years, still more illustrious. He served his country in every department of public occupation. He was Minister in five great Powers in succession. He waspresent as Secretary when the treaty of peace was signed in1783. He negotiated and signed the Treaty of Ghent, the CommercialTreaty of 1815, the French Treaty of 1822, the Prussian Treaty, and the treaty which acquired Florida from Spain. He wasSenator, Representative, Foreign Minister, Secretary of State, and President. He breasted the stormy waves of the Houseof Representatives at the age of eighty, and when he diedin the Capitol, he left no purer or loftier fame behind him. 

"Next came James Lloyd, the modest gentleman, the eloquentorator and the accomplished man of business. Then came Goreand Ashmun and Mellen and Mills, each great among the greatlawyers of a great generation. Next in the procession comesthe majestic presence of Daniel Webster, whose matchless logicand splendid eloquence gave to the Constitution of the countryan authority in the reason and in the hearts of his countrymenequal to anything in judicial decision and equal to that ofany victory of arms. With his reply to Hayne, it has beensaid that every Union cannon in the late war was shotted. His power in debate was only equalled by his wisdom in council. It was said of him by one whose fame as a great public teacherequals his own: 'His weight was like the falling of a planet, his discretion the return of its due and perfect curve. '

"Then comes Rufus Choate, next to Webster himself the foremostforensic orator of modern times, against whose imperial eloquenceno human understanding, either on the Bench or in the jurybox, seemed to be proof. Following them is he who still livesin his honored age, with his intellectual powers unshattered, the foremost citizen of his native Commonwealth, the accomplishedand eloquent Winthrop. Next comes Rantoul, who died whenhis foot had scarcely crossed the threshold of the SenateChamber, whose great hope was equal to the greatest of memories. Next is the figure of the apostle of liberty, Charles Sumner, the echo of whose voice still seems to linger in the archesof the Capitol. To those of us who remember him, he seems, as Disraeli said of Richard Cobden, 'still sitting, stilldebating, still legislating' in the Senate Chamber. 

"No two of these men were alike in the quality they broughtto the public service. Their mental portraiture is as differentand as individual as the faces painted by Titian or Van Dykeor Holbein. But each brought to the service of the Statewhat she most needed in each generation. The constructivestatesman, the framer of the Constitution and statutes, thefinancier, the debater, the lawyer, the man of business, thediplomatist, the reformer, the orator, are all there, andall are there at their best. 

"It is enough, and not too much, to say of my colleague that, as he lays down his office, the State that has been proudof them is proud of him. The State that has been satisfiedwith them is satisfied with him. In all this illustriousline, there is none other who has more faithfully and moresuccessfully discharged every duty of Senatorial service, and who has more constantly represented the interests andcharacter of the dear old Commonwealth, who has maintaineda higher or firmer place in her confidence and respect thanhe whom we greet and with whom we part to-night. Mr. Daweswas elected to the Massachusetts House of Representativesin 1847. Every year since, with one exception, he has heldsome honorable public station from the gift of his nativeState. Everywhere, at the Bar, in the State Legislature, in the Representative Chamber, in the Senate Chamber, he hasbeen a leader. Some great department of public service hasdepended upon him for a successful administration. He hasalways been appointed to some special service or duty or difficultywhich he has discharged to the entire satisfaction of hisconstituents and his political associates. His work has beenas remarkable for its variety as for its dignity and importance, or the length of time for which it has continued. He hasproved himself fit for every conspicuous position in ourRepublican army except that of trumpeter. When the dutywas done, he has not sought for personal credit or popularapplause. His qualities have not been those for which thepeople manifested their regard by shouting or clapping ofhands, or stamping of feet in public meetings; he has hadno following of ambitious politicians whom he has sought torepay for their political services at the public expense. 

"But he has had a place second to that of no other man inthe solid and enduring esteem of the people of the Commonwealth. He has been content to do a service, and has left the othermen who sought for it the credit of doing it. His officialaction has tended to make or unmake great industries. Greatfortunes have depended upon it. He has affected values ofmillions upon millions, and yet he retires from office withunstained hands, without fortune, and without a spot uponhis integrity. He has no children pensioned at the publiccharge. He will leave behind him no wealth gained directlyor indirectly from his public opportunities. He will go backto a humble and simple dwelling not exceeding in costlinessthat of many a Massachusetts merchant or farmer. But honor, good fame, the affection of his fellow citizens, the friendshipof his fellow Senators will enter its portals with him, andthere they will dwell with him until he leaves it for hislast home. "

Mr. Dawes was a very powerful and logical reasoner. He wasa very successful advocate when at the Bar and he was alwaysa strong antagonist in debate and very effective as a campaignspeaker. He stuck closely to his subject. He had a giftof sarcasm with which he could make an adversary feel exceedinglyuncomfortable, although he rarely indulged in it. He almostnever attempted eloquence, except so far as it is found inhis grave and effective statement of his case. One sentenceof his which I myself heard deserves to be remembered amongthe best things in American eloquence. Speaking to thirtyor forty people at a club in Boston of the power and greatnessof the Republic, he said: "If we cannot say of our country, as Mr. Webster said of England, 'that her morning drum-beatcircles the earth with an unbroken strain of her martial airs, 'we can at least say that before the sun sets upon Alaska hehas risen upon Maine. "

In my first Congress the leadership was shared between mycolleague, Mr. Dawes, and Robert C. Schenck of Ohio. GeneralSchenck was an old Whig. He had served with distinction inthe time of Webster and Clay and Calhoun and Corwin. He hadthe gift of vigorous, simple Saxon English. He was a verypowerful debater, a man of wisdom and of industry. He wasChairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, and carried throughto success, against odds and difficulties, an important tariffbill. At one time he found the measure, which he had introduced, overloaded and destroyed by amendments. He abandoned it indisgust, declaring that it had been "nibbled to death bypismires. " But he afterward introduced the measure in anotherform, and came off successful and triumphant in the end. 

He was afterward sent abroad by General Grant to succeed Mr. Motley. He got into trouble there by giving a letter of recommendationwhich was unwisely used to promote an enterprise known asthe Emma Mine. He gave the recommendation, I have no doubt, in entire good faith. The stock of that mine went down. Theinvestors lost their money, and great complaint was made thathe had used his official position to promote a fraudulentscheme. He was compelled to withdraw from the Mission. Hewas not recalled, but came home on leave of absence, and resignedhere. So he was not obliged to take formal leave. But thestock of the mine afterward became exceedingly valuable, and the public regretted the unjust judgment they had formedabout General Schenck. I had and have a great regard forhim. There was not a dishonest hair on the old fellow's head. His health failed soon after, so he had no opportunity torender further service, which would undoubtedly have causedthat unpleasant affair to be forgotten. 

Judge Luke P. Poland of Vermont was another very interestingcharacter. He was well known throughout the country. Hehad a tall and erect and very dignified figure, and a finehead covered with a beautiful growth of gray hair. He wasdressed in the old-fashioned style that Mr. Webster used, with blue coat, brass buttons and a buff-colored vest. Hiscoat and buttons were well known all over the country. Oneday when William Lloyd Garrison was inveighing against someconduct of the Southern whites, and said: "They say the Southis quiet now. Order reigns in Warsaw. But where is Poland?"An irreverent newspaper man said: "He is up in Vermont polishingbrass buttons. "

The Judge was a very able lawyer, and a man of very greatindustry. He and Judge Hoar went over together the revisionof the United States statutes of 1874, completing a laborwhich had been neglected by Caleb Cushing. Judge Poland hada good deal of fun in him, and had a stock of anecdotes whichhe liked to tell to any listener. It was said, I do not knowhow truly, that he could bear any amount of whiskey withoutin the slightest degree affecting his intellect. There wasa story that two well-known Senators laid a plot to get theJudge tipsy. They invited him to a room at Willards, andprivately instructed the waiter, when they ordered whiskeyto put twice as much of the liquid into Poland's glass asinto the others. The order was repeated several times. Theheads of the two hosts had begun to swim, but Poland was notmoved. At last they saw him take the waiter aside and heardhim tell him in a loud whisper: "The next time, make minea little stronger, if you please. " They concluded on the wholethat Vermont brain would hold its own with Michigan and Illinois. 

One of the most amusing scenes I ever witnessed was a callof the House in the old days, when there was no quorum. Thedoors were shut. The Speaker sent officers for the absentees. They were brought to the bar of the House one after another. Judge Poland happened to be one of the absentees. My colleague, Mr. Dawes, was in the chair. Poland was brought to the bar. Mr. Dawes addressed him with solemnity: "Mr. Poland, of Vermont, you have been absent from the session of the House withoutits leave. What excuse have you to offer?" The Judge pauseda moment and then replied in a tone of great gravity and emotion:"I went with my wife to call on my minister, and I stayeda little too long. " The House accepted the excuse, and Isuppose the religious people of the Judge's district wouldhave maintained him in office for a thousand years by virtueof that answer, if they had had their way. A man who hadbeen so long exposed to the wickedness and temptations of Washington, and had committed only the sin of staying a little too longwhen he called on his minister might safely be trusted anywhere. 

Judge Peters, of Maine, did not speak very frequently anddid not attract much public attention. But he had a stronginfluence with the members of the House. He was on the JudiciaryCommittee. He made brief, pithy speeches which generallyconvinced the House. He declined to continue in the Nationalservice, where the people of Maine would have been willingto keep him until his dying day. He afterward became ChiefJustice of Maine, and sustained the high character which theBench of that State has had from the beginning. 

There is one anecdote of him, which does not come withinthe sphere of my recollections, but which I think perhapsmy readers will prefer to anything that does. A few yearsago a young man who kept a grocery store was tried beforeJudge Peters for larceny. He was a very respectable youngtradesman. The Salvation Army had engaged quarters next tohis store, where they disturbed him and his customers a gooddeal by playing on the drum and other similar religious services. But that was not all. They used to come out on the sidewalkand beat a large drum and sing and kneel in prayer just beforehis door, much to the disturbance of his customers and theaggravation of the young grocer. One day he purloined andhid the large drum. He was detected and indicted for larceny. The Attorney-General, for the Government, maintained thateverything that went to constitute the crime of larceny existedthere. He had taken secretly another man's property from hispossession, for purposes of his own. Whether he meant todestroy it or hide it or to convert it to his own use madeno difference in the offence against the owner or againstthe law. On the other hand the defendant's counsel arguedthat it was a mere matter of mischief; that there was no feloniousintent, and no purpose to deprive the owner permanently ofthe property. The Chief Justice charged very strongly forthe Commonwealth. The jury very reluctantly brought in averdict of guilty. The poor fellow was sorely distressed. He was convicted as a thief. His life seemed to be blightedand ruined past hope. The Chief Justice said: "Mr. Clerk, you may record the verdict. I may as well sentence him now. I shall fine him a dollar, without costs. I once stole adrum myself. "

John A. Logan was a member of the House when I entered it, and I served with him in the Senate also. He was a man ofremarkable power, and remarkable influence, both with theSenate and with the people. It is, I believe, agreed by allauthorities that we had no abler officer in the Civil Warthan he, except those who were educated at West Point. Hewas always a great favorite with the veteran soldiers. Hewas rough in speech, and cared little for refinements inmanner. He was said to be an uneducated man. But I believehe was a man of a good many accomplishments; that he spokesome foreign languages well, and had a pretty good knowledgeof our political history. He was exceedingly imperious anddomineering, impatient of contradiction in any matter whichhe had in charge. So he was rather an uncomfortable man toget along with. He was especially sensitive of any ridiculeor jesting at his expense. He was supposed, I know not howtruly, to be exceedingly impatient and ready for war on anyman who crossed his path. But his behaviour when he was orderedto supersede General Thomas, just before the battle at Nashvilleand Franklin, is a noble instance of magnanimity. 

When Sherman started for the sea, Hood, with a large rebelarmy, was in his rear. Gen. Thomas was ordered to attackhim. But he delayed and delayed till the authorities at Washingtongrew impatient and ordered Logan to supersede Thomas. Everybodyknows the intensity of the passion for military glory. GeneralLogan could have carried out his orders, taken advantage ofThomas's dispositions, and won himself one of the most brilliantvictories of the war, which would have had a double lustrefrom the seeming lukewarmness of his predecessor; but whenhe arrived at the place of operations and learned Thomas'sdispositions and the reason for his delay, he became satisfiedthat the great Fabius was right and wise. His generous naturedisdained to profit by the mistake at headquarters and toget glory for himself at the expense of a brave soldier. Sohe postponed the execution of his orders, and left Thomasin his command. The result was the battle of Nashville andthe annihilation of Hood. Where in military story can therebe found a brighter page than that? That one act of magnanimousself-denial gave to American history two of its brightestnames, --the name of Thomas and the name of Logan. 

Another very able member of the House was Thomas A. Jenksof Rhode Island. He never seemed to care much for that fieldof service, but preferred to enjoy the practice of his profession, in which he was largely employed, and was earning a largeincome. But he is entitled to honorable memory as the originatorand father of the reform of the civil service in this country. He made a very able speech in its favor in 1867 or 1868, whichwas the beginning of a movement which has been successful, for which I think the public gratitude should be shared betweenhim and Dorman B. Eaton. 

Elihu B. Washburn, of Illinois, was appointed Secretary ofState by General Grant, whose constant friend and supporterhe had been through his whole military career. Washburn wasbrave, vigorous and far-sighted, a man of great influencein his State and in the House. He was prominently spokenof for the Presidency. But with Grant and Logan as his competitorsfrom his own State, there was not much chance for him. Hewas afterward Minister to France, and gained great distinctionand credit by remaining in Paris throughout the siege, andgiving shelter and support to persons who were in danger fromthe fury of the mob. He earned the gratitude alike of theGermans and the French ecclesiastics. 

He was known as the watch dog of the Treasury, when he wasin the House. Few questionable claims against the Governmentcould escape his vigilance, or prevail over his formidableopposition. But, one day, a private bill championed by hisbrother, Cadwallader, passed the House while Elihu kept entirelysilent. Somebody called out to the Speaker: "The watch dogdon't bark when one of the family goes by. "

When I entered the House, William B. Allison, of Iowa, hadalready acquired great influence there. He manifested therethe qualities that have since given him so much distinctionin the Senate. He was understood to favor what was calledRevenue Reform, and moderation in the exercise of all doubtfulnational powers. 

But his chief distinction has been gained by a service ofthirty years in the Senate. He was out of public life twoyears, and then was elected to the Senate, where he has beenkept by the State of Iowa, maintaining the confidence of hisState and of his associates in public life. During all thattime he has done what no other man in the country, in myjudgment, could have done so well. He has been a memberof the great Committee on Appropriations for thirty years, most of the time Chairman, and for twenty-six years a memberof the Committee on Finance. He has controlled, more thanany other man, indeed more than any other ten men, the vastand constantly increasing public expenditure, amounting nowto more than 1, 000 millions annually. It has been an economical, honest and wise expenditure. He has been compelled in thedischarge of his duties to understand the complications andmechanism of public administration and public expenditure. That is a knowledge in which nobody else in the Senate, exceptSenator Hale of Maine, and Senator Cockrell of Missouri, cancompare with him. He has by his wise and moderate counseldrawn the fire from many a wild and dangerous scheme whichmenaced the public peace and safety. 

He almost never takes part in the debates, unless it becomesnecessary to explain or defend some measure of which he hascharge. It is said that he is very careful not to offendanybody, and that he is unwilling to take responsibilitiesor to commit himself. There is undoubtedly some truth inthat criticism. Indeed if it were otherwise, he would findit very hard to maintain the personal influence necessaryto success in the duties to which he is immediately devoted. But he never avoids voting. His name, since he has been Senator, has been first or second alphabetically on the roll of theSenate. He is found in the Senate Chamber unless engagedin his committee-room on work which requires him to be thereduring the sessions, --and he always votes when his name iscalled. 

I have never seen any indication that he is interested inanything, or has any special knowledge or accomplishment, except what is necessary to the line of his duty. I do notknow that he has any interest in history or literature orscience or music. What he does in his time of recreation--if he ever has any time for recreation--I cannot tell. Henever seems to take any active interest in any of the questionswhich determine the action of the party or the destiny ofthe State, except those that relate to its finances. I usethe word finances in the largest sense, including means forraising revenue and maintaining a sound currency, as wellas public expenditures. He is like a naval engineer, regulatingthe head of steam but seldom showing himself on deck. I thinkhe has had a good deal of influence in some perilous timesin deciding whether the ship should keep safely on, or shouldrun upon a rock and go to the bottom. 

There is a good story told that after Thaddeus Stevens died, a friend of Mr. Blaine's was walking with him one day throughthe Rotunda of the Capitol toward the House of Representatives. Mr. Blaine said: "The death of Stevens is an emancipationfor the Republican Party. He kept the party under his heel. "His friend replied: "Whom have you got for leaders left?"Blaine said: "There are three young men coming forward. Thereis a young man who will be heard from yet. " He pointed toAllison, who happened to be just approaching. "James A. Garfieldis another. " There was a little pause, and his friend said:"Well, who is the third?" Blaine gazed straight up intothe dome, and said: "I don't see the third. "

I give my estimate of James A. Garfield later in this book. 

I think I ought not to leave out of an account of the veryable and remarkable Massachusetts delegation in the Congressof 1869 the name of George S. Boutwell, although he remainedin the House only a few days after I entered in and is stillliving. He had been a very faithful, useful and prominentmember of the House from the time he entered it in March, 1863, at the middle of the War. 

It was the desire of his associates in the House that heshould be a Member of General Grant's cabinet. When GeneralGrant's Cabinet was announced the name of Governor Boutwelldid not appear, and my brother, Judge Hoar, was nominatedfor Attorney-General. He had a high opinion of Mr. Boutwelland had been very earnest, so far as he could properly doso, in advocating his original nomination to Congress. Inthe evening after the Cabinet had been announced Mr. WilliamB. Washburn, afterward Governor, called upon me at my room. Mr. Washburn and I were not then intimate, although we afterwardbecame close friends. He said that he had been requestedby the delegation to tell me that they earnestly hoped toMr. Boutwell might have a place in the Cabinet, and that, although they had great regard for Judge Hoar, they hopedthat some arrangement might still be made which would bringabout the selection of Mr. Boutwell. I told Mr. Washburnthat I was sure that the appointment of Judge Hoar would bea surprise to him, as it was to me, and that I thought itquite doubtful whether he would wish to leave his place onthe Bench for a seat in the Cabinet, but that I could notspeak for him or judge for him. I telegraphed at once toJudge Hoar not to commit himself in any way until he reachedWashington and could see me. I met him at the depot, toldhim of the communication of the Massachusetts delegation andthat, especially considering President Johnson's quarrel withCongress, it seemed quite important that General Grant, whohad no experience whatever in political life, should havesome person among his counsellors who had the full confidenceof the leaders in Congress. The Judge strongly appreciatedthat view. When he called upon President Grant his firstconversation consisted in urging upon him very strongly theselection of Governor Boutwell. He supposed then that itwould be quite unlikely that the President would take twomen from the same State and supposed that selection wouldrequire his own refusal of the offer of the office of Attorney-General. President Grant said that he would think it overand not decide the question that day. The next morning hesent for the Judge and said: "Judge, I think I would liketo have you take the oath of office. " He handed the Judgehis commission. The Judge looked at it and saw that it wasnot signed. He said: "I think perhaps it would be betterif you were to sign it. " Grant laughed and complied withthe suggestion. Judge Hoar's first official duty was to givean opinion upon the question whether Mr. Stewart, who hadbeen nominated for Secretary of the Treasury, could underthe law undertake the office. Mr. Stewart proposed to makesome conveyances of his business in trust, by which he shouldpart with his legal title to it while he held the office ofSecretary of the Treasury and come back to it again afterhis term ended. But the Attorney-General advised the Presidentthat that was impracticable, and the result was the withdrawalof Mr. Stewart's name and the appointment of Mr. Boutwella day or two afterward. 

I have had some serious difficulties with Mr. Boutwell sincehe left the Democratic Party after his term of service asGovernor. They have, I believe, never been differences ofpolitical principle. My differences of opinion with him havebeen mainly upon the question what individuals were fit tobe trusted with political office and power, and with the leadershipin political parties, and upon the question whether certainmen and influences were to be tolerated, or whether the publicsafety required unsparing warfare upon them. So, while wehave agreed in general as to policies, we have always hadan entirely different set of friends and companions. 

Mr. Boutwell has borne an honorable part in our history. His titles to a place in the grateful memory of his countrymenare not likely to be overlooked. 

One of them deserves special mention. I am but repeatingwhat I said many years ago. As a leading member of the Houseof Representatives, and as Secretary of the Treasury underPresident Grant's Administration, he had, of course, a largeinfluence upon our financial history. He saw very early theimportance of devoting every resource of the country to thereduction of the National debt. It was not with him, as Iunderstand it, a question whether a little saving could bemade in the way of taxes by postponing the payment until therate of interest should be less or the National resourcesgreater. He saw that it was important that the people shouldnot get accustomed, as the English people are, to considera National debt as something that was to continue always. He saw that it was important to the character of the people, as to an individual, that they should be impatient and restlessunder the obligation of debt, and should consider it alikethe Nation's first duty and its greatest pride and luxuryto get rid of the burden. This has always been the temperof the State of Massachusetts, of her towns, and, in general, of her citizens. 

Accordingly he insisted that the debt should be reduced sorapidly that the people would take pride in having paid it, and would be relieved from the temptation of listening tothe specious and seductive arguments of persons contrivingdishonest methods of getting rid of it by issuing fiat money, or any device of direct or indirect repudiation. Many personscan remember in what dangerous forms this temptation came, and how many men, who otherwise deserve to be held in highesteem, yielded to it wholly or partly. Mr. Boutwell's powerfulinfluence was a very important factor in attaining the resultin which we all now take so much satisfaction, and keepingthe American people in the path of duty and honor. 

William A. Wheeler, of New York, entered the House in 1869. I soon became very well acquainted with him, an acquaintancewhich ripened into a very intimate friendship. He was a veryserious, simple-hearted and wise man. There was no man inhis time who had more influence in the House. His ancestorsdwelt in my native town of Concord in the early generations, and in Lincoln, which had been part of Concord. One of thefamily emigrated to Vermont. Wheeler's father went from Vermontto Malone, New York, where he was born, and where he was leftby his father an orphan in very early youth. The widow andchildren were without any property whatever, but got alongsomehow. Wheeler got an education, spending two or threeyears in college, and became the foremost man in his partof New York. The people of his district were in characterand way of thinking very much like our best Massachusettsconstituencies. Wheeler had little respect for the deviousand self-seeking politics which are supposed to have beenneeded for success in that State. He very much disliked RoscoeConkling, and all his ways. Conkling once said to him: "Wheeler, if you will join us and act with us, there is nothing in thegift of the State of New York to which you may not reasonablyaspire. " To which Wheeler replied: "Mr. Conkling, thereis nothing in the gift of the State of New York which willcompensate me for the forfeiture of my own self respect. "

Mr. Wheeler was one of the sub-committee, of whom Mr. Fryeand myself were the other two Republican members, to inquireinto the condition of the legality of the Kellogg State Governmentof Louisiana. He suggested what is known as the Wheelercompromise, the acceptance of which by both sides was dueto his influence and capacity for conciliation. The compromiseconsisted in an agreement to allow the Republican State officersto remain in office during the remainder of their terms, withoutturbulent or factious opposition, to submit quietly to theirauthority on the one hand, and that the two Houses of theLegislature, on the other hand, should seat the Democraticcontestants whom our sub-committee found entitled to theirseats. This compromise in reality gave effect to the opinionof the committee, as if they had been a tribunal of arbitration. Of course they had no authority to enforce their opinion againstthe objection of either party. 

As soon as the nomination of President Hayes was declaredin the Convention of 1876, I spent a very busy hour in goingabout among the delegates whom I knew, especially those fromthe Southern States, to urge upon them the name of Mr. Wheeleras a suitable person for Vice-President. I have no doubtI secured for him his election. Mr. James Russell Lowellwas a Massachusetts delegate. He was a little unwilling tovote for a person of whom he had no more knowledge. I saidto him: "Mr. Lowell, Mr. Wheeler is a very sensible man. He knows the 'Biglow Papers' by heart. " Lowell gave no promisein reply. But I happened to overhear him, as he sat behindme, saying to James Freeman Clarke, I think it was: "I understandthat Mr. Wheeler is 'a very sensible man. '"

Wheeler was one of the best parliamentarians and one of thebest presiding officers I ever knew. He had no children. It is pathetic to remember the affection which existed betweenhim and his wife. Their long living together had broughtabout a curious resemblance. She looked like him, talkedlike him, thought like him, and if she had been dressed inhis clothes, or he had been in hers, either might have passedfor the other. When she died Wheeler seemed to lose all interestin this world, shut himself off from all ordinary activities, and died a year or two after, I suppose with a broken heart. 

CHAPTER XVIPOLITICAL CONDITIONS IN 1869

When the Republican Party came into power in 1869 under itsgreat and simple-hearted President, it found itself confrontedwith very serious duties. They were enough to fill ordinarymen in ordinary times with dismay. The President was withoutpolitical experience. He had never held civil office. Hehad voted but twice in his life. He had voted the Whig ticketonce and the Democratic ticket once. So he could not justlybe charged with being an offensive partisan. He had no experiencein business except in a humble way and in that he had beenunfortunate. Congress and the President could only act underthe restraint of a written Constitution. Everything doneby either must pass the ordeal of the Supreme Court, a majorityof whose members then had no sympathy with a liberal interpretationof the National powers. The Chief Justice had been a greatRepublican leader. But he had quarrelled with Lincoln, andwas an eager aspirant for the Democratic nomination for thePresidency. 

Of the eight years after the inauguration of Lincoln morethan four had been years of actual war and more than fivepassed before formal declaration of peace. During all thistime nothing could be considered but the preservation of theUnion. From the end of the War to the accession of PresidentGrant, Congress and the President had been engaged in a strugglewith each other for power. President Johnson had been impeachedand put on trial before the Senate. So there could be noimportant legislation from the summer of 1866 until March, 1869, that did not command the assent of two thirds of bothHouses. 

Yet the feeling everywhere among the Republicans in Washingtonand throughout the North was of exultant and confident courage. The strength of the Nation had been tried and not found wanting. It had overthrown a mighty rebellion. The burden of slavery, which had hung like a millstone about the neck of the Republic, had been thrown off. Congress had been triumphant in itscontest with the President. The loyal people of the countrylooked to Grant with an almost superstitious hope. They wereprepared to expect almost any miracle from the great geniuswho had subdued the rebellion, and conducted without failuremilitary operations on a scale of which the world up to thattime had had no experience. So the dominant party addresseditself without fear to the great work before it. 

They had to determine on what conditions the States thathad been in rebellion should come back to their place underthe Constitution. 

They were to determine on what terms the men who had takenpart in the rebellion should be fully restored to citizenship. 

They were to determine the civil and political conditionof more than five million people just set free from slavery. 

They were to secure fair elections in fifteen States, wherefor many years neither free elections nor free speech hadbeen tolerated. 

If they could, they were to reconcile the North and the South, estranged by a strife so bitter that even before the War thelife of no Northern man who dared to utter Northern opinionswas safe in half the States of the country, and which hadbeen intensified by four years of bloody war--bellum plusquam civile--which had left nearly every household in thecountry mourning for its dead. 

They were to confront the greatest temptation that ever besetsmen of Anglo-Saxon race, a race ever restless and ever hungryfor empire. Hungry eyes were already bent on San Domingoand Cuba. Good men were rendered uneasy by the tales of Spanishoppression in Cuba. Men who were looking for the union ofthe two oceans by a canal across the Isthmus, or who hopedthat we should extend our dominion in this continent southward, looked upon the island belonging to the Negro Republics ofHayti and San Domingo as a desirable addition to our militaryand naval strength. 

They were to provide for the payment of an enormous debt. 

They were to accomplish the resumption of specie payment. 

They were to consider and determine anew the question ofcurrency. What should be the standard of value and a legaltender for the payment of debts?

They were to get rid of the vast burden of war taxes whichpressed heavily upon all branches of business. 

They were to decide whether the duties on imports whichhad been laid to meet the heavy cost of war should be keptin peace and whether to follow the counsel of Hamilton andhis associates in the first Administration of Washington, orthe counsel of the free traders and the English school ofpolitical economics, in determining whether American industryshould be protected. 

The people felt that they had suffered a grievous wrong fromEngland, and that unless there were reparation, which Englandhad so far steadily refused either to make or consider, thehonor of the country required that we should exact it by war. 

The emigrants from foreign lands who had come to our shoresin vast numbers, and were coming in rapidly increasing numbers, were made uneasy by the doctrine of perpetual allegiance onwhich all Europe insisted. They claimed that they were entitledto protection like native-born American citizens everywhereon the face of the earth. 

The number of civil officers appointed by the Executive hadlargely increased. This put an undue and most dangerouspower into the hands of the party controlling the Government. There was a strong feeling that this should be checked. 

Besides; during the controversy with Andrew Johnson the membersof the two Houses of Congress had come to think that theywere entitled to control all appointments of civil officersin their own States and Districts, and they were ready withscarce an exception to stand by each other in this demand. They had passed, over the veto of President Johnson, an actof disputed and quite doubtful constitutionality, seriouslycrippling the Executive power of removal from office, withoutwhich the President's constitutional duty to see that thelaws are faithfully executed cannot be performed. So eachSenator and Representative was followed like a Highland Chieftain"with his tail on, " by a band of retainers devoted to hispolitical fortunes, dependent upon him for their own, butsupported at the public charge. 

This not only threatened the freedom of election, but itselfbrought a corrupting influence into the Administration ofthe Government. 

But there was a still greater danger than all these in thecorruption which then, as always, followed a great war. Unprincipledand greedy men sought to get contracts and jobs from the Governmentby the aid of influential politicians. This aid they paidfor sometimes, though I think rarely, in money, and in contributionsto political campaigns, and in the various kinds of assistancenecessary to maintain in power the men to whom they were soindebted. This corruption not only affected all branchesof the Civil Service, especially the War and the Navy andthe Treasury, but poisoned legislation itself. 

They had to deal with claims amounting to hundreds of millionsof dollars, some wholly fraudulent, some grossly exaggeratedand some entirely just. Some of these belonged to personswho had contracts with the Government for constructing andsupplying a powerful Navy, or for supplies to the Army. Therewere demands still larger in amount from the inhabitants ofthe territory which had been the theatre of the War. Thisclass of claims was wholly new in the history of our own country. There were few precedents for dealing with them in the experienceof other countries, and the Law of Nations and the law ofwar furnished imperfect guides. 

Men wounded or disabled in the Military or Naval Service, and their widows and orphans, were to be provided for by aliberal pension system. 

These were a part only of the questions that must be studiedand understood, under the gravest personal responsibilityby every member of either House of Congress. Under the Administrationof Grant and those that succeeded, of course, there was aconstant struggle on the part of the party in power to keepin power and on the part of its opponent to get power. Sothat it was necessary that a Representative or Senator whowould do his duty, or who had the ordinary ambition, or desiredthat the counsel best for the country should prevail, shouldmaster these subjects and take a large part in discussingand advocating the policy of his party. 

During the thirty-two years from the 4th of March, 1869, to the 4th of March, 1901, the Democratic Party held theExecutive power of the country for eight years. For nearlyfour years more Andrew Johnson had a bitter quarrel withthe Republican leaders in both Houses of Congress. For sixyears the Democrats controlled the Senate. For sixteen yearsthey controlled the House of Representatives. There is lefton the Statute Book no trace of any Democratic legislationduring this whole period except the repeal of the laws intendedto secure honest elections. The two Administrations of PresidentCleveland are remembered by the business men and the laboringmen of the country only as terrible nightmares. Whateverhas been accomplished in this period, which seems to me themost brilliant period in legislative history of any countryin the world, has been accomplished by the Republican Partyover Democratic opposition. The failure to secure honestNational elections and the political and civil rights of thecolored people is the failure of the Republican Party andthe success of its Democratic antagonist. With that exception, to all the problems which confronted the country in 1869 theRepublican Party has given a simple, wise, final and mostsuccessful solution. It has done it not only without help, butover the constant opposition of its Democratic antagonist. 

Every State that went into the Rebellion has been restoredto its place in the Union. 

There has been complete and universal amnesty. No man hasbeen punished for his share in the Rebellion. 

In spite of dishonest and subtle counsel, and in spite ofgreat temptation, we have dealt with the public debt on thesimple and honest principle that the only thing to do with adebt is to pay it. The National credit is the best in theworld, and the National debt has ceased to be an object eitherof anxiety or consideration. 

Specie payments have been resumed. Every dollar issued bythe Government, or by national banks under government authority, passes current like gold. Indeed the ease with which it canbe transported and the certainty of its redemption makes thepaper money of the United States better than gold. 

The United States has joined the commercial nations of thefirst rank in making gold the world's standard of value. In doing this we have never departed from the theoreticalprinciple of bimetallism as announced by Hamilton and Washingtonand Webster and all our statesmen without exception down to1869. The contest was an exceedingly close one. The argumentsin support of the free coinage of silver were specious anddangerous. Undoubtedly for a time, and more than once, theyconverted a majority of the American people. The battle forhonest money would have been lost but for the wisdom of theRepublican statesmen who planted the party not only upon thedoctrine of theoretical bimetallism, but also upon the doctrinethat the question of the standard of value must be settledby the concurrence of the commercial nations of the worldand that if there were to be one metal as a standard, gold, the most valuable metal, was the fittest for the purpose. That was the doctrine of Alexander Hamilton. To have avowedany other principle would have reinforced our opponents withthe powerful authority of Hamilton and all his disciplesdown to the year 1873. 

The war taxes have been abolished. The weight of the burdenwhich has been in that way lifted from the shoulders of thepeople may perhaps be understood from the statement of a singlefact. The Worcester District, which I represented, paid inthe direct form of taxes to the National Treasury the enormoussum of $3, 662, 727 for the year ending June 30, 1866. Forthe year ending June 30, 1871, the taxes so paid amountedin all to $225, 000, and for the year ending June 30, 1872, they amounted to about $100, 000. 

The policy of protection to American industry, which, likethe question of honest elections, has been always in contestbetween the Republican Party and its Democratic antagonisthas, unless during the two Administrations of President Cleveland, been successfully maintained. As a consequence of that policyour manufacturing independence has been achieved. The UnitedStates has become the foremost manufacturing nation in theworld. We are penetrating foreign markets, and have builtup a domestic commerce, the like of which has never been seenbefore, and whose extent surpasses the power of human imaginationto conceive and almost of mathematics to calculate. 

The temptation to extend our territory by unlawful exerciseof power over Cuba and San Domingo was resisted by the Americanpeople. Cuba has been liberated and has taken her place amongthe free nations of the world. 

For the great offence committed against us by Great Britainin the hour of our peril we have exacted apology and reparation. There were not wanting counsellors enough to urge the Americanpeople that we should nurse this grievance and lie in waituntil the hour for our revenge should come. But the magnanimousAmerican people preferred peace and reconciliation to revenge. I ought to except this from the list of achievements due tothe Republican Party alone. In the matter of the BritishTreaty, the Democratic leaders contributed their full shareto its successful accomplishment. Mr. Justice Nelson ofthe United States Supreme Court was a distinguished memberof the Commission that made the Treaty. 

Under General Grant's Administration treaties were negotiatedwith nearly all the great powers of the world by which theyrenounced the old doctrine of perpetual allegiance, and theAmerican citizen of foreign birth is clothed with all therights and privileges of a native-born citizen wherever onthe face of the earth he may go. 

The vast number of the National offices has ceased to be amenace to the safety of the Republic and has ceased to be asource of strength to the Administration in power, or tobecome the price or reward of political activity. The officesof trust and profit now exist to serve the people and not tobribe them. 

The conflict between the Senate and the Executive which arosein the time of Andrew Johnson, when Congress undertook tohamper and restrict the President's Constitutional power ofremoval from office, without which his Constitutional dutyof seeing that the laws are faithfully executed cannot beperformed, has been settled by a return to the ancient principleestablished in Washington's first Administration. 

The vast claims upon the Treasury growing out of the war havebeen dealt with upon wise and simple principles which havecommanded general assent and in the main have resulted indoing full justice both to the Government and to the claimant. 

A disputed title to the Executive power which threatenedto bring on another civil war, and which would not have beensettled without bloodshed in any other country, has been peacefullyand quietly disposed of by the simple mechanism devised forthe occasion and by the enactment of a rule which will protectthe country against a like danger in the future. 

With all these matters I have had something to do. 

As to some of them my part has been a very humble one. Asto others I have had a part of considerable prominence. Asto all I have had full and intimate knowledge at the timeand have been in the intimate counsel of the men who wereresponsible for the result. 

Beside all these things there has been during a large partof my public service, especially the part immediately followingthe Civil War, a battle to maintain the purity of electionsand the purity of administration and government expenditureagainst corruption. The attempt to get possession of theforces of the Government for corrupt purposes assumed itsmost dangerous form and had its most unscrupulous and dangerousleader in Massachusetts. It was my fortune to have a gooddeal to do with maintaining the ancient honor of the Commonwealthand defending and vindicating the purity of her politicalorganization. 

Upon all these matters I formed my opinions carefully in thebeginning. I have adhered to those opinions, and acted onthem throughout. I formed them in many cases when they wereshared by a few persons only. But they have made their way, and prevail. They are the opinions upon which the majorityof the American people have acted, and the reasons which havecontrolled that action, seem to me now, in looking backward, to have been good reasons. I have no regret, and no desireto blot out anything I have said or done, or to change anyvote I have given. 

The duties of a Representative and Senator demand a largecorrespondence. I have had always the aid of intelligent andcompetent secretaries. Disposing of the day's mail, evenwith such aid, is not infrequently a hard day's work, especiallyfor a man past three score and ten. 

Political campaigns in Massachusetts with its small territoryand compact population are easy as compared with most of theother States. But I have been expected every second yearto make many political speeches, commonly from thirty to forty. Mr. Blaine, and Mr. Fry, and Mr. Reed, and a great many otherswho could be named, were called on for a much larger number. A man at all prominent in public affairs is also expectedto give utterance to the voice of the people on all greatoccasions of joy or sorrow, at high festivals, or at collegesand schools, on great National anniversaries, when great mendie and great historical events are celebrated. So it wasa life of hard work upon which I entered when I took my seatin the House of Representatives on the 4th of March, 1869. The thirty-four years that have followed have been for meyears of incessant labor. 

CHAPTER XVIIRECONSTRUCTION

The reconstruction policy of the Republican Party has beenbitterly denounced. Some men who supported it are in thehabit now of calling it a failure. It never commanded inits fullest extent the cordial support of the whole party. But it was very simple. So far as it applied to the Southernwhites who had been in rebellion it consisted only of completeamnesty and full restoration to political rights. No manwas ever punished for taking part in the rebellion afterhe laid down his arms. There is no other instance of suchmagnanimity in history. The War left behind it little bitternessin the hearts of the conquerors. All they demanded of theconquered was submission in good faith to the law of the landand the will of the people as it might be constitutionallydeclared. 

Their policy toward the colored people was simply the applicationto them of the principles applied to the whites, as set forthin the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitutionof nearly every State in the Union. There was to be no distinctionin political rights by reason of color or race. The Stateswere left to regulate such qualifications as residence, character, intelligence, education and property as they saw fit, onlysubject to the condition that they were to apply to all alike. 

It was the purpose of the dominant party to leave the controlof the election of national officers, as it had been leftfrom the beginning, in the hands of the local or State authorities. The power was claimed, indeed it is clearly given by the Constitution, as was asserted in the debates in the Convention that framedit, to conduct those elections under National authority, ifit should be found by experience to be necessary. But infact there was at no time any attempt to go further with Nationalelection laws than to provide for punishment of fraudulentor violent interference with elections or for a sufficientprovision to ascertain that they were properly conducted, or to protect them against violence or fraud. 

Beside this it was the desire of many Republican leaders, especially of Mr. Sumner and General Grant, that there shouldbe a provision at the National charge for the education ofall the citizens in the Southern States, black and white, so far as the States were unable or unwilling to afford it, such as had been provided for in the States of the Northfor all their citizens. It was never contemplated by themto give the right to vote to a large number of illiteratecitizens, without ample provision for their education at thepublic charge. General Grant accompanied his official announcementto Congress of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment withan earnest recommendation of such a provision. Earnest effortswere made to accomplish this result by liberal grants fromthe National treasury. Many liberal and patriotic SouthernDemocrats supported it. But it was defeated by the timidity, or mistaken notions of economy, of Northern statesmen. Inmy opinion this defeat accounts for the failure of the policyof reconstruction so far as it has failed. I do not believethat self-government with universal suffrage could be maintainedlong in any Northern State, or in any country in the world, without ample provision for public education. 

It has been claimed with great sincerity and not withoutplausible reason that a great hardship and wrong was inflictedby the victorious North on their fellow citizens when thepolitical power in their States was given over to their formerslaves. This consideration had great force in the minds ofmany influential Republicans in the North. Governor Andrewof Massachusetts, Governor Morton of Indiana, afterward Senator, men whose influence was probably unsurpassed by any othertwo men in the country, save Grant and Sumner alone, wereof that way of thinking. They thought that our true policywas to let the men who had led their States into the Rebelliontake the responsibility of restoring them to their old relations. 

It is not unlikely that the strength of the Republican Partywould have been seriously impaired, perhaps overthrown, bythe division of sentiment on this subject. But the whiteDemocrats in the South were blind to their own interest. PresidentJohnson permitted them in several States to take into theirhands again the power of government. They proceeded to passlaws which if carried out would have had the effect of reducingthe negro once more to a condition of practical slavery. Menwere to be sold for the crime of being out of work. Theirold masters were to have the preference in the purchase. Sothe whole Republican Party of the North came to be unitedin the belief that there could be no security for the libertyof the freedman without the ballot. 

It is said that this reconstruction policy has been a failure. Undoubtedly it has not gained all that was hoped for it byits advocates. But looking back now I do not believe thatany other policy would have done as well as that has done, although a large part of what was designed by the Republicanleaders of the period of reconstruction never was accomplished. 

A complete system of education at the National charge wasan essential element of the reconstruction policy. It wasearnestly advocated by Sumner and by Grant and by Edmundsand by Evarts. But there were other Republicans of greatinfluence who resisted it from the beginning. Among thesewas Senator Eugene Hale of Maine, a very accomplished Senator, an able debater and a man of large influence with his colleagues. His public life has been one of great distinction and usefulness. While an earnest partisan he has given an example of independenceof action on several notable occasions. But he always seemedto be possessed by what seems to prevail among the Republicansof Maine to a great extent, dislike for what is called sentimentalpolitics. Mr. Hale always seemed to think that the chieffunction of Congress was to provide for an honest, economical, wise and at the same time liberal public expenditure, to keepin the old paths and leave other matters alone. He dislikesnew doctrines and new policies. He is specially adverse toanything like legal restraint. He once in my hearing useda very felicitous phrase, full of wisdom, "Government by goodnature. " John Sherman, who had originally been an earnestadvocate of a liberal National expenditure for education, joined the ranks of its opponents, putting his oppositionlargely on the ground that he was unwilling to trust the Southernstates with the expenditure of large sums of money. He fearedthat the money would not be fairly expended, as between thetwo races, and that it would be made a large corruption fundfor political purposes. 

So this most essential part of the reconstruction policyof Sumner and Grant never took effect. Mr. Sumner deemedthis matter vital to success. He told me about a week beforehis death that when the resolution declaring the provisionfor public education at the National charge an essential partof the reconstruction policy, was defeated in the Senate bya tie vote, he was so overcome by his feelings that he burstinto tears and left the Senate Chamber. 

Another part of the Republican plan for reconstruction wasnever accomplished. That was the securing of a fair voteand a fair ascertainment of the result in National electionsby National power. Some partial and imperfect attempts weremade to put in force laws intended to accomplish this result. They never went farther than enactments designed to maintainorder at the polls, to secure the voter from actual violence, and to provide for such scrutiny as to make it clear thatthe vote was duly counted and properly returned, with a rightof appeal to the Courts of the United States in case of acontest, the decision of the Court to be subject to the finalauthority of the House of Representatives. These laws, althoughthey had the support of eminent and zealous Democrats andalthough they were as much needed and had as much applicationto the Northern cities as to the Southern States, were theobject of bitter denunciation from the beginning. Good menin the North listened with incredulity to the narrative ofwell established facts of cruelty and murder and fraud. Thesestories were indignantly denied at the time, although theyare not only confessed, but vauntingly and triumphantly affirmednow. The whole country seems to be made uneasy when the oldpractice to which it had been accustomed everywhere of havingoffences tried by a jury taken by lot from the people of theneighborhood, and the result of election ascertained by officersselected from the bystanders at the polls, is departed from. Besides, no strictness of laws which provide only for theproceedings at the elections will secure their freedom ifit be possible to intimidate the voters, especially men likethe colored voters at the South, from attending the elections, by threats, outrages and actual violence at their homes. Againstthese the election laws could not guard. Congress attemptedsome laws to secure the Southern Republicans against suchcrimes under the authority conferred by the Fourteenth Amendmentto the Constitution. But the Supreme Court held that theselaws were unconstitutional, it not appearing that the Stateshad by any affirmative action denied protection against suchoffences to any class of their citizens by reason of race, color, or previous condition. It was idle to expect Southernjurors, or State officers to enforce the law against suchcrimes in the condition of sentiment existing there. 

Further, the people of the North would not maintain the RepublicanParty in power forever on this one issue alone. They wereinterested in other things. They could not be expected, yearafter year, election after election, and perhaps generationafter generation, to hold together by reason of this one question, differing on other things. So whenever the Democratic Partyshould come into power it was apparent that all the vigorwould be taken out of the election laws. If there be notpower to repeal them the House of Representatives can alwaysrefuse to make the appropriation for enforcing them. So itbecame clear to my mind, and to the minds of many other Republicans, that it was better to leave this matter to the returning andgrowing sense of justice of the people of the South than tohave laws on this subject passed in one Administration, onlyto be repealed in another. A policy to be effective mustbe permanent. I accordingly announced in the Senate afterthe defeat of the Elections Bill in 1894 that in my judgmentit would not be wise to renew the attempt to control Nationalelection by National authority until both parties in the countryshould agree upon that subject. 

We should have had little difficulty in dealing with theNegro or the Indian, or the Oriental, if the American peoplehad applied to them, as the Golden Rule requires, the principlesthey expect to apply and to have applied to themselves. Wehave never understood that in some essential matters humannature is the same in men of all colors and races. Our Fathersof the time of the Revolution understood this matter betterthan we do. The difficult problems in our national politicsat this hour will nearly all of them be solved if the peoplewill adhere to rules of conduct imposed as restraints in theearly constitutions. The sublimity of the principle of self-government does not consist wholly or chiefly in the ideathat self is the person who governs, but quite as much inthe doctrine that self is the person who is governed. Howour race troubles would disappear if the dominant Saxon wouldbut obey, in his treatment of the weaker races, the authorityof the fundamental laws on which his own institutions rest!The problem of to-day is not how to convert the heathen fromheathenism, it is how to convert the Christian from heathenism;not to teach the physician to heal the patient, but to healhimself. The Indian problem is not chiefly how to teach theIndian to be less savage in his treatment of the Saxon, butthe Saxon to be less savage in his treatment of the Indian. The Chinese problem is not how to keep Chinese laborers outof California, but how to keep Chinese politics out of Congress. The negro question will be settled when the education of thewhite man is complete. 

We make every allowance for ourselves. We expect mankindto make every allowance for us. We expect to be forgivenfor our own wrong-doing. We easily forgive our own whitefellow citizens for the unutterable and terrible crueltiesthey have committed on men of other races. But if a peoplejust coming out of slavery or barbarism commit a hundredthpart of the same offence our righteous indignation knows nobounds. We have no recognition for their eager desire forcivilization or for liberty, no generous appreciation of theirimprovement and promise. And the thousand things in themthat give promise of good in the future are disregarded ifthere be any trace left in them of the old barbarism. 

Has Reconstruction been a failure? Let us see about that. We must remember that the relations of the black and whiteraces to each other, which have existed almost from the foundationof the world, cannot be changed in a single generation. Itis but thirty-three years since General Grant and the twoHouses of Congress, in political accord with him and witheach other, took possession of the Government. That possessionhas been interrupted more than once. It is but forty yearssince slavery was abolished. It is less than thirty yearssince the last of the three great Amendments to the Constitutiontook effect. What has happened in that time? Slavery hasbeen abolished. That is not a failure. The negro owns hisright to his own labor. He cannot be separated from his wifeor children. He is not prevented by law from learning toread the Bible. These things are not failures. He can ownland. He has schools and colleges. The young colored manis received as an equal into nearly every Northern collegeand university. He has frequently taken the highest universityhonors. I suppose he does not know, from the behavior ofhis companions, that they think of the difference betweenthe color of his skin and theirs. His right to vote is securein thirty-four of the forty-five States of the Union. Sofar, there has been no failure. When the Civil War brokeout, there were fifteen slave States and sixteen free States. In Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia the negro seems tohave his place now like other citizens. The same thing probablyis true in St. Louis, and likely to be true before long throughoutMissouri. There are thirty States out of forty-five, andthere will before long probably be thirty-five out of fiftyin which the old race feeling, growing out of slavery hasnever got a hold. The old race-hatred of the negro is gettinginto a corner. So far reconstruction has not been a failure. 

Two things are not yet accomplished. There are eleven Statesin which the negro is not yet secure in his political rights;and there are as many, and perhaps two or three more, in whichif he be suspected of a crime of the first magnitude, he islikely to undergo a cruel death, without a trial. That wouldhave been quite as likely, indeed a good deal more likelyto have happened, if the reconstruction measures had neverbeen enacted. 

It is a bad thing that any man who has the Constitutionalright to vote should fail to have his vote received and counted. But I think it is a fair question whether the existence ofthis condition throughout so large a country, with the prospectthat slowly and gradually as the negro improves he will gethis rights, be not better than the alternative which musthave been his reduction to slavery again, or what is nearlyas bad, a race of peons in this country. That is the questioninto the answer of which so much prejudice enters that itis hardly worth while to reason about it. My opinion is thatas the colored man gets land, becomes chaste, frugal, temperate, industrious, veracious, that he will gradually acquire respect, and will attain political equality. Let us not be in a hurry. Evils, if they be evils, which have existed from the foundationof the world, are not to be cured in the lifetime of a singleman. The men of the day of reconstruction were controlledby the irresistible logic of events; by a power higher thantheir own. I could see no alternative then, and I see noalternative now, better than that which was adopted. 

CHAPTER XVIIICOMMITTEE SERVICE IN THE HOUSE

The career of a Member of either House of Congress is determined, except in rare cases, by his assignment to Committees. Inthe House that is wholly dependent on the favor of the Speaker. In the Senate those assignments are made by Committees ofthe two parties, chosen for the purpose, who first agree onthe representation to be assigned to each. After the Senatorhas been assigned to a Committee he remains there unless hehimself desire a change, and if the Members older in the serviceretire he succeeds in the end to the Chairmanship of the Committee. There has been no instance of a departure from this rule, except when there is a change in the political control ofthe body, and no instance of deposing a Member from a Committeewithout his consent, except the single and well-known caseof Mr. Sumner. 

I was always on friendly terms with Mr. Blaine during my entireservice of eight years in the House of Representatives. ButI owed nothing to any favor of his in the matter of Committeeassignments. When I entered the service I was put on theCommittee of Education and Labor and on the Committee of Revisionof the Laws, both obscure and unimportant. In my second termI served a little while on the Committee on Elections. Iwas also placed on the Committee of Railroad and Canals. Iwas made Chairman of a special Committee to visit Louisianaand inquire into the legality of what was called the KelloggGovernment and report whether Governor Kellogg or his Democraticrival should be recognized as the lawful Governor of Louisiana. I was afterward placed on the Judiciary Committee, a positionof great honor, which I liked very much. 

With the exception of the last none of these appointmentshad any attraction for me. They were all out of the lineof my previous experience in life and the service they requiredof me was disagreeable. I was placed on the Committee onthe Judiciary by Mr. Speaker Kerr, a Democrat. Mr. Blaineat this time very earnestly pressed Mr. Martin I. Townsendof New York for the place. I do not conceive that I had anyright to complain of Mr. Blaine in this matter. I never madeany request of him for any appointment within his gift andhe was beset behind and before by the demands of men he wasunable to gratify, to many of whom he conceived himself undergreat obligation. It should be stated too that in Mr. Blaine'stime the Members from Massachusetts older in the service thanmyself had very important places indeed. So it was hardlyjust to increase the number of important Committee appointmentsfrom our State. 

But it happened to me by great good fortune that I had anopportunity, of which I was very glad, to accomplish somethingby reason of my place on each Committee on which I served, which I could not have accomplished without it. 

An amusing piece of good fortune happened to me at the beginningof my service. I was placed, as I said, on the Committeeon the Revision of the Laws. My law practice had been inthe interior of the Commonwealth. So I had little knowledgeof United States jurisprudence. I determined in order tofit myself for my new duties to make a careful study of thestatutes and law administered in the United States Courts. I took with me to Washington a complete set of the Reportsof the Supreme Court of the United States and purchased Abbott'sDigest of those decisions, then just published. The firstevening after I got settled I spent in reading the opinionsof the Supreme Court. I took the Digest beginning with theletter A, reading the abstracts, and then reading the casesreferred to. I got as far as Adm and read the cases relatingto admiralty practice. The next morning the Speaker announcedhis Committees and the House adjourned. After the adjournment, Judge Poland, Chairman of the Committee on the Revision ofthe Laws, called the Committee together and laid before thema letter he had just received from Mr. Justice Miller ofthe Supreme Court, asking for a change in the law in regardto monitions for summoning defendants in Admiralty. The changehad been made necessary by some recent decisions of the Court. The other members of the Committee looked at each other indismay. None of them was familiar with the question, or knewat all what it was all about. I then stated to them the difficulty, giving them the names of the cases and the volumes where theywere found. They were all quite astonished to find a manfrom the country, of whom probably none of them had ever heardbefore, having the law of Admiralty at his tongue's end. If the question had related to anything in the Digest underAdr, or anything thereafter, I should have been found probablymore ignorant than they were. But Judge Poland took me intohigh favor, and I found his friendship exceedingly agreeableand valuable. I do not remember that the Committee on theRevision of the Laws had another meeting while I belongedto it. 

I was also, as I have said, put on the Committee of Educationand Labor. The Bureau of Education had been lately establishedand the Commissioner appointed. But the office was exceedinglyunpopular, not only with the old Democrats and the StrictConstructionists, who insisted on leaving such things to theStates, but with a large class of Republicans. A very zealousattack was made on the Bureau, led by Mr. Farnsworth of Illinois, and by Cadwallader C. Washburn, a very able and influentialRepublican from Wisconsin. The Committee on Appropriations, of which my colleague, Mr. Dawes, was Chairman, reporteda provision for abolishing this Bureau. Mr. Dawes, himself, however, dissented. The Republicans on the Committee of Educationand Labor took up the cudgels for the Bureau. We beat theCommittee of Appropriations. The result of the strife wasthat the Bureau was put on a firmer footing with a more liberalprovision, and it has since been, under General Eaton andDr. Harris, the accomplished and devoted Commissioners, ofvery great and valuable service to the country. 

That led me to give special study to the matter of Nationaleducation. I introduced a bill for establishing an educationsystem by National authority in States which failed to doit themselves. Later, I introduced and carried through theHouse a measure for distributing the proceeds of the publicland and sums received from patents and some other specialfunds, among all the States in aid of the common schools. This bill passed the House, but was lost in the Senate mainlybecause Senator Morrill of Vermont, a most excellent and influentialstatesman, insisted that the money should go to the agriculturalcolleges, in which he took great interest, and not to commonschools. Later when I became a member of the Senate I succeededin getting a like measure twice through the Senate. But itfailed in the House. So the two Houses never agreed uponit. But the movement and discussion aroused public attentionthroughout the country and were of great value. 

While I was on that Committee, I think during my second term, there was referred to it a bill to rebuild William and MaryCollege in Virginia. The principal building of that Collegehad been destroyed by fire. The Union and Rebel forces hadfought for possession of it. It had been held by the Unionsoldiers and a court martial was sitting there when it wasattacked by the other side and the Union men driven out, andthe insurgents held the building for a few hours. They abandonedit very soon. But before the Union soldiers had got backin force some stragglers set fire to the building. It wastotally destroyed. 

William and Mary was the oldest college in the country, exceptHarvard. It numbered among its children many famous statesmen, including Jefferson, Marshall, Peyton Randolph, and Monroe. Washington was its Chancellor for twelve years. Its graduatesloved it ardently. I came to the conclusion that it wouldtend very much to restore the old affectionate feeling betweenthe States to rebuild this College without inquiring too strictlyinto the merits of the case, as tested by any strict principleof law. I accordingly reported and advocated a bill for appropriatingsixty or seventy thousand dollars to rebuild the College. Afterward, when on the Committee of Claims in the Senate, I advocated extending the same principle to all colleges, schools and other institutions of education and charity destroyedby the operations of the War without regard to the questionwho was in fault. This policy was, after a good deal of oppositionand resistance, successfully carried out. 

But the William and Mary College Bill was reported at thetime when the passions excited by the War were still burningin the breasts of many Republican statesmen. The measurewas received with derision. I was hardly allowed to go onwith my speech in order, and the ordinary courtesy of a briefextension of time to finish it was refused amid great clamor. But I got the Bill through the House the next winter. I hada powerful ally in Mr. Perce of Mississippi, a Northern soldier, who had settled in that State after the War. It was not consideredin the Senate. The measure was renewed again later in theHouse. But it was bitterly attacked by Mr. Reed of Maine, afterward Speaker, and defeated. Afterward I succeeded ingetting it through the Senate when the Democrats had possessionof the House, during the Administration of President Harrison, and it became a law. 

I have been assured by many Southern men that that measure, and the report and speech in which I advocated it, had a verystrong and wide influence in restoring good feeling towardthe Union in the minds of the people of Virginia. Severalof the graduates of William and Mary who afterward becameRepublicans have assured me of this with great emphasis. Iwas much pleased to get the following letter from GovernorHenry A. Wise, the eminent Virginia statesman, who was, withtwo or three exceptions, the most powerful and influentialadvocate of secession in the South. 

RICHMOND VA Feby 13th 1872. HON MR HOAROF MASSTS. 

_Honored Sir. _

I write for no reason but one of pure feeling of respect--not even for a reply. I am a visitor of Wm and Mary College--truly of the most venerable of the "Mothers of Thought"--and have read your excellent appeal to the H. Reps: inher behalf. It was worthy of that Grand old Comth, Massts, the elder sister of this once glorious Comth, which hailedher heartily in the Night of Revolution against Tyrrany. It was worthy of sweet memories--worthy of Letters--it waspious and patriotic. Let me just add a sentence more, tosay that if Rebellion and Sectional Hate are to be eradicated--and I hope they are--_that is the way to do it. _ Your speech& the passage of such bills, catholic in every sense of love& charity, will do more to heal our Country's wounds thanall the caustic of reconstruction which can be applied. 

With unaffected gratitude for your Speech, I pray you willnot pause upon it, but keep the bill to its passage throughboth Houses of Congress. I know you would if you could seethe destitution of instruction, and the poverty which cantpay for it, on the Consecrated peninsula of Jas Town, YorkTown, and Williamsburg. Ah! tear down every parapet of War--cruel War, wanton war call it if you will--but for the Past, for Piety's sake, for Learning and Moral's sake let Old Wm& Mary stand a Beacon Light for the guide of the Future. 

 Very sincerely Yrs HENRY A. WISE

Governor Wise had a very conspicuous career in the UnitedStates House of Representatives. He was a very zealous supporterof the Southern doctrine before the War. He was regardedas a good deal of a fire eater. He was Governor of Virginiawhen John Brown was executed. But in spite of the horrorand indignation that the people of the South felt for JohnBrown's raid he did full justice to the heroic quality ofthe man. He declared him "the gamest man" he ever saw. 

I served in my second term on the Committee on Elections underthe Chairmanship of George W. McCrary. Election cases inthe House up to that time were, as they always were in theEnglish House of Commons and as they have been too often inthe Senate, determined entirely by party feeling. Wheneverthere was a plausible reason for making a contest the dominantparty in the House almost always awarded the seat to the manof its own side. There is a well-authenticated story of ThaddeusStevens, that going into the room of the Committee of Elections, of which he was a member, he found a hearing going on. Heasked one of his Republican colleagues what was the pointin the case. "There is not much point to it" was the answer. "They are both damned scoundrels. " "Well, " said Stevens, "whichis the Republican damned scoundrel? I want to go for theRepublican damned scoundrel. "

We had a good many contests. But the Committee determinedto settle all the questions before it as they would if theywere judges in a court of justice. The powerful influenceof Mr. McCrary, the Chairman, aided largely to bring aboutthat result. The Democratic minority soon discovered thatwe were sincere and in earnest. They met us in a like spirit. I believe the Committee on Elections during that Congressreported on every case with absolute impartiality, and theHouse followed their lead. I formed a very pleasant friendshipon that Committee with Judge William M. Merrick, a MarylandDemocrat, who had made himself very much disliked by the Republicanauthorities during the War because of his supposed sympathywith Rebellion. I do not think he sympathized with the Rebellion. But he construed the Constitution very strictly and was opposedto many measures of the Administration. He was nominatedby President Cleveland to be Judge of the Supreme Court ofthe District of Columbia. The Judiciary Committee of theSenate reported against him, putting their objection on theground of the conduct imputed to him during the War, and alsoof his age. He was then sixty-seven years old. I dissentedfrom the Committee, of which I was a member, and I exertedmyself with all my might to secure his confirmation, and wassuccessful. He made a most admirable Judge, and my actionwas abundantly vindicated by the result. 

I have taken special satisfaction in two reports which Imade for that Committee. I have a right to say that I dealtwith the subjects with the same freedom from bias or prejudicewith which it would have been my duty to give to the questionif I had been sitting on the Bench of the Supreme Court ofthe United States. 

The case of Cessna _vs. _ Myers was perhaps the most interestingand important of those in which I made a report for the Committee. John Cessna had served the State of Pennsylvania for severalterms. He was a very popular and eminent Republican member. According to the returns, Myers, his adversary, had a majorityof 14. Cessna showed beyond question, and his antagonistadmitted, that more than 14 illegal votes were cast for Myers. On the other hand Myers claimed that there were many illegalvotes cast for Cessna, the evidence of which, so far as appeared, came to his knowledge first when introduced in the case. Whenthe evidence was taken Cessna claimed to have evidence that328 illegal votes were cast for Myers, and that ten legalvotes, cast or offered for him, were rejected. On the otherhand the sitting member claimed that there were 341 votesillegally thrown for the contestant, and of those Cessna admittedthat 81 had proved to be illegal. So the Committee were obligedto examine by itself the evidence in regard to the right tovote of each of several hundred persons. 

The case turned finally on some very interesting questionsof the law of domicile. It appeared that a considerablenumber of persons who were entitled to vote, if they wereresident of the district where they voted, were workmen employedin the construction of a railroad. They had come from outsidethe district for that purpose alone, and had no purpose ofremaining in the district after the railroad should be completed, and meant then to get work wherever they could find it, thereor elsewhere. There were also a number of votes cast by studentswho had gone to college for the purpose of getting an education, having no design to remain there after their studies terminated. Still another class of voters whose right was in dispute, were the paupers abiding in the public almshouse, and maintainedin common by a considerable number of townships and parishes. These paupers voted in the district where the almshouse wassituated, although it was not the district of their domicile orresidence when they were removed to it. 

The Committee held in the case of the laborer, --in spite ofthe very earnest contention to the contrary, that if the laborerelected in good faith when he came into the district to makeit his legal residence, it became his legal residence, evenif he intended to leave it and get another after his job wasdone. 

We applied a like doctrine to the case of the students, holdingthat a student of a college, being personally present in anydistrict, had the right if he so desired, to take up his abodethere, and make it by his election his legal residence fora fixed and limited time. 

The question of the paupers we left undecided, as it turnedout that whichever way it were decided, Mr. Cessna had notovercome his opponent's legal majority. 

We also decided an Arkansas case where the title to his seatof a well known Republican member of Congress was at stake, in favor of his Democratic contestant. 

I was somewhat gratified in the midst of a storm of vituperationwhich I had encountered for some political action of mine, in which I was charged by almost the entire Democratic pressof the country with being a bitter partisan to find two Democraticgentlemen who had owed their seats to the impartiality ofthe Committee on Elections, coming very zealously to the rescue. 

I served also from 1873 to 1875 on the Committee on Railroadsand Canals. I have no recollection of doing anything on thatCommittee, except aiding in reporting a bill for the regulationby National authority of railroads engaged in interstate commerce, in defence of which I made a very elaborate speech. But Iwas able to secure the passage of one very interesting andimportant measure. James B. Eads, the famous engineer, architectof the great St. Louis bridge, had a plan for opening to commercethe mouth of the Mississippi River by a system of jetties. He had submitted his plan to the Board of Engineers appointedby the War Department. But he could get no encouragement, and of the twenty members of that Board, only one, GeneralBarnard, the President, looked with any approval upon hisscheme. The Board thought that a very long and costly canalwas the only method of securing a water-way which would enableocean steamers to reach New Orleans, and the product of theMississippi valley to be carried to Europe that way. CaptainEads appeared before the Committee on Railroads and Canalsand urged his scheme in a speech of great interest and ability. The Committee adjourned for a week. They were to take upthe question at the next meeting. The vote was unanimousagainst Mr. Eads's Bill. When the Committee came out of theirroom he was waiting outside the door to learn his fate. Isaw the look of disappointment and despair on his face whenhe was told of the vote. I asked him to come with me intoanother room, which he did. I told him that I was satisfiedfrom what I had heard that his plan was a good one, althoughI had voted against it with the rest of the Committee. Itseemed to me that it would be presumptuous in me, having nospecial knowledge in such matters, to go against the practicallyunanimous report of the United States Board of Engineers. But I said: "Captain Eads, can you not frame a bill, whichwill provide that you shall not have any money from the Treasuryfor your work until you have accomplished something. If youdeepen the channel of the river a foot that will have donesome good. Suppose you provide that when you have deepenedthe river a certain number of feet you shall have so muchof your pay, when it is deepened further so much more, andso on until the work is done. " Captain Eads eagerly caughtat the plan. He said that he was willing to do it, and thathe was perfectly willing that his getting his pay should dependupon the certificate of the engineers of his having accomplishedthe result. He agreed to have a bill drawn on that principle. He brought it to me afterward. I went over it very carefully, inserting some additional securities for the Government. I then took it to the next meeting of the Committee, moved areconsideration of the vote of the previous week. That wascarried by a bare majority of one vote. I then moved thenew bill as a substitute for the old one. It was adopted. The bill passed the House and Senate under which the Eadsjetties were constructed and vessels drawing over twenty-eight feet of water passed freely up and down to and fromNew Orleans. The depth before that time, I think, had beentwelve feet. Captain Eads afterward sent me a beautifullybound copy of the history of the Eads's jetties with an inscriptioncertifying to the facts I have stated, in his own handwriting. I told this story afterward at a meeting of the business menof Boston. Mr. Corthell who happened to be present made aspeech after I got through. He is himself a very eminentwater engineer. He said that he was associated with CaptainEads at the time and had often heard Captain Eads tell thestory. 

Captain Eads afterward had a scheme which always seemed tome very feasible for a ship-railway across the Isthmus ofTehuantepec. His project was to construct a railway witha sufficient number of tracks, and to raise ships of the largestsize on the principle applied in locks of ordinary canals. He had a contrivance made of stout beams which would holdand support a loaded vessel to which it was adjusted. Thebeams were to operate something like the keys of a piano, and the whole operation was something like that by which hattersmeasure and record the shape of a man's head. This plan receivedthe hearty commendation of some very eminent engineers, includingMajor Reed of England, the highest authority of such subjects, the constructor of the dry docks at Malta. The scheme hada good many supporters in Congress. I think it would havebeen adopted but for Captain Eads's premature death. 

Rather a singular coincidence took place when I was interestingmyself in this matter which possibly may be not too trivialto record. One Thanksgiving morning I received by expressa beautiful copy of Wordsworth, which I had bought in Bostonthe day before. Just as I was opening it the morning mailwas brought in. I opened the book at random and turned toWadsworth's poem, "The Highland Broach. " My eye caught thefollowing lines:

 Lo! Ships from seas by nature barred, Mount along ways by man prepared; Along far stretching vales, whose streams Seek other seas, their canvas gleams, And busy towns grow up on coasts Thronged yesterday by airy ghosts. 

I turned by eye from these verses to the mail in which wasa copy of a New York illustrated journal containing an accountof the Eads ship-railway. 

The inscription in Eads's "History of the Jetties, " abovereferred to, is as follows:

To Hon. George F. Hoar, who, as a member of the House Committeewhich matured the Jetty Act, prepared the _first report_ inits favor, this book is presented; with the assurance thathis unfaltering support of the enterprise through all itsstruggles, entitled him to a prominent place among the statesmento whom the producers in the Valley of the Mississippi aremost largely indebted. 

 JAS B. EADS Washington, D. C. , February 1881

I had the pleasure of receiving a telegram from New Orleansshortly after the completion of the jetties saying that aloaded steamer, drawing between twenty-seven and twenty-eightfeet of water, had safely passed through them to New Orleans. 

The Commission appointed by the Government insisted upon havingthe jetties constructed at the south pass of the MississippiRiver. This Captain Eads strenuously resisted and urged thesuperiority of the southwest pass for the purpose. The Housewhen it passed the jetty bill adopted Mr. Eads's plan. Butthe Senate insisted on taking the opinion of the Commission, much to his distress. The Senate was firm, and the Housewas obliged to yield. I think everybody now agrees that Eadswas right, and that the scheme would have been perfectly successful, and would have continued to perform all that was desired ofit, if his counsel had been taken. As it is, the jettieshave been of great value and well worth their cost. But itwill probably be necessary some time to construct a similarwork in the southwest pass. 

During my first term in the House on the Committee on Educationand Labor I had the important duty of investigating the conductof the Freedman's Bureau and other charges made against GeneralOliver O. Howard. I wrote nearly the whole of the report, all of it containing the arguments of the Committee, and thesumming up of the evidence. A few passages are by the Chairman, Mr. Arnell. The Freedman's Bureau was established to aidthe colored people who had been suddenly emancipated by PresidentLincoln's Proclamation, to attain a condition where theycould get their living in comfort, and their children couldbe educated. General Howard, a very eminent officer in theCivil War, afterward at the head of the Army, was a man singularlyfitted for this duty. He was profoundly religious, absolutelyincorruptible, a man of very kind heart, not afraid to breakout new paths, apt to succeed in all his undertakings, a loverof Liberty and thoroughly devoted to his work. The resourcesat his command were the unclaimed pay of the negro soldiersand some other sums specially granted from the Treasury. Butthe work was one entirely different from anything which hadbeen accomplished by government agency in the country before. He purchased tracts of land, which were divided into buildinglots, which were sold to the colored people. Money was advancedto them to build houses, the Freedman's Bureau taking a mortgageas security. The Bureau endowed Howard University, of whichGeneral Howard was made President. A large CongregationalChurch was built in Washington with moneys advanced by theBureau, the religious society giving its bonds at seven percent. For which the structure was ample security. GeneralHoward had incurred the bitter animosity not only of the enemiesof the negro race, who disliked the whole object for whichthe Bureau was founded, but of other persons whom he had offended. I believe in no instance was there any loss to the Government, or to the fund in his charge. He was able to establish incomfortable homes, and to educate and to provide work formany thousand freedmen who had flocked to Washington duringthe disturbed period immediately following emancipation. Aftera thorough investigation, where the prosecution was conductedby Fernando Wood, a very distinguished and able Representativefrom New York, formerly Mayor of the City, General Howardwas completely exonerated by the report of the majority ofthe Committee. The report was accepted by the House. 

In 1873 I visited Louisiana, as Chairman of a special committeeraised for the purpose of inquiring into the conditions there, and ascertaining which of two rival State governments wasthe lawful one. The investigation disclosed a terrible storyof murder, brutality and crime. I made the report, signedalso by Mr. Wheeler, afterward Vice-President, and Mr. Frye, now Senator and President pro tempore of the Senate. It toldthe dreadful story of these things with absolute truth andfidelity. It is not worth while to revive these memoriesnow. But at the same time I endeavored to do full justiceto the better qualities of the Southern people and to explainhow it happened that men otherwise so honorable and braveand humane could be led by the passions of a political warfareand race prejudice to commit such offences. Mr. Lamar, ofMississippi, one of the most brilliant and able statesmenof his time, sought an interview with me after the reportwent in and thanked me for what I had said of the Southernpeople, and told me that "I was the first Northern man whoseemed to be capable of doing them justice. " What he thoughtwill be found also stated by him. 

In a speech made before a Democratic meeting in the springof 1875, Mr. Lamar said ("Life of Lamar, " p. 221);

"Well, the character of that last Committee--especially ofits Chairman, Mr. George F. Hoar--was such as to lead to noexpectation that there would be any indulgence shown to thepeople of the South, or any very harsh criticisms of his ownparty. By inheritance, by training, by political association, he was intensely anti-Southern. His manners toward Southernmen, so bitter are his feelings, are often cold and reserved;and nothing but his instinct and refinement as a gentleman, which he is in every respect, saved him from sometimes beingsupercilious; acute in intellect, cultured, trained to thehighest expression of his powers, quick in his resentmentsand combative in temperament, we certainly expected no quarterfrom his hands. But beneath all this there were genuine truthand manhood in Hoar that lifted him above the sordid feelingof malignant passion. He went, then, to that country, andhe made a report; and, while there is much in it that saddenedmy heart, while there is much which I say is unwise and unjustin his observations, there are some things, fellow citizens, which you people of the North should hark to bear in mind, while you are coming to your conclusions with reference tothe relations which you intend to sustain to the prostratepeople of my section. Here, fellow citizens, is what Mr. Hoar says in reference to the South: 'We do not overlook thecauses which tended to excite deep feeling and discontentin the white population of Louisiana. (I must read theseextracts to you because a people's interest, a people's destiny, hang largely upon the action of the people of New Hampshireand other Northern States. ) There has been great maladministration;public funds have been wasted (that means public funds havebeen embezzled, appropriated by these governments that aresucking the blood, the life blood, from a people already impoverishedby four years of calamitous war); public lands have been wasted, public credit impaired. ' Now, fellow citizens, that is thetestimony of one of the most uncompromising Republicans inthis country. "

Mr. Lamar would not have used, I am sure, the word "bitter"after we came to know each other better. Perhaps I may beforgiven if I insert here a letter from Mr. Lamar's nephew, just elected a member of Congress from the State of Florida. I know I must attribute the eulogy which it contains to hiskindness of heart, and desire to meet more than half way myown cordial feeling toward the portion of my countrymen towhom he belongs. I do not take them literally. But I confessI like to leave on record, if I may, some evidence which willcontradict the charge so constantly made by critics near home, that I am a man of intense partisan and personal bitterness. 

TALLAHASSEE, FLA. , Mch 10th, 1903

SENATOR GEORGE F. HOAR, Washington, D. C. 

_Dear Sir:_

I would like very much to have a copy of your address latelymade before the Union League of Chicago. I see notices ofthe speech in the newspapers. 

Also your address made before the New England Society somethree years ago, if you have a copy. 

Your picture, sent to me at my request, hangs in my room. It is the face and form of a great American statesman. Onewhom our people have learned to admire and love. 

Our people venerate your years, still in vigorous life andin full possession of great faculties of mind and heart. We look to you and other great Northern men to keep us inour sectional and racial questions. In one way these questionsmean so little to the sections of the country not immediatelyinterested in them, but they mean so much to the Southernpeople who have to deal with them as live, every day matters. 

I left the Attorney-General's office in this State on February28th, ult. , after fourteen years service and two years yetto run. On March 4th, inst. , I became Congressman from thenew Third Congressional district. 

I go to Washington as a Democrat, but with full knowledgethat my party does not contain all the right or all the wrongin it. And I hope that in the vexing questions of the future, that by a temperate course of thought and action, that myinfluence may be worth something, however small, to my peoplebeyond even a party view. 

But after all I feel that great and representative men ofother sections can assist the Southern people in these questionsquite as much, if not more, than we can assist ourselves. 

I hope to meet you next winter. The biography of my UncleJustice Lamar shows how much he esteemed you and your regardfor him. I am with much respect, Very truly yours, (Signed) W. B. LAMAR. 

I was also placed by Mr. Blaine on the Committee to investigatethe Union Pacific Railroad and the Credit Mobilier. I shallgive an account of this matter in a separate chapter. 

There was great public excitement on the subject. Afterthe report on the Union Pacific Railroad, and within abouta week of the end of Congress, the House adopted a resolutionto make a like investigation of the affairs of the CentralPacific Railroad. It was absolutely impossible to accomplishsuch an inquiry within the few remaining days of the session. But if we failed to attempt it the political newspapers andwhat are called Independent newspapers, always much less fairto public men than political opponents, would have chargedus with failing to make the investigation from a desire toscreen the offenders. The charge would have been greedilybelieved in the excited condition of the public mind, whichour explanation would never reach. So I advised the Committeeto call Mr. Huntington, the President of the Central PacificRailroad, and ask him to produce the accounts and recordsof his Company. To this it was anticipated that he wouldreply that these records were in California and that he couldnot get them before Congress and the authority of the Committeewould expire. Mr. Huntington was accordingly summoned. Hebrought with him Mr. William M. Evarts, as counsel, andtestified as was expected. He then, however, asked leaveof the Committee to make a statement in regard to the relationof his road to the National Government. This was granted. He then went on to say what a great public benefactor hiscompany had been. It had connected the two oceans by a greatrailroad across the continent, saving millions upon millionsto the commerce of the country. But beside that he said ithad saved to the Government more than all the moneys the Governmenthad advanced toward its construction, by preventing Indianwars. One winter especially his railroad corporation hadfed a hostile Indian tribe when the Government supplies hadfailed to reach them, saving them from the danger of starvationand saving the Government from a bloody and costly Indianwar. I said, Mr. Huntington--Was not that ultra vires fora railroad corporation? He answered, "No, Sir! no, Sir! wenever gave them anything as strong as that. " He evidentlythought he was being charged with supplying the Indians withliquor, and that ultra vires meant extra strength. 

The only other important committee work that I now recallduring my service in the House related to the investigationof the conduct of Mr. Speaker Blaine. He was charged withhaving received stock in a railroad at a price much less thanits then value with the expectation of paying for it by aidingthe passage of legislation in which the road was interested, by political service as a Member of the House of Representatives, and especially by his great influence as Speaker. It wasfurther claimed that in letters addressed by him to a mannamed Mulligan he had demanded conveyances of such stock incompensation for a ruling he had before made by which a measurein conflict with the interest of the road was defeated. Thesecharges were referred to the Committee of the Judiciary. TheHouse was then Democratic and the majority of the Committeewas made up of Mr. Blaine's political opponents. The investigationwas conducted in a spirit of bitter hostility to him. Theevidence was taken by a sub-committee of which I was nota member. But as disputed questions of procedure and asto the admission of evidence were constantly coming up whichwere referred always to the full committee, which was consideredin session all the time for that purpose, --the members wereevery day, sometimes several times a day, summoned from theirseats in the House to the meeting of the Committee. I wasfamiliar with the whole case as it went in. It was expectedthat there would be a hostile report, and it was understoodthat I should be charged with the duty of making a minorityreport. 

I studied that evidence as thoroughly and faithfully as Icould. I have gone over the matter very carefully since. I was then satisfied, and am satisfied now, that the chargesagainst Mr. Blaine of any corruption or wrong-doing weretotally unsustained. They would never have found creditfor a moment except in minds deeply excited by the bitterpolitical passion which at that time raged to a degree whollyunknown in our political strife to-day. All Mr. Blaine didwas to say when he applied for the purchase of the stock tothe men who were then trying to dispose of it that "he shouldnot be a dead-head. " He meant by that only that he was ableto be of advantage to any undertaking in which he should beinterested, an assurance which his known ability and energyand large acquaintance with business men thoroughly warrantedhim in making. There was no action of Congress expected, or legislation in which the railroad was likely to have aninterest. All that it expected to get from Congress had beenobtained already. 

The other charge that he demanded a favor in this purchaseas compensation for a ruling he had made as Speaker was, inmy judgment, equally unfounded and trivial. He simply alludedto the fact that he had made a ruling which had saved theroad from hostile legislation. Every lawyer had doubtlessmany times had jurymen remind him of the fact that they hadbeen on juries that gave verdicts in his favor. Every Memberof Congress likes to meet a pensioner for whom he has secureda pension. Neither has any thought of wrong in reviving sucha memory. The ruling Mr. Blaine had made was simply statinga clear rule of the House about which there could be no doubtwhatever. At the same time, I said at the time, what I deemit my duty to repeat now, I think Mr. Blaine erred, whenhe thought it proper to embark in such a speculative investment. Members of legislative bodies, especially great political leadersof large influence, ought to be careful to keep a thousandmiles off from relations which may give rise to even a suspicionof wrong. Their influence and character are the propertyof their country, and especially valuable to their politicalassociates. The great doctrines of which they are the influentialadvocates must not be imperiled by any smell of fire on theirgarments. But an error of judgment, or of good taste, ontheir part, is very far from being corruption. Henry Claywas a gambler. Other eminent statesmen both in this countryand in Europe have made no secret of even worse vices thanthat. They are undoubtedly to be disapproved, in some casesseverely condemned. But the people always have made and alwayswill make a distinction between such offences and the finalunpardonable guilt of corruption in office. 

James G. Blaine was a man of many faults and many infirmities. But his life is a part of the history of his country. Itwill be better for his reputation that the chapter of thathistory which relates to him shall be written by a historianwith a full and clear sense of those faults and infirmities, concealing nothing, and extenuating nothing. But also lethim set nought down in malice. Mr. Blaine was a brilliantand able man, lovable, patriotic, far-seeing, kind. He actedin a great way under great responsibilities. He was wiseand prudent when wisdom and prudence were demanded. If hehad attained to the supreme object of his ambition and reachedthe goal of the Presidency, if his life had been spared tocomplete his term, it would have been a most honorable period, in my opinion, in the history of the country. No man haslived in this country since Daniel Webster died, save McKinleyalone, who had so large a number of devoted friends and admirersin all parts of the country. 

CHAPTER XIXSALMON P. CHASE

Among the very interesting characters with whom I have formedan acquaintance in Washington was Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. I saw him but a few times. But on those occasionshe spoke to me with a freedom with which famous public menseldom speak, even to intimate friends. I incline to thinkit was his habit to speak freely to comparative strangers. But of that I know nothing. 

When I first went to Washington, in the spring of 1869, Iwas invited by Commissary-General Eaton, whose daughter wasthe wife of my cousin, to attend a meeting of a club at hishouse. The club was composed of scientific men who met ateach other's houses. The reading of a paper by the host wasfollowed by a supper. The host was permitted to invite suchguests as he saw fit, not members of the club. Chief JusticeChase was one of the guests. I was introduced to him therefor the first time, except that I went, when I was quite ayoung man, long before the war, to hear him speak and, witha great many other persons, went up and shook hands with himafter the speech was over. 

The Chief Justice left General Eaton's house when I did, and asked me if I were going his way. So we walked togetherabout a mile. He talked all the way about the next nominationfor the Presidency; about the prospects of the various candidates, and the probability of the success of the Democratic Partyif they had a candidate who would be satisfactory to the Republicanswho were disaffected with the present policies. It was evidentthat his great man had this subject, to use a cant phrase, "on the brain. " This was before the Chief Justice had hisparalytic shock. He was in the full vigor of health, a modelof manly strength and manly beauty, giving every evidencethat his great intellectual power was undiminished. 

Not long afterward a friend of mine went to Ohio with hiswife. In those days it was necessary for persons going fromWashington to the Northwest to cross Baltimore in a carriage--the Washington station and the Ohio station being in differentparts of the city. A friend of my friend went to Baltimoreto see his wife, who was going to Ohio, across the city andthen to return to Washington. He knew Chief Justice Chase. He introduced him to my friend on the cars, and they rodeacross Baltimore in one carriage, the two gentlemen, the ChiefJustice, and the wife. The Chief Justice talked to him whomhe had just met for the first time during the whole ride ofhalf an hour on the same engrossing subject, as he had tome before. 

I think there can be no doubt that Chief Justice Chase, likemany other great men, was consumed by an eager and passionateambition for the Presidency. That has been true of othergreat statesmen as well as of many small statesmen. It hasbeen specially true of great orators. The American peopleare fond of eloquent speech. They make their admiration knownto the speaker in a way that is quite likely to turn his head. In Plato's day the bee Hymettus mingled with the discourseas it came forth. To-day the bee lights in his ear and fillshis fancy with delightful dreams of a hive by the Potomac, thatched with flowers and redolent with the incense of flattery. 

I do not doubt that if Salmon P. Chase had been elected Presidentof the United States he would have administered that loftyoffice honorably and to the advantage of the country. ButI think that his ambition clouded his judgment, and inclinedhim, perhaps unconsciously, to take an attitude as a Judgeon some of the political questions on which parties were dividedafter President Grant came in, which would be acceptable tothe Democrats, and would make it possible for him to accepttheir nomination. But all this is merest speculation. Ifhe had maintained his mental and physical vigor it is quitelikely that he would have been nominated when Greeley wasnominated. If he had been, it is not unlikely, in my opinion, that he would have been elected. I thought at the time thatif Mr. Adams had been nominated in 1872, he might have beenchosen. The discontent with Grant was far-reaching, for thereasons I have stated elsewhere. But the nomination of Greeleywas ludicrous and preposterous. Almost every attack on thefirst Administration of President Grant was answered by thepolitical speakers on his side by a quotation from Greeleyor the New York _Tribune. _ A candidate seeking an electionby reason of the mistakes his antagonist has made in accordancewith his own advice, does not stand much chance of winning. The Southern people, even the white Democrats, always hada kindly feeling for Grant. They did not resent what he haddone as a soldier, as they resented what Greeley had saidas a politician. They knew too, in spite of their strongdifferences with Grant, the innate honesty, justice and courageof the man. 

Chase would have been a far stronger candidate than Greeley. However any political antagonist might dislike him, everyantagonist must respect him, and nobody could laugh at him. 

The question of the constitutional power of Congress to makeTreasury notes legal tender for all debts, whether incurredbefore or after they were issued, came up for the decisionof the Court when Chase was Chief Justice. It was a questionwhich profoundly interested and excited the public. The DemocraticParty, which more lately favored the payment of all debts, public and private, in irredeemable paper money, had assailedthe Republican Administration during the war for providing, under an alleged necessity that Treasury notes, called greenbacks, should be legal tender for the discharge of all debts. Theconstitutionality of that law had been affirmed by the courtsof fifteen States. It had been denied by one court only, that of Kentucky, the eminent Chancellor dissenting. Therewas scarcely a Republican lawyer or a Republican judge inthe country who doubted the constitutional power of Congressto impose such a quality upon the paper currency if, in theopinion of Congress, the public safety should require it. 

The question came before the Supreme Court of the United Statesin the case of Hepburn _v. _ Griswold, and was decided by thatCourt in December, 1869. 

The Court were all agreed that Congress has power under theConstitution to do not only what the Constitution expresslyauthorizes, but to adopt any means appropriate, and plainlyadapted to carry in to effect any such express power. Sothe two questions arose: First, Was the power to issue legaltender notes an appropriate, and plainly adapted means toany end which the National Government has a right to accomplish?Second, Who are to judge of the question whether the meansbe so appropriate, or plainly adapted?

There were then seven Justices of the Supreme Court. ChiefJustice Chase, with the three Democratic Justices held theLegal Tender Law unconstitutional, and declared that a lawmaking anything but gold or silver legal tender for debtswas neither appropriate nor plainly adapted to carrying onwar, or any other end for which the National Government waserected. 

He had, when Secretary of the Treasury during the War of theRebellion, originally advised the issuing of these legaltender notes. He had visited the Capitol. He had calledmembers of the two Houses of Congress from their seats and, by his great urgency, overcome their reluctance to vote forthe Legal Tender Law. My late colleague, Mr. Dawes, has morethan once told me, and others in my hearing, that he was exceedinglyreluctant to resort to that measure, and that he was inducedto support it by Mr. Chase's earnest declaration that it wasimpossible that the War should go on without it, that he wasat the last extremity of his resources. A Government notehad been formally protested in the city of New York. I haveheard a like statement from many public men, survivors ofthat time. It is not too much to say, that without Mr. Chase'surgent and emphatic affirmation that the war must stop andthe Treasury be bankrupt and the soldiers without their pay, unless this measure were adopted, it never could have passedCongress. 

Notwithstanding this, Mr. Chase puts his opinion in the LegalTender Cases on the ground that this was not a necessary, or plainly adapted means to the execution of the unquestionablepower of carrying on a great war in which the life of theRepublic was in issue. 

The question whether this necessity existed was a questionof fact. Now questions of fact cannot be determined by thecourts. If the fact be one on which depends the proprietyof legislation it must be determined by the law-making power. Of course, where facts are of such universal or general knowledgethat the court can know them judicially, without proof, likethe fact of the time of the rising of the sun, or the lawsof mechanics, or the customs prevailing in great branchesof business, the court may take judicial notice of them. Buthow could Mr. Chase, as a judge, judicially declare as a factthat the issue of legal tender notes was not necessary forcarrying on the war, when he had, as Secretary of the Treasury, having better means of knowledge than any other man, so earnestlyand emphatically declared such necessity? How could he, asa judge of one court, determine as of an unquestionable factof universal knowledge that the issue of a legal tender notewas not necessary for maintaining the Government in thatterrible war, when fourteen State tribunals, and a minorityof his own court, had declared the fact to be the other way?

This decision gave rise to an attack upon the Administrationof President Grant and especially upon Judge Hoar, then Attorney-General, which, although it has no foundation whatever infact, is occasionally revived in later years, that the Courtwas packed by appointing two new Judges to reverse the decision. The decision in Hepburn _v. _ Griswold was announced in theSupreme Court February 7, 1870. The court met at twelve o'clock. The decision was read by the Chief Justice after several opinionshad been read by other judges, so that the afternoon musthave advanced considerably before it was promulgated. Ithad not been made known to the public in advance by the press, and President Grant and Attorney-General Hoar both affirmedthat they had no knowledge of the decision and had no expectationof what it would be before it was announced. I myself hada conversation with Attorney-General Hoar in the afternoonof that day. He had just heard the decision from the ChiefJustice with great astonishment and surprise. 

Four judges concurred in the decision. There were two vacanciesin the court--one occasioned by the withdrawal of Mr. JusticeGrier, and one by the Act of Congress of the previous Sessionproviding for an additional judge. At twelve o'clock in themorning of that day, before the decision in Hepburn _v. _ Griswoldwas made known, President Grant had sent to the Senate, andthe Senate had received the communication nominating Messrs. Strong and Bradley to these vacancies. They were regardedas the ablest lawyers in the circuits where they dwelt. Bycommon consent of the entire profession they are among theablest judges who ever sat on the Supreme Bench. In my opinionMr. Justice Bradley has had no superior, save Marshall alone, on that court, in every quality of a great judge. I doubtif he has had, on the whole, an equal, save Marshall alone. They have both joined in opinions since their appointmentin very important political questions, in which the policyof the party to which they belonged was not sustained. Anoffer to them of these vacancies in their circuits was themost natural and proper thing that could have been done. There was no Republican lawyer in the country, of any considerableprominence, so far as I know, who questioned the constitutionalityof the Legal Tender Act, of distinction enough to make himthought of anywhere for a place on the Supreme Bench. Sofar as I now remember, there is but one instance of an appointmentby the President of the United States to the Supreme Courtof a man not belonging to his own political party. That isthe case of Mr. Justice Jackson, who was appointed by PresidentHarrison on my own earnest recommendation. There has neverbeen made in any quarter, so far as I know, a statement orpretence that there existed any evidence that President Grantmade these appointments, or that any member of his Cabinetadvised it because of its possible effect on the Legal TenderLaw. Yet this foolish and dirty charge has found extensivecredit. I read it once in the London _Times. _ It was, however, in a communication written by a degenerate and recreant Americanwho was engaged in reviling his own country. It was alsoreferred to by Mr. Bryan in his book on the United States. I sent him a copy of a pamphlet I prepared on the subject, and received from him a letter expressing his satisfactionthat the story was without foundation. It is the fashionstill, in some quarters, to speak, in spite of the decisionsof the Supreme Court and the numerous State courts, to whichI have referred, as if it were too clear for argument thatCongress had no right to make the Government notes a legaltender. The gentlemen who talk in that way, however, arealmost universally men of letters, or men without any legaltraining or any considerable legal capacity. They are ofthat class of political philosophers who are never trustedby their countrymen to deal with authority with any practicalquestion either legislative, administrative, or judicial. 

While saying this, I wish to affirm my own belief that, whileit may be in some great emergencies like that of our lateCivil War essential to the maintenance of the Governmentthat this power which I believe Congress has, without a shadowof a reasonable question, should be exercised, yet I shouldhold it a great calamity if it were exercised except on suchan occasion. It is a dangerous power, like the power of suspendingthe writ of _Habeas corpus, _ or the power of declaring war, or the power of reckless and extravagant public expenditure, never to be exercised if it can possibly be helped. I thinkthe American people have, in general, settled down on thisas the reasonable view, in spite of the clamor of the advocatesof fiat money on the one side, and the extreme strict constructionistson the other. 

CHAPTER XXADIN THAYER

The political history of Massachusetts from 1850 until 1888cannot be written or understood without a knowledge of theremarkable career of Adin Thayer. When I was first nominatedfor Congress, he was my earnest opponent. That was due, sofar as I know, to no dislike to me, but only to his strongfriendship for Mr. Bird. After my election, he became mystanch friend. Our friendship continued without interruptionto his death. The name of Adin Thayer is dear to my memoryand to my heart. 

I have often said that there were four men who honored mewith their friendship, whose counsel I liked to get underany difficult public responsibility, and that when these fourmen approved or agreed with anything I myself said or did, I did not care what the rest of mankind thought. It wouldhave been better to say that, although I did care very muchwhat the rest of mankind thought, I knew that when thesemen were on my side, the wisdom and conscience of Massachusettswould be there also. 

One of them was John G. Whittier. He added to the great geniuswhich made him a famous poet the quality of being one of thewisest and most discreet political advisers and leaders whoever dwelt in the Commonwealth. 

Another was my own brother, Judge Hoar, of whom I will notnow undertake to speak. He was the last friend of mine whoalways performed the act of friendship to which Adin Thayerwas never unequal, that of telling me my faults and mistakeswith much more thoroughness and plainness of speech than heever used in praising any of my virtues. 

The third was Samuel May, who died in an honored old age atLeicester, his sunset hour cheered by the memories of nobleservice and the consciousness of having borne his full sharein the greatest achievement of human history accomplishedby mere political instrumentalities--the freedom of the slave. 

The fourth was Adin Thayer, a man quite as remarkable in hisway as either of the others in his. Each of them gave highand brave counsel in great emergencies. Each of them hada great part in the overthrow of the political forces thatwere on the side of slavery, and in the triumphant overthrowof the combination which would, if successful, have corruptedMassachusetts and made of her the worst instead of the bestexample on earth of republican self-government. 

There is hardly room here for more than a sketch of AdinThayer. He was a very striking, original and picturesquefigure in the history of the Commonwealth. He was a strong, brave, wise, unselfish man. His life, so far as he took partin political affairs, was devoted to objects wholly public, never personal. He was the greatest organizer of righteousnessin his generation. We must go back to Sam Adams to find anyone who deserves to be compared with him in this respect. I cannot now undertake to tell the story of his importantservices to the Commonwealth at some very critical periods, or to narrate the history of all the political events in whichhe bore so conspicuous a share. The time to do this has notcome. It can be done only when the correspondence, the innerpersonal life of men who were the leaders of Massachusettsduring the stormy period through which she has lately passed, shall be given to the world. 

Worcester County, from the day of Rufus Putnam until to-day, has in every generation contributed eminent persons to theservice of the Commonwealth. But the service of none of themhas been in the same field as his. Indeed, as I have justsaid, we must go back to the days of the Revolution to finda conspicuous character who united so completely absolutedisinterestedness of character, inflexible integrity, passionatelove for Massachusetts, devotion to the loftiest ideals, andwas at the same time a most skilful and efficient organizerof political forces. 

Adin Thayer was born in the town of Mendon, in the Countyof Worcester, December 5, 1828. His birthplace was near ChestnutHill, in the territory which was incorporated into the townof Blackstone in 1845. He was the son of Caleb Thayer andHannah, the daughter of Peter Gaskill of Mendon. His ancestors, so far as known, in all the line of descent, were New Englandfarmers. No better race ever existed for the developmentof the highest intellectual and moral quality. They wrunga difficult livelihood from the soil and forest. They wereeducated by the responsibilities of self-government. Theywere accustomed to meditate and discuss with each other theprofoundest questions of theology and of the State. Theirlocal traditions had made them familiar with a stimulant andheroic history, in which every family had borne its share. In these Puritan communities life was a perpetual gymnasium. At the time of Mr. Thayer's birth, the strictness of thePuritan manners had softened somewhat. A milder theologywas slowly making its way, but the race which settled in NewEngland still remained without a tincture of any foreign element. 

The town was one of the oldest in Worcester County. In everygeneration it had contained men of large influence in theCommonwealth, who had kept alive the interest of the peoplein public affairs. Jonathan Russell, who, with Adams, Bayard, Clay and Gallatin, negotiated the treaty of Ghent, and whomet rather an ignominious defeat afterward in an attempt tomeasure lances with John Quincy Adams; the Hastings family, three of whom were eminent lawyers, two of them having representedthe district in Congress; were of a generation that passedfrom the stage at about the time of Judge Thayer's birth. 

The people were fond of discussing public questions, notonly in town meeting, but in neighborhood gatherings anddebating societies. The Judge used often to tell of theeager interest with which in his boyhood he listened to theseencounters. There were two men, one of whom survived untilJudge Thayer came to manhood, the other of whom died recentlyin an honored old age, who were less known abroad than thoseI have named, but who exerted a powerful influence upon thecommunity and upon the character of the observant and impressibleboy. One of them was Dan Hill, the other the Reverend AdinBallou. 

Dan Hill was one of the most remarkable men Worcester Countyever contained. He was not bred to the bar, and was withoutthe advantage of what is called a liberal education. Buthe had a wonderful aptness for understanding legal principlesand the weight and effect of evidence. His neighbors whenin trouble instinctively sought him as a shield. He was anunerring counsellor in the conduct of complicated affairs. His aid was extensively sought in the preparation of causes, in settling estates, and as guardian and trustee. He wasconcerned in hundreds of cases. It would be hard to nameone in which he had anything to do that did not terminateto the advantage of the party who employed him. He had noneof the arts of the pettifogger. He cared little for his ownpersonal advantage. He had a native and lofty scorn for dishonestyand meanness. He was never better pleased than when, withoutprospect of gain for himself, he was employing his talentsin the protection of poor and honest men against fraud andoppression. He had a large public spirit. He was early ananti-slavery man, and one of the founders of the Free SoilParty. He was specially at home in the Mendon and Blackstonetown meetings, in the meetings of the school district, in thecaucus, in the temperance and anti-slavery meetings and otherneighborhood gatherings where the people discussed matterswhich concerned the public welfare. In all these he gavesensible counsel in common affairs and high counsel in highaffairs. 

The influence of Adin Ballou, of whom Judge Thayer delightedto speak in his later years, may be traced in the strong sympathythe Judge always showed for aspirations, although exhibitedin the most crude and grotesque fashion, for the reconstructionof society according to the laws of a newer and more spirituallife. Mr. Ballou, a man of clear intellect, stainless life, sweet and amiable temper, undertook with about thirty companionsand disciples to form a community which should have the Beatitudesfor constitution, charter and by-laws. This community wasestablished at Hopedale, now a separate town, then part ofMilford, formerly part of Mendon. Some of the most importantmembers of this body withdrew from it, doubting its ability tomaintain itself financially, and it was abandoned. But ifits sweet and gracious influence on the social life in itsneighborhood be any measure of its success, it was highlysuccessful. 

Hopedale became famous afterward as the dwelling-place ofGeorge Draper, one of the most eminent manufacturers and sagaciousand public-spirited citizens--founder of the Home Market Club--the reputation and honor of whose name has been still moreextended by his sons, the eldest of whom is the admirablesoldier, Representative to Congress and Minister to Italy, General William F. Draper. 

Judge Thayer was named for Adin Ballou, although he afterwarddropped the middle name. Mr. Ballou gives his estimate ofhis namesake in the following letter:

HOPEDALE, MASS. , Aug. 20, 1888. HON. GEORGE F. HOAR, --

_My Dear Sir, _--

Your lines of 11th inst. Were duly received. I am very gladto learn that a Biography of Hon. Adin Thayer is in processof preparation, and that the work is in such competent hands. I reckoned him among my highly esteemed personal friends, and was painfully shocked by the news of his lamentable death. I knew his grandfather before him, his father and mother, and the whole family connexion more or less intimately. Theywere often attendant on my public ministrations, and I havebeen with them, during my long life, on many occasions ofinterest, joy and sorrow. They have all been persons of strongcommon sense, downright honesty and solid worth. Judge Thayerdescended from a sturdy, intelligent and respectable yeomanstock. And he has honored his heredity by his own intellectualand moral excellence. Although my personal intimacy withhim has never been close enough to enable me to describe thefootsteps of his upward career with graphical exactness, orto enrich my memory with interesting anecdotes, I can bearwitness in a general way to his good characteristics, especiallyin his youth while he was nearest under my observation, andto some extent those of his mature years. He was an industrious, affectionate, and dutiful son from childhood to maturity. He evinced early intelligence, rationality and moral principleof a superior type, availing himself by close applicationof every opportunity for acquiring useful knowledge, and didso, as the sequel proved, successfully. He was always anindependent, acute and logical thinker on a wide range ofsubjects, as well outside of his professional life as inside. But his constitution practically confined his ambition andpursuits to the state of the world's affairs as manageablefor the time being, rather than to expending his energiesfor the realization of theories greatly in advance of currentpublic opinion. In this respect he differed from his friendwho writes this graphic contribution; whom nevertheless healways respected. But he was by no means a fossil conservativelagging in the rear of progress. He marched just as far forwardin the column as he was sure it could command the ground. Thus he espoused the anti-slavery movement in politics inits germinal stage, and became one of the most sagacious andefficient organizers of the Republican Party in his nativeState. Of this, however, others are better qualified to treatthan this friend. The same is true of his pecuniary andfinancial achievements; also of his legal, judicial and officialattainments. Let abler pens in those departments eulogisehim. Whatever this writer saw of him in the judicial chairor legal forum was unexceptionably creditable to him. 

On the great themes of theology his conceptions and beliefsaccorded mainly with those of the writer. They were sublimelyliberal and regenerative, excluding all notions of the divineattributes and government in the least degree derogatory tothe character of God as the Supreme, All-Perfect Father ofthe Universe. 

Hoping that his numerous personal friends in the variousrelations of life will do greater justice and honor to hismemory than this pen can, the foregoing is respectfully tendered. 

 Very respectfully yours, ADIN BALLOU. 

But it is not necessary to seek an explanation of Judge Thayer'sinterest in life beyond the native tendencies which came tohim by lawful inheritance. More than one person of his nameand blood in former generations were noted for their publicspirit and exercised a large influence in the affairs of thetown. Traditions of two brothers, Captain Caleb Thayer and'Squire Elisha Thayer, are still fresh. Captain Caleb Thayerwas the great-grandfather of Adin Thayer, Esquire. Elijahwas grandfather of Hon. Eli Thayer, member of Congress fromthe Worcester district, and founder of the Emigrant Aid Society, which had so illustrious a share in saving Kansas from slavery. Eli Thayer tells me Elijah governed Mendon. He always carriedin town meeting what he wanted to carry, and killed what hewanted to kill. 

Caleb Thayer, the father of the Judge, was an early anti-slavery man, and one of the founders of the Free Soil Party. He was a man of vigorous sense and great public spirit. Hehad large interests in Mendon and Blackstone. He representedMendon in the Legislature and helped elect Charles Sumnerto the Senate in 1851. He was generally sociable and cheerful, but subject to occasional periods of depression of spirits, when he liked to remain in solitude until the time of gloompassed by. 

Adin Thayer's education was chiefly in the district schoolsof his neighborhood. Hosea Biglow may be taken as the typeof the ordinary Yankee country boy of that day. Adin hadthe advantage, better, if you can have but one, than anyuniversity, of being brought up in the country. He was amember of that absolute democracy, the old-fashioned NewEngland country town, where character and worth were theonly titles to respect in the community, where the son ofa President or the son of a Senator or of a Governor stoodon an absolute and entire social equality with the son of thewasherwoman. If the son of a President or Governor gavehimself any airs on that account, he had applied to him avery vigorous and effective remedy well known to our Saxonancestors. 

Adin Thayer came to manhood when the hosts of slavery andfreedom were marshalling for the great contest for the territorybetween the Mississippi and the Pacific. 

He was soaked in Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, a soaking which has somewhat the same effect on the moraland mental fibre that seven years in a tanner's vat used tohave upon sole leather. How often I have known Adin, on somegreat political occasion or crisis, to crush some sophistryor compromise, or attempt to get things on a lower plane, by indignantly flashing out with some old text, such as, "Righteousnessexalteth a nation, " or "Sin is a reproach to any people, "or answer, as he did once, to a gentleman who wanted him tosacrifice some moral principle for the sake of harmony inthe Republican Party, "My friend, we will be first pure, andthen peaceable. "

Adin Thayer was a member of the School Committee of Worcesterfor some years. He was Senator from Worcester, I think, fortwo years, in 1871 and 1872. He was appointed Collector ofInternal Revenue for the eighth district by President Lincolnon August 26, 1862, and gave way to a successor appointedby President Johnson, September 14, 1866. He was reappointedby President Grant, June 22, 1872, and held the office untilJanuary, 1877, when the eighth and tenth districts were consolidated. He was appointed Judge of Probate by Governor Rice in thefall of 1877, and held that office until his death. He wasChairman of the State Committee in 1878. He gave to the publicthree or four essays or speeches printed in newspapers, andsome of them in pamphlet form. They were, under one titleor another, treatises on the moral duties of citizenshipand appeals to the youth of the State to take their full andpatriotic share in its administration. 

But his function in life was that of an organizer. He wasan ambitious man. But he never suffered his ambitions tostand in the way of what he thought was the good of the Commonwealthor of the party. Many and many a time, as there are plentyof persons who can testify, it had been the expectation thathe would be the choice of his party for Senator or for Representativeof the district in Congress, or some important municipal office, but when the time came, Mr. Thayer was the first to suggestthat victory and harmony or the public advantage would bebest attained by some other candidate, to whose service hegave a zeal and efficiency which he never would have givenin his own behalf. He believed in party in politics, in organization, in work in the ward and in the school district. But he believedin those things because they were, in his judgment, essentialto the accomplishment of the highest results in the countryand in the Commonwealth. He was absolutely incorruptible, either by money or by office. He was a man of clean handsand a pure heart. His methods were as open as the daylight. He conducted the great campaign against General Butler, whenhe was Chairman of the State committee. He came to Bostonand found the knees of Boston trembling, people shaking intheir shoes and their teeth chattering. He went into thecommittee room, put things to rights, organized a campaignnever approached for thoroughness and efficiency in this Commonwealth, and during the whole time there sat at the table next hisown a beautiful and refined young lady hearing and knowingeverything that went on from the beginning of the campaignuntil the end. He had no political secrets. He never, touse a common phrase, "laid his ear to the ground. " He neverlistened for the stamping of feet or the clapping of hands orthe shouting or excitement or acclaim of the multitude. Hisear was to the sky. He used to speak with infinite scorn ofsettling questions of righteousness by a show of hands. Hehad a perfect faith in the American people and the peopleof Massachusetts, but it was a faith in the American peopleand the people of Massachusetts, governed by reason and notby passion, acting under constitutional restraints, listeningever for the voice of duty, a people acting not on the firstimpulse, but on sober second thought. He was often in theminority, and once or twice in his life a bolter. He wasnever afraid of being in the minority. But he never was contenteduntil he had changed or helped to change that minority intoa majority. He was a politician almost from his cradle tohis grave. He believed that the highest human occupationwas to take a share in the leadership and direction of a self-governing people. He was a very tolerant, friendly and considerateman, in dealing with men who differed from himself. He wouldpardon sinners. He would pardon politicians with whose effortsthere was, as he thought, even a mingling of ambition andself-seeking. But he had nothing but hatred and contemptfor men who received all the benefits of the Republic, butshrank from any labor or sacrifice in its behalf. To hismind the one base creature in the Commonwealth was the manwho said he was no politician. He thoroughly believed inRalph Waldo Emerson's saying, which he borrowed from his brotherCharles: "That is the one base thing in the universe, toreceive benefits and render none. " He had a clear businesssense. He was the best adviser I knew of in Worcester, withbut one possible exception, for clients who were in financialdifficulties. He was a man of absolute integrity, of absoluteveracity, and of a tender and boundless compassion. One ofthe most touching scenes I ever beheld was, when at his funeral, among the men of high station and of honor, there came forwarda little group of Negroes and fugitive slaves who had beenattracted to Worcester by its reputation as the home of freedom. They passed by the coffin with bowed heads and moistened eyes, every one of them probably knowing him as the friend and benefactorwho had made life possible for them in this strange and unaccustomedcommunity. He did not get carried off his feet by any sentimentalities. 

He was the best of company. You could not talk with him ortackle him without a bright and entertaining answer. He wasno great respecter of persons in such an encounter. I remembermeeting him one day, when he said he had just been spendingSunday in Canton. "Indeed!" said I, "my great-grandfatherused to live there, and is buried there. " "Well, sir, " heanswered, "it may be a very respectable town for all that. "

A master of English fiction, who has won fame abroad, andwho dwelt for some little time in this country, has givena most vivid and accurate description of Judge Thayer, hisspeech and his style and eloquence and sense in a novel latelypublished. One of the persons of the novel asks an Englishfriend to the club, which he calls the State Club. He goesto the Club, and this is what happens:

"The State Club held its meeting in the parlor of the well-known Warrener House. There were some fifty members present, who received the Mayor with cheers, as he entered with histwo friends. A good deal of smoke was made, and a good manyspeeches. 

"Sir Hugh found interest in listening to some of the speakers, and in looking at some of the members. Montaigne pointedout all of the notables. One of the speakers* was a shortman, with a corpulent body and a large open face; but he wasa born orator of a certain type. Rounded and polished, mellowand musical, his sentences rolled from his mouth in liquidcadence and perfect balance. Sir Hugh put him down as hisideal after-dinner speaker. He made his points clearly, neatly, and with occasional vigor that was always surprising. "

[Footnote]* John D. Long. [End of Footnote]

"'He reminds me of the Younger Pitt. Who is he?' asked SirHugh, with a touch of enthusiasm that was in striking contrastwith his habitual and aristocratic insouciance. 

"'Oh, that, ' said Montaigne, with a smile, 'is Mr. WilliamShortley, commonly called Billy Shortlegs. He is very popular, well up in classics, and stands a good chance of being Governorsome day. Shall I introduce you?'

"'Thank you, presently. Whom are they calling for now?' inquiredSir Hugh, as a chorus of voices cried out 'Amos Blackstone!Amos Blackstone! Amos, Amos, Amos!'

"Montaigne himself was chanting 'Blackstone! Blackstone!'with great gusto. When that gentleman rose, a perfect stormof cheers went up, during which Montaigne said: 'Now you willhear something, Sir Hugh. I shall want to know what you thinkof him. '

"Sir Hugh put up his eye-glass, not that his sight was defectivebut the occasion was important. Mr. Amos Blackstone had arrivedat the dignified age of three score years. In some respectshe curiously resembled the previous speaker, though considerablyhis senior. He stood perhaps five feet five inches in hisboots. With the exception of his legs, he was a heavily builtman, with a large head, an ample brow, a hairless face, veryred, with large cheeks, and an under jaw like a lion. Hiseyes were small, but wonderfully bright and intelligent. Helooked so portentously solemn, that when you learnt that hewas perfectly well in mind, body and estate, the inclinationto laugh was irresistible. This remarkable man began to speakin a husky, asthmatical voice, that gradually came out ofthe clouds and grew clear. His subject was, 'The Abstentionof our Young Men from Politics: Causes and Cure. ' He was evidentlya master of his subject, and spoke without notes. He wasabsolutely without any pretence to oratory; and yet for thirtyminutes he played upon his audience as it were a pipe, andplucked out the heart of its mystery. He was by turn, serious, merry, doleful, witty, pathetic, humorous, ironical and gravelyphilosophic. When he was gay in speech, his face was funereal, and during the utterances of his grave reflections, his facewas lighted up with a winning smile. There were moments whenone might have heard a pin drop; when one could not have heardhis name, if shouted, for laughter; when one's eyes gathereda sudden mist. 

"Sir Hugh did not once remove his eye-glass; he would haveput up half a dozen glasses had he had them. 

"'Well, ' enquired Montaigne, as the after-cheering subsided. 'A grave, melancholy intellect, with a sprightly temperament;a wonderful man. Who is he?' asked Sir Hugh, dropping hisglass. 

"'His name, as you know is Amos Blackstone; he lives somemiles away; but he is a household name. '

"'Is he in business?'

"'Yes, a lawyer; a patent lawyer. Have you ever heard ofan institution called the Political Boss?'

"'Oh, yes. At home we use him to a degree, as a sort ofpolitical Black Bogey, to scare naughty children who like toplay at Radicalism. '

"'Well, Amos Blackstone is a specimen of the Political Boss. '

"'Indeed? You surprise me, ' gasped Sir Hugh. 'Don't mistakeme; they are not all like him. He is a lion among jackals;the best political organizer in the State. But he is gettingcrowded out by younger men. We soon turn our war-horses outto pasture, in this country, ' explained Montaigne. "

No man among his contemporaries in Massachusetts had a largernumber of devoted friends than Adin Thayer. Many people whowere not counted among his acquaintances were attached tohim by sympathy of political opinions and by gratitude forhis important service to the Commonwealth. He did a thousandthings for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of theState. Many bad men found that somehow their ambitions werenipped in the bud by a process they could hardly understand, and many good men were called into the public service in obedienceto a summons from a hand the influence of which they neverdiscovered. But there were four things he largely helpedto do which were important and conspicuous in our history;I will not say things that he did, but they were things whichwould not have been done, in my judgment, if the power andinfluence of Adin Thayer had been subtracted; things accomplishedwith difficulty and with doubt. He stood by Charles Sumnerwhen that great and dangerous attempt was made to banish himfrom public life in the year 1862. It was a time when CharlesSumner, as he told me himself, could not visit the collegewhere he was graduated, and be sure of a respectful reception, when a very important Republican paper, the most importantand influential Republican paper in Massachusetts, declaredthat Charles Sumner could not address a popular audience inNew York with personal safety; when, under the lead of theUnited States District Attorney, one of the most successfulmanagers of a political meeting who ever existed in Massachusetts, an attempt was made to defeat a resolution of confidence inhim, in the Republican State Convention (when the whole ofthe House of Representatives, or of the Caucus, or of theConvention, was on one side and Richard H. Dana was on theother, it was about an even chance which came out ahead), Thayer stood by Mr. Sumner in that memorable State Convention, and helped save his great career to the country and to liberty. 

He was a devoted supporter of John A. Andrew. Andrew hadbeen Governor the traditional three years, and there weremen eager to supplant him. When Adin heard of a formidablemeeting called for that purpose, he exclaimed--I remembervery well the indignation with which he said it--"They shallnot lay their hands on the Lord's Anointed. " He sent a messageto the meeting that he would fight their candidate in everyschool district in Massachusetts. The scheme was abandoned. 

He was largely responsible for the defeat of the scheme forsubstituting biennial for annual election, and biennial sessionsof the Legislature for yearly sessions in Massachusetts, although it did not receive its deathblow at the hands ofthe people until after his death. 

But his chief service, after all, was in keeping the governmentof Massachusetts clean and incorruptible, at the time of thegreat raid which was made upon the Republican Party in theyears between 1871 and 1883. And yet, in all these servicesand contests he never appealed to a base passion or to a lowambition in any man. He summoned the nobility in men, andit answered to his call. He loved with the whole intensityof his nature, his country, his Commonwealth, and the citywhich was his home. He loved the great cause of human freedomand equality with the passionate devotion which a lover feelsfor his mistress. He was the most disinterested man I everknew in public life. He was not devoid of ambition. He believedthat the holding of public office was the best method of accomplishingpublic results. But, as I have already said, when the timecame, he always subordinated his own desire to what he deemedthe welfare of the public. 

He had, I think, one favorite poem. He was fond of all goodliterature, especially the Bible, and was never without itsresources to illustrate or make emphatic what he had to say. But there was one poem which was written to describe his andmy intimate friend, George L. Stearns, which I think was hisfavorite above all the literature with which he was acquainted. I have often heard him quote its verses. They set forth thecharacter and quality and life of Adin Thayer himself. IfThayer had died before Stearns, I believe Whittier would havewritten the same thing about him. They are familiar to myreaders, I am sure, but I will close this brief and imperfecttribute by citing them once more:

 He has done the work of a true man, -- Crown him, honor him, love him. Weep over him, tears of women, Stoop, manliest brows, above him!

 * * * * * *

 For the warmest of hearts is frozen, The freest of hands is still; And the gap in our picked and chosen The long years may not fill. 

 No duty could overtask him, No need his will outrun; Or ever our lips could ask him, His hands the work had done. 

 He forgot his own soul for others, Himself to his neighbor lending; He found the Lord in his suffering brothers, And not in the clouds descending. 

 * * * * * *

 Ah, well!--The world is discreet; There are plenty to pause and wait; But here was a man who set his feet Sometimes in advance of fate, --

 Plucked off the old bark when the inner Was slow to renew it, And put to the Lord's work the sinner When saints failed to do it. 

 Never rode to the wrong's redressing A worthier paladin. Shall we not hear the blessing, "Good and faithful, enter in!"

CHAPTER XXIPOLITICAL CORRUPTION

John Jay said that the greatest achievements of diplomacywere often little noted by history and that their authorsgot, in general, little credit. He compared it to the workof levelling uneven ground of which the face of the earthwill show no trace when it is done. The same thing is trueof successful battles with political corruption in high places, the most formidable peril to any Government and, if it benot encountered and overcome, fatal to a Republic. A nationwill survive a corrupt minister or monarch, but a corruptpeople must surely and speedily perish. We have had sporadicexamples of corruption in high office at several periods inour history. The first sixteen years after the inaugurationof the Constitution, including the Administrations of Washington, John Adams, and the first four years of Jefferson, were byno means free from it. But it never got so dangerous a holdupon the forces of the Government, or upon a great politicalparty, as in the Administration of General Grant. 

General Grant was an honest and wise man. History has assignedhim a place among our great Presidents. He showed almostunerring judgment in military matters. He rarely, I suppose, if ever, made a mistake in his estimate of the military qualityof a subordinate, or in a subordinate's title to confidence. But he was very easily imposed upon by self-seeking and ambitiousmen in civil life. Such men studied his humors and imposedupon him, if not by flattery, yet by the pretence of personaldevotion. He had been himself bitterly and most unjustlyassailed by partisan and sectional hostility. When any personto whom he had once given his confidence was detected in anylow or corrupt action Grant was very unwilling to believeor even to listen to the charge. He seemed to set his teethand to say to himself: "They attack this man as they attackme. They attack him because he is my friend. I will standby him. " So it happened that attempts to secure pure and unselfishadministration got little help from him, and that designingand crafty men whose political aims were wholly personaland selfish got his ear and largely influenced his appointmentsto office. 

Hamilton Fish, the Secretary of State, always retained hisinfluence with President Grant. He was a wise, able and thoroughlyhonest man. But as was fit, and indeed necessary, he kepthimself to the great interests which belonged to his Department, and took little share, so far as the public knew, in otherquestions. 

General Cox, of Ohio, was an able, brave and upright man. He resigned from President Grant's Cabinet, alleging as hisreason that he was not supported in the fight with corruption. Judge Hoar strenuously insisted that the Judges of the newlycreated Circuit Courts of the United States should be madeup of the best lawyers, without Senatorial dictation. PresidentGrant acted in accordance with his advice. The constitutionof the Circuit Courts gave great satisfaction to the public. But leading and influential Senators, whose advice had beenrejected, and who were compelled by the high character ofthe persons nominated to submit, and did not venture upona controversy with the President, were intensely angry withthe Attorney-General. The result was that when he was nominatedby the President for the office of Associate Justice of theSupreme Court of the United States, he was rejected by theSenate. A few Senators avowed as a pretext for their actionthat there was no Judge on that Bench from the South, andthat the new appointee ought to reside in the Southern Circuit. But these gentlemen all voted for the confirmation of Mr. Justice Bradley, a most admirable appointment, to whom thesame objection applied. Judge Hoar never doubted that theservice of a clean, able, upright Circuit Court, appointedwithout political influence, and entirely acceptable to thepublic, was well worth the sacrifice. Indeed the expressionof public regard which came to him abundantly in his lifetime, and which was manifested in the proceedings of the Bar ofMassachusetts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, andin the press of the country after his death, was more valuedby those to whom his memory is dear, than a thousand offices. 

When I entered Congress in 1869 the corridors of the Capitoland the Committee rooms were crowded with lobbyists. Thecustom of the two Houses permitted their members to introducestrangers on the floor. It would not be profitable to reviveall the scandals of that time. In general the men electedto the Senate and the House were honest and incorruptible. There were some exceptions. Adroit and self-seeking men wereoften able in the multitude of claims which must necessarilybe disposed of by a rapid examination, to impose on Committeesof the two Houses. 

As one of the managers of the Belknap trial, I alluded tosome of the more prominent and undisputed examples of corruption, in the following words:

"I said a little while ago that the Constitution had no safeguardsto throw away. You will judge whether the public events ofto-day admonish us to look well to all our securities to preventor power to punish the great guilt of corruption in office. We must not confound idle clamor with public opinion, or acceptthe accusations of scandal and malice instead of proof. Butwe shall make a worse mistake if, because of the multitudeof false and groundless charges against men in high office, we fail to redress substantial grievances or to deal withcases of actual guilt. The worst evil resulting from theindiscriminate attack of an unscrupulous press upon men inpublic station is not that innocence suffers, but that crimeescapes. Let scandal and malice be encountered by pure andstainless lives. Let corruption and bribery meet their lawfulpunishment. 

"My own public life has been a very brief and insignificantone, extending little beyond the duration of a single termof Senatorial office; but in that brief period I have seenfive judges of a high court of the United States driven fromoffice by threats of impeachment for corruption or maladministration. I have heard the taunt, from friendliest lips, that when theUnited States presented herself in the East to take part withthe civilized world in generous competition in the arts oflife, the only product of her institutions in which she surpassedall others beyond question was her corruption. I have seenin the State in the Union foremost in power and wealth fourjudges of her courts impeached for corruption, and the politicaladministration of her chief city become a disgrace and a by-word throughout the world. I have seen the chairman of theCommittee on Military Affairs in the House, now a distinguishedmember of this court, rise in his place and demand the expulsionof four of his associates for making sale of their officialprivilege of selecting the youths to be educated at our greatmilitary school. When the greatest railroad of the world, binding together the continent and uniting the two great seaswhich wash our shores, was finished, I have seen our nationaltriumph and exultation turned to bitterness and shame by theunanimous reports of three committees of Congress--two ofthe House and one here--that every step of that mighty enterprisehad been taken in fraud. I have heard in highest places theshameless doctrine avowed by men grown old in public officethat the true way by which power should be gained in the Republicis to bribe the people with the offices created for theirservice, and the true end for which it should be used whengained is the promotion of selfish ambition and the gratificationof personal revenge. I have heard that suspicion haunts thefootsteps of the trusted companions of the President. 

"These things have passed into history. The Hallam or theTacitus or the Sismondi or the Macaulay who writes the annalsof our time will record them with his inexorable pen. Andnow when a high Cabinet officer, the Constitutional adviserof the Executive, flees from office before charges of corruption, shall the historian add that the Senate treated the demandof the people for its judgment of condemnation as a farce, and laid down its high functions before the sophistries andjeers of the criminal lawyer? Shall he speculate about thepetty political calculations as to the effect on one partyor the other which induced his judges to connive at the escapeof the great public criminal? Or, on the other had, shallhe close the chapter by narrating how these things were detected, reformed and punished by Constitutional processes which thewisdom of our fathers devised for us, and the virtue and purityof the people found their vindication in the justice of theSenate?"

This passage was quoted very extensively by the Democraticspeakers all over the country, and was circulated as a campaigndocument. I was reproached by some of my Republican associatesfor furnishing ammunition for the enemy. But I was satisfied, and I am now, that in saying what I did I rendered a greatservice to the Republican Party. What was said helped toarouse public attention, and the masses of the people--alwayspure and incorruptible--set themselves earnestly and successfullyto reform the abuses. 

It never occurred to me that these abuses furnished any reasonfor placing the powers of the Government in the hands of theSouthern Democracy, or their ally, Tammany Hall. If the menwho saved the Union were not to be trusted to keep it pure;if the men who abolished slavery could not carry on a Governmentin freedom and in honor, certainly it was not likely thatthe men of Tammany Hall, or the men who had so lately attemptedto overthrow the Government, would do it any better. 

I happened to be at lunch with General Garfield just afterthe Belknap trial. He spoke of my argument, and expressedhis strong sympathy and approval. I told him that I had beenlooking into the history of the first sixteen years of theGovernment, which included the Administrations of Washingtonand John Adams and the first term of Jefferson, and that inmy opinion there was not only more corruption in proportionthen than there had been under Grant, but there had been morein amount, notwithstanding the difference in population. Istated to him a good many instances. He urged me to makea speech in which I should say publicly what I had said tohim. I acted on his advice, and in the course of a speech, in reply to Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi, I spoke as follows:

"The Republican Party, as I have said, has controlled theGovernment for sixteen years, a term equal to that which coversthe whole Administration of Washington, the whole Administrationof John Adams, and the first term of Jefferson. It has beenone of those periods in which all experience teaches us toexpect an unusual manifestation of public corruption, of publicdisorder, and of evils and errors of administration. A greatwar; the time which follows a great war; great public debts;currency and values inflated; the exertion of new and extraordinarypowers for the safety of the State; the sudden call of millionsof slaves to a share in the Government--any one of these thingswould be expected to create great disturbances, and give riseto great temptations and great corruptions. Our term ofoffice has seen them all combined. And yet I do not scrupleto affirm that not only has there been less dishonesty andmaladministration in the sixteen years of Republican ruleproportionally to the numbers and wealth of the people thanin the first sixteen years after the inauguration of Washington, but there has been less absolutely of those things. 

"Now, Mr. Speaker, I do not wish to be misunderstood. I donot wish to be misrepresented in this matter. Let no manassert that I refer to the evils of those days as eitherexcuse or palliation for the evils of ours. That generationwas a frugal and honest generation in the main, and theywould have visited with the swiftest condemnation and punishment, every breach of public trust, whether through dishonesty orusurpation. But they did not send to England for BenedictArnold. They did not restore the Tories to power. They didnot go down on their knees to George III. And ask him totake them back into favor. They believed that if the Constitutioncould not be administered honestly by a majority of the friendsof the Constitution, it could not be administered honestlyby a majority of its enemies; that if liberty were not safeand pure in the hands of those who loved her, then libertywas a failure upon the earth, and they did not think of intrustingher to the hands of those who hated her. So in this generation, had they lived to-day, they would have done simply what adistinguished president of the convention in my own State, whom the gentleman quotes, recommended; they would have takenthe Government from the hands of the lovers of liberty whoare dishonest and put it into the hands of men who entertainthe same sentiments but who are honest. It never would haveoccurred to them that because among one hundred thousand menthere are found some few who will not keep the eighth commandment, 'Thou shalt not steal, ' which is a mandate for all the publicservice, they should put in power men who have no regard forthe sixth, 'Thou shalt not kill. '"

There were several conspicuous instances of corruption withwhich I had personally to deal. 

1. One was the Credit Mobilier. 

Two Committees were appointed to investigate the affairsof the Union Pacific Railroad Company, and the Credit Mobilierof America. One Committee investigated the conduct of somemembers of the two Houses of Congress against whom some chargeshad been made. Of that Committee Judge Poland of Vermontwas the Chairman. The other Committee investigated the historyof the Union Pacific Railroad Company to report whether itscharter had been forfeited. Of that Committee Jeremiah M. Wilson of Indiana, a very able lawyer and accomplished gentleman, was Chairman. The next member to him on the Committee wasJudge Shellabarger of Ohio. Owing to reasons, stated later, it fell to me as the next in rank to conduct the greaterpart of the examination, and to make the report. 

2. Another was the impeachment and trial of General WilliamW. Belknap, Secretary of War, for receiving a bribe for theappointment of a Post Trader. 

3. A third example of the prevalent laxity of morals thatoccurred was the case of the Sanborn contracts. I was amember of the House when they were investigated, but tookno special part in the proceedings. 

4. A fourth example was the claim of Senators and Representativeswhich had been asserted in Andrew Johnson's Administration, and to which General Grant had partly yielded, to dictatethe appointment of executive officers. In that way a vastarmy of public servants, amounting to more than one hundredthousand in number, who were appointed and removed at thepleasure of the Executive, became first the instrument ofkeeping the dominant party in power, and afterward becamenot so much the instruments and servants of party as the politicalfollowers of ambitious men to whom they owed their office, and on whose pleasure they depended for maintaining them. I made, in a speech at West Newton in 1876, an earnest attackon this system, and afterward in the Senate had a good dealto do with framing the Civil Service Law, as it was called, which put an end to it. 

5. Perhaps the most dangerous attack upon the purity ofthe Government was the attempt of General Butler to get possessionof the political power in Massachusetts, and ultimately thatof the country. What I was able to do to resist and bafflethat attempt is the most considerable part of the public serviceof my life, if it has been of any public service. 

I shall speak of each of these a little more fully. 

The responsibility for three of these, I regret to say, restedupon Massachusetts men, members of the Republican Party. TheUnion Pacific Railroad Company and the Credit Mobilier weremade up largely of prominent Massachusetts men for whom GeneralButler acted as counsel. When Mr. Ames was on trial beforethe House of Representatives General Butler, then a memberof the House, appeared as a member and took part and madethe extraordinary statement to the House that he was thereas counsel for Mr. Ames. 

Sanborn, who made the contracts, was a Massachusetts man. His profits were used largely in affecting elections in Massachusetts. The Treasury officials who were in fault, whether throughcarelessness or corruption, were Massachusetts men, and thearch contriver of the scheme was a Massachusetts man. 

Yet the lesson which these things have taught me is thatthe American statesman who believes that the doctrines ofhis party are sound should never abandon his principles orquit political life because of its corruption. Let him neverfor any political advantage support or tolerate a corruptman, or vote for a corrupt candidate. If a man whose principlesare good will yield to an evil motive, it is not likely thatthe man whose principles are bad will resist it. The Americanpeople are upright and honest. They will vindicate and standby any man in the contest for honesty and uprightness, behe Democrat or Republican, so long as they believe that theends for which he is striving are for the public good. Theywill not sustain a man whose counsel they think bad, howeverhonest he may be in his own conduct, or however much he maydesire to secure honesty in the conduct of others. No manever yet accomplished much good by abandoning his party whilehe continued to hold its principles. Many men have accomplisheda great deal of good by striving to purify it. 

Every account of political history from the inside will exhibitabundant evidence of wickedness, wrongdoing, and petty personalmotives, of low ambitions, of bargains and sales, of timidity, of treachery. The reverse of the most costly tapestry looksmean and cheap. It is said that no man is a hero to his valet. The reason is not that the hero is mean or base, but thatthe valet cannot see anything that is great and noble, butonly what is mean and base. The history of no people is heroicalto its Mugwumps. But, thank God, what is petty and personalis also temporary and perishable. The voice of all history, especially the voice of the history of our Republic, speaksto us the lesson which our great philosopher taught and soimplicitly believed, Saying, What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent. 

CHAPTER XXIICREDIT MOBILIER

During the election of 1872 many rumors appeared in the pressof the country that there had been great corruption in themanagement of the affairs of the Union Pacific Railroad. Itwas charged that the members of the House and Senate, someof whom were named, had been bribed by gifts of stock in theCredit Mobilier to secure their influence in legislation affectingthe Union Pacific Railroad. 

The Credit Mobilier Co. Had been formed to take the contractfor building the Union Pacific Railroad. The stockholdersof the two companies were identical. Each stockholder ofthe Credit Mobilier owned a number of shares of the UnionPacific Railroad proportional to his holding in the formercompany. 

The Union Pacific Railroad Company and Central Pacific RailroadCompany received liberal land grants from the Government ofthe United States, that they might each build a part of theline which should connect the Atlantic States with the PacificOcean. In addition to the land grants, each road was to receivea loan of Government bonds, payable in thirty years, of $27, 000, 000, for which the Government was to pay interest, which interestwas not required to be repaid by the roads. The roads werealso authorized to give a mortgage on their properties fora like amount, of $27, 000, 000 each, which mortgage was tobe prior to the Government's lien for its loan. The charterof the Union Pacific Railroad was granted by the Governmentof the United States. That of the Central Pacific was fromthe State of California. The Government undertook to removeall Indian titles from the public land granted to the UnionPacific Railroad for a space of 200 feet in width on eachside of its entire route, and conferred the right to appropriateby eminent domain necessary private land for depots, turnouts, etc. , and public lands to the amount of ten alternate sectionsper mile, within the limits of twenty miles on each side ofthe road. It was required by the charter of the Union PacificRailroad that its stock should be paid in full in cash, andthat the interests of the Government should be specially protectedby the appointment by the President of five Government Directors. The Government bonds were to be handed over on the certificateof an officer appointed by the President, as the road advancedto completion. It was required that a Government Directorshould be a member of every Committee, standing or select. 

The managers of the Union Pacific Railroad acquired the franchiseof a Pennsylvania Company, known as the Credit Mobilier, dividedits stock among themselves in proportion to their ownershipin the Union Pacific Railroad, mortgaged the road to the extentpermitted by the act of Congress, being a little more than$27, 000, 000 and mortgaged their land grants for a furthersum of $10, 000, 000. Then they made a contract with the CreditMobilier Company to construct the road at a price which wouldexhaust all the resources of the road, including the proceedsof the bonds of all kinds, and divided the proceeds amongthemselves as dividends on the stock of the Credit Mobilier. This left the Union Pacific Railroad to begin business mortgagedto its full value, without any resources for its operation, and utterly stripped of the ample endowment which the bountyof the Government had provided for it. 

Congress supposed when this munificent grant of land and loanof credit was made it would create a great public highwayacross the continent for the use of the Government and thepeople, in war and peace, which should be a strong, solventcorporation, ready for every emergency, and as secure forthe public use as New York Harbor, or as the Pacific Ocean. 

The devisers of this scheme soon got to quarrelling amongthemselves. One faction was made up largely of Boston capitalists, and the other of men belonging in New York, New Jersey andConnecticut. The former wanted to have the headquarters ofthe corporation in Boston, with a Boston man for President;and the latter desired to have the management in New York. A suit in equity was brought, and the Boston men, headed byOakes Ames, a member of Congress, and his brother Oliver, both eminent and highly respected business men of Massachusetts, were enjoined from voting at a stockholders' meeting heldin New York for the election of officers. The injunctionwas issued by Judge Barnard, who was afterward impeached, and removed from office. On the day of the stockholders'meeting General Butler, counsel for the Ames faction, foundJudge Barnard at lunch, and got him so to modify the injunctionas to permit that the votes might be cast, the result of theelection not to be declared until the further order of theCourt. The other faction who had rested with fancied securityunder their injunction were taken by surprise. 

The Ames ticket had a majority. Thereupon one of the otherfaction wrote a letter to Elihu B. Washburn, at Washington. He was an influential member of the House of Representatives, known as the "Watch Dog of the Treasury. " The letter was putin the post-office. It exposed the whole transaction. Hethen informed his opponents what he had done. They knew verywell that if Washburn moved an investigation by the Houseof Representatives, which was likely, the game was up. Nofurther bonds would come from the United States Treasury. Judicial proceedings would in all likelihood be taken at onceto annul the charter, or restrain further action under it. They instantly came to terms. The two factions agreed ona Board of Directors. The letter to Washington was withdrawnfrom the mail. Oakes Ames received a quantity of the stockof the Credit Mobilier, which he was to distribute among influentialmembers of Congress at par, "putting it, " according to histestimony given before a Committee afterward, "where it woulddo the most good. " A list of members of the two Houses wasagreed upon, to whom the stock should be offered. It wasexpected that they would pay for it at par. But there hadbeen already a large dividend assigned to it, which with thedividend expected to be paid shortly, would amount to muchmore than the nominal par value of the stock. So the purchaseof one of the shares was like purchasing for $1, 000 a bankaccount which already amounted to, or shortly would amountto, more than double that sum. 

A list of the men who were to be induced to take this stockwas made out with wonderful and prophetic sagacity. It containedsome of the ablest and most influential men in the two Housesof Congress, representing different parts of the country. It included men as conspicuous for integrity as ability. Eachof them occupied already a great place in the respect of hiscountrymen, and nearly every one of them attained a much greaterplace afterward. This is the list of the members of Congressto whom stock was to be conveyed:

LIST OF MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO WHOM STOCK WAS TO BESOLD AGREED UPON IN NEW YORK, ENTERED IN OAKESAMES'S MEMORANDUM BOOK, AND TAKEN BYHIM TO WASHINGTON

 James G. Blaine of Maine. Senator James W. Patterson of New Hampshire. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. Schuyler Colfax of Indiana. Thomas D. Eliot of Massachusetts. Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts. George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts. James A. Garfield of Ohio. Glenni W. Schofield of Pennsylvania. William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania. Joseph F. Fowler of Tennessee. John A. Bingham of Ohio. Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware. William B. Allison of Iowa. James F. Wilson of Iowa. Roscoe Conkling of New York. James Brooks of New York. John A. Logan of Illinois. 

When Mr. Ames got to Washington he added the names of severalSenators to his list, some of whom took the stock. 

It will be seen by an examination that men of great abilityand influence were very skilfully selected. Two of themafterward became Vice-Presidents of the United States. Oneof them became President of the United States. Another becameSecretary of the Treasury. Two others became Speakers ofthe House. Five others were very prominent candidates forthe Presidency. Another was Chairman of the Judiciary Committeeof the House. Another became Chairman of the Committee onAppropriations and subsequently of Ways and Means. Nine ofthese gentlemen, then members of the House, were afterwardelected to the Senate. 

Mr. Blaine, Mr. Eliot, Mr. Bayard, Mr. Conkling and Mr. Boutwellrefused absolutely to have anything to do with the transaction. All the others were fully acquitted on investigation, by thejudgment of the House, of any corrupt purpose or any desireto make money or get private advantage by reason of theirofficial influence, or of any expectation that they wouldbe likely to be called upon to take or refuse any action byreason of their relation to these corporations. It was thoughtthat they had been careless in that they had not been puton their guard by the fact that so large a dividend was tobe paid on the stock. In all cases the amounts received werevery small, in general not amounting to more than $1, 000. In two or three instances the people thought there was wantof candor or frankness in telling the full transaction tothe public, when the newspaper charges first made their appearance. 

Henry Wilson never had any of the stock. But some of hisfriends made a present of a small sum of money to Mrs. Wilson, and the persons having the matter in charge invested a portionof it in Credit Mobilier stock. As soon as Wilson heard ofit, he directed that the stock be reconveyed to the personfrom whom it had been received, and gave his wife a smallsum of money to make up the difference of what turned outto be the value of the stock and the value of the investmentwhich had been made in its place. There was no lack of themost scrupulous integrity in the transaction. Wilson metat a great public meeting Gen. Hawley, who was one of thespeakers. Hawley told Wilson on the platform just beforehis speech that he understood that his name had been mentionedin the papers as the owner of Credit Mobilier stock. Wilsonanswered that he never had any of it. Thereupon Hawley inhis speech alluded to that matter and said he was authorizedby Mr. Wilson to say that he never owned any of the stock. Mr. Wilson did not get up and say, No, I never owned any. But my wife once had a present of a little money which wasinvested in it, and as soon as I heard of it, I immediatelyhad it returned to the person from whom it came, and I madeup the loss to my wife myself. Such, however, was the publicexcitement that his omission to do that was held in some quartersas culpable want of frankness. 

All the persons who received any of the stock and told thestory frankly at the investigation were acquitted of anywrongdoing whatever, and never in the least suffered in esteemin consequence. 

But Schuyler Colfax and Senator Patterson of New Hampshirewere found by the Committee, and believed by the people tohave been disingenuous in their account of the transaction. The Senate Committee of investigation reported a resolutionfor the expulsion of Senator Patterson. The case was a veryhard one indeed for him. The Senate adjourned, and his termexpired without any action on the resolution, or any opportunityto defend himself. 

Schuyler Colfax was also held to have given an untruthfulstory of the transaction. But the public attention was turnedfrom that by the discovery, in the investigation of his accountswhich the Committee made, that he had received large sumsof money from a person for whom he had obtained a lucrativeGovernment contract. But his term of office as Vice-Presidentexpired before any action could be taken, and he died soonafter. 

Mr. Ames, whose character as a shrewd and skilful investorand manager of property stood deservedly high, recommendedto his friends the stock of the Credit Mobilier as a safeinvestment, and one in his judgment very sure to prove profitable. 

It has been often asked how the managers of the Credit Mobiliercould be guilty of bribing men when nobody was guilty of beingbribed. But the answer is easy. The managers of the CreditMobilier knew that they had violated the law, and that aninvestigation would ruin their whole concern. The men whoreceived the stock were in ignorance of this fact. It wasas if the managers of a railroad whose route under State lawsis to be determined by a city council, or a board of selectmenor some other public body, should induce the members of sucha board to take stock in their enterprise, intending afterwardto petition the body to which the subscribers belonged toadopt a route very near land owned by them, which would muchincrease its value, the receivers of the stock being ignorantof their scheme. The person who should do that would be justlychargeable with bribery, while the persons who received thestock would be held totally innocent. That was the judgmentof the House of Representatives which acquitted the memberswho had received the stock, but held Ames, who had conductedthe transaction, censurable. A large number of the membersvoted for his expulsion. Ames was a successful business man. He was regarded by his neighbors as a man of integrity. Hewas generous and public spirited. But he and his associatesin the Union Pacific Railroad seemed, in this matter, to beutterly destitute of any sense of public duty or comprehensionof the great purposes of Congress. They seemed to treat itas a purely private transaction, out of which they might getall the money they could, without any obligation to carryout the act according to its spirit, or even according toits letter, if they could only do so without being detected. They seemed to have thought they were the sole owners of theUnion Pacific Railroad and of the Credit Mobilier corporation, and that the transaction between the two concerned themselvesonly and not the public. They treated it as if they weretransferring money from one pocket to another. 

When Congress met in December, Mr. Blaine, the Speaker, whohad been one of the persons implicated by public rumor, althoughin fact he had refused absolutely to have anything to do withthe transaction, left the Chair, and, calling Mr. Cox ofNew York to his place, introduced a resolution calling foran investigation of the affairs of the Union Pacific Railroad. 

Two Committees were appointed. One, of which Judge Polandwas Chairman, undertook to deal with the charges against themembers of the House of Representatives. The other, of whichJeremiah M. Wilson of Indiana was Chairman, was directed toinquire into the entire management of the affairs of the UnionPacific Railroad and the Credit Mobilier. I was a memberof this last Committee. A Committee was appointed also inthe Senate, with direction to inquire into the charges sofar as they affected Senators. The whole country was profoundlyexcited by the affair. 

I stood third on the Committee on which I was a member. Itwas thought best that Mr. Wilson, the Chairman, who was avery able and distinguished lawyer, should go to Boston wherethe books of the Companies were kept, and make a searchingexamination of their books and accounts. Mr. Shellabargerof Ohio, the second member on the Committee, one of the ablestlawyers in the House, was in poor health. He consented toserve only on the condition that he should not be compelledto do any duty requiring any considerable labor. So I hadto a large degree the charge of the investigation in Washington, where the witnesses were examined, and in the end the dutyof preparing the report. 

We did not deal in our report with the alleged misconductof the individual members of the House, but solely with thetwo corporations. The report sets forth the transaction atlength, and contains the following summary of the Committee'sconclusions:

The purpose of the whole act was expressly declared to be"to promote the public interest and welfare by the constructionof said railroad and telegraph line, and keeping the samein working order, and to secure the Government at all times, but particularly in time of war, the use and benefit of thesame for postal, military, and other purposes. "

Your committee cannot doubt that it was the purpose of Congressin all this to provide for something more than a mere giftof so much land, and a loan of so many bonds on the one side, and the construction and equipment of so many miles of railroadand telegraph on the other. 

The United States was not a mere creditor, loaning a sum ofmoney upon a mortgage. The railroad corporation was not amere contractor, bound to furnish a specified structure andnothing more. The law created a body politic and corporate, bound, as a trustee, so to manage this great public franchiseand endowment that not only the security for the great debtsdue the United States should not be impaired, but so thatthere should be ample resources to perform its great publicduties in time of commercial disaster and in time of war. 

This act was not passed to further the personal interestsof the corporators, nor for the advancement of commercialinterests, nor for the convenience of the general public, alone; but in addition to these the interests, present andfuture, of the Government, as such, were to be subserved. A great highway was to be created, the use of which for postal, military, and other purposes was to be secured to the Government"at all times, " but particularly in time of war. Your committeedeem it important to call especial attention to this declaredobject of this act, to accomplish which object the munificentgrant of lands and loan of the Government credit was made. To make such a highway and to have it ready at "all times, "and "particularly in time of war, " to meet the demands thatmight be made upon it; to be able to withstand the loss ofbusiness and other casualties incident to war and still toperform for the Government such reasonable service as mightunder such circumstances be demanded, required a strong, solventcorporation; and when Congress expressed the object and grantedthe corporate powers to carry that object into execution, and aided the enterprise with subsidies of lands and bonds, the corporators in whom these powers were vested and underwhose control these subsidies were placed, were, in the opinionof your committee, under the highest moral, to say nothingof legal or equitable obligations, to use the utmost degreeof good faith toward the Government in the exercise of thepowers and disposition of the subsidies. 

Congress relied for the performance of these great trustsby the corporators upon their sense of public duty; uponthe fact that they were to deal with and protect a largecapital of their own which they were to pay in money; uponthe presence of five directors appointed by the Presidentespecially to represent the public interests, who were toown no stock; one of whom should be a member of every Committee, standing or special; upon the commissioners to be appointedby the President, who should examine and report upon the workas it progressed; in certain cases upon the certificate ofthe chief engineer, to be made upon his professional honor;and lastly, upon the reserved power to add to, alter, amend, or repeal the act. 

Your committee find themselves constrained to report thatthe moneys borrowed by the corporation, under a power giventhem, only to meet the necessities of the construction andendowment of the road, have been distributed in dividendsamong the corporators; that the stock was issued, not to menwho paid for it at par in money, but who paid for it at notmore than thirty cents on the dollar in road making; thatof the Government directors some of them have neglected theirduties and others have been interested in the transactionsby which the provisions of the organic law have been evaded;that at least one of the commissioners appointed by the Presidenthas been directly bribed to betray his trust by the gift of$25, 000; that the chief engineer of the road was largely interestedin the contracts for its construction; and that there hasbeen an attempt to prevent the exercise of the reserved powerin Congress by inducing influential members of Congress tobecome interested in the profits of the transaction. So thatof the safeguards above enumerated none seems to have beenleft but the sense of public duty of the corporators. 

The Judge Poland Committee investigated the conduct of themembers who were suspected and acquitted all but two. TheHouse accepted their decision. They recommended the expulsionof Mr. Ames and of James Brooks, one of the Democratic members. There were some special circumstances in the case of Brooks, which it is not necessary to recite. Brooks died before avote on his case was taken. The House by a majority amendedthe resolution reported by the Committee in the case of Mr. Ames, and recommended a vote of censure, which was passed. Ames felt the disgrace very keenly, and did not live verylong afterward. 

These disclosures did much to bring about the uneasy conditionof the public mind which led to the Republican defeat in theelection of members of the House of Representatives in thefall of 1874, and brought Tilden so near to an election in1876. 

But it may fairly, I think, be said for the majority of theRepublican Party in both houses of Congress, and the majorityof the Republican Party in the country, that they did theirvery best to deal firmly and directly with any fraud or wrongdoingthat came to light, even if their own political associateswere the guilty parties. The political atmosphere has beenpurified as compared with the condition of those days. Thelobbyist is not seen in the Committee Room or the Corridorof the Capitol, as was the case when I entered Congress in1869. I ought perhaps to say that I think the acquittal ofBelknap on the ground that the Senate has no jurisdictionto render judgment against a civil officer on process of impeachmentafter he has left office, was influenced by political feeling. I do not think most of the Republican Senators who voted thatway would have so voted if the culprit had been a Democrat. But there were many able lawyers who thought the opinion ofthese Senators right. 

CHAPTER XXIIITHE SANBORN CONTRACTS

The forty-second Congress, at its second session, repealedall laws which provided for the payment of moieties, or commissions, to informers, so far as related to internal revenue taxes. But a provision was inserted by the Conference Committee, which attracted no attention, providing that the Secretaryof the Treasury might employ not more than three persons toassist the proper officers of the Government in discoveringand collecting any money belonging to the United States wheneverthe same might be for the interest of the United States. TheSecretary was to determine the conditions of the contract, and to pay no compensation except out of money received. Noperson was to be employed who did not file a written statement, under oath, stating the character of the claim under whichthe money was withheld or due, and the name of the personalleged to withhold the same. 

Under this law John D. Sanborn of Massachusetts, an activesupporter of General Butler, applied for a contract whichhe obtained on the 15th of July, 1872, for the collectionof taxes illegally withheld by thirty-nine distillers, rectifiersand purchasers of whiskey. He was then himself an employeeof the Government as Special Agent for the Treasury Department. Secretary Boutwell being then absent or otherwise unable toattend to his duties, this contract was signed by AssistantSecretary William A. Richardson. Sanborn had already beenemployed to work up certain whiskey cases for which he hadbeen paid $3, 000 by the Government, and these cases were includedin the foregoing contract. 

On the 25th of October, 1872, Sanborn made application tohave added to his contract the names of 760 persons, allegedto have withheld taxes imposed on legacies, successions andincomes. An additional contract for that purpose was signedby the Assistant Secretary Richardson. On the 19th of March, 1873, Sanborn applied to have the names of more than 2, 000other like persons added to his contract, which Mr. Richardsonpermitted. On the 1st day of July, 1873, Sanborn again askedto amend his contract, and Assistant Secretary Richardsonsigned the contract by which the names of 592 railroad companieswere included. That was substantially a complete list ofthe railroad companies of the country. Some of them had beenexamined by Government officials before the day of the contract, and the claims had been brought to light and found due. Sanbornhad no knowledge of any delinquency, except as to about 150of them. When he so represented to the officers of the TreasuryDepartment he was told that it did not make any difference, and to put them all in. Thereupon he took oath that theywere all delinquent, and had them added to the contract. 

The form of this contract was taken, in part, from one preparedby Secretary Boutwell, which he had carefully considered withMr. Kelsey, a subordinate in the Treasury, in June, 1872. That prepared by Mr. Boutwell, if adhered to, would have amplyprotected the Government. But it was departed from in essentialparticulars. Under Secretary Boutwell's contract only a smallnumber of claims was included. Sanborn collected, in thecourse of a year or two, $427, 000, on which sum he received50 per cent. 

The unanimous report of the Committee of the House who investigatedthe matter was written by Charles Foster of Ohio, afterwardGovernor, and Secretary of the Treasury. The Committee comprisedthe following gentlemen: Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts;W. D. Kelly of Pennsylvania; Horatio C. Burchard of Illinois;Ellis H. Roberts of New York; John A. Kasson of Iowa; HenryWaldron of Michigan; Lionel A. Sheldon of Louisiana; CharlesFoster of Ohio; James B. Beck of Kentucky; William E. Niblackof Indiana; Fernando Wood of New York. 

The Committee found that a large percentage of the $427, 000was not a proper subject for contract under the law, and thatit would have been collected by the Internal Revenue Bureauin the ordinary discharge of its duty. The law provided thatthe person with whom it was made should assist the Treasuryofficials in discovering and collecting, so that the collectionswere to be made by the Treasury. But the contract in factsigned authorized Sanborn to make the collections, and requiredthe Treasury officials to assist him. 

The Committee further called attention to the fact that thelaw provided that no person should be employed who shouldnot have fully set forth in a written statement under oaththe character of the claim out of which he proposed to recoveror assist in recovering the moneys for the United States, the laws by the violation of which the same had been withheld, and the name of the person, firm or corporation having withheldsuch moneys. This provision was disregarded utterly. 

The Committee found that the Commissioner of Internal Revenuewas not consulted in the matter, nor was any official of hisBureau, nor was he advised as to the making of the contractsor of the character of the claims, although the proper officialsof the Government, referred to in the statute, could onlyhave been the officials of the Internal Revenue Bureau. Itwas shown that the Commissioner of Internal Revenue wrotea letter protesting against the manner of these collectionsto the Secretary of the Treasury, which was never answered. The Committee found that the Commissioner was studiously ignoredby the Secretary of the Treasury and the officials in hisoffice. 

The wicked and fraudulent character of the transactions isshown in the report. 

When the Committee made their report the matter was debatedin the House of Representatives by Governor Foster and othergentlemen who had taken part in the investigation. All theseSanborn transactions were with the Assistant Secretary inMr. Boutwell's absence, until later Mr. Richardson becameSecretary of the Treasury. The Committee unanimously agreedto report a resolution that the House had no confidence inthe Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Richardson, and demandedhis removal. President Grant was notified of this conclusion. He sent for the members of the Committee and personally urgedthem to withhold the resolution, and offered that the Secretaryshould resign, and that he should be provided for in someother department of the public service. To this the Committeeagreed. It was never thought that the Secretary himself profitedcorruptly by the transaction, but only that he had sufferedhimself to be hoodwinked. It was unfortunate that nearlyall the persons who were connected with this transaction werefrom New England, most of them from Massachusetts, and severalof them from Lowell. 

CHAPTER XXIVBENJAMIN F. BUTLER

No person can adequately comprehend the political historyof Massachusetts for the thirty-five years beginning with1850 without a knowledge of the character, career and behaviorof Benjamin F. Butler. It is of course disagreeable and inmost cases it would seem unmanly to speak harshly of a politicalantagonist who is dead. In the presence of the great reconciler, Death, ordinary human contentions and angers should be hushed. But if there be such a thing in the universe as a moral law, if the distinction between right and wrong be other than fancyor a dream, the difference between General Butler and themen who contended with him belongs not to this life alone. It relates to matters more permanent than human life. Itenters into the fate of republics, and will endure after thefashion of this world passeth away. 

I cannot tell the story of my life at a most important periodwithout putting on record my estimate of him, and the natureof his influence over the youth of the Commonwealth. Besides, it is to be remembered that he took special pains to writeand to leave behind him a book in which he gave his own accountof the great controversies in which he engaged, and bitterlyattacked some of the men who thwarted his ambitions. Thisbook he sent to public libraries, including that of the BritishMuseum, where he had good reason to expect it would be permanentlypreserved. 

I shall say nothing of him which I did not say in publicspeeches or published letters while he was living and in thefulness of his strength, activity and power. History dealswith Benedict Arnold, with Aaron Burr, with the evil counsellorsof Charles I. And Charles II. , with Robespierre, with Barereand with Catiline, upon their merits, and draws from theirlives examples, or warnings, without considering the factthat they are dead. This especially is a duty to be performedfearlessly, though with due caution, when it is proposed insome quarters to erect monuments of statues to such men forthe admiration of the youth of future generations. 

Benjamin F. Butler was born November 5, 1818. He was graduatedat Waterville College, now Colby University, in the year 1838. He began the practice of law in Lowell. Compared with othermen of equal ability and distinction, he was never a verysuccessful advocate. Quiet and modest men who had the confidenceof the courts and juries used to win verdicts from him infairly even cases. He was fertile in resources. He likedaudacious surprises. He was seldom content to try a simplecase in a simple way. So that while he succeeded in somedesperate cases, he threw away a good many which with wisemanagement he might have gained. 

Butler's practice in the beginning was chiefly in the defenceof criminals, or in civil cases where persons of that classwere parties. There was very likely to be a dramatic scenein court when he was for the defence. His method of defencewas frequently almost as objectionable as the crime he wasdefending. He attacked the character of honest witnesses, and of respectable persons, victims of his guilty clients, who were seeking the remedy of the law. He had many ingeniousfashions of confusing or browbeating witnesses, and sometimesof misleading juries. He once asked a medical expert whoundertook to testify about human anatomy, in a case of physicalinjury, this question: "State the origin and insertion ofall the muscles of the forearm and hand from the elbow tothe tips of the fingers"; and another, "Give a list of thenames and the positions of all the bones in the body. " Thiswas something like asking a man who claimed to know the Englishlanguage to give off hand all the words of the English languagebeginning with a. But it confused a worthy and respectablecountry doctor, and misled the jury. The best citizen ofa country village, or his wife or daughter, who had to testifyagainst a thief or burglar who had broken into a house hadto encounter his ruffianly treatment on the witness stand. So Butler became a terror, not to evil-doers but to the opponentsof evil-doers throughout the county of Middlesex. Few lawyersliked to encounter his rough speech and his ugly personalities. 

He was a Democrat in politics and became quite popular withthe poorer class of foreign immigrants who gathered in manufacturingtowns and cities like Lowell. He had at first little successin politics for the reason that his party was a small minorityin Massachusetts. He was elected to the House of Representativesfor the Legislature of 1853. During that session there wasa memorable struggle on the part of the Whigs to repeal somuch of the act providing for an election of delegates toa Constitutional convention as required the election to beby secret ballot. There was also, as an incident of thisstruggle, an angry contest in the joint convention of thetwo Houses held for the purpose of electing some officersrequired by the Constitution to be chosen by joint ballot. The dispute related to the extent of the authority of thePresident of the Senate, as presiding officer, to controlthe joint assembly. Butler was conspicuous in that sceneof turbulence and disorder. On the occasion of some rulingby the Whig Speaker, Mr. George Bliss, a worthy and respectableold gentleman, Butler called out in a loud voice: "I shouldlike to knife that old cuss. " That utterance was quoted notonly all over the Union, but in foreign countries, in England, and on the continent, and in the West Indies, as a proof ofthe degradation and licentiousness of popular governments. It is a singular fact that a like question as to the authorityof the presiding officer of a joint convention of two legislativebodies came up in Congress when the electoral vote was counted, at the time of the election of General Grant in 1868. Butlerrepeated on a larger stage his disorderly conduct, untilSchuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House--although Mr. Wade, President of the Senate, was then presiding over the jointconvention--resumed the chair of the House, in order, as Mr. Blaine described it afterward, "to chastise the insolenceof the member from Massachusetts. "

He was chosen in 1860, when the Democratic Party was dividedbetween the supporters of Douglas and the supporters of Breckenridge, a delegate to the National Convention at Charleston, SouthCarolina, by the Douglas Democrats of Massachusetts, underinstructions to vote for Douglas. Instead, he voted thirty-seven times for Jefferson Davis. There has been but one otherinstance, I believe, in the history of Massachusetts of sucha betrayal of trust. That other related not to candidatesbut to principles. 

Under our political arrangements the presidential electoris but a scribe. He exercises no discretion, but only recordsthe will of the people who elect him. The real selection ofthe president is made by the nominating conventions. Thenominee of the party having a majority becomes the president. A breach of trust by a delegate to a nominating conventionis an act of dishonor of the same class with that to whichno presidential elector in the United States has yet stooped--a breach of trust by an elector. 

General Butler's career upon the national stage began withthe episode at Charleston. From that time until his deathhe was a very conspicuous figure in the eyes of the wholecountry. There are two or three public services for whichhe deserves credit. They ought not to be omitted in any fairsketch of his life and character. 

First. When, in the earlier days of the Rebellion, therewas a doubt whether the Democratic Party would rally to thesupport of the country, he promptly offered his services. His example was of great importance in determining the questionwhether the war of sections was also to be a war of parties. He had a large clientage, especially among that class of IrishAmericans who were apt in Massachusetts to vote with the DemocraticParty. His conduct so far was in honorable contrast withthat of some of his influential political associates, andthat of some of the old Whigs who never got over their chagrinat the success of the Republican Party. 

Second. When the question what would be the treatment ofthe negroes by the commanders of the Union army was doubtful, and when many persons wished to conciliate the old slaveholdersin the border states by disclaiming any purpose of meddlingwith the institution of slavery, General Butler made a brightand important contribution to the discussion by declaringthe negro "contraband of war. " I do not know whether thisphrase was original with him or no. It has been claimed thathe borrowed it. But he undoubtedly made it famous. Thistended somewhat to obliterate the effect of the shock causedto the lovers of liberty by his offer to the Governor of Marylandon the day his regiment landed at Annapolis, of his own servicesand those of the forces under his command, to put down anyslave insurrection, in case the negro people should attemptto assert their heaven-born rights. 

Governor Andrew wrote to General Butler censuring his offerof the use of the Massachusetts troops, as the first operationof the war, to improve the security of rebels that they mightprosecute with more energy their attacks upon the Federalgovernment. The Governor adds: "I can perceive no reasonof military policy why a force summoned to the defence ofthe Federal Government, at this moment of all others, shouldbe offered or diverted from its immediate duty to help rebels, who stand with arms in their hands, in obstructing its progresstoward the city of Washington. " General Butler answered that"if the contest were to be prosecuted by letting loose theslaves, some instrument other than myself must be found tocarry it on. " He had been, with a large part of his party, an advocate and supporter of the Fugitive Slave Law, in thedays before the war. 

Third. He governed the rebel city of New Orleans with greatvigor. He understood how to deal with a turbulent and uglypopulace. He was not imposed upon by shams or pretences, and treated the old Southern Democracy with little respect. It is probable that his vigorous remedy saved the city fromyellow fever. 

Fourth. Another thing should be added to his credit, notof moral quality, but of that quality which accounts largelyand naturally for his influence with the people. He had agift of clear, racy and simple speech. He could convey histhought to the apprehension of common men without any lossin the process. His style was of the same class with thatof William Cobbett and Horace Greeley, without ornament, not very copious, but simple, clear and vigorous. When thesethings have been said, nothing remains to be said in his favor. 

He had a ready, though rough and coarse wit, suited to thetastes of illiterate audiences and to that class of men whoare always delighted when anything is said in disparagementof anybody. I recall two or three examples. He was ratherfond of appropriating the bright sayings of others, whetherjesting or serious, and claiming credit for them. But healso had a capacity of his own for such things. 

I heard him argue a case involving the constitutionalityof the bill to annex Charlestown to Boston, before the SupremeCourt of Massachusetts. He was interrupted by the Mayor, who was on the other side, a fussy and self-important littleperson. Butler made the point that the meetings at whichthe citizens had voted for annexation had not been legal, the notice being not sufficient. The Mayor, who had saidit was the practice in Charlestown to hold public meetingson a notice not longer than the one in question. He added:"We only gave a week's notice for our election of Mayor. "Butler looked at him a moment, and said: "I should thinkthey got up their Mayor on short notice. "

His thrust at S. S. Cox in the House of Representatives attractedthe attention of the country. It was in a five-minute debate. Cox had attacked Butler savagely. Butler replied, takingup nearly the whole five minutes with arguing the questionbefore the House, taking no notice of Cox till just he wasabout to finish. He then said: "There is no need for meto answer the gentleman from New York. Every negro minstreljust now is singing the answer, and the hand organs are playingthe tune, 'Shoo Fly, don't bodder me. '"

In the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts twenty-seven different schemes for a system of representation werepressed. Somebody moved to refer them all to a committeeto consist of the persons who had proposed the schemes. "Aswell refer twenty-seven babies to their twenty-seven mothersto decide which is the prettiest, " exclaimed Butler. 

His military career was, with the exception I have stated, disgraceful to himself and unfortunate to the country. Fromthe beginning of Butler's recruiting for the war, whereverhe was in command came rumors of jobs, frauds, trading withthe rebels through the lines, and the putting of unfit personsin responsible positions. The scandal became so great thatGovernor Andrew--than whom there was never a truer, nobler, braver or more upright man in the executive chair of any Statein this country--was compelled to put on public record hisindignant denunciation. He said in a letter to Charles Sumnerand Henry Wilson, Senators in Congress, December 21, 1861:

"I am compelled to declare with great reluctance and regret, that the course of proceeding under Major-General Butler inthis Commonwealth seems to have been designed and adaptedsimply to afford means to persons of bad character to makemoney unscrupulously, and to encourage men whose unfitnesshad excluded them from any appointment by me to the volunteermilitia service, to hope for such appointment over Massachusettstroops from other authority than that of the Executive himself. "*

[Footnote]* Schouler's "Massachusetts in the War, " Vol. I. , p. 276. [End of Footnote]

The first considerable military operation of which he tookcharge was a movement upon the rebel forces at Big Bethel. It was rash, unskiful, blundering and lacking both in perseveranceand courage. His troops were repulsed with great and needlessslaughter. 

It is a doubtful and debated question whether General Butlerwas personally to blame for this terrible and disgracefulrepulse. If it were only his misfortune, it is a sample ofthe misfortunes which attended him throughout the war. Itwould not have happened to a great or even a fairly good generalofficer. The best that can be said for him is that if hewere without personal blame, that it is the chief incidentof a campaign which he went through without credit. 

But the worst example of timidity and inefficiency in Americanmilitary history, not excepting Hull's surrender, was theattempt and repulse at Fort Fisher. I do not mean when Isay timidity, personal cowardice. But I mean the fear ofthe ordinary risks which accompany every bold and successfuloperation in war. This timidity is not infrequently, as itwas in this case, characteristic of men who thrust themselvesinto places for which they are not fit. 

It was highly important to capture Wilmington, of which FortFisher was the key. It was the last remaining gateway forthe admission of necessary supplies and ammunitions of warto the rebellious States from the outer world. It was a militaryposition of great importance, a chief centre of the rebellion, and a great object in our military operations. General Butlerentered upon this undertaking with every advantage. He hadspecial detailed instructions from Grant, the greatest livingmilitary commander; and he had under him and to cooperatewith him Admiral Porter who, with one possible exception, was the ablest naval commander in our service. 

Wilmington was stripped of troops. The fort was garrisonedby four companies of infantry and one light battery. Withall the reinforcements which the enemy could muster but athousand and seventy-seven men were in the fort. The greatestarmada ever in American waters was under Butler's command--fifty vessels, thirty-three for attack and seventeen in reserve, including four iron-clads. The iron-clads opened fire uponthe fort, throwing one hundred and fifteen shells a minute. 

"Fort Fisher replied at once with all its guns. But thoseon the northeast face were silenced almost as soon as themonitors opened their terrific fire, and by the time the lastof the large vessels had anchored and got their batteries intoplay, only one or two of the enemy's guns were able to reply. The shower of shells had driven the gunners to the bomb-proofs. In one hour and fifteen minutes after the first gun was fired, not a shot came from the fort. Two magazines had been blownup, and the fort set on fire in several places. Such a torrentof missiles was falling and bursting that it was impossiblefor anything human to stand. "*

[Footnote]* Badeau's "Military History of General Grant, " Vol. 3, p. 314. [End of Footnote]

In this condition of things General Butler arrived upon thescene. Not a soldier had been hurt on the Union side. 

"General Curtis was now within fifty yards of the fort, andsent word to General Ames that he could take the work, whereuponAmes, not knowing Butler's determination, gave orders foran assault. Curtis at once moved forward, but by the timehe reached his position, night had come on, and the fleethad nearly ceased its fire .... At this juncture Butler'sorders to reembark arrived, and no assault was made. Curtisand the officers with him, declared that the fort could havebeen carried; that at the moment they were recalled, theyvirtually had possession, having actually approached so closethat a rebel flag had been snatched from the parapet and ahorse brought away from the inside stockade. 

"That night Butler informed the Admiral that he and Weitzelwere of the opinion that the place could not be carried byassault .... I shall therefore sail, he said, for HamptonRoads as soon as the transport fleet can be got in order. "*

[Footnote]* Ibid. , p. 317. [End of Footnote]

"Porter replied that he could fire much faster than he hadbeen doing, and would keep the enemy from showing himselfuntil our men were within twenty yards of the fort, and hebegged that Butler would leave some brave fellows like thosewho had snatched the flag from the parapet and taken the horsefrom the fort. "

Butler was unchangeable. He got all his troops aboard, exceptCurtis's brigade, and started back. In doing this Butlermade a fearful mistake. "My instructions to the officer whowent in command of the expedition, " says General Grant, "wereexplicit in the statement that to effect a landing would beof itself a great victory, and if one should be effected, the foothold must not be relinquished; on the contrary, aregular siege of the fort must be commenced and, to guardagainst interference by reason of storms, supplies of provisionsmust be laid in as soon as they could be got on shore. ButButler seems to have lost sight of this part of his instructions, and was back at Fort Monroe on the 28th. "*

[Footnote]* Grant's "Memoirs, " Vol. II. , p. 394. [End of Footnote]

The Admiral, however, was of a different mind from Butlerand replied to him: "I have ordered the largest vesselsto proceed off Beaufort, and fill up with ammunition, to beready for another attack, in case it is decided to proceedwith this matter by making other arrangements. We have notcommenced firing rapidly yet, and could keep any rebels insidefrom showing their heads, until an assaulting column was withintwenty yards of the works. I wish some more young gallantfellows had followed the officer who took the flag from theparapet, and the brave fellow who brought the horse from thefort. I think they would have found it an easier conquestthan is supposed. "*

[Footnote]* Ibid. , Badeau, p. 318. [End of Footnote]

"The Wilmington expedition has proven a gross and culpablefailure. Many of the troops are back here. Delays and freetalk of the object of the expedition enabled the enemy tomove troops to Wilmington to defeat it. After the expeditionstarted from Fort Monroe, three days of fine weather weresquandered, during which the enemy was without a force toprotect himself. Who is to blame, will, I hope, be known. "*

[Footnote]* Ibid. , p. 318. [End of Footnote]

Grant's statement, just quoted, was made when he had heardButler's side of the story alone. What he thought when hehad heard the whole story will appear a little later. 

Admiral Porter said, in his official dispatch: "My dispatchof yesterday will give you an account of the operations, but will scarcely give you an idea of my disappointment atthe conduct of the army authorities in not attempting to takepossession of the fort . . . . Had the army made a show of surroundingit, it would have been ours; but nothing of the kind was done. The men landed, reconnoitred, and, hearing that the enemywere massing troops somewhere, the orders were given to reembark. . . . There never was a fort that invited soldiers to walkin and take possession more plainly than Fort Fisher . . . . It can be taken at any moment in one hour's time if the rightman is sent with the troops. "

On the 30th of December Grant sent this message to Porter:

"Please hold on wherever you are for a few days, and I willendeavor to be back again, with an increased force, _and withoutthe former commander. "_

Grant at once took measures for renewing the attack and forchanging the commander. On the 31st of December the Secretaryof the Navy telegraphs to Porter: "Lieutenant-General Grantwill send immediately a competent force, _properly commanded, _to cooperate in the capture of the defences of Federal Point. "

So in every instance in which the head of the military ornaval department of this country issued an order to cooperatein this expedition he found it necessary to assure the officerto whom he gave his orders that the expedition would be properlycommanded. The Secretary adds in his dispatch to AdmiralPorter: "The Department is perfectly satisfied with yourefforts thus far. " On the next day Porter writes to GeneralGrant: "I have just received yours of December 30th. I shallbe all ready; and thank God we are not to leave here withso easy a victory at hand. Thank you for so promptly tryingto rectify the blunder so lately committed. I knew you woulddo it. " He adds, speaking of the late expedition: "We lostone man killed. You may judge what a simple business it was. "

On the 2d of January Grant directs that Terry, who is tocommand this new expedition, be sent to City Point to seehim. "I cannot go myself, " he adds to the Secretary of War, "so long as Butler would be left in command. "

January 4th, the next day but one, Grant asks for the removalof Butler. He says: "I am constrained to request the removalof Major-General Butler from the command of the departmentof Virginia and North Carolina. I do this with reluctance, but the good of the service requires it. In my absence GeneralButler necessarily commands, and there is a lack of confidencefelt in his military ability, making him an unsafe commanderfor a large army. His administration of the affairs of hisdepartment is also objectionable. "

Stanton had just left the capital on a visit to Sherman, at Savannah, and this letter at first received no answer; butGrant was very much in earnest, and on the sixth he telegrapheddirect to the President: "I wrote a letter to the Secretaryof War, which was mailed yesterday, asking to have GeneralButler removed from command. Learning that the Secretaryleft Washington yesterday, I telegraph you asking that promptaction be taken in this matter. "

That was practically the end of Butler's military service. He never received another command. 

There is no country in the world, other than ours, wherean officer guilty of such conduct, whether it came from incapacityor cowardice, would not have been promptly cashiered and probablyshot. This would have been true, as in the case of AdmiralKeppel, if his fault had been merely a failure to attack. But Butler's fault was an express disobedience of orders. The order which he disobeyed was unknown to the subordinateon whose advice he claimed to have relied. General Grantexpressly ordered him that in case of failure to attack thefort by assault, he should remain and entrench his troopson the peninsula, and cooperate with the fleet for the reductionof the place. When Grant learned the circumstances he declaredthat, in leaving after he had landed, Butler had violatedhis express orders. 

It is a source of just pride that a New England commander, and one of Massachusetts descent, General Terry, was successfulin the new attempt. Grant's instructions to him said: "Ihave served with Admiral Porter, and know that you can relyon his judgment and his nerve to undertake what he proposes. . . . The first object to be attained is to get a firm positionon the spit of land on which Fort Fisher is built, from whichyou can operate against the fort. You want to look to thepracticability of receiving your supplies, and to defendingyourself against superior forces sent against you by any ofthe avenues left open to the enemy. If such a position canbe obtained, the siege of Fort Fisher will not be abandoneduntil its reduction can be accomplished, or another plan ofcampaign is ordered from these headquarters. "

The fort which had enabled 397 vessels to pass the blockadewas taken by a great New England Captain, and largely by NewEngland troops. Butler made one contribution, and only one, to that victory. That contribution was his absence. It wasa curious coincidence which would have brought a blush ofshame upon any forehead but his, that when he was testifyingbefore an investigating committee of Congress, who were inquiringinto the cause of his great and shameful failure to take thefort, and just after he had testified that Fort Fisher wasimpregnable and that it was impossible for any Union forceto take it, a dispatch was received in the Committee Roomannouncing its fall. 

General Grant says in his "Memoirs":

"I had no idea of General Butler accompanying the expeditionuntil the evening before it got off from Bermuda Hundred, and then did not dream but that General Weitzel had receivedall the instructions, and would be in command. I rather formedthe idea that General Butler was actuated by a desire to witnessthe effect of the explosion of the powder-boat. The expeditionwas detained several days at Hampton Roads, waiting the loadingof the powder-boat. The importance of getting the Wilmingtonexpedition off without any delay, with or without the powder-boat, had been urged upon General Butler. The powder-boatwas exploded on the morning of the 24th, before the returnof General Butler from Beaufort; but it would seem, from thenotice taken of it in the Southern newspapers, that he enemywere never enlightened as to the object of the explosion untilthey were informed by the Northern press. "*

[Footnote]* "Personal Memoirs, U. S. Grant, " p. 604 appendix. [End of Footnote]

"General Butler, in direct violation of the instructionsgiven, ordered the reembarkation of the troops and the returnof the expedition. "*

[Footnote]* Ibid. , p. 605. [End of Footnote]

"I advised Admiral Porter to hold on, and that I would senda force and make another attempt to take the place. Thistime I selected Major-General A. H. Terry to command the expedition. ""At my request Major-General B. F. Butler was relieved. "*

[Footnote]* Ibid. , p. 607. [End of Footnote]

I will not undertake to give a detailed account of the blunderingstrategy of what General Grant aptly called the "Bottlingup at Bermuda Hundred" which enabled a powerful Union armyto be held in check by a small Confederate force, leavingfree the bulk of their army for hostile operations againstthe Union forces. 

So the contribution of General Butler's military genius tothe success of the United States in the war consisted ofa scheme to blow up a powder-boat in the capture of FortFisher, somewhat after the Chinese fashion of warfare, whichGeneral Grant said hardly had the effect to excite the curiosityof the occupants of the fort which it had been intended todemolish; and of his scheme of engineering at Dutch Gap andBermuda Hundred. 

General Grant got tired of him at last and ordered him toreport at Lowell. So ended the military career of incompetence, boasting and failure. 

Massachusetts soldiers from those of the humblest originto those who came from the most cultivated circles have alwayshad the reputation of gentlemen. I know of but one conspicuousexception in her entire military history. During the trialof Andrew Johnson, Butler, who was one of the managers, employedspies to visit, in his absence, the room of William M. Evarts, counsel for the President, and to search his waste basketin the hope of spying upon his correspondence. Of this heshamelessly afterward boasted. Later he employed dishonestpersons to get from the wires the private telegraphic dispatchesof Henry L. Pierce, then his colleague in the House of Representatives, sent to the Hon. W. W. Rice at Worcester. 

But this is not all. Wherever Butler is found in militarycommand there were constant rumors of the same story whichGovernor Andrew told in the beginning. It is like the ointmentof the hand which bewrayeth itself. Jobs, fraudulent contracts, trading through the lines, relatives enriched by public plunder, corrupt understanding with the enemy. These stories pursuedhim to New Orleans and from New Orleans back to Lowell. Isthere another Union General, at least was there ever anotherMassachusetts General to whose integrity such suspicion attached?He scarcely undertook to discuss the matter himself. Afterthe war a New Orleans bank, on which Butler had made a requisitionfor eighty thousand dollars in gold, employed the late EdwardsPierpont to bring an action against General Butler on theground that the money had never been paid over to the Government, but that he had kept it himself. Butler saw the counsel forthe plaintiffs and said he had received the money in an officialcapacity and had paid it over to the United States. Mr. Pierpontanswered: "If you will show that, it will constitute a gooddefence. " In the course of the conversation Pierpont said:"Your neighbors in Lowell will not think very well of it whenthey see you riding in your carriage through the streets, and know it was paid for out of the money you have taken unlawfullyfrom this bank. " Before the time came for the trial Butlersurrendered and paid over the money. After the matter wassettled he said to Mr. Pierpont: "Well, you beat me. ButI want to tell you that you made one mistake. You said thepeople of Lowell would not think very highly of me when theysaw me riding through the streets in my carriage and knewit was paid for by the money of this bank. The people wouldthink I was a fool for not having taken twice as much. "

General Butler was appointed treasurer of the National Soldiers'Home. He mingled the money of that institution with his own, got the use of it, got interest upon it, for which he neveraccounted. An attempt was made to investigate his accountsand he refused on the ground that he could not do it withoutshowing his private account books, which he was not compelledto do. 

He had a powerful political influence which made him an objectof terror to timid and ambitious men. So, much to the shameof our public authorities, the investigation was not pressed. He was allowed to pay over only such sum as he himself admittedto be due. 

General Butler's chief title to distinction in political lifewas a scheme which Massachusetts has pronounced a schemeof dishonesty and infamy in every method by which her sentimentcan be made known. This scheme was to pay off the nationaldebt and all other debts public and private, including allwidows' and soldiers' pensions, in irredeemable paper money. He proposed to issue a series of government bonds bearinginterest, payable like the principal, in greenbacks, and providingthat the greenbacks should never be redeemed, but that theholder might at any time, on demand, get from the Treasurythe equivalent in bonds. This scheme had been announced byGeneral Butler for several years before the Presidential electionof 1876. In that year General Butler, who had been defeatedfor reelection to Congress from the Essex district in 1874, was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the Middlesexdistrict, which included his home in Lowell. There was muchopposition to him. But the party feeling was very strongand no other person of large enough reputation or of conspicuousability could be found to take the Republican nomination. General Butler was accordingly nominated with the distinctpromise on his part that he would surrender his plans in regardto finance out of deference to the known wishes of his constituents, and would act with the Republican Party upon financial questions. To this pledge he owed, if not his nomination and election, certainly his great majority in the convention and at thepolls. This pledge, as in the case of the trust which hadbeen committed to him by the Douglas Democrats before thewar, he most unblushingly and shamelessly violated. He renewedand advocated his fiat money scheme. The result was thatat the next convention of the Republican Party in his districtthe following resolution was passed, without a dissentingvote:

_"Resolved, _ That we warn the people of the Commonwealth, whose votes General Butler is now soliciting by promises toserve them faithfully, that his professions when seeking officehave been found in our experience to be easily made and aseasily repudiated when the time for redeeming them came. 

"That they are neither gold nor good paper, but are a kindof fiat currency, having no intrinsic character, being cheap, delusive, irredeemable and worthless. "

This convention represented a large and overwhelming majorityof the people of the Middlesex district. It was made up assuch conventions in Massachusetts always are made up, of menof high standing and character and of great personal worth. Can there be found in the history of Massachusetts such arecord of shameless dishonor and such a terrible indictmentand conviction?

A like judgment was expressed a little later by Mr. EdwardAvery, a Democrat of high standing, who declared that theDemocratic Party had found his promises and pledges couldnot be trusted. 

He was once elected Governor. It so chanced that the RepublicanParty had been disappointed by the defeat in their State Conventionof Mr. Crapo, a gentleman of the highest standing, who hadrendered conspicuous service to his country in the NationalHouse of Representatives, and who was doubtless the choiceof a majority of his party. His successful competitor wasa man of much personal worth and highly esteemed. But itwas thought that his nomination had been compassed by skilfulpolitical management by which the will of the people had beenbaffled and defeated, and many Republicans declined to vote. There was a certain curiosity, as many men expressed it, tosee what Butler would do and to test his professions of reform, with a feeling that he would be quite harmless with a RepublicanLegislature and Council. So the experiment was tried. Thepeople of the Commonwealth had no desire to try it a secondtime. The matter of General Butler's title to public respect, if the rest of his record could be erased as by a wet sponge, might be determined by the experience of a single year. Therewas never such an exhibition as that made by him in the executivechair of Massachusetts. He proceeded to attack, to promotehis own ambitions, the fair name and fame of the Commonwealthitself. One of his speeches was so gross in its nature thatthe principal Democratic paper of Boston refused to printit, declaring it unfit for publication. 

General Butler declared in one of his public speeches whena candidate for Governor, thereby insulting the Commonwealth, especially the citizen-soldiery of Massachusetts, that thesoldiers of Massachusetts "needed but a word from him to cleanout the State House. "

But he had his eye on a still higher prize. He hoped tocompass the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. Thatnomination depended on his conciliating the old Democratic, rebel element at the South, then powerful in National Democraticcouncils. He made an attack upon the administration of theState Almshouse at Tewksbury, in which he declared that "theselling and tanning of human skins was an established industryin Massachusetts. " He charged the Commonwealth with desecratingthe graves and selling the bodies of deceased inmates of herpublic institutions for money. General Butler's charges wererefuted to the public satisfaction by the simple certificateof Mrs. Clara Leonard, a member of the State Board of Lunacyand Charities, who knew all about the matter, and in whosehigh integrity and capacity to decide the question everybodyhad implicit confidence. 

There was an investigation, and Butler signally failed tosustain himself. One incident at the hearing revealed perfectlyhis character and that of his affected sympathy for downtroddenhumanity. Some human remains were brought into the presenceof the committee, which it was alleged had come from the almshouse. Butler was in an angry mood at something that had occurredand called out peremptorily: "Give me the skin that came offthe nigger. "

I will not undertake myself to impute the motive which inspiredthis attack upon his own State. Whether it were anger inspiredby the knowledge of the estimate in which the majority ofher people held him; whether it were a gross nature with bluntedsensibilities; whether these expressions were uttered in hasteor anger, I will not say. The Honorable William P. Frye, an able and justly distinguished Representative and Senatorfrom Maine, with an intimate knowledge of General Butler, which came from a long association in the public service, charged General Butler in a public speech in Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1883, in my hearing, what he repeated atmany places elsewhere in the Commonwealth--that Butler hadmade this foul charge against Massachusetts in order thathe might win the favor of the slave-holding and rebel Democraticelements of the South by catering to their prejudices againsther. If that be true, this charge of General Butler's isthe most disgraceful single utterance that ever came fromAmerican lips. If it be not true, what must be the natureof which the gentle, charitable and kindly Senator Frye couldbelieve it true after an intimate knowledge so many years?

General Butler was disappointed in his expectation of Democraticsupport in the country at large. He had thereafter no restin politics for the sole of his foot. The remainder of hislife was spent in speculation and manufacturing enterprises. 

I repeat what I said of General Butler in his lifetime, whenhe was at the height of his power, with a full knowledgeof his vindictive character, that the success of his attemptto use and consolidate the political forces of Massachusettswould have been the corruption of her youth, the destructionof everything valuable in her character, and the establishmentat the mouth of the Charles River of another New York withits frauds, Tweed rings and scandals. 

General Butler made an earnest effort to get the Republicannomination for Governor in 1871. He had built up what wascalled a Butler party, in which he had had the aid of theNational Administration, and of all persons whom he couldeither seduce by hope of reward or terrify by fear of hisvengeance. It was not a question in considering candidacyfor office with him whether the man had rendered honest servicein civil or in military life, whether he was a man of honoror of good or bad character, but only whether he was a Butlerman. He conducted his own campaign for Governor in 1871 andagain in 1873. In the former he summoned his adherents tothe State Convention, issuing a circular in which he advisedthem to bring three days' rations in the expectation of along and angry struggle. 

I was invited by the State Central Committee to preside atthe Convention of 1871. It was quite likely that the Conventionmight break up in disorder and the result would be two factions, each claiming to be the regular Republican organization. Itold the gentlemen of the State Central Committee, who communicatedto me their desire, that I would do it on condition that thereshould be provided one hundred skilled and trustworthy policeofficers who would obey my orders, and, if it became necessary, would remove from the hall General Butler or any other personwho should defy the authority of the Convention. This thecommittee promised to do. This promise was in substance kept. The gentleman who made it as the organ of the State CentralCommittee had himself been for many years a sheriff of theCounty of Worcester, and had been a General in the CivilWar, and was a man of large capacity for handling disorderlyassemblies. He came to me afterward and said that in a halllike Mechanics Hall a well-disciplined force of not more thanfifty men would be better for the purpose of keeping orderthan a more numerous one, and he had taken the liberty ofdeparting from our agreement to that extent. To this I assented. 

When I went to the Hall that morning in taking leave of mywife I told her that the chances were that I should comehome the most disgraced man in Massachusetts. If GeneralButler succeeded in breaking up the Convention in disorderthe blame would be laid upon the presiding officer. 

But we got through safely. General Butler had calculatedthat his opponents, who were divided among several candidates, could not agree upon any one. But such an agreement was effectedupon William B. Washburn. His plan then, I supposed, wasto find some excuse for breaking up the Convention under circumstanceswhich would enable him to claim to President Grant that herepresented the regular Republican organization and that hisopponents were the bolters. My duty on the other hand wasso to conduct the Convention that there should be no pretexton his part for such a course. The Convention was in continuoussession from 11 o'clock in the forenoon until half-past onenext morning. There were several contests in which Butlerconducted the case on his own side. But his opponents heldtogether and nominated William B. Washburn. With the exceptionof the National Convention of 1880, at which I also presided, this was the most difficult duty in the way of presiding overa deliberative assembly which ever fell upon any person inthis country so far as I know. 

In the year 1873 General Butler made another attempt to getthe Republican nomination for Governor. A meeting was calledat Hamilton Hall, in Boston, of a few persons opposed to hiscandidacy, which resulted in an address to the people recommendingthe reelection of Mr. Washburn. I signed the address of whichI wrote a few sentences. Judge Hoar made a bright and characteristicspeech in which he said that "the people of Massachusettswould not yield the office of Governor to a Tichborne claimant, whether with or without a bond. " This name, "the Claimant, "stuck to Butler for the rest of his life. 

In 1871 my opposition to General Butler and support of GovernorWashburn was well known. I announced my preference for thelatter in a letter to the Springfield _Republican. _ This didnot occasion any personal quarrel with Butler, although ourrelations were never cordial. But in 1873 he was very angrywith the persons who signed the address in favor of the renominationof Governor Washburn. He wrote a letter to the people ofMassachusetts in which he angrily attacked many persons inthe Republican party whom he believed to be his opponents. Among them he bitterly attacked me. He sent a copy of thisletter in the form of a broadside to every newspaper in Massachusetts, I believe, and had it folded into every copy of the paper. I instantly replied, setting forth as well as I could thecharacter and quality of General Butler and the nature ofhis influence upon the youth of the Commonwealth. The lettercontained the following sentences:

"When General Butler proposed to pay off our national debtin irredeemable paper, General Grant silenced him with theringing sentence in his inaugural, 'Let it be understood thatno repudiator of one farthing of our public debt will be trustedin public place, ' because he knew that he was trying to temptthis people to escape from a burden by a mean and base act. 

"He has quarrelled with Grant and Wilson, and Colfax and Blaine, and Andrew, and Sumner, and the Washburnes, and Bingham, andSchenck, and Dawes, because he is quarrelsome. They havebeen compelled, each in his own way, to chastise and punishhim because he deserved to be whipped. 

"Among the unprincipled adventurers who gained favor in thecorrupt times of the Stuarts, and whose evil counsels broughtCharles the First to his doom, the most notorious was Buckingham. Gaining favor by lending himself as the subservient tool inaccomplishing every evil purpose: restless, ambitious, unscrupulous, selfish, revengeful, thrusting himself into military employmentsfor which he was unfit and from which he was compelled toretire in disgrace, getting a 'competent private fortune'by dishonest practices, which he lavished in overcoming thevirtue of timid and venal men, his name is the shame of England. Nugent says of him: 'His shrewdness in judging of men wasemployed only to enable him to found his influence upon theirweaknesses and vices; so that, when opposed to men of capacity, or thwarted by what remained of public virtue in the country, he found himself in conflict with weapons of which he knewnot the use; and his counsels were dangerous, and his administrationunprosperous. His only wisdom was the craft with which hemanaged weak or bad men, and his only virtue the courage withwhich he overawed timid ones. ' Such counsellors, fatal to amonarch, are full of peril to a republic. Such men can onlyprosper in times of public corruption. 

"General Butler has done, unless he has egregiously imposedupon us, two things well. He out-blackguarded a New Yorkmob in 1864, and with a United States army at his back, hekept down a rebel city in 1862. Massachusetts is not likelysoon to stand in need of either of these processes. But henever has accomplished anything else of much importance whenhis point could not be carried by sheer blustering. The historyof all his other attempts may be comprised in three words--_Swagger, quarrel, failure. _

"Other men have aspired before now to the office of Governorof Massachusetts. It is an honorable ambition. They werecontent to leave their claims to be set forth by others, andwere glad to waive them if by so doing they could promotethe harmony of the party. This man seeks nothing but hisown selfish ends, utterly regardless of the wishes, the welfare, or the harmony of the great party to which he professes tobelong. The people of Massachusetts have sometimes electedto this high office men who in some particulars are not deservingof respect. But the people respected them, and chose thembecause they deemed them worthy, and the persons so chosenendeavored to deserve the public confidence. This man, ifhe is chosen at all, is to be chosen without having the respectof the men to whom he looks for support. It would be harderto find a leading supporter of General Butler who will saythat he deems him honest, truthful, disinterested, or incapableof using power to gratify both his ambition and his revenge. The men whom General Butler will beat are the men whom hepersuades to support him. "

The morning after his defeat in the State Convention eachof the principal morning papers in Boston headed its accountof the Convention with the words, "Swagger, Quarrel, Failure. "

General Butler made no further reply by letter. But he cameto Worcester, where I dwelt, and addressed an enormous meetingin Mechanics Hall. I suppose many more people than thosethat got in were obliged to go away because the Hall wouldnot hold them. The General devoted his speech largely toa powerful and bitter attack upon me. I replied at a meetingat the same place a few days after. My speech ended withthe following sentences. After describing the heroism ofthe youth of Worcester in the battle with slavery and thebattle with Rebellion, I added:

"And now, after the war, another enemy, unarmed, but bringingeven greater danger, menaces the Republic. The battle withcorruption is the duty of the hour. The blow which rebellionaimed at the Nation's life you could ward off. The woundsit inflicted are already in the process of cure. But thispoison, this rotting from the core, is far more dangerousto the Republic. There is already danger that the operationsof the Tweeds and Goulds in New York may be repeated on amore gigantic scale at the National capital. The mighty railroadsto whom our public domain has been so lavishly granted, insome cases I doubt not, wisely, afford infinite opportunityfor plunder and corruption. All these are at the cost ofthe labor of the country. The increased tax falls in theend on the consumer. With the waste of our public land arediminished the resources of the laborer. Following bad precedentsCongress has itself been induced to set the pernicious exampleof which you have heard so much discussion. (This referredto the measure known as the Salary Grab. ) The author of themeasure tells you that he knew what he was doing, and if youdidn't like it you could vote against him. Are you quiteready to declare to the country that in this great contestwith extravagance and corruption, wherever the Republicansof the rest of the country may array themselves, the Republicansof Massachusetts fight under the banner of General Butler?

"You are doubtless familiar with Victor Hugo's descriptionof the marine monster said to be found in the vicinity ofthe Channel islands, and known as the Devil Fish. It isapparently formed of an almost transparent jelly, colorless, almost indistinguishable from the water which surrounds it, armed with long slender limbs, numerous as the feet of thecentipede, and strong in their grasp as hands of iron. Thebather in those waters habitually provides himself with along keen blade, which, when he finds himself encounteredby one of these monsters, he elevates above his head in hisextended right hand. As the creature approaches, the batherfeels himself slowly enveloped in the powerful limbs whichtwine about him, holding him in their iron grasp. Suddenlya head appears, and drawing itself nearer the animal seeksto fasten its mouth upon the lips of the victim and deprivehim of life. At this moment the bather strikes with his knifeinto the head of the monster. Instantly the limbs relax theirhold, the hideous creature slowly disappears, and the batheris left unharmed and safe. Our Republic finds itself to-day assailed by a monster as dangerous, unpalpable, soft, horrible but strong--strong as hands of iron. The limbs ofthis monster of Corruption have seized upon our noble Republic, but at last there is a head coming in sight, and I think theRepublicans of Massachusetts are able to bear the knife andstrike the blow which will destroy its horrible life so thatit shall fall powerless forever!"

That closed the discussion so far as we were concerned forthat campaign. 

In 1876 Judge Hoar, who had been, very much against his will, elected to Congress from the Middlesex District declined arenomination. General Butler, who had been defeated at thepolls in the Essex District two years before was thereuponnominated, having pledged himself to the Republicans thathe would abandon his fiat money doctrines in obedience tothe declared will of the people; a pledge which as statedabove he shamefully violated. There was no expectation ofdefeating him. But some few Republicans who were unwillingto support him desired a candidate on whom to unite, and theyapplied to Judge Hoar. He said he had no desire to go toCongress. But he thought there ought to be a Republican candidateagainst Butler and that he had no right to ask another manto take a position from which he flinched himself, and accordinglyhe was nominated. But Butler was elected by a large majority. 

That however was substantially the end of his relation withthe Republican Party. After the Inauguration of PresidentHayes he tried to have the public officers in his Districtwho had refused to support him removed. On President Hayes'srefusal he left the Republican Party and became, a year ortwo after, the Democratic nominee for Governor for two orthree years and, as has been seen, was elected in 1883. Iof course supported the Republican candidate and made, I suppose, thirty or forty speeches in each of those years. He had saidin explaining and defending his fiat money scheme that theword "fiat" means "let there be. " God said "fiat lux, " "letthere be light, " and there was light. He argued that fiatmoney was excellent from the very fact that it cost nothingand had no intrinsic value. So if a bill were lost or destroyeda new one could be supplied without cost. He also said thatit would stay in the country and would not be sunk in themorasses of Asia, especially in China and India, where silverand gold were absorbed and never heard of in civilized nationsafterward. I quoted these sentences with the following comment:"That, Fellow-citizens, is precisely the difference betweenOmnipotence and Humbug, between the Almighty and General Butler. God said let there be light and there was light. GeneralButler says let there be money and there is--rags. This isthe first time in our history that the American workingmanhas been gravely asked to take for his wages money it costsnothing to make, that it is no loss to lose, that it is nogain to get, and that even a Chinaman won't touch. " Butlerwas very angry and answered, rather irrelevantly, as it seemedto me, by saying that I did not go to the War, to which Ireplied as follows:

"I see that the Greenback candidate for Governor has seenfit to taunt some persons, including myself, who have venturedto exercise the privilege of free speech in this campaign, that they did not go to the war; while he boasts that he notonly went to the war but hung a rebel. Those persons whodid not go to the war may, perhaps, possess at least thisadvantage, that they can form an impartial opinion of themerits of those who did. It is the pride and the honor ofthis noble Commonwealth of ours, that of the hundred thousandbrave soldiers and sailors she sent to the war, there wasbut one notorious braggart; there was but one capable of paradingup and down the Commonwealth, vaunting that he had hung aman; exhibiting himself as the Jack Ketch of the rebellion. I bow reverently to the brave, modest, patriotic soldier, who, without thought of personal gain, gave youth, health, limb, life to save the country which he loved. I am willingto abide by his opinion, and to yield to him every place ofhonor and of office. But to you, General Butler, whose militarycareer is made up of the blunder and slaughter of Big Bethel;of the powder explosion at Fort Fisher; of the engineeringat Dutch Gap; of the "bottling-up" at Bermuda Hundred; ofthe trading with the rebels through the lines in North Carolina;of the scandals of New Orleans; to you, who were ordered byGeneral Grant to go home in disgrace; to you whose best servicehad been, if you, too, had stayed at home, I have no suchtribute to offer. When Benedict Arnold taunts Jefferson thathe did not go into battle in the Revolution, when Aaron Burrtaunts John Adams with want of patriotism, then it will betime for you to boast yourself over the men who performedthe duties of civil life during the Rebellion. "

We have had turbulent and exciting times in our State andNational politics before and since that day. But I thinkthere has been nothing in Massachusetts, and so far as I amaware there has seldom been anything in the country anywherelike the years from 1869 until 1877, when General Butler'spower was at its height. You could hardly take up a morningpaper without dreading that you should read of the removalfrom some position of honor of some brave honest soldier whohad deserved well of his country, and the substitution ofsome disreputable person in his place. All the dishonestyof the time seemed to be combined and rallied to his support. Three of his trusted lieutenants in different parts of theCommonwealth were convicted of crime and sent to the StatePrison. Another was detected in crime punishable by imprisonmentin the State Prison, but escaped prosecution by a compromise. Still another was compelled to flee the country for a seriesof forgeries, finding refuge in a South American State withwhich we had no treaty of extradition. Still another wasindicted for frauds which wrecked a National bank, and escapedconviction by a technicality. Still another was compelledto flee from the Commonwealth by the detection of some notoriousfrauds. And now more recently, in 1898, another has beenarrested, a fugitive from justice, and brought back to Massachusetts, having wrecked two banks and embezzled their funds. 

In the autumn of 1883 General Butler was a candidate forreelection. He was so confident that he had prepared hisgrounds for a magnificent illumination. But he was signallydefeated. I took a leading part in the campaign. I givethe following extract from my speech at Worcester:

"But we are thinking to-night of the matter of electing aGovernor. Character is more important than opinion; goodname to the State, as to the citizen, is better than riches. I suppose it is true of each one of you as of myself thatamong his chief comforts and pleasures in life is his pridein being a Massachusetts citizen. The honor and good fameof our beloved State is far above any question of party. Ithink I do you no more than justice when I declare that youlament as much as I do the personal character of the contestwhich is upon us. It has never been the habit of Republicansto deal in personalities. The Republican press and the Republicanplatform in Massachusetts has been singularly free from thesethings. What Democratic candidate can be named other thanthe present Governor to whom the Republicans have not delightedto pay the respect due to honorable and respected opponents. Have Gaston or Thompson or either Adams or Hancock or anyof their candidates for Congress, anything to complain ofin this respect? If we deal differently with General Butler, it is because the difference is in him. We have selectedour own candidate on a very simple principle. In determiningon whom we would confer the title, His Excellency, we havesought a man who represented in his own person our standardof excellence. We sought a man whom the fathers and mothersof the Commonwealth would be willing to hold up to their childrenfor imitation. We sought a man, tried and proved in importantpublic trusts, faithful, sincere, upright, downright, whowould continue and maintain the honored line of MassachusettsGovernors. We have found such a man in George D. Robinson. I will sum up what I have to say of Mr. Robinson by sayingthat he is in every respect the reverse of his antagonist. We are told that we must not discuss the record of the candidateof our antagonists before his election last year. That wasall condoned. I do not concede for myself that truth is necessarilydetermined by majorities. I have a high respect for the people, but they do not change men's characters by their votes. But, be it so, let bygones be bygones. Let us concede that thecareer of our present governor as citizen and soldier andstatesman furnishes a lofty example of every virtue underheaven. Let us admit that it was love of liberty that advocatedthe Fugitive Slave Law in the old Democratic days; that itwas fidelity that was sent to Charleston, to vote for Douglas, and voted fifty-seven times for Jefferson Davis; that it waspatriotism of which Governor Andrew said in 1861: 'I am compelledto declare with great reluctance and regret that the wholecourse of proceedings under Major General Butler in this Commonwealthseems to have been designed and adopted to afford means topersons of bad character to make money unscrupulously;' thatit was good generalship that caused the blunder and slaughterof Big Bethel; that it was skilful engineering that made thecanal at Dutch Gap a laughing-stock to the civilized world;that it was a great strategist that was bottled up at BermudaHundred; that it was courage that retreated from the uncapturedFort Fisher; that it was purity that caused the scandals ofNew Orleans, and integrity that traded through the lines inNorth Carolina; that it was a great soldier that was orderedby General Grant to report at Lowell; that it was zeal forthe public service that defended the Sanborn Contracts; thatit was modesty that has gone so often up and down the Stateblowing his own trumpet; that it was honesty that mingledthe funds of the Soldiers' Home with its own; that it wasgood faith that sought to juggle the public creditor out ofhis debt; that it was care for the poor and the working menthat sought to give our laborers rags for wages and our soldierswaste paper for pensions; that it was a faithful representativethat promised the men of the Middlesex District that if hemight go once more to fight the Rebel brigadiers he wouldfaithfully represent their opinions on finance and then proposedthat marvellous scheme of fiat money, which he representedit would be no loss to lose and no gain to get, and that evena Chinaman would not touch, so that the same constituencydemanded his resignation and 'resolved, that we warn the peopleof the Commonwealth, whose votes General Butler is now solicitingby promises to serve them faithfully, that his professionswhen seeking office have been found in our experience to beeasily made and as easily repudiated when the time for redeemingthem came; that they are neither gold nor good paper, buta kind of fiat currency, having no intrinsic value, cheap, delusive, irredeemable and worthless;' that it was an honestDemocrat, of whom Mr. Avery, President of this year's DemocraticConvention, declared that his promises and pledges could not betrusted; that it was consistency which has belonged to everyparty in turn. We will put the issue of this election uponthe record of the year's administration. He has shown anutter want of understanding of the true theory of the Constitution. This is illustrated in his removal of Warden Earle. He toldhis friends at the prison that he made the removal becauseEarle would not obey his orders. He had no more right togive an order to Earle than to you or me. The Governor andthe Council have the right to prescribe rules for the governmentof the prison--not the Governor. The Board of Prison Commissionershave the right to give directions to the Warden, but not theGovernor. His telling Earle to obey his orders on pain ofdismissal was as flagrant a violation of law and of the fundamentalprinciples of the Constitution, as it was an injustice toas brave an officer, as honest a man as ever tied a sash aroundhis waist. He traduced the Commonwealth in his vile Tewksburyspeech. I believe every charge he made broke down on hisown evidence or was thoroughly refuted. But if the thingwere decent to do, it might be done decently. Those of youwho have delighted to listen to the classic eloquence of Everett, to the lofty speech of Sumner, to the noble appeals of Andrew, aye, to the sincere and manly utterances of Robinson, takethat speech and read it. He insulted womanhood in the personof a defenceless girl. He insulted purity by a speech sogross that the principal Democratic paper in Boston declaresit unfit for circulation, and demands that it be suppressed. He insulted every colored man in the State, when, in an unguardedmoment, speaking from his very soul, he called out: 'Giveme the skin that came off the nigger. ' He insulted the citizensoldiers of Massachusetts when he declared that they neededbut a word from him to clean out the State House. He insultedthe common school system of Massachusetts when he said thatif his witness were a person of immoral character, the schoolsystem was responsible. He insulted the whole Commonwealthin trying to cast upon the foul imputation that she was inhumanand indifferent to her poor and unfortunate, and intimatedthat the tanning of human skins was a recognized Massachusettsindustry. Another insult is the menace of fraud that comesfrom Boston. The law requires the appointment of electionofficers, to be chosen equally from the two great parties, and every mayor of Boston, Republican and Democrat alike, Pierce, Gaston and Green, have fairly and honorably dischargedtheir duty. It is one of the most important trusts that canbe imposed upon a public official, to guard the purity ofthe vote of their fellow citizens. The Republican Committeethis year submitted its lists and the names upon them werechanged, and other men substituted, Butler men, Democratsand criminals, all charged to the Republican account. Ourneighbor, Judge Nelson, a few years ago, tried at the barof his court a man whom Governor Butler defended. He wasconvicted, sentenced and went to jail. He is now out of prison, and has been substituted for a Republican, probably by theinfluence of his former counsel, to count the ballots of thecitizens of Boston. You have heard of such proceedings inother States, but never in Massachusetts. Unless the peopleof this Commonwealth rise in their might and crush out thisattempted fraud, they will have at the mouth of the CharlesRiver another New York, with its frauds, Tweed rings and scandals. "

He answered that by an attack on the memory of my father whohad died more than twenty-five years before. Thereupon thecontroversy, so far as it had anything personal in it, ended. 

It happened that the year when General Butler was GovernorI was elected President of the Harvard Alumni Association. It was the custom of the College to invite the Governor tothe dinner of the Alumni on Commencement day as the guestof the University and to confer upon him the degree of Doctorof Laws. It would have been my duty to preside at the dinnerand to walk with him at the head of the procession, to havehim seated by my side at the table, and to extend to him thecourtesies of the University. I hardly knew what I oughtto do. I must either walk with him and sit by his side insilence or with a formal and constrained courtesy which wouldin itself be almost an affront, or on the other hand, I musttake his hand, salute him with cordiality as becomes a hoston a great occasion in dealing with a distinguished guest, and converse with him as I should have conversed with otherpersons occupying his high place. It did not seem to me thatI ought to do either, especially in the case of a man whoseoffence had not been merely against me, but who had made agross and unfounded attack upon the memory of my father, andof whose personal and public character I entertained the opinionI had so often publicly expressed. Accordingly I declinedto accept the office of President. My place was filled byJoseph H. Choate, who discharged the duty, of course, verymuch better than I could have done it. 

Mr. James F. Rhodes in his able and most impartial historyof the United States, speaking of the events of the summerof 1864 and the disintegrating and discouraging conditionof the Army of the Potomac, says:

"Circumstances seemed to indicate the bitterness of disappointmentat the failure of the high hopes and expectations which filledthe soul of Grant when he crossed the Rapidan. It was commonlybelieved in the Army that his misfortune had driven him againto drink, and on this account and others Butler with craftymethod acquired a hold on him which prevented him from actingfor the best interests of the service. It is not a gratefultask to relate the story of Butler using Grant as a tool toaccomplish his own ends. The picture of such a relation betweenthe two is repulsive, but it may be fraught with instructionas men of the type of Butler are never absent from our politicallife. "*

[Footnote]* Rhodes, "History, " Vol. 4, p. 493. [End of Footnote]

"Butler had some hold on the Commander of the Armies of theUnited States and in the interview of July 9th showed hishand. "*

[Footnote]* Rhodes, Ibid. , Vol. 4, p. 495. [End of Footnote]

I do not suppose the secret of the hold which General Butlerhad upon General Grant will ever be disclosed. Butler boastedin the lobby of the House of Representatives that Grant wouldnot dare to refuse any request of his because he had in hispossession affidavits by which he could prove that Grant hadbeen drunk on seven different occasions. This statement wasrepeated to Grant by a member of the House who told me ofthe conversation. Grant replied without manifesting any indignation, or belief or disbelief in the story: "I have refused his requestsseveral times. " In the case of almost any other person thanPresident Grant such an answer would have been a confessionof the charge. But it ought not to be so taken in his case. Unless he desired to take into his full confidence the personwho was speaking to him he was in the habit of receiving mostimportant communications with entire silence or with somesimple sentence which indicated his purpose to drop the subject. My own belief is that at some time during the War, or beforethe War in times of discouragement Grant may have been inthe habit of drinking freely and may at some time have doneso to excess. During the whole time of his Presidency I hada good opportunity to observe him in personal intercourse. I was familiar with many men who were constantly in his companyat all hours of the day and often far into the night. Theyassured me that there was no foundation for any imputationthat he was in the habit of drinking to excess then. If atany time he had formed such a habit he had put it under hisfeet. For that I think he is entitled to greater honor thanif he had never yielded to temptation. My explanation ofButler's influence over Grant is to some extent conjecture. But I believe Grant thought him a powerful political leaderand that he was entitled to respect as representing the opinionsof large numbers of men. Beside that Butler had a greatinfluence over some ambitious men who were his confederatesand over some timid men who were afraid of him. Their influencewith Grant was on Butler's side. Then Grant was apt, as Ihave said in another place, to sympathize with men who werebitterly attacked, especially men who were charged with dishonestyor corruption, because such charges were made against him. So without undertaking to explain Butler's influence withGrant, I content myself with stating it and lamenting it. He led Grant to make some very bad appointments in Massachusettswhich were totally repugnant to the feeling of her people. But for those appointments, in my opinion, the strong objectionfelt by her people to giving any President of the United Statesa third term would not have prevented her supporting him forrenomination in 1880, a support which would have insured hissuccess. 

After President Hayes came into power General Butler testedthe President's willingness to permit him to control the patronageof Massachusetts. He demanded the appointment of a man recommendedby him to the office of Postmaster at Methuen. The term hadexpired. President Hayes carefully examined the matter inperson, got a list of the principal patrons of the office, and compared it with the petitions. He determined to reappointthe incumbent, who was an excellent officer, and a Republicanwho had refused to vote for General Butler. The man whomGeneral Butler recommended had lost a leg in the War. Hehad an artificial limb so well made that many people, eventhose who worked in the same shop with him, did not knowthat he had lost his leg. Butler went before the SenateCommittee on Post Offices to get them to reject PresidentHayes's nominee, taking his own candidate with him. He hadthe man leave off his artificial leg and come on crutchesto get greater sympathy. He made an earnest and angry speechbefore the Committee attacking President Hayes. But he madeno impression, and the old Postmaster was confirmed and reappointed. Thereupon Butler left the Republican party, first declaringhimself an Independent and attempting in that capacity toget elected as Governor of the State. Failing in that heavowed himself a Democrat, and was, as has been already said, elected by the Democrats in the fall of 1882. This transactionterminated his relation to the Republican Party, and his defeatfor Governor terminated his political life with the exceptionthat he was the Greenback candidate for the Presidency in1884. But he received little support. 

CHAPTER XXVBELKNAP IMPEACHMENT

March 3, 1876, a message was sent to the Senate from theHouse of Representatives, impeaching General Belknap, theSecretary of War. He was charged with having received corruptlya large sum of money, payable in quarterly instalments, forthe appointment of a Post Trader, an officer appointed bythe Secretary of War. This was a very lucrative position, the profits of which depended very largely upon the Secretary. I was chosen one of the Managers of the Impeachment by theHouse. There was no serious question of the guilt of theSecretary. But he resigned, and his resignation was accepted, after the discovery of his misconduct, before the proceedingsof impeachment were inaugurated. The whole struggle was overthe question of the Constitutional right of the Senate toconvict a public officer on impeachment proceedings institutedafter he had left office. Upon that question I made a carefuland elaborate argument. A majority of the Senate (37 to 25)were for sustaining the proceedings. But the Senators whothought the Senate had no jurisdiction to enter a judgmentof guilty when the proceedings were commenced after the personleft office, deemed themselves constrained to vote Not Guiltyas the only mode of giving that opinion effect. 

So General Belknap was acquitted for the want of the two-thirds vote for his conviction. Every Democrat voted forconviction except Mr. Eaton of Connecticut. The followingRepublicans voted for conviction: Booth, Cameron of Pennsylvania, Dawes, Edmunds, Hitchcock, Mitchell, Morrill, Oglesby, Robertson, Sargent, Sherman, and Wadleigh. 

It is difficult to believe that the Senators who voted foracquittal were not, perhaps unconsciously, influenced by thedesire to shield a political associate from punishment. Thepower to impeach public officers after leaving office had beenexercised in England from time immemorial. It is well settledthat when in the Constitution or legislation of the UnitedStates a term of English law is used, that the meaning customarilygiven to the term in English jurisprudence is to ascribedto it here. 

The history of this clause as found in the proceedings ofthe Convention that framed the Constitution, makes very clearthe understanding of that body. They first inserted the words:"The Senate of the United States shall have power to try allimpeachments, but no person shall be convicted without theconcurrence of two-thirds of the members present, which incase of impeachment shall not extend further than to removalfrom office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any officeof trust and profit under the United States. " The framersof the Constitution regarded the power of impeachment as absolutelyessential to the working of the Government. 

That clearly gave the two Houses of Congress the common lawpowers of impeachment, as exercised by Parliament. At a latertime there was added: "The Vice-President and all civil officersof the United States shall be removed from office on impeachmentand conviction. " That was added as a limitation on the tenureof office. It seems incredible that they should have intended, without debate or division, to wholly change and so greatlylimit and narrow the clause previously adopted. 

It is obvious that impeachment and removal from office willbe in many cases an insignificant and unimportant part ofthe remedy as compared with perpetual disqualification fromholding office. It seems incredible that it could ever havebeen intended that this judgment of perpetual disqualificationto hold office could only be rendered when the defendant iswilling, and can be avoided by his voluntary resignation. 

The framers of the Constitution were very skilful Constitutionalmechanics. I am satisfied that the opinion of the majorityof the Senate will prevail hereafter, unless the case wherethe question shall come up be, like that of Belknap, stronglyaffected by party feeling. 

President Monroe said: "The right of impeachment and of trialby the Legislature is the mainspring of the great machineof government. It is the pivot on which it turns. If preservedin full vigor, and exercised with perfect integrity, everybranch will perform its duty. "

I received a good many letters expressing approval of myargument. Perhaps, without inordinate vanity, I may be permittedto preserve those which follow. The approval of my honoredand beloved instructor, Judge Thomas, gave me special satisfaction. 

I am led to publish these letters partly because I thinkthe opinion of the writers on the question is worth preservingfor future reference, but chiefly, I believe, from what Ihope will be deemed a pardonable vanity. Mr. Sumner, inediting the thirteen volumes of his speeches, has given inregard to all of them, letters from friends and correspondents, expressing his approval. I do not suppose it would ever haveoccurred to Daniel Webster to publish similar certificatesas to any speech or act of his. 

FROM GEORGE S. BOUTWELL, GOVERNOR; SECRETARY OF THE U. S. TREASURY; U. S. SENATOR, ETC. , TO JUDGE E. R. HOAR. 

UNITED STATES SENATE, WASHINGTON, May 8th, 1876. 

_My dear Judge, _

It was the opinion of all who heard your brother's argumentin the Belknap case that it was the best of the argumentsyet given and that it will rank with the best at any timedelivered in the Senate. 

I do not write this because I was in any degree surprised, but it cannot be otherwise than agreeable to you to knowthat there is a concurrence in the view I have expressed. 

 Very truly, GEO. S. BOUTWELL. To The Honble E. R. Hoar, Concord, Mass. 

FROM JUDGE BENJAMIN F. THOMAS OF THE SUPREME COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS. 

NO. 9 PEMBERTON SQ BOSTON May 25th '76. 

_My Dear Sir_

I am greatly obliged to you for sending me a copy of youradmirable argument on the question of jurisdiction in theimpeachment case. 

The argument is sensible and exhaustive, the style clear, forcible and attractive and the whole tone temper and spiritbecoming a jurist and statesman. 

 Very truly yours BENJ F. THOMAS. Hon Geo F. Hoar

FROM WILLIAM M. EVARTS, SECRETARY OF STATE; UNITED STATES SENATOR, ETC. 

NEW YORK, May 22, 1876. 

_My dear Mr. Hoar, _

I am much obliged to you for sending me your speech, as manager, on the question of jurisdiction. I had seen it applaudedin the newspapers and am happy to add mine to the generalsuffrage. It seems to me a very complete and able presentationboth of law and reasons of State on your side. 

My own opinions are strongly adverse to the jurisdiction, and I should greatly lament its maintenance by the Senate. In ordinary times I should not suppose it possible, and Ido not think it probable, now. 

I hope the defendant's counsel presented the argument as satisfactorilyfrom their side as you have done for yours. But I have littlehope that it is so. 

 Yours very truly, (Signed) WM M. EVARTS. The Hon'ble Geo F. Hoar. 

FROM JUDGE DWIGHT FOSTER OF THE SUPREME COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS. 

BOSTON, 20 May, '76. 

_My Dear Sir:_

I have read with satisfaction and admiration your exhaustiveand conclusive argument in the Belknap impeachment case. Itwould have convinced me, if I had not been of your opinionalready. In thought I doubted a little at first. My mindwas soon satisfied that the narrow construction which leftthe accused to decide whether to abide his trial or by resignationto defeat the jurisdiction of the court could not possiblybe correct. 

Congratulating you on your success, I am

 Yours sincerely DWIGHT FOSTER Honble Geo F. Hoar

FROM CHARLES DEVENS, JR. , ATTORNEY-GENERAL, ETC. 

WORCESTER May 18, '76. 

_My Dear Hoar_

I have just read with the greatest interest and satisfactionyour speech on the jurisdiction in the impeachment case. Itseems to me most able profound and convincing and I congratulateyou immensely on the effort which is spoken of by all whohave read it as most vigorous and successful. It could nothave been better done. 

 Yours most truly CHAS DEVENS JR

FROM CHARLES ALLEN, JUDGE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS. 

BOSTON May 18 1876

_Dear Mr. Hoar_

Thanks for your argument in the Belknap case. Massachusettsis very proud of what you have done in this case; and I, amongthe rest. 

 Yours very truly CHARLES ALLEN. Hon. G. F. Hoar. 

CHAPTER XXVIELECTORAL COMMISSION

When the Presidential election of 1876 was over both sidesclaimed the victory. When the certificates of the resultin the different States reached the President of the Senate, in accordance with the requirement of the Constitution andthe law, it turned out that there was one majority for Hayesand Wheeler, upon the face of the returns, if the returnsfrom the State of Oregon were construed in accordance withthe Republican claim. 

The Governor of Oregon gave a transcript of the record anddeclared his opinion that it showed one of the lawful electorsto have voted for Mr. Tilden. That would have given one majorityfor Tilden. The Republicans claimed that upon the recordthe election showed that all the Republican candidates forelector had been chosen in Oregon, and that they had all votedfor Hayes and Wheeler. 

The Democrats declared that the boards authorized to ascertainand return the result of the election for Presidential electorsin South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana had corruptly andunlawfully rejected votes that ought to be counted for them, and counted votes for the Republicans that ought not to beso counted; and had in that way changed the result which, if it had been correctly ascertained and reported, would haveshown a Democratic majority in those three States. 

The country was deeply excited. Threats of civil war wereheard in many quarters. When I went to Washington for thesession of December, 1876, while I did not believe there wouldbe a civil war, and supposed there would be some method ofescape devised, I confess I saw no such method. I now believethat but for the bitter experience of a few years before, with its terrible lesson, there would have been a resort toarms. It would have been a worse civil war than that of theRebellion, because the country would have been divided notby sections, but by parties. 

But, as I have related elsewhere, a majority in Congressagreed to submit the question to a Commission composed offive Senators, five Representatives, and five Judges of theSupreme Court, who, proceeding in accordance with an ingeniousand skilfully devised mechanism, were to determine the case. 

I believe that as time goes on, the great self-restraint ofthe American people in dealing with the momentous peril of1877, and the constructive ability which created the simplebut perfect mechanism of the Electoral Commission, will receive, as they deserve, the admiration of mankind. There was atthe time, as would be expected, some anger and disappointmentat the result. Occasionally some bigot who can find nothingbut evil in the history and life of his country, generallysome recluse who has little knowledge of affairs, chargesthe Commission with having wickedly deprived the majorityof the people of the fruits of an honest and lawful victory. But, in general, wherever I go I find that intelligent menof both parties are satisfied with the righteousness of thedecision, and admit that a different judgment would have wroughtthe destruction of the Republic. 

When the decision of the Electoral Commission was acceptedevery Democratic vote in the two Houses was against it, andevery Republican vote, save two, given in its favor. Of thesetwo, one shortly afterward left the Republican party and becamea bitter and angry Democrat. The other, a most admirableand excellent college president, told me that he thought theCommission were technically right. But he thought it betterfor the effect on the country that the Democratic contentionshould be sustained. As if in a question of Constitutionalproceeding, or rather a question of Constitutional power, a determination could be technically right, and wrong uponthe merits. If Congress, technically, that is according tothe mandate of the Constitution, had no power to decide theresult of the elections in the States, but that power wascommitted to State tribunals, how was it possible that anymember of either House of Congress, who had sworn to supportthe Constitution, could usurp that power without being forsworn?Beside, it must be conceded by everybody to be utterly impossiblethat the power of investigating disputed questions, as tothe choice of presidential electors by the States, shouldbe exercised by Congress. There is no time for such an investigationby Congress. It could only be done where a few precinctsor votes were in dispute, in places near the seat of Government. It would have been impossible to do it in time for the inaugurationof the new President before the day of railroads and telegraphsfor any State in the country. It would be impossible nowto do it in parts of the country distant from the seat ofGovernment. The choice of electors takes place in November. The result must be ascertained; the electors must meet; theirvotes must be given; they must be certified to Congress; thecount must be made and result declared in Congress beforethe 4th of March, a period of less than four months. If thereshould be a contest made in each of the forty-five States, an investigation might be demanded for every election precinctin the country. 

It seems to me clear that the power to judge of elections, returns, and qualifications of presidential electors is notgiven by the Constitution to the two Houses of Congress, oreither of them. The power which it was deemed necessarycarefully to express in regard to their own members, it couldhardly have been intended to bestow by implication from theright to be present when the certificates are opened, or evenfrom the right to count the votes. It is a power which itis utterly impracticable for Congress to exercise betweenthe time when the certificates are brought officially to itsknowledge, and the time when it must be determined who hasbeen chosen President. Indeed, the distinguished counselwho closed the case for the Tilden electors* conceded thisdifficulty, to which his only answer was the suggestion thatsuch an inquiry, like the right to the writ of _quo warranto, _must be limited by discretion; in other words, that the twoHouses may go as far into the inquiry, who were duly chosenelectors in any State, as they in their discretion think fit, or as time will permit. 

[Footnote]* Mr. Charles O'Connor. [End of Footnote]

The statement of this position seems to be its refutation. We are now discussing a question of jurisdiction. In whomis the power to determine who have been appointed electors--in Congress or in the State? It was gravely answered thatit is in Congress when the State to be investigated is nearthe seat of Government, or the inquiry to a few election precinctsonly, but it is to be left to the State in other cases; thatCongress may exert a power of inquiry into an election inDelaware which is impossible as to California, or may inquireinto one election district in New York, but cannot into twentyor a hundred. This claim would never have arisen in any man'smind before the days of railroads and telegraphs. Such investigations, possible only to the most limited extent now, would have beenwholly impossible as to most of the States when the Constitutionwas adopted. 

It is asked, is there no remedy if the officers to whom theStates intrust the power of ascertaining and declaring theresult of the election act fraudulently or make mistakes?The answer is that the Constitution of the United Statesgives no jurisdiction to Congress, when the certificates areopened and the votes are to be counted, to correct such mistakesor frauds. A like question may be put as to every publicauthority in which a final power of decision is lodged. Thedanger of mistake or fraud is surely quite as great if thefinal power be lodged in Congress, and the framers of theConstitution acted in nothing more wisely than in removingfrom Congress all power over the election of President. 

There was never yet a political party in this country, orin England, which decided ordinary election cases, exceptin the clearest case, on other than party considerations. InEngland and Canada it has been found necessary to commit tothe courts the consideration of election cases. It is seldomthat either House of Congress has resisted partisan temptationin election cases, when one seat only was the prize of thecontest. Is it likely that public virtue would withstandthe temptation of the Presidency?

The simple doctrine on which the Commission proceeded wasthat the right to determine absolutely and finally who arethe duly chosen presidential electors is committed by theConstitution to the States. The judgment of the tribunalestablished by the State for that purpose is conclusive onall the world. Congress is only to count the votes of theofficials found by the State to have the right to cast them. 

It is said that in the Oregon case the Commission departedfrom this principle, which they had acted upon in the caseof South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. But there is notthe slightest truth in that suggestion. In all of thosethree cases the laws of the State had established a tribunalwith absolute right to determine all questions arising out ofthe election. The tribunal had the right to reject votes, orcount votes, according as they found the votes to be lawfulor unlawful. They had the right to reject returns from electionprecincts where they found there could have been no lawfulor orderly election by reason of violence, or where they foundthe returns untrustworthy by reason of fraud. This powerthey exercised, and from it there was no appeal. 

On the other hand the laws of Oregon did not provide fora board of State canvassers, but provided that the Secretaryof State should canvass the votes in the presence of theGovernor, and prepare duplicate lists thereof, which listsshould be singed by the Governor and Secretary. These lists, certified by the Secretary, were before the Electoral Commission, and disclosed the choice of Republican electors. The Governor, however, undertook to declare his opinion of the result. Thatopinion was that a Democrat was chosen who had received lessthan a majority of the votes, or to use the phrase of theGovernor, "received the highest number of votes cast for personseligible, " because his Republican competitor was not eligible;and he, therefore, certified that the Democrat had the largestnumber of votes cast for persons eligible. That Democraticelector proceeded then to hold a meeting, at which he wasthe only person present, and as the two Republicans whom everybodyadmitted were lawfully chosen, did not meet with him, he proceededto fill two vacancies himself. 

The Secretary of State made the canvass required by law, recorded it and filed it in his office. He made that canvassin the presence of the Governor. He could not change it. He could not tamper with it. He had completed his officialduty when he had completed it. So that the Governor's certificateas to the effect of the election was of no more official characterthan a like certificate of the Governor-General of India wouldhave been. 

There was no claim or pretence in any quarter that the Republicansdid not have a lawful majority of the votes cast for electorsin Oregon. The only claim was that one of the electors waspostmaster, and that he did not lawfully resign before hewas chosen elector. He was postmaster at the time of theelection, but resigned a few days later. He was also chosenafter he had resigned to fill the vacancy in the ElectoralCollege, if his ineligibility created a vacancy, in the regularform according to the laws of Oregon. There was no questionor pretence in any quarter that the will of the people ofOregon was not given due effect by the judgment of the ElectoralCommission. 

I do not believe that there are any considerable number ofintelligent persons in the country, now that the excitementof the time has gone by, who doubt that the will of the peopleof South Carolina and Florida and Louisiana was carried intoeffect by the judgment of the Commission; and that their judgmentbaffled an unscrupulous conspiracy to deprive the majoritiesin those States of their lawful rights in the election becausethose majorities were made up largely of negroes. 

CHAPTER XXVIIFOUR NATIONAL CONVENTIONS1876

It has been my fortune to be a delegate from Massachusettsin four National Conventions for the nomination of Presidentand Vice-President--those of 1876, 1880, 1884 and 1888. Inthe first I was a delegate from the Worcester district, whichI then represented in Congress. In the other three I wasat the head of the delegation at large. I presided over thatof 1880. 

The history of these conventions is of great interest. Itshows the rudeness of the mechanism by which the Chief Executiveof this country is selected, and what apparently slight andtrivial matters frequently determine the choice. As is wellknown, the framers of the Constitution, after consideringvery seriously the question of entrusting the power of choosingthe President to the Senate, determined to commit that functionto electoral colleges, chosen in the several States in suchmanner as their legislatures should determine, all the electorsto give their votes on the same day. It is generally statedthat the President and Vice-President cannot be from the sameState. That is not true. The Constitutional provision isthat electors in their respective States shall vote by ballotfor President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shallnot be an inhabitant of the same State with themselves. 

It was intended that the choice of the President should notbe a direct act of the people. It was to be committed tothe discretion of men selected for patriotism, wisdom andsobriety, and removed as far as might be from all the excitementsof popular passion. 

The Constitution further provides that no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the UnitedStates, shall be appointed an elector. It was undoubtedlythe chief object of this last provision to prevent the perpetuationof power in the same hands, or under the same influences, by removing the choice of President wholly from the controlof persons wielding National authority. In a considerablemeasure this purpose has been defeated. The elector, in practice, is a mere agent or scribe. He records and executes the willof the nominating convention of the party to which he belongs, in which the real power of selection is in fact lodged. Inthese conventions members of Congress, and holders of Nationaloffice, take frequently an active and influential share. Itis remarkable, however, how often the nominating conventionshave discarded the candidates who were favored by the holdersof executive office or the two Houses of Congress. And wheresuch candidates have been nominated by the convention of eitherparty, they have often been defeated at the polls. GeneralHarrison, in 1840, was nominated instead of Webster or Clay, who were the leaders of the Whig Party, and doubtless thefavorites at Washington. In 1844, when Mr. Clay receivedthe Whig nomination, he was defeated by Mr. Polk, who had, I suppose, hardly been heard of as a candidate in politicalcircles at the Capital. In 1848 the popular feeling againcompelled the nomination of a candidate, General Taylor, overthe favorite leaders at the Capital. In 1852 Fillmore andWebster were both rejected by the Whigs for General Scott, and General Pierce was summoned from private life for theDemocratic nomination. In 1860 Seward was rejected for Lincoln. And in 1876 Hayes, whose National service had consisted ofbut one term in the House of Representatives, was chosen asthe result of a contest in which Blaine, Conkling, Mortonand Bristow, distinguished National statesmen, were the defeatedcompetitors. So, in 1880, Garfield, who had not been muchthought of in official circles, was selected as the result of amighty struggle in which Grant and Blaine were the principalchampions, and in which Edmunds and Sherman, who had longbeen prominent in the Senate, were also candidates. 

Republican National Conventions since the War of the Rebellionhave been embarrassed by another influence, which I hope willdisappear. In many of the Southern States the DemocraticParty consists almost entirely of whites who have possessedthemselves of the forces of government by criminal processes, which have been a reproach not only to this country, but tocivilization itself. The Republicans, however numerous, andalthough having a majority of lawful voters in most of theseStates, have been excluded from political power. They havehowever, of course, had their full proportionate representationin the National Convention of the Republican Party. Theirdelegates have too often been persons who had no hope forpolitical advancement in their own States, and without theambition to commend themselves to public favor by honorablepublic service, of which that hope is the parent. They havebeen, therefore, frequently either National office-holderswho may reasonably be supposed to be under the influenceof the existing Administration, or likely to be governedby a hope of receiving a National office as a reward fortheir action in the convention; or persons who can be influencedin their actions by money. This Southern contingent has beenin several of our National Conventions an uncertain and anuntrustworthy force. 

The Republican nominating convention of 1876 was held at Cincinnation June 14. The delegates from Massachusetts were:

_At Large. _--E. R. Hoar, Richard H. Dana, Jr. , Paul A. Chadbourne, John M. Forbes. 

_From Districts. _--William T. Davis, Robert T. Davis, JohnE. Sandford, Edward L. Pierce, Henry D. Hyde, J. Felt Osgood, Alpheus Hardy, C. R. McLean, James M. Shute, James F. Dwinal, George B. Loring, Henry Carter, William A. Russell, C. H. Waters, James Freeman Clarke, James Russell Lowell, A. J. Bartholomew, George F. Hoar, James F. Moore, William Whiting, Edward Learned, S. R. Phillips. 

The struggle for the nomination equalled in bitterness andin importance many of the contests between different politicalparties that had preceded it. While the great majority ofthe Republicans retained confidence in the personal integrityand patriotism of President Grant, it had become painfullymanifest that he was often an easy victim to the influenceof unscrupulous and designing men. Grant never lost his holdupon the hearts of the Northern people. Wherever there wasa contest in any State for political supremacy the least worthyfaction frequently got his ear and his confidence. He neverwavered in his attachment to the doctrines of his party--protection, sound principles of finance and currency, honestyin elections. But the old political leaders, whom the peoplemost trusted, were more and more strangers to his presence, and ambitious and designing men, adventurers who had goneSouth to make fortunes by holding office, men interested injobs and contracts, thronged the ante-chambers of the WhiteHouse. The political scandals, always likely to follow agreat war, seemed to be increasing rather than diminishingduring his second term of office. 

I never though that the proper way to put an end to thisstate of things was to abandon what I deem sound politicalprinciples, or to abandon the party that was formed to establishthem. I should as soon have thought of turning Tory becauseof like complaints in the Revolutionary War, or of askingGeorge III. To take us into favor again because of like scandalswhich existed during the Administrations of Washington andJohn Adams. But I thought, in common with many others, thata party of sound principles could be made and should be madea party of pure politics. 

The two divisions in the Republican Party, which I have indicated, marshalled their forces for the struggle in the conventionof 1876. The friends of Mr. Blaine were generally those Republicanswho had been dissatisfied with the conduct of the Administration. They embraced, also, the larger number of the enthusiasticyoung Republicans, who were attracted by Blaine's brilliantqualities, as were those who had come in contact with himby the marvellous personal charm of his delightful and graciousmanners. Roscoe Conkling was regarded as the leader of theother party. The House of Representatives, by an almost unanimousvote, had adopted the resolution declaring that it was contraryto sound principle to elect a President for a third term. So General Grant himself was not a candidate. 

But as the time for the convention drew near, there had beenan investigation in the House of Representatives into theaffairs of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, whichhad resulted in some uncomfortable revelations with referenceto Mr. Blaine. He was charged with having acquired stocksin railroads which were to be affected by National legislation, either without consideration or for a consideration far belowtheir true value, and of having eagerly sought to acquireother similar stocks, the real consideration which he paid, or expected to pay, being the use of his official influencein behalf of these corporations. This investigation, orderedby the Democratic House of Representatives, was conductedby a majority of the committee charged with it, in a spiritof bitter hostility. The investigation was still in progresswhen the Republican Convention met. The facts, which weredistorted and discolored in public report, impressed manyexcellent persons unfavorably to Mr. Blaine, and a few witha belief of his guilt. They were used dexterously by hispolitical opponents and by his rivals in his own party, andby some conspicuous persons who had, or thought they had, personal grievances against him, to excite the public mind. On the other hand, as is natural in such cases, the greatbody of Mr. Blaine's friends clung all the closer to himfrom a belief that he was the object of unjust and malignantslander. 

I did not think it, under the circumstances, wise to nominateMr. Blaine, either in 1876 or later. I believed then, andnow believe, that he would have been an admirable Presidentof the United States. But I did not think it wise to putat the head of a movement for reform and for purity of administration, a man whose supporters must defend him against such charges, and who must admit that he had most unwisely of his own accordput himself into a position where such charges were not onlypossible, but plausible. But I was exceedingly anxious thata candidate should be found who would be not only agreeableto Mr. Blaine and his supporters, but whom, if possible, theyshould have a large influence in selecting. 

Such a candidate, it was hoped, might be found in Mr. Bristow. He was a great favorite in his own State. He was a man ofspotless integrity and great ability. He had been a Unionsoldier. He was from Kentucky, and his selection as a candidatewould remove the charge of sectionalism from the RepublicanParty, and tend to give it strength with the white peopleof the South. He had made an admirable Attorney-General, and an admirable Secretary of the Treasury. He had been appointedto the Cabinet by Grant. He had not been long enough in publicservice to have encountered the enmities which almost alwaysattach themselves to men long in office, and he representedno clique or faction. He was a man of clean hands and ofpure heart. For a good while it seemed as if the rival aspirationsof Blaine and Bristow might exist without ill-feeling, sothat when the time came, the supporters of either might easilygive their support to the other, or agree without difficultyin the support of some third person. I gave a banquet atWormley's in the spring of 1876, which I hoped might havesome tendency toward this desired harmony. There were aboutforty guests. Mr. Blaine sat on my right hand as the guestof honor, and Mr. Bristow on the left. They talked together, as I sat between them, during the whole evening in the mostfriendly and delightful way, telling humorous anecdotes relatingto their own campaigns, as pleasantly as if they had beendescribing the canvass of some third person whom they wereboth supporting. I do not believe there was at that timein the heart of either a tinge of anger against the other. 

But as the contest went on, Mr. Blaine seems to have becomepossessed with a belief that the bitter public attacks uponhim were instigated by Bristow. Some of the Kentucky papershad been specially bitter. The Republican Convention openedin Cincinnati, Wednesday, June 14. The Sunday morning beforeMr. Blaine fell in a swoon on the steps of the church at thecorner of G and Tenth Streets in Washington. He was carriedto his house on Fifteenth Street. Bristow was in his officein the Treasury Department when a friend called upon him, and gave him the news of Blaine's attack, and said: "Wouldit not be well for you to go round and express your interest?"Bristow took his hat, and the two friends went together toMr. Blaine's house. 

An occurrence took place there which satisfied them boththat the feeling against Bristow on the part of Mr. Blaineand his near friends was exceedingly strong and implacable. The story was immediately telegraphed in cipher to Mr. Bristow'sprincipal manager at Cincinnati, from whom I had it a dayor two before committing it to paper. The facts were communicatedby him in confidence to members of the Kentucky delegation. 

On the first six ballots the total number of votes cast was754. Three hundred and seventy-eight were necessary fora choice. Mr. Blaine received votes varying from 285 onthe first ballot to 308 on the sixth. On all these ballots, buttwo, Bristow had the second largest number, ranging from111 to 126. On the first and second ballot he was led byMorton, who had 124 and 120 votes, and was closely followedby Conkling, whose highest vote was 99. At the end of thesixth ballot it had become manifest that the opponents ofBlaine, if they expected to succeed, must unite on a candidate. A portion of the Pennsylvania delegation had already votedfor Blaine, who was a native of that State. Others had beenheld in restraint from voting for him with difficulty, bythe influence of Don Cameron, chairman of the delegation anda strong adherent of Grant. The New York Conkling men andthe majority of the Pennsylvania delegation, led by Cameron, determined to cast their votes for Hayes, of Ohio, to preventthe nomination of Blaine. In doing that they were to unitewith their most earnest antagonists and give their supportto a candidate who probably sympathized with them less thanany other on the list. It was manifest to the Kentucky delegationthat they must make their choice between Blaine and Hayes, and that their choice would decide the nomination. They hada hurried consultation and determined to vote unanimouslyfor Hayes. The going over of Kentucky to Hayes was followedby the other States that had opposed Blaine. Hayes had onthe final ballot 384 votes, Blaine 351, and there were 21cast for Bristow, which had been cast by States standingearlier in alphabetical order on the roll, who had cast theirvotes before the stampede began. If Kentucky had cast her24 votes for Blaine, he would have been nominated. I wastold by the close friend of Bristow, of whom I have spoken, and I have no doubt he is right, that the Kentucky Republicanshad felt very kindly toward Blaine, and their action was determinedby the knowledge of the transaction I have just related. Theythought that if this bitterness and anger and dislike of Mr. Bristow existed in the mind of Mr. Blaine, it was hardlyworth while for Bristow's friends and supporters to clothehim with the Presidential office. If Bristow had not visitedBlaine's house that Sunday morning, Blaine would, in my opinion, have been the Republican candidate for the Presidency. 

What would have been the result if Mr. Blaine had been nominatedin 1876, it is now idle to speculate. I am satisfied, inlooking back, that I myself underrated his strength as a candidate. But it seems likely that he would have had the votes of allthe States which President Hayes received, and would havebeen stronger than Hayes in New York. 

Mr. Hayes came to the Presidency under circumstances of greatdifficulty and embarrassment. He was in my judgment one ofthe wisest, sincerest and most honest and patriotic men whoever held the office. 

But President Hayes's Administration was embarrassed by thedisputes about his title. The House of Representatives wasagainst him in the first Congress of his term, and in thesecond Congress the Senate and House were in the hands ofhis political opponents. He also throughout the whole termhad to encounter the hardly disguised hostility of nearlyall the great leaders of his own party in both Houses of Congress. Conkling never spoke of him in public or private without asneer. I suppose he did not visit the White House or anyDepartment during President Hayes's term. Mr. Blaine wasmuch disappointed by President Hayes's refusal to give Mr. Frye a place in the Cabinet, which he desired as a means ofcomposing some incipient jealousies in Maine. Hamlin, whowas a very influential Senator, was much disgusted by thePresident's inclination to reform the civil service. Thisfeeling was largely shared by Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania, an able and patriotic man, who ruled the Republican Partyin that State with a despotic hand, and had as little respectfor the doctrines of the civil service reformers as you mightexpect from one of his Highland ancestors who ruled over theClan Cameron in the days of the Scotch Stuarts. Cameronhad also a personal grievance, although I do not think thatmade any difference in his feeling. He had been proposedby the Pennsylvania delegation for the appointment to theEnglish Mission. But the proposition had not been receivedwith favor by President Hayes. Under these difficulties, it is greatly to his honor that so much of public good wasaccomplished in his time, and that he handed over the Governmentto a Republican successor. 

CHAPTER XXVIIIFOUR NATIONAL CONVENTIONS1880

As the time approached for the Republican Convention of 1880, it had become clear that it would witness a mighty struggle. Conkling, Don Cameron, who had succeeded to his father's powerin Pennsylvania, and Logan, of Illinois, the most distinguishedvolunteer soldier of the war, and a great favorite with hisold comrades, were the most conspicuous leaders of the partywho desired to restore the old Grant regime. They were secondedby Howe, formerly Senator from Wisconsin and later Postmaster-General under President Arthur, Creswell, of Maryland, Postmaster-General in Grant's first term, Governor Boutwell, of Massachusetts, who had a very distinguished public career as Governor, memberof the House of Representatives, Secretary of the Treasury, and Senator. They selected as their candidate their old chieftain, General Grant. He was strong not only in the powerful supportof these great political leaders, but in the solid confidenceof the great Methodist denomination to which he belonged, in the love of the old soldiers, in the memory of his greatpublic service, both in war and peace, and the general respectof the whole American people. Against this was the unwritten, but well-understood, rule of action by which the people hadbeen governed since the time of Washington, that no personshould be elected to the office of President for more thantwo terms. Against him, also, was the feeling that his judgment, which had been sound and unerring in the selection of fitmen for good military service, was very much at fault in choosingmen in whom he should confide in civil affairs. There wasa further feeling that the influence of unworthy politicians, which had been powerful with him during his second term, wouldbe more powerful if he should go back to the Presidency withtheir aid. 

Mr. Blaine's old popularity had been increased in the fouryears since his former defeat. Many people believed thathe had been not only unjustly but cruelly treated, and wereeager to record their verdict of acquittal from the malignantcharges which had been made against him since 1876. Therewas a third class, of whom I was one, who felt that it wouldbe unwise to nominate either General Grant or Mr. Blaine. While they had a great respect for the character of Grant, they dreaded the influences which would be sure to surroundhim, if he should come to the Presidency again. While theyhad the kindliest feeling for Mr. Blaine and shared the publicindignation at the character of the attacks of which he hadbeen the victim, they did not like to have a candidate whowould be so handicapped. Mr. Blaine's own imprudence hadunquestionably given an opportunity and a plausibility tothese slanders. They thought, also, that the nomination ofeither Grant or Blaine would create a feeling of anger anddisappointment in the supporters of the defeated candidate, which would seriously endanger the election. They lookedabout, therefore, for a person who might not be obnoxiousto either the Blaine men or the Grant men, and found sucha person in Mr. Edmunds of Vermont. He was a man of abilityand long public service. He was not a person calculated toinspire much popular enthusiasm, but answered very well asa standard-bearer, although his supporters were ready to transfertheir support to another candidate, other than Blaine or Grant, on whom a majority of the Convention should be brought tounite. Mr. Sherman had also a considerable body of supporterswho respected him for his eminent talents and long and valuableservices. 

General Grant had a peculiarly strong hold on the Republicansof Massachusetts. They shared with all patriotic men throughoutthe country a profound gratitude for his illustrious militaryservices. They had been impressed by a feeling of great respectfor his personal qualities. The modesty which led him to refuseto enter Richmond in triumph at the close of the war; thesimplicity of his behavior; the magnanimity which led himto claim so little praise for himself and give so much ofthe credit to which he was entitled to Sheridan and Sherman, and others of his military associates; his incorruptible personalhonesty; his soundness and firmness in dealing with all questionsaffecting the public credit, the integrity of the currency, and the rights of citizenship, had endeared him to the peopleof a Commonwealth which ever valued such traits in her publicmen. The Methodist denomination, always large in Massachusettsand powerful in her Republican councils, was proud that thisstatesman and warrior was of its fold. As the time for theconvention approached, four ex-Governors, men of great personalinfluence, leaders in the Republican Party, yet of highlydifferent character, who represented very different shadesof Republican opinion--Boutwell, Bullock, Claflin and Rice--declared themselves in favor of nominating him again. Nothingcould have prevented his carrying Massachusetts as by a greatwave, but the fact that he had been, in his second term, subjectto a most unworthy influence in the matter of appointmentsto public office. The whole National executive patronagein Massachusetts seemed given up to advancing the personalfortunes of General Butler. Brave soldiers, honored Republicans, were turned out of post-offices, to be replaced by incompetentand dishonorable adventurers, odious in the neighborhoodsfrom which they came, to please this ambitious and unscrupulousman. This excited a deep indignation which culminated whenWilliam A. Simmons was made Collector of Boston. No personalrespect for General Grant could induce the Massachusetts Republicansto run the risk of having again a President who was subjectedto personal influences like these. But for the appointmentof Simmons as the principal Federal officer in Massachusetts, I think she would have supported Grant for a third term. TheEdmunds movement would never have been made, and his nominationat Chicago would have been certain. 

The State Convention passed resolutions in favor of Mr. Edmunds, and elected as Delegates-at-Large, George F. Hoar, Worcester;Charles B. Codman, Boston; John E. Sanford, Taunton; andJulius H. Seelye, Amherst. 

The District Delegates were: Charles W. Clifford, New Bedford;Azariah Eldridge, Yarmouth; William C. Lovering, Taunton;F. A. Hobart, Braintree; Phineas Pierce, Boston; Choate Burnham, Boston; Eustice C. Fitz, Chelsea; Daniel Russell, Melrose;Dudley Porter, Haverhill; N. A. Horton, Salem; George S. Boutwell, Groton; George A. Marden, Lowell; R. M. Morse, Jr. , Boston; George W. Johnson, Milford; W. S. B. Hopkins, Worcester; William Knowlton, Upton; Alpheus Harding, Athol;Timothy Merrick, Holyoke; Wellington Smith, Lee; M. B. Whitney, Westfield. 

Of these, three were in favor of Grant, namely, Boutwell, Eldridge, Marden; two were in favor of Sherman, and one forWashburn. 

The others voted for Mr. Edmunds in the beginning, meaningto defeat both Grant and Blaine if they could, and were readyto agree on any man of respectable character and capacityby whom that defeat could be accomplished. 

George F. Edmunds had a high reputation in the country asan able lawyer, and a faithful and independent Senator. Hehad unquestionably rendered great public service in the Senate. If elected, I believe he would have administered the Presidencyon the principles which a large majority of the people ofMassachusetts hold. He was an excellent debater. He wasvery fond of criticising and objecting to what was proposedby other men. He seemed never so happy as when in oppositionto the majority of his associates. But he possessed whatpersons of that temper commonly lack, great capacity for constructivestatesmanship. Any measure of which he was the author wouldbe likely to accomplish its purpose, and to stand fire. 

David Davis, who was President pro tempore of the Senate, used to say he could always compel Edmunds to vote in thenegative on any question by putting the question in the oldNew England fashion, "Contrary-minded will say no, " for Edmundswas always contrary-minded. I once told him, borrowing asaying of an Englishman, that if George Edmunds were the onlyman in the world, George would object to everything Edmundsproposed. 

The morning after the Massachusetts Convention of 1880, whenthe convention passed resolutions, proposing Edmunds as acandidate for the Presidency, and placing me first on thedelegation at large, Edmunds came to me and said, I have nodoubt with absolute sincerity: "I have seen the proceedingsof your convention yesterday. If I know myself, I have nodesire to be President of the United States. I do not thinkI am fit for it, and if I were, I should much prefer my presentservice as Senator. I would say so in a public letter, butI suppose the chances of my nomination are so slight thatit might seem ridiculous to decline. " I said: "But, Edmunds, just think of the fun you would have vetoing bills. " He smiled, and his countenance beamed all over with satisfaction at theidea, and he replied, with great feeling: "Well, that wouldbe good fun. "

So while, as I have said, the Massachusetts delegates, mostof them, supported Mr. Edmunds as a person likely to holdsome votes until the opposition to Grant might be concentratedon some other candidate to be agreed on as the proceedingsof the convention went on, and while I think he would havemade an excellent President if he had been chosen, his candidacywas never a very strong one. 

This convention was menaced by a very serious peril. A planwas devised which, if it had been successful, would, in myjudgment, have caused a rupture in the convention and thedefeat of the Republican Party in the election. The Chairmanof the Republican National Committee was Don Cameron of Pennsylvania, then and for some years afterward a Senator of the UnitedStates from that State. He was an ardent supporter of PresidentGrant and had been Secretary of War in his Cabinet, as hisfather had been in the Cabinet of President Lincoln. Likehis father before him, he had ruled the Republican Party ofPennsylvania with a strong hand. He was not given to muchspeaking. He was an admirable executive officer, self-reliant, powerful, courageous and enterprising, with little respectfor the discontent of subordinates. He was supported by amajority of the delegates from Pennsylvania, although Blaine, who was a native of that State, had a large following there. The New York delegation was headed by Roscoe Conkling, whohad great influence over Grant when he was President, andexpected to retain that influence if he became Presidentagain. The Maryland delegation was headed by J. A. J. Creswell, who had been Postmaster-General more than five years in Grant'stwo Administrations. On the Massachusetts delegation, asI have said, was Governor Boutwell, Grant's Secretary of theTreasury during nearly the whole of his first term, and onthat from Illinois John A. Logan. These men had a large followingover the whole country. There were three hundred and eightpersons in the convention who could be counted on to supportGrant from beginning to end, and about a dozen more were exceedinglydisposed to his candidacy. The State Conventions of thethree largest and most powerful States, New York, Pennsylvaniaand Illinois, and possibly one or two others, that I do notnow remember, had instructed their delegates to vote as aunit for the candidate who should be agreed upon by the majority. Grant had a majority in each of these States. But there wasa minority of 18 in Illinois, 26 in Pennsylvania, and 19 inNew York, who were for other candidates than Grant. If theirvotes had been counted for him it would have given Grant onthe first ballot 367 votes, 13 less than the number necessaryfor a choice. As his votes went up on one of the ballotsto 313, it is pretty certain that counting these 63 votesfor Grant would have insured his nomination. But there wereseveral contests involving the title of their seats of 16delegates from the State of Louisiana, 18 from Illinois, andthree others. In regard to these cases the delegates votedin accordance with their preference for candidates. Thiswas beside several other contests where the vote was not determinedby that consideration. Now if the vote of Illinois, Pennsylvaniaand New York had each been cast as a unit, in accordancewith the preference of the majority of the delegation ineach case, these 37 votes would have been added to Grant'scolumn and subtracted from the forces of his various antagonists;and the 63 votes of the minority of the delegations in thesethree States would also have been added to the Grant column, which would have given him a total vote of more than 400, enough to secure his nomination. So the result of the conventionwas to be determined by the adaption or rejection of whatwas called the unit rule. 

Don Cameron, the Chairman of the National Committee, leftthe Senate for Chicago about ten days, I think, before theday fixed for the meeting of the convention. It was whisperedabout before his departure that a scheme had been resolvedupon by him and the other Grant leaders, which would compelthe adoption of the unit rule, whatever might be the desireof the convention itself. It was his duty, according to establishedcustom, to call the convention to order and to receive nominationsfor temporary presiding officer. He was pledged, upon thosenominations, as it was understood, to hold that the unit rulemust be applied. In that way the sitting members from thedisputed States and districts would be permitted to vote, andthe votes of the three States would be cast without dissentfor the Grant candidate. When the temporary President tookhis place he would rule in the same way on the question ofthe choice of a permanent President, and the permanent Presidentwould rule in the same way on the conflicting votes, for theappointment of committees, for determining the seats of delegates, and finally the nomination of the candidates for Presidentand Vice-President. If the minority claimed the right tovote and took an appeal from his decision, he was to holdthat on the vote on that appeal the same unit rule was toapply. If a second point of order were raised, he would hold, of course, that a second point of order could not be raisedwhile the first was pending. So the way seemed clear to excludethe contesting delegates, to cast the votes of the three greatStates solid for Grant, and compel his nomination. 

But the majority of the National Committee, of which Cameronwas Chairman, was opposed to Grant. They met, I think, theday before the meeting of the convention to make the preliminaryarrangements. Mr. Cameron, the Chairman, was asked whetherit was his purpose to carry out the scheme I have indicated. He refused to answer. A motion was then made that the Chairman, after calling the convention to order, be instructed to receivethe vote of the individual delegates without regard to theinstruction of the majority of their delegation. Cameronrefused to receive motions on that question, saying that itwas a matter beyond the jurisdiction of the committee. Alarge part of the entire day was spent in various attemptsto induce Cameron either to give a pledge or permit a resolutionto be entertained by the committee, instructing him as tohis action. He was supported by Mr. Gorham, of California, who I believe was not a member of the committee, but waspresent either as Secretary or as _Amicus Curiae_. He wasan experienced parliamentarian, and for a long time had beenSecretary of the Senate of the United States. The discussionfor the majority was conducted largely by Mr. Chandler, ofNew Hampshire, afterward Secretary of the Navy, and laterSenator. After spending a large part of the day in that discussion, some time in the afternoon an intimation was made, informally, and in a rather veiled fashion, that, unless they had moresatisfactory pledges from Mr. Cameron, he would be removedfrom the office of Chairman, and a person who would carryout the wishes of the committee be substituted. The committeethen adjourned until the next morning. Meantime the Grantmanagers applied to Colonel Strong, of Illinois, who had beenalready appointed Sergeant-at-Arms by the committee, andwho was a supporter of Grant, to ascertain whether, if thecommittee were to remove Cameron and appoint another chairman, he would recognize him as a person entitled to call the conventionto order and preside until a temporary Chairman was chosen, and would execute his lawful orders, or whether he would treatthem as without effect and would execute the orders of Cameron. He desired time of consideration, which was conceded. Heconsulted Senator Philetus Sawyer of Wisconsin, who was himselfin favor of General Grant, but who desired above all thingsthe success of the Republican Party, and was not ready forany unlawful or revolutionary action. Mr. Sawyer was a businessman of plain manners, and though of large experience in publiclife, was not much versed in parliamentary law. He calledinto consultation ex-Senator Timothy O. Howe, of Wisconsin, formerly Senator from that State, and afterward Postmaster-General under Arthur. He was a very able and clear-headedlawyer, and had a high reputation for integrity. He advisedMr. Strong that the committee might lawfully depose theirChairman and appoint another, and that it would be his duty, as Sergeant-at-Arms, to recognize the new Chairman and obeyhis lawful orders. Strong was under great obligations toSawyer, who had aided him very largely in business matters, and had a high respect for his judgment. He gave his responseto the Grant leaders in accordance with the advice of Mr. Howe, in which Senator Sawyer concurred. They had intendedto make General Creswell the President of the convention. But finding it impossible to carry their plans into effect, in order to prevent the severe measure of deposing the Chairmanof the committee, they consented that the assurances demandedshould be given. There was then a negotiation between theleaders on the side of Grant and of Blaine for an agreementupon a presiding officer. It was well known that I was notin favor of the nomination of either. Senator Hamlin, formerlyVice-President and then a Senator, proposed my name to Mr. Conkling as a person likely to be impartial between the twoprincipal candidates. Mr. Conkling replied that such a suggestionwas an insult. Hamlin said: "I guess I can stand the insult. "But on consultation of the Grant men and the Blaine men itwas agreed that I should be selected, which was done accordingly. I was nominated orally from the floor when Mr. Cameron calledthe convention to order, and chosen temporary President byacclamation and unanimously. As proceedings went on it wasthought best not to have any division or question as to apermanent Chairman and it was at the proper time ordered, also without objection, that I should act as permanent President. 

But the Grant leaders were still confident. They felt surethat none of their original votes, numbering three hundredand more, would desert them, and that it would be impossiblefor the rest of the convention, divided among so many candidates, to agree, and that they would in the end get a majority. 

I was myself exceedingly anxious on this subject. I alsofelt that if the followers of Grant could get any pretext forgetting an advantage by any claim, however doubtful, thatthey would avail themselves of it, even at the risk of breakingup the convention in disorder, rather than be baffled intheir object. So the time to me was one of great and distressingresponsibility. The forces of Grant were led on the floorof the convention by Roscoe Conkling, who nominated him ina speech of great power and eloquence. The forces of Blainewere led, as they had been in 1876, very skilfuly by SenatorsHale and Frye. Garfield was the leader of the supportersof Mr. Sherman. One of the greatest oratoric triumphs I everwitnessed was obtained by Garfield. There had been a stormof applause, lasting, I think, twenty-five minutes, at theclose of Conkling's nominating speech. It was said therewere fifteen thousand persons in the galleries, which camedown very near the level of the floor. The scene was of indescribablesublimity. The fate of the country, certainly the fate ofa great political party, was at stake, and, more than that, the selection of the ruler of a nation of fifty millions ofpeople--a question which in other countries could not havebeen determined, under like circumstances, without bloodshedor civil war. I do not think I shall be charged with exaggerationwhen I speak of it in this way. I can only compare it inits grandeur and impressiveness to the mighty torrent of Niagara. Perhaps I cannot give a satisfactory reason for so distinguishingit from other like assemblies that have gathered in this country. But I have since seen a great number of persons from all partsof the country who were present as members or spectators, and they all speak of it in the same way. A vast portionof the persons present in the hall sympathized deeply withthe supporters of Grant. Conkling's speech, as he stoodalmost in the centre of that great assembly on a platformjust above the heads of the convention, was a masterpieceof splendid oratory. He began:

 And when asked what State he hails from, Our sole reply shall be, He comes from Appomattox, And its famous apple-tree. 

It was pretty difficult for Garfield to follow this speechin the tempest of applause which came after it. There wasnothing stimulant or romantic in the plain wisdom of JohnSherman. It was like reading a passage from "Poor Richard'sAlmanac" after one of the lofty chapters of the Psalms ofDavid. Garfield began, quietly:

"I have witnessed the extraordinary scene of this conventionwith deep solicitude. Nothing touches my heart more quicklythan a tribute of honor to a great and noble character. Butas I sat in my seat and witnessed this demonstration, thisassemblage seemed to me a human ocean in a tempest. I haveseen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and itsgrandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I rememberthat it is not the billows, but the calm level of the seafrom which all heights and depths are measured. When thestorm has passed and the hour of calm settles on the ocean, when the sunlight bathes its peaceful surface, then the astronomerand surveyor take the level from which they measure all terrestrialheights and depths. 

"Gentlemen of the Convention, your present temper may notmark the healthful pulse of our people. When your enthusiasmhas passed, when the emotions of the hour have subsided, weshall find below this storm and passion that calm level ofpublic opinion from which the thoughts of a mighty peopleare to be measured, and by which their final action will bedetermined. 

"Not here, in this brilliant circle where fifteen thousandmen and women are gathered, is the destiny of the Republicto be decreed for the next four years--not here, where I seethe enthusiastic faces of seven hundred and fifty-six delegates, waiting to cast their lot into the urn and determine the choiceof the Republic; but by four millions of Republican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with wives and children aboutthem, with the calm thoughts inspired by love of home andcountry, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, and reverence for the great men who have adorned and blessedour nation in days gone by, burning in their hearts--_there_God prepares the verdict which will determine the wisdom ofour work to-night. Not in Chicago, in the heat of June, butat the ballot-boxes of the Republic, in the quiet of November, after the silence of deliberate judgment, will this questionbe settled. "

Conkling, while exciting the admiration of all men for hisdexterity and ability, lost ground at every step. He madea foolish attempt to compel the passage of a resolution deprivingof their rights to vote delegates who refused to pledge themselvesto support the choice of the convention whoever it might be. His speech nominating Grant contained a sneer at Blaine. So, while he held his forces together to the last, he made italmost impossible for any man who differed from him in thebeginning to come to him at the end. On the contrary everythingthat Garfield said was marked by good nature and good sense. I said on the first day of the convention that in my opinionif the delegates could be shut up by themselves and not permittedto leave the room until they agreed, the man on whom theywould agree would be General Garfield. This desire becamemore and more apparent as the convention went on. At last, on the thirty-sixth ballot, and the sixth day of the convention, the delegates who had previously voted for other candidatesthan Grant, began to wheel into line for Garfield. Garfieldhad one vote from the State of Pennsylvania in previous ballots. But on the thirty-fourth ballot Wisconsin, the last Stateto vote in alphabetical order, had given him her sixteen votes, and on the thirty-sixth ballot she was joined by the delegateswho had voted for other candidates than Grant. Grant heldtogether his forces till the last, receiving three hundredand thirteen votes on the thirty-fifth ballot, and three hundredand six on the thirty-sixth. It was a sublime moment, whichit was hoped would determine the destiny of the Republic formany years, a hope which was cruelly disappointed by Garfield'suntimely death. It was, as might be well believed, a momentof sublime satisfaction to me. Garfield had been my friendfor many years. I had sat close to him in the House of Representativesfor three terms of Congressional service. He had been myguest at my house in Worcester; and I had been his colleagueon the Electoral Commission in 1876. He had been educatedat a Massachusetts college. He was of old Middlesex Countystock. We were in thorough accord in our love for New England, our firm faith in her hereditary principles, and our pridein her noble history. 

Garfield has been charged, in accepting the nomination forthe Presidency, with having been untrue to the interestsof John Sherman, who was the candidate of Ohio, and whom Garfieldhad supported faithfully through every ballot. The chargeis absolutely unjust. Mr. Sherman's nomination was seen byeverybody to have been absolutely impossible long before thefinal result. I was in constant consultation with leadersof the different delegations who were trying to unite theirforces. There never was any considerable number of thosepersons who thought the nomination of Mr. Sherman practicable, notwithstanding the high personal respect in which they heldhim. At the close of the thirty-fourth ballot, when Garfieldreceived seventeen votes, he rose, and the following incidenttook place:

 Mr. Garfield, of Ohio: "Mr. President, ----" The President: "For what purpose does the gentleman rise?" Mr. Garfield: "I rise to a question of order. " The President: "The gentleman from Ohio rises to a question of order. " Mr. Garfield: "I challenge the correctness of the announcement. The announcement contains votes for me. No man has a right, without the consent of the person voted for, to announce that person's name, and vote for him, in this convention. Such consent I have not given. " The President: "The gentleman from Ohio is not stating a question of order. He will resume his seat. No person having received a majority of the votes cast, another ballot will be taken. The Clerk will call the roll. "

This verbatim report is absolutely correct, except that wherethere is a period at the end of Mr. Garfield's last sentencethere should be a dash, indicating that the sentence was notfinished. I recollect the incident perfectly. I interruptedhim in the middle of his sentence. I was terribly afraid thathe would say something that would make his nomination impossible, or his acceptance impossible, if it were made. I do not believeit ever happened before that anybody who attempted to declinethe Presidency of the United States was to be prevented bya point of order, or that such a thing will ever happen again. 

During the thirtieth ballot a vote was cast by a delegatefrom the Territory of Wyoming for General Philip H. Sheridan. General Sheridan, who was upon the platform as a spectator, came forward instantly, and said: "I am very much obligedto the delegate from Wyoming for mentioning my name in thisconvention, but there is no way in which I could accept anomination from this convention, if it were possible, unlessI should be permitted to turn it over to my best friend. "The President said: "The Chair presumed the unanimous consentof the convention to permit the illustrious soldier who hasspoken to interrupt its order for its purpose. But it willbe a privilege accorded to no other person whatever. " TheGeneral's prompt suppression of this attempt to make him acandidate was done in a direct and blunt soldierly fashion. I did not think it best to apply to him the strictness ofparliamentary law; and in that I was sure of the approvalof the convention. But the precedent of permitting such abody to be addressed under any circumstances by a person nota member would be a dangerous one, if repeated. Perhaps Imay with propriety add one thing of a personal nature. Ithas been sometimes charged that the delegates from Massachusettswere without great influence in shaping the result of thisconvention. They moved, and carried, against a formidableopposition, the civil service plank, which embodied the doctrineof civil service reform as among the doctrines of the RepublicanParty. Of whatever value may be attributed to the humbleservices of the President of the Convention, they are entitledto the credit. They had, I think, more to do than any otherdelegation with effecting the union upon Garfield. Of coursethe wishes of Mr. Blaine had very great influence indeed. I think he preferred Garfield to any other person except RobertLincoln, of Illinois, of whom he spoke to me as a person fromwhom it would be impossible to keep the votes of the coloreddelegates from the South, and who would be, by reason of therespect felt for his father's memory, highly acceptable throughthe country. But Mr. Lincoln, under the circumstances, couldnot have got the support of his own State, and without itit seemed unwise to attempt a union upon him. 

But to continue with what is personal to myself and the delegationfrom Massachusetts. When I got back to the Capitol, as Iwent into the cloak-room of the Senate to leave my hat, DonCameron sat there surrounded by a group of interested listeners. He was relating to them the story of the great contest. AsI approached the group he looked up and said:

"There comes Massachusetts. There were twenty-three men fromMassachusetts who went there to keep six hundred men fromdoing what they wanted to. And, by God, they did it. "

A few Sundays after his inauguration, during the spring sessionof the Senate, President Garfield invited Mrs. Hoar and myselfto dinner at the White House. President Hopkins, his oldfriend and teacher, and Mrs. Hopkins were there. There wereno other guests, except Judge Nott and his wife, PresidentHopkins's daughter, President Garfield's mother, and, I think, Mr. Archibald Hopkins, President Hopkins's son. PresidentGarfield asked me to remain after President Hopkins had takenhis leave. I had a long and interesting conversation withhim about his plans and purposes, and especially the difficultieswhich were then showing themselves in regard to the greatNew York appointments. Before I went upstairs, he gave hisarm to my wife and walked with her about the East room. Hesaid to her: "I hope I may live to repay your husband forall he has done for me. " Perhaps I am indulging in an unpardonablevanity in relating this testimony of two of the most interestedparties and most competent observers as to the value of thework of the Massachusetts delegation in that convention. 

I hope that somewhere before I die I may put on record myestimate of James A. Garfield, when I can say some thingswhich ought to be said, and for which there is not room inthis book and was not room in the eulogy delivered just afterhis death. It is the fashion, even among his friends, tospeak of him as a person timid if not time-serving, and aseasily swayed and moulded by a strong will. I have heardmen who knew him very well say that when he led the Houseon the Republican side, and had led his party into a positionwhich excited sharp conflict, they never could be sure thathe would not get wrong at the last moment, or have some privateunderstanding with the Democrats and leave his own side inthe lurch. This was attributed to moral timidity. I feelvery sure that this is a great mistake. Garfield's hesitation, want of certainty in his convictions, liability to changehis position suddenly, were in my opinion the result of intellectualhesitation and of a habit of going down to the roots of hissubject before he made up his mind. He had a great deferencefor other men's opinions. When, after he had expressed hisopinion, some strong and positive man came to him with a confidentutterance of a different opinion, unless Garfield had goneto the bottom of the subject himself, he was very likely todefer, to hesitate, to think himself mistaken. But when hehad had time and had thought the thing out and made up hismind, nobody and no consideration of personal interest oradvantage would stir him an inch. I suppose his courage andgenius as a soldier have never been questioned. He performedsome very important military exploits. He gave a thoroughinvestigation into the military conditions of Tennessee andKentucky, and his letter to the Department of War accomplisheda great deal toward putting things in a better way. He wasa thorough lover of his country. He hesitated long as tothe doctrine of protection, and undoubtedly made some inconsistentutterances before he took the ground which he held at last. Buthe studied the financial question, especially the great subjectsof currency and the standard of value, to the very bottom. He stood like a rock when Ohio and the whole West seemed tobe going against him, and when the statesmanship even of JohnSherman was of the willow and not of the oak. When his DistrictConvention met and passed resolutions in favor of paying intereston the Government bonds with paper, Garfield declared thathe would not take the nomination on such a platform. Thegood fight he made in Ohio turned the scale in that greatstruggle. I do not believe he wold have been a tool or servantin the Presidency. He would have mastered for himself thegreat subjects to be dealt with in our foreign policy, aswell as in domestic administration and legislation. His willwould, in my opinion, if he had been spared to us, have beenthe dominant will in our Government for eight fortunate andhappy years. Next to the assassination of Lincoln, his deathwas the greatest national misfortune ever caused to this countryby the loss of a single life. 

I have not the slightest respect for the suggestion thatGeneral Garfield in the least violated his honor or goodfaith in consenting to accept the nomination after he hadbeen elected as a delegate in the interest of Mr. Sherman. The office of the President is not personal. There can beno such thing as a personal claim upon it, or a personalobligation in regard to it. President Garfield got no advantagewhatever from the fact that he had favored Mr. Sherman. Mr. Sherman's nomination was an impossibility from the beginning. That the majority of the convention united upon Garfield wasdue to the fact that he had no enemies or antagonists in theconvention or among the people and, to some degree undoubtedly, also to the admiration felt by his fellow-delegates for thetact, sense and good nature which he showed in its discussions--qualities which were in marked contrast with those of hisvery able and powerful antagonist, Mr. Conkling. 

Beside, when the voting for Garfield in the Convention began, a dispatch was received from Mr. Sherman urging his friendsto unite in Garfield's support. That was before Garfieldhad taken any action, except an earnest attempt to declinethe nomination which, as I have already stated, was suppressedby a peremptory exercise of the authority of the chair. 

I have given more than once my estimate of James A. Garfield, although not as fully as I should like. Shortly after hisdeath I delivered a eulogy before the people of Worcesterat the request of the City Government. I was asked by JohnSherman, who more than anybody else had the matter in charge, to deliver the eulogy before the two Houses of Congress. ButMr. Sherman had spoken without due authority. The Committeeof the two Houses determined to invite Mr. Blaine, then Secretaryof State. That arrangement was required by every considerationof propriety, and was in all respects the best possible. Mr. Blaine's address on Garfield is one of the treasures of ourliterature. It would have been a great public misfortuneif that noble oration had been lost to the world. 

I knew Garfield very intimately. For six of the eight yearsI served in the House with him my seat was so near his thatwe could converse with each other in whispers. By a singularchapter of accidents our families had been closely associatedin several generations, although neither of us knew it untillong after our friendship began. 

The land of Captain John Sherman and the land of Captain JohnPrescott, both my ancestors on the mother's side, adjoinedthe land of Edward Garfield, the ancestor of the President, in Watertown. His land lay on both sides of what is now theline between Waltham and Watertown. Captain Benjamin Garfield, who may be properly called the founder of Waltham, was theleader of an earnest and protracted controversy in Watertownin which my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Sherman, was leaderon the other side. 

Lieutenant Thomas Garfield, another of the President's ancestorsin the direct line, built a house in that part of Watertown, afterward Weston, which later still was incorporated withparts of Concord and Lexington as the town of Lincoln. Heand his son Thomas were among the first incorporators, ofwhom my great-grandfather, John Hoar, was also one. ThomasGarfield built a house now standing at the end of a grass-grown lane about forty rods from the high road leading fromLincoln to Waltham and about two miles south from the centreof Lincoln. It is a secluded spot of great beauty. The house, a square, unpainted, two-story house with a great chimneyin the middle, stands surrounded by old elms and apple trees, in a tract of fertile meadow, with the Lincoln hill in thedistance. This estate passed from Lieutenant Thomas Garfieldto his son Thomas, Jr. , from him to his daughter Rebecca, wife of David Fiske, from her to her son Elijah Fiske, andfrom him to his children. One of these children married mycousin. I attended the wedding in my boyhood in the old Garfieldhouse. 

Abram Garfield, son of the second Thomas, the President'sgreat-uncle, from whom his middle name came to him, was asoldier at Concord Bridge on the 19th of April, 1775, in theLincoln Company of which my grandfather, Samuel Hoar, wasLieutenant and my two great-grandfathers served as privates. The depositions of Abram Garfield and John Hoar as to thefacts of the Concord fight were taken with others by the patriotsand sent to England for their vindication. This Abram Garfielddied in the summer of 1775, a few months after the battleat Concord. His grave, with that of his father and grandfather, the President's direct ancestors, is close to the graves ofmy own ancestors in the Lincoln burial-ground. 

The President's great-grandfather settled in Westminster. His land was close by the land of my wife's great-grandfather, and not far from the spot where her father was born. Hishouse is still standing in Westminster. My grandfather'suncle, Daniel Hoar, was one of the founders of that town andowned land not far off. 

So our friendship came by lawful inheritance. I discoveredmyself many of these facts relating to his ancestry whichhad been previously unknown to him. I have from him a letterwritten the day before he was assassinated in which he promisesafter visiting Williams College and the White Mountains tomeet me at Concord and to spend the night with my brotherthere and visit the dwelling and burial places of his ancestorsin Lincoln and then to come to Worcester as my guest. 

James A. Garfield was a man of indefatigable industry andvast information. He seemed constantly possessed by an intelligentcuriosity in regard to all subjects. He had a tenacious memory. Its stores were always ready at hand for his use on all occasions. There has been no man in public life in my time, except CharlesSumner, who was always so glad to render any service in hispower to literature and science. He was a great friend ofthe Congressional Library, and helped largely to increaseits appropriations. I got his powerful aid in procuring thepurchase of the Margry papers, at the instance of Parkman, the historian. 

During Garfield's service in the House he was the leaderof its best thought. Everything he did and said manifestedthe serious, reverent love of excellence. He was ever grave, earnest, addressing himself only to the reason and conscienceof his auditors. You will search his speeches in vain foran appeal to a base motive or an evil passion. He was remarkablyindependent in forming his judgments and inflexible in adheringto them on all grand and essential questions. His friendand Commander, General Thomas, whose stubborn courage savedthe day in the battle for the possession of Tennessee, waswell called The Rock of Chickamauga. In the greater battlein 1876 for the Nation's honor Garfield well deserves to becalled The Rock of Ohio. There has been hardly any singleservice to this country in recent times greater than thatrendered by him when he stood against the fiat money movementin Ohio. 

CHAPTER XXIXFOUR NATIONAL CONVENTIONS1884

It happened to me again to be put at the head of the Massachusettsdelegation in the convention of 1884. The leading candidateswere Mr. Blaine and President Arthur. Mr. Arthur had, inmany respects, made a very satisfactory President. He wasa man of pleasant manners and skilled in the subtle ways ofNew York politicians. He had been one of the chief representativesof a faction in the Republican Party, and he never seemedable to shake off the influences which had surrounded himbefore his election. At a dinner shortly after he was chosenVice-President, he made an apparently approving allusion towhat he called the use of soap, which was understood to meanthe use of money for corrupt purposes. He made a fatal mistake, as it always seemed to me, in permitting the resignation ofPresident Garfield's Cabinet and filling their places withmen who, like himself, belonged to the Grant faction. Ifhe had said that he would not allow the act of an assassinto make a change in the forces that were to control the Administrationso far as could be helped and that he would carry into effectthe purposes of his predecessor, wherever he could in consciencedo so, he would have maintained himself in the public esteem. But that was not his only mistake. Inconsiderately he lenthimself to the popular prejudice against the policy of riverand harbor improvements, and, in vetoing a bill passed bylarge majorities in both Houses of Congress, he sent in amessage in which he said in substance that the more corruptthe measure the more votes it was likely to get in Congress. When in the next winter he was asked to specify the objectionableitems in the bill he had vetoed, which appropriated about$18, 000, 000, he was able to point out less than five per cent. Of all the appropriations which he could say he thought werefor purposes not required by the interests of internationalor interstate commerce. And his claim was thoroughly refutedeven in regard to the items which he specified. He alsomade some very bad appointments, which deeply offended thebest Republican sentiment in many of the States. It is alittle singular that the appointment of the Collector ofthe Port of Boston should have cost two Presidents of theUnited States a renomination. Yet so it is. The old feelingin Massachusetts that it was not, on the whole, desirableto nominate Mr. Blaine existed in great strength. The businessmen liked Arthur. They thought their interests were safewith him. But the honest Republican sentiment of Massachusettswas deeply outraged by the appointment to the office of Collectorof Boston, of Mr. Roland Worthington, against the protestof her Senators and Representatives in Congress. He had beenknown only as an unscrupulous supporter of General Butler, and as the editor of a scurrilous newspaper which bitterlyattacked the opponents of that person even where they werehonest and trusted Republicans. To give this place to Mr. Worthington the President refused to reappoint Mr. Beard, who had made an admirable Collector, and who was supportedby a large majority of the best men of Boston. It was believedthat this appointment had been made in exchange for assurancesof General Butler's support in the approaching election. Worthington made a poor Collector, and, at the State electionafter his appointment, voted for Butler against the candidateof the Republican Party. But for the indignation caused bythis appointment, I think the delegation from Massachusetts, with three exceptions, would have supported Mr. Arthur forreelection. There would have been no movement for Mr. Edmunds, and but for that movement Mr. Arthur would have receivedthe Republican nomination. Upon the final ballot the voteof Massachusetts was seven for Arthur, three for Blaine andeighteen for Edmunds. 

A somewhat interesting incident occurred which shows the depthof a feeling, which I think was largely a prejudice, whichis still manifesting itself as a disturbing element in Americanpolitics. There was a great desire on the part of those whowere opposed to both Arthur and Blaine, to find a candidateupon whom they could unite, of such popularity and nationaldistinction as to make it impossible for the managers forthese candidates to hold their forces together. We thoughtthat General Sherman was the person that we wanted. It wasknown that he had written a letter to Mr. Blaine decliningto have his name used, and that a telegram had been receivedfrom him by a delegate during the session of the conventionto the same effect. But it was thought that if he were oncenominated he would find it impossible to decline, and thathis previous refusal would be an element of strength and notof weakness in the country. After the adjournment, whichwas at 11:45 A. M. , on Friday, June 6, the day before theballoting, I made an arrangement to meet Mr. George WilliamCurtis, the Chairman of the New York delegation, and one ortwo other gentlemen of the same way of thinking, from oneor two other States, and we agreed that when the conventioncame in again we would cast the votes of our delegates whoagreed with us for General Sherman. I had been authorizedby a large majority of the Massachusetts delegation to havethis interview, and I knew that I represented their opinions, although they had not, all of them, spoken to me about GeneralSherman. When I got back to the next meeting of the convention, I made known to them what I had done. I was told by severalof them that they would stand by me, but that it would causegreat dissatisfaction when they got home. 

"What is the matter?" I said. "Our people do not want a FatherConfessor in the White House, " was the answer. Although GeneralSherman was a Protestant, it is well known that his wife wasa Catholic. Soon after, Mr. Curtis came over to my seat andsaid: "Mr. Hoar, I cannot carry out our agreement. " "Whatis the matter?" said I. "There is an insurrection in theNew York delegation, " was his reply. "They do not want aFather Confessor in the White House. " So we agreed we shouldhave to give it up. When I came back to Washington, I calledat John Sherman's house and talked over the convention withhim. I told him the story I have just related. He said hewas not surprised, and that he believed the unwillingnessto have the religious faith of his wife made matter of publicdiscussion had a good deal to do with his brother's refusal topermit himself to be a candidate. 

While the convention of 1884 did not nominate the candidatefavored by the Republicans of Massachusetts, the action ofthe State, in my opinion, was decisive in defeating the nominationof President Arthur. But for that there would have been nomovement for Edmunds, and his support would have gone to thePresident. Mr. Blaine, who was nominated, was defeated atthe election. The event proved him a much stronger candidatethan I had supposed, and his subsequent career in the Departmentof State, I believe, satisfied a majority of his countrymenthat he would have made an able and discreet President. Isuppose it would hardly be denied now by persons acquaintedwith the details of the management of the Democratic campaign, at any rate I have heard the fact admitted by several verydistinguished Democrats, members of the Senate of the UnitedStates, that the plurality of the vote of New York was reallycast for Mr. Blaine, and that he was unjustly deprived ofelection by the fraud at Long Island City by which votes castfor the Butler Electoral Ticket were counted for Cleveland. I suppose also that but for the utterances of a foolish clergymannamed Burchard, Mr. Blaine's majority in that State wouldhave been so large that these frauds would have been ineffectual. 

CHAPTER XXXFOUR NATIONAL CONVENTIONS1888

In 1888 there was a very strong, almost irresistible feelingamong Republicans in the country that Blaine should be putin nomination again, although he had peremptorily and publiclyrefused to be a candidate. He was travelling abroad duringthat year. His mental vigor was unabated, as was shown byhis answer to Cleveland's free trade message, which was cabledacross the ocean and reached the people almost as soon asthe message. But the disease of which he afterward died wasthen upon him, as was known to some few of his intimate friends. Besides that, he had had an attack at Milan, which deprivedhim for a good while of the use of his limbs on one side. In 1892 I was in the care, at Milan, of a man who I supposewas the most eminent physician in the north of Italy, Dr. Fornoni, who gave me an account of Mr. Blaine's illness inthe very apartments where I was ill, and which Blaine hadoccupied before me. But when the convention came togetherthey were so eager to nominate Blaine that he was obligedto send another cable, I think, from Paris, insisting thathis wishes should be respected. There was a great diversityof opinion as to candidates, but little of the eager antagonismthat had characterized the preceding convention. The RepublicanParty had been sobered a good deal by four years of adversity. The delegates from Massachusetts where:

_At Large. _--George F. Hoar, Worcester; Henry S. Hyde, WestSpringfield; Frederick L. Burden, North Attleboro; AlansonW. Beard, Boston. 

_District. _--Frank S. Stevens, Swansea; Jonathan Bourne, New Bedford; William H. Bent, Taunton; Eben L. Ripley, Hingham;Arthur W. Tufts, Boston; Edward P. Wilbur, Boston; Jesse M. Gove, Boston; Charles J. Noyes, Boston; Edward D. Hayden, Woburn; Elmer H. Capen, Somerville; William B. Littlefield, Lynn; Samuel W. McCall, Winchester; William Cogswell, Salem;William E. Blunt, Haverhill; Joseph L. Sargent, Dracut; GeorgeS. Merrill, Lawrence; J. Henry Gould, Medford; David Farquhar, Newton; William A. Gile, Worcester; George L. Gibbs, Northbridge;John W. Wheeler, Orange; John G. Mackintosh, Holyoke; EmersonGaylord, Chicopee; and William M. Prince, Pittsfield. 

I was very desirous that the vote of Massachusetts shouldbe given to John Sherman. He was, except Mr. Blaine, unquestionablythe most distinguished living Republican statesman. He hadbeen an able champion of the opinions which the Republicansof Massachusetts held, and of the policies under which herspecial industries had been fostered. To nominate him wouldbe to go back to the early habit of placing the greatest andwisest statesmen of the country in its highest offices. ButI could not get the majority of the Massachusetts delegationto come to my way of thinking. General Coggswell, a veryable and accomplished member of the House of Representatives, and Mr. Edward D. Hayden, also a member of the House--aservice which he left greatly to the regret of his own constituentsand the people of the State--seemed to have very strong objectionsindeed to Mr. Sherman. The delegation very kindly offeredbefore the first ballot, and again just before the fourthor fifth ballot, to present my name as the candidate of Massachusetts. It would have been a very great honor to have received sucha vote from Massachusetts. I was told also by gentlemen fromother States, who spoke to me about it, that I should havehad a considerable vote from other parts of the country. Ihad quite a number of very intimate friends in the conventionfrom States outside of Massachusetts. I thought then, andthink now, though that is a matter of conjecture, that I shouldhave got about seventy votes. But I thought my nominationout of the question. I thought also that it would be utterlyinexpedient, if it could be accomplished. And I thought alsothat the office of a Senator from Massachusetts would bemore agreeable to me, and better adapted to my capacity thanthat of the President of the United States. Still the temptationto get the high compliment and honor of such a vote was verystrong indeed. But there were thirteen of our delegationof twenty-eight, who were willing to vote with me for Mr. Sherman. If I had consented to the subtraction of their votesfrom his column on the first ballot, it would have made aserious diminution of his strength. 

If I had consented to the same thing on a later ballot itwould have put him in the position of having his forces diminishingand falling away. I thought I ought not, for a mere emptyhonor to myself, to permit such an injury to be inflictedupon him, although I confess I did not then think his nominationlikely. But while the Massachusetts delegation does not seemto me to have exerted a very decisive influence upon the resultof that convention, it came very near it. After several ineffectualballotings, in which the votes of the different States weredivided among several candidates, the convention took a recessat twelve o'clock to four o'clock of the same day. Immediatelya meeting was called by a number of gentlemen representingdifferent delegations in a room in the building where theconvention was held, for consultation, and to see if theycould agree upon a candidate. The Massachusetts delegationhad authorized me to cast their vote as a unit for any candidatewhom I should think best, whom sixteen of the delegates--being one more than a majority--approved. I had ascertainedtheir opinion. While as I said there were but thirteen atmost who would support Sherman, considerably more than sixteenwere willing to support either Harrison or Allison, and perhapsone or two others, who had been prominently mentioned, including, I think, Mr. Depew, although of that I am not certain. Wemet as I said. The New York delegation had authorized itsvote to be cast unanimously for any person on whom the fourdelegates at large, Platt, Miller, Depew and Hiscock, representingdifferent shades of opinion in the Republican Party of thatState, should agree. Three of these gentlemen, Platt, Millerand Hiscock, were present at the meeting. Mr. Quay, Chairmanof the Pennsylvania delegation, was also authorized to castthe vote of the entire delegation as he should think fit. Mr. Spooner of Wisconsin, Chairman of the Wisconsin delegation, was present with a like authority. Mr. Farwell, Chairmanof the Illinois delegation, was present with a like authorityfrom his State. Mr. Clarkson, Chairman of the Iowa delegation, was present with authority to vote for Mr. Allison from thebeginning. De Young, of California, thought he could speakfor his people, though I believe without claiming authorityfrom them. Filley, of Missouri, was also present. Therewere several other gentlemen of influence, though not allof them delegates, and not all of them entitled to speak fortheir States, but feeling able to assure the company thattheir States would accede to whatever agreement might be madethere. The names of several candidates were discussed. Imade a very earnest speech in favor of Mr. Allison, settingforth what I thought were the qualities that would make hima popular candidate, and would make him an able and wise President. 

Finally, all agreed that their States should vote for Mr. Allison when the convention came in in the afternoon. Depew, as I have said, was absent. But his three colleagues saidthere could be no doubt that he would agree to their action, and there would be no difficulty about New York. We thoughtit best as a matter of precaution, to meet again a half-hourbefore the coming in of the convention, to make sure the thingwas to go through all right. I suppose that everybody inthat room when he left it felt as certain as of any eventin the future that Mr. Allison would be nominated in the convention. 

But when we met at the time fixed, the three delegates atlarge from New York said they were sorry they could not carryout their engagement. Mr. Depew, who had been supported asa candidate by his State in the earlier ballots, had madea speech withdrawing his name. But when the action of themeeting was reported to him, he said he had been compelledto withdraw by the opposition of the Agrarian element, whichwas hostile to railroads. He was then President of the NewYork Central and Hudson River Railroad Company. He said thathis opposition to him came largely from Iowa, and from theNorthwest, where was found the chief support of Allison; thatwhile he had withdrawn his own name, he would not so far submitto such an unreasonable and socialistic sentiment as to givehis consent that it should dictate a candidate for the RepublicanParty. The three other delegates at large were thereforecompelled to refuse their support to the arrangement whichhad been conditionally agreed upon, and the thing fell through. If it had gone on, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Iowa, California, and perhaps Missouri, wouldhave cast their votes unanimously for Allison, and his nominationwould have been sure. I think no other person ever came sonear the Presidency of the United States, and missed it. 

The result was the nomination of Mr. Harrison. It was a nominationquite agreeable to me. I had sat near him in the Senate forsix years, my seat only separated from his by that of JohnSherman, who, for a large part of the time, had been Presidentpro tempore. So Sherman's seat was not then occupied andHarrison and I were next neighbors. I had become very intimatewith him, and had learned to respect him highly as a veryable, upright and wise man, although he developed, as President, an ability which I think his most intimate friends had notknown before. Our relations then, and afterward, were exceedinglycordial. He was a wise, pure, upright and able President, and an eloquent orator, capable of uttering great truths ina great way, and able to bring them home to the understandingand conviction of his countrymen. He lacked what gave Mr. Blaine so great a charm, the quality of an agreeable and graciousmanner. He had little tact in dealing with individuals. Ifa man travelled three thousand miles across the continentto say something to President Harrison, he would find himselfbroken in upon two minutes after the conversation began witha lecture in which the views in opposition to his were vigorously, and, sometimes roughly, set forth. He did this even whenhe was of the same way of thinking and meant to grant thegentleman's request. Blaine would refuse a request in a waythat would seem like doing a favor. Harrison would granta request in a way which seemed as if he were denying it. An eminent Western Senator said to me once what, of course, was a great exaggeration, that if Harrison were to addressan audience of ten thousand men, he would capture them all. But if each one of them were presented to him in private, he would make him his enemy. 

However, in spite of all this the country was safe with him. While his hand was on the helm she would keep the course ofsafety, of honor, of glory, of prosperity, of republican liberty. There would be no fear for the future of the country if wewere sure to have in the great office of President a successionof Benjamin Harrisons. 

This fault of his is a fault apt to beset good and honestmen, especially when they are under the burden of great anxietiesand cares. Such men at such times are intent upon the objectto be accomplished. They are not thinking of personal considerations, of making friends or allies, or of the impression they aremaking for themselves upon mankind. But they need to learna lesson. It is a lesson which many of them learn very latein life, that many a good cause has been jeopardized or lostby this infirmity of men who are leaders on the righteousside. There is written on the walls of one of the great Englishschools a legend which I suppose has been there for sevenhundred years: "Manners Makyth Man. " It is a curious fact, however, that this legend illustrates a portrait of a pig. 

But while public men ought to be made to see how great a thingthis is, the people ought to learn how little a thing it is--how insignificant are these foibles, irritable temper, habitsof personal discourtesy, impatience, even vanity and self-confidence, compared with the great things that concern thecharacter, the welfare, and the glory of the State. I begto assure my readers that I make these observations partlyas a critic and partly as a penitent. 

I wrote to Benjamin Harrison after the Presidential campaignof 1896, urging him to consent to come to the Senate fromIndiana, citing the example of Presidents Adams and Johnson, both of whom came back to public life after they had beenPresident, although Mr. Johnson did not live to render anyservice in the Senate. 

In my letter I expressed my sense of the great value of whathe had done in the campaign. In reply I got the followingletter. Nobody who reads it will doubt that the man who wroteit had a kind and affectionate heart. 

November 10, 1896 674 NORTH DELAWARE STREET, INDIANAPOLIS, IND. 

_My dear Senator:_

It is very kind of you to take note of my work in the campaign, and I value very highly what you say of it--though your friendshiphas perhaps, in some degree, spoiled your judgment. I amthoroughly tired of the cares and excitements incident topublic life in our country. To you I may say that the peopleof this state seem to be more strongly attached to me thanever. I never appear before an audience that I am not deeplymoved by the demonstrations of the affectionate interest ofmy home people. 

Possibly they would send me to the Senate this winter if Ishould intimate a willingness to take the place, but I donot feel that I can, and have said so. 

If I could believe that any exigency in public affairs calledfor me, then my personal wishes would be subservient--butit is not so. My own belief is that as a free citizen I cando more towards giving a right direction to public affairsthan I could as a Senator. 

. . . . . . . . . . . 

My wife joins me in the desire to be kindly remembered toMrs. Hoar. 

 Most sincerely your friend, BENJAMIN HARRISON. Hon. George F. Hoar, Worcester, Mass. 

I had a great many interesting experiences of Harrison'sroughness of manner and honesty and kindness of heart, whichit would not be right to relate here. But I may mention twoor three. 

When the term of General Corse, the Democratic Postmasterat Boston, expired, Mr. Dawes and I earnestly recommendedthat he should be reappointed. He was, with one or two exceptions, the most eminent living veteran of the Civil War. He wasthe hero of one of its noted exploits. "Hold the Fort" hadmade him famous in song and story. The business men of Boston, without distinction of party, were satisfied with him, andrecommended that he be continued in the service. There wasan association of the principal trades, nineteen in number, in which each trade had three representatives, making fifty-seven in all. Of these fifty-four were Republicans, and threewere Democrats. Fifty-four, though not the same fifty-four, recommended the continuance of General Corse in the service. He was recommended by the Republican members from Boston inthe Massachusetts Senate, and by most of those in the House, and by several of the Republican members of Congress, whosedistricts contained a part of the territory served by theoffice. 

President Harrison almost angrily refused to reappoint Corse. He said that while Marshals were being murdered in Florida, and the execution of the law resisted, he would appoint noman to public office who either sympathized with such things, or belonged to a party that did not oppose and resist them. I said to him: "Mr. President, how do you reconcile thiswith your declaration that no man would be removed from publicoffice for political reasons?" The President was quite angry, and showed his anger in his reply. I said: "Good morning, Mr. President, " and took my leave, also quite angry. Butin a moment or two I went back, and said: "Mr. President, if you think there is a man in the country who has a higherregard for you, or a more sincere desire for your successthan I have, I will never come here again. " Mr. Harrisonsaid, very pleasantly, "I know that very well, Mr. Hoar. "And the difference ended as quickly as it began. 

President Harrison sent for me in a few days, and said hehad made up his mind not to appoint Corse, but would appointany Republican I would nominate. I gave a list of six names, of which that of Mayor Thomas H. Hart stood at the head. Nextto him was that of Col. Horace Rockwell. Next to him wasWm. A. Russell. I selected Mr. Russell on account of hiseminent business capacity, and also because I knew that boththe President and Postmaster-General had great regard forhim. I told him at the same time that I did not believe Mr. Russell would accept the office. Next to him was Samuel W. McCall, and the fifth name was that of John W. Candler. Nextcame Congressman Frank W. Rockwell. A messenger was sentto Boston that afternoon. He got there before daylight thenext morning, and found Mr. Russell was absent on a longjourney to the South. It was not thought the chances ofhis acceptance made it worth while to keep the office open. So it was offered to Mr. Hart, who accepted it. 

Pretty soon afterward there came a vacancy in the UnitedStates Circuit Court for the First Judicial Circuit by theresignation of Judge Lowell. I desired to have Judge Putnam, of Maine, succeed him. He, too, was a Democrat. I did notknow exactly what to do about it, after my experience in thepost-office matter. So I saw Judge Gray of the Supreme Court, who had a high regard for Putnam, and asked him if he wouldbe willing to recommend him to the President. Judge Graysaid he would do it if the President applied to him for advice. But he was not willing to offer such advice unasked. He agreed, however, that I might say that Judge Lowell was about to resign, and that when the matter came up, if the President desiredto know Judge Gray's opinion, he would be very happy to giveit. The resignation took effect in the vacation of Congress. The President invited Judge Gray to come to see him, anddetermined to accept his advice. When I got to Washingtonin December, President Harrison sent for me and said: "Mr. Hoar, I have pretty much made up my mind to appoint JudgePutnam to the Circuit Court, if you approve. " I said: "Mr. President, I heartily approve. But I shall look with somecuriosity to see how you answer the excellent argument youmade against the appointment of a Democrat to office whenGeneral Corse's term expired, " to which Harrison burst outinto hearty laughter; and both incidents closed. 

When the bill for rebuilding the William and Mary Collegebuilding, which had been destroyed during the war, was passed, President Tyler and several other gentlemen interested inthe College, were very anxious lest the President should refuseto sign it. They came to Washington to ask me to go withthem to see him. This I did. I told him the history of theCollege, giving a list of the famous men who were graduatedfrom there. I spoke of the great affection that had inspiredthe people of Virginia for centuries, and reminded him thathis own ancestor, General Washington's friend, General BenjaminHarrison of the Revolution, had been a child of the College, and I pointed out what a measure of reconcilement it wouldbe. The President listened with a rather disgusted look, until I got through, and just as I rose to take my leave, said: "Mr. Hoar, have you got any reasons except sentimentalones?" I said I had no others, except those I had stated. The gentlemen went out very down-hearted, and said when theygot out that of course he would veto the bill. I said: "Ithink I know the man pretty well, and I think there is morethan an even chance that he will sign it, " and he did. 

Just before his term of office ended, he was in the President'sRoom, at the Capitol, to dispose of bills when there was nottime to take them to the White House before the hour of twelveo'clock, on the 4th of March. Many measures had been passedwithin an hour of the time of adjournment, among them a billfor the relief of the widow of Jefferson Davis. She had writtena Memoir of her husband, on the sale of which it was understoodshe depended for her livelihood in her advancing years. Butthe publishers had neglected a technicality which, if thedecision of one Circuit Judge were good law, made the copyrightvoid. So she was at the mercy of her publishers, and it wasfeared that they meant to take advantage of the defect. Sheapplied through General Gordon, then a member of the Senate, to Congress for relief. A bill passed the two Houses, whichI had drawn, providing that where the copies required by lawto be deposited in the Library of Congress, had not been sodeposited within the time required by law, the author of thebook might deposit them at a later time, and the copyrightshould not be rendered void. This was made a general law. Just before twelve o'clock, when the Senators were in theirseats ready for the inauguration of President Harrison's successor, which was to take place in about ten minutes, General Gordoncame to me in great distress, saying: "The Attorney-Generalsays the President means to refuse to sign that bill and thathe can do nothing with him. Can you help us?" I had devisedthe plan, and had got it through the Senate. I went intothe President's Room with General Gordon and said to the Presidentthat I wanted to speak to him about that bill, and began mystory when he broke in upon me, very uncivilly, and said:"We cannot pass laws to take care of hard individual cases. "I said: "No, Mr. President, we cannot pass laws to take careof individual cases, but where a general law is just and proper, it is no objection to it that it also affords relief in acase of individual injustice. " The President made some remarkto the effect that the people of the North would not likethat we should go out of our way to help the widow of JeffersonDavis. I had not told my story, nor stated my reasons. Isaid quite angrily: "Well, Mr. President, if you will nothear me, I will stop now. " I made my bow and withdrew fromthe circle. The President called after me: "Mr. Hoar, Iwill hear you. " Whereupon I told my story. But there wasno sign of relenting upon his grim countenance. I went backto my seat with General Gordon, who had accompanied me. Hetore off a piece of an order of exercises for the Inauguration, and handed it to a page, telling him to give it to a friendof Mrs. Davis, who was outside. He had written on it: "Hewon't sign the bill. " Just after the page had departed, theAttorney-General came up and told us that the President hadsigned the bill. General Gordon called back the page. Iasked him to give me the torn fragment of the order of exercises, on which he had written the message, which I have kept asa memorial of the transaction, and of him. Perhaps I maybe pardoned for adding that General Gordon came to me justafterward with great emotion, and said, "Hoar, save my allegianceto the Democratic Party, I want you to know that you own me. "

These stories may seem trifling. But such trifles sometimesgive an idea of the character of men like Harrison more thantheir greater actions. 

Benjamin Harrison many times thought rashly and spoke hastily. But he acted always, so far as I knew, under the impulse ofa warm, kind and brave heart, and of a great and wise intellect. 

Some of my Southern brethren have spoken of me with undeservedkindness in recent years, and they like to say that my hearthas softened within the last few years, and that I have becomemore tolerant and less harsh and bigoted than I was of old. Some Northern papers have taken the same view. What I didto secure the rebuilding of the William and Mary building, and to establish the policy of restoring at National costall the property of institutions of education, charity andreligion destroyed at the South, both of which were in thebeginning opposed by the almost unanimous sentiment of myparty associates, was done in the first and second terms ofmy service in the House of Representatives, now thirty-fiveyears ago. A Boston newspaper published a series of articlesdenouncing me as a bitter partisan and a bigoted and intoleranthater of the people of the South, some years ago. That veryweek I received a letter from Mrs. Jefferson Davis thankingme for what I had done to save her from privation in her oldage; a telegram from the authorities of William and Mary College, thanking me for my service in accomplishing the rebuildingof the College; and a personal call from Judge Howell E. Jackson, of Tennessee, a Southern Democrat and Confederate, thankingme for what I had done toward procuring his appointment asAssociate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. These things all happened in the same year, I believe, certainlyin a very short time after I had done what I could to inducethe reappointment of General Corse and the selection of JudgePutnam. 

I freely admit that I have believed with all my heart andsoul in the principles of the Republican Party. But I thinkthere can be found few members of that party who have beenless controlled in their public actions by violent partisanshipthan I have. 

CHAPTER XXXISATURDAY CLUB

In 1877, about the time of my election to the Senate, I waschosen a member of the famous Saturday Club. I always attendedthe meetings when I could be in Boston until after the deathof my brother, when every man who was a member when I waschosen was dead, except Mr. Norton and Judge Gray and theyounger Agassiz and Mr. Howells, and all of them had ceasedto be constant attendants. 

They used to meet at the Parker House in Boston once a month. Each member was at liberty to bring a guest. 

I suppose there was never a merely social club with so manyfamous men in it or another where the conversation was moredelightful since that to which Johnson and Burke and Goldsmithand Garrick and Reynolds belonged. There was plenty of sparklingwit and repartee and plenty of serious talk from philosophersand men of letters and science. Agassiz and Jeffries Wymanwould sometimes debate Darwin's theory of evolution, whichDarwin had confided to Asa Gray, another member, long beforehe made it known to the public. Holmes and Lowell contributedtheir wit, and Judge Hoar, whom Lowell declared the most brilliantman in conversation he had ever known, his shrewd Yankee senseand his marvellous store of anecdote. Some of the greatestmembers, notably Emerson and Longfellow and Whittier, werein general quite silent. But it was worth going a thousandmiles if but to see one of them, or to hear the tones of hisvoice. 

In the beginning I suspected Dr. Holmes of getting himselfready for the talk at the dinner as for a lecture. But Isoon found that was utterly unjust. He was always as goodif a new subject were brought up, which he could not haveexpected and which was wholly out of the range of his experience. His stream was abundant and sparkling and clear, wheneveryou might tap the cask. "Take another glass of wine, Judge, "he said to one of the members who was starting near midnightto drive twenty miles in the cold rain of autumn, "Take anotherglass of wine; it will shorten the distance and double theprospect. "

Dr. Holmes and I were born on the same day of the year, althoughI was seventeen years behind him. I sent to the delightfulAutocrat the following note which reached him on the morningof his eightieth birthday. 

WORCESTER, Aug. 28th, 89. 

_My dear Dr. Holmes:_ Let me add my salutation to thoseof so many of your countrymen, and so many who are not yourcountrymen, save in the republic of letters, on your birthday. You may well be amused to think how many political reputationshave risen and set during your long and sunny reign. I wasled to think of this by the fact that my own birthday alsocomes Aug. 29th. But alas!

 Consules sunt quotannis et novi proconsules, Solus aut Rex aut Poeta non quotannis nascitur. 

Of Governors and Senators we have an annual crop. But Autocratsand Poets come but once in eighty years. The asteroids mustnot envy the Georgium Sides his orbit of fourscore years, but rather rejoice in his beneficent and cheerful light, and in the certainty that it will keep on shining so longas there is a star in the sky. 

 I am Faithfully yours GEO. F. HOAR. 

I got the following pleasant reply:

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS. , August 30, 1889. 

_My dear Mr. Hoar, _

Your note of felicitation upon my having reached that "lengthof days" which Wisdom, if I remember correctly, holds in herright hand, was the first I received and is the first I answer. Briefly, of course, but with heartfelt sincerity, for I hardlythought that you whose hand is on the wheel that governs thecourse of the Nation, would find time to remember so smallan event as my birthday. 

You cannot doubt that it was a great pleasure to me to readyour name at the bottom of a page containing so much thatit was kind in you to write and most agreeable for me to read. 

Please accept my warmest and most grateful acknowledgments, and believe me

 Faithfully yours, OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

NAMES OF THE MEMBERS OF THE SATURDAY CLUB WHEN IUSED TO ATTEND ITS MEETINGS. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Francis Parkman, Edwin P. Whipple, Alexander Agassiz, Horatio Woodman, R. H. Dana, John S. Dwight, Wolcott Gibbs, Samuel G. Ward, Horace Gray, R. H. Dana, Jr. , Edward N. Perkins, Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Benjamin Pierce, W. D. Howells, J. R. Lowell, Edmund Quincy, H. W. Longfellow, E. L. Godkin, J. L. Motley, William B. Rogers, C. C. Felton, William Amory, O. W. Holmes, James Freeman Clarke, E. R. Hoar, Phillips Brooks, William H. Prescott, William W. Story, John G. Whittier, George F. Hoar, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Lowell, T. G. Appleton, O. W. Holmes, Jr. , J. M. Forbes, Theodore Lyman, Charles E. Norton, William James, J. Elliot Cabot, Francis A. Walker, Samuel G. Howe, Charles F. Adams, Jr. , Frederick H. Hedge, F. L. Olmsted, Estes Howe, R. Pumpelly, Charles Sumner, H. H. Richardson, Henry James, William Endicott, Jr. , Martin Brimmer, William C. Endicott, James T. Fields, William W. Goodwin, S. W. Rowse, John C. Gray, John A. Andrew, Edward C. Pickering, Jeffries Wyman, Thomas B. Aldrich, E. W. Gurney, Edward W. Emerson, W. M. Hunt, Walbridge A. Field, Charles F. Adams, Sen. , Henry L. Higginson, Charles W. Eliot, Edward W. Hooper, Charles C. Perkins, Henry P. Walcott. 

CHAPTER XXXIITHE WORCESTER FIRE SOCIETY

I have been for fifty years a member of another club calledthe Worcester Fire Society, some of whose members have hada remarkable relation to important events in the history ofthe country, of which the story will be worth recording. Theclub was founded in 1793, before the days of fire-engines, so that if the house of any of the members caught fire, hisassociates might come to the rescue with buckets and bagsand bed-keys and other apparatus to put out the fire and savethe property. But it long since became a mere social club. It is limited to thirty members. 

The elder Levi Lincoln, Mr. Jefferson's intimate friend, confidential correspondent and Attorney-General in his Cabinet, organizer of the political movement which built up Mr. Jefferson'spower in New England in the beginning of the last century, was not, I believe, a member of the Society himself. Buthis sons were, and many of his descendants and connectionsby marriage, certainly twelve or fifteen in all. When theoffice of Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Statesbecame vacant, by reason of the death of Mr. Justice WilliamCushing of Massachusetts, September 13, 1809, Levi Lincolnthe elder was appointed, confirmed by the Senate and commissionedto fill the vacancy. Mr. Jefferson earnestly desired andurged his appointment. President Madison accompanied theoffer of the office with a letter urging Mr. Lincoln to acceptit in spite of a malady of the eyes from which he was suffering. Mr. Madison says he had got along very well as Attorney-General and he thinks he would find less inconvenience indischarging the duties of Judge. But Mr. Lincoln declinedthe office. He lived until 1820, retaining his health andvigor, except for the trouble with his eyes. 

He was a very able man. He argued the case in which it wasdecided by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts that slaverywas abolished in that State by the Constitution, in 1780. 

Judge Story was appointed in his place. If Mr. Lincoln hadaccepted, it is likely that the great judicial fame of JudgeStory would be lacking from American jurisprudence. Storywould have devoted himself, probably, to professional or politicallife. At any rate he would not have been appointed to theBench before 1820. 

There can be no doubt that if Lincoln had accepted the seatupon the Bench, he would have been a thorn in the flesh ofMarshall. He doubtless shared Mr. Jefferson's dislike forthe great Chief Justice. The case of Dartmouth College _v. _Woodward was decided in 1819. There was in fact but one dissent, but any person who reads Shirley's book on the history ofthat case will be inclined to believe that without Judge StoryDartmouth College _v. _ Woodward would not have been decidedas it was. 

More interesting and important is the relation, to Mr. Webster'sseat in the Senate, of the second Levi Lincoln, son of himof whom I have just spoken, himself a member of the WorcesterClub that has been referred to. He was Governor of Massachusetts, Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, and a Memberof the National House of Representatives. He was electedSenator of the United States by one branch of the MassachusettsLegislature when the term of Elijah H. Mills expired, March3, 1827. There can be no doubt that if he had consented hewould also have been elected by the other house. Mr. Websterwas chosen at the next Session. But before he was electedhe wrote very strongly urging Mr. Lincoln to accept the office. He said in his letter dated May 22, 1827:

"I beg to say that I see no way in which the public goodcan be so well promoted as by your consenting to go to theSenate. This is my own clear and decided opinion; it isthe opinion, equally clear and decided, of intelligent andpatriotic friends here, and I am able to add that it is alsothe decided opinion of all those friends elsewhere, whosejudgment in such matters we should naturally regard. I believeI may say, without violating confidence, that it is the wish, entertained with some earnestness, of our friends at Washington, that you should consent to be Mr. Mills's successor. I needhardly add after what I have said that this is my own wish. "

Mr. Lincoln felt constrained to decline, although the officewould doubtless have been very agreeable to him, by reasonof some statements he had made when elected Governor thathe should not be a candidate for the Senate. Mr. Lincolnmight, without dishonor or even indelicacy, have acceptedthe office in spite of those utterances. It was quite clearthat all the persons who might be supposed to have actedupon them, desired his election when the time came on. Buthe was a man of scrupulous honor and did not mean to leaveany room for the imputation that he did not regard what isdue to "consistency of character, " to use his own phrase. Now if Mr. Lincoln would have accepted the office it is likelythat he would have held it until his death in 1868. At anyrate it is quite certain that he would have held it untilthe political revolution of 1851. 

It is quite clear to me that the office of Senator was atMr. Lincoln's command. Observe that this was in 1827, andwas the election for the term of six years, ending March 3, 1833. That includes the period of Jackson's great contestwith Nullification, when Mr. Webster, with all his power, came to Jackson's support. It includes the time of the Replyto Hayne, and the great debate with Calhoun. 

Daniel Webster, I need not say, would have been a great figureanywhere. But if Mr. Lincoln had acted otherwise, there wouldhave been absent from our history and literature Webster'sReply to Hayne, the support of Jackson in the day of Nullification, the debate with Calhoun including the speech, "The Constitutionnot a Compact between Sovereign States, " and the powerfulattack on Jackson's assertion of power in the removal of thedeposits. The speech on the President's Protest, with thewonderful passage describing the power of England, would nothave been made. 

If the sentiment of Patriotism, and love of Liberty and Unionare to be dominant in this Republic, we cannot measure thevalue of the influence of Daniel Webster and the speech inreply to Hayne. I am not sure that, without Mr. Webster'spowerful championship of the side which prevailed, Mr. Calhoun'stheory would not have become established. At any rate, itwas the fortune of Daniel Webster that the doctrine of NationalUnity, whenever it has prevailed in the hearts of his countrymen, has been supported by his argument and clothed in his language. 

Another incident of the same kind, not of like importanceto those of which I have told, but still of a good deal ofinterest and importance, happened more lately. I had a gooddeal to do with it myself. 

When President Hayes entered upon office, there were but threemembers of the Senate of either party who were supportersof his Administration. I was one of them. The other twowere my colleague, Mr. Dawes, and Stanley Matthews of Ohio. President Hayes was, in my opinion, a very wise and able andupright man. It was an admirable Administration. He hada strong and excellent Cabinet. But his nomination had disappointedthe ambitions of some very influential men in his own party, and the powerful factions of which they were the leaders andcandidates. The opposing party had not only felt the usualdisappointment in defeat, but denied the lawfulness of hiselection. So I was more familiar than would ordinarily havebeen likely to have been the case with all the councils ofhis Administration. The Secretary of State was my near kinsman, and the Attorney-General had been my law partner. 

When the vacancy occurred in the English mission by the resignationof Mr. John Welsh, I very strongly urged the appointment ofMr. Lowell. Mr. Evarts was quite unwilling to select Mr. Lowell, and in deference to his wishes, President Hayes offeredthe place to several other persons, including myself. Theoffer was communicated to me by Mr. Evarts who was, at thattime, Secretary of State. But there were many good reasonswhy I could not accept it. The offer was made to GovernorAlexander H. Bullock, a member of the little society of whichI have spoken. I was myself authorized by the President tocommunicate his desire to Governor Bullock. His answer, decliningof account of the condition of his family, will be found inthe life prefixed to the published volume of his speeches. 

Now, if Governor Bullock had accepted the appointment, whichwas undoubtedly very attractive to him, what Mr. Lowell didin England would not have been done. He will doubtless godown in literature as a great poet. But it seems to me heis entitled to an equal rank among the prose writers of thecountry, and indeed among the prose writers of the Englishlanguage of our time. His admirable address on Democracy, the delightful address as President of the Wordsworth Society, several estimates of the British poets, delivered by him onvarious occasions in England when he was Minister there, areamong the very best examples of his work in prose. 

APPENDIX I

It was upon Mr. Sherman's motion that the words, "Common Defenceand General Welfare, " which have played so important a partin the construction of the Constitution, were introduced intothat instrument. He proposed to add to the taxing clausethe words, "for the payment of said debts and for the defrayingof expenses that shall be incurred for the defence and generalwelfare. "

This proposition, according to Mr. Madison, was disagreedto as being unnecessary. It then obtained only the singlevote of Connecticut. But three days afterward Mr. Shermanmoved and obtained the appointment of a Committee, of whichhe was a member, to which this and several subjects were committed. That Committee reported the clause in the shape in which itnow stands, and it was adopted unanimously. 

Its adoption is an instance of Mr. Sherman's great tenacity, and his power to bring the body, of which he was a member, to his own way of thinking in the end, however unwilling inthe beginning. This phrase had played not only an importantbut a decisive part in the great debate between a strict constructionof the Constitution and the construction which has prevailedand made it the law of the being of a great National life. 

This story is well told in Farrar's "Manual of the Constitution, "pages 110, 309, 324. 

APPENDIX II

Roger Minott Sherman, son of Roger Sherman's brother Josiah, was born in Woburn, Mass. , May 22, 1773. Mr. Sherman wasmuch attached to him and defrayed the cost of his education. He was an inmate of his uncle's family while a student atYale College. He was graduated in the year 1792. He wasone of the ablest lawyers and advocates New England ever produced, probably having no equal at the Bar of New England exceptJeremiah Mason and Daniel Webster. I attended a dinner ofthe Alumni of Yale College some years ago. President Woolseysat on one side of me, and Dr. Leonard Bacon on the other;and right opposite at the table was Rev. Dr. Atwater, thenI believe of Princeton, but formerly Mr. Sherman's pastor inFairfield. President Woolsey said that Roger Minott Shermancame nearer his conception of Cicero than any other personhe ever heard speak. They used frequently to invite him todeliver public addresses at the College. But he never wouldaccept the invitation. After refusal, the invitation wouldbe renewed again after a few years with like result. 

To the above estimate of Mr. Sherman, Dr. Bacon and Mr. Atwateragreed. 

When I was in the Law School at Harvard, Professor Simon Greenleaftold the class in one of his lectures that he was once travellingthrough Connecticut in a carriage on a summer journey, andcame to a town, I think Fairfield, which was the county seat. He stopped to get his dinner and rest his horses. While thehorses were being fed he went into the court-house, intendingto stay only a few minutes, and found Roger Minott Shermanarguing a case before the Supreme Court with Judge Gould onthe other side. He was much impressed by Mr. Sherman's clearand powerful argument. Mr. Sherman and Judge Gould wereengaged on opposite sides in nearly all the cases. ProfessorGreenleaf was so much interested by what he heard that heremained and attended court during the entire week. I donot remember his exact language, but he, in substance, gavean estimate of Mr. Sherman as a profound lawyer and able advocate, not less exalted than President Woolsey had given of him asan orator. 

Some slight account of Roger Minott Sherman will be foundin Goodrich's "Recollections. "

Mr. Evarts once told me that there was an important controversy, involving the title to a valuable cargo, in which a lawyerin Hartford was on one side, and a member of the Bar of thecity of New York on the other. The New York lawyer went toHartford to negotiate about the case. The Hartford lawyerhad obtained the opinion of Roger Minott Sherman for his clientand held it in his hand during the conversation, labelledon the outside, "Opinion of Roger Minott Sherman, " and movedit about under the eye of his opponent. The opinion was infact that the Hartford man's client had no case. But theNew York lawyer supposed that if the man had got Roger MinottSherman's opinion, and seemed to set so much store upon thedocument, it was favorable to the party who had consultedhim. He was much alarmed and settled the case on favorableterms to his antagonist. 

Mr. Sherman was famous for his quickness of wit. A storywent the rounds of the papers in my youth, which may or maynot have any truth in it, but which I will record. It issaid that he was once arguing a case against Nathan Smith, a very able but rather coarse lawyer. Mr. Smith had discussedthe question of law with the subtilty for which he was distinguished. Mr. Sherman said to the court that he thought his brotherSmith's metaphysics were out of place in that discussion;that he was not adverse to such refinement at a proper time, and would willingly, on a fit occasion, chop logic and splithairs with him. Smith pulled a hair out of his own head, and holding it up, said, --"Split that. " Sherman replied, quickas lightning, "May it please your Honor, I didn't say bristles. "

The following is the passage referred to from S. G. Goodrich's"Recollections of a Lifetime":

"Roger Minott Sherman was distinguished for acute logicalpowers and great elegance of diction, --words and sentencesseemed to flow from his lips as if he were reading from the_Spectator. _ He was a man of refined personal appearanceand manners; tall, stooping a little in his walk; deliberatein his movements and speech, indicating circumspection, whichwas one of his characteristics. His countenance was paleand thoughtful, his eye remarkable for a keen penetratingexpression. Though a man of grave general aspect, he wasnot destitute of humor. He was once travelling in westernVirginia, and stopping at a small tavern, was beset with questionsby the landlord, as to where he came from, whither he wasgoing, etc. At last said Mr. Sherman, 'Sit down, sir, andI will tell you all about it. ' The landlord sat down. 'Sir, 'said he, 'I am from the Blue Light State of Connecticut. 'The landlord stared. 'I am a deacon in a Calvinistic church. 'The landlord was evidently shocked. 'I was a member of theHartford Convention. ' This was too much for the democraticnerves of the landlord; he speedily departed, and left hislodger to himself. "

[Frontispiece: v2. Jpg]

[Title page]AUTOBIOGRAPHYOF SEVENTY YEARS

BYGEORGE F. HOAR

WITH PORTRAITS

VOLUME II. 

NEW YORKCHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS1903

[Table of Contents]CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IELECTION TO THE SENATE

CHAPTER IIPRESIDENT HAYES

CHAPTER IIICABINET OF PRESIDENT HAYES

CHAPTER IVATTEMPT TO REOPEN THE QUESTION OF THE TITLE TO THEPRESIDENCY

CHAPTER VTHE SENATE IN 1877

CHAPTER VILEADERS OF THE SENATE IN 1877

CHAPTER VIICOMMITTEE SERVICE IN THE SENATE

CHAPTER VIIITHE RIVER AND HARBOR BILL

CHAPTER IXCHINESE TREATY AND LEGISLATION

CHAPTER XTHE WASHINGTON TREATY AND THE GENEVA AWARD

CHAPTER XITHE PRESIDENT'S POWER OF REMOVAL

CHAPTER XIIFISHERIES

CHAPTER XIIITHE FEDERAL ELECTIONS BILL

CHAPTER XIVCONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS AND THE PRESIDENTIALSUCCESSION BILL

CHAPTER XVPRESIDENT CLEVELAND'S JUDGES

CHAPTER XVISOME SOUTHERN SENATORS

CHAPTER XVIICUSHMAN KELLOGG DAVIS

CHAPTER XVIIIGEORGE BANCROFT

CHAPTER XIXVISITS TO ENGLAND (1860, 1868, 1871)

CHAPTER XXVISITS TO ENGLAND, 1892

CHAPTER XXIVISITS TO ENGLAND, 1896

CHAPTER XXIISILVER AND BIMETALLISM

CHAPTER XXIIIVISITS TO ENGLAND, 1899

CHAPTER XXIVA REPUBLICAN PLATFORM

CHAPTER XXVOFFICIAL SALARIES

CHAPTER XXVIPROPRIETY IN DEBATE

CHAPTER XXVIITHE FISH-BALL LETTERS

CHAPTER XXVIIITHE BIRD PETITION

CHAPTER XXIXTHE A. P. A. CONTROVERSY

CHAPTER XXXTHE ENGLISH MISSION

CHAPTER XXXIPRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND THE SYRIAN CHILDREN

CHAPTER XXXIINATIONAL BANKRUPTCY

CHAPTER XXXIIITHE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

CHAPTER XXXIVAPPOINTMENTS TO OFFICE

CHAPTER XXXVORATORY AND SOME ORATORS I HAVE HEARD

CHAPTER XXXVITRUSTS

CHAPTER XXXVIIRECOLLECTIONS OF THE WORCESTER BAR

CHAPTER XXXVIIISOME JUDGES I HAVE KNOWN

CHAPTER XXXIXPOLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

CHAPTER XLEDWARD EVERETT HALE

APPENDIXTHE FOREST OF DEAN (BY JOHN BELLOWS)

INDEX

[Second Title page]

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SEVENTY YEARS

[Text]AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SEVENTY YEARS

CHAPTER IELECTION TO THE SENATE

I have every reason to believe that my constituents in theWorcester district would have gladly continued me in thepublic service for ten years longer, if I had been so minded. I presided over the District Convention that nominated mysuccessor. Before the convention was called to order thedelegates crowded around me and urged me to reconsider myrefusal to stand for another term, and declared they wouldgladly nominate me again. But I persisted in my refusal. I supposed then that my political career was ended. My homeand my profession and my library had an infinite attractionfor me. I had become thoroughly sick of Washington and politicsand public life. 

But the Republican Party in Massachusetts was having a deathstruggle with General Butler. That very able, adroit andambitious man was attempting to organize the political forcesof the State into a Butler party, and to make them the instrumentof his ambitions. He had in some mysterious way got the earof General Grant and the control of the political patronageof the State, so far as the United States offices were concerned. I had denounced him and his methods with all my might in aletter I had written to the people of Massachusetts, fromwhich I have already made extracts. I had incurred his bitterpersonal enmity, and was regarded with perhaps one exception, that of my older brother Judge Hoar, as his most unrelentingopponent. 

The people of Massachusetts were never an office-seekingpeople. There is no State in the Union whose representativesat the seat of Government have less trouble in that way, orthat gives less trouble to the Executive Departments or tothe President. I have had that assurance from nearly everyPresident since I have been in public life. And the peopleof Massachusetts have never concerned themselves very muchas to who should hold the Executive offices, small or large, so that they were honestly and faithfully served, and thatthe man appointed was of good character and standing. Thereform which took the civil service out of politics alwaysfound great favor in Massachusetts. But since General Butler, in some way never fully explained to the public, got the earof the appointing power he seemed to be filling all the Departmentsat Washington with his adherents, especially the importantplaces in the Treasury. The public indignation was deeplyaroused. Men dreaded to read the morning papers lest theyshould see the announcement of the removal from the publicservice of some honest citizen, or brave soldier, who wasfilling the place of postmaster or marshal, or Custom Houseofficial, or clerk in a Department at Washington, and theputting in his place some unscrupulous follower of the fortunesof General Butler. The climax was reached when Butler's chieflieutenant, Simmons, was appointed Collector of the Port ofBoston. Judge Russell, the old Collector, was an able andvery popular man. He had given Butler a sort of half-heartedsupport. But he was incapable of lending himself to any baseor unworthy purpose. He was compelled to vacate the office, much to his disgust. He accepted that of Minister to Venezuela, an unimportant foreign mission, and William A. Simmons wasappointed in his place. The process of weeding out the CustomHouse then went on with great rapidity. Colonel Moulton, one of the bravest soldiers of the Civil War, who had beenunder rebel fire in a Charleston dungeon, and Colonel A. A. Sherman, a man with a marvellous military record, were removedto make way for men for whom, to say the least, the publichad no respect. The order for their removal was recalledin consequence of a direct appeal to President Grant. Mr. Hartwell, the Treasurer, an excellent officer, who had graduatedthe first scholar at Harvard, was removed. Mrs. Chenoweth, a very accomplished lady, widow of one of the bravest officersof the Civil War, a member of Grant's staff, who was fillinga clerical position at the Custom House, was notified of herremoval. That also was arrested by a direct appeal to Grant. General Andrews, one of our best officers, afterwards professorat West Point, was dropped from the office of Marshal, andone of the adherents of Butler put in his place. 

The indignation of the better class of Republicans was aroused. Before the appointment of Simmons, Mr. Boutwell had been electedSenator, and Mr. Richardson had succeeded him as Secretaryof the Treasury. Mr. Boutwell was a favorite with the President. Mr. Sumner, then the senior Senator, was on the most unfriendlyrelations with the President, and had opposed his reelectionto the best of his ability. It was not considered likely, under the custom then universally prevailing and indeed prevailingever since, that President Grant would ever have made suchan appointment without the entire approval of the Senatorfrom the State interested, with whom he was on most friendlyterms and who had served in his Cabinet as Secretary of theTreasury. Governor Boutwell was consulted about it, and gaveit his approval, although it is understood that afterward, in obedience to the indignant feeling of the people, whichwas deeply excited, he voted against the confirmation of Simmonsin the Senate. At the same time he informed his associatesthat he did not wish to have them understand that he requestedthem to vote against Simmons because of his opposition, orbecause of any so-called courtesy of the Senate. Simmonswas the manager of Mr. Boutwell's campaign for reelection, and General Butler was his earnest supporter, giving him noticeand urging him to repair at once to Boston when the movementagainst him became formidable. 

I am quite sure that but for the determination of the peopleof Massachusetts not to endure Butler and Butlerism any longer, and probably but for the appointment of Simmons, I shouldnever have been elected Senator. It is likely there wouldhave been no change in the office until this moment. 

When I left home for Washington at the beginning of the Decembersession of Congress in 1876, the late Adin Thayer told methat some of the Republicans had got sick of Butler's rule, and they were determined to have a candidate for Senator whocould be trusted to make zealous opposition to him and hismethods, and that they proposed to use my name. I told himI did not believe they would be able to get twenty-five votes, that Mr. Boutwell, then Senator, was an able man, and thatI did not think the fact even that he was understood to bea strong friend and ally of General Butler would induce thepeople to displace him. Mr. Thayer replied that at any ratethere should be a protest. 

I had no communication from any other human being upon thesubject of my candidacy for the Senate, and made none to anyhuman being, with one exception, until my election by theLegislature was announced. My oldest sister was fatally sick, and I received a letter every day giving an account of hercondition. In a postscript to one letter from my brother, he made some slight allusion to the election for Senator thenpending in the Massachusetts Legislature. But with that exceptionI never heard about it and had nothing to do with it. 

I can truly say that I was as indifferent to the result, sofar as it affected me personally, as to the question whetherI should walk on one side of the street or the other. I didnot undervalue the great honor of representing Massachusettsin the Senate of the United States. But I had an infinitelonging for my home and my profession and my library. I neverfound public employment pleasant or congenial. But the fatessent me to the Senate and have kept me there until I am nowthe man longest in continuous legislative service in thiscountry, and have served in the United States Senate longerthan any other man who ever represented Massachusetts. 

The last three times I have been elected to the Senate Ihave had, I believe, every Republican vote of the Legislature, and I was assured--of course I cannot speak with much confidenceof such a matter--that I could have all the Democratic votes, if necessary. I state these things with a feeling of naturalpride. But I do not attribute it to any special merit ofmine. It has been the custom of Massachusetts to continueher Senators in public life so long as they were willing, and were in general accord with the political opinion of themajority of the people. 

I have, however, owed very much indeed to the moderationand kindness of the eminent gentlemen who might have beenmost formidable competitors, if they had thought fit. Justbefore the election of 1883, when all the discontented elementswere seeking a candidate, General Francis A. Walker, oneof the ablest men ever born on the soil so productive of goodand able men, was proposed as my competitor. He would havehad a great support. I think he would have liked the service, for which he was so eminently fitted. He had been my pupil, and had gone from my office to the War. He came out promptlyin a letter in which he declared that in his judgment Mr. Hoar was the fittest person in the Commonwealth for the officeof Senator. Governor Long was my Republican competitor in1883. But on two or three occasions since, when he was proposedin many quarters for the office of Senator, he promptly refusedto have his name submitted to the Legislature, and declaredhimself for me. He is a man of brilliant ability, and a greatfavorite with the people of the Commonwealth. General WilliamF. Draper, lately Ambassador to Italy, a most distinguishedsoldier, a business man of great sagacity and success, havinginherited from his father a right to the regard of the people--a regard which has been extended not only to him, but alsoto his very able and excellent brothers--more than once whenthere has been an election of Senator, has been proposed inmany quarters. He has promptly, both in letter and in publicinterviews, rejected the suggestion, finally with impatiencethat he was put to the trouble of repeating himself in thematter so often. 

I think that in any other State than Massachusetts, and eventhere, without the great kindness and moderation of thesegentlemen, my tenure of office, which will have continuedfor thirty-eight years, if my life be spared, would have beenmuch shorter. 

Mr. Sumner was in general accord with the Republicans of Massachusettson important questions in issue in his time. But he bitterlyand savagely attacked President Grant at the height of hispopularity, and did his best to defeat him for reelection. He allowed his name to be used as candidate for Governor, against Governor Washburn. The defeat of Grant would, ofcourse, have caused that of Henry Wilson, candidate for theVice-Presidency. Still I have no doubt that if Mr. Sumnerhad lived, he would have been reelected to the Senate withoutany very formidable opposition. 

CHAPTER IIPRESIDENT HAYES

President Hayes's Administration began under circumstancesof peculiar difficulty. In the first Congress of his termthe Democrats had a majority in the House. They had refusedto pass the Army Appropriation Bill the winter before andwould not consent to such a bill in the following winter withouta condition that no military force should be used to maintainorder at elections, or to keep in power state governmentsobnoxious to them. But his worst foes were of his own household. There were two factions among the Republicans, one led byMr. Blaine and the other by Conkling and Cameron. Blaineand Conkling had been disappointed aspirants for the Presidency. Mr. Hayes and his advisers were in favor of what was calledreform in the civil service and utterly rejected the claimof Senators and Representatives to dictate nominations toexecutive and judicial offices. With the exception of StanleyMatthews of Ohio and my colleague, Mr. Dawes, I was, I believe, the only cordial supporter of the President in the Senate. 

Mr. Blaine was disposed, I think, in the beginning, to givethe President his support. But he was rendered exceedinglyindignant by the refusal of President Hayes to appoint Mr. Frye to a seat in the Cabinet, which Mr. Blaine desired, asit would smooth the way of Mr. Eugene Hale, his most intimatefriend and strongest supporter, to succeed Mr. Hamlin inthe Senate. President Hayes was willing to appoint Mr. Haleto a Cabinet office. But Mr. Hale, I think very wisely, declinedthe overture, as he had before declined the tender of a seatin the Cabinet from President Grant. He would have made anexcellent Cabinet officer. But he was specially fitted forthe more agreeable and permanent public service of Senator. I do not know what occasioned President Hayes's reluctanceto comply with Mr. Blaine's desire. But it was a fortunatedecision for Mr. Frye. If he had gone into the Cabinet, in all likelihood the people of Maine would have chosen anotherSenator when Mr. Blaine became Secretary of State under Garfieldin 1881, and according to the habit of the people of thatState would have continued him in their service. So Mr. Frye's brilliant and useful career in the Senate would havebeen wanting to the history of the Republic. 

I had myself something to do with the selection of the Cabinet. I had been a member of the Convention held at Cincinnati thathad nominated President Hayes. The Massachusetts delegationhad turned the scale between him and Blaine. Their votesgave him the slender majority to which he owed his nomination. I had also been a member of the Electoral Commission to whichthe contest between him and Tilden had been submitted andI had been on the committee that framed the bill under whichthat Commission was created. I had voted with the Democratsof the House to support that bill against the judgment ofa large majority of the Republicans. I agreed with PresidentHayes in the matter of a reform in the civil service and inhis desire to free the Executive power from the trammel ofsenatorial dictation. 

I had formed a strong friendship with Mr. McCrary in the Houseof Representatives and had earnestly commended him to thePresident for appointment to the office of Attorney-General. I did not expect to make any other recommendation. Therehad been an unfortunate estrangement between the Republicansof Massachusetts and of Maine by reason of the refusal ofthe Massachusetts delegation to support Mr. Blaine for thePresidency. I thought it desirable for the interest of theRepublican Party that that breach should be healed and especiallydesirable that the incoming administration, so beset withdifficulty, should have the powerful support of Mr. Blaineand of those Republicans of whom he was the leader and favorite. So I thought it best that he should be consulted in the matterof the selection of a Cabinet officer from New England andthat I should keep aloof. 

But the day after President Hayes's inauguration, ratherlate in the afternoon, Mr. Blaine came into the Senate Chamberand told me with some appearance of excitement that he thoughtthe President wanted to see the Massachusetts Senators. Idid not, however, act upon that message, and did not go tothe White House that day. I was at my room in the eveningwhen Senator Morrill of Vermont came and told me that PresidentHayes wished him to inquire of me what Massachusetts man Idesired to have appointed to a place in the Cabinet. I toldMr. Morrill that there were two gentlemen of great capacityand high character, either of whom would make an excellentCabinet officer. One of them was William B. Washburn, andthe other Alexander H. Rice. Each of them had held the officeof Governor of the Commonwealth, and each of them had beena very eminent member of the House of Representatives. ButI said that each belonged to what might be called a separatefaction or division in the Republican Party, and the appointmentof either would be distasteful to some of the supporters ofthe other. I added that there was one man of whom I thoughtvery highly indeed, an intimate friend of mine, whose appointmentI thought would give pleasure to everybody in Massachusetts. That was General Charles Devens, then Judge of the SupremeCourt, a very eminent advocate and orator, and one of themost distinguished soldiers the State had sent into the war. 

Mr. Morrill went back to the President with the message. Early the next morning I received notice from the WhiteHouse that the President wished to see me. I complied withhis desire at once. Mr. Dawes had also been sent for andwas there. The President said he could offer General Devensthe Department of War, or perhaps the Navy. Mr. Dawes thoughtthat he would not be willing to accept the latter. I toldthe President that I thought he would; that General Devenswas a native of Charlestown. He had always taken a greatinterest in the Navy. He had known a great many of the oldand famous naval officers, and some of his near relativeshad been in that service. But the President finally authorizedme to send a telegram to General Devens offering him the Departmentof War. I sent the telegram and requested Devens to comeat once to Washington, which he did. At the same time, thePresident stated his purpose to offer Mr. McCrary the Departmentof Justice. In the course of the day, however, it was reportedto the President that Mr. McCrary had formed a decided opinionin favor of the McGarrahan claim, a claim which affected largeand valuable mining properties in California. Most personswho had investigated the claim believed it to be utterly fraudulent. There were many persons of great influence who were interestedin the mining property affected. They strongly appealed tothe President not to place in the office of Attorney-Generala man who was committed in favor of the claim. The Presidentthen asked me if I thought General Devens would be willingto accept the office of Attorney-General, and exchange itfor that of Secretary of War later, when the McGarrahan claimhad been disposed of so far as Executive action was concerned. I told the President that I thought he would. When GeneralDevens arrived I stated the case to him. He said he shouldbe unwilling to agree to such an arrangement. He would bewilling to accept the office in the beginning, but if he wereto give up the office of Attorney-General after having onceundertaken it, he might be thought to have failed to dischargehis duties to the satisfaction of the President, or that ofthe public. He was unwilling to take that risk. 

So the President determined to offer the Department of Justiceto General Devens, and the Department of War to Mr. McCrary, a good deal to the disappointment of the latter. All McCrary'sambitions in life were connected with his profession. Hetook the first opportunity to leave the Executive Departmentfor a judicial career. 

The other members of the Cabinet were: William M. Evarts, Secretary of State; John Sherman, Secretary of the Treasury;Carl Schurz, Secretary of the Interior; David M. Key, Postmaster-General; Richard M. Thompson, of Indiana, Secretary of theNavy. 

President Hayes was a simple-hearted, sincere, strong andwise man. He is the only President of the United States whopromised, when he was a candidate for office, not to be acandidate again, who kept his pledge. He carried out theprinciples of Civil Service Reform more faithfully than anyother President before or since down to the accession of PresidentRoosevelt. General Grant in his "Memoirs" praises the soldierlyquality of President Hayes very highly. He was made Brigadier-General on the recommendation of Sheridan, and brevetted Major-General for gallant and distinguished services. He wrote, after the Presidential election, to John Sherman, as follows:"You feel, I am sure, as I do about this whole business. Afair election would have given us about forty electoral votesat the South, at least that many; but we must not allow ourfriends to defeat one outrage by another. There must benothing curved on our part. Let Mr. Tilden have the placeby violence, intimidation and fraud rather than undertaketo prevent it by means that will not bear the severest scrutiny. "

He upheld the good faith of the nation in his veto of thebill to authorize the coinage of the silver dollar of 412-1/2grains, and to restore its legal tender character in 1879; andin his veto of the bill violating our treaty with China. Hegrew steadily in public favor with all parties, and with allparts of the country, as his Administration went on. Underhis Administration the resumption of specie payments was accomplished;and, in spite of the great difficulties caused by the factionalopposition in his own party, he handed down his office toa Republican successor. 

The weakness and folly of the charge against the decisionof the Electoral Commission, that it was unconstitutionalor fraudulent, and the fact that the American people werenever impressed by these charges, is shown by the fact thatGeneral Garfield, one of the majority who gave that decision, was elected to succeed President Hayes, and that six of theeight members of that majority, now dead, maintained, everyone them, throughout their honored and useful lives, the respectand affection of their countrymen, without distinction ofparty. Certainly there can be found among the great men ofthat great generation no more pure and brilliant lights thanSamuel F. Miller, William Strong, Joseph P. Bradley, FrederickT. Frelinghuysen, Oliver P. Morton and James A. Garfield. There are two survivors of that majority, Mr. Edmunds andmyself. Neither has found that the respect in which his countrymenheld him has been diminished by that decision. 

President Hayes has been accused of abandoning the reconstructionpolicy of his party. It has also been said that he showeda want of courage in failing to support the Republican StateGovernments in Louisiana and South Carolina; that if the votesof those States were cast for him they were cast for Packardand Chamberlain at the elections for Governor held the sameday, and that he should have declined the Presidency, or havemaintained these Governors in place. But these charges are, at the least, inconsiderate, not the say ignorant. It oughtto be said also that President Grant before he left officehad determined to do in regard to these State Governmentsexactly what Hayes afterward did, and that Hayes acted withhis full approval. Second, I have the authority of PresidentGarfield for saying that Mr. Blaine had come to the sameconclusion. The Monday morning after the electoral counthad been completed and the result declared, Blaine had a longtalk with Garfield, which Garfield reported to me. He toldhim that he had made up his mind, if he had been elected, to offer the office of Secretary of State to Mr. Evarts, or, if anything prevented that, to Judge Hoar. He furthersaid that he thought it was time to discontinue maintainingRepublican State Governments in office by the National powerand that the people of the Southern States must settle theirState elections for themselves. Mr. Blaine by his disappointmentin the formation of President Hayes's Cabinet was inducedto make an attack on him which seems inconsistent with thisdeclaration. But Mr. Blaine soon abandoned this ground, and, so far as I now remember, never afterward advocated interferencewith the control of the Southern States by National authority. It seems to me that President Hayes did only what his dutyunder the Constitution peremptorily demanded of him. I entirelyapproved his conduct at the time, and, so far as I know andbelieve, he agreed exactly with the doctrine on which I alwaysmyself acted before and since. The power and duty of thePresident are conferred and limited by the Constitution. TheConstitution requires that no appropriation shall be madefor the support of the Army for more than two years. In practicethe appropriation is never for more than one year. That isfor the express purpose, I have always believed, of givingto Congress, especially to the House of Representatives, whichmust inaugurate all appropriation bills, absolute controlover the use of the Army, and the power to determine for whatpurposes the military power shall be used. At the sessionbefore President Hayes's inauguration the Democratic Houseof Representatives had refused to pass an Army Bill. TheHouse refused to pass an Army Bill the next year, except oncondition that the soldiers should not be used to supportthe State Government. 

It became necessary to call a special session of Congressin October, 1877, by reason of the failure of the Army AppropriationBill the winter before. The first chapter of the Statutesof that session, being an act making appropriations for thesupport of the Army for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1878, and for other purposes, enacts "that none of the money herebyappropriated shall be expended, directly or indirectly, forany use not strictly necessary for, and directly connectedwith, the military service of the Government; and this restrictionshall apply to the use of public animals, forage, and vehicles. "

It was, therefore, President Hayes's Constitutional duty, in my judgment, to desist from using the military power ofthe Government on the 30th day of June, 1877, when the fiscalyear expired for which there was an appropriation for thesupport of the Army. In fact he removed the troops a littleearlier. But he received assurances from the Democratic leaders--whether they were made good I will not now undertake to inquire--that there should be no unlawful force on their part afterthe removal of the troops. Mr. Hayes was right and wisein securing this stipulation if he could, by freeing thesecommunities from military grasp a few weeks before he wouldhave been compelled to do it at any rate. Obedience to thisclear mandate of Constitutional duty was not in the leastinconsistent with a faithful and vigorous use of all the otherpowers which were lodged in his hands by the Constitutionfor securing the rights of the colored people, or the purityand integrity of National elections. It is true that substantiallythe same vote elected Packard of Louisiana as that which chosethe Hayes electors. But the authority to declare who is thePresident lawfully chosen, and the Constitutional power tomaintain the Governor in his seat by force are lodged invery different hands. The latter can only be used by theNational Executive under the circumstances specially describedin the Constitution, and it can never be used by him for anyconsiderable period of time contrary to the will of Congress, and without powers put in his hands by legislation which mustoriginate in the body which represents the people. 

The infinite sweetness and tact of his wife contributed greatlyto the success of the Administration of President Hayes. Shewas a woman of great personal beauty. Her kindness of heartknew no difference between the most illustrious and the humblestof her guests. She accomplished what would have been impossibleto most women, the maintenance of a gracious and delightfulhospitality while strictly adhering to her principles of totalabstinence, and rigorously excluding all wines and intoxicatingliquors from the White House during her administration. Theold wine drinkers of Washington did not take to the innovationvery kindly. But they had to console themselves with a fewjests or a little grumbling. The caterer or chef in chargeof the State dinners took compassion on the infirmity of ournature so far as to invent for one of the courses which cameabout midway of the State dinner, a box made of the frozenskin of an orange. When it was opened you found instead ofthe orange a punch or sherbet into which as much rum was crowdedas it could contain without being altogether liquid. Thiswas known as the life-saving station. 

Somebody who met Mr. Evarts just after he had been at a dinnerat the White House asked him how it went off. "Excellently, "was the reply, "the water flowed like champagne. "

CHAPTER IIICABINET OF PRESIDENT HAYES

There has hardly been a stronger Cabinet since Washingtonthan that of President Hayes. Its members worked togetherin great harmony. All of them, I believe, were thoroughlydevoted to the success of the Administration. 

The Secretary of State was William M. Evarts. He was my nearkinsman and intimate friend. His father died in his earlyyouth. My father was Mr. Evarts's executor, and the son, after his mother broke up housekeeping, came to my father'shouse in his college vacations as to a home. He studied lawat the Harvard Law School, and with Daniel Lord, a very eminentlawyer in New York. One of his early triumphs was his openingof the celebrated Monroe-Edwards case. The eminent counselto whom the duty had been assigned being prevented from attendanceby some accident, Evarts was unexpectedly called upon to takehis place. He opened the case with so much eloquence thatthe audience in the crowded court-room gave him three cheerswhen he got through. 

He rose rapidly to a distinguished place in his profession, and before he died was, I suppose, the foremost advocatein the world, whether in his country or Europe. He was counselfor President Johnson on his impeachment, counsel for theRepublican side in support of the title of President Hayesbefore the Electoral Commission; counsel for the United Statesagainst Great Britain before the Tribunal at Geneva. He wascounsel in the celebrated Lemon case, where the case was settledas to the rights of slave owners to bring their slaves intothe free States, and hold them _in transitu_. In all thesehe was successful. He was counsel also in another trial ofalmost equal interest and celebrity, the Tilton divorce suit--in which Henry Ward Beecher was charged with adultery. Inthis the jury disagreed. But the substantial victory waswith Evarts's client. 

Mr. Evarts was a man of unfailing equanimity and good nature, never thrown off his balance by any exigency in diplomacy, in political affairs, or in the trial of causes. Any personwho has occasion to follow him in his diplomatic discussionswill be impressed with the far-sighted wisdom and cautionwith which he took his positions. 

He was always a delightful orator. He rose sometimes to avery lofty eloquence, as witness especially his argument indefence of President Johnson. He had an unfailing wit. Youcould never challenge him or provoke him to an encounter withoutmaking an abundant and sparkling stream gush forth. He nevercame off second best in an encounter of wits with any man. He was a man of great generosity, full of sympathy, charity, and kindliness. If his biography shall ever be properly written, it will be as delightful as that of Sheridan or Sidney Smithfor its wit, and will be valuable for the narrative of thegreat public transactions in which he took a part. Especiallyit will preserve to posterity the portraiture of a great lawyerand advocate of the time before the days of specialists, whenthe leaders of the American Bar were great lawyers and advocates. 

I do not think Evarts's capacity as a diplomatist is known. Perhaps it never will be thoroughly understood. The workof a Secretary of State in dealing with foreign countriesis performed in the highest confidence and does not ordinarycome to light until interest in the transaction to which itrelates has grown cold. Evarts conducted some very delicatenegotiations, including that in regard to the Fortune's Baymatter, with much skill. He was careful never, for the sakeof present success, to commit the country to any doctrinewhich might be inconvenient in the remote future. 

I think Evarts failed to appreciate his own political strength. He was in the early part of his life devoted to Mr. Webster, for whom he had great reverence, and later to Mr. Seward. He sometimes, I think, failed to take wholly serious viewsof political conditions, so far as they affected him personally. I do not think he ever knew the hold he had upon the respectof the country, or upon the affection of the men with whomhe was brought into intimate association in public life, andat the Bar. He was very fond of his friends, classmates andkindred, and of his college. 

After the defeat of the Republican Party in 1884 he was chosenSenator from the State of New York. He had been candidatefor the Senate in 1861, to succeed Mr. Seward. His competitorwas Horace Greeley. Some of Mr. Evarts's friends thoughtthat the old supporters of Mr. Seward, and perhaps Mr. Sewardhimself, did not stand by him as the unfailing and powerfulsupport of Seward would have led men to expect. But whenhe came into public life in 1885, and took his seat as a Senatorfrom the great State of New York, men looked to him to bethe great leader in restoring the broken ranks of the RepublicanParty. I think it would have been easy to make him the Republicancandidate, and to elect him to the Presidency in 1888, ifhe had been willing to take that position himself. But hedid not in the Senate, or in the counsels of the party, takeor attempt to take the leadership for which he was fitted. 

He was invited in the spring or early summer of 1885 to addressa political club in Boston. The whole country listened eagerlyto see what counsel the great Senator and the great Constitutionallawyer, and great orator, had to give to his party associatesand to the people in that momentous time. But he contentedhimself with making a bright and witty speech. The club wasknown as the Middlesex Club, though it had its meetings inBoston. He gave a humorous description of the feelings ofthe Middlesex man when he went over to Boston, and those ofthe Boston man when he went over to Middlesex; and told oneor two stories of his early days in Boston, where he was born. That was all. I felt as I listened as though a pail of ice-water had been poured down my spine. 

But modesty and disinterestedness are qualities that areso infrequent among public men that we may well pardon thisbright and delightful genius for that fault. 

In the last years of his service in the Senate he had a veryserious affliction of the eyes, which rendered it impossiblefor him to use them for reading or study, or to recognizeby sight any but the most familiar human figures. He borethe calamity with unfailing cheerfulness. I believe it wascaused by overwork in the preparation of a case. The firstI knew of it, he asked me to meet him at Concord, where hewas about to make a visit. He told me what had happened, and that his physicians in Washington and New York thoughtthere was a possibility that they congestion of the veinssurrounding the optic nerve might be absorbed. But they thoughtthe case very doubtful, and advised him to go to Europe forthe benefit of the journey, and for the possible advantageof advice there. He wanted me to undertake the duties devolvingon him in the Committee of which he was Chairman, and to attendto some other public matters in his absence. His physicianin Paris told him there was not the slightest hope. He thoughtthat the darkness would certainly, though gradually, shutdown upon him. He received this sentence with composure. But he said that he had long wished to see Raphael's famousVirgin at Dresden, and that he would go to Dresden to seeit before the night set in. This he did. So the faces ofthe beautiful Virgin and the awful children were, I have nodoubt, a great consolation to him in his darkened hours. 

John Sherman was Secretary of the Treasury. I sat next tohim in the Senate for several years. I came to know him quiteintimately. I suppose few men knew him more intimately, althoughI fancy he did not give his inmost confidence to anybody, unless to his brother the General, or to a few persons ofhis own family or household. I paid the following tributeto him the day after his death:

"It is rarely more than once or twice in a generation thata great figure passes from the earth who seems the very embodimentof the character and temper of his time. Such men are notalways those who have held the highest places or been famousfor great genius or even enjoyed great popularity. They ratherare men who represent the limitations as well as the accomplishmentsof the people around them. They know what the people willbear. They utter the best thought which their countrymenin their time are able to reach. They are by no means merethermometers. They do not rise and fall with the temperatureabout them. But they are powerful and prevailing forces, with a sound judgment and practical common sense that understandsjust how high the people can be lifted, and where the manwho is looking not chiefly at the future but largely to seewhat is the best thing that can be done in the present shoulddesist from unavailing effort. Such a man was John Sherman, for whom the open grave is now waiting at Mansfield. Fornearly fifty years he has been a conspicuous figure and agreat leader in the party which has controlled the Government. Of course, in a republic it can be claimed for no man thathe controlled the course of history. And also, of course, it is not possible while the events are fresh to assign toany one man accurately his due share in the credit for whatis done, especially in legislative bodies, where mattersare settled in secret council often before the debate beginsand almost always before the vote is taken. 

"But there are some things we can say of Mr. Sherman withoutfear of challenge now and without fear of any record thatmay hereafter leap to light. 

"He filled always the highest places. He sat at the seatof power. His countrymen always listened for his voice andfrequently listened for his voice more eagerly than for thatof any other man. He became a Republican leader almost immediatelyafter he took his seat in the House of Representatives in1855. He was candidate for Speaker before the war, at thetime when the Republican Party achieved its first distinctand unequivocal national success, unless we except the electionof General Banks, who had himself been elected partly by Know-Nothing votes. Mr. Sherman failed of an election. But thecontest left him the single preeminent figure in the Houseof Representatives--a preeminence which he maintained in hislong service in the Senate, in the Treasury, and down to withina few years of his death. 

"He was a man of inflexible honesty, inflexible courage, inflexible love of country. He was never a man of greateloquence, or greatly marked by that indefinable qualitycalled genius. But in him sound judgment and common sense, better than genius, better than eloquence, always prevailed, and sometimes seemed to rise to sublimity which genius neverattains. His inflexible courage and his clear vision manifestedthemselves in the very darkest period of our history, whenhope seemed at times to have gone out in every other heart. There is a letter in his Memoirs, written April 12, 1861, which, as I remember the gloom and blackness of that time, seems to me one of the sublimest utterances in our history. The letter was written to his brother William, afterward theGeneral, who had been offered a place in the War Department, which Mr. Chase urged him to accept, saying that he wouldbe virtually Secretary of War. The offer must have been adazzling temptation to the young soldier who had left hisprofession and was engaged in civil duties as an instructor, I think, in a college somewhere. But John earnestly dissuadeshis brother from accepting it, urges him to take a positionin the field, and foretells his great military success. Hethen adds the following prediction as to the future of thecountry. It was written at midnight at the darkest singlehour of our history:

"'Let me now record a prediction. Whatever you may thinkof the signs of the times, the Government will rise from thestrife greater, stronger and more prosperous than ever. Itwill display every energy and military power. The men whohave confidence in it, and do their full duty by it, may reapwhatever there is of honor and profit in public life, whilethose who look on merely as spectators in the storm will failto discharge the highest duty of a citizen, and suffer accordinglyin public estimation. '

"Mr. Sherman's great fame and the title to his countrymen'sremembrance which will most distinguish him from other menof his time, will rest upon his service as a financier. Hebowed a little to the popular storm in the time of fiat money. Perhaps if he had not bowed a little he would have been uprooted, and the party which would have paid our national debt in fiatmoney would have succeeded. But ever since that time he hasbeen an oak and not a willow. The resumption of specie paymentsand the establishment of the gold standard, the two greatfinancial achievements of our time, are largely due to hispowerful, persistent and most effective advocacy. 

"It is a little singular that two great measures that arecalled by his name are measures, one of which he disapproved, and with the other of which he had nothing to do. I meanthe bill for the purchase of silver, known as the ShermanLaw, and the bill in regard to trusts, known as the ShermanAnti-Trust Law. The former was adopted against his protest, by a committee of conference, although he gave it a reluctantand disgusted support at the end. It was, in my judgment, necessary to save the credit of the country at the time, anda great improvement on the law it supplanted. 

"The other, known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Bill, I supposehe introduced by request. I doubt very much whether he readit. If he did, I do not think he ever understood it. Itwas totally reconstructed in the Judiciary Committee. "

Mr. Sherman was delightful company. He had a fund of pleasantanecdote always coming up fresh and full of interest fromthe stores of long experience. 

He was wise, brave, strong, patriotic, honest, faithful, simple-hearted, sincere. He had little fondness for triflingand little sense of humor. Many good stories are told ofhis serious expostulation with persons who had made somejesting statement in his hearing which he received with immensegravity. I am ashamed to confess that I used to play uponthis trait of his after a fashion which I think annoyed hima little, and which he must have regarded as exceedingly frivolous. 

He used occasionally to ask me to go to ride with him. Onehot summer afternoon Mr. Sherman said: "Let us go over andsee the new electric railroad, " to which I agreed. That wasthen a great curiosity. It was perhaps the first street railroad, certainly the first one in Washington which had electricityfor motive power. Mr. Sherman told his driver to be careful. He said the horses were very much terrified by the electriccars. I said: "I suppose they are like the labor reformers. They see contrivances for doing without their labor, and theyget very angry and manifest displeasure. " Mr. Sherman ponderedfor a moment or two, and then said with great seriousness:"Mr. Hoar, the horse is a very intelligent animal, but itreally does not seem to me that he can reason as far as that. "I told the General of it afterward, who was full of fun, andasked him if he really believed his brother thought I madethe remark seriously; to which he replied that he had no doubtof it; that John never had the slightest conception of a jest. 

At another time, one very hot summer day, Mr. Sherman said:"Hoar, I think I shall go take a ride; I am rather tired. When a vote comes up, will you announce that I am paired withmy colleague?" I called out to Senator Rollins of New Hampshire, who sat a little way off, and who kept the record of pairsfor the Republican side: "Rollins, there will be no vote thisafternoon, except one on a funeral resolution in honor ofMr. Allen of Missouri. Will you kindly announce that Mr. Sherman is paired with his colleague?" Mr. Sherman got upin great haste and went over to Mr. Rollins, and said: "Mr. Rollins, Mr. Hoar entirely misunderstood me. I never shouldthink of announcing a pair on a funeral resolution. "

Mr. Sherman was not an eloquent man, except on some few occasions, when his simple statement without ornament or passion roseto the highest eloquence by reason of the impressiveness ofhis fact or of his reasoning. His memory failed in his lastyears, and the effect of age on his other faculties becameapparent when he undertook to deal with new and complicatedsubjects. But he was clear to the last when his great subjectof finance was under consideration. One of the most admirableexamples of his power, also one of the most admirable examplesof American campaign speaking, is his statement of the financialissue between the two parties at the beginning of the campaignof 1896. It struck the key-note. The other Republican speakersonly followed it. 

He took great satisfaction in his New England ancestry. Hefrequently spoke with great pleasure of a visit made by himand the General, some twelve or fifteen years ago, I think, to Woodbury, Connecticut, where his ancestors dwelt. He tooka special pride in the character of his father, one of theOhio pioneers, from whom, I judge from his account, both hisillustrious sons derived in large measure their sterling quality. He was a far-away kinsman of my own, a relationship of whichit may well be believed I am highly proud, and of which bothGeneral Sherman and Senator Sherman were kind enough frequentlyto speak. 

For me his death ended an intimate friendship of nearly twenty-five years, during many of which we sat side by side in theSenate Chamber and enjoyed much unreserved social intercoursein long rides and walks. Among the great characters whichAmerican has given to mankind these two famous brothers, sodifferent, yet so like in their earnest love of country, theirindependence and courage, their devotion to duty, will everhold a high place. 

George W. McCrary had been an eminent member of the Houseof Representatives, where he had the confidence of both parties. He was a protege of Judge Miller, with whom he studied law. His chief ambition, however, was for judicial service. Hewas much disappointed when it was found desirable that heshould take the Department of War instead of the Departmentof Justice to which President Hayes originally intended toinvite him. He very gladly accepted the offer of a seat onthe Bench of the United States Circuit Court. He filled thatoffice with great credit, and it is highly probable wouldhave been promoted to the Supreme Court of the United States, but for his untimely death. 

He was the originator of the method of solution of the disputeas to the title to the Presidency in 1876. It ought to besaid, however, that it was done in full consultation withMr. Blaine. I was then quite intimate with both of them, and a member of the Committee in the House who reported theplan. On the seventh day of December, 1876, at the beginningof the winter session, after the election, Mr. McCrary offeredthe following resolution. It was adopted. 

"Whereas there are differences of opinion as to the propermode of counting the electoral votes for President and Vice-President and as to the manner of determining questions thatmay arise as to the legality and validity of returns madeof such votes by the several States;

"And whereas it is of the utmost importance that all differencesof opinion and all doubt and uncertainty upon these questionsshould be removed, to the end that the votes may be countedand the result declared by a tribunal whose authority nonecan question and whose decision all will accept as final: Therefore, "Resolved, That a committee of five members of this Housebe appointed by the Speaker, to act in conjunction with anysimilar committee that may be appointed by the Senate, toprepare and report without delay such a measure, either legislativeor constitutional, as may in their judgment be best calculatedto accomplish the desired end, and that said committee haveleave to report at any time. "

I do not know that a sketch of Richard W. Thompson, or DickThompson, as he was familiarly and affectionately called, properly finds a place in my autobiography. I knew him veryslightly. I dare say I visited the Navy Department in histime. But I have now no recollection of it. I had a greatrespect for him. He lived in the lifetime of every Presidentof the United States, except Washington, and I believe hesaw every one of them, except Washington, unless it may bethat he never saw Theodore Roosevelt. He was a very interestingcharacter, a man of great common sense, public spirit, witha wonderful memory, and a rare fund of knowledge of the politicalhistory of the Northwest. Indeed he was an embodiment ofthe best quality of the people of the Ohio Territory, althoughborn in Virginia. His great capacity was that of a politician. He made excellent stump speeches, managed political conventionswith great shrewdness, and also with great integrity, andhad great skill in constructing platforms. Colonel Thompsonwas a very valuable political adviser. It has never beenthe custom to select Secretaries of the Navy on account ofany previously acquired knowledge of naval affairs, althoughthe two heads of that Department appointed by Presidents McKinleyand Roosevelt have conducted it with wonderful success ina very difficult time. A day or two after the Inauguration, John Sherman, the new Secretary of the Treasury, gave a verybrilliant dinner party to the Cabinet, at which I was a guest. The table was ornamented by a beautiful man-of-war made outof flowers. Just before the guests sat down to dinner a littleadopted daughter of Secretary Sherman's attached a prettyAmerican flag to one of the masts. Somebody called attentionto the beauty of the little ornament. I asked Secretary Thompsonacross the table to which mast of a man-of-war the Americanflag should be attached. Thompson coughed and stammered alittle, and said: "I think I shall refer that question tothe Attorney-General. "

David M. Key was appointed Postmaster-General in furtheranceof President Hayes's desire, in the accomplishment of whichhe was eminently successful, to promote harmony between thesections, and to diminish, so far as possible, the heat ofparty feeling which had blazed so intensely at the time ofhis election. Mr. Key was a Democrat, and never, I believe, certainly not during President Hayes's Administration, abandonedhis allegiance to the Democratic Party. He had been a memberof the Senate from Tennessee, and Lieutenant-Colonel in theConfederate Army. His appointment was a popular one. Mr. Key administered the affairs of the Department very satisfactorily, in which he was aided very much by his Assistant Postmaster-General, Mr. Tyner, who had been an eminent member of theHouse, to whom, I suppose, he left the matter of appointmentsto office. 

Carl Schurz was a very interesting character. When I enteredthe House he was a member of the Senate from the State ofMissouri. He was admirably equipped for public service. Althougha native of Germany, he had a most excellent, copious andclear English style. No man in either House of Congress equalledhim in that respect. He was a clear reasoner, and not lackingon fit occasion in a stirring eloquence. He had renderedgreat service to the country. The value to the Union causeof the stanch support of the Germans in the Northwest, includingMissouri, whose principal city, St. Louis, contained a largeGerman population, can hardly be over-estimated. Withoutit Missouri would have passed an ordinance of secession, andthe city would have been held by the Confederates from thebeginning of the war. To prevent this the patriotism andinfluence of Carl Schurz, then very powerful with his Germanfellow-citizens, largely contributed. He also combated withgreat power the dangerous heresy of fiat money and an irredeemablecurrency. He was a stanch advocate of civil service reform, although he left Congress before the legislation which accomplishedthat was adopted. So he will be entitled to a high placein the history of the very stormy time in which he has lived, and to the gratitude of his countrymen. 

But he seems to me to have erred in underrating the valueof party instrumentalities and of official power in accomplishingwhat is best for the good of the people. When his Republicanassociates committed what he thought some grave errors, hehelped turn Missouri over to the Democrats, who have heldit ever since. So the political power of the State sinceMr. Schurz abandoned the Republican Party because of his personalobjection to President Grant, has been exerted against everythingMr. Schurz valued--honest elections, sound money, securityto the enfranchised Southern men, and the Constitutional rightswhich Mr. Schurz helped gain for them. He has never seemedto care for organization, still less to be influenced by thatattachment to organization which, while sometimes leadingto great evil, has been the source of inspiration of nearlyeverything that has been accomplished for good in this world. 

Mr. Blaine says of him, with some exaggeration, but withsome truth, that he has not become rooted and grounded anywhere, has never established a home, and is not identified with anycommunity. 

So the influence of Mr. Schurz has only been to contributesome powerful arguments to the cause which he espoused andnever, certainly for a great many years, that of a leader. Mr. Schurz's arguments for the last thirty years would havebeen as effective if published anonymously, and I dare saymore effective than they have been when given to the worldunder his name. 

Mr. Blaine says of him that he has not the power of speakingextempore; that he requires careful and studious preparation, and is never ready, off-hand, to shoot on the wing. I donot agree with Mr. Blaine's estimate of Mr. Schurz in thatparticular. I have heard him make very effective speechesin the Senate, and elsewhere, that were undoubtedly extemporary. Mr. Blaine says that Mr. Schurz is so deficient in this respectthat he has been known to use manuscript for an after-dinnerresponse. But that has been done, not infrequently, by personswho have first-rate capacity for extemporary speaking, butwho desire to say something to a number of persons much greaterthan those who sit around the tables, who are eager to readwhat they say. That should be carefully matured both in thoughtand phrase, and should convey their meaning with more precisionthan off-hand speaking is likely to attain, and be reportedwith more accuracy than off-hand speaking is likely to get. 

I have never been intimate with Mr. Schurz. I deeply lamentedhis action in supporting Mr. Cleveland, and contributing whatwas in his power to the defeat of the Republican Party ontwo occasions--a defeat which brought so much calamity tothe Republic. I have thought that in his dislikes and severejudgment of individuals he lost sight of great principles. His independence of his own party led him to support a verymuch worse party domination, and to help to accomplish measuresand establish principles to which he had been all his lifeutterly opposed. But the services to which I have alludedshould not be forgotten. They entitle him to the highestrespect, and should far outweigh his faults and mistakes. 

Mr. Schurz made one very unfortunate mistake quite early inthe course of his administration of the Interior Department. He had formed the opinion, I suppose without much practicalexperience in such matters, that it would be a good plan toget the civilized Indians of the country into the Indian Territory. Accordingly he had issued an order for the removal of thePonca Indians, of Nebraska, to the Indian Territory. ThePoncas were a small tribe, living on excellent lands, to whichthey were exceedingly attached. They were a peaceful people. It was their boast that no Ponca had ever injured a whiteman. Mr. Schurz had been informed that the Poncas were willingto go. But when they heard of the scheme, they strenuouslyobjected. They sold their ponies to enable an agent to goto Washington to make their protest known. But Mr. Schurzwas immovable. The Nebraska Senators waited upon him, buttheir expostulations were received with disdain, as the counselof politicians who were not entitled to much respect. Theremoval was effected. The Indian Territory proved unhealthyfor them. A part of the tribe made their escape, took thecoffins of those who had died with them, and made their wayback to the original home of their ancestors. 

The public feeling was deeply aroused. I happened to be athome in Worcester when a meeting was called by clergymen andother philanthropic gentlemen. It was addressed by a youngIndian woman, named Bright Eyes, who belonged, I think, toa tribe closely allied to the Poncas. I attended the meeting, but was careful not to commit myself to any distinct opinionwithout knowing more of the facts. When I got back to Washington, President Hayes called on my at my room. It was the onlytime I have ever known a President of the United States tocall upon a member of either House of Congress on public business, although I believe President Lincoln sometimes did it; andit may possibly have happened on other occasions. PresidentHayes was very much excited. He seemed at the time to thinkthat a great wrong had been done by the Secretary. He broughthis fist down upon the table with great emphasis, and said:"Mr. Hoar, I will turn Mr. Schurz out, if you say so. " I said:"O no, Mr. President, I hope nothing of that kind will bedone. Mr. Schurz is an able man. He has done his best. Hismistake, if he has made one, is only that he has adhered obstinatelyto a preconceived opinion, and has been unwilling to takeadvice or receive suggestions after he had determined on hiscourse. It would be a great calamity to have one of yourCabinet discredited by you. " President Hayes took that viewof it. Indeed, I believe on further and fuller inquiry, hecame to the conclusion that it was his duty to sustain theSecretary, so far as to keep in the Indian Territory the fragmentof the Ponca Tribe who were still there. 

I took no public part in the matter. My colleague, Mr. Dawes, who was a very earnest champion and friend of the Indians, commented on the course of the Secretary in the Senate withgreat severity; and he and the Secretary had an earnest controversy. 

Mr. Schurz was a great favorite with our Independents andMugwumps, many of whom had, like him, left the RepublicanParty in 1872, and some of whom had not returned to theirold allegiance. Mr. Schurz was invited to a public dinnerin Boston, at which President Eliot, Dr. James Freeman Clarkeand several eminent men of their way of thinking, took part. They did not discuss the merits of the principal questionmuch, but the burden of their speech was eulogy of Mr. Schurzas a great and good man, and severe condemnation of the characterof the miserable politicians who were supposed to be his criticsand opponents. There was a proposition for a call for a publicmeeting on the other side to condemn the Secretary, and standby the Indians. In this call several very able and influentialmen joined, including Governor Long. I advised very stronglyagainst holding the meeting. I was quite sure that, on theone hand, neither Mr. Schurz nor the Administration was likelyto treat the Indians cruelly or unjustly again; and on theother hand I was equally sure of the absolute sincerity andhumanity of the people who had found fault with his action. A day or two, however, after the Schurz dinner, a reporterof a prominent newspaper in Boston asked me for an interviewabout the matter, to which I assented. He said: "Have youseen the speeches of President Eliot and Dr. Clarke and Mr. Codman at the Schurz banquet?" I said, "Yes. " He asked me:"What do you think of them?" I said: "Well, it is very naturalthat these gentlemen should stand by Mr. Schurz, who hasbeen their leader and political associate. President Eliot'sspeech reminds me of Baillie Nichol Jarvie when he stoodup for his kinsman, Rob Roy, in the Town Council of Glasgowwhen some of the Baillie's enemies had cast in his teethhis kinship with the famous outlaw. 'I tauld them, ' saidthe Baillie, 'that barring what Rob had dune again the law, and that some three or four men had come to their deaths byhim, he was an honester man than stude on ony of their shanks. '"This ended the incident, so far as I was concerned. 

To draw an adequate portraiture of Charles Devens would requirethe noble touch of the old masters of painting or the loftystroke of the dramatists of Queen Elizabeth's day. He filledmany great places in the public service with so much modestyand with a gracious charm of manner and behavior which soattracted and engrossed our admiration that we failed at firstto discern the full strength of the man. It is not untilafter his death, when we sum up what he has done for purposesof biography or of eulogy, that we see how important and variedhas been the work of his life. 

Charles Devens was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, April4, 1820. His family connections led him to take early inlife a deep interest in the military and naval history ofthe country, especially in that of the War of 1812; whilethe place of his birth and the fact that he was the grandsonof Richard Devens gave to him the interest in the openingof the Revolution which belongs to every son of Middlesex. He was a pupil at the Boston Latin School; was graduatedat Harvard in 1838; was admitted to the bar in 1840; practisedlaw in Northfield and afterward in Greenfield; was Senatorfrom Franklin County in 1848 and 1849; was Brigadier-Generalof the militia; was appointed United States Marshal by PresidentTaylor in 1849, holding that office until 1853; removed toWorcester in 1854; formed a partnership with George F. Hoarand J. Henry Hill in December, 1856; was City Solicitor inthe years 1856, 1857 and 1858. The news of the surrenderof Fort Sumter was received in Worcester Sunday, April 14. Monday forenoon came the confirmation of the news and PresidentLincoln's call for 75, 000 volunteers. General Devens wasengaged in the trial of a cause before the Supreme Court, when the news was told him. He instantly requested anothermember of the Bar to take his place in the trial, went immediatelyup street, offered his services to the Government, was unanimouslychosen the same day Major of the Third Battalion of MassachusettsRifles, commissioned the next day, April 16, departed forthe seat of war April 20. The battalion under his commandwas stationed at Fort McHenry. On the 24th of July followinghe was appointed Colonel of the Fifteenth Massachusetts Regiment. 

Gen. Devens was in command of the Fifteenth Regiment at thedisastrous battle of Ball's Bluff, where he was struck bya musket ball, which was intercepted by a metallic buttonwhich saved his life. His conduct on that day received highencomium from General McClellan. He was soon after appointeda Brigadier-General of Volunteers, and assigned to a brigadein Couch's Division of the Fourth Corps. His division wasengaged in the battle in front of Fort Magruder on the 5thof May, 1862. On the 31st of the same month he was engagedin the most critical portion of the desperate fight at FairOaks, where his command was conspicuous for valor and devotion. This was one of the most stubbornly contested fields of thewar. Gen. Devens was severely wounded toward the close ofthe day, but with a few other officers he succeeded in reformingthe repeatedly broken lines and in holding the field untilreinforcements arrived and stayed the tide of Confederatetriumph. He returned to his command as soon as his woundwould permit, and took part in the battle of Fredericksburgin December, 1862. In his official report General Newtonsays: "My acknowledgments are due to all according to theiropportunities, but especially to Brigadier-General CharlesDevens, who commanded the advance and the rear guard, in thecrossing and recrossing of the river. " In the followingspring General Devens was promoted to the command of a divisionof the Eleventh Corps. He was posted with his division of4, 000 men on the extreme right of the flank of Hooker's army, which was attacked by 26, 000 men under the great rebel leader, Stonewall Jackson. General Devens was wounded by a musketball in the foot early in the day; but he kept the field, making the most strenuous efforts to hold his men togetherand stay the advance of the Confederates until his Corps wasalmost completely enveloped by Jackson's force and, in thelanguage of General Walker, "was scattered like the stonesand timbers of a broken dam. " He recovered from his woundin time to take part in the campaign of 1864. His troopswere engaged on the first of June in the battle of Cold Harbor, and carried the enemy's entrenched line with severe loss. On the third of June, in an attack which General Walker characterizesas one "which is never spoke of without awe and bated breathby any one who participated in it, " General Devens was carriedalong the line on a stretcher, being so crippled by inflammatoryrheumatism that he could neither mount his horse nor standin his place. This was the last action in which he took anactive part. On the third of April, 1865, he led the advanceinto Richmond, where the position of Military Governor wasassigned to him after the surrender. He afterwards was secondin command to General Sickles, in the Southeastern Department, and exercised practically all the powers of government fora year or two. This command was of very great importanceto him as a part of his legal training. Upon him practicallydevolved the duty of deciding summarily, but without appeal, all important questions of military law as well as those affectingthe civil rights of citizens during his administration. 

He was offered a commission in the regular army, which hedeclined. He came back to Worcester in 1866; renewed hispartnership with me for a short time; was appointed Justiceof the Superior Court April, 1867; was appointed Justice ofthe Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1873; was offered theappointment of Secretary of War in the Cabinet of PresidentHayes March 5, 1877; a day or two later was tendered the officeof Attorney-General by the President, which he accepted andheld until the expiration of President Hayes's Administration. He was offered the office of Judge of the Circuit Court ofthe First Circuit at the death of Judge Shepley, which hevery much desired to accept. But the President, althoughplacing this office at his disposal, was exceedingly unwillingto lose his service in the Cabinet; and General Devens, withhis customary self-denial, yielded to the desire of his chief. He was again appointed Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusettsin 1881, and held that office until his death. 

He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian SocietyOctober 21, 1878. He was a member of the Massachusetts HistoricalSociety. He received the degree of LL. D. From Harvard Universityin the year 1877. He was chosen President of the HarvardAlumni Association, and again elected President of that Associationin 1886, in order that he might preside at the great celebrationof the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the college, which he did with a dignity and grace which commanded theadmiration of all persons who were present on that interestingoccasion. He died January 7, 1891. 

General Devens gained very soon after establishing himselfin Worcester the reputation of one of the foremost advocatesat the bar of Massachusetts. He was a model of the professionalcharacter, of great courtesy to his opponent, great deferenceto the court, fidelity to his client, giving to every caseall the labor which could profitably be spent upon it. Thecertainty of the absolute fidelity, thoroughness, and skillwith which his part of the duty of an important trial wouldbe performed, made it a delight to try cases as his associate. He was especially powerful with juries in cases involvingthe domestic relations, or which had in them anything of thepathos of which the court-house so often furnishes examples. He did not care in those days for the preparation or argumentof questions of law, although he possessed legal learningfully adequate to the exigencies of his profession, and neverneglected any duty. 

His fine powers continued to grow as he grew older. I thinkhe was unsurpassed in this country in the generation to whichhe belonged in native gifts of oratory. He had a fine voice, of great compass and power, a graceful and dignified presence. He was familiar with the best English literature. He hada pure and admirable style, an imagination which was quickenedand excited under the stimulus of extempore speech, and washimself moved and stirred by the emotions which are most likelyto move and stir an American audience. Some of his addressesto juries in Worcester are now remembered, under whose spelljury and audience were in tears, and where it was somewhatdifficult even for the bench or the opposing counsel to resistthe contagion. He never, however, undertook to prepare andtrain himself for public speaking, as was done by Mr. Choateor Mr. Everett, or had the constant and varied practice underwhich the fine powers of Wendell Phillips came to such perfection. But his fame as an orator constantly increased, so that beforehis death no other man in Massachusetts was so much in demand, especially on those occasions where the veterans of the warwere gathered to commemorate its sacrifices and triumphs. 

Among the most successful examples of his oratoric power ishis address at Bunker Hill at the Centennial in 1875, wherethe forming the procession and the other exercises occupiedthe day until nearly sundown, and General Devens, the oratorof the day, laid aside his carefully prepared oration andaddressed the audience in a brief speech, wholly unpremeditated, which was the delight of everybody who heard it. *

[Footnote]* "The oration by Judge Devens was magnificent. He spoke whollywithout notes and his effort was largely extemporaneous. Hebegan by saying that the lateness of the hour ('twas nearly sixo'clock) would prevent his following the train of any previouslyprepared effort and he would briefly review the history of thebattle and its results upon the world's history. He spoke fornearly and hour and a quarter, holding his fine audience in raptattention by his eloquence, the elegance of his diction and hissuperb enunciation. It was, indeed, a wonderful effort, andwill compare favorably with Webster's great orations in '25 and'43. "--From the diary of Henry H. Edes. [End of Footnote]

At New Haven he delivered the address before the Army of thePotomac in commemoration of General Meade and the battle ofGettysburg, which is a fine specimen of historic narrativemingled and adorned with stately eloquence. At the banquetin the evening of the same day the gentleman who had beenexpected to respond to the toast, "The private soldier, " wasunexpectedly called away, and General Devens was asked ata moment's notice and without preparation to take his place. I heard President Grant--no mean judge--who had himself listenedto so much of the best public speaking in all parts of thecountry, say that General Devens's response to this toastwas the finest speech he ever heard in his life. The eulogyupon Grant delivered at Worcester, especially the wonderfulpassage where he contrasts the greeting which Napoleon mightexpect from his soldiers and companions in arms at a meetingbeyond the grave with that which Grant might expect from hisbrethren, is also one of the best specimens of eloquence inmodern times. Surpassing even these are the few sentenceshe addressed to his regiment after the battle of Ball's Bluff. 

General Devens had a modest estimate of his own best powers. While he was an admirable judge, bringing to the court theweight of his great experience, his admirable sense, his stainlessintegrity, his prefect impartiality, his great discernment, his abundant learning, it has always seemed to me that heerred after the war in not preferring political life to hisplace upon the bench. He could easily have been Governoror Senator, in which places the affection of the people ofMassachusetts would have kept him for a period limited onlyby his own desire, and might well have been expected to passfrom the Cabinet to an even higher place in the service ofhis country. But he disliked political strife, and preferredthose places of service which did not compel him to encounterbitter antagonism. 

He filled the place of Attorney-General with a dignity andan ability which has been rarely if ever surpassed by anyof the illustrious men who have filled that great office. Thejudges of the Supreme Court long after he had left Washingtonwere accustomed to speak of the admirable manner in whichhe had discharged his duties. I once at a dinner heard Mr. Justice Bradley, who was without a superior, if not withouta peer in his day, among jurists on either side of the Atlantic, speak enthusiastically of his recollection of General Devensin the office of Attorney-General. Judge Bradley kindly accededto my request to put in writing what he had said. His letteris here inserted:

WASHINGTON, January 20th, 1891. HON. GEO. F. HOAR. 

_My Dear Sir:_ You ask for my estimate of the services andcharacter of General Devens as Attorney-General of the UnitedStates. In general terms I unhesitatingly answer, that heleft upon my mind the impression of a sterling, noble, generouscharacter, loyal to duty, strong, able, and courteous in thefulfillment of it, with such accumulation of legal acquirementand general culture as to render his counsels highly valuablein the Cabinet, and his public efforts exceedingly gracefuland effective. His professional exhibitions in the SupremeCourt during the four years that he represented the Government, were characterized by sound learning, chastely and accuratelyexpressed, great breadth of view, the seizing of strong pointsand disregard of minute ones, marked deference for the courtand courtesy to his opponents. He was a model to the youngermembers of the bar of a courtly and polished advocate. Heappeared in the court only in cases of special importance;but of these there was quite a large number during his term. As examples, I may refer to the cases of Young _v. _ UnitedStates (97 U. S. 39), which involved the rights of neutralsin our Civil War, and particularly the alleged right of aBritish subject, who had been engaged in running the blockade, to demand compensation for a large quantity of cotton purchasedin the Confederacy and seized by the military forces of theUnited States;--Reynolds _v. _ United States (98 U. S. 145), which declared the futility of the plea, in cases of bigamyamong the Mormons, of religious belief, claimed under thefirst amendment of the Constitution; and established the principlethat pretended religious belief cannot be accepted as a justificationof overt acts made criminal by the law of the land;--The SinkingFund Cases (99 U. S. 700), which involved the validity ofthe act of Congress known as the Thurman Act, requiring thePacific Railroad Companies to make annual payments for asinking fund to meet the bonds loaned to them by the Government;--Tennessee _v. _ Davis (100 U. S. 257), as to the right of aUnited States officer to be tried in the Federal courts forkilling a person in self-defence whilst in the discharge ofhis official duties;--The Civil Rights case of Strander _v. _W. Virginia and others (100 U. S. 303-422), in which weresettled the rights of all classes of citizens, irrespectiveof color, to suffrage and to representation in the jury box, and the right of the Government of the United States to interposeits power for their protection;--Neal _v. _ Delaware (103 U. S. 370), by which it was decided that the right of suffrageand (in that case) the consequent right of jury service ofpeople of African descent were secured by the 15th Amendmentto the Constitution, notwithstanding unrepealed state lawsor constitutions to the contrary. 

In all these cases and many others the arguments of the Attorney-General were presented with distinguished ability and dignity, and with his habitual courtesy and amenity of manner; whilsthis broad and comprehensive views greatly aided the courtin arriving at just conclusions. In all of them he was successful;and it may be said that he rarely assumed a position on behalfof the Government, in any important case, in which he wasnot sustained by the judgment of the court. His advocacywas conscientious and judicial rather than experimental--as is eminently fitting in the official representative ofthe Government. It best subserves the ends of justice, thesuppression of useless litigation, and the prompt administrationof the law. 

I can only add that the members of the Supreme Court partedwith Attorney-General Devens with regret. Of him, as of somany other eminent lawyers, the reflection is just, that thehighest efforts of advocacy have no adequate memorial. Writtencompositions remain; but the noblest displays of human geniusat the bar--often, perhaps, the successful assaults of Freedomagainst the fortresses of Despotism--are lost to history andmemory for want of needful recordation. _Vixere fortes anteAgamemnona;_ or, as Tacitus says of the eloquent Haterius, "Whist the plodding industry of scribblers goes down to posterity, the sweet voice and fluent eloquence of Haterius died withhimself. "

 Very truly yours. JOSEPH P. BRADLEY. 

He was an admirable historical investigator and narrator. He carefully investigated the facts. He told the story ofthe heroic days of the Revolution and of the heroic days ofthe War for the Union with a graphic power which will givehis addresses on such subjects a permanent place in our besthistorical literature. 

But it is as a soldier that his countrymen will rememberhim, and it is as a soldier that he would wish to be remembered. Whatever may be said by the philosopher, the moralist, orthe preacher, the instincts of the greater portion of mankindwill lead them to award the highest meed of admiration tothe military character. Even when the most selfish of humanpassions, the love of power or the love of fame, is the stimulantof the soldier's career, he must at least be ready for thesupreme sacrifice--the willingness to give his life, if needbe, for the object he is pursuing. But when his end is purelyunselfish, when the love of country or the desire to saveher life by giving his own has entire mastery of the soul, all mankind are agreed to award the good soldier a glory whichit bestows nowhere else. 

There was nothing lacking in General Devens to the completesoldierly character. He had a passionate love of his country;he was absolutely fearless; he never flinched before danger, sickness, suffering or death. He was prompt, resolute andcool in the face of danger. He had a warm and affectionateheart. He loved his comrades, especially the youth who wereunder his command. He had that gentle and placable naturewhich so often accompanies great courage. He was incapableof a permanent anger. He was still less capable of revengeor of willingness to inflict injury or pain. 

As Clarendon says of Falkland: "He had a full appetite offame by just and generous actions, so he had an equal contemptfor it by base and servile expedients. " He never for an instanttolerated that most pernicious and pestilent heresy, thatso long as each side believed itself to be in the right therewas no difference between the just and the unjust cause. Heknew that he was contending for the life of his country, forthe fate of human liberty on this continent. No other causewould have led him to draw his sword; and he cared for noother earthly reward for his service. 

 Oh just and faithful knight of God, Ride on, the prize is near. 

CHAPTER IVATTEMPT TO REOPEN THE QUESTION OF THE TITLE TOTHE PRESIDENCY

In general the determination of the title to the Presidencywas acquiesced in in a manner highly creditable to the people. The Democratic party submitted to their disappointment ina manner which was on the whole exceedingly praiseworthy. This was due very largely to the influence of Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi, and I suppose to that of Mr. Bayard, of Delaware. But there were not wanting persons who were willing to revivethe question for political advantage, whatever the effectupon the public tranquillity. On May 13, 1878, when the Presidenthad been for more than a year in the quiet possession of hisoffice, Mr. Clarkson N. Potter, of New York, introduced inthe House of Representatives a resolution for the appointmentof a Committee to investigate alleged frauds in the Statesof Louisiana and Florida, in the recent Presidential election. This resolution was adopted by the House, in which everypossible parliamentary method for its defeat was resortedto by the Republican minority. The Republicans were exceedinglyalarmed, and the proceeding seemed likely to create a financialpanic which would disturb and injure the business of the country. 

Shortly after Mr. Potter's committee was appointed, it wasexpected that a report would be made denying the validityof President Hayes's title, and that the Democratic Houseof Representatives would be advised to refuse to acknowledgehim as President. This would have thrown the Government intogreat confusion and would have made a square issue. A caucusof Republican Senators was held, and the following gentlemenwere appointed a Committee, with directions to report whataction, if any, ought to be taken in the Senate in the matter:Mr. Edmunds, Mr. Howe, Mr. Conkling, Mr. Allison, Mr. Sargent, Mr. Ingalls, Mr. Oglesby, Mr. Jones (of Nevada), Mr. Christiancy, Mr. Blaine, Mr. Hoar. 

I was requested by my associates to prepare an address tothe people, to be signed by the Republican Senators, arraigningthe Democratic leaders for their unjustifiable and revolutionarycourse, and pointing out the public danger. The Committeehad a second meeting, when I read to them the following address, which I had prepared and which I still have in my possession:

"Our sense of the presence of a great public danger makesit our duty to address you. We are satisfied that the leadersof the Democratic Party meditate an attack on the President'spossession of his office, the results of which must be thedestruction of the reviving industries of the country, civilconfusion and war. There has been difference of opinion whetherthe count of the electoral vote, which under the Constitutiondetermines the President's title, must be made by the twoHouses of Congress, or by the President of the Senate in theirpresence. In the count of electoral votes, which resultedin the declaration of the election of President Hayes, bothmethods concurred, the action of the two Houses being in accordancewith a law regulating their proceedings, enacted in the lastCongress to meet the case by large majorities of both branches. The title of President Hayes, therefore, not only rests uponthe strongest possible Constitutional sanction, but the honorof both the great parties in the country is solemnly pledgedto maintain it. 

"Yet the Democratic majority in the House of Representativeshas set on foot a proceeding, which they call an investigation, intended, if they can get control of the next Congress, topave the way for the expulsion of President Hayes, and theseating of Mr. Tilden in his place. It will be the President'sduty to maintain himself in office, and the duty of all goodcitizens to stand by him. The result is Civil War. 

"We know that many Democratic Senators and Representativesdisclaim in private the purpose we attribute to their leaders, and denounce the wickedness and folly of an attempt to setaside the accepted result of the last election of President. You doubtless know that many of your Democratic neighborsgive you the same assurance. Be not lulled by these assurancesinto a false security. He is little familiar with the historyof that party who does not know how its members follow incompact columns where its leaders point the way. Like assurancespreceded the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Like assuranceson the part of many Democrats at the South preceded the laterebellion. Such convictions on the part of the Democrats, however honest or earnest, of the danger and dishonor of theproceedings just inaugurated found expression in but a singledissenting vote in the House of Representatives. 

"They say that they believe that the result in two of theStates was accomplished by fraud. We believe, on the otherhand, that those States, and others whose votes were countedfor Tilden, were strongly Republican, and would have beencounted for Hayes without a question, but for violence andcrime. The Constitution provides the time, place and mannerin which these contentions must be settled. They have beenso settled as between Hayes and Tilden, and it is only byusurpation and revolution that a subsequent Congress can undertaketo reopen them. You know how easily party majorities persuadethemselves, or affect to persuade themselves, of the existenceof facts, which it is for their party interest to establish. 

"At the end of his four years the President lays down hisoffice, and his successor is chosen. The people have in theirhands this frequent, easy and peaceful remedy for all evilsof administration. The usurpation by Congress of the powerto displace a President whenever they choose to determinethat the original declaration of the result of an electionwas wrong, on whatever pretence it is defended, is a totaloverthrow of the Constitution. 

"If you would ward off this blow at the national life, youhave one perfect means of defence, the election of a Republicanmajority in the next House of Representatives. "

When they had all agreed to it, Mr. Conkling, a member ofthe Committee who had not attended the previous meeting, came in late. The document was read to him. He opposed thewhole plan with great earnestness and indignation, spoke withgreat severity of President Hayes, and said that he hopedit would be the last time that any man in the United Stateswould attempt to steal the Presidency. Mr. Conkling's influencein the Senate and in the country was then quite powerful. It was thought best not to issue the appeal unless it wereto have the unanimous support of the Republicans. But thediscovery of some cipher dispatches, implicating some well-known persons, including one member of Mr. Tilden's household, in an attempt to bribe the canvassing boards in the Southand to purchase some Republican electors in the South andone in Oregon, tended to make the leading members of thatparty sick of the whole matter. President Hayes served outhis term peacefully and handed over the executive power, notonly to a Republican successor, but to a member of the majorityof the Electoral Commission. So it seems clear that the bulkof the American people had little sympathy with the complaints. 

CHAPTER VTHE SENATE IN 1877

When I came to the Senate that body was at the very heightof its Constitutional power. It was, I think, a more powerfulbody than ever before or since. There were no men in it, I suppose, who were equal in reputation or personal authorityto either of the great triumvirate--Webster, Clay and Calhoun. If we may trust the traditions that have come down from thetime of the Administrations of Washington and Adams, whenthe Senate sat with closed doors, none of them ever acquiredthe authority wielded by the profound sagacity of Ellsworth. 

But the National authority itself, of which the Senate wasa part, was restricted by the narrow construction which prevailedbefore the Civil War. During the Civil War everything wasbowed and bent before the military power. After the war endedthe Senate was engaged in a controversy with Andrew Johnson, during which there could be no healthy action either of theexecutive or the legislative branch of the Government. Itwas like a pair of shears, from which the rivet was gone. 

With the coming in of Grant harmonious relations were establishedbetween the two departments. But the Senators were unwillingto part with the prerogatives, which they had helped eachother to assert, and which had been wrenched from the feeblehand of Johnson. What was called Senatorial Courtesy requiredevery Senator belonging to the party in the majority to supportevery other in demanding the right to dictate and controlthe executive and judicial appointments from their respectiveStates. So every Senator had established a following, likethat of the Highland chieftain--"Vich Ian Vohr with his tailon"--devoted, of course, to the party, but devoted more completelyand immediately to his political fortunes. 

President Grant in the beginning undertook to break down thisarrogant claim. He recommended the repeal of the Civil TenureAct, the establishment of a system of competitive examinationsfor appointments in the civil service and, under the adviceof Attorney-General Hoar, made the nominations to the newCircuit Court without regard to Senatorial dictation. Buthe very soon abandoned this purpose, and formed a close friendshipand alliance with the most earnest opponents of the reform. 

While, in my opinion, this claim of the Senators was untenableand of injurious public consequences, it tended to maintainand increase the authority of the Senate. The most eminentSenators--Sumner, Conkling, Sherman, Edmunds, Carpenter, Frelinghuysen, Simon Cameron, Anthony, Logan--would have received as a personalaffront a private message from the White House expressinga desire that they should adopt any course in the dischargeof their legislative duties that they did not approve. Ifthey visited the White House, it was to give, not to receiveadvice. Any little company or coterie who had undertakento arrange public policies with the President and to reportto their associates what the President thought would haverapidly come to grief. These leaders were men, almost allof them, of great faults. They were not free from ambition. Some of them were quite capable of revenge, and of usingthe powers of the Government to further their ambition orrevenge. But they maintained the dignity and the authorityof the Senatorial office. Each of these stars kept his ownorbit and shone in his sphere, within which he tolerated nointrusion from the President, or from anybody else. 

The reform of the civil service has doubtless shorn the officeof Senator of a good deal of its power. I think PresidentMcKinley, doubtless with the best and purest intentions, did still more to curtail the dignity and authority of theoffice. I dare say the increase in the number of Senators hashad also much to do with it. President McKinley, with hisgreat wisdom and tact and his delightful individual quality, succeeded in establishing an influence over the members ofthe Senate not, I think, equalled from the beginning of theGovernment, except possibly by Andrew Jackson. And whilethe strong will of Jackson subjugated Senators, in many cases, as it did other men, yet it roused an antagonism not onlyin his political opponents, but in many important men of hisown party, which would have overthrown him but for his verygreat popularity with the common people. President McKinleyalso made one serious mistake, of which indeed he did notset the example. Yet he made what was before but an individualand extraordinary instance, a practice. If that practicecontinue, it will go far, in my judgment, to destroy the independenceand dignity of the Senate. That is, the appointment of membersof the Senate to distinguished and lucrative places in thepublic service, in which they are to receive and obey thecommand of the Executive, and then come back to their seatsto carry out as Senators a policy which they have adoptedat the command of another power, without any opportunity ofconsultation with their associates, or of learning theirassociates' opinions. 

The Constitution provides, Article I. , Sec. 6, "No Senator or Representative shall, during the time forwhich he was elected, be appointed to any civil office underthe authority of the United States, which shall have beencreated, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased, during such time; and no person holding any office under theUnited States shall be a member of either House during hiscontinuance in office. "

It is, I suppose, beyond dispute that the intention of thatprovision was to protect the members of the Legislative branchof the Government from Executive influence. The legislatorwas not to be induced to create a civil office, or to increaseits emoluments, at the request of the Executive, in the hopethat he might be appointed. He was to preserve his independenceof Executive influence, and to approach all questions in whichhe might have to deal with matters which concerned the Executivepower, or Executive action, absolutely free from any bias. 

This provision comes, with some modification, from the EnglishConstitution. The fear of Executive influence was in thatday constantly before the framers of the Constitution andthe people who adopted it. Roger Sherman, in his correspondencewith John Adams, says that he "esteems the provision madefor appointment to office to be a matter of very great importance, on which the liberties and safety of the people depend nearlyas much as on legislation. "

"It was, " he says, "a saying of one of the Kings of Englandthat while the King could appoint the Bishops and Judges hemight have what religion and laws he pleased. "

I think that sooner or later some emphatic action will betaken, probably in the form of a declaratory resolution, which will put an end to this abuse. But there will alwaysbe found men in either branch who desire such honorable employment. They will be men of great influence. There are also frequentlymen of personal worth who always support whatever the Presidentof the United States thinks fit to do, and trot or amble alongin the procession which follows the Executive chariot. So, if any President shall hereafter repeat this attempt it willrequire a good deal of firmness to defeat it. 

Senator Morgan of Alabama made a very bright comparison ofthe relation to the White House of some very worthy Senatorsto that of the bird in a cuckoo clock. He said that wheneverthe clock at the White House strikes the bird issues out ofthe door in the Senate Chamber, and says: "Cuckoo, Cuckoo, "and that when the striking is over, he goes in again and shutsthe door after him. He was speaking of Democratic Senators. But I am afraid my excellent Republican brethren can furnishquite as many instances of this servility as their opponents. 

The President has repeatedly, within the last six years, appointed members of the Senate and the House to be Commissionersto negotiate and conclude, as far as can be done by diplomaticagencies, treaties and other arrangements with foreign Governments, of the gravest importance. These include the arrangementof a standard of value by International agreement; makinga Treaty of Peace, at the end of the War with Spain; arranginga Treaty of Commerce between the United States and Great Britain;making a Treaty to settle the Behring Sea controversy; andnow more lately to establish the boundary line between Canadaand Alaska. 

President McKinley also appointed a Commission, includingSenators and Representatives, to visit Hawaii, and to reportupon the needs of legislation there. This last was as clearlythe proper duty and function of a committee, to be appointedby one or the other branch of Congress, as anything that couldbe conceived. 

The question has been raised whether these functions wereoffices, within the Constitutional sense. It was stoutlycontended, and I believe held by nearly all the RepublicanSenators at the time when President Cleveland appointed Mr. Blount to visit Hawaii, and required that the diplomaticaction of our Minister there should be subject to his approval, that he was appointing a diplomatic officer, and that he hadno right so to commission Mr. Blount, without the advice andconsent of the Senate. President McKinley seemed to acceptthis view when he sent in for confirmation the names of twoSenators, who were appointed on the Commission to visit Hawaii. The Senate declined to take action upon these nominations. The very pertinent question was put by an eminent member ofthe Senate: If these gentlemen are to be officers, how canthe President appoint them under the Constitution, the officebeing created during their term? Or, how can they hold officeand still keep their seats in this body? If, on the otherhand, they are not officers, under what Constitutional provisiondoes the President ask the advice and consent of the Senateto their appointment?

But the suggestion that these gentlemen are not officers, seems to me the merest cavil. They exercise an authority, and are clothed with a dignity equal to that of the highestand most important diplomatic officer, and far superior tothat of most of the civil officers of the country. To saythat the President cannot appoint a Senator or Representativepostmaster in a country village, where the perquisites donot amount to a hundred dollars a year, where perhaps no otherperson can be found to do the duties, because that would putan improper temptation in the way of the legislator to inducehim to become the tool of the Executive will, and then permitthe President to send him abroad; to enable him to maintainthe distinction and enjoy the pleasure of a season at a foreigncapital as the representative of the United States, with allhis expenses paid, and a large compensation added, determinedsolely by the Executive will; and to hold that the framersof the Constitution would for a moment have tolerated that, seems to me utterly preposterous. 

Beside, it places the Senator so selected in a position wherehe cannot properly perform his duties as a Senator. He isbound to meet his associates at the great National CouncilBoard as an equal, to hear their reasons as well as to imparthis own. How can he discharge that duty, if he had alreadynot only formed an opinion, but acted upon the matter underthe control and direction of another department of the Government?

The Senate was exceedingly sensitive about this questionwhen it first arose. But the gentlemen selected by the Executivefor these services were, in general, specially competent forthe duty. Their associates were naturally quite unwillingto take any action that should seem to involve a reproof tothem. The matter did not, however, pass without remonstrance. It was hoped that it would not be repeated. At the time ofthe appointment of the Silver Commission, I myself calledattention to the matter in the Senate. Later, as I have said, the Senate declined to take action on the Commission appointedto visit Hawaii. But there was considerable discussion. Severalbills and resolutions were introduced, which were intendedto prohibit such appointments in the future. The matter wasreferred to the Committee on the Judiciary. It turned outthat three members of that Committee had been appointed byPresident McKinley on the Canadian Committee. One of them, however, said he had accepted the appointment without duereflection, and he was quite satisfied that the practice waswrong. The Committee disliked exceedingly to make a reportwhich might be construed as a censure of their associates. So I was instructed to call upon President McKinley and sayto him in behalf of the Committee, that they hoped the practicewould not be continued. That task I discharged. PresidentMcKinley said he was aware of the objections; that he hadcome to feel the evil very strongly; and while he did notsay in terms that he would not make another appointment ofthe kind, he conveyed to me, as I am very sure he intendedto do, the assurance that it would not occur again. He said, however, that it was not in general understood how few peoplethere were in this country, out of the Senate and House ofRepresentatives, qualified for important diplomatic serviceof that kind, especially when we had to contend with the traineddiplomatists of Europe, who had studied such subjects alltheir lives. He told me some of the difficulties he had encounteredin making selections of Ministers abroad, where importantmatters were to be dealt with, our diplomatic representativeshaving, as a rule, to be taken from entirely different pursuitsand employments. 

That Congress in the past has thought it best to extend ratherthan restrict this prohibition is shown by the statute whichforbids, under a severe penalty, members of either House ofCongress from representing the Government as counsel. 

CHAPTER VILEADERS OF THE SENATE IN 1877

As I just said, there was no man in the Senate when I enteredit who equalled in renown either Webster, Clay or Calhoun, or wielded in the Senate an influence like that of OliverEllsworth. With at most but two or three exceptions, no oneof them would be counted among the great men of the centuryin which he lived, or will be remembered long after his death. But the average excellence was high. It was a company ofvery wise men, fairly representing the best sentiment andaspiration of the Republic. The angers and influences ofthe Civil War had gradually cooled under the healing influenceof Grant. The American people was ready to address itselfbravely to the new conditions and new problems, or to oldproblems under new conditions. 

I shall speak briefly here of some of the principal Senatorswho were there when I took my seat on March 4, 1877, or whocame into the Senate shortly afterward during that Congress. Others I have mentioned in other places in this book. 

William A. Wheeler, of New York, was Vice-President and Presidentof the Senate. On the Republican side were: William B. Allisonof Iowa, Henry B. Anthony and Ambrose E. Burnside of RhodeIsland, James G. Blaine and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, BlancheK. Bruce of Mississippi, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, RoscoeConkling of New York, John A. Logan of Illinois, Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, George F. Edmunds and Justin S. Morrillof Vermont, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, John J. Ingalls of Kansas, John P. Jones of Nevada, Stanley Matthewsand John Sherman of Ohio, John H. Mitchell of Oregon, OliverP. Morton of Indiana, Aaron A. Sargent of California, HenryM. Teller of Colorado, Bainbridge Wadleigh of New Hampshireand William Windom of Minnesota. 

On the Democratic side were: Thomas F. Bayard and Eli Saulsburyof Delaware, James B. Beck of Kentucky, Francis M. Cockrellof Missouri, A. H. Garland of Arkansas, John B. Gordon ofGeorgia, L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, Matt Ransom of NorthCarolina, Allen G. Thurman of Ohio, William P. Whyte of Maryland, M. C. Butler of South Carolina, William W. Eaton of Connecticut, James B. Eustis of Louisiana, Francis Kernan of New York, J. R. McPherson of New Jersey, and Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana. 

Henry B. Anthony was the senior member of the Senate whenI entered it. When he died he had been a Senator longer thanany other man in the country, except Mr. Benton. He hadcome to be the depository of its traditions, customs and unwrittenrules. He was a man of spirit, giving and receiving blowson fit occasions, especially when anybody assailed Rhode Island. He had conducted for many years a powerful newspaper whichhad taken part in many conflicts. But he seemed somehow theintimate friend of every man in the Senate, on both sides. Every one of his colleagues poured out his heart to him. Itseemed that no eulogy or funeral was complete unless Anthonyhad taken part in it, because he was reckoned the next friendof the man who was dead. 

He was fully able to defend himself and his State and anycause which he espoused. No man would attack either withimpunity under circumstances which called on him for reply, as he showed on some memorable occasions. But he was of amost gracious and sweet nature. He was a lover and makerof peace. When his own political associates put an indignityupon Charles Sumner, the great leader of emancipation in theSenate, which had been the scene of his illustrious service, no man regretted the occurrence more than Mr. Anthony. 

 And straight Patroclus rose, The genial comrade, who, amid the strife Of kings, and war of angry utterance, Held even balance, to his outraged friend Heart-true, yet ever strove with kindly words To hush the jarring discord, urging peace. 

Mr. Anthony was a learned man; learned in the history of theSenate and in parliamentary law; learned in the history ofhis country and of foreign countries; learned in the resourcesof a full, accurate and graceful scholarship. Since Sumnerdied I suppose no Senator can be compared with him in thisrespect. Some passages in an almost forgotten political satireshow that he possessed a vein which, if he had cultivatedit, might have placed him high in the roll of satiric poets. But he never launched a shaft that he might inflict a sting. His collection of memorial addresses is unsurpassed in itskind of literature. He was absolutely simple, modest, courteousand without pretence. He was content to do his share in accomplishingpublic results, and leave to others whatever of fame or glorymight result from having accomplished them. 

 To be, and not to seem, was this man's wisdom. 

The satire, of which I have just spoken, is almost forgotten. It is a poem called "The Dorriad, " written at the time ofthe famous Dorr Rebellion. The notes, as in the case of the"Biglow Papers, " are even funnier than the text. He givesan account of the Dorr War in two cantos, after the mannerof Scott's "Marmion. " He describes the chieftain addressinghis troops on Arcote's Hill, the place where one Arcote, informer days, had been hung for sheep-stealing, and buriedat the foot of the gallows. 

 The Governor saw with conscious pride, The men who gathered at his side; That bloody sword aloft the drew, And "list, my trusty men, " he cried-- "Here do I swear to stand by you, As long as flows life's crimson tide;-- Nor will I ever yield, until I leave my bones upon this hill. " His men received the gallant boast With shouts that shook the rocks around. But hark, a voice? old Arcote's ghost Calls out, in anger, from the ground, "If here your bones you mean to lay, Then, damn it, I'll take mine away. "

I do not know that I can give a fair and impartial estimateof Roscoe Conkling. I never had any personal difficultywith him. On the other hand, he was good enough to say ofa speech which I made in the Presidential campaign of 1872, that it was the best speech made in the country that year. But I never had much personal intercourse with him, and formedan exceedingly unfavorable opinion of him. He was an ableman, though not superior in ability to some of his associates. I do not think he was the equal in debate of Mr. Blaine, or of Carl Schurz, or, on financial questions with which thelatter was familiar, of John Sherman. But he was undoubtedlya strong man. His speech nominating Grant at the NationalConvention of 1880 was one of very great power. But he wasunfit to be the leader of a great party, and was sure, ifhe were trusted with power, to bring it to destruction. Hewas possessed of an inordinate vanity. He was unrelentingin his enmities, and at any time was willing to sacrificeto them his party and the interests of the country. He usedto get angry with men simply because they voted against himon questions in which he took an interest. Once he wouldnot speak to Justin S. Morrill, one of the wisest and kindliestof men, for months, because of his anger at one of Morrill'svotes. I suppose he defeated the Republican Party in NewYork when General John A. Dix was candidate for Governor. That opinion, however, depends chiefly on common rumor. GovernorBoutwell, in this "Recollections, " says that Mr. Conklingcontributed secretly to the defeat of Mr. Blaine, althoughhe had been willing to support Blaine four years before. He was one of the men whose counsel wrought grievous injuryto Grant, and persuaded him to permit the foolish attemptto nominate him for a third term. The deserved respect whichthe American people had for Grant, and his great influence, would not induce them to bring Conkling and the men who werehis associates again into power. I can hardly think of aman of high character in the Republican Party, except Grant, who retained Conkling's friendship. His resignation of theoffice of Senator showed how utterly lacking he was in soundpolitical wisdom, or in lofty political morality. That aSenator of the United States should vacate his own officebecause he could not control Executive patronage was a proceedingnot likely to be regarded with much respect by the Americanpeople. I suppose he expected that he would be returned bythe New York Legislature, and that the scene of his comingback would be one of great dramatic effect. 

The reason of his action was President Garfield's nominationof Judge Robertson, who had been his own earnest supporterfor the Presidency, to the office of Collector of the portof New York. It happened in this way: General Garfield'snomination for the Presidency, of which I have told the storyin another place, was brought about in part by the aid ofsome of the New York delegation, led by Judge Robertson, whohad broken away from Conkling's leadership. He was of courseangry. After Garfield's election, he demanded that no oneof the New York opponents to Grant's nomination should beappointed to office by the incoming Administration. Garfieldtold me the whole story during the spring session of 1881. He had an interview with Conkling, I think by his own request, and endeavored to come to some understanding with him whichwould ensure harmony. He told Conkling that he desired tomake one conspicuous appointment of a New York man who hadsupported him against President Grant, and that thereafterappointments should be made of fit men, without regard to thefactional division of the party in New York, between hissupporters and those of Grant, and that the Senators wouldin all cases be consulted. Conkling would not listen to thesuggestion, and declared that he would not consent to theappointment of Judge Robertson to any important office in thiscountry; that if the President chose to send him abroad, hewould make no objection. President Garfield told me thatConkling's behavior in the interview was so insolent that itwas difficult for him to control himself and keep from orderinghim out of his presence. Nothing could be more preposterousor insolent than the demand of a Senator from any State thata President just elected, who had received the support ofthe people of that State, should ostracize his own supporters. It would have been infamous for Garfield to yield to the demand. 

I ought, in saying that there was no man of high integrityand great ability among the leaders of the Republican Partywho retained Conkling's friendship, to have excepted HamiltonFish. He was a man of great wisdom, who understood well theimportance to the Republican Party of avoiding a breach withthe powerful Senator from New York. But Conkling was jealousof all the other able men in the Republican Party in his ownState. He could--

 Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne. 

The spirits of good and evil politics have striven with oneanother in New York from the beginning of her history asJacob and Esau strove together in the womb. In general theformer has prevailed in western New York and along the lakes. In the city of New York sometimes one has carried the day, and sometimes the other. When the bad element was in power, the noble State has reminded me of Tennyson's eagle caughtby the talons in carrion, unable to fly or soar. 

Oliver Wolcott, who had been one of Washington's Cabinet, afterward Governor of Connecticut, dwelt in New York for sometime. He gives this account of New York politics. 

"After living a dozen years in that State, I don't pretendto comprehend their politics. It is a labyrinth of wheelswithin wheels, and it is understood only by the managers. Why, these leaders of the opposite parties, who--in the papersand before the world--seem ready to tear each other's eyesout, will meet some rainy night in a dark entry, and agree, whichever way the election goes, they will share the spoilstogether!"

John G. Palfrey, in his wonderful "Papers on the Slave Power, "was led by his natural impatience with the conduct of thegreat State, which seemed to him such an obstacle in the pathof Liberty, to utter the following invective:

"Pour soulless giant, her honorable history is yet to begin. From her colonial times, when, patching up a dastardly truce, she helped the French and Indians down from the Berkshirehills against the shield which brave Massachusetts held overthe New England settlements, through the time of her traitorsof the Revolutionary age, down to the time of her Butlersand her Marcys, her Van Burens and Hoyts, poltroonery andcorruption have with her ruled the hour. Nature has her freaks, and in one of them she gave a great man, John Jay, to NewYork. Hamilton was a waif from the West Indies on her spirit-barren strand, and Rufus King from Massachusetts. No doubt, among her millions, she has many wise and good, but the daywhen they begin to impress any fit influence of theirs uponher counsels, will open a new chapter in the annals of NewYork. "

I am tempted to quote this powerful invective for its literaryexcellence, and not for its justice. The history of NewYork, on the whole, has been a noble history. It must beconsidered that any people that opens its hospitable door ofwelcome to all mankind, with the elective franchise, mustitself, for a time, seem to suffer in the process, and must bestrongly tempted to protect itself against evil governmentby getting control of the powers of Government by unjustifiablemethods. 

For many years a large majority of the people of the cityof New York were of foreign birth or parentage. But howwonderfully most of these have grown in the elements of goodcitizenship, and of honorable manhood; and how wonderfullytheir sisters and daughters have grown in the elements ofwomanhood. Freedom is the best schoolteacher. 

Sometimes a political leader in New York who had got powerby forbidden ways, has used it for the good of the Republic. I suppose the worst examples of all low political leadershipwere the Pelhams, the Duke of Newcastle and his brother; yetwithout them, Lord Chatham's glorious career would have beenunknown to the history of English liberty. Chatham used tosay: "The Duke of Newcastle lends me his majority to carryon the Government. "

Let me not be understood as meaning to compare Roscoe Conklingwith such characters. He was fearless. He was a powerfuldebater. He never flinched in debate from the face of anyantagonist. There was something almost sublime in his loftydisdain. He was on the side of the country in her hour ofperil. I like Charles Sumner and John Jay and John Adamsbetter. Neither of these men could have lived long on termsof friendship with Conkling. I do not think George Washingtoncould have endured him. But let what was best in him, afterall, be remembered, even if we do not forget his great faults. 

I ought not, in speaking of the eminent Senators whom I haveknown, to omit Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi. Except Mr. Revels, from the same State, he is the only negro who eversat in the Senate of the United States. He conducted himselfwith great propriety. He was always courteous and sensible. He had a clear understanding of great questions which cameup, and was quite influential with his fellow Senators. Whenthe Chinese matter was up, he stated in a few words that hecould not, when he recalled the history of his own race, consentto vote for any measure which discriminated against any manby reason of his race or color. He left the Senate Chamber, I believe, with the entire respect of his associates on bothsides. He was afterward Register of the Treasury. His speechand vote on the Chinese question were in contrast with thoseof Senator Jonas, of the neighboring State of Louisiana. Inmy speech in opposition to the Chinese bill, or that on theChinese Treaty, I alluded at some length to the treatmentof the Jews in the dark ages and down to a very recent time. Senator Jonas, who was a Jew, paid me some compliments aboutmy speech. I said: "Why will you not remember the terriblehistory of the men of your own race and blood, and help meresist a like savage treatment of another race?" Mr. Jonasrejected the suggestion with a great emphasis, and said: "Mr. Hoar, the Jews are a superior race. They are not to be classedwith the Chinese. "

There were several negro Representatives from the South whenI was in the House of Representatives. All of them behavedwith great propriety. They were men who took care of themselvesand the interests of their people in any debate. Mr. Rainey, of South Carolina, had a spirited tilt with S. S. Cox, oneof the most brilliant of the Democratic leaders, in whichhe left Cox unhorsed and on his back in the arena. None ofthem ever said an indiscreet thing, no one of them ever losthis temper or gave any opportunity for an angry or intolerantor contemptuous reply. 

Soon after Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, came to the House, in the Congress of 1875-7, unanimous consentwas asked that he might address the House at length, withoutbeing limited by the hour rule. Judge Hoar, then a memberof the House, stipulated that Mr. Elliott, of South Carolina, should, if he liked, have leave to reply. This could notdecently be refused, and that was granted also. ThereuponStephens made a powerful speech, for which he had doubtlessmade most careful preparation. Robert B. Elliott then made, on the instant that Stephens got through, an admirable reply, of which it is great praise and still not saying too muchthat it deserves to rank with the speech of Mr. Stephens. 

Elliott delivered an excellent eulogy on Charles Sumner, in Boston, which was published with those of Carl Schurzand George William Curtis, and was entirely worthy of thecompanionship. 

Perhaps, on the whole, the ablest of the colored men whoserved with me in Congress, although each of the gentlemenI have named deserves high commendation, was John R. Lynchof Mississippi. I had a very pleasant acquaintance with himwhen he was in the House. He was afterward Fourth Auditorof the Treasury. 

I was the means of procuring for him a national distinctionwhich very much gratified the men of his color throughoutthe country. The supporters of Mr. Blaine in the NationalConvention of 1884 had a candidate of their own for temporarypresiding officer. I think it was Mr. Clayton of Arkansas. It was desired to get a Southern man for that purpose. Theopponents of Mr. Blaine also desired to have a candidate oftheir own from the South. The colored Southern men were generallyBlaine men. I advised them to nominate Lynch, urging thatit would be impossible for the Southern colored people, whatevertheir preference might be as a candidate for the Presidency, to vote against one of their own color. Lynch was nominatedby Henry Cabot Lodge, afterward my colleague in the Senate, and seconded by Theodore Roosevelt and by George William Curtis. Lynch presided over the Convention during the whole of thefirst day, and a part of the second. He made an admirablepresiding officer. 

Quite curiously, I have had something to do with introducinga little more liberal practice in this respect into the policyof the country. 

I was the first person who ever invited a colored man totake the Chair in the Senate. I happened to be put in theChair one afternoon when Vice-President Wheeler was away. I spied Mr. Bruce in his seat, and it occurred to me thatit would be a good thing to invite him to take my place, whichhe did. 

When I was presiding over the National Convention of 1880, one of the English Royal Princes, Prince Leopold, Duke ofAlbany, son of Victoria, visited the Convention. He was broughtup and introduced to me. I suppose that was one of the veryrare instances in which a scion of the English Royal Housewas presented to anybody, instead of having the person presentedto him. Wishing to converse with the Prince, I called Mr. Bruce to the Chair. I thought it would be an excellent opportunityto confer an honor upon a worthy colored man in the presenceof a representative of this Royal House. Frederick Douglassafterward called on me with a delegation of colored men, andpresented me with a letter signed by prominent colored menof the country, thanking me for this act. 

It also was my fortune to secure the selection, on my recommendation, of the first colored man ever appointed to the Railway MailService. This was soon after I entered the House of Representativesin 1869. 

Perhaps I may as well add in this connection that I believedI recommended the first married woman ever appointed postmasterin this country, shortly after I entered the House. 

When Colonel Chenoweth, who had been on General Grant's staff, a most brilliant and able officer of the War, died in officeas Consul at Canton, China, to which he was appointed by PresidentGrant, I urged very strongly upon Grant the appointment ofthe widow to the place. She had, during her husband's illness, performed a great part of the duties very well, and to thegreat satisfaction of the merchants doing business there. I told General Grant the story. He said he would make theappointment--to use his own phrase--if Fish would let him. But Mr. Fish was inexorable. He thought it would be a veryundignified proceeding. He also urged, with great reason, that a Consul had to hold court for the trial of some graveoffences, committed often by very bad characters, and thatit was out of the question that a delicate lady should beexpected to know or to have anything to do with them. Sothe proposal fell through. 

Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana served in the House with me. I had with him there one very angry conflict. But it didnot interrupt our friendly relations. He was a man of a gooddeal of eloquence, very popular in his own State, and saidto have been a very successful and able lawyer, especiallyin arguing cases to juries. His political speeches in theSenate were carefully prepared, very able statements of hisside, and very severe denunciations of his antagonists. Buthe was a very kind-hearted man indeed, always willing to doa kindness to any of his associates, or to any person in trouble. If he could not be relied on to protect the Treasury againstclaims of doubtful validity, when they were urged by personsin need, or who in any way excited his sympathy, it oughtto be said in defence of him, that he would have been quiteas willing to relieve them to the extent of his power fromhis private resources. 

Bainbridge Wadleigh of New Hampshire succeeded to the Chairmanshipof the Committee on Privileges and Elections after Mr. Morton'sdeath in the summer of 1869. He was a modest, quiet and unpretendingman, of stainless integrity, of great industry in dealingwith any matter for which he had direct responsibility, andof great wisdom and practical sense. I formed a very pleasantfriendship with him, and regretted it exceedingly when heleft the Senate, after serving a single term. There was atthe time a very bad practice in New Hampshire of frequentlychanging her Senators. So few of the very able men who haverepresented her in the Senate for the last fifty years havemade the impression upon the public service, or gained thefame to which their ability would have entitled them, if theyhad had longer service. Mr. Wadleigh was an excellent lawyer, and the Senate gave him its confidence in all matters withwhich his important Committee had to deal. 

David Davis of Illinois was a very interesting character. He had been a successful lawyer, an eminent Judge in hisState, and a very admirable Judge of the Supreme Court ofthe United States, to which office he was appointed by AbrahamLincoln. 

He entered the Senate when I did, and served one term ofsix years. His service in the Senate did not add at all tohis distinction. The one thing he had done in life of whichhe was very proud and which was of most importance, was bringingabout the nomination of Abraham Lincoln at Chicago. Of thathe liked to discourse whenever he could get a listener, andhis discourses were always so entertaining that everybodylistened who could. 

David Davis thought that but for him Lincoln would not havebeen nominated. I have little doubt that he was right. Hehad many able and bright men to help him. But he was theleader, director and counsellor of all the forces. He threwhimself into it with all the zeal of a man fighting for hislife. He made pledges right and left, seeming to discoverevery man's weak point, and used entreaty, flattery and promiseswithout stint, and, if he were himself to be believed, withoutmuch scruple. When somebody said to him in my hearing, "Youmust have used a good deal of diplomacy, Judge, at that Convention. ""Diplomacy, " replied Davis, "My dear man, I lied like thedevil. " He had that sense of humor peculiar to Americans, which likes to state in an exaggerated way things that arecalculated to shock the listener, which our English and Germanbrethren cannot comprehend. So I do not think this statementof Davis's is to be taken without many grains of salt. I supposehe thought the man to whom he said it would not take it tooliterally. 

Judge Davis was a man of very warm sympathy. He liked togive accounts of cases he had tried, sitting in equity, orI think sometimes in divorce cases, where he had inventeda curious rule of law, or had stretched his discretion, to savesome poor widow, or wronged wife, or suffering orphan, ashare of an estate to which their legal title was in considerabledoubt. If he were led by his sympathies ever to be an unjustJudge, at least the poor widow had no need to worry him byher importunities. He avenged her speedily the first time. 

He was a Republican before and during the War, and a steadfastsupporter of Lincoln's policies. His opinion had been ingeneral in support of the liberal construction of the Constitution, under which the National powers had been exerted to put downthe Rebellion. 

He was elected to the Senate after resigning his place onthe Supreme Court Bench, by a union of Democrats of the IllinoisLegislature with a few discontented Republicans, defeatingLogan. When he came to the Senate he preserved his positionas an Independent. He did not go into the caucuses of eitherparty. He had no sympathy with the more radical element amongthe Democrats. Yet he liked to be considered a special representativeof the Labor Party in the country. I think he hoped thatthere might be a union or coalition of the Democrats and Labormen in the Presidential election of 1880, and that in thatway he would be elected President. 

His seat was on the Republican side. When there was a division, if he voted with the Republicans, he sat in his seat, or rosein his seat if there was a rising vote; but when, as not unfrequentlyhappened, he voted with the Democrats, he always left hisseat and went over to the Democratic side of the Chamber, and stood there until his name was called, or his vote counted. As he passed Conkling one day in one of these movings, Conklingcalled out, "Davis, do you get travel for all these journeys?"

When the Senate came together in special session, on Monday, October 10, 1881, it was found that the Democrats had a majorityof two. One Senator only was present from Rhode Island, oneonly from Nevada, and the two newly elected Senators fromNew York had not been admitted to their seats. A motion ofMr. Edmunds that the oath prescribed by law be administeredto the Senators from New York was laid on the table. On thatvote the Democrats had a majority of two, Mr. Davis votingwith the Republicans. On a resolution that Thomas F. Bayard, a Senator from Delaware, be chosen President pro tempore, Mr. Edmunds moved an amendment by striking it all out andinserting a resolution that the oath of office be administeredto Mr. Miller and Mr. Lapham of New York, and Mr. Aldrichof Rhode Island, by Mr. Henry B. Anthony the senior Senatorof the Senate. That resolution was lost by a vote of thirty-four to thirty-three, Mr. Davis voting with the Republicans. Mr. Edmunds then moved to add to the resolution declaringMr. Bayard President pro tempore, the words "for this day. "That was lost by one vote, Mr. Davis voting with the Republicans. After several other unsuccessful attempts, Mr. Bayard waschosen President pro tempore, the resolution being carriedby a majority of two votes, Mr. Davis not voting. ThereuponMr. Bayard accepted the office in a speech, brief, but whichclearly implied an expectation on his part to continue init for a considerable period of time. 

The next day, being Tuesday, October 11, Mr. Aldrich of RhodeIsland, Mr. Lapham and Mr. Miller of New York, were admittedto their seats. This left a majority of two for the Republicans, if Mr. Davis acted with them, and the two parties tied, ifMr. Davis acted with the Democrats. 

The Democrats had succeeded in electing their President protempore, whom the Republicans could not displace, and therewas left before the body a struggle for the organizationof the Senate, including the executive officers and the Committees, in which no progress could be made without Mr. Davis's help. 

That being the condition of things, the Republicans calleda caucus, in which Senator Logan, Mr. Davis's colleague, appeared with a message from Mr. Davis. This substance ofthe message was that Mr. Davis thought that the Republicansought to leave the organization, so far as the executiveoffices were concerned, in the hands of the Democrats, whohad elected the existing officers during the previous Congress, and that the Committees should be appointed with Republicanmajorities. Mr. Logan further announced that if the Republicansshould see fit to elect Mr. Davis President pro tempore, hewould vote in accordance with that understanding. Mr. Ingallsof Kansas and I were quite unwilling to accede to this arrangement. But at that time the Committees lasted only for the sessionfor which they were appointed. So the Senate could transactno business of importance, and the office of Secretary, andSergeant-at-Arms, and Door-keeper, and all the important officesof the Senate would continue in Democratic hands. So, veryreluctantly, we yielded to the desire of our associates. Whereupon a resolution was adopted continuing the standingCommittees for the session as they had come over from the lastsession, and indeed from the session before, Mr. Davis votingwith the Republicans. This vote was passed by a majorityof two votes. General Logan then introduced the followingresolution: That David Davis, a Senator from Illinois, ishereby chosen President pro tempore of the Senate. This wasalso passed by a majority of two votes, Mr. Davis and Mr. Bayard not voting. Mr. Bayard descended from the elevationhe had occupied for so short a time, amid general laughterin which he good-naturedly joined, and Mr. Davis ascendedthe throne. He made a brief speech which began with thissentence: "The honor just conferred upon me comes, as theseat in this body which I now hold did, without the leastexpectation on my part. If it carried any party obligation, I should be constrained to decline this high compliment. Ido not accept it as a tribute to any personal merit, but ratheras a recognition of the independent position which I havelong occupied in the politics of the country. "

So, it was Mr. Davis's fortune to hold in his hands the determinationbetween the two parties of the political power of the country, on two very grave occasions. But for his choice as Senatorfrom Illinois, he would have been on the Electoral Commission. I do not think, in so important a matter, that he would haveimpaired his great judicial fame by dissenting from the opinionwhich prevailed. But if he had, he would have given the Presidencyto Mr. Tilden. And again, but for the arrangement by whichhe was elected to the Presidency of the Senate, the Republicanswould not have gained control, so far as it depended on theCommittees. 

He did not make a very good presiding officer. He nevercalled anybody to order. He was not informed as to parliamentarylaw, or as to the rules of the Senate. He had a familiarand colloquial fashion, if any Senator questioned his ruling, of saying, "But, my dear sir"; or, "But, pray consider. " Hewas very irreverently called by somebody, during a ratherdisorderly scene in the Senate, where he lost control of thereins, the "Anarch old. "

But, after all, the office of presiding over the Senate iscommonly not of very great consequence. It is quite importantthat the President of the Senate should be a pleasant-naturedgentleman, and the gentleman in the Senator will almost alwaysrespond to the gentleman in the Chair. Senators do not submiteasily to any vigorous exercise of authority. Vice-PresidentsWheeler, Morton and Stevenson, and more lately, Mr. Frye, asserted their authority with as little show of force as ifthey were presiding over a company of guests at their owntable. But the order and dignity of the body have been preserved. 

Mr. Davis's fame must rest on his long and faithful and ableservice as a wise, conscientious and learned Judge. In writingthese recollections, I have dwelt altogether too much on littlefoibles and weaknesses, which seem to have something amusingin them, and too little, I am afraid, on the greater qualitiesof the men with whom I have served. This is perhaps trueas to David Davis. But I have said very much what I shouldhave said to him, if I had been chatting with him, as I veryfrequently did, in the cloak room of the Senate. 

He was a man of enormous bulk. No common arm chair wouldhold him. There is a huge chair, said to have been made forDixon H. Lewis of Alabama, long before the Civil War, whichwas brought up from the basement of the Capitol for his use. The newspaper correspondents used to say that he had to besurveyed for a new pair of trousers. 

I was one night in the Chair of the Senate when the sessionlasted to near three o'clock in the morning. It was on theoccasion of the passage of the bill for purchasing silver. The night was very dark and stormy and the rain came downin torrents. Just before I put the final question I senta page for my coat and hat, and, as soon as I declared theSenate adjourned, started for the outer door. There werevery few carriages in waiting. I secured one of them andthen invited Davis and his secretary and another Senator, when they came along, to get in with me. When we stoppedto leave Judge Davis at the National Hotel, where he lived, it was found impossible to get the door of the hack open. His great weight pressed it down, so that the door was heldtight as in a vise. The hackman and the porters pulled onthe outside, and the passengers pushed and struggled fromwithin; but in vain. After fifteen or twenty minutes, itoccurred to some one that we within should all squeeze ourselvesover to one side of the carriage, and those outside use theirwhole strength on the opposite door. This was successful. We escaped from our prison. As Davis marched into the hotelthe hackman exclaimed, as he stared after him: "By God, Ishould think you was eight men. "

Eli Saulsbury of Delaware was a very worthy Southern gentlemanof the old school, of great courage, ability and readinessin debate, absolutely devoted to the doctrines of the DemocraticParty, and possessed of a very high opinion of himself. Iknew him very intimately. He was Chairman of the Committeeon Privileges and Elections, and was a member of it when Iwas Chairman. We went to New Orleans together to make whatwas called the Copiah investigation. We used to be fond oftalking with each other. He always had a fund of pleasantanecdotes of old times in the South. He liked to set forthhis own virtues and proclaim the lofty morality of his ownprinciples of conduct, a habit which he may have got fromhis eminent colleague, Senator Bayard, who sometimes announceda familiar moral principle as if it were something the peoplewho listened to him were hearing for the first time, and ofwhich he in his youth had been the original discoverer. Ionce told Saulsbury, when he was discoursing in that way, that he must be descended from Adam by some wife he had beforeEve, who had nothing to do with the fall. He was fond ofviolently denouncing the wicked Republicans on the floor ofthe Senate, and in Committee. But his bark was worse thanhis bite. 

When the Kellogg case was investigated by the Committee onPrivileges and Elections, when I first entered the Senate, Mr. Saulsbury rose in the first meeting of the Committeeand proceeded to denounce his Republican associates. Hedeclared they came there with their minds made up on thecase, a condition of mind which was absolutely unfit for agrave judicial office, in the discharge of which all partyconsiderations and preconceived opinions should be banished. He said we should have open minds to hear the arguments andthe evidence to be introduced, as if it were a solemn trialin a court of justice. When he was in the midst of a veryeloquent and violent philippic, the Chairman of the Committee, Bainbridge Wadleigh, said quietly, "Brother Saulsbury, haven'tyou made up your mind?" Mr. Saulsbury stopped a moment, said, "Yes, I have made up my mind, " broke into a roar of laughter, and sat down. 

He was a confirmed and incorrigible bachelor. There was inNew Orleans, when we were there, a restaurant famous all overthe country, kept by a very accomplished widow. The membersof the Committee thought it would be a good thing if we couldhave such a restaurant as that in Washington. We passed aunanimous vote requesting Mr. Saulsbury to marry the widow, and bring her to Washington, as a matter of public duty. Hetook the plan into consideration, but nothing came of it. Some mischievous newspaper correspondent circulated a report, which went through the country, that Mr. Saulsbury was verymuch in love with a lady in Washington, also a charming widow. It was said that he visited her every evening; that she hada rare gift of making rum punch; that she always gave hima glass, and that afterward, although he was exceedingly temperatein such things, he fell on his knees, offered himself to thewidow, and was refused; and that this ceremony had been repeatednightly for many years. I once mentioned this story to him, and he didn't deny it. But, on the other hand, he didn'tadmit it. 

When he was chosen to the Senate he had two brothers who competedwith him for the office. One of them was then Senator. TheSenate had a good deal of difficulty in getting through itsbusiness before the 4th of March, when the new Administrationcame in, and the term of the elder Mr. Saulsbury ended. Therehad been an all-night session, so some of the Senators hadgot worn out and overcome by the loss of sleep. Just beforetwelve o'clock at noon Senator Willard Saulsbury put his headdown on this desk and fell asleep. The Senate was calledto order again for the new session, the roll called, and Mr. Saulsbury's brother Eli had been sworn in. Willard wakedup, rose, and addressed the Chair. The presiding officerquietly replied: "The gentleman from Delaware is no longera member of the Senate. " Whereupon he quietly withdrew. 

Matthew C. Butler of South Carolina was another SouthernDemocrat, fiery in temper, impatient of control or opposition, ready to do battle if anybody attacked the South, but carryinganger as the flint bears fire. He was zealous for the honorof the country, and never sacrificed the interest of the countryto party or sectional feeling. He was quite unpopular withthe people of the North when he entered the Senate, partlyfrom the fact that some of his kindred had been zealous Southernchampions before the War, at the time of some very bittersectional strifes, and because he was charged with havingbeen the leader and counsellor in some violent and unlawfulconduct toward the colored people after the War. I have notinvestigated the matter. But I believe the responsibilityfor a good deal of what was ascribed to him belonged to anotherperson of the same name. But the Republicans of the Senatecame to esteem and value Senator Butler very highly. He deservesgreat credit, among other things, for his hearty and effectivesupport of the policy of enlarging the Navy, which, when hecame into public life, was feeble in strength and antiquatedin construction. With his departure from the Senate, andthat of his colleague, General Wade Hampton, ended the powerin South Carolina of the old gentry who, in spite of somegrave faults, had given to that State an honorable and gloriouscareer. When the Spanish War broke out, General Butler wasprompt to offer his services, although he had lost a leg inthe Civil War. 

James B. Beck came into the House of Representatives whenI did, in 1869. He served there for six years, was out ofpublic life for two years, and in 1877 came to the Senatewhen I did. 

I do not think any two men ever disliked each other morethan we did for the first few years of our service. He hatedwith all the energy of his Scotch soul, --the _perfervidumingenium Scotorum, _--everything I believed. He thought theNew England Abolitionists had neither love of liberty norcare for the personal or political rights of the negro. Indeedhe maintained that the forefathers of the New England abolitionistswere guilty of bringing slavery into this continent. He hatedthe modern New England theological heresies with all the zealof his Scotch Presbyterian forbears. He hated the Reconstructionpolicy, which he thought was inspired by a desire to put thewhite man in the place where the negro had been. He hatedwith all the energy of a free-trader the protection policy, which he deemed the most unscrupulous robbery on a huge scale. He considered the gold standard a sort of power press withwhich the monopolists of the East were trying to squeezethe last drop of blood out of the farmers and workingmenof the South. He thought the public debt was held by menwho had paid very little value for it, and who ought to bepaid off in the same cheap money which was in vogue whenit was originally incurred. He hated New England cultureand refinement, which he deemed a very poor crop coming froma barren intellectual soil. He regarded me, I think, asthe representative, in a humble way, of all these things, andesteemed me accordingly. 

I was not behindhand with him, although I was not quite sofrank, probably, in uttering my opinions in public debate. But I found out, after a little while, that the Northern menwho got intimate with him on committees, or in private intercourse, found him one of the most delightful companions, fond of poetry, especially of Burns, full of marvellous stores of anecdotes, without any jot of personal malice, ready to do a kindnessto any man, and easily touched by any manifestation of kindlyfeeling toward him, or toward his Southern neighbors and constituents. My colleague, Mr. Dawes, served with him on some of the greatcommittees of the Senate and in the House, and they establisheda very close and intimate friendship. I came to know Mr. Beck later. But he had changed his feeling toward me, asI had toward him, long before either found out what the otherwas thinking about. So one day--it was the time of Mr. Dawes'slast reelection to the Senate--he came over to my side ofthe Chamber, took my hand and said with great emotion: "Icongratulate you on the reelection of Mr. Dawes. He is oneof my dearest friends, and one of the best men I ever knewin my life. " And then, as he turned away, he added: "Mr. Hoar, I have not known you as well. But I shall the samething about you, when your reelection takes place. "

He had a powerful and vigorous frame, and a powerful and vigorousunderstanding. It seemed as if neither could ever tire. Heused to pour out his denunciation of the greed of the capitalistsand monopolists and protectionists, with a fund of statisticswhich it seemed impossible for the industry of any man tohave collected, and at a length which it would seem equallyimpossible for mortal man to endure. He was equally readyon all subjects. He performed with great fidelity the laborof a member of the Committee on Appropriations, first in theHouse, and afterward in the Senate. I was the author of asmall jest, which half amused and half angered him. Somebodyasked in my hearing how it was possible that Mr. Beck couldmake all those long speeches, in addition to his committeework, or get time for the research that was needed, and howit was ever possible for his mind to get any rest; to whichI answered, that he rested his intellect while he was makinghis speeches. But this was a sorry jest, with very littlefoundation in fact. Anybody who undertook to debate withhim, found him a tough customer. He knew the Bible--especiallythe Psalms of David--and the poems of Burns, by heart. Whenhe died I think there was no other man left in the Senate, on either side, whose loss would have occasioned a more genuineand profound sorrow. 

When I came into the Senate one of the most conspicuous charactersin American public life was Oliver P. Morton of Indiana. Hehad been Governor of Indiana during the War. There was alarge and powerful body of Copperheads among the Democratsin that State. They were very different from their brethrenin the East. They were ugly, defiant and full of a dangerousactivity. Few other men could have dealt with them with thevigor and success of Governor Morton. The State at its electionswas divided into two hostile camps. If they did not resortto the weapons of war, they were filled with a hatred andbitterness which does not commonly possess military opponents. Gov. Morton, in spite of the great physical infirmity whichcame upon him before the War ended, held the State in itsplace in the Union with an iron hand. When he came to theSenate he found there no more powerful, brave or unyieldingdefender of liberty. He had little regard for Constitutionalscruples. I do not think it should be said that he wouldwillingly violate his oath to support the Constitution. Buthe believed that the Constitution should be interpreted inthe light of the Declaration of Independence, so as to bethe law of life to a great, powerful and free people. To thisprinciple of interpretation, all strict or narrow criticism, founded on its literal meaning, must yield. 

His public life was devoted to two supreme objects:

1. Preservation of the Constitutional authority of the Government. 

2. The maintenance by that authority of the political andpersonal rights of all citizens, of all races and classes. 

As I have said, he interpreted the Constitution in a mannerwhich he thought would best promote these objects. He hadlittle respect for subtilties or refinements or scruplesthat stood in the way. 

He was for going straight to his object. When the Hayesand Tilden contest was up, he was for having the Presidentof the United States put Hayes and Wheeler in power by usingall the National forces, military and other, that might beneedful. He was a member of the Committee that framed thebill for the Electoral Commission, but refused to give ithis support. 

I made a very pleasant acquaintance with him during the sessionsof that Committee. I suppose it was due to his kindly influencethat I was put upon the Committee of Privileges and Elections, of which he was Chairman, when I entered the Senate. Buthe died in the following summer, so I never had an opportunityto know him better. He was a great party leader. He hadin this respect no superior in his time, save Lincoln alone. 

It was never my good fortune to be intimate with ZachariahChandler. But I had a good opportunity for observing himand knowing him well. I met him in 1854, at the Conventionheld in Buffalo to concert measures for protecting and promotingFree State immigration to Kansas. He was the leading spiritof that Convention, full of wisdom, energy and courage. Hewas then widely known throughout the country as an enterprisingand successful man of business. When I went into the Houseof Representatives, in 1869, Mr. Chandler was already a veteranin public life. He had organized and led the political forceswhich overthrew Lewis Cass and the old Democratic Party, not only in Michigan but in the Northwest. He had been inthe Senate twelve years. Those twelve years had been crowdedwith history. The close of the Administration of Buchanan, the disruption of the Democratic Party at Charleston, theelection and inauguration of Lincoln, the putting down ofthe Rebellion, the organizing, directing and disbanding ofgreat armies, the great amendments to the Constitution, andthe contest with Andrew Johnson, had been accomplished. Thereconstruction of the rebellious States, the payment of thepublic debt, keeping the national faith under great temptation, reconciliation and the processes of legislation and administrationunder the restraints which belonged to peace, were well underway. In all these Chandler bore a large part, and a partwise, honest, powerful and on the righteous side. I knewhim afterward in the Department of the Interior. He was, in my judgment, the ablest administrative officer withoutan exception who has been in any executive department duringmy public life. His sturdy honesty, his sound, rapid, almostinstinctive judgment, his tact, his business sense, his loveof justice were felt in every fibre and branch of the greatInterior Department, then including eight great bureaus eachalmost important enough to be a Department by itself. 

The humblest clerk who complained of injustice was sure tobe listened to by the head of that great Department, who, with his quick sympathy and sound judgment, would make itcertain that right would be done. 

Chandler has little respect for the refinements of speechor for literary polish. He could not endure Mr. Sumner'spiling precedent upon precedent and quotation upon quotation, and disliked his lofty and somewhat pompous rhetoric. Heused sometimes to leave his seat and make known his disgustin the cloak room, or in the rear of the desks, to visitorswho happened to be in the Senate Chamber. But he was strongas a rock, true as steel, fearless and brave, honest and incorruptible. He had a vigorous good sense. He saw through all the foolishsophistries with which the defenders of fiat money, or debasedcurrency, sought to defend their schemes. He had no mercyfor treason or rebellion or secession. He was a native ofNew Hampshire. He had the opinions of New England, combinedwith the directness and sincerity and energy of the West. He had a very large influence in making the State of Michigananother New England. 

He was a sincere, open-hearted, large-hearted and affectionateman. He was the last man in the world of whom it would beproper to speak as a member of an intrigue or cabal. Hisstrategy was a straightforward, downright blow. His strokewas an Abdiel stroke, This greeting on thy impious crest receive. 

His eloquence was simple, rugged, direct, strong. He hadbut a scanty vocabulary. It contained no word for treasonbut "treason. " He described a lie by a word of three letters. The character of his speech was that which Plutarch ascribesto Demosthenes. He was strongly stirred by simple and greatemotions--love of country, love of freedom, love of justice, love of honesty. He hated cant and affectation. 

I believe he was fond of some good literature, but he wasvery impatient of Mr. Sumner's load of ornament and quotation. He had little respect for fine phrases or for fine sentimentor the delicacies of a refined literature. He was rough andplain-spoken. I do not think he would ever have learned tocare much for Tennyson or Browning. But the Psalms of Davidwould have moved him. 

I suppose he was not much of a civil service reformer. Heexpected to rule Michigan, and while he would have never boughtor bribed an antagonist by giving him an office, he wouldhave expected to fill the public offices, so far as he hadhis way, by men who were of his way of thinking. He was muchshocked and disgusted when Judge Hoar wanted to inquire furtherconcerning a man whom he had recommended for the office ofJudge of the Circuit Court. The Judge said something aboutasking Reuben Rice, a friend he highly respected who had livedlong in Michigan. Chandler spoke of it afterward and said:"When Jake Howard and I recommended a man, the Attorney-General wanted to ask a little railroad fellow what he thoughtof him. "

He joined with Conkling and Carpenter and Edmunds in theiropposition to the confirmation of Judge Hoar. He came toknow the Judge better afterward and declared that he himselfhad made a mistake. 

He was a strong pillar of public faith, public liberty, andof the Union. He had great faults. But without the aidof the men whom he could influence and who honored him, andto whom his great faults were as great virtues, the Unionnever would have been saved, or slavery abolished, or thefaith kept. I hold it one of the chief proofs of the kindnessof divine Providence to the American people in a time of verygreat peril that their leaders were so different in character. They are all dead now--Sumner and Fessenden and Seward andWilson and Chase and Stanton and Grant and Sherman and Sheridanand Chandler, --a circle in which Lincoln shines as a diamondin its setting. Not one of them could have been spared. 

It is proper that I should add that I have known very wella good many of the most eminent citizens of Michigan. Thislist includes Governor and Senator Henry P. Baldwin, and JudgeChristiancy, who displaced Chandler in the Senate. I havefrequently heard them speak of Mr. Chandler. Without an exceptionI believe they held him in profound esteem and honor. Theywere proud of him as the most eminent citizen of their Statewhich has been prolific of strong men, speaking of him aswe do of Sumner or Webster. 

Mr. Chandler was a remarkable example of what I have oftennoticed, how thoroughly the people come to know the true characterof a public man, even when the press of the whole countryunite to decry him. I suppose there was not a paper in NewEngland, Republican or Democratic, that spoke kindly of Zach. Chandler for many years. He was disliked by the Democraticpress for his unyielding Republicanism. He was disliked bythe Republican press that supported Charles Sumner, for hisopposition to him. He was represented as a coarse, ignorantand unscrupulous man. In the campaign of 1880 I sent hima telegram, asking him to visit me in Massachusetts and makea few speeches in our campaign. I added: "You will be receivedwith unbounded respect and honor. " The telegram was an astonishmentand revelation to the old man. He had no idea that the peopleof New England had that opinion of him. Governor Baldwintold me that he happened to be passing Chandler's house justas he received my message. Chandler knocked on the windowfor the Governor to come in. He had the telegram in his handwhen the Governor entered, and exclaimed: "Look at that; readthat; and I did not graduate at Harvard College either. " Hiscolleague, Senator Ferry, alludes to his gratification at thereceipt of this message, in his obituary delivered in the Senate. He spoke in Worcester and Boston and Lowell, and in one ortwo other places. His passage through the State was a triumphalmarch. He was received as I had predicted. In Worcesterwe had no hall large enough to hold the crowds that throngedto see him, and were compelled to have the meeting in theskating-rink. Chandler went back to Michigan full of satisfactionwith his reception. I think he would have been among themost formidable candidates for the Presidency at the nextelection, but for his sudden death. If he had been nominated, he would undoubtedly have been elected. But, a short timeafter, he was one morning found dead in his bed at Chicago. In his death a great and salutary force was subtracted fromthe public life of the country, and especially from the publiclife of the great State to whose history he had contributedso large and noble a part. 

I have found among some old notes a few sentences with whichI presented him to a mighty audience in my own city:

"Worcester is here in person to-night to give a welcome fromthe heart of Massachusetts to the Senator of Michigan. Ifour guest had nothing of his own to recommend him, it wouldbe enough to stir the blood of Massachusetts that he representsthat honored State, another New England in her interests andin her opinions. With her vast forests, her people sharewith Maine, our own great frontier State, those vast lumberinterests, for which it has been our own policy to demandprotection. Daughter of three mighty lakes, she takes a largeshare in our vast inland commerce. Her people are brave, prosperous and free. They have iron in their soil, and ironin their blood. Great as is her wealth and her material interest, she shares with Massachusetts the honor of being among theforemost of American States in educational conditions. Massachusettsis proud to--

 Claim kindred there, and have the claim allowed. 

"But our guest brings to us more than a representative titleto our regard. The memory of some of us goes back to thetime when, all over the great free Northwest, the people seemedto have forgotten to what they owed their own prosperity. The Northwest had been the gift of Freedom to the Republicon her birthday. In each of her million homes dwells Liberty, a perpetual guest. But yet that people in Illinois and Michiganand Indiana and Ohio seemed for a time to have forgotten theirown history, and to be unworthy of their fair and mighty heritage. They had been the trusted and sturdy allies of the slave powerin the great contest for the possession of the vast territorybetween the Mississippi and the Pacific. The old leaders, Douglas in Illinois and Cass in Michigan, who ruled thoseStates with an almost despotic power, sought to win the favorof the South for their aspirations for the Presidency by espousingthe doctrine of squatter sovereignty, under which the invadersfrom the slave States hard by, without even becoming residentsin good faith, might fix forever the character of that fairdomain. At that time a young knight, a figure of manly courageand manly strength, came forward to challenge General Cassto a struggle for the supremacy in Michigan. It was our guestof this evening. As you all know, the young champion vanquishedthe veteran warrior in a trial by battle for the freedom ofthe Continent. I met him at Buffalo in 1854, in the heightof the conflict, at a gathering of a few gentlemen to concertmeasures for sustaining, aiding and arming the Free Stateimmigrants in Kansas. He was the leader and the life ofthe company. Many of those immigrants had gone from WorcesterCounty, where the Emigrants' Aid Society was first devisedby Edward Hale and organized by Eli Thayer. I met him againwhen I went to Washington in 1869. I found him among theforemost of the leaders of the Senate. He had gone throughthe great period of the Civil War, and the period before theCivil War. He had stood by Lincoln in that time of trouble. He had stood firm as a rock for the financial integrity ofthe country. Afterward it was my good fortune to know a gooddeal of his administration of the great Department of theInterior. I have never known, or known of, a better administrationof any Department from the beginning of the Government, thanhis of that great office, with its eight important bureaus. 

"He brings to you to-night the news from Maine and the newsfrom Ohio. He can tell you what the Republicans are thinkingof and are doing all over the country, as they prepare themselvesfor the great contest beginning this year, to end, as we hopeand believe, with a great Republican victory in 1880. "

John James Ingalls was in many respects one of the brightestintellects I ever knew. He was graduated at Williams in 1855. One of the few things, I don't know but I might say the onlything, for which he seemed to have any reverence was the characterof Mark Hopkins. He was a very conspicuous figure in thedebates in the Senate. He had an excellent English style, always impressive, often on fit occasions rising to greatstateliness and beauty. He was for a good while Presidentpro tempore of the Senate, and was the best presiding officerI have ever known there for conducting ordinary business. He maintained in the chair always his stately dignity of bearingand speech. The formal phrases with which he declared theaction of the Senate, or stated questions for its decision, seemed to be a fitting part of some stately ceremonial. Hedid not care much about the principles of parliamentary law, and had never been a very thorough student of the rules. Sohis decisions did not have the same authority as those ofMr. Wheeler or Mr. Edmunds or Mr. Hamlin. 

I said to him one day, "I think you are the best presidingofficer I ever knew. But I do not think you know much aboutparliamentary law. " To which he replied: "I think the stingis bigger than the bee. "

He never lost an opportunity to indulge his gift of causticwit, no matter at whose expense. When the morning hour wasdevoted to acting upon the reports of committees in casesof private claims, or pensions, he used to look over, thenight before, the reports which were likely to be on the nextday's calendar. When a bill was reached he would get up andmake a pretty sharp attack on the measure, full of wit andsatire. He generally knew very little about it. When hegot through his speech he would disappear into the cloak roomand leave the Senator who had reported the bill, and had expectedto get it through without any difficulty--the case being veryoften absolutely clear and just--to spend his time in an elaborateand indignant explanation. 

Mr. Ingalls disliked very much the scrupulous administrationsof Hayes and Harrison. He yielded to the craze for free silverwhich swept over parts of the West, and in so doing lost theconfidence of the people to whose momentary impulse he hadgiven way. If he had stood stanchly on the New England doctrinesand principles in which he was educated, and which I thinkhe believed in his heart, he would have kept his State onthe right side. Shortly before the campaign in which he wasdefeated for Senator, he said in the cloak room, in my hearing, that he did not propose to be a martyr. He was the authoror a beautiful poem, entitled "Opportunity, " which I thinkshould accompany this imperfect sketch. 

 OPPORTUNITY

 Master of human destinies am I! Fame, love and fortune on my footsteps wait, Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate Deserts and seas remote, and passing by Hovel and mart and palace--soon or late I knock unbidden once at every gate!

 If sleeping, wake--if feasting, rise before I turn away. It is the hour of fate, And they who follow me reach every state Mortals desire, and conquer every foe Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate, Condemned to failure, penury and woe, Seek me in vain and uselessly implore. I answer not, and I return no more!

Ingalls was a native of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Somewhereabout 1880, being in Boston, he gave an interview to one ofthe papers in which he commented very severely on the wantof able leadership in the Republican Party in Massachusetts. I suppose the criticism was directed at me, although he didnot mention my name. In 1880 Massachusetts gave a Republicanmajority of 48, 697, and Kansas a Republican majority of 41, 897. Mr. Ingalls's leadership in Kansas had been manifested verylargely in the control of official patronage. He said inthe Senate that he and his colleague sought to get rid ofall Democrats in office in Kansas as with a fine-toothed comb. 

So far as I had been concerned, and so far as the Republicanleaders in Massachusetts had been concerned, with the exceptionof General Butler, a different policy had been adopted. Wehad never attempted to make a political instrument of officialpatronage. There had never been anything like a "boss" ora machine. Our State politics had been conducted, and ourcandidates for office nominated, after the old fashion ofa New England town meeting. When an election approached, or when a great measure or political question was to be decided, men who were influential consulted together informally, ascertainedthe public sentiment, deferred to it, if it seemed to be right, and did what they could to persuade it and guide it by speechand discussion in the press, if it needed guidance, and trusted, hardly ever in vain, to the intelligence of the people forthe result. I do not know but the diminution of the comparativeimportance of the towns, and the change of the Commonwealthand cluster of cities and manufacturing villages, and theinflux of other elements than that of the old New Englandstock may not bring about, or if indeed it is not alreadybringing about, a different conduct of affairs. But I havenever adopted any other method, and I have never desired thatmy public life or influence should survive the introductionof any other method in Massachusetts. Mr. Ingalls's methodsand mine have been tested by their results. The people ofKansas are largely of Massachusetts origin. I believe ifher leading men had pursued Massachusetts methods she wouldto a great extent have repeated Massachusetts history. Ourmethod of political management and control has been vindicatedby the fact that the Commonwealth has been kept true to itsancient faith, except in a very few years when accidentalcauses have caused the election of a Democratic Governor. Those elections were protests against an attempt to departfrom the old-fashioned method of ascertaining the will ofthe people in selecting Republican candidates. Massachusettshas kept the succession of United States Senators unbroken, and has had a Republican delegation in the House ever sincethe party came into power, with two exceptions. She has ingeneral maintained her great Republican majority. On the otherhand Kansas has been represented in turn by Democrats andPopulists and Socialists and the advocates of fiat money andfree silver. 

Senator Cockrell of Missouri entered the Senate two yearsbefore I did, and has been there ever since. He is a manof great sincerity and integrity, of great influence with hisown party, and highly esteemed by his Republican associates. He can generally be depended upon for a fair vote, certainlyalways for an honest and incorruptible vote, and to do fulljustice to a political opponent. He used for many years toprepare one speech, in each session, in which he went overthe political issues of the two parties in a violent and extremefashion. He would give us the whole history of the year andpoint out the imperfections and weakness and atrocity of theparty in power in a most unsparing fashion. This speech hewould frank home to Missouri. He seemed to think his dutyas a Democratic politician was done, and he would betake himselfto statesmanship the rest of the year. I think he has oflate discontinued that practice. I do not want what I havesaid to be taken too seriously. There is scarcely a memberof either side in either House who would be more missed fromthe public service, if anything were to happen to him, thanMr. Cockrell, nor for whom all men have a kindlier and moreaffectionate regard. Like Mr. Allison, he knows the mechanismof administration and legislation through and through. Hewould be entirely competent to fill a chair of public administrationin any college, if, as I hope may be done, such chairs shallbe established. 

When Justin Morrill died, not only a great figure left theSenate Chamber--the image of the ancient virtue of New England--but an era in our national history came to an end. He knewin his youth the veterans of the Revolution and the generationwho declared independence and framed the Constitution, asthe young men who are coming to manhood to-day know the veteranswho won our victories and the statesmen who conducted ourpolicy in the Civil War. He knew the whole history of hiscountry from the time of her independence, partly from thelips of those who had shaped it, partly because of the largeshare he had in it himself. When he was born Washington hadbeen dead but ten years. He was sixteen years old when Jeffersonand Adams died. He was twenty-two years old when CharlesCarroll died. He was born at the beginning of the secondyear of Madison's Presidency, and was a man of twenty-sixwhen Madison died. In his youth and early manhood the mannersof Ethan Allen's time still prevailed in Vermont, and Allen'scompanions and comrades could be found in every village. He was old enough to feel in his boyish soul something ofthe thrill of our great naval victories, and of the victory atNew Orleans in our last war with England, and, perhaps, tounderstand something of the significance of the treaty ofpeace of 1815. He knew many of the fathers of the countryas we knew him. In his lifetime the country grew from seventeenhundred thousand to thirty-six hundred thousand square miles, from seventeen States to forty-five States, from four millionpeople to seventy-five million. To the America into whichhe was born seventeen new Americas had been added before hedied. 

A great and healthful and beneficent power departed from ourcountry's life. If he had not lived, the history of the countrywould have been different in some very important particulars;and it is not unlikely that his death changed the result insome matters of great pith and moment, which are to affectprofoundly the history of the country in the future. Thelonger I live, the more carefully I study the former timesor observe my own time, the more I am impressed with the sensitivenessof every people, however great or however free, to an individualtouch, to the influence of a personal force. There is nosuch thing as a blind fate; no such thing as an overwhelmingand pitiless destiny. The Providence that governs this worldleaves nations as He leaves men, to work out their own destiny, their own fate, in freedom, as they obey or disobey His will. 

 Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all life, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill; Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. 

It is wonderful what things this man accomplished alone, what things he helped others to accomplish, what things wereaccomplished by the political organization of which he wasa leader, which he bore a very large part in accomplishing. 

Mr. Morrill's public life was coincident with the adventof the Republican Party to National power. His first importantvote in the House of Representatives helped to elect Mr. Banksto the office of Speaker, the first National victory of aparty organized to prevent the extension of slavery. Fromthat moment, for nearly half a century, Vermont spoke throughhim in our National Council, until, one after another, almostevery great question affecting the public welfare has beendecided in accordance with her opinion. 

It would be impossible, even by a most careful study of thehistory of the country for the last forty years, to determinewith exactness what was due to Mr. Morrill's personal influence. Many of the great policies to which we owe the successfulresult of the Civil War--the abolition of slavery, the restorationof peace, the new and enlarged definition of citizenship, the restoration of order, the establishment of public credit, the homestead system, the foundation and admission of newStates, the exaction of apology and reparation from GreatBritain, the establishment of the doctrine of expatriation, the achievement of our manufacturing independence, the takingby the United States of its place as the foremost nation inthe world in manufacture and in wealth, as it was alreadyforemost in agriculture, the creation of our vast domesticcommerce, the extension of our railroad system from one oceanto the other--were carried into effect by narrow majorities, and would have failed but for the wisest counsel. When allthese matters were before Congress there may have been menmore brilliant or more powerful in debate. But I can notthink of any wiser in counsel than Mr. Morrill. Many ofthem must have been lost but for his powerful support. Manyowed to him the shape they finally took. 

But he has left many a personal monument in our legislation, in the glory of which no others can rightfully claim to rivalhim. To him is due the great tariff, that of 1861, whichwill always pass by his name, of which every protective tariffsince has been but a modification and adjustment to conditionssomewhat changed, conditions which in general, so far as theywere favorable, were the result of that measure. To him isdue the first antipolygamy bill, which inaugurated the policyunder which, as we hope and believe, that great blot on ourNational life has been forever expunged. The public buildingswhich ornament Washington, the extension of the Capitol grounds, the great building where the State, War and Navy Departmentshave their home, the National Museum buildings, are the resultof statutes of which he was the author and which he conductedfrom their introduction to their enactment. He was the leader, as Mr. Winthrop in his noble oration bears witness, of theaction of Congress which resulted in the completion of theWashington Monument after so many years' delay. He conceivedand accomplished the idea of consecrating the beautiful chamberof the old House of Representatives as a Memorial Hall whereshould stand forever the statues of the great men of the States. So far, of late, as the prosperity and wise administrationof the Smithsonian Institution has depended upon the actionof Congress it has been due to him. Above all, the beautifulNational Library building, unequalled among buildings of itsclass in the world, was in a large measure the result of hispersistent effort and powerful influence, and stands as anenduring monument to his fame. There can be no more beautifuland enviable memorial to any man than a portrait upon thewalls of a great college in the gallery where the figuresand faces of its benefactors are collected. Mr. Morrilldeserves this expression of honor and gratitude at the handsof at least one great institution of learning in every AmericanState. To his wise foresight is due the ample endowment ofAgricultural or Technical colleges in every State in the Union. 

He came from a small State, thinly settled--from a frontierState. His advantages of education were those only whichthe public schools of the neighborhood afforded. All hislife, with a brief interval, was spent in the same town, nine miles from any railroad, except when absent in the publicservice. But there was no touch of provincialism in him. Everything about him was broad, national, American. His intellectand soul, his conceptions of statesmanship and of duty expandedas the country grew and as the demands upon him increased. He was in every respect as competent to legislate for fiftyStates as for thirteen. He would have been as competent tolegislate for an entire continent so long as that legislationwere to be governed, restrained, inspired by the principlesin which our Union is founded and the maxims of the men whobuilded it. 

He was no dreamer, no idealist, no sentimentalist. He waspractical, wise, prudent. In whatever assembly he was foundhe represented the solid sense of the meeting. But stillhe never departed from the loftiest ideals. On any questioninvolving righteousness or freedom you would as soon havehad doubt of George Washington's position as of his. He hadno duplicity, no indirection, no diplomacy. He was frank, plain-spoken, simple-hearted. He had no faculty for swimmingunder water. 

 His armor was his honest thought And simple truth his utmost skill. 

The Apostle's counsel to his young disciple will serve fora lifelike portraiture of Justin Morrill:

 "Be sober-minded: "Speak thou the things which become sound doctrine: "In all things showing thyself a pattern of good works: in doctrine shewing uncorruptness, gravity, sincerity; "Sound speech that can not be condemned; that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you. "

If you wish to sum up the quality of Justin Morrill in asingle word, mind, body, and soul, that word would be Health. He was thoroughly healthy, through and through, to the centerof his brain, to his heart's core. Like all healthy souls, he was full of good cheer and sunshine, full of hope for thefuture, full of pleasant memories of the past. To him lifewas made up of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows. But with all his friendliness and kindliness, with all hisgreat hold upon the love and respect of the people, with allhis large circle of friends, with all his delight in companionshipand agreeable converse, he dared to be alone. He found goodsociety enough always, if no other were at hand, in himself. He was many times called upon to espouse unpopular causesand unpopular doctrines. From the time when in his youthhe devoted himself to the anti-slavery cause, then odiousin the nostrils of his countrymen, to the time when in thelast days of his life he raised his brave voice against apolicy upon which the majority of his political associatesseemed bent, he never yielded the conclusions of his own judgmentor the dictates of his own conscience to any majority, toany party dictation, or to any public clamor. When Freedom, Righteousness and Justice were on his side he considered himselfin the majority. He was constant in his attendance on theworship of a small and unpopular religious denomination. He never lost his good nature, his courage, or his supremeconfidence in the final triumph of truth. 

Mr. Morrill was not a great political leader. Great politicalleaders are not often found in the Senate nowadays. He wascontented to be responsible for one man; to cast his shareof the vote of one State; to do his duty as he conceivedit, and let other men do theirs as they saw it. But at leasthe was not a great political follower. He never committedhimself to the popular currents, nor studied the vanes tosee how the winds were blowing, nor sounded the depths andthe shallows before he decided on his own course. There wasno wire running to his seat from any centre of patronage orpower. To use a felicitous phrase, I think of Senator Morganof Alabama, he did not "come out of the door and cry 'Cuckoo!'when any clock struck elsewhere. "

Mr. Morrill was a brave man--an independent man. He neverflinched from uttering his thought. He was never afraid tovote alone. He never troubled himself about majorities oradministrations, still less about crowds or mobs or spasmsof popular excitement. His standard of excellence was high. He was severe, almost austere, in his judgments of other men. And yet, with all this, everybody liked him. Everybody whocame to know him well loved him. It seems strange that henever incurred enmities or provoked resentments. I supposethe reason is that he never had any controversy with anybody. He did not mingle in the discussion of the Senate as a debater. He uttered his opinion and gave his reasons as if he wereuttering judgments. But he seldom or never undertook to replyto the men who differed from him, and he rarely, if ever, used the weapons of ridicule or sarcasm or invective, and henever grew impassioned or angry. He had, in a high degree, what Jeremy Taylor calls "the endearment of prudent and temperatespeech. "

He was one of the men that Washington would have loved andWashington would have leaned upon. Of course I do not comparemy good friend with him to whom no man living or that everlived on earth can be compared. And Mr. Morrill was nevertried or tested by executive or by military responsibilities. But the qualities which belonged to Washington belonged tohim--prudence, modesty, sound judgement, simplicity, absoluteveracity, absolute integrity, disinterestedness, lofty patriotism. If he is not to be compared with Washington, he was at leastworthy to be the countryman of Washington, and to hold a highplace among the statesmen of the Republic which Washingtonfounded. 

Neither ambition nor hatred, nor the love of ease nor thegreed of gain, nor the desire of popularity, nor the love ofpraise, nor the fear of unpopularity found a place in thatsimple and brave heart. 

 Like as a ship that through the ocean wide By conduct of some star doth make her way--

no local attraction diverted the magnet in his soul, whichever pointed to the star of day. 

As I just said, he was one of the men that Washington wouldhave loved and that Washington would have leaned upon. Ifwe do not speak of him as a man of genius, he had that absoluteprobity and that sound common sense which are safer and betterguides than genius. These gifts are the highest ornamentsof a noble and beautiful character; they are surer guidesto success and loftier elements of true greatness than whatis commonly called genius. It was well said by an early Americanauthor, * now too much neglected, that--

"There is no virtue without a characteristic beauty. Todo what is right argues superior taste as well as morals;and those whose practice is evil feel and inferiority ofintellectual power and enjoyment, even where they take noconcern for a principle. Doing well has something more init than the mere fulfilling of a duty. It is a cause of a justsense of elevation of character; it clears and strengthensthe spirits; it gives higher reaches of thought. The worldis sensible of these truths, let it act as it may. It is notbecause of his integrity alone that it relies on an honest man, but it has more confidence in his judgment and wise conduct, in the long run, than in the schemes of those of greaterintellect who go at large without any landmarks of principle. So that virtue seems of a double nature, and to stand oftentimesin the place of what we call talent. "

[Footnote]* Richard H. Dana, the elder. [End of Footnote]

He was spared the fate of so many of our great New Englandstatesmen, that of closing his life in sorrow and in gloom. His last days were days of hope, not of despair. Sumner cameto his seat in the Senate Chamber as to a solitude. Whenhe was struck with death there was found upon his table avolume of Shakespeare with this passage, probably the lastprinted text on which his eyes ever gazed, marked with hisown hand:

 Would I were dead! if God's good will were so; For what is in this world, but care and woe?

The last days of Samuel Adams were embittered by poverty, sickness, and the death of his only son. 

Daniel Webster laid wearily down his august head in disappointmentand sorrow, predicting with dying breath that the end hadcome to the great party to whose service his life was given. 

When John Quincy Adams fell at his post in the House of Representativesa great newspaper declared that there could not be found inthe country another bold enough or bad enough to take hisplace. 

But Mr. Morrill's last days were filled with hope and notwith despair. To him life was sweet and immortality assured. His soul took its flight

 On wings that fear no glance of God's pure sight, No tempest from his breath. 

And so we leave him. His life went out with the centuryof which he saw almost the beginning. What the future mayhave in store for us we cannot tell. But we offer this manas an example of an American Senator and American citizenthan which, so far, we have none better. Surely that lifehas been fortunate. He is buried where he was born. Hishonored grave is hard by the spot where his cradle was rocked. He sleeps where he wished to sleep, in the bosom of his belovedVermont. No State ever mourned a nobler son; no son was evermourned by a nobler State. He enjoyed to a ripe old age everythingthat can make life happy--honor, love, obedience, troops offriends, The love of friends without a single foe, Unequalled lot below. 

He died at home. The desire of the wise man, Let me die in my nest, was fulfilled to him. His eyes in his old age looked undimmedupon the greatness and the glory of his country, in achievingwhich he had borne so large a part. 

CHAPTER VIICOMMITTEE SERVICE IN THE SENATE

I was appointed upon the Committee on Privileges and Elections, March 9, 1877, and have continued a member of it ever since. 

I was appointed on the same day a member of the Committeeson Claims, Indian Affairs and Agriculture. I made a specialstudy in the vacation of 1877, expecting to master, as wellas I could, the whole Indian question, so that my serviceon that Committee might be of some value. But I was removedfrom the Committee on Indian Affairs, by the Committee whomade the appointments, in the following December. This wasvery fortunate, for the country and for the Indians. Mr. Dawes, my colleague, not long after was placed upon the Committee. He was a most intelligent, faithful and stanch friend of theIndians during the remainder of his lifetime. He was ready, at the Department and on the floor of the Senate, and whereverhe could exert an influence to protect and baffle any attemptto wrong them. His quiet and unpretending service to thisunfortunate and oppressed race entitles him to a very highplace in the affectionate remembrance of his countrymen. 

The Committee on Agriculture was then of little importance. I remained a member of it for a few years, and then gave itup for some service in which my constituents were more immediatelyinterested. 

In December, 1878, I was put on the Committee on Patents, and remained upon it for a little while. The Committee hadto deal occasionally with special cases of applications forextension of patents by statute, which demanded a knowledgeof the patent law, and industry and sound judgment on thepart of the Senator to whom they were committed for report. But they were not of much public interest or importance. 

In December, 1879, I was put on the Committee on the Revisionof the Laws; in December, 1883, on the Joint Committee onthe Library; in December, 1884, on the Committee of the Judiciary, of which I have been a member ever since; in December, 1888, on the Committee on Relations with Canada; in December, 1891, on the Committee on Woman Suffrage; in December, 1895, onthe Committee on Rules. 

I was on the Committee on Claims for ten years, from March9, 1877, to March 4, 1887. It is impossible to establishby the record the part any man performs, who is a member ofa deliberative body consisting of several persons, in influencingits decisions, or in establishing the principles on whichthey are based. But I believe I may fairly claim, and thatI could cite my associates on the Committee to bear testimony, that I had a great deal to do, and much more than any otherperson, in settling the doctrines upon which the Senate actedin dealing with the great questions of the claims of individualsand States and corporate bodies growing out of the War. Uponthe rules then established the Government claims amountingto hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars were decided. The victorious Republic dealt justly and generously with thevanquished and misguided men who had assailed it and soughtits destruction. 

The general doctrines by which Congress was governed werethese:

1. No rightful claim accrued to anybody for the destructionor injury to property by military movements, or operations, in a country which was the theatre of war. 

2. A fair price was to be paid for supplies for the use ofthe Army in the field (1) to loyal persons, (2) to disloyalpersons, if it were shown by a certificate of the officer whotook them, or otherwise, that they were taken with the purposeof paying for them. Inhabitants of States in rebellion werepresumed to be disloyal, unless their loyalty were shown affirmatively. 

3. A like rule was followed in determining the questionsof payment for the use of buildings, occupied as soldiers'quarters, or for other official purposes, by the Army, orinjury to them caused by such occupation. 

4. Property taken by the Army was paid for at its actualvalue to the Government, and not necessarily at its valueto owner. 

5. No claim accrued by reason of the destruction of propertywhether of loyal or disloyal persons, to prevent its fallinginto the hands of the enemy. 

6. An exception to the principle above stated, founded noton any strict principle or established law or conduct of Governments, but on sound public policy, was adopted in the case of institutionsof charity, education and religion. 

I first affirmed that doctrine in the House of Representatives, in the case of the College of William and Mary of Virginia, against the almost unanimous opinion of my political associates. I thought that such a principle would be a great protectionto such institutions in all future wars, that it would tendto heal the bitter recollections of the Civil War and theestrangements then existing between the sections of the country. I have lived to see the doctrine thoroughly established, theCollege of William and Mary rebuilt by the Government, andevery church and school and hospital which suffered by themilitary operations of the Civil War reimbursed, if it haspresented its claim. 

If I have been able to render any public service, I lookupon that I have rendered upon the Committee on Claims, althoughit has attracted but little attention, and is not of a natureto make great public impression, as perhaps more valuablethan any other. 

The duties of that Committee, when I was upon it, were verylaborious. I find that in the first session of the firstCongress, I made reports in seventeen cases, each of theminvolving a study of the evidence, a finding of the facts, andan investigation, statement and consideration of importantprinciples of law, in most cases to be applied to a novel stateof facts. I think that winter's work upon the Committee onClaims alone required more individual labor than that requiredto perform the duties of his office by any Judge of a StateCourt, of which I have any knowledge; and that the amountof money, and importance of the principles involved very farexceeded that involved in the aggregate of the cases in theSupreme Court of any State for a like period. 

I was a member of the Committee on the Library for severalyears. For two or three years I was its acting Chairmanduring the summer, and in that capacity had to approve theaccounts of the Congressional Library, and the National BotanicGarden. 

To that Committee were referred applications for the erectionof monuments and statues and similar works throughout thecountry, including the District of Columbia, and the purchaseof works for art for the Government. They used to have aregular appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars annually, to be expended at their discretion, for works of art. Thatappropriation was stopped some years ago. 

My service on that Committee brought me into very delightfulrelations with Mr. Sherman and Mr. Evarts. I introduced andgot through a bill for a monument and statue to Lafayetteand, as acting Chairman of the Library Committee was, withthe Secretary of War and the Architect of the Capitol, a memberof the Commission who selected the artists and contractedfor the statue and monument. A resolution to build the monumentpassed the Continental Congress, but was not carried intoeffect by reason of the poverty of the Confederacy in thatday. In Washington's first Administration somebody calledattention to the fact that the monument had not been built, to which my grandfather, Roger Sherman, answered: "The voteis the monument. " I was led by the anecdote to do what I couldto have the long-neglected duty performed. The statue andmonument, by two French artists of great genius, now standsat one corner of Lafayette Square. The statue of Rochambeauhas just been placed at another corner of that square. 

I was also fortunate enough, when I was on the Library Committee, to secure the purchase of the Franklin Papers for the Departmentof State. William Temple Franklin, the Doctor's son, diedin London, leaving at his lodgings a mass of valuable correspondenceof his father, and other papers illustrating his life, especiallyin France. They were discovered in the possession of thekeeper of his lodgings, many years after, by Henry Stevens, the famous antiquary and dealer in rare books. Stevens hadgot into difficulties about money, and had pledged the collectionfor about twenty-five thousand dollars. It had been offeredto the Government. Several Secretaries of State, in succession, including Mr. Blaine, had urged Congress to buy it, but withoutavail. 

One day Mr. Dwight, Librarian of the State Department, cameto see me at the Capitol about some not very important matter. While I was talking with him, he said that the one thing hewished most was that Congress would buy the Franklin Papers. He added "I think if I were to die, the words 'Franklin Papers, 'would be found engraved on my heart. " I said I thought I couldaccomplish the purchase. So I introduced a resolution, hadit referred to the Library Committee, and we had a hearing. It happened that Edward Everett Hale, who probably knew asmuch about the subject and the value of the papers as anybody, was then in Washington. At the same time John Russell Bartlettwas here, who had charge of the famous Brown Collection inRhode Island. They were both summoned before the Committee, and on their statement the Committee voted to recommend thepassage of the resolution. It passed the Senate. The provisionwas then put upon the Sundry Civil Appropriation bill. Withit, however, was a provision to buy the Rochambeau Papers, which had been sent to this county on the assurance of Mr. Sherman, who was Chairman of the Committee on the Library, that Congress would purchase them. There was also a provisionfor buying the papers of Vans Murray, Envoy to France in Napoleon'stime; and for buying two other quite important manuscriptcollections. When the bill got to the House, all these thingswere stricken out. The Conference Committee had a great strifeover them, the House refusing to put any of them in, and theSenate insisting upon all. At last they compromised, agreeingto take them alternately, including the first one, rejectingthe second; including the third, rejecting the fourth, andso on. In this lottery the Franklin Papers were saved, andMr. Sherman's Rochambeau Papers were stricken out, much tohis disgust. But he got an appropriation for them in a subsequentCongress. 

The Committee on Rules have the control of the Capitol, andthe not very important power of assigning the rooms to thedifferent Committees. Beyond that they have not, in general, much to do. There have been few important amendments to therules in my time, of which I was the author of two. 

One of them provides that an amendment to any bill may belaid on the table, on special motion, without carrying thebill itself with it. The motion to lay on the table not beingdebatable, this enables the Senate to dispose promptly ofa good many propositions, which otherwise would consume agood deal of time in debate. There had been such a provisionas to appropriation bills before. When I first suggestedthis change, Mr. Edmunds exclaimed in a loud whisper, "wewon't do that. " But I believe he approved it finally. 

The other was an amendment relating to order in debate, madenecessary by a very disagreeable occurrence, which ended inthe exchange of blows in the Senate, by two Senators fromthe same State. I had long in mind to propose, when the occasioncame, the last clause of this amendment. If Senators areto be considered to any degree as ambassadors of their States, it would seem proper that they should not be compelled tohear any reproachful language about the State they represent. Such attacks have given rise to a great deal of angry debatein both Houses of Congress. 

The following is the amendment:

No Senator in debate shall directly or indirectly by anyform of words impute to any Senator or to other Senatorsany conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator. 

No Senator in debate shall refer offensively to any Stateof the Union. 

I was also for several years a member of the Committee onWoman Suffrage. That Committee used to hear the advocatesof Woman Suffrage who liked to have their arguments reportedand sent through the mails as public documents under the frankingprivilege. 

Although a very decided advocate of the extension of theright of suffrage to women, I have not thought that it waslikely that that would be accomplished by an amendment tothe National Constitution, or indeed that it was wise toattempt to do it in that way. The Constitution cannot beamended without the consent of three-fourths of the States. If a majority can be got in three-fourths of the States forsuch an amendment, their people would be undoubtedly readyto amend their State Constitutions by which, so far as eachState is concerned, the object would be accomplished. Soit seems hardly worth while to take the trouble of plyingCongress with petitions or arguments. 

But my longest service upon Committees has been upon the twogreat Law Committees of the Senate, --the Committee on Privilegesand Elections, and the Committee on the Judiciary. 

I have been a member of the Committee on Privileges and Electionssince March 9, 1877. I was Chairman for more than ten years. I have been a member of the Committee on the Judiciary sinceDecember, 1884, and have been its Chairman since December, 1891, except for two years, from March 4, 1893, to March 4, 1895, when the Democrats held the Senate. 

While I was Chairman it was of course my duty to representand defend in debate the action of these Committees on allthe important questions referred to them. I have also, byreason of my long service, now more than twenty-six years, on the Committee of Privileges and Elections, been expectedto take part in the discussion of all the Election cases, and of all matters affecting the privileges and dignity ofthe Senate, and of individual Senators. The investigationsinto alleged outrages at the South, and wrongs connected withthem, have been conducted by that Committee. So it has beenmy fortune to be prominent in nearly all of the matters thathave come up in the Senate since I have been a member of it, which have excited angry sectional or political feeling. Mattersof finance and revenue and protection, while deeply interestingthe people, do not, in general, cause angry feeling on thepart of the political leaders. To this remark, the stateof mind of our friends, whom we are in the habit of callingMugwumps, and who like to call themselves Independents, isan exception. They have commonly discussed the profoundestand subtlest questions with an angry and bitter personalitywhich finds its parallel only in the theological treatisesof the dark ages. It is lucky for some of us that they havenot had the fires of Smithfield or of the Inquisition at theircommand. 

So, at various times in my life, I have been the object ofthe most savage denunciation, sometimes from the Independentnewspapers, sometimes from the Democratic newspapers, especiallythose in the South, and sometimes from the press of my ownparty whom I have offended by differing from a majority ofmy political friends. 

But such things are not to be taken too seriously. I havefound in general that the men who deliver themselves withmost bitterness and fury on political questions are the menwho change their minds most easily, and are in general themost placable, and not uncommonly are the most friendly andpleasant men in the world in private intercourse. I accountit my great good fortune that, although I have never flinchedfrom uttering whatever I thought, and acting according tomy own conviction of public duty, that, as I am approachingfour score years, I have, almost without an exception, thegood will of my countrymen, certainly if I may trust whatthey tell me when I meet in private intercourse men from differentparts of the country, or what they are saying of me just nowin the press. But it is quite possible that I may say ordo something before I get through which will change all that. So whether my sunset, which is to come very soon, is to beclear or under a cloud, it is impossible even to guess. 

During this period I have taken a leading part in all questionsaffecting the security of the right of suffrage conferredby the Constitution of the United States on the colored people, of honesty in elections, of questions affecting disputed titlesto seats in the Senate, and the extension of suffrage to women. 

A very interesting question, now happily almost forgotten, came up at the December session of 1878, and was renewed atthe following March session of 1879. 

In 1878 the Democrats had a majority in the House of Representatives, while the Republicans had the Presidency and the Senate. InMarch, 1879, there was a Democratic majority in the Senateand in the House, but a Republican President. The DemocraticParty chafed exceedingly under the National laws for securingthe purity of elections and for securing impartial juriesin the courts of the United States. In the December sessionof 1878, the House inserted a provision repealing these laws. They insisted, in conference, on keeping in this provision, and refused to consent to the passage of the Executive, Legislativeand Judicial Appropriation Bill, unless the Senate and thePresident would yield to their demand. Mr. Beck of Kentucky, one of the conferrees on the part of the Senate, representingwhat was then the Democratic minority, but what became atthe March session the majority, stated the doctrine of theHouse, as announced by their conferrees--adding that he agreedwith it--that unless the States should be allowed to conducttheir own elections in their own way, free from all Federalinterference, they would refuse under their Constitutionalright to make appropriations to carry on the Government. 

This was in defiance of the express provision of the Constitutionthat Congress might at any time alter the regulations prescribedby the State Legislatures as to time, place and manner ofholding elections for Senators and Representatives. 

Mr. Beck declared that that course would be adopted and adheredto, no matter what came of the Appropriation Bills. He wasfollowed by Mr. Thurman of Ohio, the leader of his party inthe Senate, and Chairman of the Judiciary when it came intopower. He said it was a question upon which he had thoughtlong and deeply, one of the gravest which ever arose for theconsideration of the American Congress, and added:

"We claim the right, which the House of Commons in Englandestablished after two centuries of contest, to say that wewill not grant the money of the people unless there is a redressof grievances . . . . England was saved from despotism and anabsolute monarchy by the exercise of the power of the Houseof Commons to refuse supplies except upon conditions thatgrievances should be redressed . . . . It is a mistake to supposethat it was a fight simply between the Throne and the Commons;it was equally a fight between the Lords and the Commons;and the result of two centuries of contest in England wasthe rule that the House of Lords had no right to amend a MoneyBill. "

This startling proposition claimed that it was in the powerof the House of Representatives to control the entire legislationof the country. It could, if the doctrine of Mr. Beck andMr. Thurman had prevailed, impose any condition upon an appropriationfor the Judges' salaries, for the salaries of all executiveofficers, for carrying on the courts, and for all other functionsof the Government. 

I made a careful study of this question and satisfied theSenate, --and I think I satisfied Mr. Beck and Mr. Thurman, --that the doctrine had no support in this country, and hadno support even in England. An examination of Parliamentaryhistory, which I studied carefully, afforded the materialfor giving a narrative of every occasion when the Commonsexerted their power of withholding supplies as a means ofcompelling a redress of grievances, from the Conquest to thepresent hour. I did not undertake in a speech in the Senateto recite the authorities in full. But I summed up the resultof the English and American doctrine in a few sentences, whichmay be worth recording here. 

"First. The Commons never withheld the supplies as a meansof coercing the assent of the Crown or the Lords to _legislation. _

"Second. The supplies withheld were not the supplies neededfor the ordinary functions of government, to which the ordinaryrevenues of the Crown were sufficient, but were for extraordinaryoccasions, as to pay the King's debts, or to conduct foreignwars. 

"Third. That when the hereditary revenues of the Crown, or those settled on the King for life at the beginning of hisreign, ceased to be sufficient for the maintenance of governmentand for public defence, the practice of withholding suppliesceased. 

"Fourth. There has been no instance since the Revolutionof 1688 of attaching general legislation to a bill for raisingor appropriating money, and scarcely, if ever, such an instancebefore that date. When such an attempt has been made it hasbeen resisted, denounced and abandoned, and the English Constitutionalauthorities, without exception, are agreed that such a proceedingis unwarrantable, revolutionary and destructive of the EnglishConstitution. 

"It is true that the luxury or ambition of Kings or theirindulgent bounty to their favorites led them to assembleParliament and to ask additional supplies from their subjects. It is also true that these requests furnished the occasionto the Commons to stipulate for redress of grievances. Butthe grievances so redressed had no relation to the laws ofthe Realm. These laws were made or altered by the free assentof the three estates in whom the law-making power vested bythe Constitution. The grievances of which the Commons soughtredress, whether from Tudor, Plantagenet or Stuart, were theimproper use of prerogatives, the granting of oppressive monopolies, the waging of costly foreign wars, the misconduct of favoritesand the like. The improvident expenditure of the royal patrimony, the granting the crown land or pensions to unworthy persons, is a frequent ground of complaint. 

"But there is a broader and simpler distinction between thetwo cases. The mistake, the gross, palpable mistake, whichthese gentlemen fall into in making this comparison, liesat the threshold. The House of Commons, in its discretion, used to grant, and sometimes now grants, supplies to the King. The American Congress, in its discretion, never grants suppliesto the President under any circumstances whatever. The onlyappropriation of the public money to which that term can properlyapply, the provision for the President's compensation, isby design and of purpose placed wholly out of the power ofCongress. The provision is peremptory that--

"'The President shall, at stated times, receive for his servicesa compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminishedduring the period for which he shall have been elected, andhe shall not receive within that period any other emolumentfrom the United States, or any of them. '

"Alexander Hamilton, in No. 72 of the 'Federalist, ' declaresthat the very purpose of this enactment is to put it beyondthe power of Congress to compel the President 'to surrenderat discretion his judgment to their inclinations. '"

Almost immediately after I entered the Senate the case cameup of the title of William Pitt Kellogg to a seat in theSenate from Louisiana. 

In January, 1877, a Republican Legislature was organizedin Louisiana, which recognized Mr. Packard as the lawful Governorof the State. Packard had been elected, according to theclaim of the Republicans, at the same election at which theRepublican electors, who cast their votes for President Hayes, had been chosen. That Legislature elected Kellogg. WhenPresident Hayes refused to continue his support of the Republicangovernment in Louisiana by military force, the Democrats organizedthe Legislature, a Democratic Governor took possession ofpower, and the Republican State Legislature melted away. Ithad done little or nothing, except to elect Mr. Kellogg. 

Under these circumstances, the Democrats on the Committeeon Privileges and Elections, and in the Senate, claimed thatthe recognition of the Democratic Governor had an ex postfacto operation which determined the title and right of theLegislature who undertook to elect Mr. Spofford, Mr. Kellogg'scompetitor. The Republicans, on the other hand, claimed thatnothing which occurred afterward could operate to determinethe question of the lawfulness of the Kellogg Legislature, or its power to elect a Senator. That must be settled bythe law and the fact. Upon these we thought Kellogg's titleto be clear. Kellogg was seated. But when the Democratsgot a majority, two years later, the Committee on Privilegesand Elections, under the lead of Benjamin H. Hill of Georgia, undertook to set aside this judgment, and to seat Mr. Spofford. Mr. Hill made a long and, it is unnecessary to say, an ablereport, setting forth the view taken by himself and by themajority of the Committee, and recommended the admission ofMr. Spofford. I advised the Republican minority to declineto follow the Democrats into the discussion of the evidence, and to put the case alone and squarely on the authority ofthe previous judgment of the Senate. This I did in the followingreport:

The undersigned, a minority of the Committee on Privilegesand Elections, to whom was referred the memorial of HenryM. Spofford, claiming the seat now occupied by William PittKellogg, submit the following as their views:

On the 30th day of November, 1877, the Senate passed the followingresolutions. 

_"Resolved, _ That William Pitt Kellogg is, upon the meritsof the case, entitled to a seat in the Senate of the UnitedStates from the State of Louisiana for the term of six years, commencing on the 4th of March, 1877, and that he be admittedthereto on taking the proper oath. 

_"Resolved, _ That Henry M. Spofford is not entitled to aseat in the Senate of the United States. "

The party majority in the Senate has changed since Mr. Kelloggtook the oath of office in pursuance of the above resolution. Nothing else has changed. The facts which the Senate consideredand determined were in existence then, as now. It is sought, by a mere superiority of numbers, for the first time, to thrusta Senator from the seat which he holds by virtue of the expressand deliberate final judgment of the Senate. 

The act which is demanded of this party majority would be, in our judgment, a great public crime. It will be, if consummated, one of the great political crimes in American history, tobe classed with the Rebellion, with the attempt to take possessionby fraud of the State Government of Maine, and with the overthrowof State Governments in the South, of which it is the fittingsequence. Political parties have too often been led by partisanzeal into measures which a sober judgment might disapprove;but they have ever respected the constitution of the Senate. 

The men whose professions of returning loyalty to the Constitutionhave been trusted by the generous confidence of the Americanpeople are now to give evidence of the sincerity of theirvows. The people will thoroughly understand this matter, and will not likely to be deceived again. 

We do not think proper to enter here upon a discussion ofthe evidence by which the claimant of Mr. Kellogg's seatseeks to establish charges affecting the integrity of thatSenator. Such evidence can be found in abundance in theslums of great cities. It is not fit to be trusted in casesaffecting the smallest amount of property, much less thehonor of an eminent citizen, or the title to an object of somuch desire as a seat in the Senate. This evidence is notonly unworthy of respect or credit, but it is in many instanceswholly irreconcilable with undisputed facts, and Mr. Kellogghas met and overthrown it at every point. 

 GEORGE F. HOAR, ANGUS CAMERON, JOHN A. LOGAN. 

The Democratic majority presented their report, without askingto have it read. Then we of the minority presented ours, and had it read. It attracted the attention of the Senateand of the country. My report contains but a few sentences. That of the Democratic minority occupies eight columns ofvery fine print in the Congressional Record. The result wasthat some of the Southern Democrats, including Mr. Bayardof Delaware, General Gordon of Georgia, General Wade Hamptonof South Carolina, and Mr. Pendleton, of Ohio, refused tosupport their associates in the extreme measure of unseatinga Senator when nothing had happened to affect the judgmentwhich seated him, except that the majority of the Senate hadchanged. Some of the Democratic gentlemen, however, whileresting upon the old judgment of the Senate, and while refusingto set that aside, thought the Democratic charges made outon the evidence, and that Mr. Kellogg's conduct and characterdeserved the severest denunciation. Senator Pendleton, ofOhio, however, with a courage and manliness that did him infinitecredit, after stating what his Democratic brethren said: "Iam bound to say that I have read the evidence carefully, andthere is nothing in it that in the least warrants any imputationupon the integrity of that Senator. "

In speaking of my Committee service, perhaps I ought to saythat I was appointed one of the Regents of the SmithsonianInstitution in the year 1881. I liked the position exceedingly. I was very much interested in the work of the Institution, and enjoyed meeting the eminent scholars and men of sciencewho were its members. After I had been a member a year ortwo a very eminent Republican Senator complained that I wasgetting more than my share of the prominent places in thegift of the Senate, and specified the Regency of the SmithsonianInstitution as an instance. I thought there was great justicein the complaint, and accordingly I resigned and Justin S. Morrill was put in my place. It was a very fortunate thing. Mr. Morrill's influence secured the construction of the NationalMuseum building, which I do not think it likely that I couldhave accomplished. That Museum was then in charge of theSecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. 

A somewhat similar thing happened to me later. In the year1885 the Nominating Committee of the Senate, of which SenatorAllison was then Chairman, proposed my name for the Committeeon Foreign Relations. I should have liked that service verymuch. I should have liked to study the history of our diplomacy, and the National interests specially in charge of that Committee, better than anything else I can think of. But I was thena member of the Committees on the Judiciary, Privileges andElections, Library, Patents and the Select Committee to Inquireinto the Claims of Citizens of the United States against Nicaragua, no one of which I desired to give up. On the other hand, Senator Frye of Maine, a very able Senator to whom the Republicansof Massachusetts were under special obligations for his servicesin their campaigns, was not at that time placed in positionson Committee service such as his ability and merit entitledhim to. Accordingly I told the Committee I thought they hadbetter amend their report and put Mr. Frye on the Committeeon Foreign Relations instead of myself. That was done. 

I incline to think that if that had not been done, and Ihad remained on the Committee for Foreign Relations, thatI could have defeated the Spanish Treaty, prevented the destructionof the Republic in the Philippine Islands, and the commitmentof this country to the doctrine that we can govern dependenciesunder our Constitution, in which the people have no politicalor Constitutional rights but such as Congress choose to recognize. 

I am not sure that modesty or disinterestedness has muchplace in the matter of the acceptance of high political office. We often hear a gentleman say: "I am not fit to be Judge;I am not fit to be Governor, or Senator, or member of Congress. I think other men are better qualified, and I will not consentto stand in their way. " This is often said with the utmostsincerity. But anybody who acts on such a feeling ought toremember that if he accept the office, it will not be filledby a worse man than he; if he accept the office, it beinga political office, he is sure that the office will be filledby a man who will desire to accomplish, and will do his bestto accomplish, the things he thinks for the public good. Heshould also remember, so far as the matter of ability is concerned, that other men are likely to be much better judges of hiscapacity than he is himself. If men are likely often to overratetheir own capacity, they are also very often likely to underrateit. 

Let me not be understood as commending the miserable self-seeking which too often leads men to urge their own claimswithout regard to the public interests. A man who is hisown candidate is commonly a very bad candidate for his party. 

One vote, more than once, would have saved the country fromwhat I think its wretched policy in regard to the PhilippineIslands. There was just one vote to spare when the SpanishTreaty was ratified. One Senator waited before voting untilthe roll-call was over and the list of the votes read by theclerk, before the finally voted for the treaty. He said hedid not wish to butt his head against the sentiment of hisState if he could do no good; but if his vote would defeatit, he should vote against it. If there had been one lessvote, his vote would have defeated it. The Treaty would havebeen lost, in my opinion, if Senator Gray, one of the Commissionerswho made it, who earnestly protested against it, but afterwardsupported it, had not been a member of the Commission. Theresolution of Mr. Bacon, declaring our purpose to recognizethe independence of the Philippine people, if they desiredit, was lost also by a single vote. The Philippine Treatywould have been lost but for Mr. Bryan's personal interpositionin its behalf. It would have been defeated, in my judgment, if Speaker Reed, a man second in influence and in power inthis country to President McKinley alone, had seen it to behis duty to remain in public life, and lead the fight againstit. 

So I think it is rarely safe for a man who is in politicallife for public, and not for personal ends, and who valuesthe political principles which he professes, to decline anyposition of power, either from modesty, doubt of his ownability, or from a desire to be generous to other men. 

My twenty years' service on the Committee on the Judiciary, so far as it is worth narrating, will appear in the accountof the various legal and Constitutional questions which itaffected. 

CHAPTER VIIITHE RIVER AND HARBOR BILL

I have throughout my whole public political life acted uponmy own judgment. I have done what I thought for the publicinterest without much troubling myself about public opinion. I always took a good deal of pride in a saying of Roger Sherman's. He was asked if he did not think some vote of his would bevery much disapproved in Connecticut, to which he repliedthat he knew but one way to ascertain the public opinion ofConnecticut; that was to ascertain what was right. When hehad found that out, he was quite sure that it would meet theapproval of Connecticut. That in general has been in my judgmentabsolutely and literally true of Massachusetts. It has requiredno courage for any representative of hers to do what he thoughtwas right. She is apt to select to speak for her, certainlythose she sends to the United States Senate, in whose choicethe whole Commonwealth has a part, men who are in generalof the same way of thinking, and governed by the same principlesas are the majority of her people. When she has chosen themshe expects them to act according to their best judgement, and not to be thinking about popularity. She likes independencebetter than obsequiousness. The one thing the people of Massachusettswill not forgive in a public servant is that he should actagainst his own honest judgment to please them. I am speakingof her sober, second thought. Her people, like the rest ofmankind, are liable to waves of emotion and of prejudice. This is true the world over. It is as true of good men asof bad men, of educated as of ignorant men, whenever theyare to act in large masses. Alexander Hamilton said thatif every Athenian citizen had been a Socrates, still everyAthenian assembly would have been a mob. So I claim no creditthat I have voted and spoken as I thought, always withoutstopping to consider whether public opinion would supportme. 

The only serious temptation I have ever had in my publiclife came to me in the summer of 1882, when the measure knownas the River and Harbor Bill was pending. The bill providedfor an expenditure of about eighteen million dollars. Ofthis a little more than four million was for the executionof a scheme for the improvement of the Mississippi River andits tributaries, which had been recommended by President Arthurin a special message. All the other appropriations put togetherwere a little less than fourteen million dollars. The billpassed both Houses. President Arthur vetoed it, allegingas a reason that the measure was extravagant; that the publicworks provided for in it were of local interest, not for theadvantage of international or interstate commerce; and thatit had got through by a system of log-rolling, the friendsof bad schemes in one State joining with the friends of badschemes in another, making common cause to support the bill. He added that in that way, the more objectionable the measure, the more support it would get. The press of the country, almost without exception, supported the President. The reasonswhich applied to each improvement were not well understoodby the public. So the conductors of the newspapers naturallysupposed the President to be in the right in his facts. TheDemocratic newspapers were eager to attack Republican measures. Where there were factions in the Republican Party, the Republicanpapers of one faction were ready to attack the men who belongedto the other. The independent newspapers welcomed any opportunityto support their theory that American public life was rottenand corrupt. So when the question came up whether the billshould pass notwithstanding the objections of the President, there was a storm of indignation throughout the country againstthe men who supported it. 

But the committees who had supported it and who had reportedit, and who knew its merits, and the men who had voted forit in either House of Congress, could not well stultify themselvesby changing their votes, although some of them did. I wassituated very fortunately in that respect. I had been absenton a visit to Massachusetts when the bill passed. So I wasnot on record for it. I had given it no great attention. The special duties which had been assigned to me related toother subjects. So when the measure came up in the SenateI had only an opinion founded on my general knowledge of theneeds of the country and the public policy, that it was allright. My reelection was coming on. I was to have a seriouscontest, if I were a candidate, with the supporters of GeneralButler, then very powerful in the State. He, in fact, waselected Governor in the election then approaching. My firstthoughts were that I was fortunate to have escaped this rock. But when the vote came on I said to myself: "This measureis right. Is my father's son to sneak home to Massachusetts, having voted against a bill that is clearly righteous andjust, because he is afraid of public sentiment?" Senator McMillan, the Chairman of the Committee who had charge of the bill, just before my name was called, asked me how I meant to vote. I told him I should vote for the bill, because I believedit to be right, but that it would lose me the support of everynewspaper in Massachusetts that had been friendly to me before. I voted accordingly. The vote was met by a storm of indignationfrom one end of Massachusetts to the other, in which everyRepublican newspaper in the State, so far as I know, united. The Springfield _Republican_ and the Boston _Herald, _ as willwell be believed, were in glory. The conduct of no pick-pocket or bank robber could have been held up to public indignationand contempt in severer language than the supporters of thatbill. A classmate of mine, an eminent man of letters, a gentlemanof great personal worth, addressed a young ladies' school, or some similar body in Western Massachusetts, on the subjectof the decay of public virtue as exemplified by me. He declaredthat I had separated myself from the best elements in theState. 

The measure was passed over the President's veto. But itcost the Republican Party its majority in the House of Representatives. A large number of the member of the House who had voted forit lost their seats. If the question of my reelection hadcome on within a few weeks thereafter, I doubt whether I shouldhave got forty votes in the whole Legislature. If I had flinchedor apologized, I should have been destroyed. But I stoodto my guns. I wrote a letter to the people of Massachusettsin which I took up case by case each provision of the bill, and showed how important it was for the interest of commercebetween the States, or with foreign countries, and how wellit justified the moderate expenditure. I pointed out thatthe bill had been, in proportion to the resources of the Government, less in amount than those John Quincy Adams and Daniel Websterhad formerly advocated; that Mr. Webster, with the singleexception of his service for preserving the Union, pridedhimself on his support of this policy of public improvementmore than on anything else in his life, and had made morespeeches on that subject than on any other. Mr. Adams claimedto be the author of the policy of internal improvements. Sothat it was a Massachusetts policy, and a Massachusetts doctrine. I asked the people of Massachusetts to consider whether theycould reasonably expect to get their living by manufacture, to which nearly the whole State was devoted, bringing theirraw material and their fuel and their iron and coal and cottonand wool from across the continent, and then carrying themanufactured article back again to be sold at the very placeswhere the material came from, in competition with States likePennsylvania and New York and Ohio and Indiana, unless thecost of transportation was, so far as possible, annihilated. 

I concluded by saying that I knew they would not come to myway of thinking that afternoon or that week, but that theywere sure to come to it in the end. With very few exceptionsthe letter did not change the course of the newspapers, orof the leading men who had zealously committed themselvesto another doctrine. But it convinced the people, and I believeit had a very great effect throughout the country, and wasthe means of saving the policy of internal improvements fromdestruction. 

Mr. Clapp, of the Boston _Journal, _ with a manliness thatdid him infinite credit, declared publicly in its columns thathe had been all wrong, and that I was right. The Worcester_Spy, _ edited by my dear friend and near kinsman, EvartsGreene, had with the rest of the press attacked my vote. Mr. Greene himself was absent at the time, so the paper wasthen in charge of an associate. When Mr. Greene returnedI asked him to spend an afternoon at my house. That wasbefore my letter came out. I had sent to Washington forall the engineers' reports and other documents showing thenecessity of every item of the bill. Mr. Greene made a carefulstudy of the bill and agreed with me. 

The Boston _Herald_ also obtained all the material from Washingtonand sent it to a very able gentleman who, though not takingany part in the ordinary conduct of the _Herald, _ was calledupon for services requiring special ability and investigation. They asked him to answer my letter. He spent five days instudying the matter, and then wrote to the managing editorof the paper than Mr. Hoar was entirely right, and that heshould not write the article desired. The _Herald, _ however, did not abandon its position. It kept up the war. But Iought to say it so far modified its action that it supportedme for reelection the next winter. 

The Springfield _Republican_ saw and seized its opportunity. It attacked the River and Harbor Bill savagely. It said:"Mr. Hoar is a candidate for reelection and has dealt himselfa very severe blow. The Commonwealth was prepared to honorMessrs. Crapo and Hoar anew. To-day it pauses, frowns andreflects. " So it kept up the attack. It had previously advocatedthe selection of Mr. Crapo as candidate for Governor. Itbitterly denounced me. Mr. Crapo had himself voted for theRiver and Harbor Bill. It could not consistently maintainits bitter opposition to me, because of my vote, while supportingMr. Crapo. So it declared it could no longer support him. 

When the State Convention came the feeling was still strong, though somewhat abated. I had been asked by the Committee, a good while before, to preside at the Convention. This Idid. I was received rather coldly when I went forward. ButI made no apologies. I began my speech by saying: "It givesme great pleasure to meet this assembly of the representativesof the Republicans of Massachusetts. I have seen these facesbefore. They are faces into which I am neither afraid norashamed to look. " The assembly hesitated a little betweenindignation at the tone of defiance, and approval of a man'sstanding by his convictions. The latter feeling predominated, and they broke out into applause. But the resolutions whichthe Committee reported contained a mild but veiled reproofof my action. 

Mr. Crapo was defeated in the Convention. I have no doubthe would have been nominated for Governor, but for his votefor the River and Harbor Bill. His successful competitor, Mr. Bishop, was a gentleman of great personal worth, highlyesteemed throughout the Commonwealth, and of experience inState administration. But it was thought that his nominationhad been secured by very active political management, concertedat the State House, and that the nomination did not fairlyrepresent the desire of the people of the Commonwealth. Whatevertruth there may have been in this, I am very sure that Mr. Crapo's defeat could not have been compassed but for his votefor the River and Harbor Bill. The result of the above feeling, however, was that the Republican campaign was conducted withoutmuch heart, and General Butler was elected Governor. 

When the election of Senator came in the following winter, I was opposed by what remained of the feeling against theRiver and Harbor Bill. My principal Republican competitorswere Mr. Crapo, whose friends rightly thought he had beentreated with great injustice; and Governor Long, a great publicfavorite, who had just ended a brilliant and most acceptableterm of service as Governor. Governor Long had presided ata public meeting where President Arthur had been receivedduring the summer, and had assured him that his action hadthe hearty approval and support of the people of the Commonwealth. I had, of course, no right to find the least fault with thesupporters of Governor Long. He would have been in everyway a most acceptable and useful Senator. I ought to saythat, as I understood it, he hardly assumed the attitude ofa candidate for the place, and declared in a public letteror speech that he thought I ought to be reelected. So, aftera somewhat earnest struggle I was again chosen. 

One curious incident happened during the election. The morningafter the result was declared, a story appeared in the papersthat Mr. Crapo's supporters had been led to come over to meby the statement that one of them had received a telegramfrom him withdrawing his name, and advising that course. Thecorrespondent of one of the papers called upon Mr. Crapo, who answered him that he had never sent any such telegramto Boston. So it was alleged that somebody who favored mehad brought about the result by this false statement. A newspapercorrespondent called on me in Washington, and asked me aboutthe story. I told him that I had not heard of the story, butthat if it turned out to be true I, of course, would instantlydecline the office. A full investigation was made of thematter, and it turned out that Mr. Crapo had sent such atelegram to a member of the Legislature in New Bedford, whohad taken it to Boston and made it known. 

The next winter, at my suggestion, a resolution was passedcalling upon the Secretary of War, Mr. Lincoln, to specifywhich items in the River and Harbor Bill of the previous winterwere not, in his opinion, advisable, or did not tend to promoteinternational or interstate commerce. He replied specifyinga very few items only, amounting altogether to a very fewthousand dollars. This reply was made by the Secretary ofWar, as he told me in private afterward, by the express directionof the President, and after consultation with him. That endedthe foolish outcry against the great policy of internal improvement, which has helped to make possible the marvels of our domesticcommerce, one of the most wonderful creations of human history. The statistics of its vast extent, greater now, I think, thanall the foreign commerce of the world put together, from thenature of the case, never can be precisely ascertained. Itis not only wonderful in its amount, but in its origin, itsresources, and in its whole conduct. All its instrumentalitiesare American. It is American at both ends, and throughoutall the way. This last year a bill providing for an expenditureof sixty millions, nearly four times the amount of that whichPresident Arthur, and the newspapers that supported him, thoughtso extravagant, passed Congress without a murmur of objection, and if I mistake not, without a dissenting vote. 

I should like to put on record one instance of the generosityand affection of Mr. Dawes. He had not voted when his namewas called, expecting to vote at the end of the roll-call. He meant to vote against the passage of the bill over theveto. But when he heard my vote for it, he saw that I wasbringing down on my head a storm of popular indignation, and made up his mind that he would not throw the weight ofhis example on the side against me. So, contrary to his opinionof the merits of the bill, he came to my side, and voted withme. 

I suppose a good many moralists will think that it is a verywicked thing indeed for a man to vote against his convictionson a grave public question, from a motive like this, of personalfriendship. But I think on the whole I like better the people, who will love Mr. Dawes for such an act, than those who willcondemn him. I would not, probably, put what I am about tosay in an address to a Sunday-school, or into a sermon tothe inmates of a jail or house of correction. I cannot, perhaps, defend it by reason. But somehow or other, I am stronglytempted to say there are occasions in life where the meanestthing a man can do is to do perfectly right. But I do notsay it. It would be better to say that there are occasionswhen the instinct is a better guide than the reason. At anyrate, I do not believe the recording angel made any troublefor Mr. Dawes for that vote. 

CHAPTER IXCHINESE TREATY AND LEGISLATION

Much of what I have said in the preceding chapter is, in substance, applicable to my vote on another matter in which I had beencompelled to take an attitude in opposition to a large majorityof my own party and to the temporary judgment of my countrymen:that is the proposed legislation in violation of the Treatywith China; the subsequent Treaty modifying that negotiatedin 1868 by Mr. Seward on our part, and Mr. Burlingame forChina; and the laws which have been enacted since, upon thesubject of Chinese immigration. I had the high honor of beinghung in effigy in Nevada by reason of the report that I hadopposed, in secret Session of the Senate, the Treaty of 1880. My honored colleague, Mr. Dawes, and I were entirely agreedin the matter. Mr. Dawes complained good-naturedly to SenatorJones, of Nevada, that he had been neglected when the Nevadapeople had singled me out for that sole honor, to which Mr. Jones, with equal good-nature, replied that if Mr. Dawesdesired, he would have measures taken to correct the error, which had inadvertently been made. 

In 1868 the late Anson Burlingame, an old friend of mineand a man highly esteemed in Massachusetts, who had beensent to China as the American Minister in Mr. Lincoln's time, was appointed by the Chinese Government its Ambassador, orEnvoy, to negotiate treaties with the United States and severalEuropean powers. He made a journey through this country andEurope, travelling with Oriental magnificence, in a statewhich he was well calculated to maintain and adorn. It wasjust after we had put down the Rebellion, abolished slavery, and made of every slave a freeman and every freeman a citizen. The hearts of the people were full of the great doctrinesof liberty which Jefferson and the Fathers of our countryhad learned from Milton and the statesmen of the English Commonwealth. 

The Chinese Treaty was concluded on the 28th of July, 1868, between Mr. Seward and Mr. Burlingame and his associate PlenipotentiariesChih-Kang and Sun Chia-Ku. It contained the following clause:

"The United States of American and the Emperor of China cordiallyrecognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to changehis home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage offree migration and emigration of their citizens and subjectsrespectively from one country to the other for purposes ofcuriosity, of trade, or as permanent residents. "

Article VII. Of the same Treaty stipulated that citizens ofeach power should enjoy all the privileges of the publiceducational institutions under the control of the government ofthe other, enjoyed by the citizens or the subjects of the mostfavored nation, and that the citizens of each might, themselves, establish schools in the others' country. Congress passedan Act, July 27, 1868, to a like effect, to which the followingis the preamble to the first section:

"Whereas the right of expatriation is a natural and inherentright of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of therights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; andwhereas in the recognition of this principle this governmenthas freely received emigrants from all nations, and investedthem with the rights of citizenship; and whereas it is claimedthat such American citizens, with their descendants, are subjectsof foreign states, owing allegiance to the governments thereof;and whereas it is necessary to the maintenance of public peacethat this claim of foreign allegiance should be promptly andfinally disavowed: Therefore, " etc. 

Thereafter, in the first term of the Administration of PresidentHayes, in the December Session of 1878, a bill was introducedwhich, almost defiantly, as it seemed to me, violated thefaith of the country pledged by the Burlingame Treaty. Therehad been no attempt to induce China to modify that Treaty. I resisted its passage as well as I could. But my objectionhad little effect in the excited condition of public sentiment. The people of the Pacific coast were, not unnaturally, excitedand alarmed by the importation into their principal citiesof Chinese laborers, fearing, I think without much reason, that American laboring men could not maintain themselves inthe competition with this thrifty and industrious race wholived on food that no American could tolerate, and who hadno families to support, and who crowded together, like sardinesin a box, in close and unhealthy sleeping apartments. 

I supposed that the labor of this inferior class would raise thecondition of better and more intelligent laborers. That, however, was a fairly disputable question. But I could notconsent to striking at men, as I have just said, because oftheir occupation. This bill was vetoed by President Hayes, who put his objections solely upon the ground that the billwas in violation of the terms of the existing Treaty. TheHouse, by a vote of 138 yeas to 116 nays, refused to passthe bill over the veto. 

But in 1880 a Treaty was negotiated, and approved by the Senateand ratified July 19, 1881, which relieved the United Statesfrom the provisions of the Burlingame Treaty, and permittedthe exclusion of Chinese laborers. I made a very earnestspeech, during a debate on this Treaty in Executive Sessionof the Senate, in opposition to it. The Senate did me thehonor, on the motion of Mr. Dawes, of a vote authorizing myspeech to be published, notwithstanding the rule of secrecy. But one Senator from the Pacific coast complained, I thinkwith some reason, that I was permitted to publish my argumenton one side when he not only was not permitted to publishhis on the other, but his constituents had no means of knowingthat he had defended his views or made proper answer to mine. So I thought it hardly fair to make by speech public, andit was not done. 

Later, in the spring of 1882, a bill was passed to carryinto effect the Treaty of 1880. That I resisted as best Icould. In opposition to this bill I made an earnest speechshowing it to be in conflict with the doctrines on which ourfathers founded the Republic; with the principles of theConstitutions of nearly all the States, including that ofCalifornia, and with the declarations of leading statesmen downto the year 1868. I showed also that the Chinese race hadshown examples of the highest qualities of manhood, of intelligence, probity and industry. I protested against a compact betweenthe two greatest nations of the Pacific, just as we were aboutto assert our great influence there, which should place inthe public law of the world, and in the jurisprudence of America, the principle that it is fitting that there should be hereaftera distinction in the treatment of men by governments and inthe recognition of their right to the pursuit of happinessby a peaceful change of their homes, based, not on conduct, not on character, but upon race and occupation; by assertingthat you might justly deny to the Chinese what you might notjustly deny to the Irish, that you might justly deny to thelaborer what you might not deny to the idler. I pointed outthat this declaration was extorted from unwilling China bythe demand of America; and that laborers were henceforth tobe classed, in the enumeration of American public law, withpaupers, lazzaroni, harlots, and persons afflicted with pestilentialdiseases. I ended what I had to say as follows:

"Humanity, capable of infinite depths of degradation, is alsocapable of infinite heights of excellence. The Chinese, like all other races, has given us its examples of both. Torescue humanity from this degradation is, we are taught tobelieve, the great object of God's moral government on earth. It is not by injustice, exclusion, caste, but by reverencefor the individual soul that we can aid in this consummation. It is not by Chinese policies that China is to be civilized. I believe that the immortal truths of the Declaration of Independencecame from the same source with the Golden Rule and the Sermonon the Mount. We can trust Him who promulgated these lawsto keep the country safe that obeys them. The laws of theuniverse have their own sanction. They will not fail. Thepower that causes the compass to point to the north, thatdismisses the star on its pathway through the skies, promisingthat in a thousand years it shall return again true to itshour and keeps His word, will vindicate His own moral law. As surely as the path on which our fathers entered a hundredyears ago led to safety, to strength, to glory, so surelywill the path on which we now propose to enter bring us toshame, to weakness, and to peril. "

The Statute then enacted, expired by its own limitationstwenty years afterward. Meantime the prejudice against Chineselabor had modified somewhat. The public had become somewhatmore considerate of their rights and, at any rate, there wasa desire to maintain some show of decency in legislating thematter. So a more moderate Statute was enacted in 1902. Iwas the only person who voted against it in either House. It was, of course, clear that resistance was useless. Itwas not worth while, it seemed to me, to undertake to expressmy objections at length. I contented myself with the followingbrief remonstrance:

"Mr. President, I think this bill and this debate indicatea great progress in sentiment. The sentiment of the countryhas passed, certainly so far as it is represented by a majorityof the Senate, the stage, if it ever was in it, of a recklessseeking to accomplish the result of Chinese exclusion withoutregard to constitutional restraints, treaty obligations, ormoral duties. There was in some quarters, as it seemed tome, in olden times, a disregard of all these restraints, certainlyin the press, certainly in the harangues which were made toexcited crowds in various parts of the country. Among othersI can remember a visit of the apostle of Chinese exclusionto Boston Common which indicated that spirit. 

"Now, that has gone largely, and the Senate has discussedthis question with a temperate desire on the part of all classesand all Senators, whatever ways of thinking they have, todo what seemed to them for the benefit of labor, the qualityof the citizenship of this country, in a moderate and constitutionalfashion. 

"But I cannot agree with the principle on which this legislationor any legislation on the subject which we have had in thecountry since 1870 rests. I feel bound to enter a protest. I believe that everything in the way of Chinese exclusioncan be accomplished by reasonable, practical and wise measureswhich will not involve the principle of striking at labor, and will not involve the principle of striking at any classof human beings merely because of race, without regard tothe personal and individual worth of the man struck at. Ihold that every human soul has its rights, dependent uponits individual personal worth and not dependent upon coloror race, and that all races, all colors, all nationalitiescontain persons entitled to be recognized everywhere they goon the face of the earth as the equals of every other man. "

I do not think any man ever hated more than I have hated theaffectation or the reality of singularity. I know very wellthat the American people mean to do right, and I believe withall my heart that the men and the party with whom I have actedfor fifty years mean to do right. I believe the judgmentof both far better than my own. But every man's conscienceis given to him as the lamp for his path. He cannot walkby another light. 

It is also true that the great political principles whichhave been in issue for the last thirty years, have been, ingeneral, those that have been debated for centuries, andwhich cannot be settled by a single vote, in a legislativebody, by the result of a single election, or even by the opinionof a single generation. In nearly every one of what I amsorry to say are the numerous instances where I have beencompelled to act upon my judgment against that of my own party, and even against that of the majority of my own countrymen, the people have subsequently come around to my way of thinking, and in all of them, I believe, I have had on my side the opinionof the great men of the great generations of the past. Certainlythe Chinese Exclusion Bill and the Chinese Treaty; the SpanishTreaty and the War against the Philippine people could nothave lived an hour before the indignation of the Americanpeople at any time from the beginning down to the time when, in 1876, they celebrated the centennial of their Independence. 

CHAPTER XTHE WASHINGTON TREATY AND THE GENEVA AWARD

The Treaty of Washington, creditable to all who engaged init, not to be judged by its details, but by its great effectin securing peace to the world, saved Great Britain from awar with us, in which it is not unlikely that the nationsof Europe who hated her would have come to take part on ourside. But it saved us from the greater danger of having thewar spirit renewed and intensified by this gigantic struggle, from an international hatred which would not have cooled againfor a century; or, if we did not declare war, from takingthe ignoble attitude of a great and free people lying in waitfor an opportunity to revenge itself. 

It was the purpose of that Treaty to remove every cause ofquarrel. One constant cause of quarrel, for many years, had been the exercise of our right to fish on the shoresof Newfoundland. In the Treaty it was agreed that the UnitedStates should have, in addition to her existing rights forten years, and for such further times as the parties shouldagree, the right to take fish on the sea coast of the BritishProvinces north of us, with permission to land for the purposeof drying nets and curing fish, and that we were to pay forthe privilege a sum to be fixed by arbitrators. Two of thesearbitrators were to be appointed by the United States andGreat Britain; the other, who would serve as umpire, to beagreed upon by the two powers, or, if not agreed upon withina certain time, then to be appointed by the Emperor of Austria. Great Britain insisted upon having the Belgian Minister tothe United States for the third arbitrator, and refused toname or suggest or agree to any other person. So the timeexpired. Thereupon the Belgian Minister, Mr. Delfosse, wasselected by the Emperor of Austria. Mr. Delfosse's own fortunein public life depended upon his Sovereign's favor. We hadalready notified Great Britain that, if the Belgian Ministerwere selected, he would probably deem himself disqualifiedby reason of the peculiar connection of his Government withthat of Great Britain. When the Treaty was negotiated, Earlde Grey, Chairman of the Commissioners, said, speaking ofthe Government to whom the matter might be referred: "I donot name Belgium, because Great Britain has treaty arrangementswith that Government which might be supposed to incapacitateit. " Belgium, as was notorious, was dependent upon GreatBritain to maintain its political existence against the ambitionsof France and Germany. Mr. Delfosse's sovereign was theson of the brother of Queen Victoria's mother and Prince Albert'sfather, and was, himself, brother of Carlotta, wife of Maximilian, whom we had lately compelled France to abandon to his fate. 

The referee awarded that we should make a payment to GreatBritain for this fishery privilege of five million five hundredthousand dollars. We never valued them at all. We abandonedthem at the end of ten years. It would have been much betterto leave the matter to Great Britain herself. If she hadbeen put upon honor she would not have made such an award. No English Judge who valued his reputation would have suggestedsuch a thing, as it seemed to us. 

I would rather the United States should occupy the positionof paying that award, after calling the attention of Englandto its injustice and wrong, than to occupy the position ofEngland when she pocketed the money. A war with England wouldhave been a grievous thing to her workingmen who stood byus in our hour of peril, and to all that class of Englishmenwhom we loved, and who loved us. Such a war would have beena war between the only two great English-speaking nationsof the world, and the two nations whose policy, under methodslargely similar, though somewhat different, were determinedby the public opinion of their people. 

If however our closer and friendlier relations with Englandare to result in our adopting her social manners, her deferenceto rank and wealth, and of adopting her ideas of empire andthe method of treating small and weak nations by great andstrong ones, it would be better that we had kept aloof, andthat the old jealousy and dislike engendered by two wars hadcontinued. 

A very interesting question was settled during the Administrationof President Hayes as to the disposition of the $15, 500, 000recovered from Great Britain by the award of the tribunalof Geneva for the violation of the obligations of neutralityduring the Civil War. Great Britain, after what we had claimedwhat was full notice of what was going on, permitted certainwar vessels to be constructed in England for the ConfederateGovernment. She permitted those vessels to leave her portsand, by a preconcerted arrangement, to receive their armament, also procured in Great Britain. She turned a deaf, an almostcontemptuous ear, to the remonstrances of Mr. Adams, ourMinister. The Foreign Office, after a while, informed himthat they did not wish to receive any more representationson that subject. But, as the War went on and the naval andmilitary strength of the United States increased and becamemore manifest, Great Britain became more careful. At lastsome Rebel rams were built by the Lairds, ship-builders ofLiverpool. Mr. Adams procured what he deemed sufficientevidence that they were intended for the Confederate service, and made a demand on Lord Russell, the British Foreign Minister, that they be detained. To this Lord Russell replied thathe had submitted the matter to the Law officers of her Majesty'sGovernment, and they could see no reason for interfering. To this Mr. Adams instantly replied that he received the communicationwith great regret, adding, "It would be superfluous in meto point out to your Lordship that this is war. " Lord Russellhastily reconsidered his opinion, and ordered the rams tobe stopped. 

He afterward, as appears in his biography by Spencer Walpole, admitted his error in not interfering in the case of the vesselsthat had gone out before. But the mischief was done. Theterror of these Confederate vessels had driven our commercefrom the sea, or had compelled our merchant vessels to sailunder foreign flags, and had enormously increased the rateof insurance to those who kept the sea under our flag. 

After the War had ended a demand for compensation was earnestlypressed upon Great Britain. A demand was made to refer theclaims to arbitration, and a Treaty negotiated for that purposeby Reverdy Johnson under Andrew Johnson's Administration, was rejected by the Senate, on the ground, among other reasons, that the element of chance entered into the result. 

Thereafter, in General Grant's time, a Joint High Commissionto deal with this controversy was agreed upon between thetwo countries, which sat in Washington, in 1871. The Commissionersin behalf of the United States were Hamilton Fish, Secretaryof State; Robert C. Schenck, then our Minister to England;Samuel Nelson, Judge of the Supreme Court; Ebenezer RockwoodHoar, lately Attorney-General, and George H. Williams, afterwardAttorney-General. On behalf of Great Britain there were Earlde Grey and Ripon, afterward Marquis of Ripon; Sir StaffordH. Northcote, afterward Earl of Idesleigh; Edward Thornton, then the British Minister here; John A. MacDonald, Premierof Canada, and Montague Bernard, Professor of InternationalLaw at Oxford. The two countries could not, in all probability, have furnished men more competent for such a purpose. Theyagreed upon a treaty. The rules by which neutral governmentswere to be held to be bound for the purposes of the arbitrationwere agreed on beforehand in the Treaty itself. They agreedto observe these rules between themselves in the future, andto invite other maritime powers to accede to them. The Treatyalso contained a statement that Her Britannic Majesty had"authorized her High Commissioners and Plenipotentiaries toexpress in a friendly spirit the regret felt by Her Majesty'sGovernment for the escape, under whatever circumstances, of the Alabama and other vessels from British ports, andfor the depredations committed by those vessels. " I am notaware a like apology has ever been made by Great Britain duringher history, to any other country. There was a provisionalso, for the reference of some other matters in dispute betweenthe two countries. One of these related to the fisheries--a source of irritation between this country and the Britishpossessions north of us ever since the Revolution. 

I will not undertake to tell that part of the story here. It was agreed to submit the questions of the claims growingout of the escape of the Rebel cruisers to a tribunal whichwas to sit at Geneva. Of this, one member was to be appointedby each of the parties, and the others by certain designatedforeign governments. Our Commissioner was Charles FrancisAdams, who had borne himself so wisely and patiently duringthe period of the Civil War. The English Commissioner wasSir Alexander Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice of England. TheUnited States was represented by Caleb Cushing, William M. Evarts and Morrison R. Waite, afterward Chief Justice ofthe United States, as counsel. 

Adams rarely betrayed any deep emotion on any public occasion, however momentous. But it must have been hard for him toconceal the thrill of triumph, after the ignominy to whichhe had submitted during that long and anxious time, when heheard the tribunal pronounce its judgment, condemning GreatBritain to pay $15, 500, 000 damages for the wrong-doing againstwhich he had so earnestly and vainly protested. Perhaps thefeeling of his grandfather when he signed the Treaty of Independencein 1783 might alone be compared to it. Yet his father, JohnQuincy Adams, had something of the same feeling when, at theclose of a war which put an end forever to the impressmentof American seamen, and made the sailor in his ship as safeas the farmer in his dwelling, he signed the Treaty whichsecured our boundary and our fisheries as they had been securedby his father. * John Quincy Adams had struck, by the directionof his father, in 1815, a seal which he gave to his son, withthe injunction to give it to his, bearing the motto, "Piscemur, venemur, ut olim, "--We keep our hunting grounds and our fishinggrounds as of old. I doubt if three such achievements, bythree successive generations, can be found in the annals ofany other family however illustrious. 

[Footnote]* This story is told more fully at page 147. It seems appropriatein both places. [End of Footnote]

The $15, 500, 000 was promptly paid. Then came the questionwhat to do with it. There was no doubt anywhere, that theowners of vessels or cargoes that had been captured or destroyedby the cruisers for whose departure from British ports GreatBritain was in fault, were entitled to be paid. That, however, would not consume the fund. The fund had been paid in goldcoin by Great Britain, September 9, 1873, and had been coveredinto the Treasury the same day. This sum was invested ina registered bond for the amount, of the five per cent. Loanof 1881, dated September 10, 1873, inscribed, "Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State, in trust. To be held subject to the futuredisposition of Congress, etc. " This sum largely exceeded whatwas necessary to make good the principal of all losses directlyresulting from the damages caused by the insurgent cruisers, above what had already been reimbursed from insurance. Theseclaims were popularly termed the "claims for direct damages. "

The question what to do with the balance was the subjectof great dispute throughout the country, and of much debatein both Houses of Congress. Some persons claimed that theowners directly damaged should receive interest. That wouldstill leave a large part of the fund undisposed of. It wasinsisted that the remainder belonged to the Government forthe benefit of the whole people who had borne the burden andcost of the war. Others claimed that, as nothing but directdamages were lawfully assessable, the balance should be paidback to Great Britain. Still others claimed that the personswho had suffered indirectly by the loss of voyages, the increasedrates of insurance, and the breaking up of business, werejustly entitled to the money. Still others, perhaps the mostformidable and persistent of all, claimed that the underwriterswho had paid insurance on vessels or cargoes destroyed, wereentitled to the money on the familiar principle that an insurerwho pays a loss is subrogated to all the legal and equitableclaims of the party insured. 

These disputes prevented any disposition of the fund by Congressuntil the summer of 1874. 

Judge Hoar, who was then a Member of the House of Representatives, suggested that as everybody agreed that the claims for directdamage ought to be paid, that it was not fair that they shouldbe kept waiting longer in order to settle the dispute aboutthe rest of the fund. In accordance with his suggestion aCourt was provided for by Act of Congress, whose duty it wasto receive and examine all claims directly resulting fromdamages caused by the insurgent cruisers. They were directed, however, not to allow any claim where the party injured hadreceived indemnity from any insurance company, except to theexcess of such claim above the indemnity. They were furtherauthorized to allow interest at the rate of four per cent. The Court performed its duty. When its judgments had beenpaid there still remained a large balance. The ablest lawyersin the Senate, in general, pressed the claim of the insurancecompanies to the balance of the fund, including Mr. Edmunds, Judge Davis, Judge Thurman and Mr. Bayard. I took up thequestion with a strong leaning for the insurance companies. I was, of course, impressed by the well-known principle oflaw that the underwriter who had paid for property destroyedby the cause against which he had insured, was entitled tobe substituted to all other rights or remedies which the ownermay have for reimbursement of his loss. I was very much impressedalso in favor of the insurance companies, who were makingwhat they doubtless believed an honest and just claim, fortifiedby many of the best legal opinions in Congress and out ofit, by the character of the attacks made on them, especiallyby General Butler. These attacks appealed to the lowest passionsand prejudices. It was said that the companies were rich;that they made their money out of the misfortunes of theircountrymen; that they were trying to get up to their arm-pits inthe National Treasury, and that they employed famous counsel. If there be anything likely to induce a man with legal orjudicial instincts to set his teeth against a proposition, it is that style of argument. 

But I came to the conclusion, both from the history of theproceedings at Geneva, and from the nature of the submission, that the claim that had been established against Great Britainwas a National claim, made by National authority for a Nationalinjury. That this was the character of the claim our counselgave express notice to Great Britain and to the tribunal. This opinion was asserted by Mr. Fish in his instructionsto the counsel. When the Government of the United Statesreceived it, it seemed to me that it was entitled to applyit in its high discretion; and to give it to such personsentitled to its protection or consideration as it should seefit. I made a careful argument in support of this view. Ithought, accordingly, that the balance of the fund, aftercompensating all persons, not yet paid, for claims directlyresulting from damage done on the high seas by Confederatecruisers, and the class of insurance companies above mentioned, should be paid to persons who had paid premiums for war risksafter the sailing of any Confederate cruiser. I maintainedthis doctrine as well as I could against the powerful argumentsI have named. There were other very strong arguments on thesame side, and I had the gratification of being assured byseveral Senators that my presentation of the case had convincedthem. Mr. Blaine, who had, himself, earnestly engaged inthe debate, said that he thought that the opinion of the majorityof the Senators had been changed by my argument. 

CHAPTER XITHE PRESIDENT'S POWER OF REMOVAL

The two most important questions of the construction of theConstitution which came up in our early history have beenfinally put at rest in our day. I have had something to dowith disposing of both of them. With the disposition of oneof them I had a leading part. 

The first of these questions was whether in executing thepowers conferred upon it by the Constitution, Congress mustconfine itself to such means and instrumentalities as arestrictly and indispensably necessary to their accomplishment;or whether it might select, among the measures which fairlypromote such Constitutional ends, any method which it shallthink for the public interest, exercising this power in aliberal way, and remembering in doing so that it is a Constitution--the vital power of a free people, --we are defining and limiting, and not an ordinary power of attorney. 

This question first came up in Washington's Administration, on the bill for establishing a National Bank. Seldom anydoubt is raised now as to the Constitutional power of theNational Government to accomplish and secure any of the greatresults which we could not secure before the war, by reasonof what is called the doctrine of State Rights. Democratand Republican, men of the South and men of the North, nowagree in exercising without a scruple the power of Congressto protect American interests by the tariff, to endow andto subsidize railroads across the continent, and to buildan Oceanic canal. 

I have in my possession, in Roger Sherman's and James Madison'shandwriting, a paper which contains the first statement ofa controversy which divided parties and sections, which inspiredNullification, and which entered largely in the strife whichbrought on the Civil War. 

(In Roger Sherman's handwriting. ) "You will admit that Congresshave power to provide by law for raising, depositing and applyingmoney for the purposes enumerated in the Constitution. " X(and generally of regulating the finances). "That they havepower so far as no particular rules are pointed out in theConstitution to make such rules and regulations as they mayjudge necessary and proper to effect these purposes. Theonly question that remains is--Is a bank (a necessary and)a proper measure for effecting these purposes? And is notthis a question of expediency rather than of right?"

(The following, on the same slip of paper, is in James Madison'shandwriting. ) "Feb. 4, 1791. This handed to J. M. By Mr. Sherman during the debate on the constitutionality of thebill for a National bank. The line marked X given up by himon the objection of J. M. The interlineation of 'a necessary&' by J. M. To which he gave no other answer than a smile. "

The other matter relates to the power of removal from office. Upon that the Constitution is silent. In the beginning twoviews were advocated. There was a great debate in 1789, whichMr. Evarts declares, "decidedly the most important and bestconsidered debate in the history of Congress. " The claim thatthe power of removal is vested absolutely in the Presidentby the Constitution prevailed in the House of Representatives, under the lead of Madison, by a majority of twelve, and bythe casting vote of John Adams in the Senate. Mr. Madisonsaid:

"The decision that is at this time made will become the permanentexposition of the Constitution; and on a permanent expositionof the Constitution will depend the genius and character ofthe whole Government. "

One party claimed that the power of removal was a necessaryincident to the power of appointment, and vested in the Presidentby virtue of his power to appoint. It was claimed also onthe same side that the President's duty to see the laws faithfullyexecuted could not be discharged if subordinates could bekept in office against his will. In most cases the Presidentnever executes the laws himself, but only has to see themexecuted faithfully. 

This view prevailed, as we have seen, in Washington's Administration. It continued to be acted upon till the time of President Johnson. In General Jackson's time its soundness was challenged byWebster, Calhoun and Clay. But there was no attempt to resistit in practice. Mr. Webster in 1835 earnestly dissentedfrom the original decision, while he admitted that he consideredit "a settled point; settled by construction, settled by precedent, settled by the practice of the Government, and settled bystatute. " It remained so settled, until, in the strife whichfollowed the rebellion, a two-thirds majority in Congresswas induced by apprehension of a grave public danger to attemptto wrest this portion of the executive power from the handsof Andrew Johnson. The statute of March 2, 1867, as construedby nearly two-thirds of the Senate, enacted that officersappointed by the predecessor of President Johnson, who, bythe law in force when they were appointed, and by the expressterms of their commission, were removable at the pleasureof the President, should remain in office until the Senateshould consent to the appointment of their successors, orapprove their removal. 

In 1867 Congress undertook to determine by statute the constructionof the Constitution as to this disputed question. Some personsclaimed that that power existed in the provision--"To makeall laws which shall be necessary and proper for carryinginto execution the foregoing powers, and all other powersvested by this Constitution in the Government of the UnitedStates, or in any Department officer thereof. "

The Constitutionality and effect of this statute were debatedon the trial of President Johnson. But it served its purposeduring the last two years of Johnson's Administration. Fivedays after Grant's inauguration, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 138 to 16, passed a bill totally repealing it. The Senate was unwilling to let go the hold which it had acquiredon the Executive power, but proposed to suspend the law forone year, so that there might be no obstacle in the path ofGeneral Grant to the removal of the obnoxious officials whohad adhered to Andrew Johnson. So a compromise was agreedupon. It permitted the President to suspend officers duringthe vacation of the Senate, but restored officers so suspendedat the close of the next session, unless, in the meantime, the advice and consent of the Senate had been obtained toa removal or the appointment of a successor. 

President Grant, in his message of December, 1869, urgedthe repeal of this modified act on the ground that--

"It could not have been the intention of the framers of theConstitution that the Senate should have the power to retainin office persons placed there by Federal appointment, againstthe will of the President. The law is inconsistent with afaithful and efficient administration of the Government. Whatfaith can an Executive put in officials forced on him, andthose, too, whom he has suspended for reason? How will suchofficials be likely to serve an Administration which theyknow does not trust them?"

The House acted on this recommendation, and passed a billfor the repeal of the statutes of 1867 and 1869 by a voteof 159 to 25. For this bill the whole Massachusetts delegation, including Mr. Dawes and myself, voted. It was never actedon in the Senate. In 1872 a similar bill passed the Housewithout a division. 

The Democratic Party has invariably supported the positionof Madison and Jackson, that the power of removal is vestedby the Constitution in the President, and cannot be controlledby legislation. 

This was the condition of matters when Mr. Cleveland cameinto office March 4, 1885. The Revised Statutes, Sections1767-1772, contained in substance the law as it was left bythe legislation of 1867 and 1869 (Sec. 1767): "Every personholding any civil office to which he has been or hereaftermay be appointed by and with the consent of the Senate, andwho shall have become duly qualified to act therein, shallbe entitled to hold such office during the term for whichhe was appointed, unless sooner removed by and with the adviceand consent of the Senate, or by the appointment, with thelike advice and consent, of a successor, in his place, exceptas herein otherwise provided. "

The President was however authorized to suspend civil officersduring the recess, except Judges, until the next session ofthe Senate, and to designate a substitute who should dischargethe duties of the office, himself being subject to removalby the designation of another. 

The President was further required to nominate within thirtydays after the commencement of each session of the Senatepersons to fill all vacancies in office, which existed atthe meeting of the Senate, whether temporarily filled or not, and in place of all officers suspended. If no appointmentwere made, with the advice and consent of the Senate duringsuch session, the office was to be in abeyance. 

It will be seen that this statute required the assent of theSenate to the exercise of the President's power of removal, although without its consent he could suspend the officer soas to deprive him of the emoluments of his office. 

So the appointment of a new officer by the advice and consentof the Senate operated in such case as a removal of the personthem holding office, and a failure of the Senate to confirmsuch proposed appointment had the effect to restore the officersuspended, or temporarily removed. 

Under these conditions there grew up a very earnest controversybetween President Cleveland and the Republican majority inthe Senate, led by the Judiciary Committee, of which Mr. Edmundswas then Chairman. It has been, I suppose from the beginningof the Government, the practice of the President to furnishto the Senate all papers and documents in his possession relatingto the fitness of officials nominated to the Senate. 

Mr. Cleveland made no objection, if I understood him correctly, to continuing that practice. But he claimed that the Senatehad nothing to do with the exercise of his power of removal, and therefore was not entitled to be informed of the evidenceupon which he acted in that. So he refused and sustainedthe heads of Departments in refusing the request of the Senateto send for its information the documents on file relatingto removals. 

This position was encountered by the Republican majority, some of them claiming that the Senate had the same rightfulshare in the removals as in appointments, and that no differencewas to be made between the two cases. Others believed, asI did, that although the power of removal might be exercisedby the President alone on his own responsibility, withoutrequiring the advice and consent of the Senate, still thatwhile the President was proceeding under the law by whichthe appointment itself operated as a removal, and a failureto affirm the appointment restored the old officer to hisplace again, that the Senate whose action was to have thatimportant effect, was entitled not only to know whether thepublic interest would be served by the appointment of theproposed official on his own merits solely, but also whetherit would be best served by the removal of his predecessoror by the restoration to office of his predecessor. Boththe President and the Senate were acting under the existinglaw, treating it as in force and valid. Now suppose it weretrue that the question of advising and consenting to the appointmentproposed by the President were a very doubtful one indeed, the question on its merits being closely balanced; and theofficer to be removed or restored according as the Senateshould consent or refuse to consent, was a man of conspicuousand unquestioned capacity and character, against whom no reasonableobjection was brought, to be removed for political reasonssolely. The Senate certainly, in exercising its power hadthe right to consider all that the President had a right toconsider, and therefore it seems to me that we were justified, in that class of cases, in asking for the documents in hispossession bearing upon the question of removal. 

It will be observed that in none of the arguments of thisConstitutional question has it been claimed that the Presidenthad the right without statute authority to suspend publicofficers, even if he had the right to remove them. That right, if he had it at all, he got under the statute under whichhe and the Senate were acting. 

On the 17th of July, 1885, the President issued an ordersuspending George M. Duskin of Alabama, from the office ofAttorney of the United States, by virtue of the authorityconferred upon him by Sec. 1768 of the Revised Statutes, which is a reenactment of the law of which I have just spoken. 

On the 14th of December, 1885, the President nominated tothe Senate John D. Burnett, vice George M. Duskin, suspended. The Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, as had beenusual in such cases, addressed a note to the Attorney-General, asking that all papers and information in the possession ofthe Department touching the conduct and administration ofthe officer proposed to be removed, and touching the characterand conduct of the person proposed to be appointed, be sentto the Committee for its information. To this the Attorney-General replied that he was directed by the President to saythat there been sent already to the Judiciary Committee allpapers in the Department relating to the fitness of John D. Burnett, recently nominated, but that it was not consideredthat the public interests would be promoted by a compliancewith said resolution and the transmission of the papers anddocument therein mentioned to the Senate in Executive session. 

That made a direct issue. Thereupon a very powerful reportaffirming the right of the Senate to require such papers wasprepared by Mr. Edmunds, Chairman of the Committee on theJudiciary, and signed by George F. Edmunds, Chairman, JohnJ. Ingalls, S. J. R. McMillan, George F. Hoar, James F. Wilsonand William M. Evarts. 

This was accompanied by a dissenting report by the minorityof the Committee, signed by James L. Pugh, Richard Coke, GeorgeC. Vest and Howell E. Jackson, afterward Associate Justiceof the Supreme Court of the United States. 

So it will be seen that the two sides were very powerfullyrepresented. The report of the Committee was encounteredby a message from President Cleveland, dated March 1, 1886, in which the President claimed that these papers in the Attorney-General's Department were in no sense upon its files, butwere deposited there for his convenience. He said: "I supposeif I desired to take them into my custody I might do so withentire propriety, and if I saw fit to destroy them no onecould complain. " Continuing, the President says that thedemands of the Senate "assume the right to sit in judgmentupon the exercise of my exclusive discretion and Executivefunction, for which I am solely responsible to the peoplefrom whom I have so lately received the sacred trust of office. "

He refers to the laws upon which the Senate based its demandand said: "After an existence of nearly twenty years of almostinnocuous desuetude these laws are brought forth--apparentlythe repealed as well as the unrepealed--and put in the wayof an Executive who is willing, if permitted, to attempt animprovement in the methods of administration. The Constitutionalityof these laws is by no means admitted. "

The President seemed to forget that he had taken action underthose laws, and had expressly cited them as the authorityfor his action, in his message announcing the suspension ofthe official. 

The controversy waxed warm in the Senate, and in the pressthroughout the country. The effect of it was that the confirmationof Mr. Cleveland's nominees for important offices was postponedfor several months, in some cases eight to ten, but as theywere exercising their functions under temporary appointments, it made no difference to them. When they were at last confirmedby the Senate, they received commissions dated from the appointmentwhich took place after the advice and consent of the Senate. So the four years, for which they could hold office, beganto run then, and when a new Administration of a differentpolitics came into power, they held their office for a periodconsiderably more than four years, except a few who wereactually removed by President Harrison. 

I do not think the people cared much about the dispute. Thesympathy was rather with President Cleveland. The people, both Republicans and Democrats, expected that the politicalcontrol of the more important offices would be changed whena new party came into power, and considered Mr. Edmunds'sConstitutional argument as a mere ingenious device to protractthe day when their political fate should overtake the Republicanofficials. 

I united with the majority of the Committee in the report, for the reasons I have stated above. I still think the positionof the Senate right, and that of the President wrong. ButI never agreed to the claim that the Senate had anything todo with the President's power of removal. So I took the firstopportunity to introduce a bill repealing the provisions ofthe statute relating to the tenure of office, which interferedwith the President's power of removal, so that we might goback again to the law which had been in force from the foundationof the Government, in the controversy with President Jackson. A majority of the Republicans had attempted to do that, asI have said, in the first session of Congress under PresidentGrant. But it had been defeated by the Senate. So I introducedin the December session, 1886, a bill which became a law March3, 1887, as follows:

"Be enacted, etc. , That sections 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, and 1772 of the Revised Statutes of the United Statesare hereby repealed. 

"Sec. 2. This repeal shall not affect any officer heretoforesuspended under the provisions of said sections, or any designation, nomination or appointment heretofore made by virtue of theprovisions thereof. 

"Approved, March 3, 1887. "

But the blood of my Republican associates was up. I gota few Republican votes for my Bill. It passed the Houseby a vote of 172 to 67. Every Massachusetts Representativevoted for the Bill, as did Speaker Reed. But in generalthe votes against it were Republican votes. Governor Longmade an able speech in its favor. 

In the Senate three Republicans only voted with me. Amongthe nays were several Senators who, as members of the House, had voted for a Bill involving the same principle in 1869. Mr. Evarts, though absent at the time of this vote, declaredhis approval of the Bill in debate; and so, I think, did Mr. Dawes, although of that I am not sure. Mr. Edmunds opposedit with all his might and main. 

Mr. Sherman, always a good friend of mine, remonstrated withme. He asked me with great seriousness, if I was consciousof the extent of the feeling among the Republicans of theSenate at my undertaking to act in opposition to them onthis and one or two other important matters, to which healluded. I replied that I must of course do what seemed tobe my duty, and that in my opinion I was rendering a greatservice to the Republican Party in getting rid of the controversyin which the people sympathized generally with the Democrats, and that I thought the gentlemen who differed from me, wouldcome to my way of thinking pretty soon. The result provedthe soundness of my judgment. I do not think a man can befound in the Senate now who would wish to go back to the lawwhich was passed to put fetters on the limbs of Andrew Johnson. I have asked several gentlemen who voted against the repealwhether they did not think so, and they all now agree thatthe measure was eminently wise and right. The oppositionto the statute of 1887 was but the dying embers of the oldfires of the Johnson controversy. 

CHAPTER XIIFISHERIES

If, on looking back, I were to select the things which Ihave done in public life in which I take the most satisfaction, they would be, the speech in the Senate on the FisheriesTreaty, July 10, 1886, the letter denouncing the A. P. A. , asecret, political association, organized for the purpose ofostracizing our Catholic fellow-citizens, and the numerousspeeches, letters and magazine articles against the subjugationof the Philippine Islands. 

I do not think any one argument, certainly that my argument, caused the defeat of the Fisheries Treaty, negotiated by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain and Mr. Bayard during Mr. Cleveland'sfirst Administration. The argument against it was too strongnot to have prevailed without any one man's contribution toit; and the Senate was not so strongly inclined to supportPresident Cleveland as to give a two-thirds majority to ameasure, unless it seemed clearly for the public interest. He had his Republican opponents to reckon with, and the Democratsin the Senate disliked him very much, and gave him a feebleand half-hearted support. 

The question of our New England fisheries has interestedthe people of the country, especially of New England, fromour very early history. Burke spoke of them before the RevolutionaryWar, as exciting even then the envy of England. One of thebest known and most eloquent passages in all literature ishis description of the enterprise of our fathers. Burke addsto that description:

"When I reflect upon the effects, when I see how profitablethey have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances meltand die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon somethingto the spirit of Liberty. "

The War of the Revolution, of course, interrupted for a timethe fisheries of the American colonies. But the fishermenwere not idle. They manned the little Navy whose exploitshave never yet received from history its due meed of praise. They furnished the ships' companies of Manly and Tucker andBiddle and Abraham Whipple. They helped Paul Jones to striketerror into St. George's Channel. In 1776, in the first yearof the Revolutionary War, American privateers, most of themmanned by our fishermen, captured three hundred and forty-two British vessels. 

The fisheries came up again after the war. Mr. Jeffersoncommended them to the favor of the nation in an elaborateand admirable report. He said that before the war 8, 000 menand 52, 000 tons of shipping were annually employed by Massachusettsin the cod and whale fisheries. England and France made urgentefforts and offered large bounties to get our fishermen tomove over there. 

For a long time the fisheries were aided by direct bounties. Later the policy of protection has been substituted. 

John Adams has left on record that when he went abroad asour representative in 1778, and again when the Treaty of 1783was negotiated, his knowledge of the fisheries and his senseof their importance were what induced him to take the mission. He declared that unless our claims were fully recognized, the States would carry on the war alone. He said:

"Because the people of New England, besides the natural claimof mankind to the gifts of Providence on their coast, arespecially entitled to the fishery by their charters, whichhave never been declared forfeited. "

In the debate on the articles of peace in the House of Lords, Lord Loughborough, the ablest lawyer of his party, said:

"The fishery on the shores retained by Britain is in thenext article not ceded, but recognized as a right inherent inthe Americans, which though no longer British subjects, theyare to continue to enjoy unmolested. "

This was denied nowhere in the debate. 

John Adams took greater satisfaction in his achievement whenhe secured our fisheries in the treaty of 1783 than in anyother of the great acts of his life. * After the treaty of 1783he had a seal struck with the figures of the pine tree, the deerand the fish, emblems of the territory and the fisheriessecured in 1783. He had it engraved anew in 1815 with themotto, "Piscemur, venemur, ut olim. " I have in my possessionan impression taken from the original seal of 1815. Thisletter from John Quincy Adams tells its story:

"QUINCY, September 3, 1836. 

_"My Dear Son:_ On this day, the anniversary of the definitivetreaty of peace of 1783, whereby the independence of the UnitedStates of America was recognized, and the anniversary of yourown marriage, I give you a seal, the impression upon whichwas a device of my father, to commemorate the successful assertionof two great interests in the negotiation for the peace, theliberty of the fisheries, and the boundary securing the acquisitionof the western lands. The deer, the pine tree, and the fishare the emblems representing those interests. 

"The seal which my father had engraved in 1783 was withoutthe motto. He gave it in his lifetime to your deceased brotherJohn, to whose family it belongs. That which I now give toyou I had engraved by his direction at London in 1815, shortlyafter the conclusion of the treaty of peace at Ghent, on the24th of December, 1814, at the negotiation of which the sameinterests, the fisheries, and the bounty had been deeply involved. The motto, 'Piscemur, venemur, ut olim, ' is from Horace. 

"I request you, should the blessing of heaven preserve thelife of your son, Charles Francis, and make him worthy ofyour approbation, to give it at your own time to him as atoken of remembrance of my father, who gave it to me, andof yours. 

 "JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. " "My son Charles Francis Adams. "

[Footnote]* See Ante, p. 131. [End of Footnote]

The negotiations of 1815 and 1818 were under the controlof as dauntless and uncompromising a spirit, and one quiteas alive to the value of the fisheries and the dishonor ofabandoning them as that of John Adams himself. If John QuincyAdams, the senior envoy at Ghent, and the Secretary of Statein 1818, had consented to a treaty bearing the constructionwhich is lately claimed he never could have gone home to facehis father. When the War of 1812 ended, Great Britain setup the preposterous claim that the war had abrogated all treaties, and that with the treaty of 1783 our rights in the fisherieswere gone. There was alarm in New England; but it was quietedby the knowledge that John Quincy Adams was one of our representatives. It was well said at that time that, as

"John Adams saved the fisheries once, his son would a secondtime. "

When someone expressed a fear that the other commissionerswould not stand by his son, the old man wrote in 1814, that--

"Bayard, Russell, Clay, or even Gallatin, would cede thefee-simple of the United States as soon as they would cedethe fisheries. " (pp. 21-22). 

These fisheries still support the important city of Gloucester, and are a very valuable source of wealth to the hardy andenterprising people who maintain them. Their story is fullof romance. A touching yearly ceremonial is celebrated atthe present time in Gloucester in commemoration of the menwho are lost in this dangerous employment. 

But the value of the fisheries does not consist chiefly inhistoric association or in the wealth which they contributeto any such community. 

They are the nursery of seamen, more valuable and less costlythan the Naval School at Annapolis. They train the men whoare employed in them to get to be at home on the sea. Theyare valuable for naval officers and for sailors. Wheneverthere shall be a war with a naval power, they will be thrownout of employ, and will seek service in our Navy. All theEnglish authorities, I believe, concur in this opinion. Iread in my speech a very interesting letter from Admiral Porterwho testified strongly to that effect. 

While it is true that many of our common sailors engagedin our cod and other fisheries are of foreign birth, it isequally true that they, almost all of them, come to live inthis country, get naturalized and become ardent Americans. This is true of the natives of the British Dominions. Butit is still more true of the Scandinavians, a hardy and adventurousrace, faithful and brave, who become full of the spirit ofAmerican nationality. 

Mr. Bayard who was, I think, inspired by a patriotic andpraiseworthy desire to establish more friendly relationswith Great Britain, seemed to me to give away the whole Americancase, and to have been bamboozled by Joseph Chamberlain atevery point. The Treaty gave our markets to Canada withoutanything of value to us in return, and afforded no just indemnityfor the past outrages of which we justly complained, and gaveno security for the future. 

The Treaty, which required a two-thirds majority for itsratification, was defeated by a vote of twenty-seven yeasto thirty nays. There were nine Senators paired in the affirmative, and eight in the negative. The vote was a strict party vote, with the exception of Messrs. Palmer and Turpie, Democrats, who were against it. 

I discussed the subject with great earnestness, going fullyinto the history of the matter, and the merits of the Treaty. I think I may say without undue vanity that my speech wasan important and interesting contribution to a very creditablechapter of our history. 

CHAPTER XIIITHE FEDERAL ELECTIONS BILL

In December, 1889, the Republican Party succeeded to the legislativepower in the country for the first time in sixteen years. Since 1873 there had been a Democratic President for fouryears, and a Democratic House or Senate or both for the restof the time. There was a general belief on the part of theRepublicans, that the House of Representatives, as constitutedfor fourteen years of that time, and that the Presidency itselfwhen occupied by Mr. Cleveland, represented nothing but usurpation, by which, in large districts of the country, the will of thepeople had been defeated. There were some faint denials atthe time when these claims were made in either House of Congressas to elections in the Southern States. But nobody seemsto deny now, that the charges were true. Mr. Senator Tillmanof South Carolina stated in my hearing in the Senate:

"We took the Government away. We stuffed ballot boxes. Weshot them. We are not ashamed of it. The Senator from Wisconsinwould have done the same thing. I see it in his eye rightnow. He would have done it. With that system--force, tissueballots, etc. --we got tired ourselves. So we called a ConstitutionalConvention, and we eliminated, as I said, all of the coloredpeople whom we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. 

"I want to call your attention to the remarkable change thathas come over the spirit of the dream of the Republicans;to remind you, gentlemen of the North, that your slogans ofthe past--brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God--have goneglimmering down the ages. The brotherhood of man exists nolonger, because you shoot negroes in Illinois, when they comein competition with your labor, and we shoot them in SouthCarolina, when they come in competition with us in the matterof elections. You do not love them any better than we do. You used to pretend that you did; but you no longer pretendit, except to get their votes. 

"You deal with the Filipinos just as you deal with the negroes, only you treat them a heap worse. "

No Democrat rose to deny his statement, and, so far as I know, no Democratic paper contradicted it. The Republicans, whohad elected President Harrison and a Republican House in 1888, were agreed, with very few exceptions, as to the duty of providinga remedy for this great wrong. Their Presidential Convention, held at Chicago in 1888, passed a resolution demanding, "effectivelegislation to secure integrity and purity of elections, whichare the fountains of all public authority, " and charged thatthe "present Administration and the Democratic majority inCongress owe their existence to the suppression of the ballotby a criminal nullification of the Constitution and the lawsof the United States. "

In the Senate at the winter session of 1888 and at the beginningof the December session of 1889, a good many Bills were introducedfor the security of National elections. Similar Bills wereintroduced in the House. A special Committee was appointedthere to deal with that subject. I had, myself, no doubtof the Constitutional authority of Congress, and of its duty, if it were able, to pass an effective law for that purpose. 

I was the Chairman of the Committee on Privileges and Elections, and it was my duty to give special attention to that subject. I had carefully prepared a Bill in the vacation, based onone introduced by Mr. Sherman, providing for holding, underNational authority, separate registrations and elections forMembers of Congress. But when I got to Washington, I found, on consultation with every Republican Senator except one, that a large majority were averse to an arrangement whichwould double the cost of elections throughout the country, and which, in States where personal registration every yearis required, would demand from every citizen his presenceat the place of polling or registration four times every alternateyear. That is, in the years when there were Congressmen tobe elected he must go twice to be registered--once for theState election, and once for the Congressional--and twiceto vote. So I drew another Bill. I say I drew it. But Ihad the great advantage of consultation with Senator Spoonerof Wisconsin, a very able lawyer who had lately come to theSenate, and I can hardly say that the Bill, as it was finallydrafted, was more mine or his. This Bill provided, in substance, that there should be National officers of both parties whoshould be present at the registration and election of Membersof Congress, and at the count of the vote, and who shouldknow and report everything which should happen, so that allfacts affecting the honesty of the election and the returnmight be before the House of Representatives. To this wereadded some section providing for the punishment of bribery, fraud and misconduct of election officers. 

In the meantime the House of Representatives had appointeda special Committee charged with a similar duty. Membersof that Committee saw me, and insisted, with a good deal ofreason, that a measure which concerned the election of membersof the House of Representatives, should originate in thatbody. Accordingly the Senate Committee held back its Bill, and awaited the action of the House, which sent a Bill tothe Senate, July 15, 1890. The House Bill dealt not onlywith the matter of elections, but also with the selectionof juries, and some other important kindred subjects. OurCommittee struck out from it everything that did not beardirectly on elections; mitigated the severity of the penalties, and reduced the bulk of the Bill very considerably. The measurewas reported in a new draft by way of substitute. It remainedbefore the Senate until the beginning of the next Session, when it was taken up for action. It was a very simple measure. 

It only extended the law which, with the approbation of bothparties, had been in force in cities of more than twentythousand inhabitants, to Congressional districts, when thereshould be an application to the Court, setting forth thenecessity for its protection. That law had received thecommendation of many leading Democrats, including S. S. Cox, Secretary Whitney, the four Democratic Congressmen who representedBrooklyn, and General Slocum, then Representative at largefrom the State of New York. It had been put in force on theapplication of Democrats quite as often as on that of Republicans. We added to our Bill a provision that in case of a disputeconcerning an election certificate, the Circuit Court of theUnited States in which the district was situated should hearthe case and should award a certificate entitling the memberto be placed on the Clerk's roll, and to hold his seat untilthe House itself should act on the case. That provision wascopied from the English law of 1868 which has given absolutepublic satisfaction there. This was the famous Force Bill, and the whole of it--a provision that, if a sufficient petitionwere made to the court for that purpose, officers, appointedby the court, belonging to both parties should be presentand watch the election; that the Judge of the Circuit Courtshould determine, in case of dispute, what name should beput on the roll of the House of Representatives, in the beginning, subject to the Constitutional power of the House to correctit, and that a moderate punishment for bribery, intimidationand fraud, on indictment and conviction by a jury of the vicinage, should be imposed. That was the whole of it. 

But the Southern Democratic leaders, with great adroitness, proceeded to repeat the process known as "firing the Southernheart. " They persuaded their people that there was an attemptto control elections by National authority. They realizedthat the waning power of their party at the South, many ofwhose business men saw that the path of prosperity for theSouth as well as for the North lay in the adoption of Republicanpolicies, might be reestablished by exciting the fear of negrodomination. The Northern Democrats, either very ignorantlyor wilfuly, united in the outcry. Governor William E. Russellof Massachusetts, a gentleman of large influence and popularitywith both parties, telegraphed to President Cleveland a piousthanksgiving for the defeat of this "wicked Bill. "

Some worthy Republican Senators became alarmed. They thought, with a good deal of reason, that it was better to allow existingevils and conditions to be cured by time, and the returningconscience and good sense of the people, rather than havethe strife, the result of which must be quite doubtful, whichthe enactment and enforcement of this law, however moderateand just, would inevitably create. 

On reflection, I came myself to the conclusion that, whilethe Bill was reasonable and there was no reasonable doubtof the power of Congress to enact it, yet the attempt to passit, if it were to fail, would do the cause infinite mischief. Itwould be an exhibition of impotence, always injurious toa political party. It would drive back into the DemocraticParty many men who were afraid of negro domination; who lookedwith great dislike on the assertion of National power overelections, and whom other considerations would induce to actwith the Republicans. So I thought it was best to ascertaincarefully the prevailing opinion and see if we were likelyto get the Bill through, and, if we found that unlikely, notto proceed far enough to have a debate in either House. 

Accordingly I visited the House of Representatives, saw severalof my Massachusetts colleagues and some other leaders. Theyagreed that, if I found that the Bill could not, in all probability, pass the Senate, it should be arranged to lay it aside inthe House without making any serious movement for it there. After that arrangement was made there was a Senate caucus. I brought up the matter and moved the appointment of a Committeeto consider the whole question of legislation with referenceto the security of elections. A gentleman who had recentlybecome a Member of the Senate rose and quite angrily objectedto taking up the matter for consideration. He declared thathe would not consent to have the subject introduced in aRepublican caucus. The proceedings of such caucuses aresupposed to be kept from the public. But they are prettysure to leak out. I could not very well get up and say thatmy reason for asking for a committee was to see whether thelaw should be suppressed or not. So I did not urge my motion. But I did the best I could. 

Before reporting the Bill I saw every Republican Senatorand obtained his opinion upon it. I have in my possessionthe original memoranda of the various answers. Not only amajority of the Republican Senators, but a majority of thewhole Senate declared emphatically for an Election Bill. Ifurther consulted them whether the authority, in case of adisputed election, to order, upon hearing, the name of theperson found to be elected to be placed on the roll shouldbe lodged in the United States Courts, or in some specialtribunal. Two or three preferred that the court should notbe invoked. But a majority of the whole Senate favored vestingthe power in the courts, and those who preferred another waystated that they were willing to abide by the judgment ofthe Committee. 

When the House Bill came up, it was, on the 7th of August, 1890, reported favorably with my Bill as a substitute. Meantimethe McKinley Tariff Bill, which Mr. Cleveland had made, sofar as he could, the sole issue in the late election, hadbeen matured and reported. It affected all the business interestsof the country. They were in a state of uncertainty and alarm. Mr. Quay of Pennsylvania proposed a resolution to the effectthat certain enumerated measures, not including the ElectionBill, should be considered at that session, and that all othersshould be postponed. That, I suppose, would have had theentire Democratic support and Republicans enough to give ita majority. It would have postponed the Election Bill withoutgiving any assurance of its consideration at the short session. So a conference of Republicans was held at which an agreementwas made, which I drew up, and signed by a majority of theentire Senate. It entitled the friends of the Election Bill tobe assured that it would be brought to a vote and passed atthe short session, if there were then a majority in its favor. This is the agreement, of which I have the original, withthe original signatures annexed, in my possession. 

"We will vote: 1. To take up for consideration on the firstday of the next session the Federal Election Bill, and tokeep it before the Senate to the exclusion of other legislativebusiness, until it shall be disposed of by a vote. 2. Tomake such provision as to the time and manner of taking thevote as shall be decided, by a majority of the RepublicanSenators, to be necessary in order to secure such vote, eitherby a general rule like that proposed by Mr. Hoar, and nowpending before the committee on rules, or by special rule ofthe same purport, applicable only to the Election Bill. "

At the next December session the Bill was taken up for considerationand, after a few days' debate, there was a motion to lay itaside. Since the measure had been first introduced, the sentimentin certain parts of the country in favor of the free coinageof silver had been strengthened. Several of the RepublicanSenators were among its most zealous advocates. There wasa motion to lay aside the Election Bill which was adoptedby a bare majority--the Democrats voting for it and severalof the Silver Republican Senators, so-called. All but oneof these had signed their names to the promise I have printed. I never have known by what process of reasoning they reconciledtheir action with their word. But I know that in heated politicalstrife men of honor, even men of ability, sometimes deceivethemselves by a casuistic reasoning which would not convincethem at other times. 

The Election Bill deeply excited the whole country. Itssupporters were denounced by the Democratic papers everywhere, North and South, with a bitterness which I hardly knew beforethat the English language was capable of expressing. My mailwas crowded with letters, many of them anonymous, the restgenerally quite as anonymous, even if the writer's name weresigned, denouncing me with all the vigor and all the scurrilityof which the writers were capable. I think this is the lastgreat outbreak of anger which has spread through the Americanpeople. 

I got, however, a good deal of consolation from the stanchfriendship and support of the Republicans of Massachusetts, which never failed me during the very height of this storm. Whittier sent me a volume of poetry which he had just published, with the inscription written on the blank leaf in his ownhand, "To George F. Hoar, with the love of his old friend, John G. Whittier. " I think I would have gone through tentimes as much objurgation as I had to encounter for thosefew words. 

There has never since been an attempt to protect Nationalelections by National authority. The last vestige of theNational statute for securing purity of elections was repealedin President Cleveland's second Administration, under thelead of Senator Hill of New York. I have reflected very carefullyas to my duty in that matter. I am clearly of the opinionthat Congress has the power to regulate the matter of electionsof Members of the House of Representatives and to make suitableprovisions for honest elections and an honest ascertainmentof the result, and that such legislation ought to be enactedand kept on the statute book and enforced. But such legislation, to be of any value whatever, must be permanent. If it onlybe maintained in force while one political party is in power, and repealed when its antagonist comes in, and is to be constantmatter of political strife and sectional discussion, it isbetter, in my judgment, to abandon it than to keep up an incessant, fruitless struggle. It is like legislation to prohibit by lawthe selling of liquor. I believe that it would be wise toprohibit the sale of liquor, with the exceptions usually madein prohibitory laws. But if we are to have in any State, as we have had in so many States, a prohibitory law one year, another with different provisions the next, a license lawthe next, and the difficulty all the time in enforcing anyof them, it is better to give the attempt at prohibitionup and to adopt a local option, or high license, or someother policy. In other words, it is better to have the secondbest law kept permanently on the statute book than to havethe best law there half the time. 

So, after Senator Hill's repealing act got through the Senate, I announced that, so far as I was concerned, and so far asI had the right to express the opinion of Northern Republicans, I thought the attempt to secure the rights of the coloredpeople by National legislation would be abandoned until therewere a considerable change of opinion in the country, andespecially in the South, and until it had ceased to be a matterof party strife. To that announcement, Senator Chandler ofNew Hampshire, who had been one of the most zealous advocatesof the National laws, expressed his assent. That statementhas been repeated once or twice on the floor of the Senate. So far as I know, no Republican has dissented from it. Certainlythere has been no Bill for that purpose introduced in eitherHouse of Congress, or proposed, so far as I know, in the Republicanpress, or in any Republican platform since. 

The question upon which the policy of all National electionlaws depends is, At whose will do you hold your right to bean American citizen? What power can you invoke if that rightbe withheld from you? If you hold the right at will of yourState, then you can invoke no power but the State for itsvindication. If you hold it at the will of the Nation, asexpressed by the people of the whole Nation under the Constitutionof the United States, then you are entitled to invoke thepower of the United States for its enforcement whenever necessary. If you hold it at the will of the white Democracy of any Stateor neighborhood then, as unfortunately seems to be the casein a good many States, you will be permitted to exercise itonly if you are a white man, and then only so long as youare a Democrat. 

I have had during my whole life to deal with that most difficultof all political problems, the relation to each other, ina Republic, of men of different races. It is a questionwhich has vexed the American people from the beginning oftheir history. It is, if I am not much mistaken, to vexthem still more hereafter. First the Indian, then the Negro, then the Chinese, now the Filipino, disturb our peace. Inthe near future will come the Italian and the Pole and thegreat population of Asia, with whom we are soon to be broughtinto most intimate and close relation. 

In my opinion, in all these race difficulties and troubles, the fault has been with the Anglo-Saxons. Undoubtedly theIndian has been a savage; the Negro has been a savage; thelower order of Chinamen have been gross and sometimes bestial. The inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, in their naturalrights, which, as we had solemnly declared to be a self-evidenttruth, were theirs beyond question, have committed acts ofbarbarism. But in every case, these inferior and alien races, if they had been dealt with justly, in my opinion, would havebeen elevated by quiet, peaceful and Christian conduct onour part to a higher plane, and brought out of their barbarism. The white man has been the offender. 

I have no desire to recall the story of the methods by whichthe political majorities, consisting in many communitieslargely of negroes and led by immigrants from the North, weresubdued. 

This is not a sectional question. 

It is not a race question. The suffrage was conferred onthe negro by the Southern States themselves. They can alwaysmake their own rules. If the negro be ignorant, you may defineignorance and disfranchise that. If the negro be vicious, you may define vice and disfranchise that. If the negro bepoor, you may define poverty and disfranchise that. If thenegro be idle, you may define idleness and disfranchise that. If the negro be lazy, you may define laziness and disfranchisethat. If you will only disfranchise him for the qualitieswhich you say unfit him to vote and not for his race or thecolor of his skin there is no Constitutional obstacle in yourway. 

So it was not wholly a race or color problem. It was largelya question of party supremacy. In three states, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida, white Democrats charged each otherwith stifling the voice of the majority by fraudulent electionprocesses, and in Alabama they claimed that a majority ofwhite men were disfranchised by a false count of negro votesin the black belt. 

It was not wholly unnatural that the men who, in dealingwith each other, were men of scrupulous honor and of undoubtedcourage should have brought themselves to do such things, or at any rate to screen and sympathize with the more hot-headed men who did them. The proof in the public recordsof those public crimes is abundant. With the exception ofReverdy Johnson of Maryland there is no record of a singlemanly remonstrance, or expression of disapproval from thelips of any prominent Southern man. But they had persuadedthemselves to believe that a contest for political power witha party largely composed of negroes was a contest for theircivilization itself. They thought it like a fight for lifewith a pack of wolves. In some parts of the South there weremen as ready to murder a negro who tried to get an officeas to kill a fox they found prowling about a hen roost. Thesebrave and haughty men who had governed the country for halfa century, who had held the power of the United States atbay for four years, who had never doffed their hats to anyprince or noble on earth, even in whose faults or vices therewas nothing mean or petty, never having been suspected ofcorruption, who as Macaulay said of the younger Pitt, "Ifin an hour of ambition they might have been tempted to ruintheir country, never would have stooped to pilfer from her, "could not brook the sight of a Legislature made up of ignorantnegroes who had been their own slaves, and of venal carpet-baggers. They could not endure that men, some of whom hadbeen bought and sold like chattels in the time of slavery, and others ready to sell themselves, although they were freemen, should sit to legislate for their States with their nobleand brave history. I myself, although I have always maintained, and do now, the equal right of all men of whatever color orrace to a share in the government of the country, felt a thrillof sadness when I saw the Legislature of Louisiana in sessionin the winter of 1873. 

There was a good deal to provoke them also in the characterof some of the Northern men who had gone to the South to takean active part in political affairs. Some of them were menof the highest character and honor, actuated by pure and unselfishmotives. If they had been met cordially by the communitieswhere they took up their abode they would have brought tothem a most valuable quality of citizenship. If Northernimmigration and Northern capital had been welcomed at theSouth it would have had as helpful and influence as it hadin California and Oregon. But the Southern men treated themall alike. I incline to think that a large number of themen who got political office in the South, when the men whohad taken part in the Rebellion were still disfranchised, and the Republicans were still in power, were of a characterthat would not have been tolerated in public office in theNorth. General Willard Warner of Alabama, a brave Union soldier, a Republican Senator from that State, was one of the bestand bravest men who ever sat in that body. Governor Packardof Louisiana was I believe a wise and honest man. But ingeneral it was impossible not to feel a certain sympathy witha people, who whatever else had been their faults never wereguilty of corruption or meanness, or the desire to make moneyout of public office, in the intolerable loathing which theyfelt for these strangers who had taken possession of the highplaces in their States. 

President Grant gave the influence and authority of his Administrationtoward maintaining in power the lawfully chosen RepublicanState Governments. But in spite of all he could do they hadall been overthrown but two when the Presidential electionwas held in 1876. Those two were South Carolina and Louisiana. The people of those two States had chosen Republican Governorsat the State election held on the same day with the electionof the President. But these Governors could not hold theirpower twenty-four hours without the support of the Nationaladministration. When that was withdrawn the negro and carpet-bag majority was powerless as a flock of sheep before a packof wolves to resist their brave and unscrupulous Democraticenemy, however inferior the latter in numbers. 

In attempting to give a dispassionate account of the historyof this great question which has entered so deeply into thepolitical and social life of the American people almost fromthe beginning, it is hard to measure the influence of raceprejudice, of sectional feeling, and of that other powerfulmotive, eagerness for party supremacy. 

Suffrage was conferred upon the negro by the Southern Statesthemselves. Under the Constitution every State can prescribeits own qualifications for suffrage, with the single exceptionthat no State can deny or abridge the right of a citizen ofthe United States to vote on account of race, color or previouscondition of servitude. 

But I am bound to say, indeed it is but to repeat what I havesaid many times, that my long conflict with their leadershas impressed me with an ever-increasing admiration of thegreat and high qualities of our Southern people. I said atChicago in February, 1903, what I said, in substance, twentyyears before in Faneuil Hall, and at about the same time inthe Senate:

"Having said what I thought to say on this question, perhapsI may be indulged in adding that although my life, politicallyand personally, has been a life of almost constant strifewith the leaders of the Southern people, yet as I grow olderI have learned, not only to respect and esteem, but to lovethe great qualities which belong to my fellow citizens ofthe Southern States. They are a noble race. We may welltake pattern from them in some of the great virtues whichmake up the strength, as they make the glory, of Free States. Their love of home; their chivalrous respect for women; theircourage; their delicate sense of honor; their constancy, whichcan abide by an opinion or a purpose or an interest of theirStates through adversity and through prosperity, through theyears and through the generations, are things by which thepeople of the more mercurial North may take a lesson. Andthere is another thing--covetousness, corruption, the lowtemptation of money has not yet found any place in our Southernpolitics. 

"Now, my friends, we cannot afford to live, we don't wishto live, and we will not live, in a state of estrangement froma people who possess these qualities. They are our kindred;bone of our bone; flesh of our flesh; blood of our blood, and whatever may be the temporary error of any Southern StateI, for one, if I have a right to speak for Massachusetts, say to her, 'Entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return fromfollowing after thee. For where thou goest I will go, andwhere thou stayest, I will stay also. And they people shallbe my people, and thy God my God. '"

In July, 1898, I was invited to deliver an address beforethe Virginia Bar Association. I was received by that companyof distinguished gentlemen with a hospitality like that Ihad found in Charleston the year before. Certainly the oldestrangements are gone. I took occasion in my address toappeal to the Virginia bar to give the weight of their greatinfluence in sustaining the dignity and authority of the SupremeCourt, in spite of their disappointment at some of its decisionsof Constitutional questions. They received what I had tosay, although they knew I differed from them on some of thegravest matters which concerned the State, and had been ananti-slavery man from my youth, with a respect and courtesywhich left nothing to be desired. At the banquet which followedthe address, this toast was given by William Wirt Henry, agrandson of Patrick Henry, himself one of the foremost lawyersand historians of the South. I prize very highly the originalwhich I have in his handwriting. 

 "Massachusetts and Virginia. "Foremost in planting the English Colonies in America; "Foremost in resisting British tyranny; "Foremost in the Revolution which won our Independence and established our free institutions; "May the memories of the past be the bond of the future. "

My own endeavor, during my long public life, has been tomaintain the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, which declares the right of every man to political equalityby virtue of his manhood, and of every people to self-governmentby virtue of its character as a people. This our fathersmeant to lay down as the fundamental law of States and ofthe United States, having its steadfast and immovable foundationin the law of God. It was never their purpose to declarethat ignorance or vice or want of experience of the institutionsof a country should not disqualify men from a share in theGovernment. Those things they meant to leave to the discretionof the power, whether State or National, which was to prescribethe qualifications of suffrage. But they did not mean thatthe accident of birthplace, or the accident of race, or theaccident of color, should enter into the question at all. To this doctrine I have, in my humble way, endeavored to adhere. In dealing with the Chinese, or any class of immigrants, Iwould prescribe as strict a rule as the strictest for ascertainingwhether the immigrant meant in good faith to be an Americancitizen, whether he meant to end his life here, to bring hiswife and children with him, whether he loved American institutions, whether he was fit to understand the political problems withwhich the people had to deal, whether he had individual worth, or health of body or mind. I would make, if need be, tenyears or twenty years, as the necessary period of residencefor naturalization. 

I would deal with the Negro or the German or the Frenchmanor the Italian on the same principle. But the one thingI have never consented to is that a man shall be kept out ofthis country, or kept in a position of inferiority, while he isin it, because of his color, because of his birthplace, orbecause of his race. 

One matter in connection with the management of the ElectionsBill I have never been able to think of since without a shudder. The Democrats in the Senate, led by Mr. Gorman, the mostskilful of their leaders, endeavored to defeat the bill bythe tactics of delay. If the debate could be prolonged sothat it was impossible to get a vote without the loss of thegreat Appropriations Bills, or some of them, the bill, ofcourse, must be laid aside. So the Republicans, on the otherhand, as is usual in such cases, refrained from debate, leavingtheir antagonists to take up the time. Every afternoon atabout five o'clock some Democrat would come to me saying thathe was to take the floor, but that he did not feel well, orwas not quite ready with some material, and ask me as a personalfavor to let the matter go over until the next morning. Thishappened so often that I became satisfied it was a concertedscheme, and made up my mind that I would not yield to sucha request again. 

But one afternoon Senator Wilson of Maryland, a quiet andmost estimable gentleman, whom I had known very well, andfor whom I had a high regard, came to me and said he feltquite unwell; he could go on that afternoon, if I insistedupon it; but he would like much better to put off speakingtill the next day. I was just beginning my answer to theeffect that I had heard that so often that I had determined Iwould not yield again to the request. But I said to myself, It cannot be possible that this man would undertake to deceiveme. He is a gentleman of high character, absolutely honorableand incapable of falsehood. So I answered, Of course, Mr. Wilson, if you are ill, I will consent to your desire. Mr. Wilson made his speech the next day. This was December 15. A few weeks after, on the 24th of February, Mr. Wilson diedsuddenly of heart disease. It was an affection of which hehad been conscious for some years, and which he had for sometime expected would cause sudden death. I dare say if hehad been compelled to proceed with his speech that day itwould have been fatal. In that case my life would have beenembittered by the memory. 

We had a meeting of the Republican members of the Committee, for consultation, before we reported the Bill. Mr. Evarts, while he approved the principle of the measure, shared verystrongly my own hesitation, caused by the fear of the politicaleffect of the defeat of a measure likely to excite so muchangry strife throughout the country. After hearing the opinionof those who favored going on with the Bill, Mr. Evarts said:"I spent a Sunday with Judge Kent on the Hudson a good manyyears ago, with several New York lawyers. We all went tothe Episcopal church in the forenoon, and dined with the Judgeafter church. During the service one of the company keptfar behind in the responses, which annoyed the Judge a gooddeal. At dinner he broke out, 'Davis, why can't you descendinto hell with the rest of the congregation?' I will descendinto hell with the rest of the congregation. "

Mr. Evarts made the descent and stood loyally by the measurein the debate to the best of his great ability. 

CHAPTER XIVCONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS AND THE PRESIDENTIALSUCCESSION BILL

When I entered the Senate, I found one very serious inconvenienceand one very great public danger in existing conditions. 

The great inconvenience grew out of the fact that by the Constitutionthe session of Congress must end on the fourth of March everyother year. A third of the Senate goes out at the same time, and every fourth year the Presidential term ends. That sessionof Congress meets, according to our usage, on the first Mondayof December. The meeting cannot well come much earlier withoutpreventing the members of the two Houses of Congress fromtaking part in the political campaign, where they are justlyexpected by the people to give an account of their stewardship, and to discuss the questions to be considered by the peoplein the election. So there are but thirteen weeks in whichto pass fourteen or fifteen great Appropriation Bills, makingit impossible to deal with any other great subject except byunanimous consent. The result is also that the AppropriationBills are put in the power of a very few men indeed. TheHouse has to submit to the dictation of the AppropriationCommittee, and cannot be allowed to debate, or even to havea separate vote on matters which nearly the whole House wouldlike to accomplish, if there were time, but which the Chairmanof the Appropriation Committee, who is usually omnipotentwith his associates, may happen to dislike. On the otherhand, in the Senate, where there is no cloture rule, any singlemember, or at best, a very few members, can defeat an AppropriationBill and compel an extra session by exercising their rightof uncontrolled debate. 

Besides; people from all parts of the country like to attendthe inauguration of a new President. The fourth of Marchis at an inclement season, and is apt to be an inclement day, and it may come on Saturday or Sunday or Monday. So personswho attend may be obliged to be away from home over Sunday, and a great many persons have lost their health or life fromexposure in witnessing the inauguration. 

I prepared a Constitutional amendment providing that the inaugurationshould take place on the last Thursday in April. I have reportedthis to the Senate several times. It has always passed thatbody with scarcely a dissenting vote, on debate and explanation. If that had been adopted, if the session were to begin inthe middle of November, a week after the November elections--which could be accomplished by an act of Congress--insteadof thirteen weeks, to which the session is now limited, therewould be a session of twenty-three or twenty-four weeks. Thiswould give time for the consideration of such legislationas might be needful. It would probably, also, permit theshortening somewhat of the long session, which not infrequentlyextends to July or August. But the plan has never foundmuch favor in the House. Speaker Reed, when he was in power, said rather contemptuously, that "Congress sits altogethertoo long as it is. The less we have of Congress, the better. "

The public danger is found in the fact that there is no provisionin the Constitution for the case where the President-electdies before inauguration. The provision is:

"In case of the Removal of the President from Office, orof his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge thePowers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolveon the Vice-President, and the Congress may by Law providefor the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice-President, declaring what Officershall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability shall be removed, or a President shallbe elected. "

Strictly construed, it is only in the case of the death, inability, etc. , of a President, that a Vice-President cansucceed, or in the case of the death, inability, etc. , of the Presidentand Vice-President both, that Congress has power to declareon whom the office shall devolve. It must be a Presidentand Vice-President that die; not merely a President and Vice-President-elect. That his is not an imaginary danger is shownby the fact of the well-known scheme to assassinate Lincolnon his way to the seat of the Government, and also by thefact that either the President or the Vice-President has diedin office so many times in the recollection of men now living. President Harrison died during his term; President Taylordied during his term; Vice-President King died during Pierce'sterm; Vice-President Wilson died during Grant's term; PresidentGarfield died during his term; Vice-President Hendricks diedduring Cleveland's term; Vice-President Hobart died duringMcKinley's term, and President McKinley during his own secondterm. So within sixty years eight of these high officialshave died in office; five of them within thirty years; fourof them within twenty years. 

I have also drawn and repeatedly procured the passage throughthe Senate of an amendment to the Constitution to protectthe country against this danger. That also has failed ofattention in the House. I suppose it is likely that nothingwill be done about the matter until the event shall happen, as is not unlikely, that both President and Vice-President-elect shall become incapacitated between the election andthe time for entering upon office. 

I was more successful in providing against another situationthat might prove quite awkward. In Washington's AdministrationCongress exercised, as far as it could, the power given bythe Constitution to provide against the death or disabilityof both the President and Vice-President, if it should happenafter they had entered upon office, as follows:

"In case of removal, death, resignation or inability of boththe President and the Vice-President of the United States, the President of the Senate, or, if there is none, then theSpeaker of the House, for the time being, shall act as President, until the disability is removed or a President elected. "

There is a tradition that when this awkward arrangement wasmade, the proposition that the Secretary of State should succeedin the case of such vacancy was defeated by the suggestionthat Mr. Jefferson had too much power and consequence already. The arrangement seemed to me clearly objectionable. In thefirst place the Vice-President, who, it is supposed, has diedor become incapable, is the Constitutional President of theSenate. The Senate, under the practice and construction ofits power which prevailed down to a very recent period, onlyelected a President pro tempore when the Vice-President vacatedthe chair. His office terminated when the Vice-Presidentresumed it, and there was no Constitutional obligation onthe Senate to elect a President pro tempore at all. So itwas quite uncertain whether there would be a President protempore of the Senate at any particular time, especially whenthe Senate was not in session. There have been two instanceswhere the President of the Senate has refused to vacate thechair, for the reason that he did not desire to have a Presidentpro tempore elected, and thereby have an honor conferred ona member of another party than his own. That happened oncein the case of Vice-President Gerry, and again, within mypersonal knowledge, in the case of Vice-President Arthur. When he succeeded to the Presidency there was no Presidentof the Senate who would have taken his place if he too hadhappened to be assassinated. So of the Speaker of the House. For a great many years the first session of a newly-electedHouse of Representatives has begun in December. There isno Speaker from the previous fourth of March until that time. Beside, the Senate, whose members hold office for six yearsand of whom only one-third goes out every two years, is veryapt to have a majority whose political opinions are opposedto those which have prevailed in the last Presidential election. So, if the President and Vice-President both die before takingtheir seats, the President of the Senate is quite likely tobring into the Executive Office opinions which the peoplehave just rejected in the election. 

On the other hand, the Secretary of State is always a memberof the party that has prevailed in the last election, andis usually the member of the party, next to the Presidenthimself, highest in its confidence. Our Secretaries of State, with rare exceptions, have been among the very ablest publicmen of the country. Among them have been Timothy Pickering, John Marshall, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, Edward Livingston, Louis McLane, John Forsyth, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, John M. Clayton, Edward Everett, Elihu B. Washburne, HamiltonFish, William M. Evarts, James G. Blaine, Thomas F. Bayard, John Sherman, and John Hay. These men, with scarcely an exception, have been among the very foremost statesmen of their time. Several of them have been Presidents of the United States, and a good many more of them have been prominent candidatesfor the Presidency. On the other hand, the list of Presidentsof the Senate contains few names of any considerable distinction. Another objection to the arrangement was the fact that thePresident of the Senate and the Speaker of the House mightbe changed at the will of the body that elected them. Sothe acting President might be displaced at the will of a politicalbody. There is a good deal of reason, also, for claimingthat if Congress declare that the officer shall act as President, he must discharge the duties of his office and the dutiesof the President at the same time, a burden which would bevery hard for one man to support. Accordingly I drew andintroduced the existing law, which reads as follows:

_"Be it enacted, etc. , _ That in case of removal, death, resignationor inability of both the President and Vice-President of theUnited States, the Secretary of State, or if there be none, or in case of his removal, death, resignation or inability, then the Secretary of the Treasury, or if there be none, orin the case of his removal, death, resignation or inability, then the Secretary of War, or if there be none, or in caseof his removal, death, resignation or inability, then theAttorney-General, or if there be none, or in case of hisremoval, death, resignation or inability, then the Secretary ofthe Interior, shall act as President until the disability of thePresident or Vice-President is removed or a President shallbe elected:

"_Provided, _ That whenever the powers and duties of the officeof President of the United States shall devolve upon any ofthe person named herein, if Congress be not then in session, or if it would not meet in accordance with law within twentydays thereafter, it shall be the duty of the person upon whomsaid powers and duties shall devolve to issue a proclamationconvening Congress in extraordinary session, giving twentydays' notice of time of meeting. 

"Sec. 2. That the preceding section shall only be held todescribe and apply to such officers as shall have been appointedby the advice and consent of the Senate to the offices thereinnamed, and such as are eligible to the office of Presidentunder the Constitution, and not under impeachment by the Houseof Representatives of the United States at the time the powersand duties of the office shall devolve upon them respectively. 

"Sec. 3. That sections one hundred and forty-six, one hundredand forty-seven, one hundred and forty-eight, one hundredand forty-nine and one hundred and fifty of the Revised Statutesare hereby repealed. (_January_ 19, 1886). "

There was some objection to it at first. It was resisted verystrenuously to the end by Senator Edmunds. But after fulldiscussion it passed the Senate with few dissenting votes. 

In the House Mr. Reed, afterward Speaker, appealed withoutsuccess to the political feeling of his associates, demandingto know if they would rather have Mr. Bayard, who was thenSecretary of State, than John Sherman, who then happened tobe President of the Senate, for President of the United States. But the House, also, by a large majority, passed the measure. 

CHAPTER XVPRESIDENT CLEVELAND'S JUDGES

I earnestly supported William B. Hornblower against the oppositionof Senator Hill, when he was nominated by Mr. Cleveland forJudge of the Supreme Court of the United States. I was thenon the Judiciary Committee. I made very careful inquiry, and had reason to believe that the best lawyers in New Yorkthought highly of him. Judge Gray told me that Mr. Hornblowerhad argued a case in the Court not long before, and that asthe Judges walked out Judge Blatchford said to him: "I hopeyou have as good a man in your Circuit to succeed you, whenthe time comes, as we have in ours in Mr. Hornblower to succeedme. "

I did not, however, support Mr. Wheeler H. Peckham. The newspaperscirculated the story extensively that--to use the phrase ofone of them--I "led the opposition. " That was not true. Iexpected to vote for Mr. Peckham until just before the votewas taken. I had communicated my expectation to support himto Senator Vilas, who had charge of the case. I thought beforethe vote was taken it was my duty to tell him I had changedmy mind. So I went round to his seat and told him. Nobodyelse knew my purpose till I voted. 

I had no political sympathy with Senator Hill, still lesswith the claim often imputed to the Senate by writers ofnewspapers, but of which I have never seen the slightestevidence, that Senators have the right to dictate such appointments. But I thought Mr. Cleveland ought not to have made such anappointment without consulting Mr. Hill, who was a lawyerof eminence and knew the sentiment of the majority of theDemocratic Party. Mr. Cleveland had nominated in successiontwo persons to an office which ought to be absolutely non-partisan, who belonged to a very small company of men devotedto his personal fortunes, who had bitterly attacked Mr. Hill. I should not, however, have deemed this objection sufficientto justify a vote against Mr. Peckham, but for the fact thatI became satisfied he was a man of strong prejudices, withlittle of the judicial temper or quality about him, and quitelikely to break down under the strain of heavy responsibility. 

I urged Mr. Vilas to ask President Cleveland to send in thename of Mr. Hornblower again, having some hope that the Senatewould reconsider its action in his case. But President Clevelandsolved the difficulty quite skilfully by sending in the nameof Senator White of Louisiana, a most admirable gentlemanand Judge, and afterward, when there came another vacancy, that of Rufus W. Peckham of New York, both of whom were confirmed, I believe, without an objection. 

I just referred to Senator William F. Vilas, of Wisconsin. I should like to put on record my great esteem for his characteras a man, and the excellence of his service as a Senator. He was on the Judiciary Committee while I was Chairman, andalso for a time when his party had the majority. He was industrious, wise, conservative, courteous, and fair, a most admirablelawyer, full of public spirit, well acquainted with the mechanismof the Government, and doing always much more than his fullshare of the work of the Committee and of the Senate. I hopethe country may have again the benefit of his great abilityin some department of the public service. 

Chief Justice Fuller said with singular felicity:

"Mr. Justice Lamar always underrated himself. This tendencyplainly sprung from a vivid imagination. With him the splendidpassions attendant upon youth never faded into the light ofcommon day, but they kept before him as an ideal, the impossibilityof whose realization, as borne in upon him from time to time, opposed him with a sense of failure. Yet the conscientiousnessof his work was not lessened, nor was the acuteness of hisintellect obscured by these natural causes of his discontent;nor did a certain Oriental dreaminess of the temperament everallure him to abandon the effort to accomplish something thatwould last after his lips were dumb. "

Matthew Arnold says in one of his essays that Americans lackdistinction. I have a huge liking for Matthew Arnold. Hehad a wonderful intellectual vision. I do not mean to saythat his three lectures on translating Homer are the greatestliterary work of our time. But I think, on the whole, thatI should rather have the pair of intellectual eyes which cansee Homer as he saw him, than any other mental quality I canthink of. But Mr. Arnold has never seemed to me to be fortunatein his judgment about Americans. He allows this quality ofdistinction to Grant, but denies it, for all the world, toAbraham Lincoln. The trouble with Mr. Arnold is that henever travelled in the United States, when on this side theAtlantic. He spent his time with a few friends who had littlelove for things American. He visited a great city or two, but never made himself acquainted with the American people. He never knew the sources of our power, or the spirit of ourpeople. 

Yet there is a good deal of truth in what he says of theAmericans of our time. It is still more true of the Englishmenof our time. The newspaper, and the telegraph, and the telephone, and the constant dissemination of news, the public libraryand the common school and college mix up all together andtend to make us, with some rare and delightful exceptions, eminently commonplace. Certainly the men who are sent toCongress do not escape this wearying quality. I know menwho have been in public office for more than a generation, who have had enormous power and responsibility, to whom thecountry is indebted for safety and happiness, who never saida foolish thing, and rarely ever when they had the chancefailed to do a wise one, who are utterly commonplace. Youcould not read the story of their public career without goingto sleep. They never said anything worth quoting, and neverdid anything that any other equally good and sensible manwould not have done in their place. I have a huge respectfor them. I can never myself attain to their excellence. Yet I would as lief spend my life as an omnibus horse as livetheirs. 

But we have occasionally some delightful exceptions. Itso happens that some of the best, most attractive men I haveknown, were from the South. They are men who stood by theSouthern people through thick and thin during the Rebellion, and in resisting every attempt on the part of the victoriousNorthern majority to raise the colored people to a politicalequality. They have all of them, I believe, been Free Traders. In general they have opposed the construction of the Constitutionwhich has prevailed in New England and throughout the North, and in which I have myself always believed. 

I have never had much personal intimacy with any of them. I have had some vigorous conflicts with one or two of them. Yet I have had from each before our association ended, assurancesof their warm personal regard. One of them, perhaps, on thewhole, the most conspicuous, is Lucius Q. C. Lamar. Hisvery name, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, indicates that hisfather must have looked for his example for his son to followfar away from the American life about him. 

Lamar was one of the most delightful of men. His Englishstyle, both in conversation and in public speaking, was freshand original, well adapted to keep his hearers expectant andalert, and to express the delicate and subtle shades of meaningthat were required for the service of his delicate and subtlethought. 

He had taken the part of the South with great zeal. He toldme shortly before he left the Senate that he thought it wasa great misfortune for the world that the Southern cause hadbeen lost. He stood by his people, as he liked to call them, in their defeat and in their calamity without flinching orreservation. While he would, I am sure, have done nothinghimself not scrupulously honorable, and while there was nothingin his nature of cruelty, still less of brutality, yet hedid not stop to inquire into matters of right and wrong whena Southerner had got into trouble, by reason of anything awhite Democrat had done in conflict with the National authority. Yet Mr. Lamar desired most sincerely the reconciliation ofthe sections, that the age-long strife should come to an endand be forgotten, and that the whole South should share theprosperity and wealth and refinement and contentment, whichsubmission to the new order of things would bring. 

He was a far-sighted man. He was not misled by temporaryexcitement or by deference to the majority of his politicalfriends who were less far-sighted than he, into any mistakes. When there was an attempt to break faith in regard to whatwas called the Wheeler compromise in the Democratic House, Mr. Lamar interposed and prevented it. Just after the countunder the Electoral Commission had been completed, there wasa very dangerous movement to delay action on the returns fromVermont, which would have prevented the completion of thework before the 4th of March. Mr. Lamar put forth all hispowerful influence among his Democratic associates on thefloor of the House, and saved the peace of the country. Heknew very well that the cause of the South, as he would havecalled it, and the cause of the Democratic Party itself, wouldnot be promoted by a new civil convulsion, still less by anybreach of faith. 

He voted against the free coinage of silver in spite of thefact that the people of his State earnestly favored it, andagainst the express instructions of its Legislature. In 1874, at a time when the passions of the Civil War seemed to blazehigher, and the angry conflict between the sections seemedto blaze higher even than during the war itself, he astonishedand shocked the people of the South by pronouncing a tenderand affectionate eulogy on Charles Sumner. He testified toSumner's high moral qualities, to his intense love of liberty, to his magnanimity, and to his incapacity for a personalanimosity, and regretted that he had restrained the impulsewhich had been strong on him to go to Mr. Sumner and offerhim his hand and his heart with it. It would have been almostimpossible for any other man who had done either of thesethings to go back to Mississippi and live. But it never shookfor a moment the love for Lamar of a people who knew so wellhis love for them. 

Afterward Mr. Lamar was made an Associate Justice of the SupremeCourt of the United States. I voted against him--in whichI made a mistake--not because I doubted his eminent integrityand ability, but because I thought that he had little professionalexperience and no judicial experience, and that his health--he was then beginning to show signs of the disease whichended his life shortly after--was not sufficient for undertakingthe great study and the labor which the new office would require. He was not long on the Bench, and was not greatly distinguishedas a Judge. But he wrote a few opinions which showed hisgreat intellectual capacity for dealing with the most complicatedlegal questions, especially such are apt to arise in patentcases. 

He was a delightful man in ordinary conversation. He hadan infinite wit and great sense of humor. He used to telldelightful stories of queer characters and events that hadcome within his own observation. My relations to him for agood while were entirely antagonistic. We had some verysharp controversies. He would never tolerate any expression, in his presence, of disrespect to Jefferson Davis. He wouldalways meet the statement that Mr. Davis was a traitor witha vigorous denial. When I made a motion excepting JeffersonDavis from the benefit of the bill to pension the soldiersof the Mexican War, Mr. Lamar compared him to Prometheus, and me to the vulture preying upon his liver. He was thelast person from whom I should have expected an expressionof compliment, or even of kindness in those days. Yet whenthe question of my reelection was pending in 1883 and thecorrespondent of a newspaper which was among my most unrelentingand unscrupulous opponents thought he might get some materialwhich would help him in his attacks, called upon Mr. Lamarin the Democratic cloak room, and asked him what he thoughtof me, Mr. Lamar replied in language which seems almost ridiculousto quote, and which was inspired only by his indignationat the attempt to use him for such a purpose: "Sir, Massachusettshas never been more powerfully represented in the Senate, not even in the time of Daniel Webster, than by Mr. Hoar. "

It was with feeling of great pleasure that in 1886 I sawHarvard confer her highest honor on this delightful Mississippian. 

He was, in his time, I think, the ablest representative, certainly among the ablest, of the opinions opposed to mine. He had a delightful and original literary quality which, ifthe lines of his life had been cast amid other scenes thanthe tempest of a great Revolution and Civil War, might havemade him a dreamer like Montaigne; and a chivalrous qualitythat might have made him a companion of Athos and D'Artagnan. 

His eulogy on Calhoun, with whom in general he sympathized, was a masterpiece of eloquence, but his eulogy on CharlesSumner, which probably no other man in the South could haveuttered without political death, was greater still. It wasa good omen for the country. At the moment he uttered it, I suppose Charles Sumner was hated throughout the South withan intensity which in this day of reconciliation it is almostimpossible to conceive. Yet Mr. Lamar in his place in theHouse of Representatives dared to utter these sentences:

"Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom, and was educated from his earliest infancy to the belief thatfreedom is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligentbeing having the outward form of man. In him, in fact, thiscreed seems to have been something more than a doctrine imbibedfrom teachers, or a result of education. To him it was agrand intuitive truth, inscribed in blazing letters upon thetablet of his inner consciousness, to deny which would havebeen for him to deny that he himself existed. And along withthe all-controlling love of freedom he possessed a moral sensibilitykeenly intense and vivid, a conscientiousness which wouldnever permit him to swerve by the breadth of a hair from whathe pictured to himself as the path of duty. Thus were combinedin him the characteristics which have in all ages given toreligion her martyrs, and to patriotism her self-sacrificingheroes. "

After speaking of the kindness of Mr. Sumner to the South, and his spirit of magnanimity, he added:

"It was my misfortune, perhaps my fault, personally neverto have known this eminent philanthropist and statesman. The impulse was often strong upon me to go to him and offerhim my hand, and my heart with it, and to express to him mythanks for his kind and considerate course toward the peoplewith whom I am identified. If I did not yield to that impulse, it was because the thought occurred that other days were comingin which such a demonstration might be more opportune and lessliable to misconstruction. Suddenly and without premonition, a day as come at last to which, for such a purpose, thereis no to-morrow. My regret is therefore intensified by thethought that I failed to speak of him out of the fulness ofmy heart while there was yet time. "

That Mr. Lamar well understood what was to be the effectof this wonderful speech upon the whole country is shownby his letter to his wife the next day, in which he says: "Inever in all my life opened my lips with a purpose more singleto the interests of our Southern people than when I made thisspeech. "

I said of this speech in an article in the _North AmericanReview:_

"The eloquent words of Mr. Lamar so touched the hearts ofthe people of the North that they may fairly be said to havebeen of themselves an important influence in mitigating theestrangements of a generation. "

The following letter explains my absence from the Senatewhen Judge Lamar's death was announced:

WASHINGTON, D. C. , January 29, 1893

_My Dear Madam:_

I was kept in bed, under the orders of my physician, theday the death of your husband was announced to the Senate. I regret exceedingly that I could not be in my place to expressmy sense of the great public loss and my warm personal admirationfor his great qualities of intellect and of heart. I servedwith him in the House of Representatives for more than fouryears, and in the Senate for more than eight years. It wasa stormy and exciting time. We differed widely on very gravequestions, and this difference was more than once very sharplymanifested in public; but the more I knew him, the more satisfiedI became of the sincerity of his patriotism, of his profoundand far-sighted wisdom, of the deep fountain of tendernessin his affectionate and simple heart, and of his brave andchivalrous quality of soul. I was more than once indebtedto him for very great kindness indeed, under circumstanceswhen I do not think he supposed it would ever come to my knowledge. 

Some of his judgments on the Supreme Bench are characterizedby marvellous beauty and felicity of style. He maintainedhis place on that great tribunal to the satisfaction of hisfriends and that admiration of his countrymen, in spite offailing health and of the fact that the best years of his lifehad been given to other studies than that of the law. 

It is a good omen for our country that the friends and disciplesof Charles Sumner unite with the people of Mississippi intheir reverence for this noble and manly character. 

 I am faithfully yours, GEORGE F. HOAR Mrs. Lamar. 

CHAPTER XVISOME SOUTHERN SENATORS

Another most delightful Democrat, with whom it was my pleasureto form quite intimate relations, was Senator Howell E. Jacksonof Tennessee. He had been in the Confederate service. Ithink he did not approve Secession, but like most others whodwelt in the South, thought his allegiance primarily due tohis State. He was an admirable lawyer, faithful, industrious, clear-headed and learned in the law. He had been a Whig beforethe war, and, like other Southern Whigs, favored a moderateprotective tariff. He was anxious to have the South takeher place as a great manufacturing community, for which hernatural resources of iron and coal and her great water powergave her such advantages. He was opposed to the Republicanmeasures of Reconstruction and to placing the negro on a politicalequality with the whites. But he also discountenanced andcondemned any lawless violence or fraud. 

Senator Jackson was appointed Judge of the United States CircuitCourt by President Cleveland. He held that office when avacancy on the Bench of the Supreme Court came by the deathof Justice Lamar. The election of 1892 had resulted in thechoice of President Cleveland. The Democrats in the Senatewere determined that no Republican who should be nominatedby President Harrison should be confirmed, and did not mean, if they could help it, that the place should be filled duringthe December session. The only way to get such a confirmationwould be for the Republican majority to put the question aheadof all other subjects, to go into Executive session everyday as soon as the Senate met, and remain there until thejudgeship was disposed of. The Democrats must then choosebetween defeating the Appropriation Bills, and compellingan extra session, which the in-coming Administration wouldnot like. In order to do that, however, the small Republicanmajority must hold together firmly, and be willing to takethe risk of an extra session. 

I called on President Harrison and urged upon him the appointmentof Judge Jackson. I represented that it was desirable thatthere should be some Democrats upon the Bench, and that theyshould be men who had the confidence of their own part ofthe country and of the country at large; that Judge Jacksonwas a man of admirable judicial quality; that he had the publicconfidence in a high degree, and that it would be impossiblefor the Democratic Party to object to his selection, whileit would strengthen the Bench. So I thought that even ifwe could put one of our men there without difficulty, it wouldbe wise to appoint Jackson. 

President Harrison was very unwilling, indeed, to take thisview. He answered me at first in his rough impulsive way, and seemed very unwilling even to take the matter into consideration. But after a considerable discussion he asked me to ascertainwhether the Republicans would be willing, if he sent in aRepublican name, to adopt the course above suggested, andtransact no other business until the result was secured, evenat the risk of defeating the Appropriation Bills and causingan extra session. I went back to the Senate and consulteda good many Senators. Nearly all of them said they wouldnot agree to such a struggle; that they thought it very undesirableindeed; that the effect would be bad. So it was clear thatnothing could be accomplished in that way. I went back tothe White House and reported. I got the authority of thegentlemen I had consulted to tell the President what theysaid. The result was the appointment of Judge Jackson, tothe great satisfaction of the country. He was a very industriousand faithful Judge. But his useful life came to an end soonafterward, I suppose largely as the result of overwork in hisimportant and laborious office. 

The Attorney-General said of Mr. Justice Jackson: "He wasnot so much a Senator who had been appointed Judge, as a Judgewho had served for a time as a Senator. "

I served with Senator Jackson on the Committee on Claims, and on the Committee on the Judiciary. We did not meet oftenin social life. He rarely came to my room. I do not rememberthat I ever visited him in his home. But we formed a verycordial and intimate friendship. I have hardly known a naturebetter fitted, morally or intellectually, for great publictrusts, either judicial or political, than his. In the beginning, I think the framers of the Constitution intended the Senateto be a sort of political Supreme Court, in which, as a courtof final resort, the great conflicts which had stirred thepeople, and stirred the Representatives of the people in thelower House, should be decided without heat and without partyfeeling. It was, I have been told, considered a breach ofpropriety to allude to party divisions in early debates inthe Senate, as it would be now deemed a breach of proprietyto allude to such divisions in the Supreme Court of the UnitedStates. 

Howell E. Jackson had this ancient Senatorial temperament. He never seemed to me to be thinking of either party or sectionor popular opinion, or of the opinion of other men; but onlyof public duty. 

He never flinched from uttering and maintaining his opinions. He never caressed or cajoled his political antagonists. Itis a great tribute to his personal quality that he owed hiselection as Senator to his political opponents who, when hisown party was divided, joined a majority of his party to electhim. He also, as has been said, owed his appointment as AssociateJustice of the Supreme Court to the impression which his probityand ability had made on his political opponents. When sickwith a fatal illness he left a sick bed to take his placeupon the Bench at the call of duty when the Income Tax casewas to be decided. There is no doubt that the effort hastenedhis death. I do not agree with the conclusion to which hecame on that great occasion. But the fact that he came tothat conclusion is enough to make me feel sure that therewere strong reasons for it, which might well convince theclearest understanding, and be reconciled with the most conscientiousdesire to do right. 

No list of the remarkable Senators of my time would be completewhich did not contain the name of Senator Vest of Missouri. He was not a very frequent speaker, and never spoke at greatlength. But his oratoric powers are of a very high order. On some few occasions he has made speeches, always speakingwithout notes, and I suppose without previous preparationso far as expression and style go, which have very deeplymoved the Senate, though made up of men who have been accustomedto oratory and not easily stirred to emotion. Mr. Vest isa brave, sincere, spirited and straightforward man. He hasa good many of the prejudices of the old Southern Secessionist. I think those prejudices would long ago have melted away inthe sunshine of our day of returning good feeling and affection, but for the fact that his chivalrous nature will not permithim to abandon a cause or an opinion to which he has onceadhered, while it is unpopular. He is like some old cavalier whosupported the Stuarts, who lived down into the days of theHouse of Hanover, but still toasted the King over the water. 

Among the most interesting characters with whom it has beenmy fortune to serve is Senator John W. Daniel of Virginia. Our ways of life, and in many particulars our ways of thinking, are far apart. But I have been led to form a great respectfor his intellectual qualities, and for his sincere and far-sighted patriotism. 

Mr. Daniel came into the Senate in 1887. He had been knownas a very eminent lawyer at the Virginia Bar, author of twoexcellent law books. He had served a single term in the NationalHouse of Representatives. He had won a National reputationthere by a very beautiful and brilliant speech at the completionof the Washington Monument. There were two notable orationsat the time, one by Mr. Daniel and one by Robert C. Winthrop. These gentlemen were selected for the purpose as best representingtwo sections of the country. Mr. Winthrop was, beyond allquestion, the fittest man in the North for such a task. Ihave a special admiration for the spirit and eloquence withwhich he performed such duties. To my mind no higher praisecould be given Mr. Daniel's address than that it is worthyof that company. 

I had occasion to look at Mr. Winthrop's address some littletime ago, and, opening the volume containing it in the middle, I read a page or two with approval and delight thinking itwas Mr. Winthrop's. But I found, on looking back to the beginningthat it was Senator Daniel's. 

Mr. Daniel speaks too rarely in the Senate. He is alwayslistened to with great attention. He speaks only on importantquestions, to which he always makes an important contribution. He has the old-fashioned Virginia method of speech, now nearlypassed away, --grave, deliberate, with stately periods andsententious phrases, such, I suppose, as were used in theConvention that adopted the Constitution, or in that whichframed or revised the Constitution of Virginia. 

Mr. Daniel was a Confederate soldier. He is a Virginianto his heart's core. He looks with great alarm on the possibilitythat the ancient culture and nobility of the South, and thelofty character of the Virginian as he existed in the timeof Washington and Marshall and Patrick Henry may be degradedby raising what he thinks an inferior race to social or evenpolitical equality. 

But he retains no bitterness or hate or desire for revengeby reason of the conflict of the Civil War. He delivered anaddress before the President of the United States, the SupremeCourt, the representatives of foreign Governments, the twoHouses of Congress and the Governors of twenty-one Statesand Territories, on the 12th of December, 1900, on the occasionof the celebration of the Centennial Anniversary of establishingthe seat of Government at Washington. That remarkable addresswas full of wise counsel to his countrymen. Coming from arepresentative of Virginia, who had borne arms and been badlywounded in the Civil War, it had a double value and significance. Mr. Daniel declared the cheering and hopeful truth that greatraces are made of a mixture of races, and that the best andbravest blood of the world's great races is mixed in theAmerican. He appealed eloquently to the circumstances whichshould stir the heart of the whole people to a new and loftierlove of country. He pointed out that the differences in forty-five great Commonwealths are not greater than ought to beexpected, and indeed not greater than is healthy. He pointedout the National strength, the power of our great Republicstands at the dawn of a new century, with every man underits flag a freeman and ready to defend it. He called uponhis countrymen to stand by the Monroe Doctrine, to be readyto defend it, if need be, in arms. He then specially appealedto the people to foster the inventive genius of the country, and repeated Mr. Jefferson's lofty prophecy that in some futureday--

"The farthest star in the heavens will bear the name of Washington, and the city he founded be the Capital of the universal Republic. "

Isham G. Harris entered the Senate the same day I did. Icounted him always among my friends, although we had somesharp passages. I cannot describe him better than by reprintinghere what I said of him in the Senate after his death. 

"Mr. President, the great career of Senator Harris is wellknown to his countrymen. He has been for more than a generationa striking and conspicuous figure in our public life. Hiscolleague, his successor, the men of his own political faith, the people of the great State which he served and honoredand loved so long, will, each in their own way, portray hischaracter and record their esteem and affection. 

"My tribute must be that of a political opponent. So faras I have been able to exert any influence upon the historyof my country during the long conflict now happily past, ithas been in opposition to him, to the party to which he belonged, to the opinions which he held, I am sure, quite as zealouslyand conscientiously as I hold my own. 

"We entered the Senate on the same day. He was a Southerner, a Democrat and a Confederate. I was born and bred in NewEngland, a Republican, and an Abolitionist. We rarely spokein the same debate except on different sides. Yet I haveno memory of him that is not tender and affectionate, andthere is nothing that I can honestly say of him except wordsof respect and of honor. 

"He was a typical Southerner. He had the virtues and thefoibles that belonged to that character in the generationthe last of whom are now passing from the stage of publicaction. He was a man of very simple and very high qualities. He was a man of absolute frankness in public behavior andin private dealing. The thought that was in his heart correspondedabsolutely with the utterance of his lips. He had nothingto conceal. I was about to say he was a man without the giftof diplomacy; but he was a man with the gift of the highestdiplomacy--directness, simplicity, frankness, courage--qualitieswhich make always their way to their mark and to their goalover all circumlocutions and ambiguities. 

"He was a man of brief, clear and compact speech. He wouldsum up in a few vigorous and ringing sentences the argumentto which other men would give hours or days. He had an instinctfor the hinge or turning point of a debate. 

"He was a man of absolute integrity and steadfastness. Whathe said, that he would do. Where you left him, there, solong as he lived, you would find him when you came back. He was a man of unflinching courage. He was not afraid ofany antagonist, whether in the hall of debate or on the fieldof battle. 

"He was an acknowledged master of parliamentary law, a systemupon which not only the convenient procedure of legislativebodies largely depends, but which has close relations to ConstitutionalLiberty itself. How often a few simple and clear sentencesof his have dispersed the clouds and brought order out ofconfusion in this Chamber. 

"His great legislative experience made him invaluable asa servant of his own State, of the country and as a counsellorto his younger associates. 

"He was a pleasant man in private intercourse. He had greatsense of humor, a gift of portraiture, a good memory. Sohe brought out of the treasure-house of his varied experienceabundant matter for the delight of young and old. There isno man left in the Senate who was better company in hoursof recreation. 

"His influence will be felt here for a long time. His strikingfigure will still seem to be hovering about the Senate Chamber, still sitting, still deliberating, still debating. 

"Mr. President, it is delightful to think how, during thelives of the men who took part in the great conflict whichpreceded and followed the Civil War and the greater conflictof the war itself, the old bitterness and estrangements areall gone. Throughout the whole land the word 'countryman'has at last become a title of endearment. The memory of theleaders of that great conflict is preserved as tenderly bythe men who fought with them as by the men who followed them. Massachusetts joins with Tennessee in laying a wreath on thetomb of her great soldier, her great Governor, her great Senator. He was faithful to truth as he saw it; to duty as he understoodit; to Constitutional Liberty as he conceived it. 

"If, as some of us think, he erred, his error was that of abrave man ready to give life and health and hope to the unequalstruggle. 

 To his loved cause he offered, free from stain, Courage and faith; vain faith and courage vain. 

"And, Mr. President, when he returned to his allegiance, he offered to the service of his reunited country the samezeal and devotion he had given to the Confederacy. Therewas no reserved or half-hearted loyalty. We could have countedon his care for the honor and glory of his country, on hiswise and brave counsel, in this hour of anxiety, with an unquestioningconfidence. So Massachusetts to-day presses the hand of Tennesseeand mourns with her for her great citizen who has departed. "

James B. Eustis of Louisiana was of old Massachusetts stock. His father was graduated at Harvard, and went to New Orleans, where he acquired great distinction at the bar, and as ChiefJustice of that State. Senator Eustis's great-uncle was GeneralEustis, an eminent solider of the Revolutionary War, and afterwardGovernor of Massachusetts. 

Senator Eustis seemed somewhat indolent, and to take verylittle interest indeed in what was going on, except on somefew occasions when he bore himself in debate with remarkableability. I think his grave, scholarly style, and his powerfulreasoning, the propriety, dignity and moderation with whichhe dealt with important subjects, made him nearly the finestexample of Senatorial behavior I have ever known. He oncemade a speech in Executive session, on a topic which was suggestedsuddenly and he could not have anticipated, on the characterand history of French diplomacy, which was marvellous alikefor his profound and accurate knowledge of the subject andthe beauty and grace of his discourse. 

I was not intimate with him in Washington. But I met himin Paris, while he was Ambassador there under President Cleveland'sAdministration. I have delightful memories of his hospitality, especially of one breakfast, where there was but one otherguest beside myself, in a beautiful room overlooking the Seineand the Place de la Concorde. 

If I were to select the one man of all others with whom Ihave served in the Senate, who seems to me the most perfectexample of the quality and character of the American Senator, I think it would be Edward C. Walthall of Mississippi. Iknew him personally very little. I do not now remember thatI ever saw him, except in the Capitol, or in the Capitol grounds. I had, I dare say, some pleasant talks with him in the SenateChamber, or the cloak room. But I remember little of themnow. He rarely took part in debate. He was a very modestman. He left to his associates the duty of advocating hisand their opinions, unless he was absolutely compelled bysome special reason to do it himself. When he did speak theSenate listened to a man of great ability, eloquence and dignity. I once heard him encounter William M. Evarts in debate. Evartsmade a prepared speech upon a measure which he had in charge. Walthall's reply must have been unpremeditated and whollyunexpected to him. I think Evarts was in the right and Walthallin the wrong. But the Mississippian certainly got the betterof the encounter. 

It is a remarkable truth, which impresses itself upon me moreand more the longer I live, that men who are perfectly sincereand patriotic may differ from each other on what seem theclearest principles of morals and duty, and yet both sidesbe conscientious and patriotic. There is hardly a politicalquestion among the great questions that have excited the Americanpeople for the last half century on which we did not differfrom each other. The difference was not only as to the interpretationof the Constitution, and the welfare of the people, but seemedto go down to the very roots of the moral law. 

Yet what I have just said about him is without exaggeration. I have the right to believe that he entertained the kindliestand most cordial feeling of regard for me. Not long beforehe died, President McKinley sent for me to come to the WhiteHouse. He wished to talk with me about what he should doin dealing with Cuba. He was then holding back the popularfeeling, and resisting a demand which manifested itself amongRepublicans in both Houses of Congress for immediate and vigorousaction which would without doubt have brought on the war withSpain without delay. He hoped then that the war might beavoided. I had to go to the Capitol before complying withthe President's request, as it was shortly before the timefor the session. As I was leaving the Capitol to go to theWhite House, I met Senator Walthall. He said, "You seem tobe going the wrong way this morning, " or something like that. I said, "Yes, I am going to see the President. " Senator Walthallsaid; "I wish you would be good enough to say to him fromme that he may depend upon the support of the Democrats inthe Senate, with only one or two exceptions, " whom he named, "to support him in his efforts to avoid war, and to accomplisha peaceful solution of the difficulties in regard to Cuba. "I undertook to give the message. And just as we were parting, Senator Walthall turned and said to me that he wished to tellme how highly he regarded me, and how sensible he was, notwithstandingmy very strong Northern feeling, of my appreciation of thecharacter of the Southern people, and my desire to do themfull justice. He added that he regarded it one of the mostpleasant things that had happened to him in life that he hadhad the pleasure of serving with me. I do not now rememberthat I ever spoke to him again. He did not come to the SenateChamber very often afterward. I have thought since that thisunwonted expression of deep feeling from a gentleman notwont to wear his heart upon his sleeve toward his politicalopponent, and a man with whom he so often disagreed, wasdue to a premonition, of which he was perhaps unconscious, that the end of his life was near, and to the kindly andgentle emotions which in a brave and affectionate heart likehis the approach of death is apt to bring. 

I could hardly venture to repeat this story, to which thereis no other witness than my own, but for some letters in mypossession from Mr. Walthall's daughter and friends in whichthe writers quote even stronger expressions of his regard. 

I heard a great deal of him from Senator Lamar, who lovedhim as a brother, and almost worshipped him as a leader. SenatorLamar told me that he thought Walthall the ablest militarygenius of the Confederacy, with the exception of Lee, and, I think, of Stonewall Jackson. Indeed, I think he expresseddoubt whether either exception could be made. He said thatif anything had happened to Lee, Walthall would have succeededto the chief command of the Confederate forces. General Walthallseemed to me the perfect type of the gentleman in characterand speech. He was modest, courteous and eager to be of serviceto his friends or his country. The description of the youngKnight given us by Chaucer, the morning star of English poetry, still abides as the best definition of the gentleman. 

 Curteis he was, lowly and serviceable. 

His colleague, Mr. Williams of Mississippi, after Walthall'sdeath, described the Southern gentleman of our time in a sentencewhich deserves to stand by the side of Chaucer's:

"The ideal gentleman was always honest; spoke the truth;faced his enemy; fought him, if necessary; never quarrelledwith him nor talked about him; rode well; shot well; usedchaste and correct English; insulted no man--bore no insultfrom any; was studiously kind to his inferiors, especiallyto his slaves; cordial and hospitable to his equals; courteousto his superiors, if he acknowledged any; he scorned a demagogue, but loved his people. "

I do not undertake to draw his portraiture. I suppose thatwhoever does that must describe a great soldier and a greatlawyer, as well as a great Senator. I only state what I sawof him in the Senate Chamber. It was said of him by an eminentRepublican Senator, his associate on the Committee on MilitaryAffairs, that in dealing with questions which affected theright of Union soldiers, or growing out of service to theUnion during the Civil War, no stranger could have discoveredon which side of that great war he had ranged himself. 

CHAPTER XVIICUSHMAN KELLOGG DAVIS

I reprint here a paper read before the American AntiquarianSociety shortly after Mr. Davis's death. 

Cushman Kellogg Davis was born at Henderson, Jefferson County, New York, June 16, 1838, and died at St. Paul, Minnesota, November 27, 1900. On his mother's side he was descendedfrom Robert Cushman and Mary Allerton, the last survivor ofthe company which came over in the Mayflower. He was graduatedat the University of Michigan in 1857, and admitted to theBar shortly before the breaking out of the Civil War. Heenlisted at the beginning of the War and served as First Lieutenantof Company B, Eighth Wisconsin Regiment, until 1864, whenhe was compelled by physical infirmity to resign his commission. He was an excellent soldier. He sustained an injury to oneof his eyes, which caused him much pain through life, untila few years before his death he lost the sight of that eyealtogether. 

After his return from the war, he began the practice of thelaw anew, in which he gained great distinction. For manyyears, and until his death, he was the acknowledged leaderof the Bar of his State. He was a member of the State Legislatureof Minnesota in 1867, United States District Attorney from1868 till 1873, and Governor of the State in 1874 and 1875. He was one of the Regents of the State University of Minnesotafrom 1892 to 1898. In 1887 he was elected United States Senator, and reelected in 1893 and 1899. He held the office of Senatoruntil his death. He was Chairman of the Committee on ForeignRelations from March, 1897, till his death. He was one ofthe Commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Paris withSpain. 

He was a great lover of books, of which he had a costly collection. He knew Shakespeare very thoroughly, and was the author ofa book called "The Law of Shakespeare. "

He was also a zealous and thorough student of the careerof Napoleon, whose civic and military career he greatly admired. His mind was a marvellous storehouse of literary gems whichwere unknown to most scholars, but rewarded his diligent searchand loving study of his books. 

Many good stories are told by his companions of the Bar andin public life of his apt quotations. It is said that heonce defended a Judge in an impeachment case. The point involvedwas the power of the court to punish for contempt, and Davisquoted in support of his position the splendid and well-knownlines of Henry the Fourth, in the famous scene where the ChiefJustice punishes the Prince of Wales for contempt of the judicialoffice and authority. For this anecdote, the writer is indebtedto Senator Lodge. In the Senate, during the Hawaiian debate, he quoted this passage from Juvenal:

 Sed quo cecidit sub crimine; quisnam Delator? quibus judiciis; quo teste probavit? Nil horum; verbosa et grandis epistola venit A Capreis. Bene habet; nul plus interrogo. 

He then proceeded:

"My friend from Massachusetts (Mr. Hoar) requests me to translatethat. He does not need it, of course. But another Senator(Mr. Washburn) suggests that some of the rest of us do. Iwill not attempt to give a literal translation, but I willgive an accurate paraphrase, which will show its application. 'Into what crime has he fallen? By what informer has he beenaccused? What judge has passed upon him? What witness hastestified against him? Not one or any of these. A verboseand turgid message has come over from Capri. That settlesit. I will interrogate no further. '"

The most ardent admirers of the then President, Mr. Cleveland, could not help joining in the laugh. 

Mr. Davis took great delight in his descent from the earlysettlers of Plymouth, and valued exceedingly the good willof the people of Massachusetts. The members of the Societywho were fortunate enough to meet him will not forget theirdelight in his pleasant companionship, when he visited Massachusettsa few years ago to attend our meeting and contribute a paperto our Proceedings. He had hoped to repeat the visit. 

I prefer, instead of undertaking to complete this imperfectsketch by a new portraiture of my honored friend, to add whatI said in the Senate, when the loss of Mr. Davis was stillrecent:--

"Mr. President: There is no Senator who would not be gladto lay a wreath of honor and affection on the monument ofCushman K. Davis. That, however, is more especially the rightof his colleague and his successor and the members of thegreat Committee where he won so much of his fame. I oughtto say but a few words. 

"The Senate, as its name implies, has been from the beginning, with few exceptions, an assembly of old men. In the courseof nature many of its members die in office. That has beentrue of thirty-eight Senators since I came to the Capitol. Others, a yet larger number, die soon after they leave office. Of the men with whom I have served in this Chamber fifty-eight more are now dead, making in all ninety-six, enoughand to spare to organize another Senate elsewhere. To thatnumber has been added every Vice-President but two. Uponthose who have died in office eulogies have been pronouncedin this Chamber and in the House. The speakers have obeyedthe rule demanded by the decencies of funeral occasions--nilde mortuis nisi bonum--if not the command born of a tendererpity for human frailty--jam parce sepulto. But in general, with scarcely and exception, the portraitures have been trueand faithful. They prove that the people of the AmericanStates, speaking through their legislative assemblies, arenot likely to select men to represent them in this augustassembly who are lacking in high qualities either of intellector of character. However that may be, it is surely true ofMr. Davis that whatever has been or will be said of him to-day, or was said of him when the news of his death first shockedthe country, is just what would have been said when he wasalive by any man who knew him. I have served with him herenearly fourteen years. I have agreed with him and I havediffered from him in regard to matters of great pith and momentwhich deeply stirred the feelings of the people, as they didmine, and doubtless did his own. I never heard any man speakof him but with respect and kindness. 

"Of course, Mr. President, in this great century which isjust over, when our Republic--this infant Hercules--has beengrowing from its cradle to its still youthful manhood, thegreatest place for a live man has been that of a soldierin time of war and that of a statesman in time of peace. Cushman K. Davis was both. He did a man's full duty in both. No man values more than I do the function of the man of letters. No man reveres more than I do the man of genius who in a lovingand reverent way writes the history of a great people, orthe poet from whose lyre comes the inspiration which inducesheroic action in war and peace. But I do not admit that thetitle of the historian or that of the poet to the gratitudeand affection of mankind is greater than that of the soldierwho saves nations, or that of the statesman who creates orpreserves them, or who makes them great. I have no patiencewhen I read that famous speech of Gladstone, he and Tennysonbeing together on a journey, when he modestly puts Mr. Tennyson'stitle to the gratitude of mankind far above his own. Gladstone, then Prime Minister, declared that Tennyson would be rememberedlong after he was forgotten. That may be true. But whethera man be remembered or whether he be forgotten; whether hiswork be appreciated or no; whether his work be known or unknownat the time it is accomplished, is not the test of its greatnessor its value to mankind. The man who keeps this moral being, or helps to keep this moral being we call a State in the pathsof justice and righteousness and happiness, the direct effectof whose action is felt in the comfort and happiness and morallife of millions upon millions of human lives, who opens andconstructs great highways of commerce, who makes schools anduniversities not only possible but plenty, who brings to passgreat policies that allure men from misery, and poverty, andoppression, and serfdom in one world, to free, contented, happy, prosperous homes in another, is a great benefactorto mankind, whether his work be accomplished with soundingof trumpets, or stamping of feet, or clapping of hands, orthe roar and tumult of popular applause, or whether it bedone in the silence of some committee room, and no man knowit but by its results. 

"I am not ready to admit that even Shakespeare worked on ahigher plane, or was a greater power on earth, than King Alfredor George Washington, even if it be that he will survive themboth in the memory of man. The name of every man but onewho fought with Leonidas at Thermopylae is forgotten. Butis AEschylus greater than Leonidas, or Miltiades, or Themistocles?The literature of Athens preserves to immortality the fameof its great authors. But it was Solon, and Pericles, andMiltiades that created and saved and made great the city, without which the poets could not have existed. Mr. Tennysonhimself came nearer the truth than his friend, Mr. Gladstone, when he said:

 He That, through the channels of the state, Conveys the people's wish, is great; His name is pure; his fame is free. 

"There have been soldiers whose courage saved the day in greatdecisive battles when the fate of nations hung in the scale, yet whose most enduring monument was the column of smoke whichrose when their death shot was fired. There have been statesmenwhose silent influence has decided the issue when the countrywas at the parting of the ways, of whose service history takesno heed. The great Ohio Territory, now six imperial States, was twice saved to freedom by the almost unnoticed actionof a single man. With all respect for the man of letters, we are not yet quite ready to admit that the trumpeter isbetter than the soldier, or the painter greater than the lion. 

"There is no need of many words to sum up the life and characterof Cushman Davis. His life was in the daylight. Minnesotaknew him. His country knew him and loved him. He was a goodsoldier in his youth, and a great Senator in his maturer manhood. What can be said more, or what can be said better, to sumup the life of an American citizen? He offered his life forhis country when life was all before him. His State and hiscountry rewarded him with their highest honor. The greatorator and philosopher of Rome declared in his youth, andrepeated in his age, that death could not come prematurelyto a man who had been Consul. This man surely might be accountedready to die. He had discharged honorably life's highestduty, and his cup of honor and of glory was full. 

"We are thinking to-day of something more than a public sorrow. We are mourning the loss of a close and delightful companionship, a companionship which lightened public care and gave infinitepleasure to private intercourse. If he had never held office, if his name had never been heard even beyond the boundariesof a single municipality, he would have been almost anywherea favorite and foremost citizen. He was, in the first place, always a gentleman; and a true gentleman always gives toneto any company in which he is found, whether it be among therulers of States or the humblest gathering of friendly neighbors. Lord Erskine said on a great occasion:

"'It is impossible to define in terms the proper feelingsof a gentleman; but their existence has supported this countryfor many ages, and she might perish if they were lost, '

"Certainly our friend had this quality. He was everywherea gentleman. He met every occasion in life with a simpleand quiet courtesy. There was not much of deference in it. There was no yielding or supplication or timidity in it. Ido not think he ever asked favors, though no man was morewilling to grant them. But there is something more than thisin the temper of which I am speaking. The man who possessesit gives unconsciously to himself or his associates tone toevery circle, as I just said, in which he is found. So, whereverhe was, his manner or behavior prevailed, whatever might havehappened to the same men if they had been left alone. 

"Senator Davis was a man who kept well his own counsel. Hewas a man to whom it was safe for other men to trust theircounsel. His conversation, to which it was always a delightto listen, had no gossip in it. Still less had it ever anythingof ill nature or sarcasm. He liked to share with a friendthe pleasure he took in finding some flower or gem of literaturewhich, for long ages till he found it in some out-of-the-way nook, had--

 Blushed unseen, And wasted its sweetness on the desert air. 

"He had what Jeremy Taylor calls, 'the great endearment ofprudent and temperate speech. '

"His conversation was sparkling and witty and full of variety, but no spark from him was ever a cinder in the eye of hisfriend. 

"He had a learning rare among public men, and, for its variety, rare, I think, among scholars. He would bring out bits ofhistory, full of interest and instruction, from the most obscuresources, in common conversation. He was an excellent Latinscholar. He had read and mastered Tacitus, and a man whohas mastered Tacitus has had the best gymnastic training ofthe intellect, both in vigor and style, which the resourcesof all literature can supply. 

"One secret of his great popularity with his companions here--a popularity I think unexcelled, indeed, I incline to thinkunequalled by that of any other man with whom I have served--is that to which the late Justin Morrill owed so much. Henever debated. He rarely answered other men's arguments, never with warmth or heat. But he was exceedingly tenaciousof his own opinion. He was, in the things he stood for, asunyielding as flint and true as steel. But his flint or steelnever struck out a spark by collision with any other. Hespoke very rarely in debate in general; only when his officialplace on his committee, or something which concerned his ownconstituents especially, made speaking absolutely imperative. Then he gave his opinion as a judge gives it, or as a delegateto some great international council might be supposed to giveit; responsible for it himself, but undertaking no responsibilityfor other men's opinion or conduct; never assuming that itwas his duty or within his power to convert, or change, orinstruct them, still less to chastise them. Whether thatway be the best way for usefulness in a deliberative body, especially in a legislative body of a great popular government, I will not undertake now to say. Certainly it is not thecommon way here or elsewhere. It is very rare indeed, thatany man possessing the great literary and oratorical powerof Mr. Davis, especially a man to whom nobody ever thoughtof imputing timidity or undue desire to enjoy public favor, or want of absolute confidence in his own opinions, will befound to refrain from employing these qualities to persuadeor convince other men. 

"He had a rare and exquisite gift which, if he had been aman of letters and not a man engaged in a strenuous publiclife, would have brought him great fame. Once in a whilehe said something in private, and more rarely, though onceor twice, in a public speech, which reminded you of the delicatetouch of Hawthorne. His likening President Cleveland andMr. Blount, looking upon the late royalty of the SandwichIsland with so much seriousness, to Don Quixote and SanchoPanza taking in great earnest the spectacle of a theatricalrepresentation at a country fair and eager to rescue the distresseddamsel, was one of the most exquisite felicities of the literatureof the Senate. 

"He had great pride in his ancestry, and was a great loverof the history of New England and Plymouth, from which theycame, though he never gave himself airs on account of it. He was a descendant of Robert Cushman, the preacher of thePilgrims, whose service was in a thousand ways of such valueto the little colony at Plymouth. Yet it had never happenedto him to visit the scenes with which the feet of his ancestorshad been so familiar, until a few years ago he did me thehonor to be my guest in Massachusetts, and spent a few daysin visiting her historic places. He gazed upon Boston andPlymouth and Concord reverently as ever Moslem gazed uponMecca or the feet of palmer stood by the holy sepulchre. Thatweek to him was crowded with a delight with which few otherhours in his life could compare. I had hoped that it mightbe my fortune and his that he might visit Massachusetts again, that her people might gather in their cities to do him honor, and might learn to know him better, and might listen to thesincere eloquence of his voice. But it was ordered otherwise. 

"There are other things his country had hoped for him. Shehad hoped a longer and higher service, perhaps the highestservice of all. But the fatal and inexorable shaft has strickenhim down in the full vigor of a yet strenuous manhood. Thegreat transactions in which he had borne so large a part stillremain incomplete and their event is still uncertain. 

"There is a painting which a great Italian master left unfinished. The work was taken up and completed by a disciple. The finishedpicture bears this inscription: 'What Titian left unfinished, Palma reverently completed, and dedicated to God. ' So mayour beloved Republic find always, when one servant leaveshis work unfinished, another who will take it up and dedicateit to the country and to God. "

CHAPTER XVIIIGEORGE BANCROFT

One of the most delightful friendships of my life was withGeorge Bancroft, the famous historian. I never knew himuntil I went to Washington in 1877. But we established atonce, as a matter of course, the relation of an intimate friendship. He was born in Worcester, to which he was much attached, thoughhe had spent little of his life there after he had left college. Mrs. Bancroft had known my oldest brother and sister intimately, when she lived in Boston. I had learned from Mr. Emerson, who rarely gave his praise lightly, as well as from my ownstudy, to value Mr. Bancroft very highly as a historian, which he soon found out. 

I almost always found him waiting for me on the doorstepof my dwelling when I came from church the first Sunday afterI reached Washington, at the beginning of a session. I haveenjoyed many hours at his table, rendered delightful by theconversation of the eminent guests whom he gathered there, but by no conversation more delightful than his own. 

Mr. Bancroft had two enthusiasms which made him a great historian--an enthusiasm for truth which spared no labor and left nostores of information unsearched, and an enthusiastic loveof country. He believed that the great emotions and motiveswhich move a free people are the noble, not the mean motives. He has written and interpreted the history of the United Statesin that faith. I believe his work will endure so long asthe love of liberty shall endure. I gave my estimate of himat a meeting of the American Antiquarian Society, of whichwe were both chosen Vice-Presidents, in October, 1880, justafter the completion of his eightieth year and of his "Historyof the United States, " as follows:

"It is not usual to discuss the report of the committee topropose a list of officers. But one of the names reportedgives special interest to the occasion. On the third of thismonth of October, our honored associate Mr. Bancroft completedhis eightieth year. At the same time he completed his 'Historyof the United States' to the formation of the Federal Constitution. 

"This Society, while it is national and continental in thescope of its investigations, strikes down its roots into thesoil of this locality, where its founder dwelt, and where itscollections are kept. 

"For both these reasons we cherish our relations to Mr. Bancroft. He was born within a few rods of this spot. He is descendedby the mother's side from an old Worcester County family whowere conspicuous in the administration of its public affairslong before the Revolution. His father was one of the sixpersons who petitioned for the act of incorporation of thisSociety, and one of its first members. His brother by marriage, Governor Davis, was your predecessor in the President' chair. 

"These reasons would be enough to induce us to value our relation. But he has filled a highly honorable and conspicuous placein public life. He is, I believe, the senior person livingwho has been a member of the Cabinet. He is the senior amongliving persons who have filled important diplomatic stations. He has represented the United States at Berlin and at St. James. 

"His history is, and doubtless will be, the great standardauthority upon the important period which it covers. Heis the only person living whose judgment would change theplace in public estimation held by any of the great statesmenof the Revolutionary times. He has had the rare good fortuneamong men of letters, to have proposed to himself a greattask, requiring a lifetime for its accomplishment, the successfulachievement of which is enough to make any life illustrious, and to have lived to complete it with powers of body and mindundiminished. It is his fate to know, while alive, the estimatein which he will be held by posterity. In his case, thatknowledge can be only a source of pleasure and satisfaction. 

"In this Mr. Bancroft resembles Gibbon. We all rememberGibbon's delightful account of the completion of his greatwork. 

"In another thing, alone among great historians, Mr. Bancroftresembles Gibbon. As an artist he has accomplished that mostdifficult task of composing a history made up of many separatethreads, which must keep on side by side, yet all be subordinateto one main and predominant stream. But his narrative neverloses its constant and fascinating interest. No other historian, I believe, except Gibbon, has attempted this without becominginsufferably dull. 

"Mr. Bancroft tells the story of thirteen States, separate, yet blending into one National life. It is one of the mostwonderful things in our history, that the separate Stateshaving so much in common, have preserved so completely, evento the present time, their original and individual characteristics. Rhode Island, held in the hollow of the hand of Massachusetts;Connecticut, so placed that one would think it would becomea province of New York; Delaware, whose chief city is buttwenty-five miles from Philadelphia, yet preserve their distinctivecharacteristics as if they were states of the continent ofEurope, whose people speak a different language. This showshow perfectly state rights and state freedom are preservedin spite of our National union, how little the power at thecentre interferes with the important things that affect thecharacter of a people. Why is it that little Delaware remainsDelaware in spite of Pennsylvania, and little Rhode Islandremains Rhode Island notwithstanding her neighbor Massachusetts?

 What makes the meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free Down to its roots, and in that freedom bold. And so the grandeur of the forest tree Comes, not from casting in a formal mould, But from its own divine vitality. 

"But Mr. Bancroft is more fortunate than Gibbon. Gibbon wroteof decline, of decay, of dissolution, and death; of the days, to use his own words, 'when giants were becoming pigmies. 'Bancroft tells the story of birth, and growth, and youth, and life. His name is to be inseparably associated with agreat and interesting period in the world's history; withwhat in the proud imagination of his countrymen must everbe the greatest and most interesting of all periods, whenpigmy villages were becoming giant States. I am sure thatit is a delight to this assembly of distinguished scholars, assembled near his birthplace, to send him, at the completionof his great work, and of his eightieth year, their cordialsalutation. "

I went to see Mr. Bancroft on the evening of the last Sundayin December, 1890. He was sitting in his library up stairs. He received me in his usual emphatic manner, taking both myhands and saying, "My dear friend, how glad I am to see you!"He was alone. He evidently knew me when I went in, and inquiredabout Worcester, as he commonly did, and expressed his amazementat its remarkable growth. 

I stayed with him about twenty or thirty minutes. The topicsof our conversation were, I believe, suggested by me, andthe whole conversation was one which gave evidence of fullunderstanding on his part of what we were talking about. Itwas not merely an old man's memory of the past, but the freshand vigorous thought on new topics which were suggested tohim in the course of the conversation. I think he exhibiteda quickness and vigor of thought and intelligence and spokewith a beauty of diction that no man I know could have surpassed. 

I asked him if he could account for the interest in historicalstudy among the older Harvard graduates, and mentioned thefact that the principal historians of this country, includinghimself, Prescott, Sparks, Motley, Palfrey and Parkman, wereall Harvard men and were eminent at a time when there werescarcely any other eminent historical scholars in America. He did not directly answer this question, but said that hisown inclination toward history, he thought, was due very muchto the influence of his father. He said his father wouldhave been a very eminent historian, if he had had materialat his command, and that he had a remarkably judicious mind. 

He spoke of some clergymen, especially the Unitarian clergymen, so many of whom belonged to Harvard at his time. He saidhe had little sympathy for the Unitarianism of his day, "forits theology, no; for its spirituality, yes. "

He asked me about the Election Bill pending in the Senate. I spoke of the great storm of abuse I had had to encounterfor advocating it, but said I thought on the whole the feelingbetween the different sections of the country and differentpolitical parties was better than it ever had been beforein this country, and much better than that which now existedbetween different political parties in foreign countries. He cordially agreed to this, and made some observations whichI do not now recall, but which were interesting and bright. 

After we had talked together for some time, he said: "Mymemory is very poor: I cannot remember your first name. "I said: "It is the same as yours, Mr. Bancroft--George. "He paused a moment with an amused and puzzled look, and said:"What is your last name?" He had evidently known me verywell during most of the preceding part of the interview. 

I told his son about this conversation the day after Mr. Bancroft's death. He said that the presence of a visitoracted in this way as a stimulant, but that he had not latelyshown much intelligence in the family, seeming lost and feeble. 

CHAPTER XIXVISITS TO ENGLAND[1860, 1868, 1871]

I was born within a mile of the spot where the War of theRevolution began. My ancestors and other kindred on bothsides took an active and prominent part in the struggle withEngland. I am descended from the early Puritans of Massachusettsin every line of descent. So it will readily be believedthat all my feeling and sympathy have been on the side ofmy country in the great controversy with England, which beganwith the exile of the Pilgrims in 1620 and continued, withlittle interruption, until our last great quarrel with her, which ended with the arbitration at Geneva. Yet I am a passionatelover of England. Before I ever went abroad, I longed tovisit the places famous in her history, as a child longs togo home to his birthplace. 

I have visited Europe six times. On each occasion I devotedthe largest part of my time to Great Britain. The desireto see England again has increased with every visit. Certainlythere is nothing like England, and there never has been anythinglike England in the world. Her wonderful history, her wonderfulliterature, the beauty of her architecture, the historic andpoetic associations which cluster about every street and riverand mountain and valley, her vigorous life, the sweetnessand beauty of her women, the superb manhood of her men, hernavy, her gracious hospitality, her courage and her loftypride--although some single race of people may have excelledhere in a single particular--make up a combination never equalledin the world. I am, of course, not to be understood to bringmy own country into the comparison. 

The first time I went abroad was in 1860. I had for a companionmy friend from infancy, George M. Brooks, of Concord. Wetravelled like a couple of Bohemians, never riding where wecould walk; lunching or dining where he happened to find ourselveswhen we were hungry; taking second or third class carriageson the railroads, and getting into conversation with anybodywho would talk to us. I doubt whether I shall ever have inthis world, or in another, a sensation more delicious thanthat I had when the old steamer, "America, " steamed up theChannel toward the mouth of the Mersey, with the green shoresof Ireland on one side and England on the other. I am afraidif I were to relate the story of that journey, it would beonly to please myself by reviving its recollections, and notfor the delight of my readers, so many of whom have a similarmemory of their own. 

We heard John Bright and Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerstonin a great debate in the House of Commons on the paper duties, and saw Lord Brougham walking backward and forward on theterrace by Brougham Castle, near Penrith. We saw Edinburghand the Trosachs, and Abbotsford and Stirling. I had beena loving reader of Scott from my childhood, and was almostas much at home in Scotland as if I had been born in the Canongateor the Saltmarket. I had had a special fancy for readingand studying topographical books on London, and found myself, pretty soon, so much at home there that I think I could havemade a very decent living as a guide. 

We spent a month in Switzerland. I made the journey overthe mountain passes on foot, keeping up with my companion, who had a horse or a mule. I could walk twenty-five or thirtymiles a day without great fatigue. 

Augustus Flagg of the famous book-selling firm of Little& Brown, with whom I had dealt a great deal, was on theship when I went out. He went abroad to purchase books forhis house. In those days the book-stalls in London were minesof rare treasures. They had not been much examined by collectorsor dealers, and the men who kept them did not know the valueof books that were almost priceless in the eyes of virtuosos. Mr. Flagg and I spent together a good many days in ransackingthe old book-stalls and shops, some of them in out-of-the-way places in the old city, even below the Tower. I couldnot afford to buy a great many books then. But I knew somethingabout them, and the experience was like having in my handsthe costliest rubies or diamonds. 

The journey each way, which now takes six or seven days, thentook fourteen. The Cunard steamer, whose successor, withits bilge keel and its vastly greater size, is as comfortable, even in very rough weather, as the first class city hotel, was as disagreeable in rough weather, to a man unaccustomedto the ocean, as a fishing smack. But the passengers gotwell acquainted with one another. There was agreeable societyon board, and the days passed pleasantly. 

Among the passengers was Joseph Coolidge of Boston, fatherof Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, late Minister to France. Mr. Coolidge had been a great traveller in his day; had had somecommercial occupations in the East, and was very pleasantcompany. His wife was a granddaughter of Mr. Jefferson. He told me that two of Mr. Jefferson's daughters--or granddaughters, I am not now absolutely sure which--had kept school and earnedmoney, which they had applied to the payment of Mr. Jefferson'sdebts. The story was highly creditable to these Virginialadies, who might well have thought that their illustriousancestor's service might excuse his family from making sacrificesin discharge of such an obligation, if his countrymen at largedid not feel its force. 

I went over pretty much the same ground in 1868 with threeladies. I made both these journeys as an ordinary sightseer. I took few letters of introduction. I did not deliver those, except in one or two cases to American gentlemen living abroad. 

One experience in this latter journey, however, it may beworth while to tell. I had a very pleasant friendship withHenry T. Parker, a Boston man and a graduate of Harvard, who had a comfortable property and had married an Englishlady and had settled in London. He found an occupation, congenial to his own taste, in buying books, as agent of someof the great libraries in the United States, including theHarvard Library and the Boston City Library. He was an intimatefriend of Mr. Cox, the accomplished Librarian of the Bodleian, to whom he gave us letters. 

Mr. Cox treated us with special courtesy and showed us manytreasures of the Library, especially some wonderful illuminatedmanuscripts. One of them, the Duc de Monpensier, who hadbeen at Oxford shortly before and who was an authority insuch matters, felt confident was illustrated by Raphael. Mr. Cox had discovered, just before I was there, in some cryptwhere it had lain unknown for two hundred years, a touchingletter from Clarendon, who was Chancellor of the University, which I think will move the heart of every man who loves thecollege where he was educated. The letter was written byLord Clarendon just after he had landed at Calais, a hopelessexile, on his last flight from the country to which he wasnever again to return. The great orator, statesman, historian, lawyer, judge, --counsellor, companion and ancestor of monarchs, --flying for his life, in his old age, into a foreign land, from the court of which, for a generation, he had been theornament and head, soon as his feet touch a place of safety, thinks of his University. See the noble heart through thesimple and stately rhetoric:

GOOD MR. VICE-CHANCELLOR;

Having found it necessary to transport myselfe out of England, and not knowing when it shall please God that I shall returneagaine, it becomes me to take care that the University maynot be without the service of a person better able to be ofuse to them than I am like to be, and I doe therefore herebysurrender the office of chancellor into the hand of said University, to the end that they may make choyce of some other personbetter qualified to assist and protect them, than I am. Iam sure he can never be more affectionate to it. I desireyou as the last suite I am likely to make to you, to believethat I doe not fly my country for guilt, and how passionatelysoever I am pursued, that I have not done anything to makethe University ashamed of me, or to repent the good opinionthey had once of me, and though I must have no mention inyour publique devotions, (which I have always exceedinglyvalued, ) I hope I shall always be remembered in your privateprayers, as

 Good Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Your affectionate servant, CLARENDON. CALAIS, this 7-17 Dec. , 1667. 

In 1871 I went abroad alone. I spent the whole time in England, except for a brief visit to Scotland. My purpose in goingaway was to get a vacation. I meant to do some studying inthe British Museum, especially to make a thorough study ofthe conditions and economic principles affecting the strifebetween capital and labor, which then threatened both thiscountry and England. I got a collection of the authoritiesand the references. But I did not find that I got a greatdeal of light from anything that had been written or saidso far. I made a few very agreeable acquaintances. I hada letter to Thomas Hughes, and visited at his house. I foundGeorge W. Smalley, who had been a pupil in my office, establishedin a delightful house near London. He seemed to be on termsof intimacy with the famous Englishmen who were the leadersof both political parties, and with many eminent men of letters. I spent a delightful evening with Mr. Hughes at a club whichI think was called the European Club, or something like that, where the members smoked clay pipes and drank beer. Thereseemed to be no other provision for the refreshment of thebody or soul. But the conversation was very pleasant. Themembers sat together about a table, and the conversation wasquite general and very bright. The talk turned, during theevening, on Scotsmen. The Englishmen present seemed to havesomething left of the old prejudice about Scotland with whichDr. Johnson was possessed. They imputed to the modern Scotsmenthe same thrifty habit and capacity for looking after himselfthat prevailed a hundred years before, when Dr. Johnson andJohn Wilkes, who quarrelled about everything else, becamereconciled when they united in abuse of their Northern neighbors. Sir Frederick Pollock cited a marginal note from the reportof some old criminal case, to the following effect: "Possessionof property in Scotland evidence of stealing in England. "

I was guilty of one piece of stupid folly. Mr. Hughes kindlyproposed to take me to see Carlyle. This was not very longafter our war, when our people were full of indignation atCarlyle's bitter and contemptuous speech about us, especiallyhis "American Iliad in a Nutshell. " I was a little doubtfulabout what sort of a reception I should get, and declinedthe invitation. I have bitterly regretted this ever since. My brother visited Carlyle about 1846, bearing with him aletter from Emerson. Carlyle was very civil to him, and likedhim very much, as appears by a letter from him to Mr. Emerson. 

During the visit I heard a great debate between Gladstoneand Disraeli. A brief account of it will be found in thechapter on "Some Famous Orators I have Heard. "

A friend in Worcester gave me a letter to Mr. Wornum, theDirector of the National Gallery, with whom he had been afellow-pupil at Kensington. Mr. Wornum received me with greatcordiality. He asked me to come to the Gallery the nextday, when it would be closed to the public. He said he wouldbe glad to show it to me then, when we would be free of interruption. He was the author of what I understand to be an excellenthistory of painting, and was regarded as the most competentjudge in Europe of the value and merit of paintings. I supposeParliament would at any time, on his sole recommendation, have given ten or twenty or perhaps fifty thousand guineasfor a masterpiece. I shall never forget the delight of thatday. He told me the history of the great paintings in theNational Gallery, some of which had belonged to monarchs, popes, noblemen or famous merchants of almost all the countriesin Europe. He said that while there were many larger galleries, the National Gallery was the best in the world as affordingthe best and most characteristic examples of every schoolof painting. I cannot remember much that was said in thatlong day, interrupted only by a pleasant lunch together. Butit was a day full of romance. It was as if I had had in myhand the crown jewels of every potentate in the world, andsomebody had told me the history of each gem. For this pictureFrancis the First, or Charles V. , or Henry VIII. Had beenbidders. This had belonged to Lorenzo de Medici, or PopeLeo X. This had come from the famous collection of CharlesI. , scattered through Europe on his death; and this had belongedto some nobleman whose name was greater than that of monarchs. 

Mr. Wornum spoke of his treasures with an enthusiasm whichno worshipper at the throne of any Saint or Divinity couldsurpass. That day was among the few chiefest delights ofmy life. 

CHAPTER XXVISITS TO ENGLAND1892

My next visit to England was in the spring of 1892. Thewinter before, I had a severe attack of iritis, which left myeyes in a very demoralized condition. I did not find muchrelief in this country, not, I suppose, because of want ofskill in our ophthalmic surgeons, but because of the impossibilityof getting any rest anywhere where I could be reached by telephoneor telegraph. To a person who can bear an ordinary voyagethere is no retreat like an ocean steamer. Telephone, telegraph, daily paper; call or visit of friend, client, or constituent;daily mail--sometimes itself, to a busy public man, enoughfor a hard day's work--all these are forgotten. You spendyour ten days in an infinite quiet like that of Heaven. Yousit in your deck-chair with the soft sea breeze on your forehead, as the mighty ocean cradle rocks you, and see the lace ofan exquisite beauty that no Tyrian weaver ever devised, breakingover the blue or purple waves, with their tints that no Tyriandye ever matched. Ah! Marconi, Marconi, could not you letus alone, and leave the tired brain of humanity one spotwhere this "hodge-podge of business and trouble and care"could not follow us and find us out?

On this journey I visited England, France and Switzerland. It so happened that I had had a good deal to do with the appointmentof our Ministers to these three countries. Colonel John D. Washburn, a very accomplished and delightful gentleman, nowdead, had been a pupil of mine as a law student. He livedin Worcester and had been a very eminent member of the MassachusettsLegislature. I think he would have been Governor of the Stateand had a very brilliant career but for a delicacy of organizationwhich made him break down in health when under any severestrain of responsibility, especially such as involved antagonismand conflict. He was of a very friendly, gentle disposition, and disliked to be attacked or to attack other men. I toldMr. Blaine, the Secretary of State when Mr. Harrison's Administrationcame in, that I had but one favor to ask of it; that was, that he should send Washburn as Minister to Switzerland. Ihad two or three very pleasant days with him at Berne. Buthe had sent his family away and was preparing to resign hisplace. So I had not much opportunity of seeing Switzerlandunder his guidance. 

Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, then Minister to France, had alsobeen appointed on my very earnest recommendation. He wasa great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, a very able businessman, highly esteemed throughout the country. His guidancewas implicitly followed by many people in important businesstransactions. He had had the charge of the financial affairsof some large manufacturing corporations, and was understoodto have extricated the Northern Pacific Railroad out of someserious difficulties, into which it fell again after he leftits control. He had been a Democrat. But he had seen theimportance of the protective policy to American interests, as would naturally be expected of a descendant of that highprotectionist, Thomas Jefferson. He had no sympathies withany measures that would debase or unsettle the currency, andset his face and gave his powerful influence against all formsof fiat or irredeemable paper money, and the kindred follyof the free coinage of silver by this country alone, withoutthe concurrence of the commercial nations of the world. 

Soon after Mr. Harrison's Administration began, I receiveda message about nine o'clock one evening, asking me to goto the White House at once. I obeyed the summons. The Presidentsaid he desired, if I had no objection, to send in the nameof Dr. Loring of Massachusetts, as Minister to Portugal. Itold him that I had no objection whatever; that Dr. Loringwas an able man of agreeable manners, and had performed admirablyevery public duty he had undertaken. I said that the Doctorhad felt a little disturbed, I thought, that I had refusedto call a meeting of the Massachusetts delegation to presshis name upon the President for a Cabinet office, to whichPresident Harrison replied, "I put my foot on that prettyquick. " Dr. Loring had been a great friend and supporterof Mr. Blaine, the Secretary of State. I conjectured, althoughthe President did not say so, that the choice of Dr. Loringhad been made at the Secretary's instance. 

The President then said that he wanted to talk with me aboutthe English Mission, which had troubled him a good deal. Hementioned the names of several prominent men in differentparts of the country, including Robert Lincoln and Mr. Jewett, an eminent lawyer in Chicago, whose name was earnestly pressedupon him by the Senators from Illinois. I said that I hadknown Mr. Lincoln pretty well when he was in President Garfield'sand Mr. Arthur's Cabinet, and thought very highly of him. He was a very modest man indeed, never pressing any claimto public consideration or office, either on his own accountor as his father's son, and never seeking responsibility. But I had noticed that when he had anything to say or anythingto do, he always said or did the wisest and best thing to besaid or done under the circumstances. I do not know howmuch influence what I said had, but it seemed to gratifyPresident Harrison exceedingly, and he stated that he wasstrongly inclined to appoint Mr. Lincoln. 

I was told the next morning he sent for the two IllinoisSenators, and told them that he had made up his mind to nominateMr. Lincoln, and that one of them, Senator Farwell, was exceedinglyoffended. He was also much disturbed by President Harrison'sattitude in regard to the appointment of the postmaster atChicago. The result was that when President Harrison's namecame up for another nomination, Mr. Farwell was opposed tohim, and when he was with difficulty nominated for reelection, the State of Illinois voted for Cleveland. Senator Cullom, though not liking very well to have his opinion disregarded, was more discreet. He did not see fit to make the exerciseof the President's rightful and Constitutional prerogativea reason for breaking off his friendly relations with theAdministration, with whose principles he was in full accord. This is an instance of President Harrison's want of tact. I have little doubt that if, before finally announcing hisintention, he had sent for the Illinois Senators--as AbrahamLincoln would have done, or as President McKinley would havedone--gone over the whole ground with them, and told themhis reasons and desire, they would have cheerfully acquiescedin the conclusion to which he had come, and their friendshipwith him would have been strengthened and not weakened. 

After saying what was to be said about the English Mission, I said to President Harrison: "We have a gentleman in Massachusetts, whom I think it is very desirable indeed to place in someimportant public service; that is Thomas Jefferson Coolidge. He is a great-grandson of Mr. Jefferson. " I said to the Presidentthe substance of what I have just stated above, about Mr. Coolidge. I added that while Mr. Coolidge would be an excellentperson for the English Mission, which his uncle Mr. Stevensonhad held, yet, of course, I did not think, under the circumstances, that it would be proper to make another important diplomaticappointment from Massachusetts just then; but I hoped thatan opportunity might come later. President Harrison seemedto be much impressed with the suggestion, and said that hewould bear it in mind. 

When I went back to my room, it occurred to me that I had betterspeak to Mr. Blaine about it. If he first heard of it fromthe President he might think that I was trying to deal withthe President about matters in his Department over his headand without consulting him. So I went round to the StateDepartment early the next morning, and told Mr. Blaine whatI had said to the President. I found that he knew all aboutMr. Coolidge. I inadvertently spoke of him as grandson ofMr. Jefferson. Blaine immediately corrected me by saying, "great-grandson. " He seemed to like the plan very well. 

Nothing came of the matter at that time. But later, whenthe Pan-American Commission was appointed, the President, of his own motion, appointed Mr. Coolidge as one of the Americanrepresentatives. Later, I happened to be one day at the WhiteHouse, and President Harrison told me that Whitelaw Reid hadannounced his intention of resigning the French Mission beforelong. I reminded him of our conversation about Mr. Coolidge, and urged his name very strongly on him. He hesitated a gooddeal. I got the approval of every New England Senator butone to the proposal. The President still hesitated and seemedinclined to appoint Mr. Andrew D. White. But he finallyyielded to the urgency for Mr. Coolidge. I should have beensorry if anything I had done had resulted in depriving thecountry of the service of Andrew D. White. I suppose himto be one of the very best representatives we ever had abroad. But an opportunity came soon after, to send him first toRussia, and then to Germany, where he has represented what isbest in the character, ability, desire, interest and scholarshipof the American people. 

So we had two first-rate representatives abroad instead ofone. Mr. Coolidge discharged his functions to the satisfactionof the Administration, and to the universal approval of hiscountrymen. 

He received me when I visited Paris with a very cordial anddelightful hospitality. I had the pleasure of meeting athis house at dinner M. Ribot, then Prime Minister of Franceand afterward President of the French Republic, and severalothers of the leading men in their public life. But I spokeFrench very imperfectly indeed, and understood it much less, when spoken by a Parisian. The conversation was, in general, in French. So I got very little knowledge of them by beingin their society. 

My visit in England gave me a good deal more to remember. Mr. Lincoln also received me with great cordiality. He gavea dinner at which several of the leaders of the Liberal Partywere present; among them, Sir William Vernon Harcourt. Ihad letters to Sir William Vernon Harcourt, and to Lord Rosebery, and to Lord Coleridge, Lord Chief Justice of England. SirWilliam Vernon Harcourt and Lord Rosebery each called on me, and spent an hour at my room. But Parliament was dissolvedjust at that time, so the Liberal leaders had at once to beginthe campaign which resulted in Mr. Gladstone's victory. SoI had no opportunity to make an intimate acquaintance witheither of them. I owed to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes an introductionto John Bellows, a Quaker, a most delightful gentleman, thefirst authority in his time on the Roman antiquities of GreatBritain, a fine classical scholar and learned in old Englishliterature and in the languages from which came the rootsof our English tongue. I formed with him a close friendshipwhich ended only with his death, in 1902. A year before hedied he visited me in my home at Worcester, and received thedegree of Master of Arts from Harvard. Mr. Bellows is theauthor of the wonderful French Dictionary. 

I spent a few days with Lord Coleridge in Devon. His houseat Ottery St. Mary's is close to the spot where Samuel TaylorColeridge was born. I met there several of the race. I donot know whether they were living in the neighborhood or happenedto be there on a visit. 

I found in the church, close by, the tomb of John Sherman, one of my own kindred, I have no doubt, of the race whichcame from Colchester and Dedham in Essex, and Yaxley in Suffolk. 

The Lord Chief Justice was much distressed lest he had donewrong in complying with General Butler's invitation to visithim at Lowell. He said that many of his American friendshad treated him coldly afterward, and that his friend RichardDana, whom he highly esteemed, had refused to call upon himfor that reason. 

I told him he did absolutely right, in my opinion. I saidthat General Butler was then Governor of the Commonwealthof Massachusetts, and that an eminent person, holding a highofficial character, from a foreign country, could not undertaketo question the personal character, or the title to be consideredgentlemen, of the men whom the American people put into theirhigh places. 

Lord Coleridge said he received fifty guineas every morningfor his services in the Tichborne trial. "But, " he added, "my general practice in my profession was so much interruptedby it that I could not have got along that year but for mysalary as Attorney-General. "

He spoke with great pride of his cross-examination of theClaimant. He said one of the papers had complained thathis cross-examination did no good to his case whatever. "ButI made him admit that he sent his photograph to some person, as the photograph of Arthur Orton. " He said the common peoplein England still held to the belief that the Claimant wasthe genuine Sir Roger Tichborne, and, by a curious contradiction, this feeling was inspired largely by their sympathy with himas a man of humble birth. I said, "Yes, I think that is true. I heard somebody, a little while ago, say that they heardtwo people talking in the cars, and one of them said to theother, 'They wouldn't give him the estate, because he wasthe son of a poor butcher. '" This very much amused the LordChief Justice. 

I asked him about the story I had heard and had verifiedsome time before, of the connection, in the person of LadyRolle, between two quite remote periods. Lady Rolle wasalive until 1887, maintaining her health so that she gavedinner parties in that year, shortly before she died. She wasthe widow of Mr. Rolle, afterward Lord Rolle, who made aviolent attack on Charles James Fox in 1783. He was thenthirty-two years old. From him the famous satire, the Rolliad, took its name. When he went to pay his homage to Queen Victoriaat her Coronation in Westminster Abbey, he was quite feeble, and rolled down the steps of the throne. The young Queenshowed her kindness of heart by jumping up and going to helphim in person. Some of the English told the foreigners presentat the ceremonial that that was part of the ceremony, andthat the Rolles held their lands on the tenure of going throughthat performance at every coronation. Lady Rolle was marriedto her husband in 1820. He was then sixty-nine, and she ayoung girl of twenty years old. He was eighty or ninety yearsold when he died, and she survived as his widow for many years. Something came up on the subject of longevity which inducedme to refer to this story and ask Lord Coleridge if it weretrue. We were then riding out together; "Yes, " said he, "there, "pointing to a dwelling-place in full sight, "is the housewhere she lived. "

His Lordship asked me about an American Judge with whom hehad some acquaintance. I told him that I thought his reputationwas rather that of a jurist than a Judge. "Oh, yes, " saidhe, "a jurist is a man who knows something about the law ofevery country but his own. "

Lord Coleridge had a good reputation as a story-teller. Itwas pleasant to get an auditor who seemed to like to hearthe stories which have got rather too commonplace to be worthtelling over here. He had a great admiration for PresidentLincoln, and was eager to hear anything anybody had to tellof him. I told him the famous story of Lincoln's reply tothe man who had left with him his poem to read, when he gaveit back. "If anybody likes that sort of thing, it's justthe sort of thing they'd like. " I overheard his Lordship, as he circulated about the room, a little while afterward, repeating the story to various listeners. 

He thought Matthew Arnold the greatest living Englishman. He spoke with great respect of Carlyle. He said: "Emersonwas an imitator of Carlyle, and got his thoughts from him. "I could not stand that. It seemed to me that he had probablynever read a page of Emerson in his life, and had got hisnotion from some writer for a magazine, before either of thesegreat men was well known. I took the liberty of saying, withsome emphasis, "Emerson was a far profounder and saner intellectthan Carlyle. " To which he said, "Why, what do you say?"I repeated what I had said, and he received the statementwith great politeness, but, of course, without assent. 

During this summer I paid a visit to Moyle's Court, nearSouthampton, formerly owned by Lady Alice Lisle, whose daughtermarried Leonard Hoar, President of Harvard College. LeonardHoar was the brother of my ancestor, John Hoar of Concord, and the son of Charles Hoar, Sheriff of Gloucester. Thereis a statement in an old account of some Puritan worthiesthat I have seen, to the effect that John Hoar and Leonardmarried sisters. If that be true, John Hoar's wife, Alice, was a daughter and namesake of Lady Alice Lisle. AlthoughI should like to believe it, I am afraid that the claim cannotbe made good. Lady Alice Lisle was a lady of large wealthand good lineage. Her husband was John Lord Lisle, who wasLord Justice under Cromwell, and one of the Judges in thetrial of Charles I. He drew the indictment and sentence ofthe King, and sat next to Bradshaw at the trial, and directedand prompted him in difficult matters. He was murdered oneSunday morning on his way to church when in exile at Lausanne, Switzerland, on the Lake of Geneva, by three ruffians, saidto be sent for that purpose by Queen Henrietta. Lady AliceLisle was a victim of the brutality of Jeffries. After Monmouth'srebellion and defeat, she gave shelter and food to two fugitivesfrom Monmouth's army. The report of her trial is in Howell. There was no proof that she knew that they were fugitivesfrom Monmouth's army, although she supposed one of them wasa Dissenting minister. There had been no conviction of theprincipals, which the English law required before an accessoryafter the fact could be found guilty. She suggested thispoint at the trial, but it was overruled by Jeffries. Heconducted the case with infinite brutality. She was a kindlyold lady, of more than seventy years. She slept during partof the trial, probably being fatigued by the journey, in whichshe had been carried on horseback from Moyle's Court to Winchester, and the sleepless nights which would naturally have followed. She was sentenced to be burned at the stake. But the sentencewas commuted to beheading, at the intercession of the gentryof the neighborhood. She had disapproved of the executionof the King; said she had always prayed for him, and had ason in the King's army. Macaulay's account of the story isfamiliar to all readers of English history. 

I was received at the old house with great kindness by Mrs. Fane, wife of the present proprietor. It is a beautifulold house with carved oak partitions, with a dining roomrising to the roof. Lady Lisle's chamber and the place wherethe two fugitives were concealed are still shown. Mrs. Fanehad gathered some local traditions which are not found inprint. One old lady, who had been well known to persons nowliving, had received some of them from her grandmother, whowas cotemporary with Lady Alice. 

The lady was very popular with her tenants in the neighborhood. The messenger who came from Winchester to arrest her tookher on horseback behind him, according to the custom of thetime. The horse cast a shoe. The messenger was for pressingon without regard to the suffering of the animal. She insistedthat he should stop and have the horse shod. The man roughlyrefused. She said: "I have made no outcry, on my own account. But everybody here loves me. If you do not stop, I shallcry out. You will never get away with me alive. " The fellowwas frightened and consented to stop at a smithy. When thesmith had finished his work, Lady Lisle said: "I will be backthis way in two or three days, and I will pay you. " To thisthe messenger said: "Yes, you will be back this way in twoor three days, but without your head. "

The headless body was brought back from Winchester after thetrial. The next day, when the household were at dinner, aman came to the outside and thrust into the dining room windowa basket, containing her head. This was said to be for "greaterindignity. "

Lady Lisle had known Hicks, one of the persons whom she relieved, before. When the court was sitting for the trial of CharlesI. , she went up to London to expostulate with her husband. She arrived at his lodgings just as he was setting out ina procession, with some state, for Westminster Hall, wherethe trial was held. As she approached to speak to him, hedid not recognize her in the soiled dress in which she hadtravelled, and motioned her away rather roughly. It was saidthat she was overcome by the press in the crowd and fell tothe ground. Hicks, who was a Dissenting minister, raisedher up and took her to his own lodging near by in the Strand. She said to him that she could not recompense him there, butif he would come to Hampshire, or to the Isle of Wight, whereshe had property, she would be glad to repay him. 

Saturday, October 22, 1892, with Mrs. Hoar and her sister, Mrs. Rice, I went from Southampton to Ringwood, about twentymiles, and thence drove to Ellingham Church, about two milesand a half. The church is a small but very beautiful structureof stone, with a small wooden belfry. The tomb of Lady AliceLisle is a heavy, flat slab of gray stone, raised about twoor three feet from the ground, bearing the following inscription:

 Here lies Dame Alicia Lisle and her daughter Ann Harfeld who dyed the 17th of Feb. 1703-4 Alicia Lisle dyed the second of Sept. 1685. 

It is close to the wall of the church, on the right of theporch. In the church is seen the old Lisle pew of carvedoak, now the pew of the Earl of Normanton. Opposite thepew is the pulpit, also of carved black oak, apparently ancient. The church contains a tablet to the memory of the former ownerof Moyle's Court, who died in 1622. 

Moyle's Court is about a mile and a half from Ellingham Church. The drive is along a beautiful lane shaded by trees whosebranches meet from the two sides, through a beautiful andfertile country, adorned by herds of fine cattle. Moyle'sCourt is a large two-story building, consisting of two squarewings connected by the main building. The wings project fromthe main building in front, but the whole forms a continuousline in the rear. As you approach it, you pass numerousheavy, brick outbuildings, including several farmhouses, oneof which is quite large, and apparently of great antiquity. We were received by Mrs. Fane with the greatest courtesy. She said that the landed estate connected with Moyle's Courtis very large, now or recently yielding the Earl of Normantonseven thousand pounds a year. 

The present occupant of Moyle's Court, Frederick Fane, Esq. , came there about twenty-one years before. The house was thenmuch dilapidated, but he has restored it in a style in keepingwith the ancient architecture. The principal room is a dininghall, rising from the ground some twenty-five feet in height, with a gallery at one end, on a level with the second story. The walls of this room are of beautiful, carved oak, the frontof the gallery being ancient, and as it existed in the timeof Lady Alice Lisle. The staircase, also of fine, carvedoak, is of equal antiquity. The carved oak in the passagesand some of the other rooms has been restored by Mr. Fanefrom material found in the attic. There is also a curiousold kitchen, with a large fireplace, with a closet in thechimney where it is said one of the persons succored by LadyAlice Lisle was found hidden. In the cellar is a curiouslycarved head on a stone beam, which seemed as if it might formerlyhave supported a mantel-piece or shelf. It is said that thisportion of the cellar was once a chapel. 

Some of the chambers have been named by Mr. Fane from personsconnected with the tragedy--Dame Alicia, Monmouth, Nelthrop, Hicks, Tryphena--these names being inscribed on the doors. The room is shown where Lady Lisle is said to have been seized. 

The old tombstone over the grave of Leonard Hoar and his wife, at the Quincy burial-ground, in Massachusetts, is almost anexact copy of that over Lady Alice Lisle, at Ellerton nearMoyle's Court. They were doubtless selected by the same taste. Mrs. Leonard Hoar, whose maiden name was Bridget Lisle, wasconnected quite intimately with three of the great tragediesin the history of English liberty. Her father, as has beensaid, was murdered at Lausanne. Her mother was murdered underthe form of the mock judgment of Jeffries, at Winchester. Her niece married Lord Henry Russell, son of the Duke of Bedford, and brother of Lord William Russell, the story of whose tragicdeath is familiar to every one who reads the noble historyof the struggle between liberty and tyranny which ended withthe Revolution of 1688. 

Bridget Hoar married again after the death of her husband, President Hoar. Her second husband was a Mr. Usher, whoseems to have been insane. She lived with him very unhappily, then separated from him and went back to England, stayingthere until he died. She then came back to Boston and died, May 25, 1723. At her own request she was buried at the sideof her first husband. A great concourse of the clergy andthe principal citizens, including the Governor, attended herfuneral. 

It was my good fortune to be instrumental, after this visit, in correcting an evil which had caused great annoyance toour representatives abroad for a good many years. 

The Americans have never maintained their representativesabroad with a dignity becoming a great power like the UnitedStates. The American Minister is compelled by our rules towear a dress which exposes him to be mistaken for a waiterat any festive gathering. Distinctions of rank are well establishedin the diplomatic customs of civilized nations. It is wellunderstood that whether a representative of a county shallbe an Ambassador, a Minister Plenipotentiary, a Minister Resident, or a Charge' d'affaires, depends on the sense of its rankamong the nations of the world of the country that sends him. For many years all argument was lost on Congress. The UnitedStates representative must not adopt the customs as to dressof the effete monarchies of the old world. To send an Ambassadorinstead of a Minister was to show a most undemocratic deferenceto titles, abhorrent to every good republican. There hadbeen several attempts to make a change in this matter, alwaysunsuccessful, until I went abroad in 1892. 

When I was in London in that year, I saw a great deal ofMr. Lincoln. He told me how vexatious he found his position. When the Minister for Foreign Affairs received the diplomaticrepresentatives of other countries at the Foreign Office, Ambassadors were treated as belonging to one rank, or class, and the Ministers as to a lower one. The members of eachclass were received in the order of their seniority. We changeour Ministers with every Administration. So the Ministerof the United States is likely to be among the juniors. Hemight have to wait all day, while the representatives of insignificantlittle States were received one after another. If, beforethe day ended, his turn came, some Ambassador would arrive, who would get there, perhaps, five minutes before it was timefor Mr. Lincoln to go in, he had precedence at once. So therepresentative of the most powerful country on earth mighthave to lose the whole day, only to repeat the same experienceon the next. 

An arrangement was made which partly cured the trouble bythe Minister for Foreign Affairs receiving Mr. Lincoln, onspecial application, informally, at his residence, on someother day. But that was frequently very inconvenient. And, besides, it was not always desirable to make a special applicationfor an audience, which would indicate to the English Governmentthat we attached great importance to the request he mighthave to make, so that conditions of importance would be likelybe attached to it by them. It was quite desirable, sometimes, to mention a subject incidentally and by the way, rather thanto make it matter of a special appointment. 

When I got to Paris, I found Mr. Coolidge complaining of thesame difficulty. I told our two Ministers that when I gothome I would try to devise a remedy. Accordingly I proposedand moved as an amendment to the Consular and Diplomatic AppropriationBill, the following clause:

"Whenever the President shall be advised that any foreigngovernment is represented, or is about to be represented inthe United States, by an Ambassador, Envoy Extraordinary, Minister Plenipotentiary, Minister Resident, Special Envoy, or Charge' d'affairs, he is authorized, in his discretion, to direct that the representatives of the United States tosuch government shall bear the same designation. This provisionshall in no wise affect the duties, powers, or salary of suchrepresentative. "

This had the hearty approval of Senators Allison and Hale, the leading members of the Committee on Appropriations, andwas reported favorably by that Committee. 

Senator Vest was absent when the matter came up, and it passedwithout opposition. Mr. Vest announced, the next day, thathe had intended to oppose it. I am afraid if he had, he wouldhave succeeded in defeating it. 

When it went to the House, the Committee on Appropriationsconsented to retain the amendment, and it was favored by Mr. Hitt of Illinois, who had, himself, represented the countryabroad and knew all about such matters. There was a littleopposition in the House. But it was quieted without greatdifficulty. Vice-President Morton, who had, himself, representedthe country at Paris, went personally to the House and usedhis great influence in favor of the proposition. Mr. Blountof Georgia, a very influential Democrat, threatened to makea strong opposition. But the gentlemen who favored it saidto him: "Now you are going out of the House, but your countrymenwill not long let you stay in retirement. You will be summonedto important public service somewhere. It is quite likelythat your political friends will call you to one of theseimportant diplomatic places, where you will be in danger ofsuffering the inconvenience yourself, if the present systemcontinue. " Mr. Blount was pacified. And the measure whichI think would have been beaten by a pugnacious oppositionin either House of Congress, got through. 

Among the most impressive recollections of my life is thefuneral of Tennyson in Westminster Abbey. I got a seat atthe request of the American Minister by the favor of ArchdeaconFarrar, who had charge of the arrangements. It was a mostimpressive scene. I had a seat near the grave, which wasin the Poets' Corner, of which the pavement had been opened. The wonderful music; the stately procession which followedthe coffin through the historic West entrance, in the mostvenerable building in the world, to lay the poet to sleephis last sleep with England's illustrious dead of more thana thousand years, In those precincts where the mighty rest, With rows of statesmen and with walks of Kings, to which

 Ne'er since their foundation came a nobler guest, was unspeakably touching and impressive. The solemn burialservice was conducted by the aged Dean, doomed, not long after, to follow the beloved poet to his own final resting-placenear by. 

The choir sang two anthems, both by Tennyson--"Crossing theBar" and "Silent Voices"--the music of the latter by LadyTennyson. 

The grave lay next to Robert Browning's, hard by the monumentto Chaucer. I looked into it and saw the oaken coffin withthe coronet on the lid. 

The pall-bearers were the Duke of Argyle, Lord Dufferin, Lord Selbourne, Lord Rosebery, Mr. Jowett, Mr. Lecky, Mr. Froude, Lord Salisbury, Dr. Butler, Head of Trinity, Cambridge, Sir James Paget, Lord Kelvin and the United States Minister. The place of Mr. Lincoln, who had gone home on leave of absence, was taken by Mr. Henry White. 

After depositing the body, the bearers passed the seat whereI sat, one by one, pressing through between two rows of seats, so that their garments touched mine as they went by. 

The day was cloudy and mournful, blending an unusual gloomwith the dim religious light of the Abbey. But just as thebody was let down into the earth, the sun came out for a momentfrom the clouds, cheering and lightening up the nave and aislesand transepts of the mighty building. As the light struckthe faces of the statues and the busts, it seemed for a momentthat the countenances changed and stirred with a momentarylife, as if to give a welcome to the guest who had come tobreak upon their long repose. Of course it was but an idleimagination, begot, perhaps, of the profound excitement whichsuch a scene, to the like of which I was so utterly unaccustomed, made upon me. But as I think of it now, I can hardly resistthe belief that it was real. 

It was my good fortune during this journey to become thepurchaser of Wordsworth's Bible. It was presented to himby Frederick William Taber, the famous writer of hymns. Whileit is absolutely clean, it bears the mark of much use. Itwas undoubtedly the Bible of Wordsworth's old age. On mynext visit to England I told John Morley about it. He said, if it had been known, I never should have been allowed totake it out of England. It bears the following inscriptionin Taber's handwriting:

 William Wordsworth From Frederick Wm Taber, In affectionate acknowledgment of his many kindnesses, and of the pleasure and advantage of his friendship. Ambleside. New Year's Eve. 1842. A. D. Be stedfast in thy Covenant, and be _conversant_ therein, and wax old in thy work. Ecclesiasticus XI. 20. 

CHAPTER XXIVISITS TO ENGLAND1896

In 1896 I found myself again utterly broken down in healthand strength. I had, the November before, a slight paralysisin the face, which affected the muscles of the lower lid ofone of my eyes, causing a constant irritation in the organitself. After a time this caused a distortion of the lips, which I concealed somewhat by a moustache. But it operated, for a little while, as an effective disguise. When I camehome during the winter, an old conductor on the Boston & AlbanyRailroad, whom I had known quite well, when he took my ticketlooked at me with some earnestness and said, "Are you notrelated to Senator Hoar?" To which I answered, "I am a connectionof his wife, by marriage. "

I found I must get rid of the work at home, if I were toget back my capacity for work at all. So I sailed for Southamptonbefore the session of Congress ended. It was the only timeI had absented myself from my duties in Congress, except foran urgent public reason, for twenty-seven years and more. 

I saw a good many interesting English people. It is notworth while to give the details of dinners and lunches andsocial life, unless something of peculiar and general interestoccur. Almost every American who can afford it goes abroadnow. Our English kinsmen are full of hospitality. They havegot over their old coldness with which they were apt to receivetheir American cousins, although they were always the mostdelightfully hospitable race on earth when you had once gotwithin the shield of their reserve. 

I remember especially, however, a very pleasant Sunday spenton the Thames, at the delightful home of William Grenfell, Esq. , which I mention because, by a fortunate accident, thevisit had some very interesting consequences. There I metSir John Lubbock, now Baron Avebury, famous for his writingson financial questions and on Natural History, especiallyfor his observations of the habits of ants. He told me, ifI am not mistaken, that he had personally watched the conductand behavior of more than fifteen thousand individual ants. There was a company of agreeable English ladies and gentlemen. They played games in the evening after dinner, as you mightexpect of a company of American boys and girls of sixteenor eighteen years old. 

Mr. Grenfell was a famous sportsman. His house was filledwith the trophies of his skill in hunting. I was told thathe had crossed the Channel in a row-boat. 

Sir John Lubbock invited me to breakfast with him a few daysafterward in St. James Square. There I met a large numberof scientific men, among them the President of the GeographicalSociety, and the Presidents or Heads of several other of theimportant British Societies. I was presented to all thesegentlemen. But I found I could not easily understand thenames, when they were presented. Englishmen usually, evenwhen they speak the language exactly as we do, have a peculiarpronunciation of names, which makes it very hard for an Americanear to catch them. I could not very well say, "What namedid you say?" or ask the host to repeat himself. So I wasobliged to spend the hour in ignorance of the special dignityof most of the illustrious persons whom I met. 

Just behind my chair hung a full-length portrait of AdmiralBoscawen, a famous naval officer connected with our earlyhistory. For him was named the town of Boscawen in New Hampshire, where Daniel Webster practised law. The house where we werehad been his. I think he was in some way akin to the host. 

I sailed for home on Wednesday. The Friday night before, I dined with Moreton Frewen, Esq. , an accomplished Englishgentleman, well known on this side of the Atlantic. Mr. Frewenhad been very kind and hospitable to me, as he had been tomany Americans. He deserves the gratitude of both nationsfor what he has done to promote good feeling between the twocountries by his courtesy to Americans of all parties andways of thinking. He has helped make the leading men of bothcountries know each other. From that knowledge has commonlyfollowed a hearty liking for each other. 

I mention this dinner, as I did the visit to Mr. Grenfell, because of its connection with a very interesting transaction. The guests at the dinner were Sir Julian Pauncefote, afterwardLord Pauncefote, the British Ambassador to the United States, who was then at home on a brief visit; Sir Seymour Blaine, an old military officer who had won, as I was told, greatdistinction in the East, and two Spanish noblemen. 

The soldier told several very interesting stories of hismilitary life, and of what happened to him in his early days. 

Of these I remember two. He said that when he was a youngofficer, scarcely more than a boy, he was invited by the Dukeof Wellington, with other officers, to a great ball at ApsleyHouse. Late in the evening, after the guests had left thesupper room, and it was pretty well deserted, he felt a desirefor another glass of wine. There was nobody in the supperroom. He was just pouring out a glass of champagne for himself, when he heard a voice behind him. "Youngster, what are youdoing?" He turned round. It was the Duke. He said, "I amgetting a glass of wine. " To this the Duke replied, "You oughtto be up-stairs dancing. There are but two things, Sir, fora boy like you to be doing. One is fighting; the other dancingwith the girls. As for me I'm going to bed. " Thereupon theDuke passed round the table; touched a spring which openeda secret door, in what was apparently a set of book-shelves, and disappeared. 

Sir Seymour Blaine told another story which, I dare say, is well known. But I have never seen it in print. He saidthat just before the Battle of Talavera when the Duke, thenSir Arthur Wellesley, was in command in Spain, the Englishand French armies had been marching for many days on parallellines, neither quite liking to attack the other, and neitherhaving got the advantage in position which they were seeking. At last, one day, when everybody was pretty weary with thefatigues of the march, the Duke summoned some of his leadingofficers together and said to them: "You see that clump oftrees (pointing to one a good distance away, but in sightfrom where they stood)--when the head of the French columnreaches that clump of trees, attack. As for me I'm goingto sleep under this bush. " Thereupon the great soldier laydown, all his arrangements being made, and everything beingin readiness, and took his nap while the great battle of Talavera--on which the fate of Spain and perhaps the fate of Europedepended--was begun. This adds another instance to the listof the occasions to which Mr. Everett refers when he speaksof Webster's sleeping soundly the night before his great replyto Hayne. 

"So the great Conde' slept on the eve of the battle of Rocroi;so Alexander slept on the eve of the battle of Arbela; andso they awoke to deeds of immortal fame!"

But this dinner of Mr. Frewen's had a very interesting consequence. As I took leave of him at his door about eleven o'clock, heasked me if there were anything more he could do for me. Isaid, "No, unless you happen to know the Lord Bishop of London. I have a great longing to see the Bradford Manuscript beforeI go home. It is in the Bishop's Library. I went to Fulhamthe other day, but found the Bishop was gone. I had supposedthe Library was a half-public one. I asked the servant whocame to the door for the librarian. He told me there wasno such officer, and that it was treated in all respects asa private library. But I should be very glad if I could getan opportunity to see it. " Mr. Frewen answered, "I do notmyself know the Bishop. But Mr. Grenfell, at whose houseyou spent Sunday, a little while ago, is his nephew by marriage. He is in Scotland. But if I can reach him, I will procure foryou a letter to his uncle. " That was Friday. Sunday morningthere came a note from Mr. Grenfell to the Bishop. I enclosedit to his Lordship in one from myself, in which I said thatif it were agreeable to him, I would call at Fulham the nextTuesday, at an hour which I fixed. I got a courteous replyfrom the Bishop, in which he said that he would be glad toshow me the "log of the Mayflower, " as he called it. I keptthe appointment, and found the Bishop with the book in hishand. He received me very courteously, and showed me a littleof the palace. He said that there had been a Bishop's palaceon that spot for more than a thousand years. 

I took the precious manuscript in my hands, and examinedit with an almost religious reverence. I had delivered theaddress at Plymouth, the twenty-first of December, 1895, onthe occasion of the two hundred and seventy-fifth anniversaryof the landing of the Pilgrims upon the rock. In preparingfor that duty I read carefully, with renewed enthusiasm anddelight, the noble and touching story as told by GovernorBradford. I declared then that this precious history oughtto be in no other custody than that of their children. 

There have been several attempts to procure the return ofthe manuscript to this country. Mr. Winthrop, in 1860, throughthe venerable John Sinclair, Archdeacon, urged the Bishopof London to give it up, and proposed that the Prince of Wales, then just coming to this country, should take it across theAtlantic and present it to the people of Massachusetts. TheAttorney-General, Sir Fitzroy Kelley, approved the plan, andsaid it would be an exceptional act of grace, a most interestingaction, and that he heartily wished the success of the application. But the Bishop refused. Again, in 1869, John Lothrop Motley, the Minister to England, who had a great and deserved influencethere, repeated the proposition, at the suggestion of thatmost accomplished scholar, Justin Winsor. But his appealhad the same fate. The Bishop gave no encouragement, and said, as had been said nine years before, that the property couldnot be alienated without an Act of Parliament. Mr. Winsorplanned to repeat the attempt on his visit to England in 1887. When he was at Fulham the Bishop was absent, and he was obligedto go home without seeing him in person. 

In 1881, at the time of the death of President Garfield, Benjamin Scott, Chamberlain of London, proposed again inthe newspapers that the restitution should be made. Butnothing came of it. 

When I went abroad I determined to visit the locality onthe borders of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, from which Bradfordand Brewster and Robinson, the three leaders of the Pilgrims, came, and where their first church was formed, and the placesin Amsterdam and Leyden where the emigrants spent thirteenyears. But I longed especially to see the manuscript of Bradfordat Fulham, which then seemed to me, as it now seems to me, the most precious manuscript on earth, unless we could recoverone of the four gospels as it came in the beginning from thepen of the Evangelist. 

The desire to get it back grew and grew during the voyageacross the Atlantic. I did not know how such a propositionwould be received in England. A few days after I landedI made a call on John Morley. I asked him whether he thoughtthe thing could be done. He inquired carefully into the story, took down from his shelf the excellent though brief life ofBradford in Leslie Stephen's "Biographical Dictionary, " andtold me he thought the book ought to come back to us, andthat he should be glad to do anything in his power to help. It was my fortune, a week or two after, to sit next to Mr. Bayard at a dinner given to Mr. Collins, by the American consulsin Great Britain. I took occasion to tell him the story, and he gave me the assurance, which he afterward so abundantlyand successfully fulfilled, of his powerful aid. I was compelled, by the health of one of the party with whom I was travelling, to go to the Continent almost immediately, and was disappointedin the hope of an early return to England. 

After looking at the volume and reading the records on theflyleaf, I said: "My Lord, I am going to say something whichyou may think rather audacious. I think this book ought togo back to Massachusetts. Nobody knows how it got over here. Some people think it was carried off by Governor Hutchinson, the Tory Governor; other people think it was carried off byBritish soldiers when Boston was evacuated; but in eithercase the property would not have changed. Or, if you treatit as booty, in which last case, I suppose, by the law ofnations ordinary property does change, no civilized nationin modern times applies that principle to the property oflibraries and institutions of learning. "

The Bishop said: "I did not know you cared anything aboutit. "

"Why, " said I, "if there were in existence in England a historyof King Alfred's reign for thirty years, written by his ownhand, it would not be more precious in the eyes of Englishmenthan this manuscript is to us. "

"Well, " said he, "I think myself that it ought to go back, and if it depended on me it would have gone back before this. But many of the Americans who have been here have been commercialpeople, and did not seem to care much about it except as acuriosity. I suppose I ought not to give it up on my ownauthority. It belongs to me in my official capacity, andnot as private or personal property. I think I ought to consultthe Archbishop of Canterbury. And, indeed, " he added, "Ithink I ought to speak to the Queen about it. We should notdo such a thing behind Her Majesty's back. "

I said: "Very well, when I go home I will have a properapplication made from some of our literary societies, andask you to give it consideration. "

I saw Mr. Bayard again and told him the story. He was atthe train when I left London for the steamer at Southampton. He entered with great interest into the matter, and told meagain he would do anything in his power to forward it. 

When I got home I communicated with Secretary Olney aboutit, who took a kindly interest in the matter, and wrote toMr. Bayard that the Administration desired he should do everythingin his power to promote the application. The matter was thenbrought to the attention of the Council of the American AntiquarianSociety, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the PilgrimSociety of Plymouth and the New England Society of New York. These bodies appointed committees to unite in the application. Governor Wolcott was also consulted, who gave his hearty approbationto the movement, and a letter was despatched through Mr. Bayard. 

Meantime, Bishop Temple, with whom I had my conversation, had himself become Archbishop of Canterbury, and in that capacityPrimate of all England. His successor, Rev. Dr. Creighton, had been the delegate of Emanuel, John Harvard's College, to the great celebration at Harvard University in 1886, onthe two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its foundation. He had received the degree of Doctor of Laws from the University, had been a guest of President Eliot, and had received PresidentEliot as his guest in England. 

The full story of the recovery of the manuscript, in whichthe influence of Ambassador Bayard and the kindness of BishopTemple, afterward Archbishop of Canterbury, had so large apart, is too long to tell here. Before the question was decidedArchbishop Temple consulted Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, whotook a deep interest in the matter, and gave the plan hercordial approval. I think, as I had occasion to say to theBritish Ambassador afterward, that the restoration of thispriceless manuscript did more to cement the bonds of friendshipbetween the people of the two countries than forty Canal Treaties. In settling Imperial questions both nations are thinking, properly and naturally, of great interests. But his restorationwas an act of purest kindness. The American people, in themidst of all their material activities, their desire for wealthand empire, are a sentimental people, easily and deeply stirredby anything that touches their finer feelings, especiallyanything that relates to their history. 

The Bishop was authorized to return the manuscript by a decreerendered in his own Court, by his Chancellor. The Chancelloris regarded as the servant of the Bishop, and holds office, I believe, at his will. But so does the King's Chancellorat the King's will. I suppose the arrangement by which theChancellor determines suits in which his superior is affectedmay be explained on the same ground as the authority of theLord Chancellor to determine suits in which the Crown is aparty. 

I was quite curious to know on what ground, legal or equitable, the decree for the restoration of the manuscript was made. I wrote, after the thing was over, to the gentleman who hadacted as Mr. Bayard's counsel in the case, asking him to enlightenme on this subject. I got a very courteous letter from himin reply, in which he said he was then absent from home, butwould answer my inquiry on his return. After he got back, however, I got a formal and ceremonious letter, in which hesaid that, having been employed by Mr. Bayard as a publicofficer, he did not think he was at liberty to answer questionsasked by private persons. As the petition and decree hadgone on the express ground that the application for the returnof the manuscript was made by Mr. Bayard, not in his official, but only in his private capacity, as he had employed counselat my request, and I had been responsible for their fees, I was, at first, inclined to be a little vexed at the answer. On a little reflection, however, I saw that it was not bestto be too curious on the subject; that where there was a willthere was a way, and probably there was no thought, in gettingthe decree, on the part of anybody concerned, to be too strictas to legalities. I was reminded, however, of Silas Wegg'sanswer to Mr. Boffin, when he read aloud to him and his wifeevening after evening "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "which Silas had spoken of at first, as "The Decline and Fallof the Russian Empire. " Mr. Boffin noticed the inconsistency, and asked Mr. Wegg why it was that he had called it "The Declineand Fall of the Russian Empire" in the beginning. To whichMr. Wegg replied that Mrs. Boffin was present, and that itwould not be proper to answer that question in the presenceof a lady. 

The manuscript was brought to Massachusetts by Mr. Bayard, on his return to the United States at the end of his officialterm. It was received by the Legislature in the presenceof a large concourse of citizens, to whom I told the storyof the recovery. Mr. Bayard delivered the book to the Governorand the Legislature with an admirable speech, and GovernorWolcott expressed the thanks of the State in an eloquent reply. He said that "the story of the departure of this preciouswork from our shores may never in every detail be revealed;but the story of its return will be read of all men, and willbecome a part of the history of the Commonwealth. There areplaces and objects so intimately associated with the world'sgreatest men or with mighty deeds that the soul of him whogazes upon them is lost in a sense of reverent awe, as itlistens to the voice that speaks from the past, in words likethose which came from the burning bush, 'Put off thy shoesfrom off they feet, for the place whereon thou standest isholy ground. '

"The story here told is one of triumphant achievement, andnot of defeat. As the official representative of the Commonwealth, I receive it, sir, at your hands. I pledge the faith of theCommonwealth that for all time it shall be guarded in accordancewith the terms of the decree under which it is delivered intoher possession as one of her chiefest treasures. I expressthe thanks of the Commonwealth for the priceless gift, andI venture the prophecy that for countless years to come andto untold thousands these mute pages shall eloquently speakof high resolve, great suffering and heroic endurance madepossible by an absolute faith in the over-ruling providenceof Almighty God. "

The Bishop gave the Governor of Massachusetts the right todeposit the manuscript either in his office at the StateHouse or with the Massachusetts Historical Society, of whichArchbishop Temple and Bishop Creighton, who succeeded BishopTemple in the See of London, were both Honorary members. TheGovernor, under my advice, deposited the manuscript in theState House. It seemed to him and to me that the Commonwealth, which is made up of the Colony which Bradford founded, andof which he was Governor, blended with that founded by thePuritans under Winthrop, was the fitting custodian of thelife in Leyden of the founders of Plymouth, of the voyageacross the sea, and of the first thirty years of the Colonyhere. It is kept in the State Library, open at the spot whichcontains the Compact made on board the Mayflower--the firstwritten Constitution in history. Many visitors gaze uponit every year. Few of them look upon it without a tremblingof the lip and a gathering of mist in the eye. I am toldthat it is not uncommon that strong men weep when they beholdit. 

CHAPTER XXIISILVER AND BIMETALLISM

I was compelled, by the state of my health, to be absentfrom the country in the campaign which preceded the Presidentialelection of 1896, except for the last week or two. But, ofcourse, I took a very deep interest indeed in the campaign. Mr. Bryan's theories, and those of his followers in many partsof the country, had thoroughly alarmed the business men ofthe Northern and Eastern States. But in the new States ofthe Northwest, especially in those that contained silver mines, a large majority of the people, without distinction of party, had become converts to the doctrine that the United Statesshould coin silver at a ratio compared to gold of sixteento one, and make the silver so coined legal tender in thepayment of all debts, public and private. The price of silveras compared with that of gold had been constantly fallingfor several years past. This was attributed to the effectof the legislation which demonetized silver except to a limitedamount. Several eminent Republicans, both in the Senate andin the House, as well as many others in private station, leftthe Republican Party on that issue. Several States that hadbeen constantly and reliably Republican became Democraticor Populist, under the same influence. 

The Democratic Platform of 1896 demanded the immediate restorationof the free coinage of gold and silver at the present ratioof 16 to 1, without waiting for the consent of any other nation. That doctrine was reaffirmed and endorsed in the DemocraticNational Platform for 1900. 

There were two theories among the persons who desired to maintainthe gold standard. One was entertained by the persons knownas Gold Monometallists. They insisted that no value couldbe given to any commodity by legislation. They said thatnothing could restore silver to its old value as comparedwith gold; that its fall was owing to natural causes, chieflyto the increased production. They insisted that every attemptto restore silver to its old place would be futile, and thatthe promise to make the attempt, under any circumstances, was juggling with the people, from which nothing but disasterand shame would follow. They justly maintained that, if weundertook the unlimited coinage of silver, and to make itlegal tender, under the inevitable law long ago announcedby Gresham, the cheaper metal, silver, would flow into thecountry where it would have a larger value for the purposeof paying debts, and that gold, the more precious metal, woulddesert the country where there would be no use found for itas long as the cheaper metal would perform its function accordingto law. From this, it was claimed, would follow the makingof silver the exclusive basis of all commercial transactions;the disturbance of our commercial relations with other countries, and the establishment of a standard of value which would fluctuateand shrink as the value of silver fluctuated and shrunk. Sothat no man who contracted a debt on time could tell whatwould be the value of the coin he would be compelled to paywhen his debt became due, and all business on earth wouldbecome gambling. They, therefore, demanded that the RepublicanParty should plant itself squarely on the gold standard; shouldannounce its purpose to make gold the exclusive legal tenderfor the country, and appeal to the people for support in thePresidential election, standing on that ground. 

To them their antagonists answered, that the true law wasstated by Alexander Hamilton in his famous Report, acceptedby all his contemporaries, and by all our statesmen of allparties down to 1873 or thereabouts, and recognised in theConstitution of the United States. That doctrine was, thatthe standard of value must necessarily be fixed by the agreementof all commercial nations. No nation could, without infinitesuffering and mischief, undertake to set itself against therule adopted by the rest of mankind. It was best, if thenations would consent to it, to have two metals instead ofone made legal tender, at a ratio to be agreed upon by allmankind, establishing what was called Bimetallism. If thiswere done, the Gresham law could not operate, because therewould be no occasion for the cheaper metal to flow into anyone country by reason of its having a preference there inthe payment of debts; and nothing which would cause the moreprecious metal to depart from any country by reason of itsbeing at a disadvantage. If such a rule were adopted, anda proper ratio once established, it would be pretty likelyto continue, unless there were a very large increase in theproduction of one metal or the other. If the supply of goldin proportion to silver were diminished a little, the correspondingdemand for silver by all mankind would bring up its priceand cure the inequality. So, if the supply of gold were toincrease in proportion to silver, a like effect would takeplace. 

If, however, the nations of the world were to agree on onemetal alone, it was best that the most precious metal shouldbe taken for that purpose. 

The above, in substance, was the doctrine of Alexander Hamilton, the ablest practical financier and economist that ever lived, certainly without a rival in this country. 

The duties specially assigned to me in the Senate and inthe House related to other matters. But I made as thoroughand faithful a study as I could of this great question, andaccepted Hamilton's conclusions. I believed they were rightin themselves, and thought the reasons by which they weresupported, although the subject is complex and difficult, likely to find favor with the American people. Silver hasalways been a favorite metal with mankind from the beginning. While gold may be the standard of value, it is too preciousto be a convenient medium of payment for small sums, suchas enter into the daily transactions of ordinary life. Itis said that you can no more have a double standard, or twomeasures of value, than you can have a double standard, ortwo measures of distance. But the compensating effect maybe well illustrated by what is done by the makers of clocksfor the most delicate measurements of time, such as are usedfor astronomical calculations. The accuracy of the clockdepends upon the length of the pendulum and the weight whichthe pendulum supports. If the disk at the end of the pendulumbe humg by a wire of a single metal, that metal expands andshrinks in length under changing atmospheric influences, andaffects the clock's record of time. So the makers of theseclocks resort to two or three wires of different metals, differentlyaffected by the atmosphere. One of these compensates forand supplements the other, so that the atmospheric changeshave much less effect than upon a single metal. 

Beside the fact that I thoroughly believed in the soundnessof bimetallism, as I now believe in it, I thought we oughtnot to give our antagonists who were pressing us so hard, and appealing so zealously to every debtor and every man inpecuniary difficulties, the advantage, in debate before thepeople, of arraying on their side all our great authoritiesof the past. We had enough on our hands to encounter Mr. Bryan and the solid South and the powerful Democratic Partyof New York and the other great cities, and every man in thecountry who was uneasy and discontented, without giving themthe right to claim as their allies Alexander Hamilton, andGeorge Washington, and Oliver Ellsworth, and John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, and Thomas H. Benton. I was, therefore, eager that the Republican Party should statefrankly in its platform what I, myself, deemed the sound doctrine. It should denounce and condemn the attempt to establish thefree coinage of silver by the power of the United Statesalone, and declare that to be practical repudiation and nationalruin. But I thought we ought also to declare our willingness, if the great commercial nations of the earth would agree, to establish a bimetallic system on a ratio to be agreed upon. 

Some of the enemies of the Republican Party, who could notadopt the Democratic plan for the free coinage of silver, without contradicting all their utterances in the past, denouncedthis proposal as a subterfuge, a straddle, an attempt to deceivethe people and get votes by pledges not meant to be carriedout. 

I believed then, and I believe now, that we were right indemanding that the Republican Party should go into the campaignwith the declaration I have stated. 

It is true that you cannot give value to any commodity bylaw. It is as idle to attempt to make an ounce of silverworth as much as an ounce of gold by legislation, as it is totry to make one pound weigh two pounds, or one yard measuretwo yards. You cannot increase the price of a hat, or a coat, or a farm, by act of Congress. The value of every article, whether gold or silver, whether used as money or as merchandise, must depend upon the inexorable law of demand and supply. But you can, by legislation, compel the use of an article, which use will create a demand for it, and the demand willthen increase its price. If Congress shall require that everysoldier in the United States Army shall wear a hat or coatof a particular material or pattern, or shall enact that everyman who votes shall come to the polls dressed in broadcloth, if there be a limited supply of these commodities, the priceof the hat or the coat or the broadcloth will go up. So, when the nations of the world joined in depriving silver ofone of its chief uses--that of serving the function of a tenderfor the payment of debts, the value of silver diminished becauseone large use which it had served before was gone. Whetherthis doctrine be sound or no, it was the result of as carefulstudy as I ever gave in my life, to any subject, public orprivate. It was not only the doctrine of the Fathers, butof recent generations. It was the doctrine on which the Republicansof Massachusetts, a community noted for its conservatism andbusiness sagacity, had planted the Commonwealth, and it wasthe doctrine on which the American people planted itself andwhich triumphed in the election of 1896. 

I have been accused, sometimes, of want of sincerity, and, by one leading New England paper, with having an imperfectand confused understanding of the subject. Perhaps I maybe pardoned, therefore, for quoting two testimonials to thevalue of my personal contribution to this debate. One camefrom Senator Clay of Georgia, one of the ablest of the Democraticleaders. After I had stated my doctrine in a brief speechin the Senate one day, he crossed the chamber and said tome that, while he did not accept it, he thought I had madethe ablest and most powerful statement of it he had ever heardor read. The other came from Charles Emory Smith, afterwarda member of President McKinley's Cabinet and editor of the_Press, _ a leading paper in Philadelphia. I have his letterin which he says that he think an edition of at least a millioncopies of my speech on gold and silver should be publishedand circulated through the country. He also said, in an articlein the _Saturday Evening Post, _ June 14, 1902:

"In the great contest over the repeal of the Silver PurchaseAct he made the most luminous exposition, both of what hadbeen done, and the reasons for it; and what ought to be done, and the grounds for it, that was heard in the Senate. "

It occurred to me that I could render a very great serviceto my country, during my absence, if I could be instrumentalin getting a declaration from England and France that thosecountries would join with the United States in an attemptto reestablish silver as a legal tender. 

It was well known that Mr. Balfour, Leader of the Administrationin the House of Commons, was an earnest bimetallist. He hadso declared himself in public, both in the House and elsewhere, more than once. 

There had been a resolution, not long before, signed by morethan two thirds of the French Chamber of Deputies, declaringthat France was ready to take a similar action whenever Englandwould move. I, accordingly, with the intervention of Mr. Frewen, the English friend I have just mentioned, arrangedan interview with Mr. Balfour in Downing Street. We had avery pleasant conversation indeed. I told him that if hewere willing, in case the United States, with France and Germanyand some of the smaller nations, would establish a commonstandard for gold and silver, to declare that the step wouldhave the approval of England, and that, although she wouldmaintain the gold standard alone for domestic purposes, shewould make a substantial and most important contribution tothe success of the joint undertaking, that it would insurethe defeat of the project for silver monometallism, from whichEngland, who was so largely our creditor, would suffer, inthe beginning almost as much as we would, and perhaps muchmore, and would avert the panic and confusion in the businessof the world, which would be brought about by the successof the project. 

I did not state to Mr. Balfour exactly what I thought thecontribution of England to this result ought to be. He, onthe other hand, did not tell me what he thought she woulddo. I did not, of course, expect that England would establishthe free coinage of silver for her own domestic purposes. But I thought it quite likely that she would declare her cordialapproval of the proposed arrangement between the other countries, and would reopen her India mints to the free coinage of therupee, and maintain the silver standard for the Queen's threehundred million subjects in Asia. This contribution, I thought, if Great Britain went no farther, would give great supportto silver, and would ensure the success of the concerted attemptof the other commercial nations to restore silver to its oldplace. 

Mr. Balfour expressed his assent to my proposal, and enteredheartily into the scheme. He said he would be very happyindeed to make such a declaration. I suggested to him thatI had been authorized to say, by one or two gentlemen withwhom I had talked, that, if he were willing, a deputationof the friends of Bimetallism would wait upon him, to whomhe could express his opinion and purpose. He said he thoughtit would be better that he should write a letter to me, andthat if I would write to him stating what I had said orally, he would answer it with such a statement as I desired. Itold him I was going to Paris in a few days, and that I wouldwrite to him from Paris when I got there. The matter wasleft in that way. The next day, or the next day but one, a luncheon was given me at White's, the club famous for itsmemories of Pitt and Canning and the old statesmen of thattime, and still the resort of many of the Conservative leadersof to-day. There were present some fifteen or twenty gentlemen, including several members of the Government. A gentlemanwho had known of my interview with Mr. Balfour, and sat atthe table some distance from me, made some allusion to itwhich was heard by most of the guests. I said that I didnot like to repeat what Mr. Balfour had said; that gentlemenin his position preferred, if their opinions were to be madepublic, to do it for themselves, rather than to have anybodyelse do it for them. To this, one member of the Government--I think it was Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, but I will not undertaketo be sure--said: "It is no secret that Mr. Balfour's opinionsare those of a majority of Her Majesty's Government. "

I went to Paris, and wrote at once the letter that had beenagreed upon, of which I have in my possession a copy. Iat once secured an introduction to M. Fougirot, the Memberof the French Assembly who had drawn and procured the signaturesto the resolution to which I just referred. That is, I amtold, a not uncommon way in France of declaring the senseof the House in anticipation of a more formal vote. He enteredheartily into the plan. He thought Germany would at onceagree, at any rate, he was sure that Belgium, Spain, Italyand all the European commercial powers would come into thearrangement, and that the whole thing would be absolutelysure if Great Britain were to agree. I waited a week or twofor the letter from Mr. Balfour. In the meantime I got aletter from Mr. Frewen, who told me that Mr. Balfour hadshown him the letter he had written to me; that it was admirable, and eminently satisfactory. But no letter came. I waitedanother week or two, and then got another letter from Mr. Frewen, in which he said that he had taken no copy of Mr. Balfour's letter, and had returned the original, and askedme, if I had no objection, if I would give him a copy of it. I answered that I had heard nothing, whereupon Mr. Frewenwrote a note to Mr. Balfour, telling him that I had not heard. Mr. Balfour said that he had, after writing the letter, submittedit to a meeting of his colleagues; that one of them had expressedhis most emphatic disapproval of the plan, and that he didnot feel warranted in taking such a step against the objectionof one of his colleagues. I gathered, from what I heard afterward, that Mr. Balfour wished he had sent he letter without communicatingits contents. But of this I have no right to be sure. Mr. Balfour sent Mr. Frewen the following letter, which is nowin my possession. It was, I suppose with his approval, sentto me. 

10 DOWNING STREET, WHITEHALL, S. W. August 6, 1896. 

DEAR MORETON FREWEN. 

I think Senator Hoar has just reason to complain of my longsilence. But, the truth is that I was unwilling to tellhim that my hopes of sending him a letter for publicationhad come to an end, until I was really certain that this wasthe case. I am afraid however that even if I am able nowto overcome the objections of my colleagues, the letter itselfwould be too late to do much good. Please let me know whatyou think on this subject. 

 Yours sincerely, ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR. 

I never blamed him. He was in the midst of a good deal ofdifficulty with his Education Bill. Certainly there canbe no obligation on the Leader of the English House of Commonsto do anything that he is not sure is for the interests ofhis own country, or his own party, for the sake of benefittinga foreign country, still less for the sake of affecting itspolitics. Indeed, I suppose Mr. Balfour would have utterlyand very rightfully disclaimed any idea of writing such aletter, unless he thought what was proposed would benefitEngland. When I went back to London, an offer was made melater to arrange another interview with Mr. Balfour, andsee if something else could not be devised. This I declined. I thought I had gone as far as I properly could, with a duesense of my own dignity. The exigency at home had prettymuch passed by. 

A day or two after I got to Paris, after I had seen M. Fougirot, I cabled my colleague, Mr. Lodge, at St. Louis, where thedelegates to the convention to nominate a President were thengathering, stating my hope that our convention would insertin its platform a declaration of the purpose of the RepublicanParty to obtain, in concert with other nations, the restorationof silver as a legal tender in company with gold, and thatI had reason to feel sure that such a plan could be accomplished. This cable reached St. Louis on the morning the conventionassembled. I do not know how much influence it had, or whetherit had any, in causing the insertion of that plank in theplatform. Such a plank was inserted. In my opinion it savedthe Presidential election, and, in my opinion, in saving thePresidential election, it saved the country from the incalculableevil of the free coinage of silver. 

After I came home, at the next winter's session, I told thestory of what I had done, to a caucus of the Republican Senators. A Committee was thereupon appointed by John Sherman, Presidentof the Caucus, to devise proper means for keeping the pledgeof the National platform and establishing international bimetallismin concurrence with other nations. The Committee consistedof Messrs. Wolcott, Hoar, Chandler, Carter and Gear. Theyreported the Act of March 3, 1897, authorizing a commissionto visit Europe for that purpose, of which Senator Wolcottwas chairman. 

A Commission was sent abroad by President McKinley, in pursuanceof the pledge of the Republican National platform, to endeavorto effect an arrangement with the leading European nationsfor an international bimetallic standard. Senator Wolcottof Colorado, who was the head of this Commission, told mehe was emboldened to undertake it by the account I had given. The Commission met with little success. I conjecture thatthe English Administration, although a majority of the Government, and probably a majority of the Conservative Party, were Bimetallistsand favored an international arrangement on principle, didnot like to disturb existing conditions at the risk of offendingthe banking interests at London, especially those which hadcharge of the enormous foreign investments, the value ofwhich would be constantly increasing so long as their debtswere payable, principal and interest, in gold, the value ofwhich, also, was steadily appreciating. 

It has been the fashion of some quite zealous--I will notsay presumptuous, still less ignorant or shallow writers onthis subject--to charge bimetallists with catering to a mischievous, popular delusion, for political purposes, or with shallownessin thinking or investigating. I have had my share of suchcriticism. All I have to say in reply to it is that I havedone my best to get at the truth, without, so far as I amconcerned, any desire except to get at and utter the truth. In addition to the authority of our own early statesmen, and to that of the eminent Englishmen to whom I have referred, I wish to cite that of my pupil and dear friend, General FrancisA. Walker, who is declared by abundant European, as well asAmerican authority, to be the foremost writer on money ofmodern times. He was a thorough believer in the doctrineI have stated. 

He pointed out the danger, indeed the ruin, of undertakingto reestablish silver without the consent of foreign nations. But he declared that the happiness and, perhaps, the safetyof the country rested on Bimetallism. He said:

"Indeed, every monometallist ought also to be a monoculist. Polyphemus, the old Cyclops, would be his ideal. Unfortunatelyour philosophers were not in the Garden of Eden at the timewhen the Creator made the mistake of endowing men with eyesin pairs. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that thereare probably few men whose eyes do not differ from each otheras to every element affecting vision by more than the degreefrom which gold and silver varied from the French standardof fifteen and a half to one for whole decades. "

The German Imperial Parliament passed a resolution, in June, 1895, in favor of Bimetallism, and the Prussian Parliamentpassed a resolution favoring an international bimetallic convention, provided England joined it, May 22, 1895. 

The great increase in the gold product of the world, andthe constant diminution in the value of silver, have put anend to the danger of the movement for the free coinage ofsilver, and made the question purely academic or theoretic, at any rate for a good while to come. The same causes havediminished the desire for a bimetallic standard, and makethe difficulty of establishing a parity between silver andgold, for the present, almost insuperable. So the questionwhich excited so much public feeling throughout the worldfor nearly a quarter of a century, and endangered not onlythe ascendancy of the Republican Party, but the financialstrength of the United States, has become almost wholly oneof theory and ancient history. 

After leaving Paris I spent a few delightful weeks at Innsbruckin Austria, and Reichenhall in Germany, both near the frontierbetween those two countries. The wonderful scenery and thecurious architecture and antiquity of those towns transportone back to the Middle Ages. But I suppose they are too wellknown now, to our many travellers, to make it worth whileto describe them. I went to those places for the health ofa lady nearly allied to my household. She was under the careof Baron Liebig, one of the most famous physicians in Germany, the son of the great chemist. I got quite well acquaintedwith him. He was a very interesting man. He had a peculiarmethod of dealing with the diseases of the throat and lungslike those under which my sister-in-law suffered. He hadseveral large oval apartments, air-tight, with an inner wallmade of porcelain, like that used for an ordinary vase orpitcher. From these he excluded all the air of the atmosphere, and supplied its place with an artificial air made for thepurpose. The patients were put in there, remaining an hourand three quarters or two hours each day--I do not know butsome of them for a longer time. Then they were directed totake long walks, increasing them in length day by day, a considerablepart of the walk being up a steep hill or mountain. I believehis method was of very great value to the patient who wasin my company. The Baron thought he could effect a completecure if she could stay with him several months. But thatwas impossible. 

CHAPTER XXIIIVISITS TO ENGLAND1899

I visited England again in 1899. I did not go to the Continentor Scotland. My wife consulted a very eminent London physicianfor an infirmity of the heart. He told her to go to the Isleof Wight; remain there a few weeks; then to go to Boscombe;stay a few weeks there; then to Malvern Hills, and thenceto a high place in Yorkshire, which, I believe, is nearly, if not quite, the highest inhabited spot in England. Thistreatment was eminently advantageous. But to comply with thedoctor's direction took all the time we had at our commandbefore going home. 

We had a charming and delightful time in the Isle of Wight. We stayed at a queer little Inn, known as the "Crab and Lobster, "kept by Miss Cass, with the aid of her sister and niece. Wemade excursions about the island. I saw two graves side byside which had a good deal of romance about them. One wasthe grave of a woman. The stone said that she had died atthe age of one hundred and seven. By its side was the graveof her husband, to whom she had been married at the age ofeighteen, and who had died just after the marriage. So shehad been a widow eighty-nine years, and then the couple, separatedin their early youth, had come together again in the grave. 

We found a singular instance of what Americans think so astonishingin England, the want of knowledge by the people of the localitywith which they were familiar in life, of persons whose nameshave a world-wide reputation. In a churchyard at Bonchurch, about a mile from our Inn at Ventnor, is the grave of JohnStirling--the friend of Emerson--of whom Carlyle wrote a memoir. Sterling is the author of some beautiful hymns and other poems, including what I think is the most splendid and spirited balladin English literature, "Alfred the Harper. " Yet the sextonwho exhibited the church and the churchyard did not seem toknow anything about him, and the booksellers near by neverhad heard of him. The sexton showed, with great pride, thegrave of Isaac Williams, author of the "Shadow of the Cross"and some other rather tame religious poetry. He was a devoutand good man, and seemed to be a feeble imitator of Keble. I dare say, the sexton first heard of Sterling and saw hisgrave when we showed it to him. 

The scenery about Boscombe and the matchless views of theChannel are a perpetual delight, especially the sight, ona clear day, of the Needles. 

We did not find it necessary to obey the doctor's advice togo to Yorkshire. After leaving Boscombe, I spent the restof my vacation at Malvern Hills, some eight or nine milesnorth of Worcester, and some twenty miles from Gloucester. 

The chief delight of that summer--a delight that dwells freshlyin my memory to-day, and which will never be forgotten whilemy memory endures--was a journey through the Forest of Dean, in a carriage, in company with my friend--alas, that I mustsay my late friend!--John Bellows, of Gloucester. He was, I suppose, of all men alive, best qualified to be a companionand teacher of such a journey. He has written and publishedfor the American Antiquarian Society an account of our journey--a most delightful essay, which I insert in the appendix. He tells the story much better than I could tell it. My readerswill do well to read it, even if they skip some chapters ofthis book for the purpose. I am proud and happy in this wayto associate my name with that of this most admirable gentleman. 

I visited Gloucester. I found the houses still standingwhere my ancestors dwelt, and the old tomb in the Churchof St. Mary de Crypt, with the word Hoare cut in the pavementin the chancel. 

My ancestors were Puritans. They took an active part in theresistance to Charles I. , and many traces are preserved oftheir activity in the civic annals of Gloucester. Two ofmy name were Sheriffs in those days. There were two otherSheriffs whose wives were sisters of my direct ancestors. Charles Hoar, my direct ancestor, married one of the Cliffordfamily, the descendant of the brother of Fair Rosamond, andtheir arms are found on a tomb, and also on a window in theold church at Frampton-on-Severn, eight miles from Gloucester, where the Cliffords are buried. The spot where fair Rosamondwas born, still, I believe, belongs to the Clifford family. 

I got such material as I could for studying the history ofthe military operations which preceded the siege and captureof Worcester and the escape of Charles II. Several of theold houses where he was concealed are shown, as also one inWorcester from which he made his escape out of the windowwhen Worcester was stormed, just as Cromwell's soldiers wereentering at the door. 

Shakespeare used to pass through Gloucester on his way toLondon. Some of his celebrated scenes are in Gloucestershire. The tradition is that Shakespeare's company acted in the yardof the New Inn, at Gloucester, an ancient hostelry still standing, a few rods only from the Raven Tavern, which belonged to myancestors, and is mentioned in one of their wills still extant. I have no doubt my kindred of that time saw Shakespeare, andsaw him act, unless they had already learned the Puritanismwhich came to them, if not before, in a later generation. 

I purchased, some years ago, some twenty ancient Gloucestershiredeeds, of various dates, but all between 1100 and 1400. Oneof them was witnessed by John le Hore. It was of lands atWotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire. I have in my possessiona will of Thomas Hore of Bristol, dated 1466, in which hementions his wife Joanna, and his daughters Joanna and Margery, and his sons Thomas and John. These names--Thomas, John, Joanna and Margery--are the names of members of the familywho dwelt in the city of Gloucester in later generations. So I have little doubt that Thomas was of the same race, althoughthere is a link in the pedigree, between his death and 1560or 1570 which I cannot supply. This Thomas bequeaths landat Wotton-under-Edge, so I conjecture that John also was ofthe same race. A large old black oak chest bound with iron, bequeathed by Thomas to Bristol in 1466, is still in thepossession of the city. 

I was very much gratified that the people of the old Cityof Gloucester were glad to recognize the tie of kindred whichI, myself, feel so strongly. I received a handsome box, containing a beautifully bound copy of an account of the Cityfrom the Traders' Association of the City of Gloucester. This account of the matter appears in the _Echo, _ a localpaper of July 4, 1899. 

GLOUCESTER CITY. GLOUCESTER TRADERS' ASSOCIATION. INTERESTING PRESENTATION

On Monday evening a largely attended public meeting was heldin the Guildhall under the auspices of the Gloucester Traders'Association for the purpose of hearing addresses on "The municipalelectricity supply. " Mr. D. Jones (president) occupied thechair, and there were also present on the platform the Mayor(Mr. H. R. J. Braine), City High Sheriff (Mr. A. V. Hatton), Councillors Holborook, Poole and several members of the association. 

The Chairman said that in his position as president of theassociation it was his pleasurable duty to present a copy oftheir guide to Mr. G. F. Hoar, the distinguished member ofthe United States Government, who had always taken a greatinterest in their historic City. --The presentation consistedof a handsomely carved box made by Messrs. Matthews and Co. From pieces of historic English oak supplied by Mr. H. Y. J. Taylor. On the outside of the cover are engraved the Cityarms, and a brass plate explaining the presentation. A beautifullyprinted copy of the well-known guide, bound in red morocco, has been placed within, and on the inside of the cover thereis the following illuminated address:

"To the Hon. G. F. Hoar, of Worcester, Mass. , Senator of theUnited States of America. Sir, --The members of the Traders'Association, Gloucester, England, ask your acceptance of abound copy of their guide to this ancient and historic City, together with this box made from part of a rafter taken fromthe room in which Bishop Hooper was lodged the night beforehis burning, and from oak formerly in old All Saints' Church, as souvenirs of the regard which the association entertainsfor you and its recognition of your ardent affection for theCity of Gloucester, the honored place of the nativity of theprogenitor of your family, Charles Hoar, who was elder Sheriffin 1634; and may these sincere expressions also be typicalof the sterling friendship existing between Great Britainand America. "

"Senator Hoar had been unable to attend the meeting, andthe presentation was entrusted to the American Vice-Consul, Mr. E. H. Palin, to forward to him. Remarking on the presentation, the Mayor expressed his regret that Mr. Hoar had been unableto accept the high and important position of American Ambassadorwhich had been offered to him. Addresses on the installationof the electric light were then given by Mr. Hammond, M. I. C. E. , and Mr. Spencer Hawes. "

I was invited by the Corporation of the City to visit themin the fall and receive the freedom of the City, which wasto be bestowed at the same time on Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. But I had arranged to return to the United States before thetime fixed for the ceremonial. So I was deprived of thatgreat pleasure and honor. 

I had a great longing to hear the nightingale. I find inan old memorandum that I heard the nightingale in Warwickshirein 1860, somewhere about the twentieth of May. But the occurrence, and the song of the bird, have wholly faded from my memory. When I was abroad in 1892 and '96 I hoped to hear the song. But I was too late. Mrs. Warre, wife of the Rector of Bemerton, George Herbert's Parsonage, told me that the nightingaleswere abundant in her own garden close to the Avon, but thatthey did not sing after the beginning of the nesting sessionwhich, according to a note to White's "History of Selborne, "lasts from the beginning of May to the early part of June. Waller says:

 Thus the wise nightingale that leaves her home, Pursuing constantly the cheerful spring, To foreign groves does her old music bring. 

There are some counties in England where the bird is notfound. It is abundant in Warwickshire, Gloucester and theIsle of Wight. It is not found in Scotland, Derbyshire orYorkshire or Devon or Cornwall. Attempts to introduce itin those places have failed. The reason is said to be thatits insect food does not exist there. 

I utterly failed to hear the nightingale, although I wasvery close upon his track. On the night of the fifth ofJune at Freshwater, close to Tennyson's home, we were takenby a driver, between eleven and twelve at night, to two copsesin one of which he said he had heard the nightingale the nightbefore; and at the other they had been heard by somebody, from whom he got the information, within a very few days. But the silence was unbroken, notwithstanding our patienceand the standing reward I had offered to anybody who wouldfind one that I could hear. Two different nights shortlyafterward, I was driven out several miles past groves wherethe bird was said to be heard frequently. Nothing came ofit. May 29, at Gloucester, I rode with my friend, H. Y. J. Taylor, Esq. , an accomplished antiquary, out into the country. We passed a hillside where he said he had heard the nightingaleabout eleven o'clock in the daytime the week before. Shakespearesays:

 The nightingale, if she should sing by day, When every goose is cackling, would be No better a musician than the wren. 

But the nightingale does sometimes sing by day. Mr. Taylorsays that on the morning he spoke of the whole field seemedto be full of singing birds. There were larks and finchesand linnets and thrushes, and I think other birds whose nameI do not remember. But when the nightingale set up his songevery other bird stopped. They seemed as much spellboundby the singing as he was, and Philomel had the field to himselftill the song was over. It was as if Jenny Lind had comeinto a country church when the rustic choir of boys and girlswere performing. 

The nightingale will sometimes sing out of season if hismate be killed, or if the nest with the eggs therein be destroyed. 

He is not a shy bird. He comes out into the highway and willfly in and out of the hedges, sometimes following a traveller. And the note of one bird will, in the singing season, provokethe others, so that a dozen or twenty will sometimes be heardrivalling one another at night, making it impossible for theoccupants of the farmhouses to sleep. 

The superstition is well known that if a new-married manhear the cuckoo before he hear the nightingale in the spring, his married peace will be invaded by some stranger withinthe year. But if the nightingale be heard first he will behappy in his love. It is said that the young married swainsin the country take great pains to hear the nightingale first. We all remember Milton's sonnet:

 O nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray Warbl'est at eve, when all the woods are still, Thou with fresh hope the Lover's heart dost fill, While the jolly hours lead on propitious May, They liquid notes that close the eye of Day, First heard before the shallow Cuckoo's bill Portend success in love; O, if Jove's will Have linkt that amorous power to thy soft lay, Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate Foretell my hopeless doom in some Grove nigh; As thou from year to year hast sung too late For my relief; yet hadst no reason why, Whether the Muse, or Love, call thee his mate, Both them I serve, and of their train am I. 

I had a funny bit of evidence that this superstition is notentirely forgotten. A very beautiful young lady called uponus in London just as we were departing for the Isle of Wight. I told her of my great longing to hear the nightingale, andthat I hoped to get a chance. She said that she had justcome from one of her husband's country estates; that she hadnot seen a nightingale or heard one this year, although theywere very abundant there. She said she had seen a cuckoo, which came about the same time. I suppose she observed alook of amusement on my countenance, for she added quick aslightning, "But he didn't speak. "

I made this year a delightful visit to Cambridge University. I was the guest of Dr. Butler, the Master of Trinity, andhis accomplished wife, who had, before her marriage, beatenthe young men of Cambridge in all of the examinations. Dr. Butler spoke very kindly of William Everett, with whom hehad been contemporary at Cambridge. He told me that EdwardEverett, when he received his degree at Oxford, was treatedwith great incivility by the throng of undergraduates, notbecause he was an American, but because he was a Unitarian. I told this story afterwards to Mr. Charles Francis Adams. He confirmed it, and said that his father had refused thedegree because he did not wish to expose himself to a likeincivility. 

I dined in the old hall of Trinity, and met many very eminentscholars. I saw across the room Mr. Myers, the author ofthe delightful essays, but did not have an opportunity to speakto him. I was introduced, among other gentlemen, to AldusWright, Vice or Deputy Master, eminent for his varied scholarship, and to Mr. Frazer, who had just published his admirable editionof Pausanias. 

A great many years ago I heard a story from Richard H. Dana, illustrating the cautious and conservative fashions of Englishmen. He told me that when the Judges went to Cambridge for theAssizes they always lodged in the House of the Master of Trinity, which was a royal foundation, the claim being, that as theyrepresented the King, they lodged there as of right. On theother hand the College claims that they are there as the guestsof the College, and indebted to its hospitality solely fortheir lodging. When the Judges approach Cambridge, the Masterof Trinity goes out to meet them, and expresses the hope thatthey will make their home at the College during their stay;to which the Judges reply that "They are coming. " The Headof the College conducts them to the door. When it is reached, each party bows and invites the other to go in. They go in, and the Judges stay until the Assize is over. This ceremonyhas gone on for four hundred years, and it never yet has beensettled whether the Judges have a right in the Master's house, or only are there as guests and by courtesy. I suppose thatin the United States both sides would fight that questionuntil it was settled somehow. Each would say: "I am verywilling to have the other there. But I want to know whetherhe has any right there. " I asked about the truth of thisstory. Dr. Butler said it was true and seemed, if I understoodhim aright, to think the Judges' claim was a good one. Mr. Wright, the Deputy Master, to whom I also put the question, spoke of it with rather less respect. 

CHAPTER XXIVA REPUBLICAN PLATFORM

I have had occasion several times to prepare the Republicanplatform for the State Convention. The last time I undertookthe duty was in 1894. I was quite busy. I shrunk from thetask and put it off until the time approached for the Convention, and it would not do to wait any longer. So I got up one morningand resolved that I would shut myself up in my library andnot leave it until the platform was written. AccordinglyI sat down after breakfast, with the door shut, and takinga pencil made a list of topics about which I thought thereshould be a declaration in the platform. 

I wrote each at the top of a separate page on a scratch-block, intending to fill them out in the usual somewhat grandiloquentfashion which seems to belong to that kind of literature. I supposed I had a day's work before me. 

It suddenly occurred to me: Why not take these headingsjust as they are, and make a platform of them, leaving theConvention and the public to amplify as they may think fitafterward. Accordingly I tore out the leaves from the scratch-block, and handed them to a secretary to be put into type. The whole proceeding did not take fifteen minutes. 

The sense of infinite relief that the Convention had when, after listening a moment of two, they found I was gettingover what they expected as a rather tedious job, with greatrapidity, was delightful to behold. I do not believe therewas ever a political platform received in this country withsuch approval, certainly by men who listened to it, as that:

PLATFORM

"The principles of the Republicans of Massachusetts are aswell known as the Commonwealth itself; well known as the Republic;well known as Liberty; well known as Justice. 

Chief among them are:

An equal share in Government for every citizen. 

Best possible wages for every workman. 

The American market for American labor. 

Every dollar paid by the Government, both the gold and thesilver dollars of the Constitution, and their paper representatives, honest and unchanging in value and equal to every other. 

Better immigration laws. 

Better naturalization laws. 

No tramp, Anarchist, criminal or pauper to be let in, sothat citizenship shall not be stained or polluted. 

Sympathy with Liberty and Republican government at home andabroad. 

Americanism everywhere. 

The flag never lowered or dishonored. 

No surrender in Samoa. 

No barbarous Queen beheading men in Hawaii. 

No lynching. 

No punishment without trial. 

Faith kept with the pensioner. 

No deserving old soldier in the poorhouse. 

The suppression of dram drinking and dram selling. 

A school at the public charge open to all the children, andfree from partisan or sectarian control. 

No distinction of birth or religious creed in the rights ofAmerican citizenship. 

Devotion paramount and supreme to the country and to the flag. 

Clean politics. 

Pure administration. 

No lobby. 

Reform of old abuses. 

Leadership along loftier paths. 

Minds ever open to the sunlight and the morning, ever opento new truth and new duty as the new years bring their lessons. "

I ought to explain one phrase in this platform, which I havesince much regretted. That is the phrase, "No barbarous Queenbeheading men in Hawaii. " It was currently reported in thepress that the Queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani, was a semi-barbarous person, and that when Mr. Blount, Mr. Cleveland'sCommissioner, proposed to restore her government and saidthat amnesty should be extended to all persons who had takenpart in the revolution, she had said with great indignation, "What, is no one to be beheaded?" and that upon that answerMr. Blount and Mr. Cleveland had abandoned any further purposeof using the power of the United States to bring the monarchyback again. That, so far as I knew, had never been contradictedand had obtained general belief. 

I ought not to have accepted the story without investigation. I learned afterward, from undoubted authority, that the Queenis an excellent Christian woman; that she has done her bestto reconcile her subjects of her own race to the new orderof things; that she thinks it is better for them to be underthe power of the United States than under that of any othercountry, and that they could not have escaped being subjectedto some other country if we had not taken them; and that sheexpended her scanty income in educating and caring for thechildren of the persons who were about her court who had losttheir own resources by the revolution. I have taken occasion, more than once, to express, in the Senate, my respect forher, and my regret for this mistake. 

CHAPTER XXVOFFICIAL SALARIES

When I was in the House the salaries of the Judges of theSupreme Court of the United States were raised to ten thousanddollars a year, and a provision for a retiring pension, tobe continued for life to such of them as became seventy yearsold, and had served ten years on the Bench, was enacted. 

But it is always very difficult indeed to get salaries raised, especially the salaries of Judges. That it was accomplishedthem was due largely to the sagacity and skill of Mr. Armstrongof Pennsylvania. He was a very sensible and excellent Representative. His service, like that of many of the best men from Pennsylvania, was too short for the public good. I had very little to dowith it myself, except that I talked the matter over a gooddeal with Mr. Armstrong, who was a friend of mine, and heartilysupported it. 

After I entered the Senate, however, I undertook to get througha bill for raising the salaries of the Judges of the UnitedStates District Courts. The District Judges were expectedto be learned lawyers of high reputation and character, andlarge experience. Very important matters indeed are withinthe jurisdiction of the District Courts. They would haveto deal with prize cases, if a war were to break out. Inthat case the reputation of the tribunals of the United Statesthroughout the world would depend largely on them. They havealso had to do a large part of the work of the Circuit Courts, especially since the establishment of the Circuit Courts ofAppeals, as much of the time of the Circuit Judges is requiredin attendance there. 

I had great difficulty in getting the measure through. Butat last I was successful in getting the salaries, which hadranged from $1, 500 to $4, 000 in different districts of thecountry, made uniform and raised to $5, 000 a year. 

Later I made an attempt to have the salaries of the Judgesof the Supreme Court of the United States increased. Mydesire was to have the salary of the Associate Judges fixedat $15, 000, being an increase of fifty per cent. , that of theChief Justice to be $500 more. I met with great difficulty, but at last, in the winter of 1903, I succeeded in gettingthrough a measure, which I had previously reported, whichincreased the salary of the Associate Judges to $12, 500, andthat of the Chief Justice to $13, 000. The same measure increasedthe salaries of the District Judges from $5, 000 to $6, 000, and that of the Circuit Judges from $6, 000 to $7, 000 a year. 

The salary of Senators and Representatives is shamefullysmall. This is a great injustice, not only to members ofthe two Houses, but it is a great public injury, because thecountry cannot command the service of able men in the primeof life, unless they have already acquired large fortunes. It cannot be expected that a lawyer making from $25, 000 to$50, 000 a year, or a man engaged in business, whose annualincome perhaps far exceeds that amount, will leave it for$5, 000 a year. In that way he is compelled not only to livefrugally himself, but what is more disagreeable still, tosubject his household to the live in the humblest style ina costly and fashionable city, into which wealthy personsare coming from all parts of the country. 

The members of Congress have a great many demands upon them, which they cannot resist. So a Senator or Representativewith $5, 000 a year, living in Washington a part of the yearand at home the other part, cannot maintain his family aswell as an ordinary mechanic or salaried man who gets $2, 500or $3, 000 a year, and spends all his time in one place. 

The English aristocracy understand this pretty well. Theygive no salary at all to the members of their House of Commons. The result is that the poor people, the working people andpeople in ordinary life, cannot get persons to represent them, from their own class. That will soon be true in this country, if we do not make a change. I suppose nearly every memberof either House of Congress will tell you in private thathe thinks the salary ought to be raised. But the poor menwill not vote for it, because they think the example willbe unpopular, and the rich men do not care about it. 

CHAPTER XXVIPROPRIETY IN DEBATE

The race of demagogues we have always with us. They haveexisted in every government from Cleon and the Sausage-maker. They command votes and seem to delight popular and legislativeassemblies. But they rarely get very far in public favor. The men to whom the American people gives its respect, andwhom it is willing to trust in the great places of power, are intelligent men of property, dignity and sobriety. 

We often witness and perhaps are tempted to envy the applausewhich many public speakers get by buffoonery, by rough wit, by coarse personality, by appeal to the vulgar passions. Weare apt to think that grave and serious reasonings are loston the audiences that receive them, half asleep, as if listeningto a tedious sermon, and who come to life again when the stumpspeaker takes the platform. But it will be a great mistaketo think that the American people do not estimate such thingsat their true value. When they come to take serious action, they prefer to get their inspiration from the church or thecollege and not from the circus. Uncle Sam likes to be amused. But Uncle Sam is a gentleman. In the spring of 1869, whenI first took my seat in Congress, General Butler was in theHouse. He was perhaps as widely known to the country as anyman in it except President Grant. He used to get up somescene of quarrel or buffoonery nearly every morning session. His name was found every day in the head-lines of the newspapers. I said to General Banks one day after the adjournment: "Don'tyou think it is quite likely that he will be the next Presidentof the United States?" "Never, " said General Banks, in hissomewhat grandiloquent fashion. "Why, " said I, "don't yousee that the papers all over the country all full of him everymorning? People seem to be reading about nobody else. Whereverhe goes, the crowds throng after him. Nobody else gets suchapplause, not even Grant himself. "

"Mr. Hoar, " replied General Banks, "when I came down to theHouse this morning, there was a fight between two monkeyson Pennsylvania Avenue. There was an enormous crowd, shoutingand laughing and cheering. They would have paid very littleattention to you or me. But when they come to elect a Presidentof the United States, they won't take either monkey. "

The men who possess the capacity for coarse wit and roughrepartee, and who indulge it, seldom get very far in publicfavor. No President of the United States has had it. NoJudge of the Supreme Court has had it, no Speaker of theHouse of Representatives, and, with scarcely an exception, no eminent Senator. 

CHAPTER XXVIITHE FISH-BALL LETTER

In August, 1890, the Pittsburg _Post, _ a Democratic paper, made a savage attack on me. He attributed to me some veryfoolish remark and declared that I lived on terrapin and champagne;that I had been an inveterate office-seeker all my life; andthat I had never done a stroke of useful work. Commonly itis wise to let such attacks go without notice. To noticethem seriously generally does more harm than good to the partyattacked. But I was a good deal annoyed by the attack, andthought I would make a good-natured and sportive reply toit, instead of taking it seriously. So I sent the editorthe following letter, which was copied quite extensively throughoutthe country, North and South; and I believe put an end, forthe rest of my life, to the particular charges he had made:

UNITED STATES SENATE, WASHINGTON, D. C. , Aug. 10, 1890. 

TO THE EDITOR OF THE PITTSBURG POST;

_My Dear Man:_ Somebody has sent me a copy of your papercontaining an article of which you do me the honor to makeme the subject. What can have put such an extravagant yarninto the head of so amiable and good-natured a fellow? I neversaid the thing which you attribute to me in any interview, caucus or anywhere else. I never inherited any wealth orhad any. My father was a lawyer in very large practice forhis day, but he was a very generous and liberal man and neverput much value upon money. My share of his estate was about$10, 500. All the income-producing property I have in theworld, or ever had, yields a little less than $1, 800 a year;$800 of that is from a life estate and the other thousandcomes from stock in a corporation which has only paid dividendsfor the last two or three years, and which I am very muchafraid will pay no dividend, or much smaller ones, after twoor three years to come. With that exception the house whereI live, with its contents, with about four acres of land, constitute my whole worldly possessions, except two or threevacant lots, which would not bring me $5, 000 all told. Icould not sell them now for enough to pay my debts. I havebeen in my day an extravagant collector of books, and havea library which you would like to see and which I would liketo show you. Now, as to office-holding and working. I thinkthere are few men on this continent who have put so much hardwork into life as I have. I went one winter to the MassachusettsHouse of Representatives, when I was twenty-five years old, and one winter to the Massachusetts Senate, when I was thirtyyears old. The pay was two dollars a day at that time. Iwas nominated on both occasions, much to my surprise, andon both occasion declined a renomination. I afterward twicerefused a nomination for Mayor of my city, have twice refuseda seat on the Supreme Bench of Massachusetts, and refusedfor years to go to Congress when the opportunity was in mypower. I was at last broken down with overwork, and wentto Europe for my health. During my absence the arrangementswere made for my nomination to Congress, from which, whenI got home, I could not well escape. The result is I havebeen here twenty years as Representative and Senator, thewhole time getting a little poorer year by year. If youthink I have not made a good one, you have my full authorityfor saying anywhere that I entirely agree with you. Duringall this time I have never been able to hire a house in Washington. My wife and I have experienced the varying fortune of Washingtonboarding houses, sometimes very comfortable, and a good dealof the time living in a fashion to which no mechanic earningtwo dollars a day would subject his household. Your "terrapin"is all in my eye, very little in my mouth. The chief carnalluxury of my life is in breakfasting every Sunday morningwith an orthodox friend, a lady who has a rare gift for makingfish-balls and coffee. You unfortunate and benighted Pennsylvanianscan never know the exquisite flavor of the codfish, salted, made into balls and eaten on a Sunday morning by a personwhose theology is sound, and who believes in all the fivepoints of Calvinism. I am myself but an unworthy heretic, but I am of Puritan stock, of the seventh generation, andthere is vouchsafed to me, also, some share of that ecstasyand a dim glimpse of that beatific vision. Be assured, mybenighted Pennsylvania friend, that in that hour when theweek begins, all the terrapin of Philadelphia or Baltimoreand all the soft-shelled crabs of the Atlantic shore mightpull at my trousers legs and thrust themselves on my noticein vain. 

 I am faithfully, GEO. F. HOAR

CHAPTER XXVIIITHE BIRD PETITION

Before the year 1897 I had become very much alarmed at theprospect of the total extinction of our song-birds. TheBobolink seemed to be disappearing from the field in Massachusetts, the beautiful Summer Red Bird had become extinct, and theOriole and the Scarlet Tanager had almost disappeared. Manyvarieties of songbirds which were familiar to my own boyhoodwere unknown to my children. The same thing seems to be goingon in other countries. The famous Italian novelist, Ouida, contributed an article in the _North American Review_ a fewyears ago in which she described the extermination of theNightingale in Italy. The Director of the Central Park, inone of his Reports, stated that within fifteen or twenty yearsthe song-birds of the State of New York had diminished forty-five per cent. 

One afternoon in the spring of 1897, Governor Claflin calledon me at my Committee Room in the Capitol and told me a ladyhad just visited his daughter at her rooms who had on herhead eleven egrets. These egrets are said to come from thefemale White Heron, a beautiful bird abounding in Florida. They are a sort of bridal ornament, growing out on the headof the female at pairing time and perishing and dropping offafter the brood is reared. So the ornament on the horriblewoman's head had cost the lives of eleven of these beautifulbirds and very likely in every case the lives of a brood ofyoung ones. 

When I went home I sat down after dinner and wrote with apencil the following petition. 

_"To the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

"We, the song-birds of Massachusetts and their playfellows, make this our humble petition:_

"We know more about you than you think we do. We know howgood you are. We have hopped about the roofs and looked inat the windows of the homes you have built for poor and sickand hungry people and little lame and deaf and blind children. We have built our nests in the tress and sung many a songas we flew about the gardens and parks you have made so beautifulfor your own children, especially your poor children, to playin. 

"Every year we fly a great way over the country, keepingall the time where the sun is bright and warm; and we knowthat whenever you do anything, other people all over thegreat land between the seas and the great lakes find it out, and pretty soon will try to do the same thing. We know;we know. We are Americans just as you are. Some of us, like some of you, came from across the great sea, but mostof the birds like us have lived here a long while; and birdslike us welcomed your fathers when they came here many yearsago. Our fathers and mothers have always done their bestto please your fathers and mothers. 

"Now we have a sad story to tell you. Thoughtless or badpeople are trying to destroy us. They kill us because ourfeathers are beautiful. Even pretty and sweet girls, whowe should think would be our best friends, kill our brothersand children so that they may wear plumage on their hats. Sometimes people kill us from mere wantonness. Cruel boysdestroy our nests and steal our eggs and our young ones. Peoplewith guns and snares lie in wait to kill us, as if the placefor a bird were not in the sky, alive, but in a shop windowor under a glass case. If this goes on much longer, all yoursong-birds will be gone. Already, we are told, in some othercountries that used to be full of birds, they are almost gone. Even the nightingales are being all killed in Italy. 

"Now we humbly pray that you will stop all this, and willsave us from this sad fate. You have already made a lawthat no one shall kill a harmless song-bird or destroy ournests or our eggs. Will you please to make another that noone shall wear our feathers, so that no one will kill us to getthem? We want them all ourselves. Your pretty girls arepretty enough without them. We are told that it is as easyfor you to do it as for Blackbird to whistle. 

"If you will, we know how to pay you a hundred times over. We will teach your children to keep themselves clean and neat. We will show them how to live together in peace and love andto agree as we do in our nests. We will build pretty houseswhich you will like to see. We will play about your gardensand flower-beds, --ourselves like flowers on wings, --withoutany cost to you. We will destroy the wicked insects and wormsthat spoil your cherries and currants and plums and applesand roses. We will give you our best songs and make the springmore beautiful and the summer sweeter to you. Every Junemorning when you go out to the field, Oriole and Blackbirdand Bobolink will fly after you and make the day more delightfulto you; and when you go home tired at sundown, Vesper Sparrowwill tell you how grateful we are. When you sit on your porchafter dark, Fife Bird and Hermit Thrush and Wood Thrush willsing to you; and even Whip-poor-will will cheer up a little. We know where we are safe. In a little while all the birdswill come to live in Massachusetts again, and everybody wholoves music will like to make a summer home with you. "

I thought it might, perhaps, strike the Legislature of Massachusettsand the public more impressively than a sober argument. Thewhole thing took only fifteen or twenty minutes. The petitionwas signed by all the song-birds of Massachusetts, and illustratedby Miss Ellen Day Hale with the portraits of the signers. It was presented to the Massachusetts Senate by the HonorableA. S. Roe, Senator from the Worcester District. The Legislatureacted upon it and passed the following Statute:

"Whoever has in his possession the body of feathers of anybird whose taking or killing is prohibited by section fourof chapter two hundred and seventy-six of the acts of theyear eighteen hundred and eighty-six, or wears such feathersfor the purpose of dress or ornament, shall be punished asprovided in said section: _provided_ that his act shall notbe construed to prohibit persons having the certificate providedfor in said sections from taking or killing such birds; and_provided, further, _ that this act shall not apply to NaturalHistory Associations, or to the proprietors of museums, orother collections for scientific purposes. 

_"Approved June 11, 1897. "_

The Statute was copied in several other States. I thinkthe petition helped a good deal the healthy reaction which, owing largely to the efforts of humane societies and NaturalHistory Associations and especially of some very accomplishedladies, has arrested the destruction of these beautiful ornamentsof our woods and fields and gardens, "our fellow pilgrimson the journey of life, " who have so much of humanity in themand who, like us, have their appointed tasks set to them bythe great Creator. 

CHAPTER XXIXTHE A. P. A. CONTROVERSY

One very unreasonable, yet very natural excitement has stirreddeeply the American people on several occasions in our history. It came to us by lawful inheritance from our English and Puritanancestors. That is the bitter and almost superstitious dreadof the Catholics, which has resulted more than once in riotsand crimes, and more than once in the attempt to exclude themfrom political power in the country. This has sometimes takenthe form of a crusade against all foreigners. But religiousprejudice against the Catholics has been its chief inspiration. 

I just said that this feeling, though absolutely unjustifiable, was yet quite natural, and that it came to us by lawful inheritance. I have always resisted it and denounced it to the utmost ofmy power. My father was a Unitarian. I was bred in thatmost liberal of all liberal faiths. But I have believed thatthe way to encounter bigotry is by liberality. If any mantry to deprive you of your absolute right, begin to defendyourself by giving him his own. Human nature, certainly Americanhuman nature, will never, in my opinion, long hold out againstthat method of dealing. 

Our people, so far as they are of English descent, learnedfrom their fathers the stories of Catholic persecution andof the fires of Smithfield. Fox's "Book of Martyrs, " oneof the few books in the Puritan libraries, was, even down tothe time of my youth, reverently preserved and read in theNew England farmhouses. 

So it was believed that it was only the want of power thatprevented the Catholics from renewing the fires of Smithfieldand the terrors of the Inquisition. It was believed thatthe infallibility and supremacy of the Pope bound the Catholiccitizen to yield unquestioning obedience to the Catholic clergyin matters civil and political, as well as spiritual. Therewas a natural and very strong dread of the Confessional. 

This feeling was intensified by the fact of which it waspartly the cause, that when the Irish-Catholics first cameover they voted in solid body, led often by their clergy, forthe Democratic Party, which was in the minority in the NewEngland States, especially in Massachusetts. England downto a very recent time disqualified the Catholics from civiloffice. 

Our people forgot that the religious persecution, of whichthey cherished the bitter memory, was the result of the spiritof the age, and not of one form of religious faith. Theyforgot that the English Protestants not only retaliated onthe Catholics when they got into power, but that the Bishopsfrom whose fury, as John Milton said, our own Pilgrim Fathersfled, were Protestant Bishops and not Catholic. They forgotthe eight hundred years during which Ireland had been underthe heel of England, and the terrible history so well toldby that most English of Englishmen, and Protestant of Protestants, Lord Macaulay. 

"The Irish Roman Catholics were permitted to live, to be fruitful, to replenish the earth; but they were doomed to be what theHelots were in Sparta, what the Greeks were under the Ottoman, what the blacks now are at New York. Every man of the subjectcaste was strictly excluded from any public trust. Take whatpath he might in life, he was crossed at every step by somevexatious restriction. It was only by being obscure and inactive, that he could, on his native soil, be safe. If he aspiredto be powerful and honoured, he might gain a cross or perhapsa Marshal's staff in the armies of France or Austria. Ifhis vocation was to politics, he might distinguish himselfin the diplomacy of Italy or Spain. But at home he was amere Gibeonite, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. Thestatute book of Ireland was filled with enactments which furnishto the Roman Catholics but too good a ground for recriminatingon us when we talk of the barbarities of Bonner and Gardiner;and the harshness of those odious laws was aggravated by amore odious administration. For, bad as the legislators were, the magistrates were worse still. In those evil times originatedthat most unhappy hostility between landlord and tenant, whichis one of the peculiar curses of Ireland. Oppression andturbulence reciprocally generated each other. The combinationof rustic tyrants was resisted by gangs of rustic banditii. Courts of law and juries existed only for the benefit of thedominant sect. Those priests who were revered by millionsas their natural advisers and guardians, as the only authoriseddispensers of the Christian sacraments, were treated by thesquires and squireens of the ruling faction as no good-naturedman would treat the vilest beggar. "

When I came into political life shortly after 1848, I foundthis anti-Catholic feeling most intense. The Catholics inMassachusetts were, in general, in a very humble class. Theimmigration, which had well begun before the great Irish Famine, was increased very much by that terrible calamity. The Irishmenwere glad to build our railroads at sixty cents a day, dwellingin wretched shanties, and living on very coarse fare. Theyhad brought with them the habit of drinking whiskey, comparativelyharmless in their native climate--though bad enough there--but destructive in New England. So they contributed verylargely to the statistics of crime and disorder. 

Even then they gave an example--from which all mankind mighttake a lesson--of many admirable qualities. They had a mostpathetic and touching affection for the Old Country. Theyexhibited an incomparable generosity toward the kindred theyhad left behind. From their scanty earnings, Edward Everett, a high authority, estimates that there were sent twenty millionsof dollars in four years to their parents and kindred. 

There was some jealousy on the part of our working people, especially the men and women employed in large manufacturingestablishments, lest the Irish, by working at cheaper wages, would drive them out of employment. But the Irishman soonlearned to demand all the wages he could get. The accessionof the Irish laborer increased largely the productive forcesof the State. So there was more wealth created, of whichthe better educated and shrewder Yankee got the larger share. By the bringing in of a lower class of labor he was elevatedto a higher place, but never driven out of work. The prejudiceof which I have spoken showed itself in some terrible Protestantriots in New Orleans and in Baltimore, and in the burningof the Catholic Convent at Charlestown. 

There was also a strong feeling that the compact body ofCatholics, always voting for one political party was a dangerto the public security. Of course this feeling manifesteditself in the Whig Party, for whose adversary the solid Irish-Catholic vote was cast. As early as 1844, after the defeatof Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster made a suggestion--I do know whereit is recorded now, but I was informed of it on good authorityat about the time he made it--that there must be some publiccombination with a view to resist the influence of our foreignelement in our politics. 

But there was no political movement on any considerable scaleuntil 1854. In that year there was a very dangerous crusadewhich came very near National success, and which got controlof several States. 

In the fall of 1857 the Republican Party elected its firstGovernor. The slavery question was still very prominent, and the people were deeply stirred by the attempt to repealthe Missouri Compromise. So in that year, under the leadershipof Nathaniel P. Banks, Gardner, the Know-Nothing Governor, was defeated, and from that time the strength of Know-Nothingismwas at an end. I was elected to the Senate in the fall of1856 as the Republican candidate from the county of Worcesterover the Know-Nothing and Democratic candidates. 

It is a remarkable fact that of the men known to join theKnow-Nothing Party, no man, unless he were exceedingly youngand obscure when he did it, ever maintained or regained thepublic confidence afterward, with the exception of Henry Wilson, Anson Burlingame and Nathaniel P. Banks. These men all leftit after the first year. Wilson and Burlingame denouncedit with all the vigor at their command, and Banks led theforces of the Republican Party to its overthrow. 

I ought to say, however, of this movement and of the A. P. A. Movement, as it is called, of which I am now to speak, that I do not think the leaders in general shared the bitterand proscriptive feeling to which they appealed. The secretorganization, founded on religious prejudice, or on race prejudice, is a good instrument to advance the political fortunes ofmen who could not gain advancement in an established politicalorganization. So a great many men are active and busy insuch organizations, who would be equally active and busy inmovements founded on precisely the opposite doctrines, ifthey could as well find their advancement in them. Yet, asI have said, the prejudice which lay at the bottom of thismovement was very powerful, very sincere, and not unnatural. 

Secret societies were formed all over the country. It seemednot unlikely that the surprise of 1854 would be repeated, and that the great Republican party, which had done so muchfor civil liberty, would either be broken to pieces or wouldbe brought to take an attitude totally inconsistent with religiousliberty. 

The organization, calling itself the American ProtectiveAssociation, but known popularly as the A. P. A. , had itsbranches all over the North. Its members met in secret, selected their candidates in secret--generally excluding allmen who were not known to sympathize with them--and then attendedthe Republican caucuses to support candidates in whose selectionmembers of that political party who were not in their secretcouncils had no share. Ambitious candidates for office didnot like to encounter such a powerful enmity. They in manycases temporized or coquetted with the A. P. A. If theydid not profess to approve its doctrine. So far as I know, no prominent Republican in any part of the country put himselfpublicly on record as attacking this vicious brotherhood. Many men who did not agree with it were, doubtless, so strongin the public esteem that they were not attacked. 

That was the condition of things when, in the early summerof 1895, I delivered an address at the opening of the SummerSchool of Clark University in which I spoke briefly, but invery strong terms, in condemnation of the secrecy and of theproscriptive principles of this political organization. Ideclared: "I have no patience or tolerance with the spiritwhich would excite religious strife. It is as much out ofplace as the witchcraft delusion or the fires of Smithfield. "I added: "This Nation is a composite. It is made up of manystreams, of the twisting and winding of many bands. The quality, hope and destiny of our land is expressed in the phrase ofour Fathers, 'E Pluribus Unum'--of many, one--of many States, one Nation--of many races, one people--of many creeds, onefaith--of many bended knees, one family of God. " A littlelater I went with the Massachusetts Club, of which I was amember, to an outing at Newport. There, briefly but stillmore emphatically, I called upon the people not to revivethe bitter memories of ancient, social and religious strife. 

These two speeches excited the indignation of the leadersof this organization. A gentleman named Evans, I believeborn in England, took up the cudgels. He was supported bymany worthy clergymen and a good many newspapers which hadbeen established to support the doctrine of the A. P. A. Organization. Mr. Evans, if I am right in my memory, claimedthat he was not a member of the organization. But he stoodup for it stanchly in two letters to me, in which he veryseverely denounced what I had said, and pointed out the wickedbehavior of some Catholic priests to whom he referred. Hesaid he had looked up to me as he formerly did to CharlesSumner and William H. Seward; that my course would tend asabsolutely to the breaking up of the Republican Party as DanielWebster's speech did to the breaking up of the old Whig Party, and that I had rung my own death knell; that the one mistakeWesley made when he called slavery "the sum of all villainies"was that he did not except the Roman Catholic Church. Headded that there were at least three million members of thesepatriotic orders, constituting at least three fifths of theRepublican Party, and that their membership was being added todaily. Mr. Evans also said, what was absolutely withoutfoundation, that I had said, "We need a Father Confessor. "

That gave me my opportunity. I answered with the followingletter in which I stated my own doctrine as vigorously andclearly as I knew how. 

WORCESTER, Aug. 5, 1895. T. C. EVANS, ESQ. :

_My Dear Sir_--One of the great evils, though by no meansthe greatest evil of secret political societies, is that foolishand extravagant statements about men who don't agree withthem get circulated without opportunity for contradictionor explanation. You seem to be a well-meaning and intelligentman; yet I am amazed that any well-meaning and intelligentman should believe such stuff as you repeat in your letterof August 3. I never said, thought or dreamed what you imputeto me. I don't believe there ever was any report in the Worcester_Telegram_ to that effect. Certainly there is none in thereport of what I said in the summer school at Clark Universitythe morning after, and there is no such statement in any ofthe other Worcester newspapers. I never anywhere expressedthe idea that there should be a confessional or that therewas any need of a Father Confessor, or that I wanted to seesomething in our Protestant churches like the Father Confessorin the Catholic. The whole thing is a miserable lie and inventionmade out of whole cloth. The language, which you quote, aboutan attempt to recall on one side, "the cruelties of the CatholicChurch and frighten our women and children with horrid hobgoblins, "is not my language. That does appear in the _Telegram_. Butit is the reporter's statement of what he understood my ideato be in his own language. What I said was: "We are confrontedwith a public danger which comes from an attempt to rousethe old feelings of the dark ages, and which ought to haveended with them, between men who have different forms of faith. It is an attempt to recall on one side the cruelties of theCatholic Church and to frighten old women of both sexes, and, on the other side, to band the men of the Catholic Churchtogether for political action. Both these attempts will fail. "

There is no more zealous believer in the principles of theNew England Puritans, and no more zealous advocate of them, than I am. There is not a man in Massachusetts who has moreat heart the welfare and perpetuity of our system of freecommon schools than I have. I was the first person, so faras I know, who called public attention to the fact that theywere in danger, in any formal way. I drew and had put inthe platform of the Republican State Convention the followingresolution: "The Republican Party ever has maintained andever will maintain and defend, the common schools of Massachusettsas the very citadel of happiness. They shall be kept opento all the children and free from all partisan and sectariancontrol. "

This doctrine I stand by. And I stand by the further doctrine, as I stated at length in my address at Clark University, thatthe whole resources of the Commonwealth are pledged to theirsupport, and that that is the bottom mortgage on every dollarof our property, and that no person can escape or be allowedto escape that responsibility. The difference between youand me is a difference of method. I want to get the 700, 000Catholics in Massachusetts on our side. I want them to sendtheir children to the public schools, to pay their share ofthe cost, and when their young men and women are suitable, are intelligent, liberal persons, attached to the school system, I want some of them to be employed as teachers. I don't wishto exclude them from my political support when they are Republicansand agree with me in other matters, because of their religiousfaith. Nor do I wish to exclude them from being public schoolteachers, if they will keep their particular religious tenetsout of their instruction, because of their religious faith, anymore than I would have excluded Phil Sheridan from his officein the army, or would have refused to support him for anypublic office, if he had been nominated for it. Further, I want to state and advocate my opinions in the face of day, and you may be sure that I shall do this without flinchingbefore anybody's threats or anybody's displeasure or indignation. You, on the other hand, I understand, want to go into a cellarto declare your principles. You want to join an associationwhose members are ashamed to confess they belong to it; manyof whom, without apparently forfeiting the respect of theirfellows, lie about their membership in it when they are askedabout it. You want to mass together the whole Catholic populationof Massachusetts to the support of their extreme and wrong-headed priests, if any such can be found. 

The difference between us is a difference of methods in accomplishingthe same result. I think your method would overthrow thecommon school system, would overthrow the Republican Party, and would end by massing together all the Catholic voters, as proscription always does mass men together, to increaseand strengthen that political power which you profess so muchto dread. 

When O'Neill, the young Catholic soldier of Worcester, laydying, he said: "Write to my dear mother and tell her I diefor my country. I wish I had two lives to give. Let theUnion flag be wrapped around me and a fold of it laid undermy head. " I feel proud that God gave me such a man to bemy countryman and townsman. I have very little respect forthe Americanism that is not moved and stirred by such a story. If O'Neill had left a daughter who had her father's spirit, I would be willing to trust my child or grandchild to herinstruction in secular education in the public school, evenif the father had kissed with his last breath the cross onwhich the Saviour died, or even if the parting soul had receivedcomfort from the lips of Thomas Conaty or John Power or JohnIreland or Archbishop Williams. 

When John Boyle O'Reilly, the Catholic poet, sang the praisesof the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in that noblest of odes, whenhe quoted in his preface from William Bradford and John Robinsonand Robert Cushman, I was glad to hear what he said, especiallywhen he quoted from the lips of the clergyman Robinson: "Icharge you before God that you follow me no further than youhave seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If God revealanything to you by any other instrument of His, be as readyto receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by myministry, for I am verily persuaded, I am very confident, the Lord hath more truths yet to break forth out of His HolyWord. " I liked what he said. If I understand your formerletter correctly, you didn't. That is where we differ. WhenJohn Boyle O'Reilly said, declaring the very spirit of NewEngland Puritanism, and speaking of religious faith, "theone sacred revolution is change of mind, " when he spoke thesenoble lines:

 So held they firm, the Fathers aye to be, From Home to Holland, Holland to the sea-- Pilgrims for manhood, in their little ship, Hope in each heart, and prayer on every lip. Apart from all--unique, unworldly, true, Selected grain to sow the earth anew; A winnowed part--a saving remnant they; Dreamers who work; adventurers who pray! We know them by the exile that was theirs; Their justice, faith and fortitude attest. 

When he further said:

 On the wintry main God flings their lives as farmers scatter grain, His breath propels the winged seed afloat; His tempests swerve to spare the fragile boat; Here on this rock and on this sterile soil, Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men; Began the making of the world again, Their primal code of liberty, their rules Of civil right; their churches, courts and schools; Their freedom's very secret here laid down-- The spring of government is the little town! On their strong lines, we base our social health-- The man--the home--the town--the Commonwealth; Their saintly Robinson was left behind To teach by gentle memory; to shame The bigot spirit and the word of flame; To write dear mercy in the Pilgrim's law; To lead to that wide faith his soul foresaw--

I liked what he said. If I understand your former letter, you didn't. You don't want a man who differs from you sayingor thinking such things. I want the whole 700, 000 Catholicsof Massachusetts to believe what John Boyle O'Reilly believed, and to love and reverence the Puritan founders of Massachusettsas he did, and I think my way is the way to make them do it. You don't, if I understand you. You think the way to makegood citizens and good men of them and to attract them toProtestantism, is to exclude them, their sons and daughters, from all public employment and to go yourself into a darkcellar and curse at them through the gratings of the windows. 

I stated my religious faith and my ideas of the relationof our religious denominations to each other, in an addressI delivered at Saratoga last year, of which I send you acopy, and which I hope, as you have kindly volunteered tosend me so much of your opinion, you may perhaps be willingto read. It doesn't become me to say anything about it myself. I am deeply sensible of its imperfections. It fails to dojustice to what is in my own heart. But perhaps I may bepermitted to say that within a few weeks after it was delivered, an eminent Catholic clergyman sent me a message expressinghis delight in it. The most famous Episcopalian Bishop inthe country said to a friend of mine that he had read it withgreat pleasure and that it sounded to him like the old times. A Baptist minister, bearing one of the most distinguishednames in the country, wrote me a letter, in which he said, as he read it, "At every sentence, I said to myself, Amen, Amen. " An eminent Orthodox minister, Doctor of Divinity, read it aloud to his parish, in full, instead of his Sunday'ssermon. And a very excellent and able Methodist ministerwrote to me and said, "If that is Unitarianism, I am afraidI am a Unitarian. " I think the time has come to throw downthe walls between Christians and not to build new ones. Ithink the time has come to inculcate harmony and good willbetween all American citizens, especially between all citizensof the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

You quote some expressions which you attribute to Catholicclergymen. If you don't get any nearer right in quotingthem than you do in quoting me, I don't believe that theyever said any such thing. If they have, they never willpersuade any considerable number of Catholic laity in thiscountry, in this nineteenth century, to follow them. You mayperhaps induce the Catholic young men and women of Massachusettsto believe there is something in what those clergymen say. They never will succeed in doing it themselves. 

I don't think you will succeed in getting any considerablenumber of the people of this country, who are able to readand write, or to count ten on their fingers, to believe that, asI am entering my seventieth year, I am actuated by any personalambition, in the counsel which I give my fellow citizens. I don't think you will get them to believe that, if I wereso actuated, I should begin by saying anything which wouldestrange a considerable number of the Protestant Republicancitizens of Massachusetts. I don't think you will convincethem that I am indifferent to the good will of so large aportion of the American people as are said to be enlistedin the ranks of the secret society to which you refer. Ifyou know as little of your Catholic fellow citizens as youknow of me, you have a good deal as yet to learn of the subjectof which you are speaking. 

On the other hand, you may be quite sure I should be unwillingto do injustice to any of my fellow citizens. They will hardlyneed be assured that I would not lightly or unnecessarilyincur their disapprobation. But you may perhaps think itpardonable that I should not be thoroughly informed as tothe principles, motives or conduct of a secret society. Asyou have undertaken the duty of giving me information, willyou kindly answer for me the following questions:

1st. Is the organization to which you refer a secret organization?Are its discussions in the face of day? Do the persons whosepolitical errors they especially oppose have an opportunityto know their purposes and to be convinced by their arguments?If the organization be in any respect secret, why is it deemednecessary to maintain such secrecy in the United States ofAmerica and at the close of the nineteenth century?

2d. Is it the custom of many persons who belong to it todeny, when inquired of, that they are members of such anassociation? And if this be true, does such a falsehood costthem the respect and friendship of their associates or diminishtheir influence in the order?

3d. Do members of the association, after joining it, retaintheir membership in other political parties? Do they agreetogether upon candidates for office or delegates to conventionsto nominate officers and then go into their party caucusesto support such delegates agreed upon in secret, without consultationwith their political brethren? If that be true, does it seemto you that that course is honest?

4th. Do you understand that any considerable number of Catholiclaymen, in this country, accept the interpretation which youput upon the fifteen articles which you quote as principlesof the Roman Catholic Church? Is it not true that the interpretationis absolutely rejected by the Catholic laity in general, andthat they affirm for themselves as absolute independence ofthe Pope or of the clergy in all secular matters as you orI claim for ourselves in regard to Protestant clergymen?

5th. Are not Italy and France, two Catholic countries, to-day as absolutely free from any temporal power or influenceof the Pope or the Catholic clergy as is Massachusetts?

6th. I have had sent me a little leaflet, purporting to bethe principles of the American Protective Association, whichyou doubtless have seen. When you say, in your third article, that the American Protective Association is "opposed to theholding of offices in the National, State or municipal Government, by any subject or supporter of such ecclesiastical power, "and in your fifth article, that you "protest against the employmentof the subjects of any un-American ecclesiastical power asofficers or teachers of our public schools, " do you mean, or no, that no Catholic shall hold such National or Stateor municipal office, and that no Catholic shall be a teacherin a public school? You don't answer this question by quotingthe language of church officials in by-gone days or the intemperatelanguage of some priests in recent times. It is a practicalquestion. Do you or don't you mean to exclude from such officeand from such employment as teachers the bulk of the Catholicpopulation of Massachusetts?

7th. Is it you opinion that General Philip H. Sheridan, were he living, would be unfit to hold civil or military officein this country? Or that his daughter, if she entertainedthe religious belief of her father, should be disqualified frombeing a teacher in a public school?

I have no pride of opinion. I shall be very glad to reviseany opinion of mine and, as you state it, I shall be veryglad to "know better in the future, " if you will kindly enlightenme. 

You and I, as I have said, have the same object at heart. We desire, above all things, the maintenance of the principlesof civil and religious liberty; and above all other instrumentalitiesto that end, the maintenance of our common school system, at the public charge, open to all the children and free frompartisan or sectarian control. If you and I differ, it isonly as to what is the best means of accomplishing theseends. If you think that they are best accomplished by secretsocieties, by hiding from the face of day, by men who willnot acknowledge what they are doing, and by refusing publicemployment to men and women who think on these subjects exactlyas we do, but whose religious faith differs from ours, thenI don't agree with you. I think your method will resultin driving and compacting together, in solid mass, personswho will soon number nearly or quite fifty per cent. Of thevoting population of Massachusetts. Nothing strengthensmen, nothing makes them so hard to hear reason, nothing sodrives them to extremity in opinion or in action as persecutionor proscription. 

On the other hand, my method is the method of absolute freedomand of pure reason. The Catholic boy, who has grown up inour common schools, who had formed his youthful friendshipswith his Protestant classmates, whose daughter or sister, as he grows older, is employed as a teacher, will very soonbe attached to our common school system as we are ourselves. He will be required, as he gets property, to pay his shareof his support. He cannot ask to be exempt from a tax towhich all Protestants cheerfully submit, whether their ownchildren be in the schools or not, and he will not easilybe made to give his consent to paying twice. The AmericanSpirit, the Spirit of the age, the Spirit of Liberty, theSpirit of Equality, especially what Roger Williams called"Soul Liberty" is able to maintain herself in a fair fieldand in a free contest against all comers. Do not compel herto fight in a cellar. Do not compel her to breathe the damp, malarial atmosphere of dark places. Especially let no memberof the Republican Party, the last child of freedom, lend hisaid to such an effort. The atmosphere of the Republic isthe air of the mountain top and the sunlight and the openfield. Her emblem is the eagle and not the bat. 

 I am faithfully yours, GEORGE F. HOAR. 

After the publication of the foregoing letter, I receivedone from Theodore Roosevelt, who was holding a high officein New York City, then at the beginning of his illustriouspolitical career. He expressed his hearty sympathy and approval, and offered to lay aside everything else and come to my aid, if I so desired. I need not say I took special pleasure inthis letter, which disclosed so unmistakably the honest andbrave heart of the man, who was then in his difficult officefighting wild beasts at Ephesus. But I did not need to accepthis offer. 

I was angrily denounced. But the leading Republican paperssoon came to my support. The Republican political leadersgenerally, though quietly, approved what I had said and done. The generous and just heart of the American people was stirred, and the result was that the movement, inspired by bigotryand intolerance, lost its force, languished for a year ortwo, and was little heard of afterward. 

I dare say that the same causes which excited it may provokea similar movement more than once hereafter. But I believeit will fail as that failed. 

I know how prone men are, especially old men, in tellingthe story of their lives, to over-estimate the value and theconsequence of the things in which they have taken a part. But I think I am not extravagant in claiming that the overthrowof this dangerous delusion was of great value not only tothe Republican Party, but to the cause of religious libertyin this country, and that the success of the A. P. A. Wouldhave been the destruction of both. 

CHAPTER XXXTHE ENGLISH MISSION

I may as well put on record here a matter which I supposehas never been made public. When in President Hayes's timeMr. Welsh resigned the English Mission, Mr. Lowell, then inSpain, was strongly recommended for the place. Mr. Evarts, Secretary of State, was quite unwilling to have Mr. Lowellappointed. I fancied that Mr. Evarts might have been influencedsomewhat by his reluctance to appoint a Harvard man. He wasan exceedingly pleasant-natured man, with no bitterness inhim. But he entered with a good deal of zeal into the notunhealthy rivalry between the two famous Universities, Harvardand Yale. Of course I did not like that notion. PresidentHayes had an exceedingly friendly feeling for Harvard. Hehad studied at the Harvard Law School, and later had the degreeof Doctor of Laws there. Mr. Lowell hesitated about acceptingthe duty. I said to the President: "In the matter of theEnglish Mission, if Mr. Lowell declines, I have a suggestionto make which Mr. Evarts, I am afraid, won't like very well. But I wish to ask you to consider it, Evarts or no Evarts. "My relations with both of them made this familiar and half-boyish style of dealing with so important a matter not unbecoming. "I think President Eliot would be an excellent person forsuch a service. It is understood that he is somewhat outof health. I think if he should go to England for a yearor two, and take a vacation from his duties at the College, it would reflect great credit on your Administration and onthe country, and he would return to his duties at Harvardwith renewed health and added reputation and capacity forusefulness. " Mr. Hayes did not quite commit himself. Buthe expressed his very emphatic approval of the idea, and saidhe guessed it might be brought to pass. But I had, at hisrequest, sent a cable to Mr. Lowell who was then in Spain, urging him to take the place. He was then hesitating, butfinally, as is well known, consented. 

I was on the friendliest terms with President Hayes. As Ihave already said he was good enough to offer me the officeof Attorney-General, when the appointment of Devens to theCircuit Court was under consideration. 

I had already, before that time, received from Mr. Evarts, Secretary of State, the offer of the English Mission, as Ihave said in another place, when Mr. Welsh resigned. 

I may as well state here, although it belongs to a latertime, that the offer was made to me again, by President McKinley. I give the correspondence with President McKinley when hemade me that offer:

EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, D. C. September 13, 1898. HON. GEORGE F. HOAR (Confidential), WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS. 

It would give me much satisfaction to appoint you Ambassadorto London. Will it be agreeable to you?

 WILLIAM MCKINLEY. 

September 14, 1898. TO THE PRESIDENT, WASHINGTON, D. C. 

I am highly honored by your confidence, for which I am grateful. But I believe I can better serve my country, and better supportyour Administration by continuing to discharge the legislativeduties to which I have been accustomed for thirty years, thanby undertaking new responsibilities at my age, now past seventy-two. If it were otherwise, I cannot afford to maintain thescale of living which the social customs of London make almostindispensable to an Ambassador, and I have no right to imposeupon my wife, in her present state of health, the burden whichwould fall upon her. Be assured of my warm personal regardand of my desire to stand by you in the difficult and tryingperiod which is before you. 

 GEO. F. HOAR

CHAPTER XXXIPRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND THE SYRIAN CHILDREN

A very touching incident, characteristic of the kind heartof President Roosevelt, ought to be put on record in connectionwith his visit to Worcester. 

During the Christmas holidays of 1901 a very well known Syrian, a man of high standing and character, came into my son's officeand told him this story:

A neighbor and countryman of his had a few years before emigratedto the United States and established himself in Worcester. Soon afterward, he formally declared his intention of becomingan American citizen. After a while, he amassed a little moneyand sent to his wife, whom he had left in Syria, the necessaryfunds to convey her and their little girl and boy to Worcester. She sold her furniture and whatever other belongings she had, and went across Europe to France, where they sailed from oneof the northern ports on a German steamer for New York. 

Upon their arrival at New York, it appeared that the childrenhad contracted a disease of the eyelids, which the doctorsof the Immigration Bureau declared to be trachoma, which iscontagious, and in adults incurable. It was ordered thatthe mother might land, but that the children must be sentback in the ship upon which they arrived, on the followingThursday. This would have resulted in sending them back aspaupers, as the steamship company, compelled to take themas passengers free of charge, would have given them only suchfood as was left by the sailors, and would have dumped themout in France to starve, or get back as beggars to Syria. 

The suggestion that the mother might land was only a cruelmockery. Joseph J. George, a worthy citizen of Worcester, brought the facts of the case to the attention of my son, who in turn brought them to my attention. My son had meantimeadvised that a bond be offered to the Immigration authoritiesto save them harmless from any trouble on account of the children. 

I certified these facts to the authorities and received astatement in reply that the law was peremptory, and that itrequired that the children be sent home; that trouble hadcome from making like exceptions theretofore; that the Governmenthospitals were full of similar cases, and the authoritiesmust enforce the law strictly in the future. Thereupon Iaddressed a telegram to the Immigration Bureau at Washington, but received an answer that nothing could be done for thechildren. 

Then I telegraphed the facts to Senator Lodge, who went inperson to the Treasury Department, but could get no morefavorable reply. Senator Lodge's telegram announcing theirrefusal was received in Worcester Tuesday evening, and repeatedto me in Boston just as I was about to deliver an addressbefore the Catholic College there. It was too late to doanything that night. Early Wednesday morning, the day beforethe children were to sail, when they were already on the ship, I sent the following dispatch to President Roosevelt:

TO THE PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D. C. 

I appeal to your clear understanding and kind and brave heartto interpose your authority to prevent an outrage which willdishonor the country and create a foul blot on the Americanflag. A neighbor of mine in Worcester, Mass. , a Syrian bybirth, made some time ago his public declaration for citizenship. He is an honest, hard-working and in every way respectableman. His wife with two small children have reached New York. 

He sent out the money to pay their passage. The childrencontracted a disorder of the eyes on the ship. The Treasuryauthorities say that the mother may land but the childrencannot, and they are to be sent back Thursday. Ample bondhas been offered and will be furnished to save the Governmentand everybody from injury or loss. I do not think such athing ought to happen under your Administration, unless youpersonally decide that the case is without remedy. I am toldthe authorities say they have been too easy heretofore, andmust draw the line now. That shows they admit the power tomake exceptions in proper cases. Surely, an exception shouldbe made in the case of little children of a man lawfully here, and who has duly and in good faith declared his intentionto become a citizen. The immigration law was never intendedto repeal any part of the naturalization laws which providethat the minor children get all the rights of the father asto citizenship. My son knows the friends of this man personallyand that they are highly respectable and well off. If ourlaws require this cruelty, it is time for a revolution, andyou are just the man to head it. 

 GEORGE F. HOAR. 

Half an hour from the receipt of that dispatch at the WhiteHouse Wednesday forenoon, Theodore Roosevelt, President ofthe United States, sent a peremptory order to New York tolet the children come in. They have entirely recovered fromthe disorder of the eyes, which turned out not to be contagious, but only caused by the glare of the water, or the hardshipsof the voyage. The children are fair-haired, with blue eyes, and of great personal beauty, and would be exhibited withpride by any American mother. 

When the President came to Worcester he expressed a desireto see the children. They came to meet him at my house, dressedup in their best and glorious to behold. The President wasvery much interested in them, and said when what he had donewas repeated in his presence, that he was just beginning toget angry. 

The result of this incident was that I had a good many similarapplications for relief in behalf of immigrants coming inwith contagious diseases. Some of them were meritorious, and others untrustworthy. In the December session of 1902I procured the following amendment to be inserted in the immigrationlaw. 

"Whenever an alien shall have taken up his permanent residencein this country and shall have filed his preliminary declarationto become a citizen and thereafter shall send for his wifeor minor children to join him, if said wife or either of saidchildren shall be found to be affected with any contagiousdisorder, and it seems that said disorder was contracted onboard the ship in which they came, such wife or children shallbe held under such regulations as the Secretary of the Treasuryshall prescribe until it shall be determined whether the disorderwill be easily curable or whether they can be permitted toland without danger to other persons; and they shall not bedeported until such facts have been ascertained. "

CHAPTER XXXIINATIONAL BANKRUPTCY

I have, since I have been in the Senate, taken great interestin the passage of a bill for a system of National Bankruptcy. The Constitution gives Congress power to establish a uniformsystem of Bankruptcy. The people of Massachusetts, a commercialand manufacturing State from the beginning, have always desireda Bankrupt law. They were large dealers with other Statesand with other countries. Insolvent debtors in Massachusettscould not get discharge from their debts contracted in suchdealings. The Massachusetts creditors having debts againstinsolvents in other States found that their debtors underthe laws of those States either got preferences or made fraudulentassignments which they could not detect or prevent. 

On the other hand, the bankruptcy laws have always been unpopularin many parts of the country. The Democrat who strictly construedthe Constitution did not like to see this power of Congressvigorously exercised. The National Courts, who must administersuch laws, were always the object of jealousy and suspicionin the South and West. The people did not like to be summonedto attend the settlement of an estate in bankruptcy, hundredsand hundreds of miles, to the place where the United StatesCourt was sitting, in States like Texas or Missouri. Thesympathy of many communities is apt to be with the debtor, and not with the creditors, who were represented as harpiesor vultures preying on the flesh of their unfortunate victims. A good example of this prejudice will be found in an extractfrom the speech of Senator Ingalls, of Kansas. He said indefending what was known as the equity scheme:

"The opposition arose first, from the great wholesale merchantsin the chief distributing centres of the country. They havetheir agents and attorneys in the vicinity of every debtor, obtaining early information of approaching disaster, and readyto avail themselves of the local machinery of State courtsby attachment or by preferences, through which they can securefull payment of their claims, to the exclusion of less powerfulor less vigilant but equally meritorious creditors. Naturallythey want no Bankrupt law of any description. 

"Second. From the disabled veterans of the old army registers;from the professional assignees and wreckers of estates, who, by exorbitant fees and collusive sales of assets to convenientfavorites, plundered debtor and creditor alike and made thesystem an engine of larceny and confiscation. 

"Third. From those who desire, instead of a system for thedischarge of honest but unfortunate debtors upon the surrenderof their estates, a criminal code and a thumb-screw machinefor the collection of doubtful and desperate debts. Theycovet a return to the primitive practices which prevailedin Rome, when the debtor was sold into slavery or had hisbody cut into pieces and distributed pro rata among his creditors. 

"Fourth. From those timid and cautious conservatives whobelieve that nothing is valuable that is not venerable. 

"Like the statesman described by Macaulay, they prefer toperish by precedent rather than be saved by innovation. Theyadhere to ancient failures rather than incur the risk of successthrough venture and experiment. 

"Fifth. From Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and otherornamental organizations who, being entirely uninformed onthe subject, permit themselves to become the conduits throughwhich the misrepresentation and animosity of avaricious creditorsand rapacious attorneys are discharged upon Congress and thecountry. "

I had moved in the Senate, in 1882, a bill favored by themerchants and manufacturers of Massachusetts, which was largelythe work of Judge John Lowell, of the United States CircuitCourt, one of the most accomplished lawyers of his day, asan amendment to a bill which Mr. Edmunds, Mr. Davis and Mr. Ingalls had reported as a Subcommittee to the Senate JudiciaryCommittee, and which had been reported from that Committeeto the Senate. 

The Lowell Bill was on my motion substituted for the reportof the Judiciary Committee, by a majority of three. Thisbill was extensively discussed in June and December. ButI was unable to secure its passage. It passed the Senate, but it did not get through the House. 

I have had the Parliamentary charge of all Bankruptcy measuresin the Senate from that time. After the failure of the LowellBill, the Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce, and otherlike associations throughout the country, took up the mattervery zealously by employing an able lawyer, the Hon. JayL. Torrey of Missouri, to present the matter in the two Housesof Congress. He was thoroughly acquainted with the principlesand history of Bankruptcy laws in this country and England. But he had no compromise in him. He insisted on the Billwhich he drew, which was a modification of the Lowell Bill, without being willing to make any concession to objectionor difference of opinion in Congress, or out of it. He saidhe would have a perfect law, or none at all. The measureas he drew it was apparently very austere and harsh to thedebtor. It enumerated a large number of offences for whichthe debtor was to be punished by fine and imprisonment, andby a denial of his discharge. Mr. Torrey's provisions werenot very unreasonable. But they made it seem as if the Billwere a penal code for the punishment of fraudulent debtors. A simple provision that any debtor who wilfully should makefalse answer to any question lawfully put to him by the Court, or who wilfully concealed or attempted to conceal any propertyfrom his assignee should lose his discharge and be punishedwith a proper and moderate punishment, would have answeredthe whole purpose. I take some blame to myself for not insistingmore strenuously upon modifying Mr. Torrey's measure. Buthe constantly visited different Senators and Representativesand came back to me with glowing accounts of the prospectsof the Bill, and of their promises to support the Bill. Hewas also the agent of the business organizations of the countrywho had passed resolutions in favor of the measure as he haddrawn it. It seemed to me therefore that if I should getthe Bill amended and then it got lost, I should incur thegreat reproach of having obstinately set up my judgment againstthat of this large number of the ablest men in the country, who were so deeply interested in the matter. So the Bill, though brought up and pressed Congress after Congress, faileduntil Mr. Torrey enlisted in the Spanish War. 

I then introduced a Bill in a softened and modified form. It was attacked in that form by Senator Nelson of Minnesota, a very excellent lawyer and gentleman of great influence, in the Senate. He succeeded in having the Bill modifiedand softened still more. The Bill then passed and went tothe House which, under the leadership of the Judiciary Committee, substituted the original Bill. 

Mr. Nelson and I, with Mr. Lindsay of Kentucky, were put onthe Conference Committee in the Senate, with Mr. Henderson, afterward Speaker, Mr. Ray of New York, now Judge of theU. S. District Court, and Mr. Terry of Missouri, on the partof the House. We struggled nearly the whole winter. Mr. Nelson and Mr. Ray took the burden of the contest upon theirshoulders. Their attempts at compromise reminded their brethrenof the old scientific problem--"What will happen when an irresistibleforce encounters an immovable obstacle. " But both gentlemen, each exceedingly firm in his own opinion when he thought hewas in the right, were wise and reasonable and conscientiousmen. So at last they agreed upon the present BankruptcyBill, which became a law July 1, 1898. It was on the wholesatisfactory to the country, except for one clause in it, whichwas interpreted by the United States Supreme Court in a mannercontrary to the understanding and expectation of the framersof the Bill. 

A law was passed February 7, 1903, correcting this and someminor defects. It is hoped, though we cannot be sure insuch a matter, that a permanent system of Bankruptcy, soessential to all commercial, indeed to all civilized nations, isnow established, and will be maintained in the United States. 

CHAPTER XXXIIITHE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

It has been my singular ill fortune that I have been compelledto differ from the Republican Party, and from a good manyof my political associates, upon many important matters. 

It has been my singular good fortune that, so far, they haveall come to my way of thinking, as have the majority of theAmerican people, in regard to every one, with perhaps oneexception. That is the dealing of the American people withthe people of the Philippine Islands, by the Treaty with Spain. The war that followed it crushed the Republic that the Philippinepeople had set up for themselves, deprived them of their independence, and established there, by American power, a Government inwhich the people have no part, against their will. No man, I think, will seriously question that that action was contraryto the Declaration of Independence, the fundamental principlesdeclared in many State constitutions, the principles avowedby the founders of the Republic and by our statesmen of allparties down to a time long after the death of Lincoln. 

If the question were, whether I am myself right, or whethermy friends and companions in the Republican Party be right, I should submit to their better judgment. But I feel quiteconfident, though of that no man can be certain, that if thejudgment of the American people, even in this generation, could be taken on that question alone, I should find myselfin the majority. If it be not so, the issue is between theopinion of the American people for more than a century, andthe opinion that the American people has expressed for oneor two Presidential terms. 

Surely I do not need to argue the question; at any rate, Iwill not here undertake to argue the question, that our dealingwith the Philippine people is a violation of the principlesto which our people adhered from 1776 to 1893. If the maintenanceof slavery were inconsistent with them, it was admitted thatin that particular we were violating them, or were unablefrom circumstances to carry them into effect. Mr. Jeffersonthought so himself. 

But the accomplishment by this Republic of its purpose tosubjugate the Philippine people to its will, under the claimthat it, and not they, had the right to judge of their fitnessfor self-government, is a rejection of the old American doctrineas applicable to any race we may judge to be our inferior. 

This doctrine will be applied hereafter, unless it be abandoned, to the Negro at home. Senator Tillman of South Carolina wellsaid, and no gentleman in the Senate contradicted him: "Republicanleaders do not longer dare to call into question the justiceor the necessity of limiting Negro suffrage in the South. "The same gentleman said at another time: "I want to call yourattention to the remarkable change that has come over thespirit of the dream of the Republicans. Your slogans of thepast--brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God--have goneglimmering down through the ages. The brotherhood of manexists no longer. " These statements of Mr. Tillman have neverbeen challenged, and never can be. 

I do not mean here to renew the almost interminable debate. I will only make a very brief statement of my position:

The discussion began with the acquisition of Hawaii. Eversince I came to the Senate I had carefully studied the matterof the acquisition of Hawaii. I had become thoroughly satisfiedthat it would be a great advantage to the people of the UnitedStates, as well as for the people of Hawaii. 

Hawaii is 2, 100 miles from our Pacific coast. Yet if a linebe drawn from the point of our territory nearest Asia to theSouthern boundary of California, that line being the chordof which our Pacific coast is the bow, Hawaii will fall thisside of it. Held by a great Nation with whom we were at war, it would be a most formidable and valuable base of supplies. We had sustained a peculiar relation to it. American missionarieshad redeemed the people from barbarism and Paganism. Manyof them, and their descendants, had remained in the Islands. The native Hawaiians were a perishing race. They had gonedown from 300, 000 to 30, 000 within one hundred years. 

The Japanese wanted it. The Portugese wanted it. Other nationswanted it. But the Hawaiians seemed neither to know nor carewhether they wanted it or no. They were a perishing people. Their only hope and desire and expectation was that in theProvidence of God they might lead a quiet, undisturbed life, fishing, bathing, supplied with tropical fruits, and be letalone. 

We had always insisted that our relation to them was peculiar;that they could not be permitted to fall under the dominionof another power, even by their own consent. That had beendeclared by our Department of State under Administrationsof all parties, including Mr. Webster, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Bayard. They were utterly helpless. As their Queen has latelydeclared: "The best thing for them that could have happenedwas to belong to the United States. "

By the Constitution of Hawaii, the Government had been authorizedto make a treaty of annexation with this country. It wassaid that that Constitution was the result of usurpation whichwould not have come to pass but for American aid, and thepresence of one of our men-of-war. But that Government hadbeen maintained for six or seven years. Four of them werewhile Mr. Cleveland was President, who it was well known wouldbe in full sympathy with an attempt to restore the old Government. So if the people had been against it, the Government underthat Constitution could not have lasted an hour. 

President Harrison had negotiated a treaty of annexation, against which no considerable remonstrance or oppositionwas uttered. My approval of it was then, I suppose, wellknown. Certainly no friend of mine, and nobody in Massachusetts, so far as I know, in the least objected or remonstrated againstit. The treaty was withdrawn from the consideration of theSenate by President Cleveland. 

Another was negotiated soon after President McKinley camein. Meantime, however, the controversy with Spain had assumedformidable proportions, and the craze for an extension ofour Empire had begun its course. Many Republican leaderswere advocating the acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands, notfor the reasons I have just stated, but on the avowed groundthat it was necessary we should own them as a point of vantagefor acquiring dominion in the East. It was said that Chinawas about to be divided among the great Western powers, andthat we must have our share. I saw when the time approachedfor action of the McKinley Treaty that the question couldnot be separated, at least in debate, from the question ofentering upon a career of conquest of Empire in the Far East. 

Under these circumstances the question of duty came to me:Will you adhere to the purpose long formed, and vote for theacquisition of Hawaii solely on its own merit? Or, will youvote against it, for fear that the bad and mischievous reasonsthat are given for it is so many quarters, will have a pernicioustendency only to be counteracted by the defeat of the treatyitself?

I hesitated long. President McKinley sent for me to cometo the White House, as was his not infrequent habit. He saidhe wanted to consult me upon the question whether it wouldbe wise for him to have a personal interview with SenatorMorrill of Vermont. He had been told that Mr. Morrill wasopposed to the Treaty. The President said: "I do not quitelike to try to influence the action of an old gentleman likeMr. Morrill, so excellent, and of such great experience. Itseems to me that it might be thought presumptuous, if I wereto do so. But it is very important to us to have his vote, if we can. " The President added something implying that heunderstood that I was in favor of the Treaty. 

I said, "I ought to say, Mr. President, in all candor, thatI feel very doubtful whether I can support it myself. " PresidentMcKinley said: "Well, I don't know what I shall do. We cannotlet those Islands go to Japan. Japan has her eye on them. Her people are crowding in there. I am satisfied they donot go there voluntarily, as ordinary immigrants, but thatJapan is pressing them in there, in order to get possessionbefore anybody can interfere. If something be not done, therewill be before long another Revolution, and Japan will getcontrol. Some little time ago the Hawaiian Government observedthat when the immigrants from a large steamer went ashorethey marched with a military step, indicating that they werea body of trained soldiers. Thereupon Hawaii prohibited thefurther coming in of Japanese. Japan claimed that was inviolation of their treaty, and sent a ship of war to Hawaii. I was obliged to notify Japan that no compulsory measuresupon Hawaii, in behalf of the Japan Government, would be toleratedby this country. So she desisted. But the matters are stillin a very dangerous position, and Japan is doubtless awaitingher opportunity. "

I told President McKinley that I favored then, as I alwayshad, the acquisition of Hawaii. But I did not like the spiritwith which it was being advocated both in the Senate andout of it. I instanced several very distinguished gentlemenindeed, one a man of very high authority in the Senate inmatters relating to foreign affairs, who were urging publiclyand privately the Hawaiian Treaty on the ground that we musthave Hawaii in order to help us get our share of China. PresidentMcKinley disclaimed any such purpose. He expressed his earnestand emphatic dissent from the opinions imputed to severalleading Republicans, whom he named. 

I never, at any time during the discussion of the Philippinequestion, expressed a more emphatic disapproval of the acquisitionof dependencies or Oriental Empire by military strength, thanhe expressed on that occasion. I am justified in puttingthis on record, not only because I am confirmed by severalgentlemen in public life, who had interviews with him, butbecause he made in substance the same declaration in public. 

He declared, speaking of this very matter of acquiring sovereigntyover Spanish territory by conquest:

"Forcible annexation, according to our American code of morals, would be criminal aggression. "

He said at another time:

"Human rights and constitutional privileges must not be forgottenin the race for wealth and commercial supremacy. The Governmentof the people must be by the people and not by a few of thepeople. It must rest upon the free consent of the governedand all of the governed. Power, it must be remembered, whichis secured by oppression or usurpation or by any form of injusticeis soon dethroned. We have no right in law or morals to usurpthat which belongs to another, whether it is property or power. "

I suppose he was then speaking of our duty as to any peoplewhom we might liberate from Spain, as the results of the SpanishWar. He unquestionably meant that we had no right, in lawor morals, to usurp the right of self-government which belongedto the Cubans, or to the Philippine people. 

Yet I have no doubt whatever that in the attitude that hetook later he was actuated by a serious and lofty purposeto do right. I think he was led on from one step to anotherby what he deemed the necessity of the present occasion. Idare say that he was influenced, as any other man who wasnot more than human would have been influenced, by the apparentlyearnest desire of the American people, as he understood it, as it was conveyed to him on his Western journey. But I believeevery step he took he thought necessary at the time. I furtherbelieve, although I may not be able to convince other men, and no man will know until the secret history of that timeshall be made known, that if he had lived, before his Administrationwas over, he would have placed the Republic again on the principlesfrom which it seems to me we departed--the great doctrineof Jefferson, the great doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, that there can be no just Government by one people over anotherwithout its consent, and that the International law declaredby the Republic is that all Governments must depend for theirjust powers upon the consent of the governed. This was insistedon by our Fathers as the doctrine of International law, tobe acted upon by the infant Republic for itself. In thisI am confirmed by the testimony of Mr. Secretary Long, whowas in President McKinley's most intimate counsels. 

The Treaty negotiated by President McKinley with Hawaii wasnot acted upon. It was concluded to substitute a joint resolution, for which there was a precedent in the case of the acquisitionof Texas. I voted for the joint resolution, as did SenatorHale of Maine, and several Democratic Senators, who were earnestlyopposed to what is known as the policy of Imperialism. 

I left the President, after the conversation above related, without giving him any assurance as to my action. But Idetermined on full reflection, to support the acquisition ofHawaii, in accordance with my long-settled purpose, and atthe same time to make a clear and emphatic statement of myunalterable opposition to acquiring dependencies in the East, if we did not expect, when the proper time came, to admitthem to the Union as States. This I did to the best of mypower. I was invited to give an address before a collegein Pennsylvania, where I took occasion to make an emphaticdeclaration of the doctrine on which I meant to act. 

Afterward, July 5, 1898, I made a speech in the Senate, onthe joint resolution for the acquisition of Hawaii, in whichI said that I had entertained grave doubts in regard to thatmeasure; that I had approached the subject with greater hesitationand anxiety than I had ever felt in regard to any other matterduring the whole of my public life. 

I went on to say:

"The trouble I have found with the Hawaiian business is this:Not in the character of the population of the Sandwich Island, not in their distance from our shores, not in the doubt thatwe have an honest right to deal with the existing governmentthere in such a matter. I have found my trouble in the natureand character of the argument by which, in the beginning andever since, a great many friends of annexation have soughtto support it . . . . 

"If this be the first step in the acquisition of dominionover barbarous archipelagoes in distant seas; if we are toenter into competition with the great powers of Europe inthe plundering of China, in the division of Africa; if weare to quit our own to stand on foreign lands; if our commerceis hereafter to be forced upon unwilling peoples at the cannon'smouth; if we are ourselves to be governed in part by peoplesto whom the Declaration of Independence is a stranger; or, worse still, if we are to govern subjects and vassal States, trampling as we do it on our own great Charter which recognizesalike the liberty and the dignity of individual manhood, thenlet us resist this thing in the beginning, and let us resistit to the death. 

"I do not agree with those gentlemen who think we would wrestthe Philippine Islands from Spain and take charge of themourselves. I do not think we should acquire Cuba, as theresult of the existing war, to be annexed to the United States. "

I reinforced this protest as well I could. But I went onto state the reasons which had actuated me in favoring themeasure, and that my unconquerable repugnance to the acquisitionof territory to be held in dependency did not apply to thatcase. 

I cited the Teller resolution, and declared that it boundthe American people in honor, and that its principle appliedto all Spanish territory. I maintained that there was nothingin the acquisition of Hawaii inconsistent with this doctrine. I think so still. 

I was bitterly reproached by some worthy persons, who I supposewill always find matter for bitter reproach in everythingsaid or done on public matters. They charged me with speakingone way and voting another. But I am content to leave thecase on its merits, and on the record. 

The war went on. The feeling of the country was deeply excited. President McKinley made his famous Western journey. He wasgreeted by enthusiastic throngs. The feeling in that partof the country in favor of a permanent dominion over the PhilippineIslands was uttered by excited crowds, whom he addressed fromthe platform and the railroad cars as he passed thorough thecountry. But the sober, conservative feeling, which seldomfinds utterance in such assemblies, did not make itself heard. 

The President returned to Washington, undoubtedly in the honestbelief that the country demanded that he acquire the PhilippineIslands, and that Congress should govern them. 

I have never attributed publicly, or in my own heart, toPresident McKinley any but the most conscientious desireto do his duty in what, as the case seems to me, was an entirechange of purpose. Many military and naval officers, fromwhose reports he had to get his facts almost wholly, insistedthat the Philippine people were unfit for self-government. After the unhappy conflict of arms the solution of the problemseemed to be to compel the Philippine people to unconditionalsubmission. It would not be just or fair that I should undertaketo state the reasons which controlled the President in adoptingthe conclusions to which I did not myself agree. I am merelytelling my own part in the transaction. 

When I got back to Washington, at the beginning of the sessionin December, 1898, I had occasion to see the President almostimmediately. His purpose was to make a Treaty by which, withoutthe assent of their inhabitants, we should acquire the PhilippineIslands. We were to hold and govern in subjection the peopleof the Philippine Islands. That was pretty well understood. 

The national power of Spain was destroyed. It was clearthat she must submit to whatever terms we should impose. The President had chosen, as Commissioners to negotiate theTreaty, five gentlemen, three of whom, Senators Cushman K. Davis, and William P. Frye and Whitelaw Reid, the accomplishededitor of the New York _Tribune, _ former Minister to France, were well known to be zealous for acquiring territory in theEast. Mr. Frye was said to have declared in a speech notlong before he went abroad that he was in favor of keepingeverything we could lay our hands on. I suppose that was, however, intended as a bit of jocose extravagance, which thatmost excellent gentleman did not mean to have taken too seriously. 

Mr. Day, the Secretary of State, and Senator Gray of Delaware, were understood to be utterly opposed to the policy of expansionor Imperialism. 

I do not know about Mr. Day. But it appeared, when threeyears afterward the correspondence between the Commissionersand the Department of State became public, that Mr. Day expressedno objection to the acquisition of Luzon, but objected toa peremptory demand for the whole Philippine Island group, thereby--to use his language--"leaving us open to the imputationof following agreement to negotiate with demand for wholesubject matter of discussion ourselves. "

The public impression as to Senator Gray is confirmed by thefollowing remonstrance, which appears in the same correspondence:

PEACE COMMISSIONERS TO MR. HAY[Telegram]

PARIS, October 25, 1898. 

The undersigned cannot agree that it is wise to take PhilippineIslands in whole or in part. To do so would be to reverseaccepted continental policy of the country, declared and actedupon throughout our history. Propinquity governs the caseof Cuba and Porto Rico. Policy proposed introduces us intoEuropean politics and the entangling alliances against whichWashington and all American statemen have protested. It willmake necessary a navy equal to largest of powers; a greatlyincreased military establishment; immense sums for fortificationsand harbors; multiply occasions for dangerous complicationswith foreign nations, and increase burdens of taxation. Willreceive in compensation no outlet for American labor in labormarket already overcrowded and cheap; no area for homes forAmerican citizens; climate and social conditions demoralizingto character of American youth; new and disturbing questionsintroduced into our politics; church question menacing. Onwhole, instead of indemnity--injury. 

The undersigned cannot agree that any obligation incurredto insurgents is paramount to our own manifest interests. Attacked Manila as part of legitimate war against Spain. If we had captured Cadiz and Carlists had helped us, wouldnot owe duty to stay by them at the conclusion of war. Onthe contrary, interests and duty would require us to abandonboth Manila and Cadiz. No place for colonial administrationor government of subject people in American system. So muchfrom standpoint of interest; but even conceding all benefitsclaimed for annexation, we thereby abandon the infinitelygreater benefit to accrue from acting the part of a great, powerful, and Christian nation; we exchange the moral grandeurand strength to be gained by keeping our word to nations ofthe world and by exhibiting a magnanimity and moderation inthe hour of victory that becomes the advanced civilizationwe claim, for doubtful material advantages and shameful steppingdown from high moral position boastfully assumed. We shouldset example in these respects, not follow in the selfish andvulgar greed for territory which Europe has inherited frommediaeval times. Our declaration of war upon Spain was accompaniedby a solemn and deliberate definition of our purpose. Nowthat we have achieved all and more than our object, let ussimply keep our word. Third article of the protocol leaveseverything concerning the control of the Philippine Islandsto negotiation between the parties. 

It is absurd now to say that we will not negotiate but willappropriate the whole subject-matter of negotiation. Atthe very least let us adhere to the President' instructionsand if conditions require the keeping of Luzon forego thematerial advantages claimed in annexing other islands. Aboveall let us not make a mockery of the injunction containedin those instructions, where, after stating that we tookup arms only in obedience to the dictates of humanity andin the fulfillment of high public and moral obligations, andthat we had no design of aggrandizement and no ambition ofconquest, the President among other things eloquently says:

"It is my earnest wish that the United States in making peaceshould follow the same high rule of conduct which guided itin facing war. It should be as scrupulous and magnanimousin the concluding settlement as it was just and humane inits original action. "

This and more, of which I earnestly ask a reperusal, bindsmy conscience and governs my action. 

GEORGE GRAY. WEDNESDAY, 12. 30, night. 

Senator Gray afterward signed the Treaty, defended it indebate, and voted for its ratification. He vigorously defendedhis vote on the floor of the Senate, chiefly by the argumentthat when he learned that it was the purpose of the UnitedStates to expel Spain from the Philippine Islands, he concludedit was our duty to remain there for the protection of thepeople against foreign rapacity and against domestic anarchy. He claimed that he had been influenced in coming to this conclusionvery considerably by the fact that I was reported to havesaid that under no circumstances would we give back the Philippinepeople to Spain. That was true. I believed then, and believenow, that it was our duty to deliver them from Spain, to protectthem against her, or against the cupidity of any other nationuntil her people could have tried fully the experiment of self-government, in which I have little doubt they would havesucceeded. 

When I saw President McKinley early in December, 1898, hewas, I suppose, committed to the policy to which he adhered. He greeted me with the delightful and affectionate cordialitywhich I always found in him. He took me by the hand, andsaid: "How are you feeling this winter, Mr. Senator?" Iwas determined there should be no misunderstanding. I repliedat once: "Pretty pugnacious, I confess, Mr. President. "The tears came into his eyes, and he said, grasping my handagain: "I shall always love you, whatever you do. "

I found we differed widely on this great subject. I denouncedwith all the vigor of which I was capable the Treaty, andthe conduct of the war in the Philippine Islands, in the Senate, on the platform, in many public letters, and in articles inmagazines and newspapers. But President McKinley never abatedone jot of his cordiality toward me. I did not, of course, undertake to press upon him my advice in matters affectingthe Philippine Islands, about which we differed so much. Buthe continued to seek it, and to take it in all other mattersas constantly as ever before. 

In order that it may not be supposed that I deceived myselfin regard to President McKinley's kindly regard, I may perhapsbe pardoned for saying that his close friend, Senator Hanna, has more than once assured me that McKinley's love for mewas never abated, and for citing a sentence from an articleby Charles Emory Smith, his trusted counsellor and able andaccomplished Postmaster-General, in this Cabinet. Mr. Smithsays:

"Senator Hoar was the earnest foe and critic of PresidentMcKinley's policy. But President McKinley had the warmestregard and consideration for him. Nothing, indeed, in publiclife was sweeter than the sentiment of these different anddiffering men toward each other. President McKinley was anxiousto commission Senator Hoar as Minister to England, and profferedhim the place. It was without any desire to remove him fromthe arena of contention--apprehension of such a reflectionrestrained the proffer for a time--though the contention hadnot then been fully developed. "

After President McKinley's death I expressed the public sorrowand my own in an address to a vast audience of the peopleof my own city of Worcester, in Mechanics' Hall; and again, at the request of the Republican State Committee, at the RepublicanState Convention shortly afterward. 

I have reason to know that both the addresses gave pleasureto many of the lamented President's closest and warmest friendsthroughout the country. I was afterward invited by the CityGovernment of Worcester to deliver a historical eulogy onPresident McKinley before them. That office, it seemed tome, I ought to decline. It was not because I was behind anyother man in admiration or personal affection for that loftyand beautiful character. But I thought that address, whichwas not only to utter the voice of public sorrow, but to givea careful and discriminating sketch of the public life ofits subject, ought to be delivered by some person who agreedwith him in regard to the most important action of his life. I could not well pass over the Philippine question. I couldnot well speak of it without stating my own opinion. I couldnot undertake to state President McKinley's opinion, conductor policy, without expressing my disapproval of it, and ifI did not do that, I could not state it without being thoughtby those who heartily approved it, not to have stated it justlyand fairly. 

I had repeatedly declared, during the preceding two years, both before and since his death, my highest admiration forthe intellectual and moral qualities of my beloved friend, and my belief that he would have a very high place in historyamong the best and ablest men of the country. 

But I thought the story of the important part of his lifeshould be told from his point of view, and not from mine;that the reasons which governed him should be stated by aperson sure to appreciate them fully. If a great CatholicPrelate were to die, his eulogy should not be pronouncedby a Protestant. When Dr. Channing died, we did not selecta Calvinist minister to pronounce his funeral sermon. WhenCharles Sumner died Mr. Schurz and Mr. Curtis, not some oldWhig, and not some earnest supporter of General Grant, pronouncedthe eulogy. I suppose nobody would have dreamed of askinga Free Trader to pronounce the eulogy on President McKinleyif he had died soon after the beginning of his first term. So I declined the office. The City did not ask anybody elseto fill my place, or perform the task. 

I will not now renew the debate about our treatment of thepeople of the Philippine Islands. My opinion has not at allchanged. I think that under the lead of Mabini and Aguinaldoand their associates, but for our interference, a Republicwould have been established in Luzon, which would have comparedwell with the best of the Republican Governments between theUnited States and Cape Horn. For years and for generations, and perhaps for centuries, there would have been turbulence, disorder and revolution. But in her own way Destiny wouldhave evolved for them a force of civic rule best adapted totheir need. If we had treated them as we did Cuba, we shouldhave been saved the public shame of violating not only ourown pledges, but the rule of conduct which we had declaredto be self-evident truth in the beginning of our history. We should have been saved the humiliation of witnessing thesubjection by Great Britain of the Boers in South Africa, without a murmur of disapproval, and without an expressionof one word of sympathy for the heroic victims. 

My term as Senator expired on the fourth of March, 1901. The election of Senator for the following term came in Januaryof that year. I differed sharply from my colleague, Mr. Lodge, in this whole matter. But the people of Massachusetts, withthe generous and liberal temper which ever distinguished thatnoble Commonwealth, desired that their Senators should actupon their own judgment, without any constraint. 

A resolution was introduced at the session of the Legislatureof 1899 by Mr. Mellen, Democratic member from Worcester, thankingme for my speech in opposition to the Spanish Treaty, endorsingthe doctrine of that speech, and condemning the subjugationof the Philippine people by force of arms. 

Charles G. Washburn, Republican member from Worcester, introduceda resolution commending my speech, and declaring it to be"A speech of the loftiest patriotism and eloquent interpretationof the high conception of human freedom which the fatherssought to preserve for all time in the Declaration of Independenceand in the Constitution of the United States. "

These resolution, if adopted, would, by implication, condemnthe well-known opinion and action of my colleague. They wereencountered by several others, none of which referred to eitherSenator, but expressed approval of the Spanish Treaty. Oneof them, however, presented in the House by Mr. Mills ofNewburyport, declared that the Treaty ought to be ratified, and then the United States should fulfil to Porto Rico andthe Philippine Islands the pledge of self-government and independencemade to Cuba. Very wisely all these resolutions were referredto the Committee on Federal Relations, who reported this asa compromise:

RESOLUTION REPORTED BY THE COMMITTEE ON FEDERAL RELATIONS, OF THE LEGISLATURE, MARCH 29, 1899

_Resolved, _ by the Senate and House of Representatives ofthe Commonwealth of Massachusetts in General Court assembled, that Massachusetts, ever loyal in sympathy and support ofthe General Government, continues her unabated confidencein her Senators, and with a just pride in the eloquent andmemorable words they have uttered, leaves them untrammeledin the exercise of an independent and patriotic judgment uponthe momentous questions presented for their consideration. 

The whole matter was then dropped. But the Legislature, and the generous people of Massachusetts whom they represented, acted upon the spirit of the Committee's Resolution. I wasreelected without opposition. I had every Republican vote, and many Democratic votes, of the Legislature. My affectionateand cordial relations with my brilliant and accomplished colleaguehave never suffered an instant's interruption. 

I think I am entitled to record, however, that this resultwas not accomplished by any abatement of my opposition tothe policy of the Administration as to the Philippine Islands. I made a great many speeches within a few weeks of the Presidentialelection in 1900. The members of the Senate and House, ofthe Massachusetts Legislature, who were to choose a Senator, were to be chosen at the same time. I expressed my unchangedand earnest opposition of disapproval to the whole businessat length. 

In speaking of the habit of appealing to the love of theflag in behalf of this policy of conquest, I said that therewas but one symbol more sacred than the American flag. Thatwas the bread and wine which represented the body and bloodof the Saviour of mankind; adding, that a man who would usean appeal to the flag in aid of the subjugation of an unwillingpeople, would be capable of using the sacramental wine fora debauch. 

The week before the election of Senator came on a bill forthe reorganization of the Army was before the Senate. Thatcontained a provision for increasing the Army to a hundredthousand men, allowing the President, however, to reduce itto seventy thousand, and to raise it again if necessary, so it would in his discretion be elastic, within those limitations. 

Mr. Bacon, of Georgia, who seemed to be the leader of theDemocrats on that measure, inquired of the Republicans whowere managing the bill, how many men they needed and whattime would be required to put down the insurrection in thePhilippine Islands. Senator Bacon said that they would givethem the hundred thousand men, or any force they might demandfor one or two or three or five years, or for any requiredtime. But they were unwilling to give the President the powerof expanding and contracting the army in time of peace. Thiswas in full Senate. 

I followed with a statement that I had no objection to givingthe President this discretion, and did not disapprove thebill on that account. I thought the size of the Army intime of peace should be left largely to the opinion of theexperts, especially General Miles, the famous soldier at thehead of our Army, who thought the regular Army should consistof one hundred for every thousand of our population. Thatwould be about eighty thousand then, and before long wouldrequire a hundred thousand men. But I said I was opposedto raising soldiers to carry on the war in the PhilippineIslands. The only way to stop it that I knew was to refuseto vote for the Army Bill. I voted against it solely on thataccount. 

I meant that if the Legislature of Massachusetts were toreelect me, no man should ever have it to say that I hadbought my reelection by silence on this question, or concealedmy opinion, however extreme it might be, until after election. 

After my election I delivered an address before the two Housesof the Legislature, at their request, and was received witha most cordial enthusiasm. 

Yet I think that if any leading Republican who had differedfrom me on this question, especially Governor Long, of whosebrilliant administration of the Navy the people of the Commonwealthwere so proud, had pressed his candidacy for the office inopposition to me, as has been the custom in like cases inother States, it is not unlikely that he would have been elected. 

I have no doubt I should have found Governor Roger Wolcotta formidable competitor, if he had lived and been willing. Governor Wolcott had made a statement in public, quietly andbriefly, as was his wont, expressing his sympathy with mewhen the question of the Treaty was under debate. Somewhatlater he made a statement in the same way, expressing hisopinion that the Administration should be supported. Boththese declarations were in general terms. They were not inconsistentwith each other. But death arrested the honorable and usefulcareer of Roger Wolcott when he was still in the prime oflife, in the strength of his noble manhood, a strength whichseemed rapidly enlarging and growing as if in early youth. 

I have not doubt that the subjugation of the Philippine Islands, the acquisition of a dependency to be held in subjection bythe United States, the overthrow of the great doctrine thatGovernments rest on the consent of the governed; that allthe painful consequences which have attended the war for thesubjugation of that distant people, would have been avoidedif the Democratic opposition had been hearty and sincere. The same spirit that defeated the Election bill in spite ofthe majority in its favor, would have easily accomplishedthat result. The Democratic Party, as a party, never meantbusiness in this matter. I do not deny that many Democrats--I dare say a majority of the Democrats--were as earnestlyand seriously opposed to the acquisition of the PhilippineIslands as I was myself. But they never wielded their partystrength in opposition to it. I said to one eminent Democraticleader early in the year 1900: "There is one way in whichyou can put an end to this whole business. If you can electa Democratic House it will have power under the Constitutionto determine the use to which the Army shall be put. In thatway you compelled President Hayes to refrain from furthersupport by military force of the Republican State Governmentsin the South. " He answered: "Mr. Hoar, we shall never doanything as radical as that. "

When Senator Bacon made the offer to the majority of the Senateto agree to give them all the military power they desiredfor the suppression of the resistance in the Philippinesfor as long a time as they should think it necessary, theentire Democratic Party in the Senate was in their seats, and there was no expression of dissent. 

I think the Democratic Party feared the fate of the Federalistswho opposed the War of 1812, and of the Democrats who opposedthe War for the Union in 1861. This of course in the natureof things is but conjecture. 

Seventeen of the followers of Mr. Bryan voted for the Treaty. The Treaty would have been defeated, not only lacking theneedful two thirds, but by a majority of the Senate but forthe votes of Democrats and Populists. 

Senators Morgan and Pettus of Alabama, Senator McLaurin ofSouth Carolina, Senator McEnery of Louisiana, were avowedsupporters of the Treaty from the beginning. 

Mr. Bryan in the height of the contest came to Washingtonfor the express purpose of urging upon his followers thatit was best to support the Treaty, end the War, and let thequestion of what should be done with our conquest be settledin the coming campaign. He urged upon them, as I was toldby several Democrats at the time who did not take his advice, that the Democratic Party could not hope to win a victoryon the financial questions at stake after they had been beatenon them in a time of adversity; and that they must have thisissue for the coming campaign. He was besought by his wiserpolitical associates to go away and leave the Senate to settlethe matter. But he remained. 

After that it became impossible, not only to defeat the Treaty, but to defeat the policy which had inspired it. The Treatypledged that the Philippine Islands should be governed byCongress. It undertook obligations which require for theirfulfillment, at least ten years' control of the Islands. It put the people of the Philippine Islands in the attitudeof abandoning the Republic they had formed, and of acknowledgingnot only our supremacy but that they were neither entitledor fit to govern themselves or to carry on the war which hadunfortunately broken out. I do not mean to imply that, asI have said, a large number of the Democratic Party both inpublic life and out of it, were not sincere and zealous intheir opposition to this wretched business. But next to avery few men who controlled the policy of the Republican Partyin this matter, Mr. Bryan and his followers who voted in theSenate for the Treaty are responsible for the results. 

I have been blamed, as I have said already, because, withmy opinions, I did not join the Democratic Party and helpto elect Mr. Bryan. I disagreed with him and his party asto every other issue then pending before the American people. So differing from him, I found nothing in his attitude orthat of his party, to induce me to support him, or even toinspire my confidence in their settlement of the question ofImperialism or expansion. 

In my opinion, if he had been elected, he would have acceptedthe result, have put the blame for it on his predecessorin office, and matters would have gone on very much as theyhave under Republican control. 

I have been told by many Senators who voted for the Treaty, that they regretted that vote more than any other act of theirlives. Enough Senators have said this to me in person, notonly to have defeated the Treaty, but if they had so voted, to have defeated it by a majority. A very eminent RepublicanSenator told me that more than twenty Senators, who votedfor the Treaty, had given the same assurance to him. Butthey are very unwilling to make the declaration public. Severalgentlemen, however, have publicly expressed their regret fortheir vote, as is well known, enough to have changed the result. 

When I think of my party, whose glory and whose service toLiberty are the pride of my life, crushing out this peoplein their effort to establish a Republic, and hear peopletalk about _giving_ them good Government, and that they arebetter off than they ever were under Spain, I feel very muchas if I had learned that my father, or some other honoredancestor, had been a slave-trader in his time, and had boastedthat he had introduced a new and easier kind of hand-cuffsor fetters to be worn by the slaves during the horrors ofthe middle passage. 

I do not believe that there is a respectable or intelligentFilipino to-day, unless possibly some Macabebe scout, whowould not get rid of the Government of the United Statesat once, if he could. Buencamino is said to be one of theablest of their public men. He has been quoted as friendlyto us, and is so. There is no doubt that he has so expressedhimself. He has been appointed a member of the Taft Government, and has had committed to him the responsible and importantduty of deciding the appointments to the offices which areto be filled by the native Filipinos, under the existing establishment. It is said by both sides that he is crafty and selfish andambitious, and that he likes to be on the side that is thestrongest. How that may be, I do not know. But he will noteven pretend to accept the rule of the United States willingly. He appeared as a witness before a Committee of the House ofRepresentatives, when in this country in 1902. He was askedwhether his people approved the policy of the Democratic Party. He answered emphatically: "No. They do not wish to have theUnited States abandon them to the ambition or cupidity offoreign Governments. " But he added: "Every Filipino is infavor of the policy advocated by Senator Hoar. " "What!" saidhis inquirer, with great surprise, "Do you mean to say thatevery Filipino agrees with Senator Hoar in his views?" "Yes, "replied the man, with great emphasis; "every Filipino agreeswith Senator Hoar. "

I mentioned this one day in conversation with President Roosevelt. He told me that Buencamino had said exactly the same thingto him. 

General Miles told me on his return from his journey roundthe world that he saw many leaders of the Philippine people;that they spoke of me with great regard and attachment. 

June 17, 1902, an eminent Hindoo scholar, published a longarticle in the _Japan Times, _ in which he said:

"The speech of Mr. Hoar, though an address to his own countrymen, is a message of hope to the whole world which sank with despondencyat the sight of Republican America behaving like a cruel, tyrannical and rapacious Empire in the Philippines and particularlyto the broken-hearted people of Asia who are beginning tolose all confidence in the humanity of the white races. Oris it that they have lost it already? Hence all papers inAsia should reprint his speech, translate it, and distributeit broadcast. Let it be brought home to the Asiatic peopleso that they may work and worship their champion and his forefathers. Thanks to the awakening in America, thanks to the forces thatare at work to chase out the degenerating, demoralizing passionfor territorial aggrandizement from the noble American mindand save it for itself and the world at large from the cancerof Imperialism. "

I am afraid I am committing an offence against good tastein repeating such laudations. But it must be rememberedthat a public man who has to encounter so much bitter revilingand objurgation, is fairly entitled to have a little extravaganceon the other side that the balance may be even. I would ratherhave the gratitude of the poor people of the Philippine Islands, amid their sorrow, and have it true that what I may say ordo has brought a ray of hope into the gloomy caverns in whichthe oppressed peoples of Asia dwell, than to receive a DucalCoronet from every Monarch in Europe, or command the applauseof listening Senators and read my history in a Nation's eyes. 

At first there can seem nothing more absurd than the suggestionof my Asiatic friend that the people of Asia should worshiptheir champion and his ancestors. But on second thought, it is fair to say that while no human being can be entitledto be worshipped by any other, yet that we got our love ofLiberty from our ancestors, or at any rate that is where Igot mine, and that they are entitled to all the credit. 

CHAPTER XXXIVAPPOINTMENTS TO OFFICE

Among the great satisfactions in the life of public men isthat of sometimes being instrumental in the advancement toplaces of public honor of worthy men, and of being able tohave a great and salutary influence upon their lives. I havealways held to the doctrine of what is called Civil ServiceReform, and have maintained to the best of my ability thedoctrine of the absolute independence of the Executive insuch matters, as his right to disregard the wishes and opinionsof members of either House of Congress, and to make his appointments, executive and judicial, without advice, or on such adviceas he shall think best. But, at the same time, there canbe no doubt that the Executive must depend on some adviceother than his own, to learn the quality of men in differentparts of this vast Republic, and to learn what will be agreeableto public opinion and to the party which is administeringthe Government and is responsible for its administration. He will, ordinarily, find no better source of such informationthan in the men whom the people have shown their own confidenceby entrusting them with the important function of Senatoror Representative. He will soon learn to know his men, andhow far he can safely take such advice. He must be carefulto see to it that he is not induced to build up a factionin his party, or to fill up the public offices with the partisansof ambitious but unscrupulous politicians. When I enteredthe House of Representatives, before the Civil Service Reformhad made any progress, I addressed and had put on file withthe Secretary of the Treasury a letter in which I said thatI desired him to understand when I made a recommendation tohim of any person for public office, it was to be taken merelyas my opinion of the merit of the candidate, and not as anexpression of a personal request; and that if he found anyother person who would in his judgment be better for the publicservice, I hoped he would make the selection without regardto my recommendation. 

I have never undertaken to use public office as personalpatronage, or to claim the right to dictate to the Presidentof the United States, or that the executive was not entirelyfree, upon such advice as he saw fit, or without advice, if hethought fit, in making his selection for public office. 

It has been my good fortune to have influenced, or I thinkI may fairly say, procured the appointment to public officeof many gentlemen who would not have been appointed withoutmy active efforts. I have no reason to be ashamed of oneof the list. I believe that the following gentlemen, besideothers less distinguished, who have been very satisfactory, able and faithful public servants, owe their appointment tomy original suggestion, or would not have been appointed withoutmy earnest efforts. 

Charles Devens, Attorney-General; Alanson W. Beard, Collectorof the Port of Boston; Horace Gray, first to the office ofReporter of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, and laterto that of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the UnitedStates; J. Evarts Greene, Postmaster of Worcester; ThomasL. Nelson, Judge of the District Court of Massachusetts; FrancisC. Lowell, Judge of the District Court of Massachusetts; HowellE. Jackson, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of theUnited States; John D. Washburn, Minister to Switzerland. 

I think I may also fairly claim that the election of WilliamB. Washburn as Governor of Massachusetts was due not onlyto the fact that I originally proposed him as a candidate, but to my active efforts in the campaign which preceded theConvention which nominated him. 

There is no man in this list of greater ability or of higherquality of manhood than Evarts Greene. Mr. Greene was compelledby the illness of his wife to remain fast-bound in one spot, instead of going to some large city where his great talentwould have commanded a very high place indeed in his professionas editor. When he edited the Worcester _Spy, _ it was oneof the most influential Republican newspapers in the country. The _Spy_ got into pecuniary difficulties. Mr. Greene, withsome reluctance, accepted the office of Postmaster, an officewhich, according to usage in such cases, was in my gift. 

Just before Postmaster-General Wanamaker, whose executiveability no man will question, went out of office, he requestedMr. Greene to send to the Department an account of the improvementshe had made and proposed in the post-office service. Thiswas sent in a circular all over the country to other likepost-offices. 

Just before Mr. Greene died, President Roosevelt visitedWorcester. In passing the post-office, where the personsemployed in the service were collected, he stopped and saidhe was glad to see "what we have been accustomed to considerthe record post-office. " This, as may well be believed, gave Mr. Greene great satisfaction. 

CHAPTER XXXVORATORY AND SOME ORATORS I HAVE HEARD

The longer I live, the more highly I have come to value thegift of eloquence. Indeed, I am not sure that it is notthe single gift most to be coveted by man. It is hard, perhapsimpossible, to define, as poetry is impossible to define. To be a perfect and consummate orator is to possess the highestfaculty given to man. He must be a great artist, and more. He must be a great actor, and more. He must be a master ofthe great things that interest mankind. What he says oughtto have as permanent a place in literature as the highestpoetry. He must be able to play at will on the mighty organ, his audience, of which human souls are the keys. He musthave knowledge, wit, wisdom, fancy, imagination, courage, nobleness, sincerity, grace, a heart of fire. He must himselfrespond to every emotion as an AEolian harp to the breeze. He must have

 An eye that tears can on a sudden fill And lips that smile before the tears are gone. 

He must have a noble personal presence. He must have, inperfection, the eye and the voice which are the only andnatural avenues by which one human soul can enter into andsubdue another. His speech must be filled with music, andpossess its miraculous charm and spell, Which the posting winds recall, And suspend the river's fall. 

He must have the quality which Burke manifested when WarrenHastings said, "I felt, as I listened to him, as if I werethe most culpable being on earth"; and which made Philip sayof Demosthenes, "Had I been there he would have persuadedme to take up arms against myself. "

He has a present, practical purpose to accomplish. If hefail in that he fails utterly and altogether. His object is toconvince the understanding, to persuade the will, to setaflame the heart of his audience or those who read what hesays. He speaks for a present occasion. Eloquence is thefeather that tips his arrow. If he miss the mark he is afailure, although his sentences may survive everything elsein the permanent literature of the language in which he speaks. What he says must not only accomplish the purpose of the hour, but should be fit to be preserved for all time, or he canhave no place in literature, and a small and ephemeral placein human memory. 

The orator must know how so to utter his thought that itwill stay. The poet and the orator have this in common. Each must so express and clothe his thought that it shallpenetrate and take possession of the soul, and, having penetrated, must abide and stay. How this is done, who can tell? Carlyledefines poetry as a "sort of lilt. " Cicero finds the secretof eloquence in a

 Lepos quidem celeritasque et brevitas. 

One writer lately dead, who has a masterly gift of nobleand stirring eloquence, finds it in "a certain collocation ofconsonants. " Why it is that a change of a single word, oreven of a single syllable, for any other which is an absolutesynonym in sense, would ruin the best line in Lycidas, orinjure terribly the noblest sentence of Webster, nobody knows. Curtis asks how Wendell Phillips did it, and answers his ownquestion by asking you how Mozart did it. 

When I say that I am not sure that this is not the singlegift most to be coveted by man, I may seem to have left outthe moral quality in my conception of what is excellent. Butsuch is the nature of man that the loftiest moral emotionsare still the overmastering emotions. The orator that doesnot persuade men that righteousness is on his side will seldompersuade them to think or act as he desires; and if he failin that he fails in his object; and the orator who has notin fact righteousness on his side will in general fail so topersuade them. And even if in rare cases he do persuadehis audience, he does not gain a permanent place in literature. Bolingbroke's speeches, though so enthusiastically praisedby the best judges, have perished by their own worthlessness. 

Although the danger of the Republic, and his own, still occupiedhis thoughts, Cicero found time in his old age to record, at the request of his brother Quintus, his opinion, _de omniratione dicendi. _ It is not likely that the treatise "deOratore" or that "de Claris Oratoribus" will ever be matchedby any other writer on this fascinating subject, except thebrief and masterly fragment of Tacitus. 

He begins by inquiring why it is that, when so many personsstrive to attain the gift of eloquence, and its rewards offame and wealth and power are so great, the number of thosewho succeed as orators is so small in comparison with thenumber of those who become great generals, or statesmen, or poets. I suppose this fact, which excited the wonderof Cicero, exists in our country and our time. There is aforeign country which is to us as a posterity. If we reckonthose Americans only as great orators who are accepted inEngland as such, or who, belonging to past generations areso accepted now by their own countrymen, the number is verysmall. A few sentences of Patrick Henry are preserved, asa few sentences of Lord Chatham are preserved. The greatthoughts of Webster justify, in the estimation of the reader, the fame he enjoyed with his own generation. The readersof Fisher Ames--alas, too few--can well comprehend the spellwhich persuaded an angry and reluctant majority to save thetreaty to which the nation had pledged its faith, and, perhaps, the life of the nation itself. With these exceptions, thenumber of American orators who will live in history as oratorscan be counted on the fingers of one hand. 

I have never supposed myself to possess this gift. The instructionwhich I had in my youth, especially that at Harvard, eitherin composition or elocution, was, I think, not only of noadvantage, but a positive injury. Besides the absence ofgood training, I had an awkward manner, and a harsh voice. Until quite late in life I never learned to manage so thatI could get through a long speech without serious irritationof the throat. But I have had good opportunity to hear thebest public speaking of my time. I have heard in England, on a great field day in the House of Commons, Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and John Bright, and, later, Disraeli, Gladstone and Bernal Osborne. I have heard Spurgeon, andBishop Wilberforce, and Dr. Guthrie in the pulpit. 

At home I have heard a good many times Daniel Webster, EdwardEverett, Rufus Choate, Robert C. Winthrop, John P. Hale, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Richard H. Dana, RalphWaldo Emerson, James G. Blaine, Lucius Q. C. Lamar, JamesA. Garfield, William McKinley, William M. Evarts, BenjaminF. Thomas, Pliny Merrick, Charles Devens, Nathaniel P. Banks, and, above all, Kossuth; and in the pulpit, James Walker, Edwards A. Park, Mark Hopkins, Edward Everett Hale, GeorgePutnam, Starr King, and Henry W. Bellows. So, perhaps, myexperience and observation, too late for my own advantage, may be worth something to my younger readers. 

I am not familiar with the books which have been lately publishedwhich give directions for public speaking. So I dare saythat what I have to advise is already well known to youngmen, and that all I can say has been said much better. ButI will give the result of my own experience and observation. 

In managing the voice, the speaker when he is engaged in earnestconversation, commonly and naturally falls into the best toneand manner for public speaking. Suppose you are sitting abouta table with a dozen friends, and some subject is startedin which you are deeply interested. You engage in an earnestand serious dialogue with one of them at the other end ofthe table. You are perfectly at ease, not caring in the leastfor your manner or tone of voice, but only for your thought. The tone you adopt then will ordinarily be the best tone foryou in public speaking. You can, however, learn from teachersor friendly critics to avoid any harsh or disagreeable fashionof speech that you may have fallen into, and that may be habitualto you in private conversation. 

Next. Never strain your vocal organs by attempting to fillspaces which are too large for you. Speak as loudly anddistinctly as you can do easily, and let the most distantportions of your audience go. You will find in that way verysoon that your voice will increase in compass and power, andyou will do better than by a habit of straining the voicebeyond its natural capacity. Be careful to avoid falsetto. Shun imitating the tricks of speech of other orators, evenof famous and successful orators. These may do for them, but not for you. You will do no better in attempting toimitate the tricks of speech of other men in public speaking thanin private speaking. 

Never make a gesture for the sake of making one. I believethat most of the successful speakers whom I know would findit hard to tell you whether they themselves make gesturesor not, they are so absolutely unconscious in the matter. But with gestures as with the voice, get teachers or friendlycritics to point out to you any bad habit you may fall into. I think it would be well if our young public speakers, especiallypreachers, would have competent instructors and critics amongtheir auditors, after they enter their profession, to givethem the benefit of such observations and counsel as may besuggested in that way. If a Harvard professor of elocutionwould retain his responsibility for his pupils five or tenyears after they got into active life he would do a greatdeal more good than by his instructions to undergraduates. 

So far we have been talking about mere manner. The matterand substance of the orator's speech must depend upon theintellectual quality of the man. 

The great orator must be a man of absolute sincerity. Neveradvocate a cause in which you do not believe, or affect anemotion you do not feel. No skill or acting will cover upthe want of earnestness. It is like the ointment of thehand which bewrayeth itself. 

I shall be asked how I can reconcile this doctrine with thepractice of the law. It will be said the advocate must oftendefend men whom he believes to be guilty, or argue to thecourt propositions he believes to be unsound. This objectionwill disappear if we consider what exactly is the functionof the advocate in our system of administering justice. 

I suppose it is needless to argue to persons of Americanor English birth that our system of administering justice issafer for the innocent and, on the whole, secures the punishmentof guilt and secures private right better than any otherthat now exists or that ever existed among men. The chiefdistinction of the system we have inherited from England consistsin two things: first, the function of the advocate, andsecond, that cases are decided not upon belief, but uponproof. It has been found that court or jury are more likelyto get at truth if they have the aid of trained officers whoseduty it shall be to collect and present all the arguments oneach side which ought to be considered before the court orjury reach the decision. The man who seems clearly guiltyshould not be condemned or punished unless every considerationwhich may tend to establish innocence or throw doubt uponguilt has been fully weighed. The unassisted tribunal willbe quite likely to overlook these considerations. Publicsentiment approves the judgment and the punishment in thecase of John W. Webster. But certainly he should never havebeen convicted without giving the fullest weight to his previouscharacter and to the slightness of the temptation to the commissionof such a crime, to the fact that the evidence was largelycircumstantial, to the doubt of the identity of the body ofthe victim, and to the fact that the means or instrument ofthe crime which ordinarily must be alleged and proved in casesof murder could not be made certain, and could not be setforth in the indictment. The question in the American orEnglish court is not whether the accused be guilty. It iswhether he be shown to be guilty, by legal proof, of an offencelegally set forth. It is the duty of the advocate to performhis office in the mode best calculated to cause all such considerationsto make their due impression. It is not his duty or his rightto express or convey his individual opinion. On him the responsibilityof the decision does not rest. He not only has no right toaccompany the statement of his argument with any assertionas to his individual belief, but I think the most experiencedobservers will agree that such expressions, if habitual, tendto diminish and not to increase the just influence of thelawyer. There was never a weightier advocate before New Englandjuries than Daniel Webster. Yet it is on record that he alwayscarefully abstained from any positiveness of assertion. Heintroduced his weightiest arguments with such phrases as, "It will be for the jury to consider, " "The Court will judge, ""It may, perhaps, be worth thinking of, gentlemen, " or someequivalent phrase by which he kept scrupulously off the groundwhich belonged to the tribunal he was addressing. The tricksof advocacy are not only no part of the advocate's duties, but they are more likely to repel than to attract the hearers. The function of the advocate in the court of justice, as thusdefined and limited, is tainted by no insincerity or hypocrisy. It is as respectable, as lofty, and as indispensably necessaryas that of the judge himself. 

In my opinion, the two most important things that a youngman can do to make himself a good public speaker are:

First. Constant and careful written translations from Latinor Greek into English. 

Second. Practice in a good debating society. 

It has been said that all the greatest Parliamentary oratorsof England are either men whom Lord North saw, or men whosaw Lord North--that is, men who were conspicuous as publicspeakers in Lord North's youth, his contemporaries, and themen who saw him as an old man when they were young themselves. This would include Bolingbroke and would come down only tothe year of Lord John Russell's birth. So we should haveto add a few names, especially Gladstone, Disraeli, John Bright, and Palmerston. There is no great Parliamentary orator inEngland since Gladstone died. I once, a good many years ago, studied the biographies of the men who belonged to that periodwho were famous as great orators in Parliament or in Court, to find, if I could, the secret of their power. With theexception of Lord Erskine and of John Bright, I believe everyone of them trained himself by careful and constant translationfrom Latin or Greek, and frequented a good debating societyin his youth. 

Brougham trained himself for extemporaneous speaking in theSpeculative Society, the great theatre of debate for the Universityof Edinburgh. He also improved his English style by translationsfrom the Greek, among which is his well-known version of the"Oration on the Crown. "

Canning's attention, while at Eton, was strongly turned toextemporaneous speaking. They had a debating society, inwhich the Marquis of Wellesley and Charles Earl Grey had beentrained before him, in which they had all the forms of theHouse of Commons--Speaker, Treasury benches, and an Opposition. Canning also was disciplined by the habit of translation. 

Curran practised declamation daily before a glass, recitingpassages from Shakespeare and the best English orators. Hefrequented the debating societies which then abounded in London. He failed at first, and was ridiculed as "Orator Mum. " Butat last he surmounted every difficulty. It was said of himby a contemporary: "He turned his shrill and stumbling brogueinto a flexible, sustained, and finely modulated voice; hisaction become free and forcible; he acquired perfect readinessin thinking on his legs; he put down every opponent by themingled force of his argument and wit; and was at last crownedwith the universal applause of the society and invited bythe president to an entertainment in their behalf. " I am notsure that I have seen, on any good authority, that he wasin the habit of writing translations from Latin or Greek, but he studied them with great ardor and undoubtedly adopted, among the methods of perfecting his English style, the customof students of his day of translation from these languages. 

Jeffrey joined the Speculative Society, in Edinburgh, inhis youth. His biographer says that it did more for himthan any other event in the whole course of his education. 

Chatham, the greatest of English orators, if we may judgeby the reports of his contemporaries, trained himself forpublic speaking by constant translations from Latin and Greek. The education of his son, the younger Pitt, is well known. His father compelled him to read Thucydides into English atsight, and to go over it again and again, until he had gotthe best possible rendering of the Greek into English. 

Macaulay belonged to the Cambridge Union, where, as in thesociety of the same name at Oxford, the great topics of theday were discussed by men, many of whom afterward became famousstatesmen and debaters in the Commons. 

Young Murray, afterward Lord Mansfield, translated Sallustand Horace with ease; learned great part of them by heart;could converse fluently in Latin; wrote Latin prose correctlyand idiomatically, and was specially distinguished at Westminsterfor his declamations. He translated every oration of Cicerointo English and back again into Latin. 

Fox can hardly have been supposed to have practised much indebating societies, as he entered the House of Commons whenhe was nineteen years old. But it is quite probably thathe was drilled by translations from Latin and Greek into English;and in the House of Commons he had in early youth the advantageof the best debating society in the world. It is said thathe read Latin and Greek as easily as he read English. Hehimself said that he gained his skill at the expense of theHouse, for he had sometimes tasked himself during the entiresession to speak on every question that came up, whether hewas interested in it or not, as a means of exercising andtraining his faculties. This is what made him, accordingto Burke, "rise by slow degrees to be the most brilliant andaccomplished debater the world ever saw. "

Sir Henry Bulwer's "Life of Palmerston" does not tell us whetherhe was trained by the habit of writing translations or indebating societies. But he was a very eager reader of theclassics. There is little doubt, however, considering thehabit of his contemporaries at Cambridge, and that he wasambitious for public life, and represented the Universityof Cambridge in Parliament just after he became twenty-one, that he belonged to a debating society and that he was drilledin English composition by translation from the classics. 

Gladstone was a famous debater in the Oxford Union, as iswell known, and was undoubtedly in the habit of writing translationsfrom Greek and Latin, of which he was always so passionatelyfond. He says in his paper on Arthur Hallam that the Etondebating club known as the Society supplied the British Empirewith four Prime Ministers in fourscore years. 

The value of the practice of translation from Latin or Greekinto English, in getting command of good English style, inmy judgment, can hardly be stated too strongly. The explanationis not hard to find. You have in these two languages andespecially in Latin, the best instrument for the most preciseand most perfect expression of thought. The Latin prose ofTacitus and Cicero, the verse of Virgil and Horace, are likea Greek statue, or an Italian cameo--you have not only exquisitebeauty, but also exquisite precision. You get the thoughtinto your mind with the accuracy and precision of the wordsthat express numbers in the multiplication table. Ten timesone are ten--not ten and one one-millionth. Having got theidea into your mind with the precision, accuracy, and beautyof the Latin expression, you are to get its equivalent inEnglish. Suppose you have knowledge of no language but yourown. The thought comes to you in the mysterious way in whichthoughts are born, and struggles for expression in apt words. If the phrase that occurs to you does not exactly fit thethought, you are almost certain, especially in speaking orrapid composition, to modify the thought to fit the phrase. Your sentence commands you, not you the sentence. The extemporaryspeaker never gets, or easily loses, the power of preciseand accurate thinking or statement, and rarely attains a literaryexcellence which gives him immortality. But the conscientioustranslator has no such refuge. He is confronted by the inexorableoriginal. He cannot evade or shirk. He must try and tryand try again until he has got the exact thought expressedin its English equivalent. This is not enough. He must getan English expression if the resources of the language willfurnish it, which will equal as near as may be the dignityand beauty of the original. He must not give you pewter forsilver, or pinchbeck for gold, or mica for diamond. Thispractice will soon give him ready command of the great richesof his own noble English tongue. It will give a habitualnobility and beauty to his own style. The best word and phrasewill come to him spontaneously when he speaks and thinks. The processes of thought itself will grow easier. The oratorwill get the affluence and abundance which characterize thegreat Italian artists of the Middle Ages, who astonish usas much by the amount and variety of their work as by itsexcellence. 

The value of translation is very different from that of originalwritten composition. Cicero says:

"Stilus optimus et praestantissimus dicendi effector ac magister. "

Of this I am by no means sure. If you write rapidly youget the habit of careless composition. If you write slowlyyou get the habit of slow composition. Each of these is aninjury to the style of the speaker. He cannot stop to corrector scratch out. Cicero himself in a later passage stateshis preference for translation. He says that at first he usedto take a Latin author, Ennius or Gracchus, and get the meaninginto his head, and then write it again. But he soon foundthat in that way if he used again the very words of his authorhe got no advantage, and if he used other language of hisown, the author had already occupied the ground with the bestexpression, and he was left with the second best. So he gaveup the practice and adopted instead that of translating fromthe Greek. 

But to go back to what makes an orator. As I have said, his object is to excite the emotions which, being excited, willbe most likely to impel his audience to think or act as hedesires. He must never disgust them, he must never excitetheir contempt. He can use to great advantage the most variedlearning, the profoundest philosophy, the most compellinglogic. He must master the subject with which he has to deal, and he must have knowledge adequate to illustrate and adornit. When every other faculty of the orator is acquired, itsometimes almost seems as if the voice were nine-tenths, andeverything else but one-tenth, of the consummate orator. Itis impossible to overrate the importance to his purpose ofthat matchless instrument, the human voice. 

The most fastidious critic is by no means the best judge, seldom even a fairly good judge, of the public speaker. Heis likely to be a stranger to the emotion which the oratorinspires and excites. He is likely to fall into mistakes likethat which Goldwin Smith makes about Patrick Henry. Mr. Smith ridicules Henry's speech and action and voice. Theemotion which the great Virginian stirred in the breasts ofhis backwoodsmen seems very absurd to this cultured Englishman. The bowing and changes of countenance and gesticulating ofthe orator seem to him like the cheapest acting. Yet to uswho understand it, it does not seem that Patrick Henry inthe old church at Richmond need yield the palm to Chathamin St. Stephen's Chapel, either for the grandeur of his themeor of his stage, or the sublimity of his eloquence. 

Matthew Arnold had the best pair of intellectual eyes ofour time. But he sometimes made a like mistake as a criticof poetry. He speaks slightingly of Emerson's Fourth ofJuly Ode--

 Oh tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire. 

What did the Englishman know of the Fourth of July emotionwhich stirred all Americans in the days when the countryhad just escaped destruction, and was entering upon its newcareer of freedom and of glory? What could he understandof that feeling, full of the morning and of the springtime, which heard the cannon boom and the bells ring, with stirringand quickened pulse, in those exultant days? Surely therenever was a loftier stroke than that with which the New Englandpoet interpreted to his countrymen the feeling of that joyoustime--the feeling which is to waken again when the Fourthof July comes round on many anniversaries:

 Oh tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire. 

It is often said that if a speech read well it is not a goodspeech. There may be some truth in it. The reader cannot, of course, get the impression which the speaker conveys bylook and tone and gesture. He lacks that marvellous influenceby which in a great assembly the emotion of every individualsoul is multiplied by the emotion of every other. The readercan pause and dwell upon the thought. If there be a fallacy, he is not hurried away to something else before he can detectit. So, also, more careful and deliberate criticism willdiscover offences of style and taste which pass unheeded ina speech when uttered. But still the great oratoric triumphsof literature and history stand the test of reading in thecloset, as well as of hearing in the assembly. Would notMark Anthony's speech over the dead body of Caesar, had itbeen uttered, have moved the Roman populace as it moves thespectator when the play is acted, or the solitary reader inhis closet? Does not Lord Chatham's "I rejoice that Americahas resisted" read well? Do not Sheridan's great perorations, and Burke's, in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, read well?Does not "Liberty and Union, Now and Forever!" read well?Does not "Give me Liberty or Give me Death!" read well? Doesnot Fisher Ames's speech for the treaty read well? Do notEverett's finest passages read well?

There are examples of men of great original genius who haverisen to lofty oratory on some great occasion who had notthe advantage of familiarity with any great author. But theyare not only few in number, but the occasions are few whenthey have risen to a great height. In general the orator, whether at the Bar, or in the pulpit, or in public life, whois to meet adequately the many demands upon his resources, must get familiarity with the images and illustrations hewants, and the resources of a fitting diction, by soakinghis mind in some great authors which will alike satisfy andstimulate his imagination, and supply him with a lofty expression. Of these I suppose the best are, by common consent, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. It is a maxim that the pupil whowishes to acquire a pure and simple style should give hisdays and nights to Addison. But there is a lack of strengthand vigor in Addison, which perhaps prevents his being thebest model for the advocate in the court-house or the championin a political debate. I should rather, for myself, recommendRobert South to the student. If the speaker, whose thoughthave weight and vigor in it, can say it as South would havesaid it, he may be quite sure that his weighty meaning willbe expressed alike to the mind of the people and the apprehensionof his antagonist. 

There is one great difference between the condition of theAmerican orator and that of the orator of antiquity. Thespeaker, in the old time, addressed an audience about to actinstantly upon the emotions or convictions he had himselfcaused. Or he spoke to a Judge who was to give no reasonfor his opinion. The sense of public responsibility scarcelyexisted in either. The speech itself perished with the occasion, unless, as in some few instances, the orator preserved itin manuscript for a curious posterity. Even then the bestof them had discovered that not eloquence, but wisdom, isthe power by which states grow and flourish. 

"Omnia plena consiliorum, inania verborum. 

"Quid est tam furiosum quam verborum vel optimorum atque ornatissimorumsonitus inanis nulla subjecta sententia nec scientia?"

Cicero's oratory is to excite his hearers, whether Judgeor popular assembly, for the occasion. Not so in generalwith our orator. The auditor is ashamed of excitement. Hetakes the argument home with him: He sleeps on it. He readsit again in the newspaper report. He hears and reads theother side. He discusses with friends and antagonists. Hefeels the responsibility of his vote. He expects to haveto justify it himself. Even the juryman hears the soberstatement of the Judge, and talks the case over with hisassociates of the panel in the quiet seclusion of the jury-room. The Judge himself must state the reasons for his opinions, which are to be read by a learned and critical profession andby posterity. The speaker's argument must be sounded, andrung, and tested, and tried again and again, before the auditoracts upon it. Our people hear some great orators as theywitness a play. The delight of taste, even intellectualgratification, caused by what is well said, is one thing. Conviction is quite another. The printing-press and the reporter, the consultation in the jury-room, the reflection in the Judge'schamber, the delay of the election to a day long after thespeech, are protections against the mischief of mere oratory, which the ancients did not enjoy. 

I heard a debate in the House of Commons in 1860, on thepaper duties, in which Lord John Russell, Palmerston, Gladstone, and John Bright took part. Gladstone's part was not veryprominent. I now remember little that he said. His image, as it then appeared, is effaced by his later appearance ona much greater occasion. Bright spoke admirably, both inmanner and matter. He was an Independent, through givinggeneral support to the measures of the Government, in whichPalmerston and Lord Russell were the leaders. He complainedbitterly of their acquiescence in what he thought the unconstitutionalattitude of the House of Lords, in refusing to consent tothe abolition of the paper duties, for which the House ofCommons had voted. But the Government, though they had triedto abolish the duty, were very glad to hold on to the revenue. Bright had none of the English hesitation, and frequent punctuationof sentences with--"er"--"er"--which has led some one, speakingof English orators, to say that "to err" is human. He remindedme in general, in look, voice, and manner, of the late RichardH. Dana, although he sometimes threw more passion and zealinto his speech than Dana ever indulged. Periods followedeach other in easy and rapid flow. He had a fine voice anddelivery, easily filling the hall from his place below thegangway. 

Palmerston, in his jaunty and off-hand way, rebuked Brightfor desiring to make the House of Commons adopt a resolutionwhich would only show its own helplessness. On the whole, he seemed to me to get the better of the debate. Bright couldnot persuade the House, or the people of England, to makea great constitutional question out of the paper duties, especiallyafter the powerful speech of Lord Lyndhurst, who, then morethan ninety years old, argued for the side of the Lords witha power that no other speaker on the subject rivalled. 

I heard Gladstone again in 1871, when there was a great strugglebetween him and Disraeli over the Parliamentary and MunicipalElections Bill. I visited the House with Thomas Hughes, towhom I was indebted for much courtesy while in London, andhad a seat on the floor just below the gallery, where a fewstrangers are, or were then, admitted by special card fromthe Speaker. 

Bernal Osborne, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Sir Stafford Northcote, Gladstone, and Disraeli took part in the debate. The billwas introduced by Mr. Gladstone's Government. The questionthat night was on a motion to strike out the provision forthe secret ballot; so the opponents of the Government hadto close in support of the motion. The report of Hansardpurports to be in the first person. But I can testify frommemory that it is by no means verbally accurate. I have nodoubt the speeches were taken down in short-hand. The phoneticsystem was then used. But the report seems to be about likethose which our good short-hand reporters used to make beforethat invention. The speeches are well worth studying by aperson who wishes to get an idea of the intellectual and literaryquality of these champions. There is no great passage inany one of them. But the capacity and quality of power appeardistinctly. Osborne was full of a shrewd and delightful wit, without the vitriolic flavor which often appears in the sarcasmof Disraeli. Gladstone showed his power of elevating thediscussion to a lofty plane, which his opponent never reached, although Disraeli launched at him many a keen shaft frombelow. Mr. Hughes sat by me most of the night, and occasionallybrought and introduced to me some eminent person whom he thoughtI would like to know. 

The members of our National House of Representatives, howeverturbulent or disorderly, never would submit to the fashionof treating a speaker whom they do not want to hear whichprevails in the House of Commons. When Mr. Gladstone gotthrough, the night was far spent, and the House evidentlywanted to hear Disraeli, then vote and go home. Mr. Plunket, a member for the University of Dublin, who seemed an intelligentand sensible man, rose, wishing to correct a statement ofMr. Gladstone's, which he thought had done him an injustice. Disraeli rose about the same time, but bowed and gave way. The House did not like it. Poor Plunket's voice was drownedin the storm of shouts--"Sit down. Sit down. Dizzy, Dizzy, "in which my friend, Mr. Hughes, although of Gladstone's party, joined at the top of his lungs. I think the Bedlam lastedfive minutes. But Plunket stood his ground and made his correction. 

Although Bernal Osborne was a man of great wit and sense, and Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach werethen, as the latter is now, very eminent characters, yet theonly speakers who belonged to the rank of the great oratorswere Gladstone and Disraeli. I will not undertake to addanother description of Gladstone to the many with which everyreader of mine is thoroughly familiar. The late Dr. Bellowsresembled him very nearly, both in his way of reasoning andhis manner of speech. Persons who have heard Dr. Bellowsat his best will not deem this comparison unworthy. 

Gladstone was terribly in earnest. He began his speech bya compliment to Northcote, his opponent, for whom he had shownhis esteem by sending him to the United States as one of theJoint High Commission to make the Alabama Treaty. But whenMr. Gladstone was well under way, Sir Stafford interposeda dissent from something he said by calling out "No, no"--a very frequent practice in the House. Gladstone turnedupon him savagely, with a tone of anger which I might almostcall furious: "Can the gentleman tolerate no opinion buthis own, that he interjects his audible contradiction intothe middle of my sentence?" The House evidently did not likeit. Hughes, who agreed with Gladstone, said to me: "Whata pity it is that he cannot control his temper; that is hisgreat fault. "

There are no passages in this speech of Gladstone that canbe cited as among the best examples of the great style ofthe orator. But there are several that give a good idea ofhis manner, and show something of the argument in two orthree sentences: "I am not at all ashamed of having said, and I will say it again, that this is a choice of evils. I do notsay that the proposal for a secret ballot is open to no objectionswhatever. I admit that open voting has its evils as wellas its merits. One of these merits is that it enables aman to discharge a noble duty in the noblest possible manner. But what are its demerits? That by marking his vote you exposethe voter to be tempted through his cupidity and through hisfears. We propose, by secret voting, to greatly diminishthe first of these, and we hope to take away the second. Wedo not believe that the disposition to bribe can operate withanything like its present force when the means of tracingthe action of the man bribed are taken away, because men willnot pay for that they do not know they will ever receive. "

"I think it is too late for the honorable gentleman to say, 'We are passing through an experiment; wait for more experiment. '""We have already been debating this subject for forty years;we have plenty of time on our hands; it is a Godsend to haveanything to fill up our vacant hours; and therefore let uspostpone the subject in order that it may be dealt with infuture years. "

The great quality of Gladstone, as of Sumner, is his profoundseriousness. He makes the impression on his hearers, an impressionmade, but not so strongly, upon his readers, that the matterhe is discussing is that upon which the foundations of heavenand earth rest. 

It would be a great mistake to hold Disraeli cheap. He turnedthe tables upon Osborne, who had gone into several, what Disraelicalled, archaeological details, with respect to the antiquityof the ballot, and had cited a proclamation of Charles I. Prohibiting the ballot in all corporations, either in thecity of London or elsewhere, which Disraeli said "was donewith the admirable view of identifying the opinions of thosewho sit on this side of the House with the political sentimentsof that monarch. But there was another assertion of the principlethat the ballot should be open that the gentleman has notcited. That occurred in the most memorable Parliament thatever sat in England--the Long Parliament . . . . They wishedit therefore to be exercised, not to satisfy the self-complacencyof the individual, but with due respect for common-sense andthe public opinion of the country, and influenced by all thosedoctrines and all that discipline of party which they believedto be one of the best securities for public liberty. "

Gladstone showed in his speech the profounder reflectionon the general subject, the more philosophy, and the intenserearnestness; Disraeli showed quickness of wit, a ready commandof his resources, ability for subtle distinctions, and glimpsesof his almost Satanic capacity for mocking and jeering. Hedescribes Mr. Gladstone most felicitously as "inspired bya mixture of genius and vexation. " He speaks of his majorityas a "mechanical majority, a majority the result of heedlessnessof thought on the part of members who were so full of otherquestions that they gave pledges in favor of the ballot withoutdue consideration. "

He said: "There is a celebrated river, which has been thesubject of political interest of late, and with which weare all acquainted. It rolls its magnificent volume, clear andpellucid, in its course; but it never reaches the ocean; itsinks into mud and morass. And such will be the fate ofthis mechanical majority. The conscience of the country isagainst it. It is an old-fashioned political expedient;it is not adapted to the circumstances which we have to encounterin the present, and because it has no real foundation of truthor policy, it will meet with defeat and discomfiture. "

Gladstone had, what is quite rare, and what no famous Americanorator that I now think of, except Choate and Evarts, havehad--a tendency to diffuse and somewhat involved speech, andat the same time a gift of compact epigrammatic utteranceon occasions. When Mr. Evarts, who was my near relative, and a man with whom I could take a liberty, came into theSenate, I said to him that we should have to amend the rulesso that a motion to adjourn would be in order in the middleof a sentence; to which he replied that he knew of nobodyin this country, who objected to long sentences, except thecriminal classes. 

Gladstone was the last of a school of oratory, and the lastof our time--I hope not for all time--of a school of statesmen. When he entered upon a discussion in Parliament, or on thehustings, he elevated it to the highest possible plane. Thediscussion became alike one of the highest moral principlesand the profoundest political philosophy. He seemed to bespeaking as our statesmen of the Revolutionary time, and thetime of framing our Constitution. He used to speak to allgenerations alike. What he had to say would have been trueand apt and fit to be uttered in the earlier days of Athensand Rome, and true and apt and fit to be uttered for thousandsof years to come. He had, in a large measure, a failing whichall Englishmen have, and always had; the notion that whatis good for England is good for humanity at large. Stillit was a lofty morality and a lofty ideal statesmanship. Itwas sincere. What he said, that he believed. It came straightfrom his heart, and he kindled in the bosoms of his listenersthe ardor of his own heart. He was not afraid of his ideals. 

I heard Dr. Guthrie in Edinburgh in 1860. It was a hot day. My companion was just getting well from a dangerous attackof bleeding at the lungs. We made our way with difficultyinto the crowded church. The people were, almost all of them, standing. We were obliged, by my friend's condition, to getout again before the sermon. I remember, however, the oldman's attitude, and his prayer in the racy, broad Scotch, the most tender, pathetic and expressive language on earthfor the deeper emotions as well as for humor. I wonder ifmy readers have ever seen the version of the Psalms--

"Frae Hebrew Intil Scottis, " by P. Hately Waddell, LL. D. , Minister, Edinburgh, 1891. 

If not, and they will get it, a new delight is in store forthem, and they will know something of the diction of Dr. Guthrie. 

He once began a prayer, "O Lord, it is a braw thing to loeye. But it is a better (bitter) thing to hate ye. "

The beauty of this dialect is that while it is capable alikeof such tenderness, and such lofty eloquence, and such exquisiteand delicate humor, it is, like our Saxon, incapable of falsetto, or of little pomposities. 

I heard Lyman Beecher, then a very old man, before a meetingof the members of the Massachusetts Legislature in 1852, whenthe measure known as the Maine Liquor Law was pending. Hebore unmistakable marks of advanced age. But there were oneor two passages that showed the power of the orator, one especiallyin which he described the beauty and delight of our homes, and intemperance threatening them with its waves like a greatsea of fire. 

I saw Henry Ward Beecher several times in private, and hadpleasant talks with him. But I am sorry to say I never heardhim speak, so far as I can now remember, on any occasion whenhe put forth his power. But if half that is told of his speeches, during the Civil War, some of them to hostile and angry audiences, be true, he was a consummate master. One story is told ofhim which I suppose is true, and, if it be true, ranks himas one of the greatest masters of his art that ever lived. It is said that he was speaking to a great crowd in Birmingham, or perhaps Liverpool, which constantly goaded him with hostileinterruptions, so that he had great difficulty in gettingon. At last one fellow provoked the cheers and applause ofthe audience by crying out--"Why didn't you put down the Rebellionin sixty days as you said you would?" Beecher paused a momentuntil they became still, in their eagerness to hear his reply, and then hurled back--"We should if they had been Englishmen. "The fierce, untamed animal hesitated a moment between angerand admiration, and then the English love of fair play andpluck prevailed, and the crowd cheered him and let him goon. 

But any man who reads Beecher's delightful "Letters from theWhite Mountains, " or some of his sermons, and imagines hisgreat frame, and far-sounding voice, will get a conceptionof his power to play on the feelings or men, of his humor, and pathos, and intense conviction, and rapidity in passingfrom one emotion to another, and will understand him. 

I heard Rufus Choate a great many times. I heard nearlyall the speeches given in Brown's Life; and I heard him agreat many times at the Bar, both before juries and the fullCourt. He is the only advocate I ever heard who had theimperial power which would subdue an unwilling and hostilejury. His power over them seemed like the fascination ofa bird by a snake. Of course, he couldn't do this with ableJudges, although all Judges who listened to him would, I think, agree that he was as persuasive a reasoner as ever lived. But with inferior magistrates and juries, however intelligent, however determined they were in a made-up opinion, howeveron their guard against the charmer, he was almost irresistible. There are very few important cases recorded that Choate lost. Non supplex, sed magister aut dominus videretur esse judicum. 

Choate's method was pure persuasion. He never appealed tobase motives, nor tried to awake coarse prejudices or stormypassions. He indulged in no invective. His wit and sarcasmand ridicule amused the victim almost as much as it amusedthe bystander. He had the suaviloquentia which Cicero attributesto Cornelius. There was never a harsh note in his speech. 

 Latrantur enim jam quidam oratores, non loquuntur. 

When he was confronted with some general rule, or some plainfact, he had a marvellous art of subtle distinction. Heshowed that his client, or witness, or proposition, belongedto a class of itself. He invested it with a distinct andintense personality. He held up his fact or his principlebefore the mind of the Court and the jury. He describedand pictured it. He brought out in clear relief what distinguishedit from any other fact or proposition whatever. If necessary, he would almost have made a jury, before he was through, thinkthe Siamese twins did not look alike, and possibly that theynever could have been born of the same parents. 

He had a voice without any gruff or any shrill tones. Itwas like a sweet, yet powerful flute. He never strained itor seemed to exert it to its fullest capacity. I do not knowany other public speaker whose style resembled his in theleast. Perhaps Jeremy Taylor was his model, if he had anymodel. The phraseology with which he clothed some commonplaceor mean thought or fact, when he was compelled to use commonplacearguments, or to tell some common story, kept his auditorsever alert and expectant. An Irishman, who had killed hiswife, threw away the axe with which Choate claimed the deedwas done, when he heard somebody coming. This, in Choate'slanguage, was "the sudden and frantic ejaculation of the axe. "Indeed his speech was a perpetual surprise. Whether you likedhim or disliked him, you gave him your ears, erect and intent. He used manuscript a great deal, even in speaking to juries. When a trial was on, lasting days or weeks, he kept pen, ink, and paper at hand in his bedroom, and would often get up inthe middle of the night to write down thoughts that came tohim as he lay in bed. He was always careful to keep warm. It was said he prepared for a great jury argument by takingoff eight great coats and drinking eight cups of green tea. 

When I was a young lawyer in Worcester I had something todo before the Court sitting in the fourth story of the oldstone court house in Boston. I finished my business andhad just time to catch the train for home. As I came downthe stairs I passed the door of the court-room where theUnited States Court was sitting. The thick wooden door wasopen, and the opening was closed by a door of thin leatherstretched on a wooden frame. I pulled it open enough to lookin, and there, within three feet of me, was Choate, addressinga jury in a case of marine insurance, where the defence wasthe unseaworthiness of the vessel. I had just time to hearthis sentence, and shut the door and hurry to my train: "Shewent down the harbor, painted and perfidious--a coffin, butno ship. "

I hear now, as if still in the eager throng, his speech inFaneuil Hall during the Mexican War. He demanded that weshould bring back our soldiers to the line we claimed asour rightful boundary, and let Mexico go. He said we haddone enough for glory, and that we had humiliated her enough. 

"The Mexican maiden, as she sits with her lover among theorange-groves, will sing to her guitar the story of thesetimes--'Ah, woe is me, Alhama, ' for a thousand years to come. "

Choate, like other good orators, and like some great poets, notably Wordsworth, created the taste which he satisfied. His dramatic action, his marvellous and strange vocabulary, his oriental imagination, his dressing the common and meanthings of life with a poetic charm and romance, did not atonce strike favorably the taste of his Yankee audiences. Webster and Everett seem to have appreciated him from thefirst. But he was, till he vindicated his title to be a greatlawyer, rather a thorn in the flesh of Chief Justice Shaw, ofwhose consternation and amazement, caused by the strangefigure that appeared in his court-room, many queer storiesused to be told. But the young men and the people likedhim. 

"Non probantur haec senibus--saepe videbam cum invidentemtum etiam irascentem stomachantem Philippum--sed miranturadulescentes multitudo movetur. "

It was a curious sight to see on a jury twelve hard-headedand intelligent countrymen--farmers, town officers, trustees, men chosen by their neighbors to transact their importantaffairs--after an argument by some clear-headed lawyer forthe defence, about some apparently not very doubtful transaction, who had brought them all to his way of thinking, and had warnedthem against the wiles of the charmer, when Choate rose toreply for the plaintiff--to see their look of confidence anddisdain--"You needn't try your wiles upon me. " The shoulderturned a little against the speaker--the averted eye--andthen the change; first, the changed posture of the body; theslight opening of the mouth; then the look, first, of curiosity, and then of doubt, then of respect; the surrender of the eyeto the eye of the great advocate; then the spell, the charm, the great enchantment--till at last, jury and audience wereall swept away, and followed the conqueror captive in histriumphal march. 

He gesticulated with his whole body. Wendell Phillips mostirreverently as well as most unjustly compared him to a monkeyin convulsions. His bowings down and straightening himselfagain were spoken of by another critic, not unfriendly, asopening and shutting like a jack-knife. His curly black hairsseemed each to have a separate life of its own. His eyesshone like coals of fire. There is a passage of Everett'swhich well describes Choate, and is also one of the very bestexamples of Everett, who, with all his fertility of originalgenius, borrowed so much, and so enriched and improved everythingthat he borrowed. Cicero said of Antonius:

"Omnia veniebant Antonio in mentem; eaque suo quaeque loco, ubi pluimum proficere et valere possent, ut ab imperatoreequites pedites levis armatura, sic ab illo in maxume opportunisorationis partibus conlocabantur. "

Now see what Everett does with this thought in his eulogy, spoken in Faneuil Hall, the week after Choate's death:

"He is sometimes satisfied, in concise epigrammatic clauses, to skirmish with his light troops, and drive in the enemy'soutposts. It is only on fitting occasions, when great principlesare to be vindicated, and solemn truths told, when some moralor political Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought, that heputs on the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric. It isthen that his majestic sentences swell to the dimensionsof his majestic thought; then it is that we hear afar off theawful roar of his rifled ordnance; and when he has stormedthe heights, and broken the centre, and trampled the squares, and turned the staggering wings of the adversary, that hesounds his imperial clarion along the whole line of battle, and moves forward with all his hosts, in one overwhelmingcharge. "

One of the most remarkable advocates of my day was SidneyBartlett. He seldom addressed juries, and almost never publicassemblies. He was a partner of Chief Justice Shaw before1830. He argued cases before the Supreme Court of the UnitedStates and before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts afterhe was ninety. He cared for no other audience. He had amarvellous compactness of speech, and a marvellous sagacityin seeing the turning-point of a great question. He foundthe place where the roads diverged, got the Court's face setin the right direction, and then stopped. He would arguein ten or fifteen minutes a point where some powerful antagonistlike Curtis or Choate would take hours to reply. I once toldhim that his method of argument was to that of ordinary lawyerslike logarithms to ordinary mathematics. He seemed pleasedwith the compliment, and said, "Yes, I know I argue over theirheads. The Chief Justice told me he wished I would talk alittle longer. " I do not know that Bartlett ought to be reckonedamong orators. But he had a great power of convincing, andgiving his intellectual delight to minds capable of appreciatinghis profound and inexorable logic. 

Edward Everett seems to me, on the whole, our best exampleof the orator, pure and simple. Webster was a great statesman, a great lawyer, a great advocate, a great public teacher. To all these his matchless oratory was but an instrument andincident. 

Choate was a great winner of cases, and as relaxation hegave, in the brief vacations of an overworked professionallife (he once defined a lawyer's vacation as the time after hehas put a question to a witness while he is waiting for ananswer), a few wonderful literary and historical addresses. He gave a brief period of brilliant but most unwilling servicein each House of Congress. He made some powerful politicalspeeches to popular audiences. But his heart was always inthe court-house. No gambler ever hankered for the feverishdelight of the gaming table as Choate did for that absorbinggame, half chance, half skill, where twelve human dice mustall turn up together one way, or there be no victory. 

But Everett is always the orator. He was a clergyman a littlewhile. He was a Greek professor a little while. He was aCollege President a little while. He was a Minister to Englanda little while. He was Representative in Congress and Senator. He was Governor of the Commonwealth. In these places he didgood service enough to make a high reputation for any otherman. Little of these things is remembered now. He was aboveall things--I am tempted to say, above all men--the foremostAmerican orator in one class. 

There is one function of the orator peculiar to our country, and almost unknown elsewhere. That is the giving utteranceto the emotion of the people, whether of joy or sorrow, onthe occasions when its soul is deeply stirred--when some greatman dies, or there is a great victory or defeat, or some notableanniversary is celebrated. This office was filled by othermen, on some few occasions by Daniel Webster himself, butby no man better than by Everett. A Town, or City, or Stateis very human. In sorrow it must utter its cry of pain; invictory, its note of triumph. As events pass, it must pronounceits judgement. Its constant purpose must be fixed and mademore steadfast by expression. It must give voice to its loveand its approbation and its condemnation. It must registerthe high and low water mark of its tide, its rising and itssinking in heat and cold. This office Edward Everett, fornearly fifty years, performed for Massachusetts and for thewhole country. In his orations is preserved and recordedeverything of the emotion of the great hours of our people'shistory. The camera of his delicate photography has preservedfor future generations what passed in the soul of his ownin the times that tried the souls of men. 

I do not know where he got his exquisite elocution. He wentabroad in his youth, and there were good trainers abroad, then. He must have studied thoroughly the speeches of Ciceroand the Greek orators. Many casual phrases in his works, besides many quotations, show his familiarity with Cicero'swriting on oratory. 

If you would get some faint, far-off conception of him, firstlook at the best bust or picture of Everett you can find. Imagine the figure with its every movement gentle and graceful. The head and face are suggestive of Greek sculpture. Thisperson sits on the platform with every expression dischargedfrom the face, looking like a plaster image when the artisthas just begun his model, before any character or intelligencehas been put into it. You think him the only person in theaudience who takes no interest whatever in what is going on, and certainly that he expects to have nothing to do with ithimself. He is introduced. He comes forward quietly andgracefully. There is a slight smile of recognition of thewelcoming applause. The opening sentences are spoken in asoft--I had almost said, a caressing voice, though still alittle cold. I suppose it would be called a tenor voice. There was nothing in the least unmanly about Edward Everett. Yet if some woman had spoken in the same tones, you wouldhave not thought them unwomanly. 

 Illa tamquam cycnea fuit divini hominis vox et oratio. 

He has found somewhere in the vast storehouse of his knowledgea transaction exactly like the present, or exactly in contrastwith it, or some sentiment of poet or orator which just fitsthe present occasion. If it be new to his audience, he addsto it a newer delight still by his matchless skill as a narrator--a skill almost the rarest of all talents among public speakers. If it be commonplace and hackneyed he makes it fresh and pleasantby giving in detail the circumstances when it was first uttered, or describes some occasion when some orator has applied itbefore; or calls attention to its very triteness as givingit added authority. If he wish to express his agreement withthe last speaker and "say ditto to Mr. Burke, " he tells youwhen that was said, what was the occasion, and gives you thename of Mr. Kruger, who stood for the representation of Bristolwith Burke. 

Mr. Everett's stores were inexhaustible. If any speakerhave to get ready in a hurry for a great occasion, let himlook through the index of the four volumes of Everett's speeches, and he will find matter enough, not only to stimulate hisown thought and set its currents running, but to illustrateand adorn what he will say. 

But pretty soon the orator rises into a higher plane. Somelofty sentiment, some stirring incident, some patriotic emotion, some play of fancy or wit comes from the brain or heart ofthe speaker. The audience is hushed to silence. Perhapsa little mist begins to gather in their eyes. There is nowan accent of emotion in the voice, though still soft andgentle. The Greek statue begins to move. There is life inthe limbs. There has been a lamp kindled somewhere behindthe clear and transparent blue eyes. The flexible musclesof the face have come to life now. Still there is no jar ordisorder. The touch upon the nerves of the audience is likethat of a gentle nurse. The atmosphere is that of a Maymorning. There is no perfume but that of roses and lilies. But still, gently at first, the warmer feelings are kindled inthe hearts of the speaker and hearers. The frame of thespeaker is transfigured. The trembling hands are liftedhigh in the air. The rich, sweet voice fills the vast audiencechamber with its resonant tones. At last, the bugle, thetrumpet, the imperial clarion rings out full and clear, andthe vast audience is transported as to another world--I hadalmost said to a seventh heaven. Read the welcome to Lafayetteor the close of the matchless eulogy on that illustrious objectof the people's love. Read the close of the oration on Washington. Read the contrast of Washington and Marlborough. Read thebeautiful passage where, just before the ocean cable was laid, the rich fancy of the speaker describes--

"The thoughts that we think up here on the earth's surfacein the cheerful light of day--clothing ourselves with elementalsparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in thetwinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far downamong the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, thorough the oozy dungeons ofthe rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whosedancing tassels will in a few months be coquetting with thewest wind on those boundless prairies, flashing along theslimy decks of old sunken galleons, which have been rottingfor ages; messages of friendship and love, from warm, livingbosoms, burn over the cold green bones of men and women, whosehearts, once as fond as ours, burst as the eternal gulfsclosed and roared over them, centuries ago. "

Read the passage in the eulogy on Choate where he describeshim arming himself in the entire panoply of his gorgeousrhetoric--and you will get some far-away conception of thepower of this magician. 

One thing especially distinguishes our modern orator fromthe writer in the closet, where he writes solely for his readers, or where he has prepared his speeches beforehand--that is, the influence of the audience upon him. There is nothinglike it as a stimulant to every faculty, not only imagination, and fancy, and reason, but especially, as every experiencedspeaker knows, memory also. Everything needed seems to comeout from the secret storehouses of the mind, even the thingsthat have lain there forgotten, rusting and unused. Mr. Everettdescribes this in a masterly passage in his Life of Webster. Gladstone states it in a few fine sentences:

"The work of the orator, from its very inception, " he says, "is inextricably mixed up with practice. It is cast in themould offered to him by the mind of his hearers. It is aninfluence principally received from his audience (so to speak)in vapor, which he pours back upon them in a flood. The sympathyand concurrence of his time is, with his own mind, joint parentof his work. He cannot follow nor frame ideals; his choiceis to be what his age would have him, what it requires inorder to be moved by him, or else not to be at all. "

I heard six of Kossuth's very best speeches. He was a marvellousorator. He seemed to have mastered the whole vocabulary ofEnglish speech, and to have a rare gift of choosing wordsthat accurately expressed his meaning, and he used so to fashionhis sentences that they were melodious and delightful to theear. That is one great gift or oratory, as it is of poetry, or indeed of a good prose style. Why it is that two wordsor phrases which mean precisely the same thing to the intellect, have so different an effect on the emotions, no man can tell. To understand it, is to know the secret not only of reachingthe heart, but frequently of convincing the understandingof man. 

Kossuth made a great many speeches, sometimes five or sixin a day. He could have had no preparation but the few minuteswhich he could snatch while waiting for dinner at some housewhere he was a guest, or late at night, after a hard day'swork. But his speeches were gems. They were beautiful insubstance and in manner. He was ready for every occasion. When the speaker who welcomed him at Roxbury told him thatRoxbury contained no historic spot that would interest a stranger, Kossuth at once answered, "You forget that it is the birthplaceof Warren. " When old Josiah Quincy, then past eighty, saidat a Legislative banquet that he had come to the time--"whenthe keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong menshall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because theyare few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, and they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fearsshall be in the way, " Kossuth interrupted him, "Ah! but thatwas of ordinary men. "

I was a member of the Legislature when Kossuth visited Boston. I heard his address to the House and to the Senate, his replyto the Governor's welcome. I heard him again at the Legislativebanquet in Faneuil Hall, and twice in Worcester--on the Commonin the afternoon, and at the City Hall in the evening. Ishook hands with him and perhaps exchanged a word or two, but of that I have no memory. Afterward I visited him withmy wife at Turin in 1892, when he was a few months past ninety. He received me with great cordiality. I spent two hours withhim and his sister, Madam Ruttkay. They both expressed greatpleasure with the visit, and Madam Ruttkay kissed Mrs. Hoaraffectionately when we took leave. Kossuth's beautiful Englishperiods were as beautiful as they were forty years before, at the time of his famous pilgrimage through the United States. His whole conversation related to the destiny of his belovedHungary. He spoke with great dignity of his own share inthe public events which affected his country. There was nothingof arrogance or vanity in his claim for himself, yet in speakingof Francis Joseph, he assumed unconsciously the tone of asuperior. He maintained that constitutional liberty couldnever be permanent where two countries with separate legislatureswere under one sovereign. He said the sovereign would alwaysbe able to use the military and civil power of one to accomplishhis designs against the liberty of the other. The opinionof Kossuth on such a question is entitled to the greatestdeference. But I incline to the belief that, while undoubtedlythere may be great truth in the opinion, the spirit of libertywill overcome that danger. Hungary and Hungary's chief cityseem rapidly to be asserting control in their own affairsand an influence in the Austro-Hungary Empire which no monarchwill be able to withstand, and which it is quite likely theroyal family will not desire to withstand. In these daysmonarchs are learning the love of liberty, and I believein most cases to-day the reigning sovereigns of Europe areeager to promote constitutional government, and prefer thetitle of Liberator to that of Despot. 

I have heard Wendell Phillips speak a great many times. Ido not include him in this notice, because, if I did, I oughtto defend my estimate of him at considerable length, and tojustify it by ample quotation. I think him entitled to thevery highest rank as an orator. I do not estimate his moralcharacter highly. I think he exerted very little influence onhis generation, and that the influence he did exert was in themain pernicious. I have had copied everything he said, fromthe time he made his first speech, so far as it is found inthe newspapers, and have the volumes in which his speechesare collected. I never had occasion to complain of him onmy own account. So far as I know and believe, he had thekindliest feeling for me until his death, and esteemed mypublic service much more highly than it deserved. But hebitterly and unjustly attacked men whom I loved and honoredunder circumstances which make it impossible for me to believethat his conduct was consistent with common honesty. He seemednever to care for the soundness of his opinion before he utteredit, or for the truth of the fact before he said it, if onlyhe could produce a rhetorical effect. He seemed to like todefame men whom the people loved and honored. Toward thelatter part of his life, he seemed to get desperate. If hefailed to make an impression by argument, he took to invective. If vinegar would not answer he resorted to cayenne pepper. If that failed, he tried to throw vitriol in the eyes of themen whom he hated. His remedy for slavery was to destroythe country, and to leave the slave to the unchecked willof the South. During Lincoln's great trial, he attacked andvilified him. At the time when nearly every household inthe North was mourning for its dead, he tried to persuadethe people that Lincoln did not mean to put down the Rebellion. He never gave the people wise counsel, and rarely told themthe honest truth. He rarely gave his homage to anybody. Whenhe did, it was to bad men, and not to good men. 

There can be no worse influence upon the youth of the Republicthan that which shall induce them to approve sentiments, notbecause they are true, but only because they are eloquentlysaid. 

CHAPTER XXXVITRUSTS

I have given the best study I could to the grave evil of theaccumulation in the country of vast fortunes in single hands, or of vast properties in the hands of great corporations--popularly spoken of as trusts--whose powers are wielded byone, or a few persons. This is the most important questionbefore the American people demanding solution in the immediatefuture. A great many remedies have been proposed, some withsincerity and some, I am afraid, merely for partisan ends. The difficulty is increased by the fact that many of the evilscaused by trusts, or apprehended from them, can only be curedby the action of the States, but cannot be reached by Congress, which can only deal with international or interstate commerce. As long ago as 1890 the people were becoming alarmed aboutthis matter. But the evil has increased rapidly during thelast twelve years. It is said that one man in this countryhas acquired a fortune of more than a thousand million dollarsby getting an advantage over other producers or dealers ina great necessary of life in the rates at which the railroadstransport his goods to market. 

In 1890 a bill was passed which was called the Sherman Act, for no other reason I can think of except that Mr. Shermanhad nothing to do with framing it whatever. He introduceda bill and reported it from the Finance Committee providingthat whenever a trust, as it was called, dealt with an articleprotected by the tariff, the article should be put on thefree list. This was a crude, imperfect, and unjust provision. It let in goods made abroad by a foreign trust to competewith the honest domestic manufacturer. If there happenedto be an industry employing thousands or hundreds of thousandsof workmen, in which thousands of millions of American capitalwas invested, and a few persons got up a trust--perhaps importers, for the very purpose of breaking down the American manufacturer--and made the article to a very small extent, all honest manufacturerswould be deprived of their protection. 

Mr. Sherman's bill found little favor with the Senate. Itwas referred to the Judiciary Committee of which I was thena member. I drew as an amendment the present bill which Ipresented to the Committee. There was a good deal of oppositionto it in the Committee. Nearly every member had a plan ofhis own. But at last the Committee came to my view and reportedthe law of 1890. The House disagreed to our bill and thematter went to a Conference Committee, of which Mr. Edmunds, the Chairman of the Committee, and I, as the member of theCommittee who was the author of the bill, were members. TheHouse finally came to our view. 

It was expected that the Court, in administering that law, would confine its operation to cases which are contrary to thepolicy of the law, treating the words "agreements in restraintof trade, " as having a technical meaning, such as they aresupposed to have in England. The Supreme Court of the UnitedStates went in this particular farther than was expected. In one case it held that "the bill comprehended every schemethat might be devised to restrain trade or commerce amongthe several States or with foreign nations. " From this opinionseveral of the Court, including Mr. Justice Gray, dissented. It has not been carried to its full extent since, and I thinkwill never be held to prohibit the lawful and harmless combinationswhich have been permitted in this country and in England withoutcomplaint, like contracts of partnership which are usuallyconsidered harmless. We thought it was best to use this generalphrase which, as we thought, had an accepted and well-knownmeaning in the English law, and then after it had been construedby the Court, and a body of decisions had grown up underthe law, Congress would be able to make such further amendmentsas might be found by experience necessary. 

The statute has worked very well indeed, although the Courtby one majority and against the very earnest and emphaticdissent of some of its greatest lawyers, declined to givea technical meaning to the phrase, "in restraint of trade. "But the operation of the statute has been healthy. The Attorney-General has recently given an account of suits in equity bywhich he had destroyed a good many vast combinations, includinga combination of the six largest meat-packing concerns inthe country; a combination of railroads which had been restrainedfrom making any rebate or granting any preference whateverto any shipper; and a pooling arrangement between the Southernrailroads which denied the right of the shippers interestedin the cotton product in the South to prescribe the routeover which their goods should pass. He has also brought asuit in equity to prevent the operation of a proposed mergerof sundry transcontinental railroads, thereby breaking upa monopoly which affected the whole freight and passengertraffic of the Northwest. 

The public uneasiness, however, still continued. The matterwas very much discussed in the campaign for electing membersof the House of Representatives in the autumn of 1902. 

I made two or three careful speeches on the subject in Massachusetts, in which I pointed out that the existing law, in general, was likely to be sufficient. I claimed, however, further, that Congress had, in my opinion, the power of controllingthe whole matter, by reason of its right to prescribe termson which any corporation, created by State authority or itsown, should engage in interstate or international commerce. It might provide as a condition for such traffic by a corporation, that its officers or members should put on file an obligationto be personally liable for the debts of the concern in casethe conditions prescribed by Congress were not complied with. 

The House of Representatives passed a very stringent billknown as the Littlefield Bill, which was amended by the JudiciaryCommittee, of which I was the Chairman, by adding the provisionsof a bill which I had, myself, previously introduced, basedon the suggestions above stated. 

But there was a general feeling that the amendments to theexisting law proposed by the Administration were all thatshould be made at present. These consisted in providingsevere penalties for granting rebates by railroads to favoredshippers; for having suits under the existing law broughtforward for prompt decision, and for giving the new Departmentof Commerce large powers for the examination of the conductof the business of such corporations, and to compel them tomake such returns as should be thought desirable. 

I should have preferred to have the bill I reported broughtforward and discussed in the Senate, although there was obviouslyno time, with the pressure of other business, to get it through. But it was thought best by a majority of the Republicans notto take it up. Some of them thought it was likely, if passed, to have a very serious and perhaps disastrous effect on thecountry. So far as I know, nobody in either House of Congressor in the press has pointed out why such a result would belikely to follow. 

On the whole I was very well satisfied. The interests concernedare vast. A rash or unskilful remedy might bring infinitetrouble or ruin to lawful business. The work of restrainingthe trusts is going on very well under the law of 1890. Itis a matter which must be discussed and considered by theAmerican people for a great many years to come, and the evilsfrom the trusts at present are rather in anticipation thanin reality. So I am very well content, for the present, withwhat has been accomplished. 

CHAPTER XXXVIIRECOLLECTIONS OF THE WORCESTER BAR

The Worcester Bar, when I came to it, was much like a classof boys in college. There was rivalry and sharp practicein some cases, and roughness of speech toward each other andtoward witnesses and parties. But in the main, the lawyersstood by one another and were ready to help each other introuble, and the lawyer's best and most trustworthy friendswere his associates. The Judge and the jurymen, and the lawyersfrom out of town used to come into Worcester and stay at theold Sykes or Thomas Tavern, opposite the court-house, andat another one known as the United States Hotel, further south. The former was kept for a good many years by an old fellownamed Sykes. He was a singular-looking person--a large head, stout body, rather protuberant belly, and short curved legsand very long arms. He had large heavy eyebrows, a wide mouthand a curved nose and sallow complexion looking a good deallike the caricatures of the Jewish countenance in the comicnewspapers. He had two sons who looked very much like himand seemed about as old as their father. One day the threewere standing in front of his tavern when a countryman camealong who undertook to stop with his load at the front doorof the tavern. Sykes was standing there with his two sons, one on each side of him. He did not like to have the countrymanstop his load in that spot and called out to him rather roughly, "Move along. " The fellow surveyed the group for a momentwith an amused look and complied with the order, but shoutedout to the old man: "Wal, this is the fust time I ever sawthree Jacks of Spades in one pack. "

The Court sat till six o'clock and often far into the evening, and began at half-past eight or nine. So there was no chancefor the country lawyers to go home at night. There was greatfun at these old taverns in the evening and at meal times. They insisted generally, like Mrs. Battles in whist, on therigor of the game, and the lawyer had to look sharp afterhis pleadings or he found himself tripped up. The partiescould not be witnesses, nor could any person interested inthe result of the trial. So many a good case, and many agood defence failed for want of the legal evidence to makeit out. But the whole Bar and the public seemed to take aninterest in important trials. People came in from the countryround with their covered wagons, simply for the pleasure ofattending Court and seeing the champions contend with eachother. The lawyers who were not engaged in the case werealways ready to help those who were with advice and suggestion. It used to be expected that members of the Bar would be inthe court-house hearing the trials even if they were not engagedin them. That was always an excuse for being absent fromthe office, and their clients sought them at the court-housefor consultation. I cannot but think that the listening tothe trial and argument of causes by skilful advocates wasa better law school than any we have now, and that our youngmen, especially in the large cities, fail to become good advocatesand to learn the art of putting in a case, and of examiningand cross-examining witnesses, for want of a constant andfaithful attendance on the courts. 

In those old times, our old lawyers, if Charles Lamb hadknown them and should paint them, would make a set of portraitsas interesting as his old Benchers of the Inner Temple. OldCalvin Willard, many years sheriff of Worcester, would havedelighted Elia. He did not keep the wig or the queue or thesmall-clothes of our great-grandfathers, but he had theirformal and ceremonial manners in perfection. It was likea great State ceremonial to meet him and shake hands withhim. He paused for a moment, surveyed you carefully to besure of the person, took a little time for reflection to besure there was nothing in the act to compromise his dignity, and then slowly held out his hand. But the grasp was a warmone, and the ceremony and the hand-shake conveyed his cordialrespect and warmth of regard. He always reminded me of theEnglishman in Crabbe's "Tales" who, I think, may have beenhis kinsman. 

 The wish that Roman necks in one were found That he who formed the wish might deal the wound, This man had never heard. But of the kind Is the desire which rises in his mind. He'd have all English hands, for further he Cannot conceive extends our charity, All but his own, in one right hand to grow; And then what hearty shake would he bestow. 

Mr. Willard was once counsel before a magistrate in a casein which he took much interest. A rough, coarse countrylawyer was on the other side. When Willard stated some legalproposition, his adversary said: "I will bet you five dollarsthat ain't law. " "Sir, " said Mr. Willard, drawing himselfup to his full height, with the great solemnity of tone ofwhich he was master: "Sir, I do not permit myself to makethe laws of my country the subject of a bet. "

Another of the old characters who came down to my time fromthe older generation was Samuel M. Burnside. He was a manof considerable wealth and lived in a generous fashion, dispensingan ample hospitality at his handsome mansion, still standingin Worcester. He was a good black-letter lawyer, though withoutmuch gift of influencing juries or arguing questions of lawto the Court. He was a good Latin scholar, very fond of Horaceand Virgil, and used to be on the committees to examine thestudents at Harvard, rather disturbing the boys with his somewhatpedantic questioning. He was very nearsighted, and, it issaid, once seized the tail of a cow which passed near himin the street and hurried forward, supposing some woman hadgone by and said, "Madam, you are dropping your tippet. "

One of the most interesting characters among the elders ofthe Worcester Bar was old Rejoice Newton. He was a man ofexcellent judgment, wisdom, integrity and law learning enoughto make him a safe guide to his clients in their importanttransactions. He was a most prosaic person, without sentiment, without much knowledge of literature, and absolutely withouthumor. He was born in Northfield near the banks of the ConnecticutRiver and preserved to the time of his death his love of ruralscenes and of farming. He had an excellent farm a mile ortwo out of town, where he spent all the time he could getfrom his professional duties. He was associated with ChiefJustice Shaw in some important cases, and always thought thatit was due to his recommendation that Governor Lincoln appointedthe Chief Justice--a suggestion which Governor Lincoln usedto repel with great indignation. The Governor was also agood farmer, especially proud of his cattle. Each of themliked to brag of their crops and especially of the produceof their respective dairies. Governor Lincoln was once discoursingto Devens and me, in our office, of a wonderful cow of hiswhich, beside raising an enormous calf, had produced the creamfor a great quantity of butter. Mr. Devens said: "Why, thatbeats Major Newton's cow, that gave for months at a time somefifteen or eighteen quarts at a milking. " "If Brother Newtonhears of my cow, " said Governor Lincoln, "he will at oncedouble the number of quarts. " The old Major was quite fondof telling stories, of which the strong points were not aptto suffer in his narration. One Fourth of July, when he hadgot to be an old man, he came down street and met a brothermember of the Bar, who took him up into the room of the WorcesterLight Infantry, a Company of which the Major's deceased sonhad long ago been the Captain. The members of the Companywere spending the Fourth with a bowl of punch and other refreshments. The Major was introduced and was received with great cordiality, and my friend left him there. The next day my friend wasgoing down street and met the Captain of the Light Infantry, who said: "That was a very remarkable old gentleman you broughtinto our room yesterday. He stayed there all the forenoon, drinking punch and telling stories. He distinctly rememberedGeneral Washington. He went home to dinner, came back afterdinner, drank some more punch, and remembered ChristopherColumbus. "

The old Major was once addressing the Supreme Court and maintaineda doctrine which did not commend itself to Chief Justice Shaw. The Chief Justice interposed: "Brother Newton, what is theuse of arguing that? We have held otherwise in such a case(citing it) and again and again since. " The Major paused, drew his spectacles slowly off his nose, and said to the Courtwith great seriousness: "May it please your Honors, I havea great respect for the opinions of this Court, except insome very gross cases. "

A man by the name of Lysander Spooner, whose misfortune itwas to be a good deal in advance of his age, the author ofa very clever pamphlet maintaining the unconstitutionalityof slavery, also published some papers attacking the authenticityof Christian miracles. In these days of Bob Ingersoll suchviews would be met with entire toleration, but they shockedMajor Newton exceedingly, as they did most persons of histime. Spooner studied for the Bar and applied to be admitted. He was able to pass an examination. But the Major, as _amicuscuriae, _ addressed the Court and insisted that Spooner wasnot a man of proper character, and affirmed in support ofhis assertion that he was the author of some blasphemous attackson Christianity. The result was that Spooner's applicationwas denied. The Court adjourned for dinner. It was the dayof the calling of the docket, and just before the Judge camein in the afternoon, the whole Bar of Worcester County wereassembled, filling the room. The Major sat in a seat nearone of the doors. He had dined pretty heavily, the day washot and the Major was sleepy. He tipped back a little inhis chair, his head fell back between his shoulders and hismouth opened, with his nose pointed toward the zenith. Justthen Spooner came in. As he passed by the Major, the temptationwas irresistible. He seized the venerable nose of the oldpatriarch between his thumb and finger, and gave it a vigoroustwist. The Major was awakened and sprang to his feet, andin a moment realized what had happened. He was, as may bewell supposed, intensely indignant. No Major in the militiacould submit to such an insult. He seized his chair and hurledit at the head of the offender, but missed, and the bystandersinterposed before he was able to inflict the deserved punishment. 

The Major lived to a good old age. His mental facultiesbecame somewhat impaired before he died. He had great respectfor his excellent son-in-law, Colonel Wetherell, who was onGovernor Andrew's staff during the War, and thought that anythingwhich ought to be accomplished could be accomplished by theinfluence of the Colonel. Somebody told him during the hardestpart of the war that we ought to bend all our energies tothe capture of Richmond. If Richmond were to fall the rebellionwould be easily put down. "You are quite right, sir, " saidthe Major. "It ought to be done, and I will speak to ColonelWetherell about it. " But everybody who knew the worthy Major, unless it were some offender against justice, or some personagainst whose wrong-doing he had been the shield and protectorto a client, liked the kindly, honest and sturdy old man. He was District Attorney for the district which included WorcesterCounty--an office then and ever since held by admirable lawyers. He prided himself on the fact that he never drew an indictmentwhich was not sustained by the Court, if it were questioned. He liked to recite his old triumphs. He especially plumedhimself on his sagacity in dealing with one case which camebefore him. A complaint was made of a book well known atthat time, the memoirs of a dissolute woman, which was fullof indecency, but in which there could not be found a single, separate indecent sentence or word. The Major was at a lossfor some time what to do in indicting it. If he set forththe whole book, it would give it an immortality on the recordsof the court which perhaps would be worse for the public moralsthan the original publication. Finally he averred in theindictment that the defendant had published a book so indecentthat it was unfit to be spread on the records of the court. The question went up to the Supreme Court and the indictmentwas held good. It was difficult for the Court or the juryto find that such a book was fit to be spread on the recordsof the Court, and the Major secured his victory and convictedhis criminal. 

One of the bright young lawyers who came to the Bar a fewyears after I did, was Appleton Dadmun. He died of consumptionafter a brief but very successful career. He was the verytype and embodiment of the Yankee countryman in his excellenciesand his defects and in his fashion of speech and behavior. He was a graduate of Amherst College. The only evidence Iever discovered of his classical education was his habit ofusing the Greek double negative in ordinary English speech. He used to employ me almost always as senior when he had acase to argue to a jury, or an important law argument in Court. He would put off the engagement until just as the case wascoming on. He used to intend to try his cases himself. Buthis heart, at the last moment, would fail him. He was asanxious about his clients' cases as if they were his own. He was exceedingly negligent about his pleadings and negligentin the matter of being prepared with the necessary formalproofs of facts which were really not doubtful but whichwere put in issue by the pleadings. When I was retainedmy first duty was to prepare an amendment of the declarationor the answer or plea, or, perhaps, to see whether he hadgot the attesting witness to prove some signature. But whenwe had got past all that I used to find that he had preparedhis evidence with reference to what was the pinch of thecase of what was likely to be finally the doubtful point inthe mind of court or jury with infinite sagacity and skill. I have rarely known a better judge of the effect of evidenceon the mind of ordinary juries. He took his clients into hisaffection as if they had been his own brethren or children, and seemed always to hate to be compelled to make any chargefor his services, however successful. 

He had a pleasant wit. On one occasion a member of the barnamed Holbrook, who was not a bad fellow, but had, like therest of the world, some peccadilloes to repent of, came intothe Court-house one morning just as the Court was coming inwhere the lawyers were gathered. Much excited, he said hewas riding into Worcester in a chaise from the neighboringtown where he spent his nights in the summer. His horse hadrun away and tore at a terrible rate down Main Street, swingingthe chaise from one side to the other as he ran, and breakingsome part of the harness and perhaps one of the shafts. Butat last he had contrived to crawl out through the window behindin the chaise top and hold on to the cross-bar. Letting himselfdown just as the chaise had got to the extremity of its swayfrom one side to another, he let go and escaped without injury. But, he said, it was a terrible five minutes. Every actionof his life seemed to rush through his memory with the swiftnessof a torrent. "You ought to have very heavy damages, sir, "said Mr. Dadmun. 

Another of the brightest of the young lawyers when I cameto the Bar was H. He had, however, had rather an unfortunateintroduction to life. His father, who was a very wealthyand prosperous manufacturer, sent him to Yale College andsupplied him liberally with money, not only for his support, but for the indulgence of every extravagant taste. Besidespending what his father allowed him, he incurred a good manydebts, expecting to find no difficulty in their payment. Hisfather failed in business with a great crash about the endof his junior year and died suddenly. He kept on, however, on credit, until he graduated and then came out with a heavyload of debt, and no resources for studying his profession. He got thorough, however, by dint of plausible manners. Hewas a very honest fellow in other respects, but he got thehabit of incurring debts which he could not pay. Then hetook to drinking hard, and finally went to New York, and diedafter a career of dissipation. But everybody liked him. Drunkor sober, he was the best company in the world, full of anecdoteflavored with a shrewd and not ill-natured wit. There was amanufacturer in a village near Worcester who had failed inbusiness owing large debts all about. He was a man of enormousbulk, the fattest man in the whole region round-about, weighingconsiderably over three hundred. He left the State to avoidhis creditors, and dwelt in New York, keeping himself outof their reach. At last it was discovered by a creditor thathe used to come to Worcester in the train which arrived fromNew York on the Western Railroad shortly before midnight Saturday, go over to his old home, which was not far off, stay thereSunday, when he was exempt from arrest, and take the carsSunday night at about the same hour for New York. Accordinglyold Jonathan Day, a veteran deputy-sheriff, armed with anexecution, lay in wait for him one dark and stormy Saturdaynight at the little old wooden depot of the Western Railroad, some hundred or two feet from Grafton Street. The traincame in, and the debtor got out. The old General laid hishands on him, and told him he was his prisoner. He protestedand demurred and begged, making all manner of promises topay the debt if the officer would not take him to jail. ButDay was inexorable. Meantime the train had gone on, and thekeeper of the depot had put out the lights and gone off. Therewas nobody left in the darkness but the officer and the debtor. "Well, " said the fellow, "if you are going to take me to jailyou must carry me. I won't walk. " So he sat himself downon the platform. Day tried to persuade him to walk, and thentugged and tugged at his collar, but without the slightesteffect. He might as well have tried to move a mountain. Hewaited in a good deal of perplexity, and at last he heardthe rattle of wheels on Grafton Street, and gave a loud yellfor assistance. The owner of the wagon came to the scene. General Day demanded his help as one of the posse comitatus. But it was as hard to the two to move the obstruction as ithad been for the old General alone. So the General put thedebtor in charge of his new recruit, and went off up streetto see what counsel he could get in the matter. All the lightsin the lawyers' offices and places of business were out excepta solitary gleam which came from the office of my friendH. He was sitting up alone, soaking himself with the contentsof a bottle of brandy. General Day found him sitting thereand stated his case. My friend heard it through, took itinto consideration, and took down and consulted the RevisedStatutes and the Digest. At last he shook his head with anair of drunken gravity and said: "I don't find any expressprovision anywhere for such a case. So I think we must begoverned by the rule of law for the case nearest like it wecan find. That seems to be the case of the attachment ofpersonal property, such as lumber, which is too bulky to beremoved. My advice to you is to put a placard on him sayinghe is attached, and go off and leave him till Monday morning. "

When I was a young man, one summer a few years after my admissionto the Bar, I took a journey on foot with Horace Gray throughBerkshire County. We started from Greenfield and walked overthe Hoosac Mountain to Adams and Williamstown, then over theold road to Pittsfield, then to Stockbridge, Great Barrington, and the summit of Mt. Washington, now better known as Mt. Everett or Taghsomi; thence to Bashpish Falls in New York, and to the Salisbury Lakes in Connecticut. We visited manyinteresting places and enjoyed what has always seemed to methe most beautiful scenery on earth. 

There were one or two quite ludicrous adventures. I wentalone to the top of Bald Mountain in Lenox one day. Grayhad been there and preferred to visit a neighboring hilltop. As I approached the summit, which was a bare pasture, I cameupon a powerful bull with a herd of cattle near him. He beganto bellow and paw the ground and move toward me in angry fashion. There was no chance for any place of refuge which I couldhope to gain. I looked around for some rock or instrumentof defence. It was, I think, the most imminent danger towhich I have ever been exposed. I was calculating my capacityfor dodging the creature when suddenly a sound like a smallclap of thunder was heard. The rest of the herd, which seemedquite wild, seeing the approach of a stranger, had taken alarmand started off down the hillside on a full run, their rushingand trampling causing the earth to reverberate beneath theirtread and produce the sound of which I have just spoken. The old bull hearing the sound and seeing his companionsdeparting concluded he would follow their example. He turnedtail too, and retreated down the mountain side, much to myrelief. 

On our walk through Lanesboro we stopped at a plain countrytavern to get lunch. There were several codgers such as inthose days used to haunt country bar-rooms about eleven o'clockin the morning and four o'clock in the afternoon. Sittingin an old wooden chair tilted back against the wall of theroom was one of them curled up with his knees sticking uphigher than his head. He looked at Gray's stately proportionsand called out: "How tall are you?" Gray, who was alwaysrather careful of his dignity, made some brief answer notintended to encourage familiarity. But the fellow persisted:"I would like to measure with you. " Gray concluded it wasbest to enter into the humor of the occasion. So he stoodup against the wall. The other man proceeded to draw himselfup out of the chair, and unroll, and unroll, and unroll untilat last his gigantic stature reached up almost as high asGray's. But he fell short a little. I learned, later, thatit was a man named Shaw who afterward became famous as a writerand humorist under the pseudonym of Josh Billings. He wasthe son of Henry Shaw, formerly of Lanesboro; at that timea millionaire dwelling in New York, and known to fame asone of the two Massachusetts Representatives who voted forthe Missouri Compromise in 1820. Henry Shaw was, I believe, a native of Lanesboro, and had represented the Berkshire districtin Congress. 

The person whom the Worcester lawyers of this time like bestto remember was Peter C. Bacon. He was the Dominie Sampsonof the Worcester Bar. I suppose he was the most learned manwe ever had in Worcester, and probably, in Massachusetts. He was simple and guileless as a child; of a most inflexiblehonesty, devoted to the interest of his clients, and an enthusiasticlover of the science of the law. When, in rare cases, hethoroughly believed in the righteousness of his case, he wasirresistible. But in general he was full of doubts and hesitation. He was, until he was compelled to make his arguments morecompact by the rules of court limiting the time of arguments, rather tedious. He liked to go out into side-paths and todiscourse of matters not material to the issue but suggestedto him as he went along. He had a curious fashion of usingthe ancient nomenclature of the Common law where it had passedout of the knowledge even of most lawyers and the comprehensionof common men. He would begin his appeal to the jury in somecase where a fraud had been attempted on his client, by saying, "Gentlemen, the law abhorreth covin. " He was a lawyer everywhere. His world was the Court-house and his office. I met him inthe street, of a Sunday noon, one summer and said to him, "Why, Brother Bacon, you must have had a long sermon to-day. "

"Oh, " Mr. Bacon said, "I stayed to the Sunday-school. I havea class of young girls. It's very interesting. I've got'em as far as the Roman Civil Law. "

Mr. Bacon could seldom be made angry by any incivility tohimself. But he resented any attempt to deprive a client, however much of a n'er-do-well he might be, of all the rightsand forms of a legal trial. He was also much disturbed ifany lawyer opposed to him misstated a principle of law, whoought, in his judgment, to know better. I was once tryinga case against him and his partner, Judge Aldrich, where GeneralDevens was my associate. Devens was summing up the case, and complaining of the conduct of some parties interestedin the estate of a deceased person. One of them was a sonof a deceased niece. There being no children, under our law, the nephews and nieces inherit, but not the children of deceasednephews or nieces, when there are living nephews or nieces. General Devens, not having in his mind the legal provisionat the moment, said to the jury: "The sound of the earth onthe coffin of the old lady had scarcely ceased when one ofthese heirs hurried to the probate office to get administration. "Mr. Bacon rose and interrupted him with great emotion. "Heis not an heir. "

"I said, " Mr. Devens repeated, "one of these heirs, Mr. A. F. "

Bacon burst into tears and said again, with a broken voice:"He is not an heir, I say, he is not an heir. "

I saw the point and whispered to Devens: "An assumed heir. "

"Very well, " Devens said, "an assumed heir, if my friend likesit better. " Bacon replied with a "Humph" of contentment andsatisfaction, and the matter subsided. As I was walking homefrom the court-house with Mr. Bacon afterward I expressedmy regret at the occurrence and told him that General Devenshad the greatest respect for him. Mr. Bacon replied: "Hehad no business to say it. Aldrich told me to tell him hehad not read the 'Revised Statutes. ' But I would not say sucha thing as that, sir, about any man. "

But Brother Bacon had the kindliest of hearts. It was impossiblefor him to bear malice or retain resentment against anybody. When I was a youngster I was once in a case where Bacon wason the other side. Charles Allen was my associate. It wasa case which excited great public feeling. There were throngsof witnesses. It was tried in the middle of the terrificheats of one of the hottest summers ever known in Worcester. Allen, who had a power of stinging sarcasm which he much delightedto use, kept Bacon nervous and angry through the whole trial. At last, one afternoon, Bacon lost his patience. When theCourt adjourned, he stood up on a little flight of steps onthe outside of the Court-house and addressed the crowd, whowere going out. He said: "Charles Allen has abused me allthrough this trial. He is always abusing me. He has abusedme ever since I came to this Bar. I have said it before andI will say it again--_he is a curious kind of a man. "_ Thisutterance relieved Brother Bacon's wounded feelings and henever probably thought of the matter again. 

One of the great events in Bacon's life was his receivingthe degree of Doctor of Laws from Brown University, wherehe was graduated. This gave infinite satisfaction to hisbrethren of the Bar, who were all very fond of him. It wasat once proposed, after the old Yankee fashion in the countrywhen a man got a new hat or a new suit of clothes, that weshould all go down to T. 's to "wet" it. T. Was the proprietorof a house a few miles from Worcester, famous for cookinggame and trout in the season, and not famous for a strictobservance of the laws against the sale of liquor. Therewas a good deal of feeling about that among the temperancepeople of the town, although it was a most excellent, properlykept house in all other respects. But the prejudice againstit of the strict teetotalers had occasioned some entirelyunfounded scandal about its management in other matters. Mr. Bacon, when invited by the Bar to go as a guest, acceptedthe invitation, but stipulated that he should have providedfor him a pint bottle of English ale. He said he was opposed, on principle, to drinking intoxicating liquors, but his doctorshad ordered that he should drink a pint of ale every day withhis dinner. That was provided. The Bar sat down to dinnerat an early hour and the fun and frolic were kept up far intothe small hours of the night. Brother Bacon was the subjectof every speech and of every toast. He seemed to think itwas necessary for him to reply to every speaker and toast. So he was kept on his legs a great part of the night. Ashe sipped his modest tumbler of ale, Brother Dewey, who satnext to him, would replenish it, when Mr. Bacon was not looking, from a bottle of champagne. So at least two quart bottlesof champagne were passed into the unsuspecting Brother Baconthrough that single pint of beer. When we broke up, the hostcame to ask us how we had enjoyed ourselves, and Mr. Bacontold him he would like to know where he got his English ale, which he thought was the best he had ever tasted in his life. It is the only instance that I know of in modern times ofthe repetition of the miracle of the widow's cruse. 

Judge Thomas, then holding the Supreme Court at Worcester, wanted very much indeed to go down with the Bar, but he thoughtit would not quite do. The next morning, Mr. Bacon had totry a libel for adultery between two parties living in thetown where the Bar had had their supper. He had had no chanceto see his witnesses, who got into town just as the Courtopened. So he had to put them on and examine them at a venture. The first one he called was a grave-looking citizen. Mr. Bacon asked him a good many questions, but could get no answerwhich tended to help his case, and at last he said, with someimpatience: "Mr. Witness, can you tell me any single factwhich tends to show that his man has committed adultery?"

"Well, all I know about it, Squire Bacon, " replied the witness, "is that he's been seen at Charlie T. 's"--the inn where Baconhad had his supper the night before. There was an immenseroar of laughter from the Bar, led by Judge Thomas, the ringof whose laugh could have been heard half way across the square. 

Brother Bacon, though a modest and most kindly man, used tothink he had a monopoly of the abstruser knowledge in regardto real property and real actions. It used sometimes to provokehim when he found a competent antagonist in cases involvingsuch questions. There was a suit in which Bacon was for thedemandant where a creditor had undertaken to levy an executionof property standing in a wife's name but claimed to havebeen conveyed to her in trust for the husband on considerationpaid by him. In such cases, under the Massachusetts law, the land may be levied upon as the property of the debtor, notwithstanding the ostensible title is in another. The wifecontested the facts. But after the bringing of the suit, the wife died, and the husband by her death became tenantby the courtesy. Of course his title as tenant by the courtesywas unaffected by the previous levy, and his wife's rightto contest the demand devolved upon him. The husband andwife had both been made parties defendant to the suit underthe Massachusetts practice. It would not do to let the creditorget judgment. Under the advice of Mr. Nelson, afterwardJudge, one of the most learned and careful lawyers, the defendantpleaded a special non-tenure, and the case was reported tothe full bench of the Supreme Court, where Mr. Bacon wasemployed for the plaintiff. The report inaccurately saidthat the defendant filed a disclaimer. Mr. Bacon made avery learned argument to show that upon the facts the disclaimercould not be supported, and was going on swimmingly, underfull sail. Mr. Bacon said in his argument: "If he had pleadednon-tenure, I admit, your Honors, he would have been prettywell off. " Whereupon Judge Hoar sent for the original papers, and looking at them read the plea, and said: "Isn't that aplea of non-tenure?" Mr. Bacon was obliged to admit thatit was. The Chief Justice said: "Well, then, the tenantis in the condition which you describe as being pretty welloff, isn't he, Brother Bacon?" Bacon answered with an angryand impatient "Humph. " The Chief Justice said: "Are thereany other objections to the plea, Brother Bacon?" "More thanforty, your Honor, " replied Bacon indignantly, "which I shouldstate to you at a proper time. " The Chief Justice said thatthat seemed to be the proper time. But Mr. Bacon sat downin high dudgeon, without further remark. 

He was the kindliest of men, both to man and beast. I oncewas at a country tavern where Bacon and I were to dine. Itwas about the time of the session of the Supreme Court. Iwas sitting on the veranda of the hotel waiting for dinnerto be ready, in the summer afternoon. Mr. Bacon took a littlewalk, and as he came along and was passing the porch, a puppyran after him, came up behind, and seized his pantaloons inhis teeth, making quite a rent in them. Bacon looked roundand saw the mischief, and shook his finger at the poor dog. I am sure he had no idea that anybody of the human specieswas within hearing. The animal crouched down in great terror, expecting a beating. Mr. Bacon paused a moment with hisuplifted finger, and addressed the cur. "Why do you try tobite me? Why do you tear my pantaloons? Do you think I cango through the Supreme Court without pantaloons?" With thathe left the poor dog to the reproaches of his own conscienceand took no further notice of the transaction. 

I ought perhaps, as I have told this story at Brother Bacon'sexpense, to tell one at my own where he came out decidedlyahead. We were opposed in a real estate case where the otherevidence of the title was pretty strong Bacon's way, but theancient bounds seemed to agree with my client's theory. Iaddressed the jury with all the earnestness in my power infavor of the importance of maintaining the ancient landmarks, quoting the curse of the Scripture on him that removed them, and endeavored to make them see how much of the safety andsecurity of property depended on sticking to them in spiteof any amount of fallible human testimony. I thought I hadmade a good impression. When Brother Bacon came to reply, he told the jury about the Roman god Terminus who watchedover boundaries, and after quite an eloquent description, he told the jury: "Brother Hoar always seems to me when hemakes this argument, which I have heard a good many timesbefore, to think he is the god Terminus, and that the protectionof all our modern landmarks is in his exclusive province. "The jury were very much amused. I have forgotten how thecase was decided. But I should doubtless remember if it hadbeen decided in my favor. 

Quite late in life some of Mr. Bacon's clients, seeing thathe was out of health, and grateful for his long, faithful andpoorly paid service, made an arrangement to send him on ajourney to Europe. He was gone a little more than a year, visiting England, France, Italy and Spain, and returningwith new vigor for another ten years of hard work. His interestin Europe had come chiefly from the literature which he hadread in his younger days. He was not very familiar with muchEnglish prose or poetry later than the time of Addison. Inone of his first letters in London he announced with greatsatisfaction, "I have a room not far from the celebrated WestminsterAbbey mentioned in the _Spectator. "_

But Brother Bacon ought not to be remembered alone, or chiefly, for his eccentricities. He was a profound, accurate and ablejurist. The great interests of clients were safe with him. To him the profession of the lawyer was a sacred office. Inever think of him without recalling Cicero's beautiful descriptionin the "De Oratore" of the old age of the great lawyer:

Quit est enim praeclarius quam honoribus et republicae muneribusperfunctum senem posee suo jure dicere id quot apud Eniumdicit ille Pythias Apollo, se esse eum, unde sibi, si no populiet reges, at onmnes sui cives consilium expetant;

 suarum rerum incerti quos ego ope mea ex incertis certos compotesque consili dimitto ut ne res temere tractent turbidas. 

Est enim sine dubio domus jurisconsulti totius oraculum civitatis. 

Mr. Bacon lived to celebrate his golden wedding, and endeda stainless and honored life in a ripe old age, mourned bythe whole community, of which he had been a pillar and anornament. His portrait hangs in the Court House where hewould have loved best to be remembered. 

In my early days at the Worcester Bar there were a good manybright men, young and old, who had their offices in the countrytowns, but who tried a good many cases before juries. Allthe courts for the county in those days were held in Worcester. Among these country lawyers was old Nat Wood of Fitchburg, now a fine city; then a thriving country town. Mr. Woodhad a great gift of story-telling, and he understood verywell the character and ways of country farmers. He used tocome down from Fitchburg at the beginning of the week, stopat the old Sykes Tavern where the jurymen and witnesses putup, spend the evening in the bar-room getting acquainted withthe jurymen and telling them stories. So when he had a caseto try, he was apt to have a very friendly tribunal. Hisenemies used to say that he always contrived to sleep withone juryman himself, and have his client sleep with another, when he had a case coming on. He was quite irritable andhasty, and would sometimes break out with great indignationat some fancied impropriety of the other side, without fullyunderstanding what was going on. I was once examining a witnesswho had led rather a roving and vagabond life. I asked himwhere he had lived and he named seven different towns ineach of which he had dwelt within a very short time. I observed:"Seven mighty cities claimed great Homer dead. " Wood instantlysprang to his feet with great indignation. "Brother Hoar, I wish you would not put words into the witness's mouth. "

Wood was a native of Stirling, a thinly settled country townnear the foot of Mount Wachusett. The people of that townwere nearly equally divided between the Unitarian and Universalistcongregations. Each had its meeting house fronting on thepublic common or Green, as it was called. In the summer thefarmers would come to meeting from distant parts of the town, bringing luncheon with them; have a short intermission afterthe morning service, and then have a second service in theafternoon. During the recess, in pleasant summer weather, the men of the two congregations would gather together onthe Green, discussing the news of the town, and very oftengetting into theological controversies. In the winter, theygathered in the tavern or post-office in the same way. Therewas one Universalist champion who told the gathering that hewould make any man admit the truth of Universalism in fiveminutes. He was a well known and doughty champion, and theUnitarians were rather loth to tackle him. But, one Sunday, Lawyer Wood came home to spend the day at his birthplace, and the Unitarians thought it was a good chance to encounterthe Universalist champion. So they accepted his challengeand put Wood forward to meet him. 

The Universalist theologian began: "You'll admit there isa God?"

"No, I'll be damned if I do, " replied Wood. 

The fellow was completely non-plussed. He had got to takeup his five minutes in compelling Wood to admit the existenceof a Creator. So he was obliged to retire from the fielddiscomfited. 

Another of our leaders at the Bar was Henry Chapin. He hadmade his way from a rather humble place in life to be oneof the leaders of a very able Bar, Mayor of Worcester, andto hold a place of large influence in the various business, social, charitable and religious activities of the community. He was not specially learned, specially profound or speciallyeloquent. But he had a rare gift of seizing upon the thoughtwhich was uppermost in the minds of excellent and sensiblemen, country farmers, skilled workmen in the shops, businessmen, expressing it in a clear and vigorous way, always agreeingwith the best sentiment of the people. This, with an unfailingcourtesy and pleasant humor and integrity of character andlife gave him great popularity. He was exceedingly happyin short speeches at dinners or at political meetings. Hehad a fund of entertaining anecdote which never seemed tofail. He was very careful not to seem dogmatic, or to asserthimself too strongly. He would put forward his opinion withsaying, "It strikes my mind, " or "It has occurred to me, "or "I thought perhaps it was possible, " or "It is my impression. "I remember once protesting before old Judge Byington againstsome objection which the counsel on the other side had madeto a witness testifying to his impressions. I told the Judgethat Brother Chapin never in his life stated anything morestrongly. If you asked him if he were married, he wouldsay it was his impression he was. The Judge said: "Well, we have a lawyer in Berkshire County who has the same habit. Only if you ask him if he is married it is his impressionhe isn't. "

It is said that when he went to see the Siamese Twins, heobserved to the exhibitor, "Brothers, I suppose. " But Ibelieve that story had been told before of one of the RoyalDukes. 

Mr. Chapin was nominated by the Republicans for Congress andaccepted and would have had a useful and distinguished publiclife. But he became alarmed by the opposition of the Know-Nothings and withdrew from the canvass much to the dissatisfactionof his political friends. That ended his political aspirations. But he was soon after appointed to the more congenial officeof Judge of Probate, which he discharged to great public satisfactionuntil his lamented death. 

CHAPTER XXXVIIISOME JUDGES I HAVE KNOWN

Unquestionably the most important character in the legalhistory of Massachusetts is Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw. Hewas a great lawyer before he came to the Bench. He had writtenone or two very able articles for the _North American Review, _one of them a vigorous statement of the opinion of Massachusettsupon slavery. He was the author of a petition signed by manyof the leading men of Massachusetts in opposition to the hightariff of 1828. No more powerful statement of the argumentagainst high protection can be found. I have been surprisedthat the modern free-traders have not long ago discoveredit, and brought it to light. He was one of the managers ofthe impeachment of Judge Prescott, securing a conviction againsta powerful array of counsel for the defendant, which includedDaniel Webster. He was consulted in difficult and importantmatters by eminent counsel in other counties than Suffolk. 

But all these titles to distinction have been forgotten inhis great service as Chief Justice of Massachusetts for thirtyyears. No other judicial fame in the country can rival his, with the single exception of Marshall. He was induced toundertake the office of Chief Justice very reluctantly, bythe strong personal urgency of Mr. Webster. Mr. Websterused to give a humorous account of the difficulty he had inovercoming the morbid scruples of the great simple-heartedintellectual giant. He found Mr. Shaw in his office in acloud of tobacco-smoke. Mr. Webster did not himself smoke, and was at some disadvantage during the interview for thatreason. 

Mr. Shaw was rather short in stature and, in the latter partof his life, somewhat corpulent. He had a massive head, alow forehead, and strong and rather coarse features. He remindedyou of the statues of Gog and Magog in the Guildhall in London. His hair came down over his forehead, and when he had beenaway from home for a week or two, so that his head got no combingbut his own, it was in a sadly tangled mass. His eye wasdull, except when it kindled in discussion, or when he wasstirred to some utterance of grave displeasure. 

There is an anecdote of Mr. Choate which occasionally goesthe rounds of the papers, and which is often repeated quiteinaccurately. The true version is this. I heard it withina few hours after it happened, and have heard it at firsthand more than once since. 

Mr. Choate was sitting next to Judge Hoar in the bar whenthe Chief Justice was presiding, and the Suffolk docket wasbeing called. The Chief Justice said something which ledMr. Choate to make a half-humorous and half-displeased remarkabout Shaw's roughness of look and manner, to which JudgeHoar replied: "After all, I feel a reverence for the oldChief Justice. "

"A reverence for him, my dear fellow?" said Choate. "So doI. I bow down to him as the wild Indian does before his woodenidol. I know he's ugly; but I bow to a superior intelligence. "

Judge Shaw's mind moved very slowly. When a case was argued, it took him a good while to get the statement of facts intohis mind. It was hard for him to deal readily with unimportantmatters, or with things which, to other people, were mattersof course. If the simplest motion were made, he had to unlimberthe heavy artillery of his mind, go down to the roots of thequestion, consider the matter in all possible relations, anddeal with it as if he were besieging a fortress. When hewas intent upon a subject, he was exceedingly impatient ofanything that interrupted the current of his thought. Sohe was a hard person for young advocates, or for any otherunless he were strong, self-possessed, and had the respectof the Judge. My old friend and partner, Judge Washburn, once told me that he dreaded the Law term of the Court asit approached, and sometimes felt that he would rather layhis head down on the rail, and let a train of cars pass overit, than argue a case before Shaw. The old man was probablyunconscious of this failing. He had the kindest heart inthe world, was extremely fond of little children and beautifulyoung women, and especially desirous to care for the rightsof persons who were feeble and defenceless. 

I was myself counsel before him in a case where the questionwas whether a heifer calf, worth six or seven dollars, theoffspring of the one cow which our law reserves to a poordebtor against attachment, was also exempt. My opponent undertookto make some merriment about the question, and there was somelaughter at the Bar. The old Chief Justice interposed withgreat emotion: "Gentlemen, remember that this is a matterof great interest to a great many poor families. " There wasno laughter after that, and that heifer calf did duty in manya trial afterward, when the young advocates at the WorcesterBar had some poor client to defend. 

The Chief Justice had not the slightest sense of humor. Whenold Judge Wilde, the great real property Judge, died afteran illustrious judicial service of thirty-five years, somebodyshowed Chief Justice Shaw a register published in Boston whichrecorded his death, "Died in Boston, the Honorable SamuelS. Wilde, aged eighty, many years Justice of the Peace. " Itwas passed up to the Bench. The old Chief Justice lookedat it, read it over again, and said "What publication is this?"

In the old days, when the lawyers and Judges spent the eveningsof Court week at the taverns on the Circuit, the Chief Justiceliked to get a company of lawyers about him and discourseto them. He was very well informed, indeed, on a great varietyof matters, and his talk was very interesting and full ofinstruction. But there was no fun in it. One evening hewas discoursing in his ponderous way about the vitality ofseed. He said: "I understand that they found some seed ofwheat in one of the pyramids of Egypt, wrapped up in a mummy-case, where it had been probably some four thousand yearsat least, carried it over to England last year and plantedit, and it came up and they had a very good crop. "

"Of mummies, sir?" inquired old Josiah Adams, a waggish memberof the Bar. 

"No, Mr. Adams, " replied the Chief Justice, with a tone ofreproof, and with great seriousness. "No, Mr. Adams, notmummies--wheat. "

Adams retired from the circle in great discomfiture. Heinquired of one of the other lawyers, afterward, if he supposedthat the Chief Justice really believed that he thought theseed had produced mummies, and was told by his friend thathe did not think there was the slightest doubt of it. 

Chief Justice Shaw, though very rough in his manner was exceedinglyconsiderate of the rights of poor and friendless persons. Sometimes persons unacquainted with the ways of the worldwould desire to make their own arguments, or would in someway interrupt the business of the court. The Chief Justicecommonly treated them with great consideration. One amusingincident happened quite late in his life. A rather dissipatedlawyer who had a case approaching on the docket, one day toldhis office-boy to "Go over to the Supreme Court and see whatin hell they are doing. " The Court were hearing a very importantcase in which Mr. Choate was on one side and Mr. Curtison the other. The Bar and the Court-Room were crowded withlisteners. As Mr. Curtis was in the midst of his argument, the eye of the Chief Justice caught sight of a young urchin, ten or eleven years old, with yellow trousers stuffed intohis boots, and with his cap on one side of his head, gazingintently up at him. He said, "Stop a moment, Mr. Curtis. "Mr. Curtis stopped, and there was a profound silence as theaudience saw the audacious little fellow standing entirelyunconcerned. "What do you want, my boy?" said the Chief Justice. "Mr. P. Told me to come over here and see what in hell youwas up to, " was the reply. There was a dive at the unhappyyouth by three or four of the deputies in attendance, anda roar of laughter from the audience. The boy was ejected. But the gravity of the old Chief Justice was not disturbed. 

He had a curiously awkward motion, especially in moving abouta parlor in social gatherings, or walking in the street. I once pointed out to a friend a ludicrous resemblance betweenhis countenance and expression and that of one of the tortoisesin the illustrations of one of Agassiz's works on naturalhistory. To which my friend replied: "It is the tortoiseon which the elephant stands that bears up the foundationsof the world, " alluding to the Hindoo mythology. 

Chief Justice Shaw's opinions, as we have them in the reports, are exceedingly diffuse. That practice would not answer fora generation which has to consult the reports of forty-fiveStates and of the Supreme Court and nine judicial circuitsof the United States, besides the reports of the decisionsof some of the District Judges, and in most cases the Englishdecisions. But it would be a great public loss if any ofChief Justice Shaw's utterances were omitted. His impulse, when a question was argued before him, was to write a treatiseon the subject. So his decisions in cases where the questionsraised are narrow and unimportant are often most valuablecontributions to jurisprudence. He seldom passed over anypoint or suggestion without remark. He went to the bottomof the case with great patience and incredible industry. Thecounsel who lost his case felt not only that he had had theopinion of a great and just magistrate, but that every considerationhe could urge for his client was respectfully treated andeither yielded to or answered. Some of his ablest and mostfar-reaching decisions were written after he was eighty yearsold. 

He possessed, beyond any other American Judge, save Marshall, what may be termed the statesmanship of jurisprudence. Henever undertook to make law upon the Bench, but he perceivedwith a far-sighted vision what rule of law was likely to operatebeneficially or hurtfully to the Republic. He was watchfulto lay down no doctrine which would not stand this test. Hisgreat judgments stand among our great securities, like theprovisions of the Bill of Rights. 

The Chief Justice was a tower of strength to the Massachusettsjudiciary. But for him it is not unlikely that the Statewould have adopted an elective judiciary or a tenure limitedto a term of years. But the whole people felt that his greatintegrity and wisdom gave an added security to every man'slife, liberty, and property. So the proposition to limitthe judicial tenure, although espoused by the two partieswho together made up a large majority of the people of theState, was defeated when it was submitted to a popular vote. It is, however, a little remarkable that in the neighboringState of Vermont, for many years the Judges of the SupremeCourt were annually elected by the Legislature, a system which, I believe, has worked on the whole to their satisfaction. They have had an able judiciary. It is said that old ChiefJustice Shaw was one evening discoursing at a meeting of theBoston Law Club to an eminent Vermont Judge, who was a guest. He said, "With your brief judicial tenure, sir--" The Vermonterinterrupted him and said, "Why, our tenure of office is longerthan yours. " "What do you mean?" said the Chief Justice. "I do not understand you. " "Why, " was the reply, "our Judgesare elected for a year, and you are appointed as long as youbehave yourselves. "

Chief Justice Shaw is said to have been a very dull child. The earliest indication of his gift of the masterly and unerringjudgment which discerned the truth and reason of things was, however, noticed when he was a very small boy. His motherone day had a company at tea. Some hot buttered toast wason the table. When it was passed to little Lemuel he pulledout the bottom slice, which was kept hot by the hot platebeneath and the pile of toast above. His mother reproachedhim quite sharply. "You must not do that, Lemuel. Supposeeverybody were to do that?" "Then everybody would get a bottomslice, " answered the wise urchin. 

Judge Shaw had the sturdy spirit and temper of the old seafaringpeople of Cape Cod, among whom he was born and bred. He wasfond of stories of the sea and of ships. He liked to hearof bold and adventurous voyages. Judge Gray used to tellthe story of the old Chief's standing with his back to thefire, with his coat-tails under his arm, in the Judges' roomat the Suffolk Court-House, one cold winter morning, whenthe news of the fate of Sir John Franklin's expedition orthe story of some other Arctic tragedy had just reached Bostonand was in the morning papers. 

"I hope, sir, " said Judge Bigelow, "that there will be nomore of these voyages to discover the North Pole. "

"I want 'em to find that open Polar sea, sir, " said Shaw. 

"But don't you think, " said Judge Bigelow, "that it is toobad to risk so many human lives, and to compel the sailorsto encounter the terrible suffering and danger of these Arcticvoyages?"

"I think they'll find it yet, sir, " was all the reply Bigelowcould get. 

Judge Shaw, in his latter days, was reverenced by the peopleof Massachusetts as if he were a demi-god. But in his nativecounty of Barnstaple he was reverenced as a God. One winter, when the Supreme Court held a special session at Barnstaplefor the trial of a capital case, Judge Merrick, who was oneof the Judges, came out of the Court-house just at nightfall, when the whole surface of the earth was covered with ice andslush, slipped and fell heavily, breaking three of his ribs. He was taken up and carried to his room at the hotel, andlay on the sofa waiting for the doctor to come. While theJudge lay, groaning and in agony, the old janitor of the court-house, who had helped pick him up, wiped off the wet fromhis clothes and said to him, "Judge Merrick, how thankfulyou must be it was not the Chief Justice!" Poor Merrick couldnot help laughing, though his broken ribs were laceratinghis flesh. 

Next to Chief Justice Shaw in public esteem, when I cameto the Bar in December, 1849, was Mr. Justice Wilde. Hewas nearly eighty years old, and began to show some signsof failing powers. But those signs do not appear in hisrecorded opinions. He was a type of the old common-lawyerin appearance and manner and character. He would have beena fit associate for Lord Coke, and would never have givenway to him. I suppose he was never excelled as a real-propertylawyer in this country. He had the antiquated pronunciationof the last century, a venerable gray head and wrinkled countenance, with heavy gray eyebrows. He seemed to the general publicto be nothing but a walking abridgment. Still, he was a verywell-informed man, and had represented a district of whatis now the State of Maine in Congress with great distinction. A friend of mine went rather late to church at King's Chapelone Sunday when the congregation had got some way in the service, and was shown into the pew immediately in front of old JudgeWilde. The Judge was just uttering in a distinct, clear tone, "Lord, teach me Thy statoots. " It was the only petition heneeded to have granted to make him a complete Judge. Ofthe Lord's common law he was a thorough master. 

He was no respecter of persons. He delivered his judgmentswith an unmoved air, as if he had footed up a column of figuresand were announcing the result. When I was in the Law School, Mr. Webster was retained to argue an important real estatecase before Judge Wilde in Suffolk County. Mr. Webster wasmaking what would have been a powerful argument on a questionof land-title but for a statute passed since the days of hisconstant practice, which had not come to his knowledge. Therewas a great audience, and when Mr. Webster had got his pointfairly stated, he was interrupted by Wilde. "Pooh, pooh, Mr. Webster. " The Judge pointed out that Webster had overlookedone link in the chain of his antagonist's title. 

"But, " said Mr. Webster in reply, "the descent tolls theentry. "

"That rule is abolished by the statoot, sir. "

"Why didn't you tell me that?" said Webster angrily to hisjunior. 

Another of our great old Judges was Judge Fletcher. He hadhad a great practice as an advocate in Boston, especiallyas a commercial lawyer. He had a great power of clear statement. He brought out his utterances in a queer, jerking fashion, protruding his lips a little as he hesitated at the beginningof his sentences. But he knew how to convey his meaning tothe apprehension of Courts and juries. He left the Benchless than two years after I came to the Bar. I never hadbut one important case before him. He was a bachelor. Hewas very interesting in conversation, liked the company ofyoung men, who never left him without carrying away some delightfulanecdote or shrewd and pithy observation. 

A lawyer from the country told me one day that he had justbeen in Fletcher's office to get his opinion. While he wasin the office, old Ebenezer Francis, a man said to be worth$8, 000, 000, then the richest man in New England, came to consulthim about a small claim against some neighbor. Fletcher interruptedhis consultation with my friend and listened to Mr. Francis'sstory. In those days, parties could not be witnesses in theirown cases. Fletcher advised his client that although he hadan excellent case, the evidence at his command was not sufficientto prove it, and advised against bringing an action. Francis, who was quite avaricious, left the office with a heavy heart. When he had gone, Fletcher turned to my friend and said: "Isn'tit pitiful, sir, to see an old critter, wandering about ourstreets, destitute of proof?"

But the most interesting and racy character among our oldJudges was Theron Metcalf. He used to say of himself--a sayingthat did him great injustice--that he was taken to fill agap in the Court as people take an old hat to stop a brokenwindow. He undervalued his own capacity. He was not a goodJudge to preside at jury trials. He had queer and eccentricnotions of what the case was all about, and while he wouldstate a principle of law with extraordinary precision andaccuracy he had not the gift of making practical applicationof the law to existing facts. So a great many of his rulingswere set aside, and it did not seem, when he had held a longterm of Court, that a great deal had been accomplished. Buthe was a very learned common-lawyer. His memory was a completedigest of the decisions down to his time. He comprehendedwith marvellous clearness the precise extent to which anyadjudged case went, and would state its doctrine with mathematicalprecision. 

He hated statutes. He was specially indignant at the abolitionof special pleading. He sent word to me, when I was Chairmanof the Judiciary Committee in the Massachusetts Senate, askingto have a provision enacted for simplifying the process ofbringing before the full Bench for revision the proceedingsin habeas corpus, or mandamus, or certiorari, or some otherspecial writ, I forget now what. I called upon him at once, and pointed out to him that exactly what he wanted was accomplishedby the Practice Act of 1852. This was the statute under whichall our legal proceedings in cases affecting personal propertywere had. Metcalf said, with great disgust: "I have said, sir, that if they did not repeal that thing I would not readit. "

He used to enliven his judgments with remarks showing a gooddeal of shrewd wisdom. In one case a man was indicted foradvertising a show without a license. The defendant insistedthat the indictment was insufficient because it set out merelywhat the show purported to be, and not what it really was. On which the Judge remarked: "The indictment sets out allthat is necessary, and, indeed, all that is safe. The showoften falls short of the promise in the show-bill. "

There was once a case before him for a field-driver who hadimpounded cattle under the old Massachusetts law. The casetook a good many days to try, and innumerable subtle questionswere raised. The Judge began his charge to the jury: "Gentlemenof the jury, a man who takes up a cow straying in a highwayis a fool. "

Another time there was a contest as to the value of somepersonal property which had been sold at auction. One sideclaimed that the auction-sale was a fair test of the value. The other claimed that property that was sold at auction wasgenerally sold at a sacrifice. Metcalf said to the jury:"According to my observation, things generally bring at auctionall they are worth, except carpets. "

I once tried a case before him against the Norwich Railroadfor setting fire to the house of a farmer by a spark froma locomotive. It was a warm summer afternoon when the housewas burnt up. There was no fire in the house except a fewcoals among the ashes in a cooking stove where the dinnerhad been cooked some hours before. The railroad was verynear the house. There was a steep up-grade, so that the engineerswere tempted to open the bonnet of their smokestacks for abetter draught. We called as a witness a sturdy, round-faced, fat old woman, who testified that she was sitting at her window, knitting, in a house some little distance away, when the trainwent by. She put in a mark to see, as she expressed it, "howmany times round" she could knit before supper. A few minutesafter, she heard a cry of fire, and looked out and saw a blazeon the roof of her neighbor's house, just kindling, closeto the eaves on the side where the engine had passed. Shethrew down the stocking and went to help. The stocking wasfound after the fire with the mark just as she left it. Sowe claimed that we could tell pretty well how long the timehad been between the passing of the train and the breakingout of the fire. Judge Metcalf, who was always fussy andinterfering, said: "How can we tell anything by that, unlesswe know how large the stocking was?" The old lady, witha most bland smile, turned to the Judge as if she were soothingan infant, lifted up the hem of her petticoats, and exhibiteda very sturdy ankle and calf, and said, "Just the size I wear, your Honor. " There was a roar of laughter in the court-house. The incident was published in the morning paper the next day, much to the Judge's indignation. He addressed the audiencewhen he came into Court in the morning, and said: "I see theWorcester _Spy_ has been trying to put a fool's cap on myhead. "

Judge Metcalf told me this story about Chief Justice Parsons. The Chief Justice's manner to the Bar, as is well-known, wasexceedingly rough. He was no respecter of persons, and treatedthe old and eminent lawyers quite as harshly as the youngsters. The Bar used to call him Ursa Major. The Chief Justice usedto look over the pleadings carefully before the trials began. It was in the time when special pleading often brought theissue to be decided into a narrow compass. Soon after thecase was begun, the Judge would take the case out of the handsof the counsel and examine the witnesses himself, and givean opinion which was likely to be implicitly followed by thejury. Jabez Upham, of Brookfield, in Worcester County, Mr. Justice Gray's grandfather, once sent his office-boy to Courtwith a green bag containing his papers, thinking there wasno use in going himself. At last the leading members of theBar in Boston got very angry, and four or five of them agreedtogether to teach the old Chief a lesson. So they sat downto a trial in the Supreme Court where Parsons was presiding. Pretty soon he interfered with the lawyer who was puttingin the case for the plaintiff, in his rough way. The lawyerrose and said: "I cannot take care of my client's rightswhere my own are not respected, " or something to that effect. "I will ask Brother Sullivan to take my place. " Sullivan, who was possessed of the case, took the place. The trialwent on a little while, when something happened which offendedSullivan. He rose and said he could not go on with the caseafter his Honor's remark, and would ask Brother So-and-So, perhaps Otis, to take his place. This happened three or fourtimes in succession. The Chief Justice saw the point andadjourned the Court very early for the noon recess, and wentto the house of his colleague, Judge Sewall, who lived outsomewhere on the Neck, called him out and said: "You mustgo down and hold that Court. There is a con_spire_acy sir. "Parsons never held a _nisi-prius_ term in Suffolk again. 

Chief Justice Shaw used to tell with great indignation thestory of his first appearance before Parsons, when a youngman. There was a very interesting question of the law ofreal property, and Samuel Dexter, then the head of the Bar, was on the other side. Parsons was interested in the questionas soon as it was stated, and entered into a discussion withDexter in which they both got earnestly engaged. The ChiefJustice intimated his opinion very strongly and was just decidingit in Dexter's favor, when the existence of the young manon the other side occurred to him. He looked over the barat Shaw and said: "Well, young man, do you think you canaid the Court any in this matter?" "I think I can, sir, "said Shaw with spirit. Parsons listened to him, but, I believe, remained of his first opinion. 

Judge Metcalf in the time when he was upon the Bench had thecredit, I do not know how well deserved it was, of not beingmuch given to hospitality. He was never covetous, and hewas very fond of society and conversation. But I fancy hehad some fashions of his own in housekeeping which he thoughtwere not quite up to the ways of modern life. At any rate, he was, so far as I know, never known to invite any of hisbrethren upon the Bench or of the Bar to visit him at hishouse, with one exception. One of the Judges told me thatafter a hard day's work in court the Judges sat in consultationtill between nine and ten o'clock in the evening, and he walkedaway from the Court-House with Judge Metcalf. The Judge wentalong with him past the Tremont House, where my informantwas staying. As they walked up School Street, he said: "Why, Judge Metcalf, I didn't know you went this way. I thoughtyou lived out on the Neck somewhere. " "No, sir, " said JudgeMetcalf, "I live at number so-and-so Charles Street, and I willsay to you what I heard a man say the first night I movedinto my present house. I heard a great noise in the street aftermidnight, and got up and put my head out of the window. Therewas a man lying down on the sidewalk struggling, and anotherman, who seemed to be a policeman, was on top of him holdinghim down. The fellow with his back to the ground said: 'Letme get up, --- d--- you, ' The policeman answered: 'I sha'n'tlet you get up till you tell me what your name is and whereyou live. ' The fellow answered, 'My name is Jerry Mahoney, --- d--- you, and I live at No. 54 Cambridge Street, --- d---you, where I'd be happy to see you, --- d--- you, if you dareto call. " That was the only instance known to his judicialbrothers of Judge Metcalf's inviting a friend to visit him. 

Judge Metcalf's legal opinions will read, I think, in thefuture, as well as those of any Judge of his time. They arebrief, compact, written in excellent English, and preciselyfit the case before him without any extraneous or superfluousmatter. He would have been a very great Judge, indeed, ifhis capacity for the conduct of jury trials and dealing with_nisi-prius_ business in general had equalled his abilityto write opinions on abstract questions. 

John Davis was never a Judge. But a few words about him maywell find a place here. He had long since withdrawn fromthe practice of law when I came to Worcester. He remainedin the Senate of the United States until March 4, 1853. Butthe traditions of his great power with juries remained. Iwas once or twice a guest in his house, and once or twiceheard him make political speeches. 

My father, who had encountered all the great advocates of histime in New England--Webster, Choate, Jeremiah Mason, Dexter--used to say that John Davis was the toughest antagonist heever encountered. Mr. Davis had no graces of oratory or person. He was not without a certain awkward dignity. His head wascovered with thick and rather coarse white hair. He remindedyou a little, in look and movement, of a great white bear. But he had a gift of driving his point home to the apprehensionof juries and of the people which was rarely equalled. Hewas a man of few words and infrequent speech, without witor imagination. He thoroughly mastered the subjects withwhich he dealt. When he had inserted his wedge, he droveit home with a few sledge-hammer blows. It was commonlyimpossible for anybody to extract it. It was only the greatweight of his authority, and the importance of the matterswith which he dealt, which kept him from seeming exceedinglytedious. I remember thinking when I heard him make a speechin behalf of General Scott in the City Hall, in the autumnof 1852, that if any man but John Davis were talking the audiencecould not be kept awake. He spoke very slowly, with the toneand manner of an ordinary conversation. "The Whigs, fellow-citizens, have presented for your suffrages this year, forthe office of President of the United States, the name ofMajor-General Winfield Scott. I know General Scott. I havehad good opportunity to acquaint myself with his characterand public service. I think you may give him your confidence, gentlemen. " That was pretty much the whole speech. At anyrate, there was nothing more exciting in it. But it was JohnDavis that said it, and it had great effect upon his audience. 

Mr. Davis supported General Taylor for President in 1848, thereby, on the one hand, offending Mr. Webster, with whomhis relations had for some time been exceedingly strained, and the anti-slavery men in Massachusetts on the other. Itwas understood also that he had displeased Governor Lincolnat the time of his election to the Senate, Governor Lincolnthinking that Mr. Davis had taken an undue advantage of hisofficial influence as Governor to promote his own selection. But the two united in the support of General Taylor, whichled Charles Allen to quote a verse which has been more thanonce applied in the same way since, "And in that day Pilateand Herod were made friends together. "

Mr. Davis was a careful and prudent manager of money matters, and left what was, for his time, a considerable estate, consideringthe fact that so much of his life had been passed in the publicservice. His success in public life was, doubtless, in largemeasure, increased by his accomplished and admirable wife, the sister of George Bancroft. She was a lady of simple dignity, great intelligence, great benevolence and kindness of heart. Her conversation was always most delightful, especially inher old age, when her mind was full of the treasures of herlong experience and companionship with famous persons. Mr. Davis left five sons, all of them men of ability. The eldesthas been Minister to Berlin, Assistant Secretary of State, Secretary of Legation in London, Judge of the Court of Claims, and Reporter of the decisions of the Supreme Court of theUnited States. Another son, Horace, has been a member ofCongress, eminent in the public life of California, and, Ibelieve, president of the University of California. 

John Davis won great distinction by a very powerful speechon the tariff question in reply to James Buchanan. Buchananwas one of the most powerful Democratic leaders in the Senate, but Davis was thought by the Whigs to have got much the betterof him in the debate. It was generally expected that he wouldbe the Whig candidate for the Vice-Presidency in 1840. Butanother arrangement was made, for reasons which may be aswell told here. The Whig Convention to nominate a Presidentwas held at Harrisburg, Pa. , in December 4, 1839, nearly ayear before the election. The delegates from the differentStates were asked to consult together and agree upon theirfirst choice. Then they were asked to say whom they thoughtnext to the person they selected would be the strongest candidate. When the result was ascertained, it was discovered that WilliamHenry Harrison was thought by a very large majority of theConvention to be the strongest candidate they could find. He was accordingly selected as the Whig standard-bearer. A committee of one person from each State was then chosen topropose to the Convention a candidate for Vice-President. Benjamin Watkins Leigh, of Virginia, was a strong supporterof Henry Clay, a man of great personal worth, highly esteemedthroughout the country. The Convention adjourned, and camein after the adjournment to hear the report of the committee. Mr. Leigh accosted the Chairman of the committee and stoodwith him in a conspicuous place as the delegates filed in. He inquired of the Chairman what conclusion they had cometo as to a candidate for Vice-President. To which the Chairmanreplied: "You will be informed in due time. " When the Conventionwas called to order, one of the delegates from Massachusettsmade a speech in which he set forth the high qualities thatwere desired in a candidate for this important office, and, after giving a sketch of exalted character and great capacityfor the public service, he ended by declaring that such aman was Mr. Leigh, of Virginia, and proposing his name asthe unanimous recommendation of the committee. Mr. Leighwas taken aback. He had been a zealous supporter of Mr. Clay. He addressed the chair, saying he was much gratifiedby what had been said by his friend from Massachusetts, andhe hoped he might live in some humble measure to deserve thetribute which had been paid to him. But he thought that havingbeen a zealous supporter of Mr. Clay, and having had, in somesense, the charge of his candidacy, he could not himself accepta nomination in connection with another person without exposinghimself to the suspicion that he had in some way benefittedby the defeat of his own candidate and leader. It was saidthat his embarrassment was increased by the fact that he hadbeen seen conversing with the Chairman of the committee bythe members of the Convention. How that is I do not know. The result was the nomination of Mr. Tyler, his election, his succession to the Presidency after the death of Harrison, which resulted in such disastrous consequences to the Whigs. 

John Davis was a Federalist and a Whig. His sons were Whigsand Republicans always on the conservative side of publicquestions. His nephew, Colonel Isaac Davis, was in that respecta contrast to his uncle. 

It has been charged that John Davis, by taking up the timeat the close of the session of Congress by an indiscreetspeech, was the means of defeating the Wilmot Proviso, whichhad come from the House inserted in a bill for the incorporationof Oregon as a Territory. This statement has received generalcirculation. It is made in Pierce's "Life of Sumner, " andin Von Holst's "Constitutional History. " There is no truthin it. I investigated the matter very carefully, and haveleft on record a conclusive refutation of the whole storyin a paper published by the American Antiquarian Society. 

Mr. Davis's popularity, however, enabled him to render animportant service to his party at home. The Democrats in1839 had elected their governor, Marcus Morton, by a majorityof one vote by reason of the unpopularity of the law to preventliquor-selling, known as the Fifteen-Gallon Law, which hadbeen passed in January, 1838. They were anxious to redeemthe State, and summoned John Davis, their strongest and mostpopular man, to lead their forces. He accordingly resignedhis seat in the Senate, was chosen Governor by a large majority, and was reelected to the Senate again the next year. 

Sketches like these, made by a man who was young when themen he is talking about were old, are apt to give prominenceto trifles, to little follies and eccentricities. Let nobodythink that there was anything trifling or ludicrous aboutJohn Davis. He was a great, strong, wise man, a championand tower of strength. He not only respected, but embodiedthe great traditions and opinions of Massachusetts in thegreat days, after the generation of the Revolution had leftthe state when she earned for herself the name of the "ModelCommonwealth, " and her people were building the structureof the Commonwealth on the sure foundations which the master-workmen of the Colonial and Revolutionary days had laid. Themajestic presence of Webster, the classic eloquence of Everett, the lofty zeal of Sumner have made them more conspicuous figuresin the public eye, and it is likely will preserve their memeorylonger in the public heart. But the figure of John Davisdeserves to stand by the side of these great men in imperishablememory as one of the foremost men of the State he loved sowell and served so faithfully and wisely. 

The Bar of Worcester County in 1850 and the years followingwas a very able one, indeed. It had many men of high reputationin the Commonwealth and some of wide national fame. The principalcitizen of Worcester and the most distinguished member ofthe Bar was Governor Levi Lincoln. Although he had long sinceleft practice, he used always to come into the court onceat each term of the Supreme Court, bow respectfully to theBench, and invite the Judges to dinner at his house, and withdraw. He filled a very large place in the history of Massachusettsfrom the time of his graduation at Harvard in 1802 until theclose of the War in 1865. There is, so far as I know, nomemoir of him in existence, except one or two brief sketcheswhich appear in the proceedings of some local societies ofwhich he was a member. 

His father, Levi Lincoln the elder, was an intimate friendand correspondent of Mr. Jefferson, and Attorney-Generalin his Cabinet. He was nominated Judge of the Supreme Courtof the United States by Mr. Madison and confirmed by the Senateand actually appointed, but was unable to take the officebecause of failing sight. He did more, probably, than anyother man to organize and bring to success the political revolutionin New England which followed Jefferson's accession to thePresidency in 1801. Many letters to him are found in Mr. Jefferson's published works, and there are many letters fromhim to Mr. Jefferson in the Jefferson papers in the archivesat Washington. Some of the correspondence on both sides isenough to make the hair of the civil service reformer standon end. The son adopted his father's political opinions andwas an enthusiastic supporter of Jefferson in his youth. Jeffersonwrote a letter, which I think is now in existence, praisingvery highly some of young Mr. Lincoln's early performances. He delivered an address at Worcester, March 4, 1803, a fewmonths after he left college, in which he proposed that theFourth of March, the day of Mr. Jefferson's accession tothe Presidency, should be celebrated thereafter instead ofthe Fourth of July. He says: "Republicans no longer can hailthe day as exclusively theirs. Federalism has profaned it. She has formed to herself an idol in the union of Church andState, and this is the time chosen to offer its sacrifice. "He sets forth "the long train of monstrous aggressions ofthe Federalists" under Washington and Adams; declares thatthey "propose a hereditary executive and a Senatorial nobilityfor life, " and says that the "hand would tremble in recording, and the tongue falter in reciting, the long tale of monstrousaggression. But on the Fourth of March was announced fromthe Capitol the triumph of principle. Swifter than Jove onhis imperial eagle did the glad tiding of its victory pervadethe Union. As vanish the mists of the morning before therays of a sunbeam, so error withdrew from the inquiries ofthe understanding. The reign of terror had passed, " etc. , etc. But there never was a better example of Emerson's maximthat "a Conservative is a Democrat grown old and gone to seed. "As the young man grew in reputation and influence he becamemore moderate in his opinions. He was appointed Judge ofthe Supreme Court; then was elected Governor by a union ofall parties in what was called "the era of good feeling";held the office nine years; then represented the Worcesterdistrict in Congress, and withdrew to a dignified and honorableretirement from which he emerged to hold the office of Mayorof Worcester the first year of the life of the city. He was, as I remember him, the very embodiment of dignity and aristocracy. He had a diffuse and rather inflated style, both in publicspeaking and in private conversation. His dignity had a baresuspicion of pomposity in it. He looked with great disdainupon the simplicity of behavior of some of his successors, and their familiarity with all classes of the people. Hecame into my office one morning full of an intense disgustwith something Governor Briggs had been doing. He said: "Inmy time, sir, the office of Governor of the Commonwealth wasan office of dignity. The arrival of the Chief Magistratein any town was an event of some importance. He travelledin his carriage, with suitable attendants. He appeared inpublic only on great occasions. But now you see hand-billsabout the street giving notice that there is to be a Temperancetea-party to-morrow afternoon, in some vestry or small hall. Music by the Peak family. His Excellency George N. Briggswill address the meeting. Admission, ten cents. "

He accepted his position at the head of the social life ofWorcester as a matter of course. I remember one night, whena party was breaking up, I said to the person next to me, insome jesting fashion: "I am sorry to see the decay of theold aristocracy. " The Governor, who was getting his coatat the other end of the room, overheard the remark, and calledout: "Who is lamenting our decay?"

The Governor looked with great disgust upon the formationof the Free Soil Party and the Anti-Slavery movement. Butwhen the war came he remained thoroughly loyal. He encouragedenlistment in every way, and measures for the support of theGovernment had all the weight of his influence. He was aPresidential elector, and voted for Abraham Lincoln at thetime of his second election. 

When Webster was first chosen Senator he refused to be a candidatefor the office until it was ascertained whether Governor Lincolnwould accept it. The Governor then declined, for the reasonI have stated in another place. He was also offered an appointmentto the Senate by Governor Washburn when Mr. Everett resignedin 1853. But it is said that he was quite desirous of beingelected Senator when Mr. Davis was first chosen. 

The Governor was, as just said, an example of Emerson's famoussaying that a Conservative is a Democrat grown old and goneto seed. He was looked upon as the embodiment of reverenddignity. His household was at the head of the social lifeof Worcester during his later years. Every family in theCounty was proud who could trace a connection with his. Therewere a few traditions in the old Federalist families likethe Thomases and the Allens of a time when the Lincolns wereaccounted too democratic to be respectable. But they gainedlittle credence with people in general. One day, however, I had to try a real estate case which arose in the adjoiningtown and involved an ancient land-title. An old man namedBradyill Livermore was summoned as a witness for my client. He was, I think, in his ninety-fifth year. He lived in asparsely settled district and had not been into Worcesterfor twenty or twenty-five years. I sat down with him in theconsultation-room. After he had told me what he knew aboutthe case, I had a chat with him about old times and the changesin Worcester since his youth, and he asked me about some ofthe members of the Bar then on the stage. Governor Lincoln, who had long retired, happened to be mentioned. The old fellowbrought the point of his staff down with great emphasis uponthe floor, and then held it loosely with the fingers of histrembling and shaking hand, and said, very earnestly, butwith a shrill and strident voice like that of one of Homer'sghosts: "They say, sir, that that Mr. Lincoln has got tobe a very respectable man. But I can remember, sir, whenhe was a terrible Jacobite. "

I have given elsewhere a portraiture of Charles Allen, anda sketch of his great career. He was a man of slender physicalframe and feeble voice. But he was a leader of leaders. When in 1848 he left the Whig Convention in Philadelphia, an assembly flushed with the anticipation of National triumph, declaring, amid the jeers and hisses of its members, thatthe Whig Party was dead--a prediction verified within fouryears--down to the election of Lincoln, in 1860, he was inMassachusetts a powerful influence. He was a great advocate, a great judge, a great counsellor. He was in my judgmenta greater intellectual force than any other man in his time, Daniel Webster not excepted. It was a force before whichWebster himself more than once recoiled. I knew him intimatelyand was, I believe, admitted to no inconsiderable share ofhis confidence. But there is no space here to do justiceto my reverence for his noble character. 

On the whole, the most successful of the Worcester Bar, inmy time, in the practice of his profession, was Emory Washburn. He was a man of less intellectual power undoubtedly than eitherof his great contemporaries and antagonists, Allen, Merrick, or Thomas. Yet he probably won more cases, year in and yearout, than either of them. He was a man of immense industry. He went to his office early in the morning, took a very shorttime, indeed, for his meals, and often kept at work untilone or two o'clock in the morning of the next day. He sufferedseverely at one time from dyspepsia brought on by constantwork and neglect of exercise; but generally he kept his vigoroushealth until his death at the age of eighty. He was indefatigablein his service to his clients. His mind was like a steelspring pressing on every part of the other side's case. Itwas ludicrous to see his sympathy and devotion to his clients, and his belief in the cause of any man whom he undertook tochampion. It seemed as if a client no sooner put his headon the handle of Washburn's office-door than his heart warmedto him like that of a mother toward her first-born. No strengthof evidence to the contrary, no current of decisions settlingthe law would prevent Washburn from believing that his manwas the victim of prejudice or persecution or injustice. Buthis sincerity, his courtesy of manner and kindness of heartmade him very influential with juries, and it was rare thata jury sat in Worcester county that had not half a dozenof Washburn's clients among their number. 

I was once in a very complicated real estate case as Washburn'sassociate. Charles Allen and Mr. Bacon were on the otherside. Mr. Bacon and I, who were juniors, chatted about thecase just before the trial. Mr. Bacon said: "Why, Hoar, EmoryWashburn doesn't understand that case the least in the world. "I said, "No, Mr. Bacon, he doesn't understand the case theleast in the world. But you may depend upon it he will makethat jury misunderstand it just as he does. " And he did. 

Charles Allen, who never spared any antagonist, used to bemerciless in dealing with Washburn. He once had a case withhim which attracted a great deal of public attention. Therehad been a good many trials and the cost had mounted up toa large sum. It was a suit by a farmer who had lost a flockof sheep by dogs, and who tried to hold another farmer responsibleas the owner of the dog which had killed them. One of thewitnesses had been out walking at night and heard the barkof the dog in the field where the sheep were. He was askedto testify if he could tell what dog it was from the mannerof his bark. The evidence was objected to, and Allen undertookto support his right to put the question. He said we wereable to distinguish men from each other by describing theirmanner and behavior, when the person describing might notknow the man by name. "For instance, may it please your Honor, suppose a stranger who came into this court-house during thistrial were called to testify to what took place, and he shouldsay that he did not know anybody in the room by sight, butthere was a lawyer there who was constantly interrupting theother side, talking a great deal of the time, but after alldidn't seem to have much to say. Who would doubt that hemeant my Brother Washburn?"

This gibe is only worth recording as showing the court-housemanners of those times. It is no true picture of the honest, faithful and beloved Emory Washburn. He was public-spirited, wise, kind-hearted, always ready to give his service withouthope of reward or return to any good cause, a pillar of thetown, a pillar of the church. He had sometimes a certainconfusion of statement and of thought, but it was only apparentin his oral discourse. He wrote two admirable law-books, one on easements, and one on real property. Little & Brownsaid his book on easements had the largest sale of any law-book ever published in this country up to its time. He wasa popular and useful Professor in the Harvard Law School. He gave a great deal of study to the history of Massachusetts, and was the author of some valuable essays on historical questions, and some excellent discourses on historical occasions. Heleft no duty undone. Edward Hale used to say: "If you wantanything done well, go to the busiest man in Worcester todo it--Emory Washburn, for example. " He was grievously disappointedthat he was not appointed Judge of the Supreme Court whenJudge Thomas became a member of the Bench. A little whileafterward there was another vacancy, and Governor Cliffordtook Merrick, another of Washburn's contemporaries and rivalsat the bar, although Merrick was a Democrat, and the Governor, like Washburn himself, was a Whig. This was almost too muchfor him to bear. It took place early in the year 1853. Mr. Washburn sailed for Europe a few weeks after, and felt almostlike shaking off the dust of his feet against Massachusettsand the Whig Party. But he was very agreeably compensatedfor his disappointment. During his absence he was nominatedby the Whigs for the office of Governor, to which office hewas elected in the following January, there being then, underour law, which required a clear majority of all the votes, no choice by the people. He made an admirable and popularGovernor. But the Nebraska Bill was introduced in that year. This created strong excitement among the people of Massachusetts, and the Know-Nothing movement came that fall, inspired moreby the desire of the people to get rid of the old parties, and form a new anti-slavery party, than by any real oppositionto foreigners, which was its avowed principle. This partyswept Massachusetts, electing all the State officers and everymember of the State Legislature except two from the town ofNorthampton. They had rather a sorry Legislature. It wasthe duty of the outgoing Governor to administer the oath tothe Representatives- and Senators-elect. Governor Washburnperformed that duty, and added: "Now, gentlemen, so far asthe oath of office is concerned, you are qualified to enterupon your duties. "

Governor Washburn was a thorough gentleman, through and through, courteous, well-bred, and with an entirely sufficient senseof his own dignity. But he had little respect for any falsenotions of gentility, and had a habit of going straight atany difficulty himself. To this habit he owed much of hissuccess in life. A very amusing story was told by Mrs. Washburnlong after her husband's death. She was one of the brightestand sprightliest and wittiest of women. Her husband owedto her much of his success in life, as well as much of hiscomfort and domestic enjoyment. She used to give sometimeshalf a dozen entertainments in the same week. She was neverdisconcerted by any want of preparation or suddenness of demandupon her hospitality. One day some quite distinguished guestsarrived in Worcester unexpectedly, whom it was proper thatshe should keep to dinner. The simple arrangements whichhad been made for herself and her husband would not do. Sheaccordingly went at once to the principal hotel of the town, inthe neighborhood, and bargained with the landlord to sendover the necessary courses for her table, which were justhot and cooked and ready for his own. She got off very comfortablywithout being detected. 

Her story was that one time when Judge Washburn was Governorthe members of his Staff came to Worcester on some publicoccasion and were all invited to his house to spend the night. When he got up in the morning he found, to his consternation, that the man who was in the habit of doing such services athis house was sick, or for some other reason had failed toput in an appearance, and none of the boots of the young gentlemenwere blacked. The Governor was master of the situation. Hedescended to his cellar, took off his coat, blacked all theboots of the youngsters himself, and met them at breakfastwith his usual pleasant courtesy, as if nothing had happened. 

I do not undertake to give a full sketch of Benjamin F. Thomas. He was one of the very greatest of American lawyers. Butsuch desultory recollections as these are apt to dwell onlyon the eccentricities or peculiarities or foibles of men. They are not the place for elaborate and noble portraiture. 

Judge Thomas was the principal figure in the Worcester court-house after Judge Allen's election to Congress in 1848. JudgeThomas did not get large professional business very rapidly. He was supposed, in his youth, to be a person of rather eccentricmanners, studious, fond of poetry and general literature andof historical and antiquarian research. He was impulsive, somewhat passionate, but still with an affectionate, sunny, generous nature, and a large heart, to which malice, hatred, or uncharitableness were impossible. It is said that in hisyounger days he used to walk the streets, wrapped in his ownthoughts, unconscious of the passers-by, and muttering poetryto himself. But when I came into his office as a student, in August, 1849, all this trait had disappeared. He was aconsummate advocate, a favorite alike with Judges and jurors, winning his causes wherever success was possible, and largelyemployed. He had a clear voice, of great compass, pitchedon rather a high key, but sweet and musical like the soundof a bugle. The young men used to fill the court-house tohear his arguments to juries. He became a very profound lawyer, always mastering the learning of the case, but never leaningtoo much upon authorities. Charles Emerson's beautiful phrasein his epitaph upon Professor Ashmun, "Books were his helpers, never his masters, " was most aptly applied to Thomas. Ifhe had any foible which affected at all his usefulness orsuccess in life it was an impatience of authority, whetherit were the authority of a great reputation, or of party, or of public sentiment, or of the established and settledopinions of mankind. He went on the Supreme Bench in 1853. Dissenting opinions were rare in the Massachusetts SupremeCourt in those days. In this I think the early Judges wereextremely wise. Nothing shakes the authority of a court morethan the frequent habit of individual dissent. But JudgeThomas dissented from the judgments of his court on severalvery important occasions. His dissenting opinions were exceedinglyalike. I think it would have been better if they had notbeen delivered. I think he would have been much more likelyto have come to the other conclusion if the somewhat imperiousintellect of Shaw had not been put into the prevailing scale. When all Massachusetts bowed down to Webster, Judge Thomas, though he respected and honored the great public idol, supportedTaylor as a candidate for the Presidency. At the dinnergiven to the Electoral College after the election, where Mr. Webster was present, Judge Thomas shocked the meeting by saying:"Some persons have spoken of our candidate as their secondchoice. I am proud to say that General Taylor was not onlymy last, but my first choice. " So, when Judge Thomas wasin Congress, while he was as thoroughly loyal, patriotic, and brave a man as ever lived, he opposed the policies ofthe Republican Party for carrying on the war and putting downthe Rebellion. He was thought to be inspired by a great dislikeof submitting to party authority or even to that of PresidentLincoln. He was very fond of young men. When he was Judgethey always found that they had all the consideration thatthey deserved, and had no fear of being put at a disadvantageby any antagonist, however able or experienced. The Judgeseemed always to be stirred by the suggestion of an intellectualdifficulty. When I was seeking some remedy at his hands, especially in equity, I used to say that I thought I had ajust case, but I was afraid his Honor might think the legaldifficulties were insuperable and I did not know whether Icould get his Honor's approbation of what I asked. He wouldinstantly rouse himself and seem to take the suggestion asa challenge, and if it were possible for human ingenuity tofind a way to accomplish what I wanted he would do it. Hepreserved the sweetness and joyous spirit of boyhood to theday of his death. It was delightful to catch him when hewas at leisure, to report to him any pleasant story that wasgoing about, and to hear his merry laugh and pleasant voice. He was a model of the judicial character. It was a delightto practise before him at _nisi prius. _ I have known a greatmany admirable lawyers and a good many very great Judges. I have known some who had more learning, and some, I suppose, though very few, who had greater vigor of intellect. Butno better Judge ever sat in a Massachusetts court-house. DwightFoster felicitously applied to him the sentence which was firstuttered of Charles James Fox, that "his intellect was allfeeling, and his feeling all intellect. "

Dwight Foster came to the Bar just a week after I did. ButI ought not to omit him in any account of the Massachusettslawyers or Judges of my time. He rose rapidly to a placein the first rank of Massachusetts lawyers, which he helduntil his untimely death. He was graduated the first scholarin his class at Yale in 1848. Before he was graduated hebecame engaged to a very admirable and accomplished lady, daughter of Roger S. Baldwin, Governor of Connecticut andUnited States Senator, then head of the Connecticut Bar. Thislady had some tendency to a disorder of the lungs and throatwhich had proved fatal to two of her brothers. Dwight Fosterwas very anxious to get her away from New Haven, where hethought the climate and her habit of mingling in gay societyvery unfavorable to her health. So he set himself to workto get admitted to the Bar and get established in businessthat he might have a place for her in Worcester. He was examinedby Mr. Justice Metcalf, after studying a little more thana year, and found possessed of attainments uncommon even forpersons who had studied the full three years and had beena good while at the Bar. Judge Metcalf admitted him, andon some other Judge criticising what he had done, the Judgesaid, with great indignation, "If he thinks Foster is notqualified, let him examine him himself. "

Mr. Foster's first employment had very awkward consequences. The people in Worcester had the old Puritanic dislike to theatricalentertainments, and had always refused to license such exhibitions. But a company of actors desired to obtain a theatre for theseason and give performances in Worcester. There was a greatopposition, and the city government ordered a public hearingof the petition in the old City Hall. Foster was employedby the petitioners. The hall was crowded with citizens interestedin the matter, and the Mayor and Aldermen sat in state onthe platform. When the hearing was opened, the audience werestruck with astonishment by the coming forward of Dwight Foster'sfather, the Hon. Alfred D. Foster, a highly honored citizenof great influence and ability. He had been in the StateSenate and had held some few political offices, but had dislikedsuch service and had never practised law, having a considerableproperty which he had inherited from his father, the formerUnited States Senator. He made a most eloquent and powerfulappeal to the aldermen to refuse the petition, in the nameof morality and good order. He stated the deplorable effectof attending such exhibitions on the character of the youthof our city of both sexes, cited the opinion and practiceof our ancestors in such matters, and made a profound impression. He then warned his hearers against the young man who was tofollow him, whom, he said, he loved as his life, but he wasthere employed as a lawyer with his fee in his hand, withoutthe responsibility which rested upon them of protecting themorals and good order of the city. It was very seldom thatso powerful a speech was heard in that hall, although it wasthe cradle of the Anti-slavery movement, and had been thescene of some of the most famous efforts of famous orators. Everybody supposed that the youth was crushed and would notventure to perform his duty in the face of such an attack. But he was fully equal to the occasion. He met his fatherwith a clear, simple, modest, but extremely able statementof the other side; pointed out the harmlessness of such exhibitionswhen well conducted, and that the strictness which confoundedinnocence and purity with guilt and vice was itself the parentand cause of vice. He did not allude to his father by nameor description, but in replying to his arguments said: "Itis said in some quarters, " or "An opposition comes from somequarters" founded on such-and-such reasons. He got the sympathyof his audience and carried his point. And from that timenobody hesitated to trust Dwight Foster with any cause, howeverimportant, from any doubt of his capacity to take care ofhis clients. 

He had been brought up as a Whig. But when the NebraskaBill was passed, he became a zealous and earnest Republican. He was candidate for Mayor, but defeated on a very close voteby George W. Richardson. He held the office of Judge of Probatefor a short time, by appointment of Governor Banks; was electedAttorney-General in 1860 when Governor Andrew was chosen Governor, and soon after was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court, anoffice which he filled with great distinction, then left theBench to resume his practice, and died of a disease of theheart which he inherited from his ancestors. He was GovernorAndrew's Attorney-General during the War, who said of himthat "he was full of the fire and hard-working zeal of Massachusetts. "He was the organ of the patriotism and energy of Worcesterat the seat of government during the war, looking out forthe interests of her soldiers, and always urging the braveand vigorous counsel. I lost a stanch friend by his death. I can sum up his qualities in no better way than by the word"manliness. " He never uttered an ignoble word, thought anignoble thought, or did an ignoble act. His method of speechwas clear, simple, spirited, without much pathos or emotion, but still calculated to stir and move his hearers. 

I had more intimate relations with Judge Thomas L. Nelsonthan with any other member of the Worcester Bar except thosewith whom I formed a partnership. We were never in partnership. But after I went to Congress in 1869, he moved into my officeuntil his appointment to the Bench. So when I was at homewe were in the same room. He had been accustomed for a longtime before to employ me to assist him in important trialsbefore the jury and in arguments before the Supreme Court. I suppose I am responsible for his appointment to the DistrictCourt, although the original suggestion was not mine. Afterthe death of Judge Shepley, there was a general expectationthat Judge John Lowell, of the District Court, would be madeCircuit Judge. One morning one of the Boston papers suggestedseveral names for the succession, among them that of Mr. Knowlton, of Springfield, and Mr. Nelson. I said nothingto him. But he observed: "I see in a paper that I am spokenof as District Judge. " I replied: "Yes, I saw the article. "Neither of us said anything further on the subject. WhenI got to Washington I met Mr. Devens, then Attorney-General, who said, "We shall have to appoint a District Judge, I suppose. I think your friend Nelson is the best man for it. But Isuppose he would not accept it. " I said: "No, I don't believehe would accept it. But, if you think he is the best manfor it, the question whether he will accept it ought to bedetermined by him, and not by his friends for him. " I hadno thought that Mr. Nelson would leave his practice for theBench. But I thought it would be a very agreeable thing tohim to have the offer. I wrote to him a day or two afterwardthat I thought it likely he would be offered the place. Heanswered by asking me, if it were to be offered to him, howmuch time would be given to him to consider the matter. Soonafter I was informed by Attorney-General Devens that the Presidenthad offered him the place on the Circuit Bench, and that hevery much desired to accept it. But he thought that, althoughthe President had put the place at his disposal, he was veryunwilling to have any change in the Cabinet, and doubted whetherhe ought to accept the offer unless he were very sure thePresident was willing to spare him. One day soon after, PresidentHayes sent for me to come to see him. I called at the Attorney-General's office, told him the President had sent for me, and that he probably wished to speak about the Circuit Judgeship, and I wanted to know what he would like to have me say. Devenssaid that he should prefer that way of spending the rest ofhis life to any other. But the President had done him a greathonor in inviting him to his Cabinet, and he did not wishto leave him unless he were sure that the President was willing. I went to the White House. When President Hayes opened thesubject, I told him what was the Attorney-General's opinion. The President said that if he could be sure that were true, it would relieve his mind of a great burden. I told him hecould depend on it. The President said he did not know anybodyelse whom he should be as willing to have in his Cabinet asDevens, unless I myself would consent to accept the place. He gave a little friendly urging in that direction. I toldhim that I had lately been elected to the Senate after a considerablecontroversy, and that I did not think I could in justice tothe people of the State make a vacancy in the office whichwould occasion a new strife. I called on Devens on my wayback, and reported to him what the President had said. Heimmediately went to the White House, and they had a full understanding, which resulted in Devens keeping his place in the Cabinetthrough the Administration. 

It was then suggested that while Judge Lowell was a mostadmirable District Judge, and in every way an admirable lawyer, yet that it would be better if it were possible to get oneof the leaders of the Bar, who would supply what Judge Lowelllacked--the capacity for charging juries on facts, and presidingat jury trials, and to leave him in the District Court, wherehis services were so valuable. The office of Circuit Judgewas accordingly offered to Mr. William G. Russell. I wroteto Nelson, asking him to consider my first letter on the subjectas not having been written. Mr. Russell replied, decliningthe place, and saying, with great emphasis that he was sorrythe President should hesitate a moment about offering theplace to Judge Lowell, whom he praised very highly. But thePresident and the Attorney-General thought that it shouldbe offered to Mr. George O. Shattuck, a very eminent lawyerand advocate. On inquiry, however, it turned out that Mr. Shattuck, who was in poor health, was absent on a journey, and it was so unlikely that he would accept the offer thatit was thought best not to diminish the value and honor toJudge Lowell of the place by offering it further to anotherperson. Accordingly the place was offered to Judge Lowelland accepted by him. 

General Devens than said to me: "I have been thinking overthe matter of the District Judge, and I think if a man entirelysuitable can be found in the Suffolk Bar, that the appointmentrather belongs to that Bar, and I should like, if you haveno objection, to propose to the President to offer it to Mr. Charles Allen. " Mr. Allen was later Judge of the SupremeCourt of Massachusetts. I assented, but said: "If Mr. Allenrefuses it, I hope it will then be offered to Mr. Nelson, in accordance with your original opinion. " The Attorney-General agreed. The offer was made to Mr. Allen, and by himdeclined. When the letter of refusal came, the Attorney-General and I went together to the White House and showedthe President the letter. In the meantime a very strong recommendationof Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. , now of the Supreme Court, had been received by the President. He felt a good deal ofinterest in Holmes. I think they had both been wounded inthe same battle. But, at any rate, they were comrades. ThePresident then said: "I rather think Holmes is the man. " Ithen gave him my opinion of Mr. Nelson, and the Presidentsaid to Devens: "Do you agree, Mr. Attorney-General?" Devenssaid: "I do. " And the President said: "Then Nelson be it. "Mr. Nelson, to my surprise, accepted the appointment. 

Judge Nelson was a master of equity and bankruptcy. No doctrinewas too subtle or abstruse for him. The matter of marshallingassets, or the tacking of mortgages, and such things whichrequire a good deal of the genius of the mathematician, wereclear in his apprehension. He was one of the two or threemen in the State who ever understood the complications ofthe old loan-fund associations. He was especially a masterof legal remedies. He held on like a bull-dog to a case inthe justice of which he believed. When you had got a verdictand judgment in the Supreme Court against one of Nelson'sclients, he was just ready to begin work. Then look out forhim. He had with this trait also a great modesty and diffidence. If anybody put to him confidently a proposition against hisbelief, Nelson was apt to be silent, but, as Mr. Emersonsaid of Samuel Hoar, "with an unaltered belief. " He wouldcome out with his reply days after. When he came to statethe strong point in arguing his case, he would sink his voiceso it could hardly be heard, and look away like a bashfulmaiden giving her consent. Judge Bigelow told me, very earlyin Nelson's career, that he wished I would ask my friend tomake his arguments a little longer, and to raise his voiceso the court could hear him better. They always found hisarguments full of instruction, and disliked to lose anythingso good a lawyer had to say. His value as a Judge was largelyin consultation and in his sound opinions. I suppose that, like his predecessor, Judge Lowell, he was not the very bestof Judges to preside at jury trials, or to guide juries intheir deliberations. Indeed, Nelson had many of the intellectualtraits--the same merits and the same defects that Lowellhad. Lowell was a man of great wit, and a favorite withthe Boston Bar when he was appointed. So they made the bestof him. They were not inclined to receive Nelson's appointmentvery graciously. It was some years before he establisheda high place in their confidence and esteem. But it was establishedbefore his death. Gray and Putnam and Webb, all in theirway lawyers of the first class, found Nelson a most valuableand acceptable associate, and have all spoken of him in mostenthusiastic terms. He was a good naturalist. He knew thesong-birds, their habits, and dwelling-places. He knew allthe stars. He liked to discuss difficult and profound questionsof public policy, constitutional law, philosophy, and metaphysics. Sometimes, when I came home from Washington after a periodof hard work, if I happened to find Nelson in the cars whenI went to Boston, it was almost painful to spend an hour withhim, although his conversation was very profound and interesting. But it was like attempting to take up and solve a difficultproblem in geometry. I was tired, and wanted to be humminga negro melody to myself. He was a man of absolute integrity, not caring whether he pleased or displeased anybody. He hada good deal of literary knowledge, was specially fond of Emerson, and knew him very thoroughly, both prose and verse. He hada good deal of wit, one of the brightest examples of whichI will not undertake to quote here. He was a civil engineerin his youth, and was always valuable in complicated questionsof boundary, or cases like our sewer and water cases, whichrequire the application of practical mathematics. He wasa friendly and placable person so far as he was concernedhimself, but resented, with great indignation, any unkindnesstoward any of his friends or household. His friend and associate, Judge Webb, after his death spoke with great beauty and pathosof Nelson's love of nature and of his old county home:

"When, in later years, he revisited the scenes of his childhood, he made no effort to conceal his affection for them; as hewandered among the mountains and along the valleys, so dearlyremembered, his eye would grow bright, his face beam withpleasure, and his voice sound with the tone of deep sensibility. He grew eloquent as he described the beauty spread out beforehim, and lovingly dwelt on the majesty and grandeur of themountain at the foot of which his infancy was cradled. Itwas high companionship to be with him at such times. Hisear was open to catch the note of every bird, which came tohim like voices of well-beloved friends; he knew the brooksfrom their sources to their mouths, and the rivers murmuredto him the songs they sang in the Auld Lang Syne. But deepas was the joy of these visits, they did not allure him fromthe more rugged paths of labor and duty. "

The wisdom of Nelson's selection, if it need vindication, is abundantly established by the memorial of him reportedby a committee, of which Lewis S. Dabney was chairman, andadopted by the Suffolk Bar. The Bar, speaking of the doubtexpressed in the beginning by those who feared an inland lawyeron the Admiralty Bench, goes on to say:

"Those who knew him well, however, knew that he had been asuccessful master and referee in many complicated cases ofgreat importance; that his mathematical and scientific knowledgeacquired in his early profession as an engineer was largeand accurate, and would be useful in his new position; thathe who had successfully drawn important public acts wouldbe a successful interpreter of such acts; that always a studentapproaching every subject, not as an advocate but as a judicialobserver, he would give that attention to whatever was newamong the problems of his judicial office that would makehim their best master and interpreter, and that what in othersmight be considered weakness or indolence was but evidenceof a painful shrinking from displaying in public a naturallyfirm, strong, earnest and persistent character, a characterwhich would break out through the limitations of nature wheneverthe occasion required it. 

"Those who, as his associates upon the Bench, or as practitionersbefore him at the Bar, have had occasion to watch his longand honorable career, now feel that the judgment of his friendswas the best and that his appointment has been justified;and those who have known him as an Associate Justice of theCircuit Court of Appeals have felt this even more strongly. "

Another striking figure of my time was Horace Gray. He wasin the class before me at Harvard, though considerably younger. I knew him by sight only in those days. He was very tall, with an exceedingly youthful countenance, and a head thatlooked then rather small of so large-limbed a youth--ratherawkward in his gait and bearing. But after he reached manhoodhe grew into one of the finest-looking men of his time. Ibelieve he was the tallest man in Boston. He expanded inevery way to a figure which corresponded to his stately height. He was the grandson of the famous William Gray, the greatmerchant and ship-owner of New England, who was an importantfigure in the days just preceding and just following the Warof 1812. Many anecdotes are still current of his wise andracy sayings. His sons inherited large fortunes and wereall of them men of mark and influence in Boston. FrancisC. Grey, the Judge's uncle, was a man of letters, a historicalinvestigator. He discovered the priceless Body of Libertiesof 1641, which had remained unprinted from that time, althoughthe source from which our Bill of Rights and constitutionalprovisions had been so largely drawn. 

Judge Gray's father was largely employed in manufacturingand owned some large iron works. The son had been broughtup, I suppose, to expect that his life would be one of comfortand ease, free from all anxieties about money, and the extentof the labor of life would be, perhaps, to visit the counting-room a few hours in the day to look over the books and seegenerally that his affairs were properly conducted by hisagents and subordinates. He had visited Europe more thanonce, and was abroad shortly after his graduation when thenews reached him that the companies in which his father'sfortune was invested had failed. He at once hurried homeand set himself resolutely to work to take care of himself. He was an accomplished naturalist for his age and time, andhad a considerable library of works on natural history. Heexchanged them for law-books and entered the Law School. Iwas splitting wood to make my own fire one autumn morningwhen my door, which was ajar, was pushed open, and I saw aface somewhere up in the neighborhood of the transom. Itwas Gray, who had come to inquire what it was all about. Hehad little knowledge of the rules or fashions of the Law School. I told him about the scheme of instruction and the hours oflectures, and so forth. We became fast friends, a friendshipmaintained to his death. He at once manifested a very vigorousintellect and a memory, not only for legal principles, but forthe names of cases, which I suppose had been cultivated byhis studies in natural history and learning the scientificnames of birds and plants. At any rate, he became one ofthe best pupils in the Law School. He afterward studiedlaw with Edward D. Sohier, and immediately after his admissionbecame known as one of the most promising young men at theBar. Luther S. Cushing was then Reporter of the decisionsof the Supreme Court. He was in poor health and employedGray to represent him as Reporter on the Circuit. Gray alwayshad a marvellous gift of remembering just where a decisionof principle of law could be found, and his thumb and forefingerwould travel instantly to the right book on the obscurestshelf in a Law Library. So nothing seemed to escape his thoroughand indefatigable research. When he was on the Circuit, learnedcounsel would often be arguing some question of law for whichthey had most industriously prepared, when the young Reporterwould hand them a law-book with a case in it which had escapedtheir research. So the best lawyers all over the State gotacquainted at an early day with his learning and industry, andwhen Cushing soon after was obliged to resign the office ofReporter, Gray was appointed by the general consent of thebest men of the profession, although he had as a competitionJudge Perkins, a very well known lawyer and Judge, who hadedited some important law-books and was a man of mature age. This was in 1854, only three years after his admission tothe Bar. The office of Reporter was then one of the greatoffices of the State, almost equal in dignity to that of theJudge of the Supreme Court itself. Four of our MassachusettsReporters have been raised to that Bench. He was quite largelyretained and employed during that period, especially in importantquestions of commercial law. He resigned his office of Reporterabout the time of the breaking out of the war. Governor Andrewdepended upon his advice and guidance in some very importantand novel questions of military law, and in 1864 he was appointedAssociate Justice of the Court. In 1873 he became its ChiefJustice, and in 1882 was made Associate Justice of the SupremeCourt of the United States. The extent of his learning andthe rapidity and thoroughness of his research were marvellous. But it is not upon this alone, or chiefly, that his fame asone of the great Judges of the world will rest. He was aman of a native, original intellectual power, unsurpassedby any man who has been on the Bench in his time, either inthis country or in England. His decisions have been as soundand as acceptable to the profession upon questions where noauthority could be found upon which to rest, and upon questionsoutside of the beaten paths of jurisprudence as upon thosewhere he found aid in his great legal learning. He was aremarkably acceptable _nisi-prius_ Judge, when holding courtin the rural counties, and, though bred in a city, where humannature is not generally learned so well, he was especiallyfortunate and successful in dealing with questions of factwhich grow out of the transactions of ordinary and humblelife in the country. He manifested on one or two occasionsthe gift of historical research and discussion for which hisuncle Francis was so distinguished. 

It was my sorrowful duty to preside at a meeting of the Barof the Supreme Court of the United States to express theirsense of their great loss and that of the whole country, after Gray's death. 

I add some extracts from the remarks which I made on thatoccasion:

The Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States come togetherto pay a tribute of honor to a great lawyer and Judge. Ishall have, I am sure, another opportunity to put on recordmy own sense of the irreparable loss of a dear friend andcomrade of more than fifty years. To-day we are to speak, as members of the Bar, of an honored Judge whom the inexorableshaft has stricken in his high place. 

He was in his seat in the Supreme Court of the United Statesfor the last time Monday, February 3, 1902. On the eveningof that day he had a slight paralytic shock, which seriouslyaffected his physical strength. He retained his mental strengthand activity unimpaired until just before his death. On the9th day of July, 1902, he sent his resignation to the President, to take effect on the appointment and qualifying of his successor. So, he died in office, September 15, 1902. 

On his mother's side Judge Gray was the grandson of JabezUpham, one of the great lawyers of the day, who died in 1811, at the age of forty-six, after a brief service in the NationalHouse of Representatives. He was settled in Brookfield, WorcesterCounty. But the traditions of his great ability were freshwhen I went there to live, nearly forty years after his death. The memory of the beauty and sweetness and delightful accomplishmentof Mr. Upham's daughter, Judge Gray's mother, who died inthe Judge's early youth, was still fragrant among the oldmen and women who had been her companions. She is mentionedrepeatedly in the letters of that accomplished Scotch lady--friend of Walter Scott and of so many of the English andScotch men of letters in her time--Mrs. Grant of Laggan. Mrs. Grant says in a letter published in her Memoir: "Myfailing memory represents my short intercourse with Mrs. Gray as if some bright vision from a better world had comeand, vanishing, left a trail behind. " In another letter shespeaks of the enchantment of Mrs. Gray's character: "Anythingso pure, so bright, so heavenly I have rarely met with. "

The title, which the kindness of our countrymen has givento Massachusetts, that of Model Commonwealth, I think hasbeen earned largely by the character of her Judiciary, andnever could have been acquired without it. Among the greatfigures that have adorned that Bench in the past, the figureof Justice Gray is among the most conspicuous and stately. 

Judge Gray has had from the beginning a reputation for wonderfulresearch. Nothing ever seemed to escape his industry andprofound learning. This was shown on a few occasions whenhe undertook some purely historical investigation, as in hisnotes on the case of the Writs of Assistance, argued by JamesOtis and reported in Quincy's Reports, and his recent admirableaddress at Richmond, on Chief Justice Marshall. But whileall his opinions are full of precedent and contain all thelearning of the case, he was, I think, equally remarkablefor the wisdom, good sense, and strength of his judgments. I do not think of any Judge of his time anywhere, either hereor in England, to whom the profession would ascribe a higherplace if he be judged only by the correctness of his opinionsin cases where there were no precedents on which to lean andfor the excellent original reasons which he had to give. Ithink Judge Gray's fame, on the whole, would have been greateras a man of original power if he had resisted, sometimes, the temptation to marshal an array of cases, and had sufferedhis judgments to stand on his statement of legal principleswithout the authorities. He manifested another remarkablequality when he was on the Bench of Massachusetts. He wasan admirable _nisi-prius_ Judge. I think we rarely have hada better. He possessed that faculty which made the jury, in the old days, so admirable a mechanism for performing theirpart in the administration of justice. He had the rare gift, especially rare in men whose training has been chiefly uponthe Bench, of discerning the truth of the fact, in spite ofthe apparent weight of the evidence. That Court, in his time, had exclusive jurisdiction of divorces and other matters affectingthe marital relations. The Judge had to hear and deal withtransactions of humble life and of country life. It was surprisinghow this man, bred in a city, in high social position, havingno opportunity to know the modes of thought and of life ofpoor men and of rustics, would settle these interesting anddelicate questions, affecting so deeply the life of plainmen and country farmers, and with what unerring sagacity hecame to the wise and righteous result. 

Judge Gray's opinions for the eighteen years during whichhe sat on the Bench of Massachusetts constitute an importantbody of jurisprudence, from which the student can learn thewhole range of the law as it rests on principle and on authority. 

And so it came to pass when the place of Mr. Justice Cliffordbecame vacant that by the almost universal consent of theNew England Circuit, with the general approval of the professionthroughout the whole country, Mr. Justice Gray became hissuccessor. Of his service here there are men better qualifiedto speak than I am. He took his place easily among the greatJudges of the world. He has borne himself in his great officeso, I believe, as to command the approbation of his countrymenof all sections and of all parties. He has been every incha Judge. He has maintained the dignity of his office everywhere. He has endeared himself to a large circle of friends hereat the National Capital by his elegant and gracious hospitality. His life certainly has been fortunate. The desire of hisyouth has been fulfilled. From the time, more than fiftyyears ago, when he devoted himself to his profession, therehas been, I suppose, no moment when he did not regard theoffice of a Justice of the Supreme Court as not only the mostattractive but also the loftiest of human occupations. Hehas devoted himself to that with a single purpose. He hassought no fame or popularity by any other path. Certainlyhis life has been fortunate. It has lasted to a good old age. But the summons came for him when his eye was not dimmed norhis natural force abated. He drank of the cup of the watersof life while it was sweetest and clearest, and was not leftto drink it to the dregs. He was fortunate also, almost beyondthe lot of humanity, in that by a rare felicity, the greatestjoy of youth came to him in an advanced age. Everything thatcan make life honorable, everything that can make life happy--honor, success, the consciousness of usefulness, the regardof his countrymen, and the supremest delight of family life--all were his. His friends take leave of him as another ofthe great and stately figures in the long and venerable processionof American Judges. 

Next to Judge Wilde in seniority upon the Bench among theassociate Judges was Mr. Justice Charles A. Dewey of Northampton. He had had a good deal of experience as a prosecuting attorneyin a considerable general practice in the western part ofthe State. He was careful in his opinions never to go beyondwhat was necessary for the case at bar. It is said that thereis no instance that any opinion of his was ever overruledin a very long judicial service. 

Judge Dewey was a man of absolute integrity and faithfulin the discharge of his judicial duty. He had no sentimentand, so far as I ever knew, took little interest in mattersoutside of his important official duties. He was very carefulin the management of property. When the Democrats were inpower in Massachusetts in 1843 they reduced the salaries ofthe Judges of the Supreme Court in violation of the Constitutionalprovision. Chief Justice Shaw refused to touch a dollar ofhis salary until the Legislature the next year restored theold salary and provided for the payment of the arrears. JudgeDewey held out for one quarter. But the next quarter he wentquietly to the State House, drew his quarter's salary, wentdown on to State Street and invested it, and did the sameevery quarter thereafter. 

In the days of my early practice the Supreme Court used tosit in Worcester for about five or six weeks, beginning inApril. It had exclusive jurisdiction of real actions, andlimited equity jurisdiction. All suits where the matter inissue was more than three hundred dollars might be broughtoriginally in that court or removed there by the defendantfrom the Common Pleas if the plaintiff began it below. Sothe court had a great deal of business. It also had jurisdictionof divorce cases, appeals from the Probate Court and somespecial writs such as habeas corpus, certiorari and mandamus. But after all, the old Court of Common Pleas was the placewhere the greater part of the law business of the county wastransacted. There were at first four civil terms in the year, and, after Fitchburg became a half shire, there were two moreterms held there. The Common Pleas had jurisdiction of allcrimes except capital. 

There were some very interesting characters among the oldJudges of the Common Pleas. Among the most remarkable wasJudge Edward Mellen, who was first side Judge and afterwardChief Justice. He was a man of great law-learning, indefatigableindustry and remarkable memory for cases, diffuse and long-winded in his charges, and apt to take sides. He took everythingvery seriously. It is said that he would listen to the mostpathetic tale of human suffering unmoved, but would burstinto tears at the mention of a stake and stones or two chestnutstaddles. 

Mellen with the other Judges of the old Common Pleas Courtwas legislated off the Bench by the abolition of that courtin 1858. He moved from Middlesex to Worcester and resumedpractice, but was never largely employed. He was a repositoryof the old stories of the Middlesex Bar, many of which diedwith him. 

A Lowell lawyer told me this story of Judge Mellen. My informanthad in his office a law student who spent most of his timein reading novels and poetry and writing occasionally forthe newspapers. He was anxious to get admitted to the Barand had crammed for the examination. In those days, unlessthe applicant had studied three years, when he was admittedas of course, the Judge examined him himself. The Judge washolding court at Concord, and an arrangement was made thatthe youngster should go to the Judge's room in the eveningand submit himself to the examination. He kept the appointment, but in about ten minutes came out. My informant, who hadrecommended him, asked him what was the matter. He said hedidn't know. The Judge had asked him one question only. Hewas sure he answered it right, but the Judge immediately dismissedhim with great displeasure. The next morning the lawyerwent up to Judge Mellen in court and said, "Judge, what wasthe matter with the young man last night? Did you not findhim fitted?"

"Fitted?" said the Judge. "No sir. I asked him what wasthe rule in Shelley's Case, and he told me the rule in Shelley'sCase was that when the father was an atheist the Lord Chancellorwould appoint a guardian for his children. "

"Ah, " was the reply. "I see. The trouble is that neitherof you ever heard of the other's Shelley. "

Judge Byington of Stockbridge in Berkshire used to come toWorcester a great deal to hold the old Common Pleas Court. He was an excellent lawyer and an excellent Judge--dry, fondof the common law, and of black letter authorities. He hada curious habit of giving his charge in one long sentencewithout periods, but with a great many parentheses. But hehad great influence with the juries and was very sound andcorrect in his law. I once tried a case before him for damagesfor the seizure of a stock of liquors under the provisionsof the Statute of 1852, known as the Maine Liquor Law, whichhad been held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. He began:"The Statute of 1852 chapter so-and-so gentlemen of the jurycommonly known as the Maine Liquor Law which has created greatfeeling throughout this Commonwealth some very good men werein favor of it and some very good men were against it readliterally part of it would be ridiculous and you may takeyour seats if you please gentlemen of the jury I shall beoccupied some time in my charge and I do not care to keepyou standing and some of it would be absurd and some of itreads very well. " And so on. 

A neighbor of Judge Byington from Berkshire County was JudgeHenry W. Bishop of Stockbridge. He was an old Democraticpolitician and at one time the candidate of his party forGovernor. He was not a very learned lawyer, but was quick-witted and picked up a good deal from the arguments of counsel. Aided by a natural shrewdness and sense, he got along prettywell. He had a gift of rather bombastic speech. His exuberanteloquence was of a style more resembling that prevalent insome other parts of the country than the more sober and severefashion of New England. Just before he came to the Benchhe was counsel in a real estate case in Springfield whereMr. Chapman, afterward Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was on the other side. The evidence of recent occupationand the monuments tended in favor of Chapman's client. Butit turned out that the one side had got a title under theoriginal grant of the town of Blandford, and the other underthe original grant of an adjoining town, and that the townline had been maintained from the beginning where Bishop claimedthe true line to be. When he came to that part of the case, he rose mightily in his stirrups. Turning upon Chapman, whowas a quiet, mild-mannered old gentleman, he said: "The gentleman'seyes may twinkle like Castor and Pollux, twin stars; but hecan't wink out of sight that town line of Blandford. He mayplace one foot on Orion and the other on Arcturus, and seizethe Pleiades by the hair and wring all the water from theirdripping urns; but he can't wash out that town line of Blandford. "The local newspaper got hold of the speech and reported it, and it used to be spoken occasionally by the school boys fortheir declamation. Bishop is said to have been much disturbedby the ridicule it created, and to have refused ever to go toSpringfield again on any professional employment. 

Judge Aldrich was appointed to the Bench of the SuperiorCourt of Massachusetts by Governor William B. Washburn afterI left the practice of law for public life. I appeared beforehim in a very few cases and must take his judicial qualitylargely from the report of others. He was a very powerfuland formidable advocate, especially in cases where moral principlesor the family relations were concerned, or where any elementof pathos enabled him to appeal to the jury. The most tedioushours of my life, I think, have been those when I was forthe defendant and he for the plaintiff, and I had to sit andlisten to his closing argument in reply to mine. He had agift of simple eloquence; the influence with juries whichcomes from earnestness and the profound conviction of therighteousness of the cause he had advocated, and the weightof an unsullied personal character and unquestioned integrity. 

Mr. Aldrich's appointment to the Bench came rather late inhis life, so he was not promoted to the Supreme Court, whichwould undoubtedly have happened if he had been younger. Hewas an excellent magistrate and the author of one or two valuablelaw books. Although my chief memories of him are of the manyoccasions on which I have crossed swords with him, and ofbattles when our feelings and sympathy were profoundly stirred, still they are of the most affectionate character. He hada quick temper and was easily moved to anger in the trialof a case. But as an eminent western Judge is reported tohave said in speaking of some offence that had been committedat the Bar, "This Court herself are naterally quick-tempered. "So the sparks of our quarrels went out as quickly as theywere kindled. I think of P. Emory Aldrich as a stanch andconstant friend, from whom, so long as his life lasted, I receivednothing but friendliest sympathy and constant and powerfulsupport. 

Judge Aldrich, as I just said, was a man of quick temper. He was ready to accept any challenge to a battle, especiallyone which seemed to have anything of a personal disrespectin it. I was present on one occasion when the ludicrousmisspelling of a word, it is very likely, saved him from comingto blows with a very worthy and well-known citizen of WorcesterCounty. Colonel Artemus Lee, of Templeton, one of the mostestimable citizens of northern Worcester County, a man imperiousand quick-tempered, who had been apt to have his own way inthe region where he dwelt, and not very willing to give upto anybody, employed me once to bring suit for him againstthe Town of Templeton to recover taxes which he claimed hadbeen illegally assessed and collected. He was a man whosespelling had been neglected in early youth. Aldrich was forthe Town. All the facts showing the illegality of the assessment, of course, were upon the Town records. So we thought if theparties met with their counsel we could agree upon a statementof facts and submit the question of law to the court. Wemet in Judge Aldrich's office, Colonel Lee and myself andJudge Aldrich and some of the Town officers, to make up thestatement. But Mr. Aldrich had not had time to look verydeeply into the law of the case, and made some difficulties inagreeing upon the facts, which we thought rather unreasonable. We sat up to a late hour in a hot summer evening trying toget at a statement. At last Lee's patience gave out. Hehad had one or two hot passages at arms with Mr. Aldrichin the course of the discussion already. He rose to his feetand said in a very loud and angry tone--his voice was alwayssomething like that of a bull of Basham--"This is a farce. "Aldrich rose from his seat and to the occasion and said veryangrily, "What's that you say, Sir?" Lee clenched both fistsby his side, thrust his own angry countenance close up tothat of his antagonist, and said, "A farce, Sir--F-A-R-S-E, Farce. " Aldrich caught my eye as I was sitting behindmy client and noticed my look of infinite amusement. Hisanger yielded to the comedy of the occasion. He burst intoa roar of laughter and peace was saved. If Lee had spelledthe word farce with a "c, " there would have been a battleroyal. 

CHAPTER XXXIXPOLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

I close this book with a statement of the political principleswhich I think define the duty of the American people in thenear future, and from which I hope the Republic will not departuntil time shall be no more; and of the simple religious faithin which I was bred, and to which I now hold. 

They cannot to my mind be separated. One will be found insome resolutions offered in the Senate December 20, 1899. The other in what I said on taking the chair at the NationalUnitarian Conference, at Washington, in October 1899. 

"Mr. Hoar submitted the following resolution:

"WHEREAS the American people and the several States in theUnion have in times past, at important periods in their history, especially when declaring their Independence, establishingtheir Constitutions, or undertaking new and great responsibilities, seen fit to declare the purposes for which the Nation or Statewas founded and the important objects the people intend topursue in their political action; and

"WHEREAS the close of a great war, the liberation by theUnited States of the people of Cuba and Porto Rico in theWestern Hemisphere and of the Philippine Islands in the farEast, and the reduction of those peoples to a condition ofpractical dependence upon the United States, constitute anoccasion which makes such a declaration proper; Therefore, be it

_"Resolved, _ That this Republic adheres to the doctrineswhich were in the past set forth in the Declaration of Independenceand in its National and State constitutions. 

_"Resolved, _ That the purpose of its existence and the objectsto which its political action ought to be directed are theennobling of humanity, the raising from the dust its humblestand coarsest members, and the enabling of persons coming lawfullyunder its power or influence to live in freedom and in honorunder governments in whose forms they are to have a sharein determining and in whose administration they have an equalvoice. Its most important and pressing obligations are:

"First. To solve the difficult problem presented by thepresence of different races on our own soil with equal Constitutionalrights; to make the Negro safe in his home, secure in hisvote, equal in his opportunity for education and employment, and to bring the Indian to a civilization and culture in accordancewith his need and capacity. 

"Second. To enable great cities to govern themselves infreedom, in honor, and in purity. 

"Third. To make the ballot box as pure as a sacramentalvessel, and the election return as perfect in accord withthe law and the truth as a judgment of the Supreme Court. 

"Fourth. To banish illiteracy and ignorance from the land. 

"Fifth. To secure for every workman and for every workingwoman wages enough to support a life of comfort and an oldage of leisure and quiet, as befits those who have an equalshare in a self-governing State. 

"Sixth. To grow and expand over the continent and over theislands of the sea just so fast, and no faster, as we canbring into equality and self-government under our Constitutionpeoples and races who will share these ideals and help tomake them realities. 

"Seventh. To set a peaceful example of freedom which mankindwill be glad to follow, but never to force even freedom uponunwilling nations at the point of the bayonet or at the cannon'smouth. 

"Eighth. To abstain from interfering with the freedom andjust rights of other nations or peoples, and to rememberthat the liberty to do right necessarily involves the libertyto do wrong; and that the American people has no right totake from any other people the birthright of freedom becauseof a fear that they will do wrong with it. "

SPEECH ON TAKING THE CHAIR AT THE NATIONAL UNITARIAN CONFERENCE, IN WASHINGTON, OCTOBER, 1899

"The part assigned to me, in the printed plan of our proceedings, is the delightful duty of bidding you welcome. But you finda welcome from each other in the glance of the eye, in thepressure of the hand, in the glad tone of the voice, betterthan any that can be put into formal words. 

 From hand to hand the greeting goes; From eye to eye the signals run; From heart to heart to bright hope glows; The seekers of the light are one. 

Every Unitarian, man and woman, every lover of God or HisSon, every one who in loving his fellow-men loves God andHis Son, even without knowing it, is welcome in this company. 

"We are sometimes told, as if it were a reproach, that wecannot define Unitarianism. For myself, I thank God thatit is not to be defined. To define is to bound, to enclose, toset limit. The great things of the universe are not to bedefined. You cannot define a human soul. You cannot definethe intellect. You cannot define immortality or eternity. You cannot define God. 

"I think, also, that the things we are to be glad of and tobe proud of and are to be thankful for are not those thingsthat separate us from the great body of Christians or thegreat body of believers in God and in righteousness, but inthe things that unite us with them. No Five Points, no AthanasianCreed, no Thirty-nine Articles, separate the men and womenof our way of thinking from humanity or from Divinity. 

"But still, although we do not define Unitarianism, we knowour own when we see them. There are men and women who liketo be called by our name. There are men and women for whomFaith, Hope, and Charity forever abide; to whom Judea's newsare still glad tidings; who believe that one day Jesus Christcame to this earth, bearing a Divine message and giving aDivine example. There are women who bear their own sorrowsof life by soothing the sorrows of others; youths who, whenDuty whispers low, 'Thou must, ' reply, "I can'; and old mento whom the experience of life has taught the same brave lesson;examples of the patriotism that will give its life for itscountry when in the right, and the patriotism that will makeitself of no reputation, if need be, to save its country frombeing in the wrong. 

"They do not comprehend the metaphysics of a Trinal Unity, nor how it is just that innocence should be punished, thatguilt may go free. They do not attribute any magic virtueto the laying on of hands; nor do they believe that the tracesof an evil life in the soul can be washed out by the sprinklingof a few drops of water, however pure, or by baptism in anyblood, however innocent, in the hour of death. But they dounderstand the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, and theyknow and they love and they practise the great virtues whichthe Apostle tells us are to abide. 

"I think there can be found in this country no sectarianismso narrow, so hide-bound, so dogma-clad, that it would liketo blot out from the history of the country what the men ofour faith have contributed to it. On the first roll of thisWashington parish will be found close together the names ofJohn C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams. John Quincy Adamshad learned from his father and mother the liberal Christianfaith he transmitted to his illustrious son. If we wouldblot out Unitarianism from the history of the country, wemust erase the names of many famous statesmen, many famousphilanthropists, many great reformers, many great orators, many famous soldiers, from its annals, and nearly all of ourgreat poets from its literature. 

"I could exhaust not only the time I have a right to take, but I could fill a week if I were to recall their names andtell the story of their lives. Still less could I speakadequately of the men and women who, in almost every neighborhoodthroughout the country, have found in this Unitarian faithof ours a stimulant to brave and noble lives and a sufficientcomfort and support in the hour of a brave death. As I standhere on this occasion, my heart is full of one memory, --ofone who loved our Unitarian faith with the whole fervor ofhis soul, who in his glorious prime, possessing everythingwhich could make life happy and precious, the love of wifeand children and friends, the joy of professional success, the favor of his fellow-citizens, the fulness of health, theconsciousness of high talent, heard the voice of the Lordspeaking from the fever-haunted hospital and the tropicalswamp, and the evening dews and damps, saying, 'Where is themessenger that will take his life in his hand, that I maysend him to carry health to my stricken soldiers and sailors?'When the Lord said, 'Whom shall I send?' he answered, 'Heream I: send me. '*

[Footnote]* Sherman Hoar, who after a brilliant public and professional career, gave his life to his country by exposure in caring for the sick soldiersof the Spanish war. [End of Footnote]

"The difference between Christian sects, like the differencebetween individual Christians, is not so much in the matterof belief or disbelief of portions of the doctrine of the Scriptureas in the matter of _emphasis. _ It is a special qualityand characteristic of Unitarianism that Unitarians everywherelay special emphasis upon the virtue of Hope. It was saidof Cromwell by his secretary that hope shone in him like afiery pillar when it had gone out in every other. 

"There are two great texts in the Scripture in whose sublimephrases are contained the germs of all religion, whethernatural or revealed. They lay hold on two eternities. Onerelates to Deity in his solitude--'Before Abraham was, Iam. ' The other is for the future. It sums up the wholeduty and the whole destiny of man: 'And now abideth Faith, Hope, and Charity, --these three. ' If Faith, Hope, and Charityabide, then Humanity abides. Faith is for beings withoutthe certainty of omniscience. Hope is for beings withoutthe strength of omnipotence. And Charity, as the apostledescribes it, affects the relations of beings limited andimperfect to one another. 

"Why is it that this Christian virtue of Hope is placed asthe central figure of the sublime group who are to accompanythe children of God through their unending life? It is becausewithout it Faith would be impossible and Charity would bewasted. 

"Hope is that attribute of the soul which believes in thefinal triumph of righteousness. It has no place in a theologywhich believes in the final perdition of the larger numberof mankind. Mighty Jonathan Edwards, --the only genius sinceDante akin to Dante, --could you not see that, if your worldexist where there is no hope and where there is no love, therecan be no faith? Who can trust the promise of a God who hascreated a Universe and peopled it with fiends? The Apostleof your doleful gospel must preach quite another Evangel:And now abideth Hate, and now abideth Wrath, and now abidethDespair, and now abideth Woe unutterable. With Hope, as wehave defined it, --namely, the confident expectation of thefinal triumph of righteousness, --we are but a little lowerthan the angels; without it we are but a kind of vermin. 

"The literature of free countries is full of cheer: the storyends happily. The fiction of despotic countries is hopeless. People of free countries will not tolerate a fiction whichteaches that in the end evil is triumphant and virtue iswretched. Want of hope means either distrust of God or abelief in the essential baseness of man or both. It teachesmen to be base. It makes a country base. A world whereinthere is no hope is a world where there is no virtue. Thecontrast between the teacher of hope and the teacher of despairis to be found in the pessimism of Carlyle and the serenecheerfulness of Emerson. Granting to the genius of Carlyleeverything that is claimed for it, I believe that his chieftitle hereafter to respect as a moral teacher will be foundin Emerson's certificate. 

"But I must not detain you any longer from the business whichwaits for this convention. It is the last time that I shallenjoy the great privilege and honor of occupying this chair. 

"Perhaps I may be pardoned, as I have said something of thereligious faith of my fellow Unitarians, if I declare myown, which I believe is theirs also. I have no faith in fatalism, in destiny, in blind force. I believe in God, the livingGod, in the American people, a free and brave people, whodo not bow the neck or bend the knee to any other, and whodesire no other to bow the neck or bend the knee to them. I believe that the God who created this world has ordainedthat his children may work out their own salvation and thathis nations may work out their own salvation by obedienceto his laws without any dictation or coercion from any other. I believe that liberty, good government, free institutions, cannot be given by any one people to any other, but mustbe wrought out for each by itself, slowly, painfully, in theprocess of years or centuries, as the oak adds ring to ring. I believe that a Republic is greater than an Empire. I believethat the moral law and the Golden Rule are for nations aswell as for individuals. I believe in George Washington, not in Napoleon Bonaparte; in the Whigs of the Revolutionaryday, not in the Tories; the Chatham, Burke, and Sam Adams, not in Dr. Johnson or Lord North. I believe that the NorthStar, abiding in its place, is a greater influence in theUniverse than any comet or meteor. I believe that the UnitedStates when President McKinley was inaugurated was a greaterworld power than Rome in the height of her glory or even Englandwith her 400, 000, 000 vassals. I believe, finally, whateverclouds may darken the horizon, that the world is growing better, that to-day is better than yesterday, and to-morrow will bebetter than to-day. "

CHAPTER XLEDWARD EVERETT HALE

To give a complete and truthful account of my own life, thename of Edward Everett Hale should appear on almost everypage. I became a member of his parish in Worcester in August, 1849. Wherever I have been, or wherever he has been, I havebeen his parishioner ever since. I do not undertake to speakof him at length not only because he is alive, but becausehis countrymen know him through and through, almost as wellas I do. 

He has done work of the first quality in a great varietyof fields. In each he has done work enough to fill the lifeand to fill the measure of fame of a busy and successful man. I have learned of him the great virtue of Hope; to judgeof mankind by their merits and not their faults; to understandthat the great currents of history, especially in a republic, more especially in our Republic, are determined by great andnoble motives and not by mean and base motives. 

In his very best work Dr. Hale seems always to be doing andsaying what he does and says extempore, without premeditation. Where he gets the time to acquire his vast stores of knowledge, or to think the thoughts we all like to hear, nobody can tell. When he speaks or preaches or writes, he opens his intellectualbox and takes the first appropriate thing that comes to hand. 

I do not believe we have a more trustworthy historian thanDr. Hale, so far as giving us the motive and pith and essenceof great transactions. He is sometimes criticised for inaccuracyin dates or matters that are trifling or incidental. I supposethat comes from the fact that while he stores away in hismind everything that is essential, and trusts to his memoryfor that, he has not the time, which less busy men have, toverify every unsubstantial detail before he speaks or writes. Sir Thomas Browne put on record his opinion of such criticsin the "Christian Morals. "

"Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition and human Lapses, may make not only Moles but Warts in learned Authors, whonotwithstanding, being judged by the capital matter, admitnot of disparagement. I should unwillingly affirm that Cicerowas but slightly versed in Homer, because in his Work _DeGloria_ he ascribed those verses unto Ajax, which were deliveredby Hector. Capital Truths are to be narrowly eyed, collateralLapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too strictlysifted. And if the substantial subject be well forged out, we need not examine the sparks which irregularly fly fromit. "

When Dr. Hale was eighty years old, his countrymen manifestedtheir affection for him in a manner which I think no otherliving man could have commanded. It was my great privilegeto be asked to say to him what all men were thinking, at agreat meeting in Boston. The large and beautiful hall wasthronged with a very small portion of his friends. If theyhad all gathered, the City itself would have been thronged. I am glad to associate my name with that of my beloved teacherand friend by preserving here what I said. It is a feebleand inadequate tribute. 

The President of the United States spoke for the whole countryin the message which he sent:

WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, Mar. 25, 1902. 

_My dear Sen. Hoar:_ I very earnestly wish I could be atthe meeting over which you are to preside in honor of theeightieth birthday of Edward Everett Hale. A classical allusionor comparison is always very trite; but I suppose all of uswho have read the simpler classical books think of Timoleonin his last days at Syracuse, loved and honored in his oldage by the fellow citizens in whose service he had spent thestrength of his best years, as one of the noblest and mostattractive figures in all history. Dr. Hale is just sucha figure now. 

We love him and we revere him. We are prouder of our citizenshipbecause he is our fellow citizen; and we feel that his lifeand his writing, both alike, spur us steadily to fresh efforttoward high thinking and right living. To have written "TheMan Without a Country" by itself would be quite enough tomake all the nation his debtor. I belong to the innumerablearmy of those who owe him much, and through you I wish himGodspeed now. 

 Ever faithfully yours, THEODORE ROOSEVELT. 

I spoke as follows:

"If I try to say all that is in my heart to-night, I do notknow where to begin. If I try to say all that is in yourhearts, or in the hearts of his countrymen, I do not knowwhere to leave off. Yet I can only say what everybody hereis silently saying to himself. When one of your kindredor neighbors comes to be eighty years old, after a useful andhonored life, especially if he be still in the vigor of manlystrength, his eye not dim or his natural force abated, hischildren and his friends like to gather at his dwelling in hishonor, and tell him the story of their gratitude and love. They do not care about words. It is enough if there be pressureof the hand and a kindly and loving glance of the eye. Thatis all we can do now. But the trouble is to know how to doit when a man's friends and lovers and spiritual childrenare to be counted by the millions. I suppose if all the peoplein this country, and, indeed in all the quarters of the globe, who would like to tell their gratitude to Dr. Hale, wereto come together to do it, Boston Common would not hold them. 

"There is once in a while, through the quality is rare, anauthor, a historian, or a writer of fiction, or a preacher, or apastor, or an orator or poet, or an influential or belovedcitizen, who in everything he says or does seems to be sendinga personal message from himself. The message is inspiredand tinctured and charged and made electric with the qualityof the individual soul. We know where it comes from. Nomask, no shrinking modesty can hide the individuality. Everyman knows from whom it comes, and hails it as a special messageto himself. We say, That is from my friend to me! The messagemay be read by a million eyes and reach a million souls. Butevery one deems it private and confidential to him. 

"This is only, when you come to think of it, carrying thegenius for private and personal friendship into the man'sdealing with mankind. I have never known anybody in allmy long life who seemed to me to be joined by the heart-strings with so many men and women, wherever he goes, asDr. Hale. I know in Worcester, where he used to live; Iknow in Washington, where he comes too seldom, and wherefor the last thirty-three years I have gone too often, poorwomen, men whose lives have gone wrong, or who are crippledin body or in mind, whose eyes watch for Dr. Hale's comingand going, and seem to make his coming and going, if theyget a glimpse of him, the event they date from till he comesagain. To me and my little household there, in which we nevercount more than two or three, his coming is the event of everywinter. 

"Dr. Hale has not been the founder of a sect. He has neverbeen a builder of partition walls. He has helped throw downa good many. But still, without making proclamation, he hasbeen the founder of a school which has enlarged and broadenedthe Church into the Congregation, and which has brought thewhole Congregation into the Church. 

"When he came, hardly out of his boyhood, to our little parishin Worcester, there was, so far as I know, no Congregationalchurch in the country whether Unitarian or of the ancientCalvinistic faith, which did not require a special vote andceremonial of admission to entitle any man to unite with hisbrethren in commemorating the Saviour as he desired his friendsand brethren to remember him by the rite of the last supper. Until then, the Christian communion was but for a favoredfew. Mr. Hale believed that the greater the sinfulness ofthe individual soul the greater the need and the greater thetitle to be taken into the fellowship and the brotherhoodof the Saviour of souls. So, without polemical discussion, or any heat of controversy, he set the example which has beenso widely followed. This meant a great deal more than theabolition of a ceremonial or the change of a rubric. It wasan assertion of the great doctrine, never till of late perfectlycomprehended anywhere, that the Saviour of men came into theworld inspired by the love of sinners, and not for an electand an exclusive brotherhood of saints. 

"We are not thinking chiefly of another world when we thinkof Dr. Hale or when we listen to him. He has been tellingus all his life that what the theologians call two worldsare but one; that the Kingdom of God is here, within and aroundyou; that there is but one Universe and not two; that therelation of man to God is that of father and child, not ofmaster and slave, or even of sovereign and subject; that whenman wields any of the great forces of the Universe, it isGod also who is wielding them through him; that the powerof a good man is one of God's powers, and that when man isdoing his work faithfully the supreme power of God's omnipotenceis with him. 

"Dr. Hale has done a good many things in his own matchlessfashion. He would have left a remarkable name and fame behindhim if he had been nothing but a student and narrator of history, as he has studied and told it; if he had been nothing buta writer of fiction--the author of 'The Man Without a Country, 'or 'Ten Times One is Ten, ' or 'In His Name'--if he had donenothing but organize the Lend a Hand clubs, now found in thefour quarters of the world; if he had been nothing but aneloquent Christian preacher; if he had been nothing but abeloved pastor; if he had been only a voice which lifted toheaven in prayer the souls of great congregations; if he hadbeen only a public-spirited citizen, active and powerful inevery good word and work for the benefit of this people; ithe had been only the man who devised the plan that might havesaved Texas from slavery, and thereby prevented the CivilWar, and which did thereafter save Kansas; if he had beenonly remembered as the spiritual friend and comforter of largenumbers of men and women who were desolate and stricken bypoverty and sorrow; if he had been only a zealous lover ofhis country, comprehending, as scarcely any other man hascomprehended, the true spirit of the American people; if hehad been any one of these things, as he has been, it wouldbe enough to satisfy the most generous aspiration of any man, enough to make his life worth living for himself and his race. And yet, and yet, do I exaggerate one particle, when I saythat Dr. Hale has been all these, and more?

"Edward Everett Hale has been the interpreter of a pure, simple loving and living faith to thousands and thousandsof souls. He has taught us that the fatherhood and tendernessof God are manifested here and now in this world, as theywill be hereafter; that the religion of Christ is a religionof daily living; that salvation is the purifying of the soulfrom sin, not its escape from the consequences of sin. Heis the representative and the incarnation of the best andloftiest Americanism. He knows the history of his country, and knows his countrymen through and through. He does notfancy that he loves his country, while he dislikes and despiseshis countrymen and everything they have done and are doing. The history he loves and has helped to write and to make isnot the history of a base and mean people, who have driftedby accident into empire. It is the history of such a nationas Milton conceived, led and guided by men whom Milton wouldhave loved. He will have a high and a permanent place inliterature, which none but Defoe shares. He possesses thetwo rarest of gifts, that to give history the fascinationof fiction, and that to give fiction the verisimilitude ofhistory. He has been the minister of comfort in sorrow andof joy in common life to countless persons to whom his friendshipis among their most precious blessings, or by whose firesidehe sits, personally unknown, yet a perpetual and welcome guest. 

"Still, the first duty of every man is to his own family. He may be a warrior or a statesman, or reformer, or philanthropist, or prophet or poet, if he careth not first for his own household, he is worse than an infidel. So the first duty of a Christianminister is still that of a pastor to his own flock. Youknow better than I do how it has been here in Boston; butevery one of our little parish in Worcester, man or woman, boy or girl, has felt from the first time he or she knew him, ever afterward, that Dr. Hale has been taking hold of hishand. That warmth and that pressure abide through all ourlives, and will abide to the end. There are countless personswho never saw his face, who still deem themselves his obedient, loving and perpetual parishioners. 

"I knew very well a beautiful woman, left widowed, and childless, and solitary, and forlorn, to whom, after every other consolationseemed to have failed to awake her from her sorrow and despair, a friend of her own sex said: 'I thought you were one ofEdward Hale's girls. ' The appeal touched the right chordand brought her back again to her life of courage and Christianwell-doing. 

"He has ever been a prophet of good hope and a preacher ofgood cheer. When you have listened to one of his sermons, you have listened to an evangel, to good tidings. He hasnever stood aloof from the great battles for righteousnessor justice. When men were engaged in the struggle to elevatethe race for the good of their fellow men, no word of discouragementhas ever come from his lips. He has recalled no memory ofold failure in the past. He has never been found outsidethe ranks railing at or criticising the men who were doingthe best work, or were doing the best work they knew how todo. He has never been afraid to tackle the evils that othermen think hopeless. He has uttered his brave challenge tofoemen worthy of his steel. Poverty and war and crime andsorrow are the enemies with whom he has striven. 

"I do not know another living man who has exercised a morepowerful influence on the practical life of his generation. He has taught us the truth, very simple, but somehow nobodyever got hold of it till he did, that virtue and brave living, and helping other men, can be made to grow by geometricalprogression. I am told that Dr. Hale has more correspondentsin Asia than the London _Times. _ I cannot tell how many personsare enrolled in the clubs of which he was the founder andinspirer. 

"But I am disqualified to do justice to the theme you haveassigned to me. For an impartial verdict you must get animpartial juryman. You will have to find somebody that loveshim less than I do. You cannot find anybody who loves himmore. To me he has been a friend and father and brother andcounsellor and companion and leader and instructor; prophetof good hope, teacher of good cheer. His figure mingles withmy household life, and with the life of my country. I canhardly imagine either without him. He has pictured for usthe infinite desolation of the man without a country. Butwhen his time shall come, what will be the desolation of thecountry without the man?

"And now what can we give you who have given us so much? Wehave something to give you on our side. We bring you a morecostly and precious gift than any jewel or diadem, thoughit came from an Emperor's treasury. 

 Love is a present for a mighty King. 

"We bring you the heart's love of Boston where you were born, and Worcester where you took the early vows you have keptso well; of Massachusetts who knows she has no worthier son, and of the great and free country to whom you have taughtnew lessons of patriotism, and whom you have served in a thousandways. 

"This prophet is honored in his own country. There willbe a place found for him somewhere in the House of many Mansions. I do not know what will be the employment of our dear friendin the world whose messages he has been bringing to us solong. But I like to think he will be sent on some errandslike that of the presence which came to Ben Adhem with a greatwakening light, rich and like a lily in bloom, to tell himthat the name of him who loved his fellow men led all thenames of those the love of God had blessed. "

APPENDIXTHE FOREST OF DEANBY JOHN BELLOWS

The Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, is one of the veryfew primeval Forests of Britain that have survived to thiscentury. It has just been my privilege to accompany SenatorHoar on a drive through a portion of it, and he has askedme to write a few notes on this visit, for the American AntiquarianSociety, in the hope that others of its members may sharein the interest he has taken in its archaeology. 

I am indebted for many years' acquaintance with George F. Hoar, through Oliver Wendell Holmes, to the circumstancethat the Hoar family lived in Gloucester from the time ofthe Tudors, if not earlier; and this has led him to pay repeatedvisits to our old city, with the object of tracing the historyof his forefathers. In doing this he has been very successful;and only within the last few months my friend H. Y. J. Taylor, who is an untiring searcher of our old records, has come uponan item in the expenses of the Mayor and Burgesses, of a paymentto Charles Hoar, in the year 1588, for keeping a horse readyto carry to Cirencester the tidings of the arrival of theSpanish Armada. And Charles Hoar's house is with us to thisday, quaintly gabled, and with over-hanging timber-framedstories, such as the Romans built here in the first century. It stands in Longsmith Street, just above the spot where fortyyears ago I looked down on a beautiful tessellated pavementof, perhaps, the time of Valentinian. It was eight feet belowthe present surface; for Gloucester, like Rome, has beena rising city. 

Senator Hoar had been making his headquarters at Malvern, and he drove over from there one afternoon, with a view toour going on in the same carriage to the Forest. A betterplan would have been to run by rail to Newnham or Lydney, to be met by a carriage from the "Speech House, " a governmenthotel in the centre of the woods; but as the arrangement hadbeen made we let it stand. 

To give a general idea of the positions of the places weare dealing with, I may say that Upton Knoll, where I amwriting, stands on the steep edge of a spur of the CotteswoldHills, three and a half miles south of Gloucester. Lookingnorth, we have before us the great vale, or rather plain, of the Severn, bounded on the right by the main chain of theCotteswolds, rising to just over one thousand feet; and onthe left by the hills of Herefordshire, and the beautifulblue peaks of the Malverns; these last being by far the moststriking feature in the landscape, rising as they do in asharp serrated line abruptly from the plain below. They areabout ten miles in length, and the highest point, the WorcestershireBeacon, is some fourteen hundred feet above the sea. It isthe spot alluded to in Macaulay's lines on the Armada--

 Till twelve fair counties saw the blaze on Malvern's lonely height;

and two hundred years before the Armada it was on "Malvernhulles" that William Langland "forwandered" till he fell asleepand dreamed his fiery "Vision of Piers Plowman"--

 In a somere season, when softe was the sonne

when, looking "esteward, after the sonne" he beheld a castleon Bredon Hill

 Truth was ther-ynne

and this great plain, that to him symbolized the world. 

 A fair feld ful of folke fonde ich ther bytwyne; Alle manere of men; the meme and the ryche. 

Now, in the afternoon light, we can see the towns of Greatand North Malvern, and Malvern Wells, nestling at foot ofthe steep slant; and eight miles to the right, but over thirtyfrom where we stand, the cathedral tower of Worcester. Thewhole plain is one sea of woods with towers and steeples glintingfrom every part of it; notably Tewkesbury Abbey, which shineswhite in the sunlight some fourteen miles from us. Nearer, and to the right, Cheltenham stretches out under Cleeve Hill, the highest of the Cotteswolds; and to the left Gloucester, with its Cathedral dwarfing all the buildings round it. Thiswooded plain before us dies away in the north into two ofthe great Forests of ancient Britain; Wyre, on the left, fromwhich Worcester takes its name; and Feckenham, on the right, with Droitwich as its present centre. Everywhere throughthis area we come upon beautiful old timber-framed housesof the Tudor time or earlier; Roman of origin, and still metwith in towns the Romans garrisoned, such as Chester and Gloucester, though they have modernized their roofs, and changed theirdiamond window panes for squares, as in the old house of CharlesHoar's, previously mentioned. 

Now if we turn from the north view to the west, we get a differentlandscape. Right before us, a mile off, is Robin's Wood Hill, a Cotteswold outlier; in Saxon times called "Mattisdun" or"Meadow-hill, " for it is grassed to the top, among its trees. "Matson" House, there at its foot, was the abode of CharlesI. During his siege of Gloucester in 1643. To the left ofthis hill we have again the Vale of the Severn, and beyondit, a dozen miles away, and stretching for twenty miles tothe southwest are the hills of the Forest of Dean. They aresteep, but not lofty--eight hundred or nine hundred feet. At their foot yonder, fourteen miles off, is the lake-likeexpanse of the Severn; and where it narrows to something undera mile is the Severn Bridge that carries the line into theForest from the Midland Railway. Berkeley Castle lies juston the left of it, but is buried in the trees. ThornburyTower, if not Thornbury Castle, further south, is visiblewhen the sun strikes on it. Close to the right of the bridgeis an old house that belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh; and, curiously enough, another on the river bank not far aboveit is said to have been occupied by Sir Francis Drake justbefore the coming of the Armada. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, who commanded the Spanish fleet, was ordered to detach a forceas soon as he landed, to destroy the Forest of Dean, whichwas a principal source for timber for the British navy; andit is probable that the Queen's ministers were aware of thisand took measures in defence, with which Drake had to do. 

Two miles lower than the bridge is the Forest port of Lydney, now chiefly used for shipping coal; and as the ex-Verdererof the Forest resides near it, and he would be able to furnishinformation of interest to our American visitor, we decidedto drive to Lydney to begin. 

It was too late to start the same day, however; and SenatorHoar stayed at Upton, where his visit happens to mark theclose of what is known as the "open-field" system of tillage;a sort of midway between the full possession of land by freehold, and unrestricted common rights. The area over which he walked, and which for thousands of years has been divided by "meres"and boundary stones, is now to be enclosed, and so will loseits archaeological claims to interest. In one corner of it, however, there still remains a fragment of Roman road, withsome of the paving stones showing through the grass of thepasture field. The name of this piece of land gives the clueto its history. It is called Sandford; a corruption of SarnFord, from _sarnu_ (pronounced "sarney") _to pave;_ and _fford, _a road. These are Celtic Cornish and Welsh words; and itshould be noted that the names of the Roman roads in the Islandas well as those of the mountains and rivers, are nearly allCeltic, and not Latin or Saxon. *

[Footnote]* The Whitcombe Roman Villa, four miles east of Upton, stands ina field called Sandals. In Lyson's description of it, writtenin 1819 it stands as _Sarn_dells. The paved road ran throughthe dell. [End of Footnote]

We made a short delay in the morning, at Gloucester, to giveSenator Hoar time to go on board the boat "Great Western"which had just arrived in our docks from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to visit the mother city, after a perilous voyage across theAtlantic by Captain Blackburn single-handed. Senator Hoarhaving welcomed the captain in his capacity of an old Englishmanand a New Englander "rolled into one, " we set out for Lydney, skirting the bank of one arm of the Severn which here formsan island. It was on this Isle of Alney that Canute and EdmundIronside fought the single-handed battle that resulted intheir dividing England between them. * We pass on to the Islandat Westgate Bridge; and a quarter of a mile further leaveit by Over Bridge; one of Telford's beautiful works. Justbelow it the Great Western Railway crosses the river by aniron bridge, the western piers of which rest upon Roman foundations. 

[Footnote]* Sharon Turner's "Anglo Saxons, " Vol. III. , Chap. XV. [End of Footnote]

One remarkable thing which I believe I forgot to mention toGeorge Hoar as we crossed the Island, is, that the meadowson both sides of the causeway belong to the "Freemen" of thecity; and that, go back as far as we may in history, we cannotfind any account of the original foundation of this body. But we have this clue to it--that Gloucester was made intoa Colony in the reign of Nerva, just before the end of thefirst century; and in each Roman colony lands were allottedto the soldiers of the legions who had become freemen by reasonof having served for twenty-five years. These lands werealways on the side of the city nearest the enemy; and thelands we are crossing are on the western side of Glevum, nearestthe _Silures, _ or South Welsh, who were always the most dangerousenemies the Romans had in Britain. Similarly, at Chester, the freemen's lands are on the west, or enemy's side, by theDee. In Bath it was the same. 

Immediately after passing "Over" Bridge we might turn off, it time permitted, to see Lassington Oak, a tree of giantsize and unknown age; but as Emerson says--

 There's not enough for this and that-- Make thy option which of two!

and we make ours for Lydney. A dozen miles drive, oftenskirting the right bank of the Severn, brings us to Newnham, a picturesque village opposite a vast bend, or horse-shoe, of the river, and over which we get a beautiful view fromthe burial ground on the cliff. The water expands like alake, beyond which the woods, house-interspersed, stretchaway to the blue Cotteswold Hills; the monument to WilliamTyndale being a landmark on one of them--Nibley Knoll. Justunder that monument was fought the last great battle betweenBarons. This battle of Nibley Knoll, between Lord Berkeleyand Lord Lisle, left the latter dead on the field, at night, with a thousand of the men of the two armies; and made LordBerkeley undisputed master of the estates whose name he bore. 

We now leave the river, and turn inland; and in a short timewe have entered the Forest of Dean proper; that is, the landsthat belong to the Crown. Their area may be roughly set downas fifteen miles by ten; but in the time of the Conqueror, and for many years after, it was much larger; extending fromRoss on the north, to Gloucester on the east, and thence thirtymiles to Chepstow on the south-west. That is, it filled thetriangle formed by the Severn and the Wye between these towns. It is doubtless due to this circumstance of its being so completelycut off from the rest of the country by these rivers thatit has preserved more remarkably than any other Forest, thecharacteristics and customs of ancient British life, to whichwe shall presently refer; for their isolation has kept theDean Foresters to this hour a race apart. 

Sir James Campbell, who was for between thirty and forty yearsthe chief "Verderer, " or principal government officer of theForest, lives near Lydney. He received us with great kindness, and gave us statistics of the rate of grown of the oak, bothwith and without transplantation. Part of them are publishedin an official report on the Forest (A 12808. 6/1884. Wt. 3276. Eyre & Spottiswoode, London) and part are in manuscriptwith which Senator Hoar has been presented. Briefly, thechief points are these:

In 1784 or thereabouts acorns were planted in "Acorn PatchEnclosure" in the Forest; and in 1800 trees marked A and Bwere taken from this place and planted opposite the "SpeechHouse. " Two, marked D and F, were drawn out of Acorn Patchin 1807 and planted near the Speech House fence. Another, marked N, was planted in 1807, five and one-half feet high, in the Speech House grounds, next the road; and L, M, N, X, have remained untransplanted in the Acorn Patch. 

The dimensions were (circumference, six feet from the ground), in inches-- A B D F L M N XIn 1814, Oct. 5, 14-3/4 14 11 9-1/2 15-5/8 18-1/2 13 24-1/2 1824, Oct. 20, 29-1/2 28-3/4 25-3/8 22-1/8 22-1/2 23-3/4 30-1/8 32-1/8 1844, Oct. 5, 58-1/2 58 45 46 35 34-1/2 57 44-1/2 1864, Oct. 1, 73-1/2 71 59-1/2 67-3/4 46-1/2 44 73-1/4 56

Another experiment tried by Sir James Campbell himself gavethe following results:

Experiment begun in 1861 to test the value, if any, of merelylifting and replanting oak trees in the same holes withoutchange of soil, situation, or giving increased space; as comparedwith the experiment already detailed, which was begun in1800. 

In 1861, twelve oak trees of about 25 years' growth, whichhad been self-sown (dropping from old trees afterwards cutdown) in a thick plantation, were selected, all within gunshotof each other, and circumferences measured at five feet fromthe ground. Of these, six were taken up and immediately replantedin the same holes. The other six were not interfered withat all. 

Aggregate admeasurement of six Aggregate admeasurement of sixdug up and replanted. Marked not interfered with. Marked inin _white_ paint 1, 2, 3, &c. _red_ paint 1, 2, 3, &c. 1861, 24-1/2 inches 27 inches (_i. E. _, 2-1/2 inches more than the transplanted ones, at starting. )1866, 37-3/4 " 46-1/2 " (_i. E. _, 10-7/8 inches more than the transplanted ones at starting. )1886, 118-1/4 " 118-5/8 " (_i. E. _, the transplanted ones had now _regained_ 10-1/2 inches. )1888, 125-1/2 " 123-1/2 " (The transplanted trees in '88 had outgrown the others by 2 ins. )1890, 133-7/8 " 128 " (The transplanted trees in '90 had outgrown the others by 5-7/8 ins. )1892, 141 " 131-1/4 " (The transplanted trees in '92 had outgrown the others by 9-3/4 ins. )

Thus proving that merely transplanting is beneficial to oaks;the benefit, however, being greater when the soil is changedand more air given. *

[Footnote]* The Earl of Ducie, who has had very large experience as anarboriculturist, does _not_ hold the view that oaks are benefitedby transplanting, if the acorns are sown _in good soil. _ In thecase of trees that show little or no satisfactory progress afterfour years, but are only just able to keep alive, he cuts themdown to the root. In the next season 80 per cent. Of themsend up shoots from two to three feet high, and at once startoff on their life's mission. [End of Footnote]

From Lydney a drive of a few miles through pleasant ups anddowns of woodland and field, brings us to Whitemead Park, the official residence of the Verderer, Philip Baylis. Thetitle "Verderer" is Norman, indicating the administrationof all that relates to the "Vert" or "Greenery" of the Forest;that is, of the timber, the enclosures, the roads, and thesurface generally. The Verderer's Court is held at the "SpeechHouse, " to which we shall presently come: but the Forest ofDean is also a mineral district, and the Miners have a separateCourt of their own. That some of their customs go back toa very remote antiquity we may well believe when we find thescale of which the Romans worked iron in the Forest; a scaleso great that with their imperfect method of smelting withCatalan furnaces, etc. , so much metal was left in the Romancinder that it has been sought after all the way down to withinthe present generation as a source of profit; and in thetime of Edward I. , one-fourth of the king's revenue fromthis Forest was derived from the remelted Roman refuse. 

I have a beautiful Denarius of Hadrian which was found inthe old Roman portion of the Lydney-Park Iron Mine in 1854, with a number of other silver coins, some of them earlierin date; but when we speak of the "mines, " the very ancientones in the Forest were rather deep quarries than what wouldnow be termed mines. As we drive along we now and then noticenear the roadside, nearly hidden by the dense foliage of thebushes, long dark hollows, which are locally known as _"scowles, "_another Celtic word meaning gorges or hollows; something likeghyll in the Lake District, "Dungeon Ghyll, " and so on. Thesewere Roman and British Hematite mines. If we had been schoolboysI would have taken Senator Hoar down into a scowl and we shouldboth have come back with our clothes spoiled, and our armsfull of the splendid hartstongue ferns that cover the sidesand edges of the ravine. But they are dangerous places forany but miners _or_ schoolboys; and I shrank from encouragingan enthusiastic American to risk being killed in a Roman pit, even with the ideal advantage of afterwards being buried withhis own ancestors in England! So I said but little aboutthem. 

The Miners' Court is presided over by another governmentofficer, called the "Gaveller"; from a Celtic word which means_holding;_ as in the Kentish custom of "Gavelkind. "* Thesecourts are held in "Saint Briavels" (pronounced "Brevels")Castle: a quaint old building of the thirteenth century, on the western edge of the Forest, where it was placed tokeep the Welsh in check. It looks down on a beautiful reachof the river Wye at Bigswear; and it was just on this edgethat Wordsworth stood in 1798, when he thought out his "Linescomposed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, " etc. 

 Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters; and again I hear These waters rolling from their mountain springs With a soft inland murmur. Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs. 

Senator Hoar will recall the scene from the railway below:the

 "Plots of cottage ground" that "lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses";

and he will say how exactly the words describe

 These hedge-rows; hardly hedge-rows; little lines Of sportive wood run wild, for they cover yards in width in some places, as he willremember my pointing out to him. The castle is placed onthe outside of the Forest and close on the Wye, to guard whatwas seven centuries ago the frontier of Wales; and the lateWilliam Philip Price (Commissioner of Railways and for manyyears member of Parliament for Gloucester) told me that whenhe was a boy the Welsh tongue was still spoken at Landogo, the next village down the river, midway between Bigswear andTintern. 

[Footnote]* I suspect "Gaffer, " the English equivalent of "Boss, " may bethe same root: _i. E. , _ the _taker_ or contractor. [End of Footnote]

Philip Baylis showed us some of the old parchments connectedwith the Mine Court; one document especially precious beinga copy of the "Book of Denys, " made in the time of EdwardIII. It sets forth the ancient customs which formed the lawsof the miners. At this point the Verderer had to settle somematter of the instant, but he put us under the care of a youngman who acted as our guide to one of the ancient and giantoaks of the Forest, on the "Church Hill" enclosure, aboutthree-quarters of a mile up the hill above the Park. Nicholls("History of the Forest of Dean, " page 20) thinks the nameChurch Hill comes from the setting apart of some land herefor the Convent of _Grace Dieu_ to pay for masses for thesouls of Richard II. , his ancestors and successors. 

It was a steep climb; and the evening twilight was comingon apace as we followed the little track to the spot wherethe old oak rises high above the general level of the wood, reminding one of Rinaldo's magical myrtle, in "Jerusalem Delivered":

 O'er pine, and palm, and cypress it ascends; And towering thus all other trees above Looks like the elected queen and genius of the grove!

Only that for an _oak_ of similar standing we must say "king"instead of "queen"; emblem as it is of iron strength and endurance. 

It is not so much the girth of the tree as its whole bearingthat impresses a beholder; and I do not think either of uswill forget its effect in the gloom and silence and mysteryof the gathering night. 

Resisting a kindly pressure to stay the night at Whitemead, that we might keep to our programme of sleeping at the SpeechHouse, we started on the last portion of the long day's drive. The road from Parkend, after we have climbed a considerablehill, keeps mostly to the level of a high ridge. It is broadand smooth; and the moonlight and its accompanying black shadowson the trees made the journey one of great beauty; while themountain air lessened the sense of fatigue that would otherwisehave pressed heavily on us after so long a day amid such novelsurroundings. The only thing to disturb the solitude isthe clank of machinery; and the lurid lights, as we pass acolliery; and then a mile of two more with but the soundof our own wheels and the rhythm of the horses' feet, andwe suddenly draw up at an hotel in the midst of the Forest, its quiet well-lighted interior inviting us through the doorway, left open to the cool summer night air. We are at the SpeechHouse. We had bespoken our rooms by wire in the morning:Senator Hoar had a _chambre d'honneur, _ with a gigantic carvedfour-post bed that reminded him of the great bed of Ware. His room like my "No. 5, " looked out over magnificent baysof woodland to the north. The Speech House is six hundredfeet above the sea, and the mountain breeze coming throughthe wide open window, with this wonderful prospect of oakand beech and holly in the moonlight, --the distance veiled, but scarcely veiled, by the mist, suggest a poem untranslatablein words, and incommunicable except to those who have passedunder the same spell. We speak of a light that makes darknessvisible; and similarly there are sounds that deepen the longintervals of silence with which they alternate. One or twovehicles driving past; now and then the far-off call of owlsanswering one another in the woods--one of the sweetest soundsin nature--the varying cadence carrying with it a sense ofboundlessness and infinite distance; and with it we fall asleep. 

If there is anything more beautiful than a moonlight summernight in the heart of the Forest of Dean, it is its transformationinto a summer morning, with the sparkle of dew on the grass, and the sunrise on the trees; with the music of birds, andthe freshness that gives all these their charm. 

As soon as we are dressed we take a stroll out among the trees. In whichever direction we turn we are struck by the abundanceof hollies. I believe there are some three thousand fullgrown specimens within a radius of a mile of the Speech House. This may be due to the spot having been from time immemorialthe central and most important place in the Forest. The roadsthat lead to it still show the Roman paving-stones in manyplaces, as Senator Hoar can bear witness; and the centralpoint of a British Forest before the Roman time would be occupiedby a sacred oak. The Forest into which Julius Caesar pursuedthe Britons to their stronghold, was Anderida, that is, theHoly Oak; from _dar, _ oak (Sanskrit, daru, a tree), and _da, _good. It is worth remarking that this idea survives in thepersonal name, Holyoak; for who ever heard of "Holyelm, " or"Holyash, " or a similar form compounded of the adjective andthe name of any other tree than the oak. If there is an exceptionit is in the name of the _holly_. The Cornish Celtic wordfor holly was Celyn, from Celli (or Kelli), a grove; literallya _grove-one;_ so that the holly was probably planted as agrove or screen round the sacred oak. Such a planting ofa holly grove in the central spot of the Forest in the Druidtime, would account for these trees being now so much morenumerous round the Speech House than they are in any otherpart of the woods. The Saxon name is merely the word _holy_with the vowel shortened, as in _holi_day; and that the treereally was regarded as holy is shown by the custom in theForest Mine Court of taking the oath on a stick of holly heldin the hand. This custom survived down to our own times;for Kedgwin H. Fryer, the late Town Clerk of Gloucester, told me he had often seen a miner sworn in the Court, touchingthe Bible with the holly stick! The men always kept theircaps on when giving evidence to show they were "Free miners. "

The oaks, marked A. B. , of whose growth statistics have alreadybeen given, stand on the side of the Newnham road oppositethe Speech House. The Verderer is carrying on the annualrecord of their measurements. 

We return to the house by the door on the west; the one atwhich we arrived last evening. It was then too dark to observethat the stone above it, of which I took a careful sketchseveral years ago, is crumbling from the effects of weather, after having withstood them perfectly for two centuries. Thecrown on it is scarcely recognizable; and the lettering hasall disappeared except part of the R. 

We breakfast in the quaint old Court room. Before us isthe railed-off dais, at the end, where the Verderer and hisassistants sit to administer the law. On the wall behindthem are the antlers of a dozen stags; reminders of the time, about the middle of the present century, when the herds ofdeer were destroyed on account of the continual poaching towhich they gave occasion. Many of the cases that come beforethe Court now are of simple trespass. 

This quaint old room, with its great oak beam overhead, andits kitchen grate wide enough to roast a deer--this strangeblending of an hotel dining-room and a Court of Justice, hasnevertheless a link with the far distant past more wonderfulthan anything that has come down to us in the ruins of Greeceor Rome. 

Look at the simple card that notifies the dates of holdingthe Vederer's Court. Here is an old one which the Verderer, Philip Baylis, has kindly sent to Senator Hoar in responseto his request for a copy. 

 V. R. Her Majesty's Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, VERDERERS' COURT. Verderers: Charles Bathurst, Esq. Sir Thomas H. Crawley-Boevey, Bart. Maynard Willoughby Colchester-Wemyss, Esq. Russell James Kerr, Esq. Deputy-Surveyor: Philip Baylis, Esq. Steward: James Wintle. ----NOTICE---- The VERDERERS of Her Majesty's Forest of Dean hereby give Notice that the COURT of ATTACHMENT of our Sovereign Lady the Queen for the said Forest will be holden by adjournment, at the Speech House, in the said Forest, at half-past Two o'clock, in the afternoon, on the following days during the year 1897, viz. : Wednesday, the 27th January; Monday, the 8th March; Saturday, the 17th April; Thursday, the 27th May; Tuesday, the 6th July; Monday, the 16th August; Friday, the 24th September; Wednesday, the 3rd November; Monday, the 13th December; James Wintle, Steward. Newnham, 1st January, 1897. 

Many years ago I stood in the Court Room examining a similarnotice, puzzled at the absence of any system or order in thetimes appointed for the sittings, which did not come oncea month, or every six weeks; and did not even fall twice insuccession on the same day of the week. Turning to the landlordof the hotel I asked, "What is the rule for holding the Court?_When_ is it held?" _"Every forty days at twelve o'clockat noon"_ was the reply. Reflection showed that so strangea periodicity related to no notation of time with which weare now in touch; it must belong to a system that has passedaway; but what could this be?

We are reminded by the date of the building we are in (1680), that the room itself cannot have been used for much more thantwo centuries for holding the Courts. 

But there was a Verderer's Court held in several Forestsbesides this Forest of Dean, long before the Stuart days. The office itself is mentioned in Canute's Forest charter, dating back nearly nine hundred years; and as at that periodabout a third of England was covered with Forests, their influencemust have been very powerful; and local laws and customs inthem must have been far too firmly established for such aman as Canute to alter them. He could only have confirmedwhat he found; much as he confirmed the laws of nature asthey affected the tides at Southampton!

The next Forest Charter of national importance after Canute's, is that of Henry III. , in 1225. It is clear that he, again, made no material change in the old order of things; and inrecapitulating the old order of the Forest Courts, he ordainsthat the Court of Attachment (called in Dean Forest the Courtof the Speech) was to be held _every forty days. _ This Courtwas one of first instance, simply for the hearing of evidenceand getting up the cases for the "Swainmote, "* which came_three times a year. _ The Swains were free man; and at their_mote_ evidence was required from _three_ witnesses in eachcase, on which the Verderer and other officers of the kingpassed sentence in accordance with the laws laid down in thisCharter. From this Swainmote there was a final appeal tothe High Court of the Judges in Eyre (Eyre, from "errer" towander, being the Norman French for Itinerant, or, on Circuit)which was held _once in three years. _

[Footnote]* That the Forest Charter of Hen. III. Did not establish thesecourts is proved from a passage in Manwood, cap. 8, which runsthus: "And the said Swainmotes shal not be kept but within thecounties in the which they have been used to be kept. "[End of Footnote]

The forty-day court was common to all the ancient forestsof Britain; and that they go back to _before_ the time ofHenry III. Is clear from the following extracts from Coke'sFourth Institute, for which I am indebted to the kindnessof James G. Wood, of Lincoln's Inn. 

CAP. LXXIII. Of the Forests and the Jurisdiction of the Courts[p 289] of the Forest. * * * * * * * And now let us set down the Courts of the Forests--Within _every_ Forest there are these Courts 1. The Court of the Attachments or the Woodmote Court. This is to kept before the Verderors every forty days throughout the year --and thereupon it is called the Forty-day Court--At this Court the Foresters bring in the Attachments de viridi et venalione [&c &c] * * * * * * * 2. The Court of regard or Survey of days is holden every third year [&c &c] * * * * * * * 3. The Court of Swainmote is to be holden before the Verderors as judges by the Steward of the Swainmote thrice in every year [&c] * * * * * * * 4. ------ The Court of the Justice Seat holden before the Chief Justice of the Forest ---- aptly called Justice in eire ------ and this Court of the Justice Seat cannot be kept oftener than every third year. * * * * * * * [319] _For the antiquity of such Forests within England as we have treated of the best and surest argument therof is that the Forests in England (being in number 69) except the New Forest in Hampshire erected by William the Conqueror as a conqueror, and Hampton Court Forest by Hy 3, by authority of Parliament, are so ancient as no record or history doth make any mention of any of their Erections or beginnings. _

Here then we have clear evidence that nearly seven hundredyears ago the Verderer's Court was being held at periods oftime that bore no relation to any division of the year knownto the Normans or Plantagenets, or, before them, to the Saxons, or even, still earlier, to the Romans. We are, therefore, driven back to the period before the Roman invasion in Britain, and when the Forest legislation was, as Caesar found it, inthe hands of the Druids. In his brief and vivid account ofthese people he tells us that they used the Greek alphabet;and as he also says they were very proficient in astronomy, it seems clear that they had their astronomy from the samesource as their literature. Their astronomy involved of necessitytheir notation of time. And the Greeks, in turn, owed theirastronomy to the Egyptians, with whom the year was reckonedas of three hundred and sixty days; and this three hundredand sixty-day year gives us the clue to the forty-day periodfor holding the Forest Courts in Ancient Britain. 

We cannot fail to be struck, as we examine the old Forestcustoms, with the constant use of the _number three, _ as asacred or "lucky" number, on every possible occasion. Wehave just seen the role it plays in the Mine Court, with its_three_ presiding officials, its jury of multiples of _three_(twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight); its holly stick oath swornby _three_ witnesses. We have notice the Swainmote Court, also requiring _three_ witnesses, held _three_ times a year, andsubordinate to the Court of Eyre held once in _three_ years;to which should be added the perambulation of the Forestbounds at the same triennial visit in Eyre, when the king'sofficers were accompanied by nine foresters in fee (_threethrees_) and twenty-four jurors (_eight threes_). 

To go fully into the role of the number three in Britishtraditions would require a profound study; but it may beuseful briefly to note its influence on the Bardic poetry--the Triads, where the subjects are all grouped in threes. Nor was this predilection confined to the Island. We findit affecting the earliest history of Rome itself, with its _nine_gods ("By the nine gods he swore") and the _nine_ books whichthe Sibyl destroyed by _threes, _ till the last _three_ weresaved. Then we have the evidence in the name _nundina_*for a market, that the week was originally a cycle not ofseven, but of _nine_ days; and our own saying that a giventhing is a _"nine days wonder"_ is undoubtedly a survivalfrom the period when the nine days made a week, ** for sucha phrase expresses a round number or unit of time; not nine_separate_ days. 

[Footnotes]* The Romans meant by _nundinae_ periods that were really ofeight days; but they made them nine by counting in the one _from_which they started. So accustomed were they to this methodof notation that the priests who had the control of the calendar, upset Julius Caesar's plan for intercalating a day once in_four_ years ("Bissextile") by insisting that the intervalintended was _three_ years! Augustus was obliged to rectifythis by dropping the overplus day it occasioned. It is thisRoman custom of _inclusive_ reckoning which has led to theFrench calling a week _huit jours_, and a fortnight, _unequinzaine_. 

** The word week comes from _wika_ (= Norsk _vika_) to bend or_turn_. The idea connected with it was no doubt that of themoon's turning from one of its quarters to the next. I canremember when some of the people in "the Island" in Gloucesteralways made a point of _turning_ any coins they had in theirpockets when it was new moon and repeating a sort of invocationto the moon! How or when the nine day week was exchangedby western nations for the seven day one, we do not know;but it is likely that it may have been brought about by thePhoenicians and Jews, who regarded the number _seven_ asthe Druids regarded _three_--as something especially sacred. They had much of the commerce of Southern Europe in theirhands, and, therefore, a certain power in controlling themarkets, which it would be a convenience to Jews to _prevent_falling on the sabbath day. The circumstance that the lunarmonth fitted in with four weeks of seven days no doubt made iteasier to effect the change from _nundinae_. [End of Footnotes]

Shakespeare had been struck with the relationship of the_nine_ day week, alluded to in the proverb, to the more modernone of seven days, as is shown by his very clever juxtapositionof the two in "As You Like It. " In Act III. , Scene 2, hemakes Celia say to Rosalind

"But didst thou hear _without wondering_ how thy name shouldbe hanged and carved upon these trees?"

And Rosalind replies

"I was _seven_ of the _nine days out of the wonder_ beforeyou came"--_etc. _

Gloucester, down till the Norman time, and after, was thegreat manufactory of the iron brought from the Forest ofDean. The metal was brought up the Severn by barges, tothe quay which stood at the road running straight down fromLongsmith Street (in which Charles Hoar's house stands), andburied under all this street we find the cinder and slag ofthe Roman forges. In Domesday book (which was ordered tobe drawn up at a Parliament in Gloucester in 1083) it statesthat the City had paid to the King (_i. E. , _ Edward the Confessor)ten _dicres_ of iron yearly. This is very remarkable, fora dicre was three dozen rods or bars; so that the whole tributewas three hundred and sixty bars, or _one bar per day forthe Druid year of three hundred and sixty days. _*

[Footnote]* For more than a century after Julius Caesar had altered theyear to three hundred and sixty-five days, the Roman soldierswere still paid at the ancient rate of three hundred andsixty days only, losing the rest as _"terminalia, "_ or daysnot counted as belonging to the year! The proof of thisis that in the time of Domitian a soldier's _year's_ pay dividedby three hundred and sixty gives an even number of _ases_. [End of Footnote]

And now we come back to the Verderer's Court at the SpeechHouse with a clear reason for its being held _"every fortydays at twelve o'clock at noon. "_

Forty days was the _ninth_ of the Druid year of three hundredand sixty, and was a period of five weeks of eight days each, but which according to the ancient method of counting werecalled _"nine-days. "_ And the reason the Court sits "at Twelveo'clock at noon" is because the Druid day began at noon. Evennow, within ten miles of where I write, the children on MinchinhamptonCommon, on the Cotteswold hills, keep up _"old May Day, "_which was the opening of the Druid year, though they are ignorantof this. Boys and girls arm themselves on that day with boughsof the beech, and go through certain games with them; butexactly as the clock strikes _twelve_ they throw them away, under pain of being stigmatized as _"May fools!"_

Well has Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, that _"All_ thingsare _in all_ things!" Even this commonplace list of Courtdays in the Forest of Dean becomes a beautiful poem whenthe light of such a past shines on it; just as the veriest dustof the Krakatoan volcano evolves itself into every colorof the rainbow when it rises into the sunset sky. 

Since writing this paper I find that Philip Baylis, the Verdererof the Forest of Dean, has kindly sent three or four dozenof young oak trees from the Government plantations, to Washington, in order that they may be planted there and in some otherplaces in the United States, to begin the century with. TheState Department of Agriculture has arranged for the plantingof these oaks, and the periodical record of their measurements, so that a valuable basis will be established for an experimentthat may be carried on for a century, or more; and we, thearchaeologists of the nineteenth century, shall have wipedaway the stigma implied in the old Aberdeen Baillie's remark, that as _Posteerity_ had never done anything for us, we oughtnot to do anything for _posteerity!_

The Earl of Ducie has sent, accompanying these Forest of Deanoaks, four small plants, seedlings from the great ChestnutTree on his Estate at Tortworth; the largest and oldest ofits sort in Great Britain. It measures forty-nine feet roundthe trunk. 

Leaving the Speech House for Coleford and Newland we descenda steep hill for half a mile, and crossing the rail at theStation we begin to ascend the opposite rise through the woods. As the carriage climbs slowly up we keep on the lookout forthe margin-stones of the Roman paving which here and thereshow through the modern metaled surface--pieces fifteen totwenty inches long by about five inches in thickness, andset so deep in the ground that eighteen hundred years' wearhas never moved them. They are buttressed on the outer edgeby similar blocks set four or five inches lower, and themselvesforming one side of the solidly paved water-way or gutterwhich was constructed as part of every such road on a steepgradient, to secure it from abrasion by flood or sudden rushfrom heavy rainfall. There are many excellent examples ofthis in the Forest of Dean. We are on the watch, however, for some part where the _"margines"_ remain on _both_ sidesof the way. At last we come upon such a place, and alightingfrom the carriage we strain the tape measure across at twoor three points. The mean we find to be thirteen feet andseven inches. As the Roman foot was just over three per cent. Less than ours, this means that the Romans built the roadhere for a fourteen-foot way. So far as I have examinedtheir roads they were always constructed to certain standardwidths--seven feet, nine feet, eleven feet, thirteen feet, fourteen feet, or fifteen feet. 

It is not too much to say that most of the main roads inEngland are Roman; but the very continuity of their use hascaused this to be overlooked. All the _old_ roads in theForest of Dean have been pronounced by the Ordnance Surveyors, after close examination, to bear evidences of Roman paving, although for some centuries since then wheel carriages wentout of use here!

There is a vivid description in Statius of the making ofan imperial-road through such another Forest (if not indeedthis very one!) especially worth recalling here, because itwas written at very nearly the period of the building ofthis track over which we are journeying; _i. E. , _ near theend of the first century. 

The poet stands on a hill from which he can see the effectof the united work of the army of men who are engaged inthe construction: perhaps a hundred thousand forced laborers, under the control of the legionary soldiers who act as theengineers. He makes us see and hear with him the tens ofthousands of stone cutters and the ring of their tools squaringthe "setts"; and then one platoon after another stepping forwardand laying down its row of stones followed by rank after rankof men with the paviours' rammers, which rise and fall atthe sweep of the band-master's rods, keeping time in a statelymusic as they advance; the continuous falling and crashingof the trees as other thousands of hands ply the axes alongthe lines, that creep, slowly, but visibly, on through theForest that no foot had ever trodden--the thud of the multitudinousmachines driving the piles in the marshy spaces; the wholeinnumerable sounds falling on the ear like the roaring ofa great and vast sea. 

The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but thisis substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothingthat so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the powerof the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness, inone day, of an iron way that shall last for all time. 

We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteenhundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catchsome glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behindit so ineffaceable a mark. 

"I intended to ask you just now whether the man you spoketo in the road was a typical native of the district?" saidSenator Hoar. "He was dark and swarthy, with very black hairand piercing eyes; not at all like the majority of peoplewe see in Gloucester for instance. " "Yes, he is a typicalForester"; exactly such a man as Tacitus describes his Silurianancestors; so Spanish in appearance that he tries to accountfor it by remarking that _"that part of Britain lies overagainst Spain";_ as if it was such a short run across theBay of Biscay to the upper end of the Bristol Channel thatnothing would be more natural than for Spaniards to sail overhere with their wives and families and become Silures!

These Western Britons, both here in the Forest and in Cornwallcertainly remind one of Spaniards. The type is of an olderCeltic than that of the present Welsh people proper, as someevidences in the language also point to the occupation beingan older one. With respect to this particular district ofthe Forest and the East of Monmouthshire, one more elementmust not be left out of the account; and that is, that Caerleonwas founded by the second legion being removed to it fromGloucester about the time this road was made; and that itremained for three hundred years the headquarters of thatlegion, which was a Spanish one raised in the time of Augustus. Forty years ago I remember being at Caerleon (two and onehalf miles from Newport), when I met the children of the villagecoming out of school. It was hard to believe they were notSpanish or Italian!

At all events this part of Britain lies over against Boston;and Americans can cross over and see Caerleon for themselvesmore easily than the people could, of whom Tacitus wrote. 

INDEX [omitted]

[Transcriber's notes:

Typed into MS-DOS Editor under Windows XP, using 7-bit charactersonly. Several errors of punctuation or of single letters have beencorrected. The author uses both "contemporary" and "cotemporary. "

The Latin has not been checked for spelling, grammar, or sense. The one Greek quotation (of two words) has been omitted. 

Words have been hyphenated at the ends of lines only when the wordsare hyphenated elsewhere in the text or in common usage. ]