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  EULOGY

  ON

  CHIEF-JUSTICE CHASE,


  DELIVERED BY

  WILLIAM M. EVARTS,


  BEFORE THE

  ALUMNI OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, AT HANOVER, JUNE 24, 1874.


  NEW YORK:
  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
  549 AND 551 BROADWAY.
  1874.

  ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by
  D. APPLETON & CO.,
  In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.




  EULOGY

  ON

  CHIEF-JUSTICE CHASE.




MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN, THE ALUMNI OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE: When, not
many weeks since, the committee of your association did me the honor to
invite me to present, in an address to the assembled graduates of the
college, a commemoration of the life, the labors, and the fame of the
very eminent man and greatly honored scholar of your discipline, lawyer,
orator, senator, minister, magistrate, whom living a whole nation
admired and revered, whom dead a whole nation laments, I felt that
neither a just sense of public duty nor the obligations of personal
affection would permit me to decline the task. Yielding, perhaps too
readily, to the persuasions of your committee that somewhat close
professional and public association with the Chief-Justice in the later
years of his life, and the intimate enjoyment of his personal
friendship, might excuse my want of that binding tie of fellowship in a
commemoration, in which the venerated college does dutiful honor to a
son, and the assembled alumni crown with their affection the memory of a
brother, I dismissed also, upon the same persuasion, all anxious
solicitudes, which otherwise would have oppressed me, lest importunate
and inextricable preoccupations of time and mind should disable me from
presenting as considerable, and as considerate, a survey of the eminent
character and celebrated career of Mr. Chase as should comport with
them, or satisfy the just exigencies of the occasion.

The commemoration which brings us together has about it nothing
funereal, in sentiment or observance, to darken our minds or sadden our
hearts to-day. The solemn rites of sepulture, the sobbings of sorrowing
affection, the homage of public grief, the concourse of the great
officers of state, the assemblage of venerable judges, the processions
of the bar, of the clergy, of liberal and learned men, the attendant
crowds of citizens of every social rank and station, both in the great
city where he died, and at the national capital, have already graced his
burial with all imaginable dignity and unmeasured reverence. To prolong
or renew this pious office is no part of our duty to-day. Nor is the
maturity or nurture which the college gives to those it calls its sons,
bestowed as it is upon their mind and character, affected by the death
of the body as is the heart of the natural mother; nor are you, his
brethren in this foster care of the spirit, bowed with the same sense of
bereavement as are natural kindred. The filial and fraternal relation
which he bore to you, the college and the alumni, is hardly broken by
his death, nor is he hidden from you by his burial. His completed
natural life is but the assurance and perpetuation of the power, the
fame, the example, which the discipline and culture here bestowed had
for their object, and in which they find their continuing and
ever-increasing glory. The energy here engendered has not ceased its
beneficent activity, the torch here lighted still diffuses its
illumination, and the fires here kindled still radiate their heat.

Not less certain is it that the spirit of this commemoration imposes no
task of vindication or defense, and tolerates no tone of adulation or
applause. The tenor of this life, the manifestation of this character,
was open and public, before the eyes of all men, upon an eminent stage
of action, displayed constantly on the high places of the world. No
faculty that Mr. Chase possessed, no preparation of mind or of spirit,
for great undertakings or for notable achievements, ever failed of
exercise or exhibition for want of opportunity, or, being exercised or
exhibited, missed commensurate recognition or responsive plaudits from
his countrymen. His career shows no step backward, the places he filled
were all of the highest, the services he rendered were the most
difficult as well as the most eminent. If, as the preacher proclaims,
"time and chance happeneth to all," the times in which Mr. Chase lived
permitted the widest scope to great abilities and the noblest forms of
public service; and the fortunes of his life show the felicity of the
occasions which befell him to draw out these abilities, and to receive
these services. Not less complete was the round of public honors which
crowned his public labors, and we have no occasion, here, to lament any
shortcomings of prosperity or favor, or repeat the authentic judgment
which the voices of his countrymen have pronounced upon his fame.

The simple office, then, which seems to me marked out for one who
assumes this deputed service in the name of the college and for the
friends of good learning, is, in so far as the just limits of time and
circumstance will permit, to expose the main features of this celebrated
life, "to decipher the man and his nature," to connect the true elements
of his character and the moulding force of his education with the work
he did, with the influence he wielded in life, with the power of the
example which lives after him, and always to have in view, as the most
fruitful uses of the hour, his relations to the men and events of his
times, and, not less, his true place in history among the lawyers,
orators, statesmen, magistrates of the land. _Vera non verba_ is our
maxim to-day; truth, not words, must mark the tribute the college pays
to the sober dignity and solid worth of its distinguished son.

Born of a lineage, which on the father's side dates its American descent
from the Puritan emigration of 1640, and on the mother's, finds her the
first of that stock native to this country, the son of these parents
took no contrariety of traits from the union of the blood of the English
Puritans and the Scotch Covenanters, but rather harmonious corroboration
of the characteristics of both. These, sturdy enough in either, combined
in this descendant to produce as independent and resolute a nature for
the conflicts and labors of his day, as any experience of trial or
triumph, of proscription or persecution suffered or resisted, had
required or supplied in the long history of the contests of these two
congenial races with priests and potentates, with principalities and
powers. Nothing could be less consonant with a just estimate of the
strong traits of this lineage, than which neither Hebrew, nor Grecian,
nor Roman nurture has wrought for its heroes either a firmer fibre or a
nobler virtue, than to ascribe its chief power to enthusiasm or
fanaticism. Plain, sober, practical men and women as they were, there
was no hard detail of every-day life that they were not equal to, no
patient and cheerless sacrifice they could not endure, no vicissitude of
adverse or prosperous fortune which they could not meet with unchecked
serenity. If it be enthusiasm that in them the fear of God had cast out
the fear of man, or fanaticism that they placed "things that are
spiritually discerned" above the vain shows of the world of sense, in so
far they were enthusiasts and fanatics. In every stern conflict, in
every vast labor, in every intellectual and moral development of which
this country has been the scene, without fainting or weariness they have
borne their part, and in the conclusive triumph of the principles of the
Puritans and their policies over all discordant, all opposing elements,
which enter into the wide comprehension of American nationality, theirs
be the praise which belongs to such well-doing.

The son of a farmer--a man of substance, and of credit with his
neighbors, and not less with the people of his State--young Chase drew
from his boyhood the vigor of body and of mind which rural life and
labors are well calculated to nourish. Several of his father's brothers
were graduates of this college, and reached high positions in Church and
State. An unpropitious turn of the commercial affairs of the country
nipped, with its frost, the growing prosperity of his father, whose
death, soon following, left him, in tender years, and as one of a
numerous family, to the sole care of his mother. With most scanty means,
her thrift and energy sufficed to save her children from ignorance or
declining manners; maintained their self-respect and independence; set
them forth in the world well disciplined, stocked with good principles,
and inspired with proud and honorable purposes. To the praise of this
excellent woman, wherever the name of her great son shall be proclaimed,
this, too, shall be told in remembrance of her: that a Christian's
faith, and a mother's love, as high and pure as ever ennobled the most
famous matrons of history, stamped the character and furnished the
education which equipped him for the labors and the triumphs of his
life. One cannot read her letters to her son in college without the
deepest emotion. How many such women were there, in the plain ranks of
New England life, in her generation! How many are there now! Paying
marvelous little heed to the discussion of women's rights, they show a
wonderful addiction to the performance of women's duties.

His uncle, Bishop Chase of Ohio, assumed, for a time, the care and
expense of his education, and this drew him to the West, where, under
this tutelage, he pursued academic studies for two years. At the end of
this time he returned to his mother's charge, entered the junior class
of Dartmouth College, and graduated in the year 1826, at the age of
eighteen. The only significance, in its impression on his future life,
of this brief guardianship of the Western Bishop, was as the determining
influence which fixed the chief city of the West in his choice as the
forum and arena of his professional and public life. After spending four
years in Washington, gaining his subsistence by teaching, a law-student
with Mr. Wirt--then at the zenith of his faculties and his
fame--studying men and manners at the capital, watching the new
questions then shaping themselves for political action, observing the
celebrated statesmen of the day, conversant with the great Chief-Justice
Marshall and his learned associates on the bench of the Supreme Court,
and with Webster, and Binney, and other famous lawyers at its bar, he
was admitted to practice, and, at the age of twenty-two, established
himself at Cincinnati, transferring thus, once and forever, his home
from the New England of his family, his birth, his education, and his
love, to the ruder but equally strenuous and more expansive society of
the West.

While yet of tender years, following up the earlier pious instruction of
his mother, and his own profound sense of religious obligations under
the inculcation of the Bishop, he accepted the Episcopal Church as the
body of Christian believers in whose communion he found the best support
for the religious life he proposed to himself. When he left your college
he had not wholly relinquished a purpose, once held, of adopting the
clerical profession. His adhesion to the Christian faith was simple and
constant and sincere, and he accepted it as the master and rule of his
life, in devout confidence in the moral government of the world, as a
present and real supremacy over the race of man and all human affairs.
He was all his life a great student of the Scriptures, and no modern
speculations ever shook the solid reasons of his belief. When he entered
the city of Washington, fresh from college, "the earnest prayer of his
heart was, that God would give him work to do, and success in doing it."
When he was laying out the plans of professional life, on his first
establishment at Cincinnati, his invocation was, "May God enable me to
be content with the consciousness of faithfully discharging all my
duties, and deliver me from a too eager thirst for the applause and
favor of men." All through the successive and manifold activities of his
busy and strenuous life, when, to outward seeming, they were all worldly
and personal, the same predominant sense of duty and religious
responsibility animated and solemnized the whole.

At this point in his life we may draw the line between the period of
education for the work he had before him and that work itself. What Mr.
Chase was, at this time, in all the essential traits of his moral and
intellectual character--in his views of life, its value, its just
objects and aims, its social, moral, and religious responsibilities; in
his views of himself, his duties, obligations, prospects, and
possibilities; in his determinations and desires--such, it seems to me
from the most attentive study of all these points--such, in a very
marked degree, he continued to be at every stage of his ascent in life.

What, then, shall we assign as the decisive elements, the controlling
constituents, of character--and what the assurance of their persistence
and their force--which this youth could bring to the service of the
State, or contribute to the advancement of society and the well-being of
mankind?

These were simple, but, in combination, powerful, and adequate to fill
out worthily the life of large opportunities which, though not yet
foreseen to himself, was awaiting him.

The faculty of reason was very broad and strong in him, yet without
being vast or surprising. It seized the sensible and practical relations
of all subjects submitted to it, and firmly held them in its tenacious
grasp; it exposed these relations to the apprehension of those whose
opinion or action it behooved him to influence, by methods direct and
sincere, discarding mere ingenuity, and disdaining the subtleness of
insinuation. His education had all been of a kind to discipline and
invigorate his natural powers; not to encumber them with a besetting
weight of learning, or to supplant them by artificial training.

His oratory was vigorous, with those "qualities of clearness, force, and
earnestness, which produce conviction." His rhetoric was ample, but not
rich; his illustrations apposite, but seldom to the point of wit; his
delivery weighty and imposing.

His force of will, whether in respect of peremptoriness or persistency,
was prodigious. His courage to brave, and his fortitude to endure, were
absolute. His loyalty to every cause in which he enlisted--his fidelity
in every warfare in which he took up arms--were proof against peril and
disaster.

His estimate of human affairs, and of his own relation to them, was
sober and sedate. All their grandeur and splendor, to his apprehension,
connected themselves with the immortal life, and with God, as their
guide, overseer, and ruler; and the sum of the practical wisdom of all
worthy personal purposes seemed to him to be, to discern the path of
duty, and to pursue it.

His views of the commonwealth were essentially Puritan. Equality of
right, community of interest, reciprocity of duty, were the adequate,
and the only adequate, principles with him to maintain the strength and
virtue of society, and preserve the power and permanence of the State.
With these principles unimpaired and unimpeded he feared nothing for his
countrymen or their government, and he made constant warfare upon every
assault or menace that endangered them.

It was with these endowments and with this preparation of spirit, that
Mr. Chase confronted the realities of life, and assumed to play a part
which, whether humble or high in the scale and plane of circumstance,
was sure to be elevated and worthy in itself; for the loftiness of his
spirit for the conflict of life was

            "Such as raised
  To height of noblest temper heroes old
  Arming to battle."

Such a character necessarily confers authority among men, and that Mr.
Chase was ready, on all occasions arising, to assert his high principles
by comporting action was never left in doubt. Whether by interposing
his strong arm to save Mr. Birney from the fury of a mob of Cincinnati
gentlemen, incensed at the freedom of his press in its defiance of
slavery; or by his bold and constant maintenance in the courts of the
cause of fugitive slaves in the face of the resentments of the public
opinion of the day; or by his fearless desertion of all reigning
politics to lead a feeble band of protestants through the wilderness of
anti-slavery wanderings, its pillar of cloud by day, its pillar of fire
by night; or as Governor of Ohio facing the intimidations of the slave
States, backed by Federal power and a storm of popular passion; or in
consolidating the triumphant politics on the urgent issue which was to
flame out into rebellion and revolt; or in his serene predominance,
during the trial of the President, over the rage of party hate which
brought into peril the coördination of the great departments of
Government, and threatened its whole frame--in all these marked
instances of public duty, as in the simple routine of his ordinary
conduct, Mr. Chase asked but one question to determine his course of
action, "Is it right?" If it were, he had strength, and will, and
courage to carry him through with it.

In the ten years of professional life which followed his admission to
the bar, Mr. Chase established a repute for ability, integrity,
elevation of purpose and capacity for labor, which would have surely
brought him the highest rewards of forensic prosperity and distinction,
and in due course, of eminent judicial station. In this quieter part of
his life, as in his public career, it is noticeable that his employments
were never common-place, but savored of a public zest and interest. His
compilation of the Ohio Statutes was a _magnum opus_, indeed, for the
leisure hours of a young lawyer, and possesses a permanent value,
justifying the assurance Chancellor Kent gave him, that this surprising
labor would find its "reward in the good he had done, in the talents he
had shown, and in the gratitude of his profession."

But this quiet was soon broken, never to be resumed, and though the
great office of Chief-Justice was in store for him, it was to be reached
by the path of statesmanship and not of jurisprudence.

If it had seemed ever to Mr. Chase and his youthful contemporaries, that
they had come upon times when, as Sir Thomas Browne thought two hundred
years ago, "it is too late to be ambitious," and "the great mutations of
the world are acted," the illusion was soon dispelled. It has been sadly
said of Greece in the age of Plutarch, that "all her grand but turbulent
activities, all her noble agitations spent, she was only haunted by the
spectres of her ancient renown." No doubt, forty years ago, in this
country, there was a prevalent feeling that the age of the early
settlements and, again, of our War of Independence, had closed the
heroic chapters of our history, and left nothing for the public life of
our later times, but peaceful and progressive development, and the calm
virtues of civil prudence, to work out of our system all incongruities
and discords. But what these political speculations assigned as the
passionless work of successive generations, was to be done in our time,
and, as it were, in one "unruly right."

Mr. Chase had supported General Harrison for the presidency in 1840, not
upon any very thorough identification with Whig politics, but partly
from a natural tendency toward the personal fortunes of a candidate from
the West, and from his own State, in the absence of any strong
attraction of principle to draw him to the candidate or the politics of
the Democratic party. But, upon the death of Harrison and, the elevation
of Tyler to the presidency, Mr. Chase, promptly discerning the signs of
the times, took the initiative toward making the national attitude and
tendency on the subject of slavery the touchstone of politics. Politic
and prudent by nature, and with no personal disappointments or
grievances to bias his course, he doubtless would have preferred to save
and use the accumulated and organized force of one or the other of the
political parties which divided the country, and press its power into
the service of the principles and the political action which he had,
undoubtingly, decided the honor and interests of the country demanded.
He was among the first of the competent and practical political thinkers
of the day, to penetrate the superficial crust which covered the
slumbering fires of our politics, and to plan for the guidance of their
irrepressible heats so as to save the constituted liberties of the
nation, if not from convulsion, at least from conflagration. He found
the range of political thought and action, which either party permitted
to itself or to its rival, compressed by two unyielding postulates. The
first of these insisted, that the safety of the republic would tolerate
no division of parties, in Federal politics, which did not run through
the slave States as well as the free. The second was that no party could
maintain a footing in the slave States, that did not concede the
nationality of the institution of slavery and its right, in equality
with all the institutions of freedom, to grow with the growth and
strengthen with the strength of the American Union. Nothing can be more
interesting to a student of politics than the masterly efforts of
patriotism and statesmanship, in which all the great men of the country
participated, for many years, to confine the perturbations of our public
life to a controversy with this latter and lesser postulate. Seward with
the Whig party, Chase with the Democratic party, and a host of others in
both, tried hard to conciliate the irreconcilable, and to stultify
astuteness, to the acceptance of the proposition that slavery, its
growth girdled, would not be already struck with death. Quite early,
however, Mr. Chase grappled with the primary postulate, and through
great labors, wise counsels, long-suffering patience, and by the
successive stages of the Liberty party, Independent Democracy, and
Free-Soil party, led up the way to the Republican party, which, made up
by the Whig party dropping its slave State constituency, and the
Democratic party losing its Free-Soil constituents, rent this primary
postulate of our politics in twain, and took possession of the
Government by the election of its candidate, Mr. Lincoln.

This movement in politics was one of prodigious difficulty and
immeasurable responsibility. It was so felt to be by the prime actors in
it, though with greatly varying largeness of survey and depth of
insight. In the system of American politics it created as vast a
disturbance as would a mutation of the earth's axis, or the displacement
of the solar gravitation, in our natural world. This great transaction
filled the twenty years of Mr. Chase's mature manhood, say, from the age
of thirty to that of fifty years. He must be awarded the full credit of
having understood, resolved upon, planned, organized, and executed, this
political movement, and whether himself leading or coöperating or
following in the array and march of events, his plan, his part, his
service, were all for the cause, its prosperity, and its success. To
one who considers this career, not as completed and triumphant, not with
the glories of power, and dignities, and fame which attended it, not
with the blessings of a liberated race, a consolidated Union, an
ennobled nationality which receive the plaudits of his countrymen, but
as its hazards and renunciations, its toils and its perils, showed at
the outset, in contrast with the ease and splendor of his personal
fortunes which adhesion to the political power of slavery seemed to
insure to him, and then contemplates the promptness of his choice and
the steadfastness of his perseverance, the impulse and the action seem
to find a parallel in the life of the great Hebrew statesman, who, "_by
faith_, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of
Pharaoh's daughter," and "_by faith_, forsook Egypt, not fearing the
wrath of the king."

The first half of this period of twenty years witnessed only the
preliminaries, equally brave and sagacious, of agitation, promulgation
of purposes and opinions, consultations, conventions, and political
organizations, more and more comprehensive and effective. All this time
Mr. Chase was simply a citizen, and apparently could expect no political
station or authority till it should come from the prosperous fortunes of
the party he was striving to create. Suddenly, by a surprising
conjunction of circumstances he was lifted, at one bound, to the highest
and widest sphere of influence, upon the opinion of the country, which
our political establishment presents--I mean the Senate of the United
States. The elective body, the Legislature of Ohio, was filled in almost
equal numbers with Whigs and Democrats, but a handful of Liberty party
men held the control to prevent or determine a majority. They elected
Mr. Chase. The concurrence is similar, in its main features, to the
election of Mr. Sumner to the Senate, two years afterward, in
Massachusetts. Much criticism of such results is always and necessarily
excited. The true interpretation of such transactions is simply a
transition state from old to new politics, wherein party names and
present interests are unchanged, but opinions and projects and prospects
are taking a new shape, and the old mint, all at once, astonishes
everybody by striking a new image and superscription, soon to be stamped
upon the whole coinage. The part of Mr. Chase in this election, as of
Mr. Sumner in his own, was elevated and without guile. His term in the
Senate brought him to the year 1856, and was followed by two successive
elections and four years' service as Governor of Ohio, and a reëlection
to the Senate. In these high stations he added public authority to his
opinions and purposes, and gained for them wider and wider influence,
while he discharged all general senatorial duties, and official
functions as Governor, with benefit to the legislation of the nation and
to the administration of the State.

As the presidential election approached and the Republican party took
the field with an assurance of assuming the administration of the
Federal Government, and of meeting the weighty responsibility of the new
political basis, the question of candidates absorbed the attention of
the party, and attracted the interest of the whole country. When a new
dynasty is to be enthroned, the _personality_ of the ruler is an element
of the first importance. In the general judgment of the country, and
equally to the apprehension of the mass of his own party and of its
rival, Mr. Seward stood as the natural candidate, and upon manifold
considerations. His unquestioned abilities, his undoubted fidelity, his
vast services and wide following in the party, presented an
unprecedented combination of political strength to obtain the nomination
and carry the election, and of adequate faculties and authority with the
people for the prosperous administration of the presidential office.
Second only to Mr. Seward, in this general judgment of his countrymen,
stood Mr. Chase, with just enough of preference for him, in some
quarters, over Mr. Seward, upon limited and special considerations, to
encourage that darling expedient of our politics, a resort to a _third_
candidate. This recourse was had, and Mr. Lincoln was nominated and
elected.

The disclosure of Mr. Lincoln to the eyes of his countrymen as a
possible, probable, actual candidate for the presidency came upon them
with the suddenness and surprise of a revelation. His advent to power as
the ruler of a great people, in the supreme juncture of their affairs,
to be the head of the state among its tried and trusted statesmen, to
subordinate and coördinate the pride and ambition of leaders, the
passions and interests of the masses, and to guide the destinies of a
nation whose institutions were all framed for obedience to law and
perpetual domestic peace, through rebellion, revolt, and civil war; and
to the subversion of the very order of society of a vast territory and a
vast population, finds no parallel in history; and was a puzzle to all
the astrologers and soothsayers. It has been said of George III.--whose
narrow intellect and obstinate temper so greatly helped on the rebellion
of our ancestors to our independence--it has been said of George III.,
that "it was his misfortune that, intended by nature to be a farmer,
accident placed him on a throne." It was the happy fortune of the
American people, that to the manifest advantages of freedom from
jealousies of any rivals; and from commitment, by any record, to schemes
or theories or sects or cabals, pursued by no hatreds, beguiled by no
attachments, Mr. Lincoln added a vigorous, penetrating, and capacious
intellect, and a noble, generous nature which filled his conduct of the
Government, in small things and great, from beginning to end, "with
malice to none and charity to all." These qualities were indispensable
to the safety of the Government and to the prosperous issue of our civil
war. In the great crisis of a nation struggling with rebellion, the
presence or absence of these personal traits in a ruler may make the
turning-point in the balance of its fate. Had Lincoln, in dealing with
the administration of government during the late rebellion, insisted as
George III. did, in his treatment of the American Revolution, upon "the
right of employing as responsible advisers those only whom he personally
liked, and who were ready to consult and execute his personal wishes,"
had he excluded from his counsels great statesmen like Seward and Chase,
as King George did Fox and Burke, who can measure the dishonor,
disorder, and disaster into which our affairs might have fallen? Such
narrow intelligence and perversity are as little consistent with the
true working of administration under our Constitution as they were under
the British Constitution, and as little consonant with the sound sense
as they are with the generous spirit of our people.

By the arrangement of his Cabinet, and his principal appointments for
critical services, Mr. Lincoln showed at once that nature had fitted him
for a ruler, and accident only had hid his earlier life in obscurity. I
cannot hesitate to think that the presence of Mr. Seward and Mr. Chase
in the great offices of State and Treasury, and their faithful
concurrence in the public service and the public repute of the
President's conduct of the Government, gave to the people all the
benefits which might have justly been expected from the election of
either to be himself the head of the Government and much else besides. I
know of no warrant in the qualities of human nature, to have hoped that
either of these great political leaders would have made as good a
minister under the administration of the other, as President, as both of
them did under the administration of Mr. Lincoln. I see nothing in Mr.
Lincoln's great qualities and great authority with this people, which
could have commensurately served our need in any place, in the conduct
of affairs, except at their head.

The general importance, under a form of government where the confidence
of the people is the breath of the life of executive authority, of
filling the great offices of state with men who, besides possessing the
requisite special faculties for their several departments and large
general powers of mind for politics and policies, have also great repute
with the party, and great credit with the country, was well understood
by the President. He knew that the times needed, in the high places of
government, men "who," in Bolingbroke's phrase, "had built about them
the opinion of mankind which, fame after death, is superior strength and
power in life."

Of the great abilities which Mr. Chase, in his administration of the
Treasury, exhibited through the three arduous years of that public
service, no question has ever been made. The exactions of the place knew
no limits. A people, wholly unaccustomed to the pressure of taxation,
and with an absolute horror of a national debt, was to be rapidly
subjected to the first without stint, and to be buried under a mountain
of the last. Taxes which should support military operations on the
largest scale, and yet not break the back of industry which alone could
pay them; loans, in every form that financial skill could devise, and to
the farthest verge of the public credit; and, finally, the extreme
resort of governments under the last stress and necessity, of the
subversion of the legal tender, by the substitution of what has been
aptly and accurately called the "coined credit" of the Government for
its coined money--all these exigencies and all these expedients made up
the daily problems of the Secretary's life. We may have some conception
of the magnitude of these financial operations, by considering one of
the subordinate contrivances required to give to the currency of the
country the enormous volume and the ready circulation without which the
tides of revenue and expenditure could not have maintained their flow. I
refer to the transfer of the paper money of the country from the State
to the national banks. This transaction, financially and politically,
transcends in magnitude and difficulty, of itself alone, any single
measure of administrative government found in our history, yet the
conception, the plan, and the execution, under the conduct of Mr. Chase,
took less time and raised less disturbance than it is the custom of our
politics to accord to a change in our tariff or a modification of a
commercial treaty. Another special instance of difficult and complicated
administration was that of the renewal of the intercourse of trade, to
follow closely the success of our arms, and subdue the interests of the
recovered region to the requirements of the Government. But I cannot
insist on details, where all was vast and surprising and prosperous. I
hazard nothing in saying that the management of the finances of the
civil war was the marvel of Europe and the admiration of our own people.
For a great part of the wisdom, the courage, and the overwhelming force
of will which carried us through the stress of this stormy sea, the
country stands under deep obligations to Mr. Chase as its pilot through
its fiscal perils and perplexities. Whether the genius of Hamilton,
dealing with great difficulties and with small resources, transcended
that of Chase, meeting the largest exigencies with great resources, is
an unprofitable speculation. They stand together, in the judgment of
their countrymen, the great financiers of our history.

A somewhat persistent discrepancy of feeling and opinion between the
President and the Secretary, in regard to an important office in the
public service, induced Mr. Chase to resign his portfolio, and Mr.
Lincoln to acquiesce in his desire. No doubt, it is not wholly fortunate
in our Government that the distribution of patronage, a mixed question
of party organization and public service, should so often harass and
embarrass administration, even in difficult and dangerous times. Mr.
Lincoln's ludicrous simile is an incomparable description of the system
as he found it. He said, at the outset of his administration, that "he
was like a man letting rooms at one end of his house, while the other
end was on fire." Some criticism of the Secretary's resignation and of
the occasion of it, at the time, sought to impute to them consequences
of personal acerbity between these eminent men, and the mischiefs of
competing ambitions and discordant counsels for the public interests.
But the appointment of Mr. Chase to the chief-justiceship of the United
States silenced all this evil speech and evil surmise.

There is no doubt that Mr. Chase greatly desired this office, its
dignity and durability both considered, the greatest gratification, to
personal desires, and the worthiest in public service, and in public
esteem, that our political establishment affords. Fortunate, indeed, is
he who, in the estimate of the profession of the law, and in the general
judgment of his countrymen, combines the great natural powers, the
disciplined faculties, the large learning, the larger wisdom, the firm
temper, the amiable serenity, the stainless purity, the sagacious
statesmanship, the penetrating insight, which make up the qualities that
should preside at this high altar of justice, and dispense to this great
people the final decrees of a government "not of men, but of laws." To
whatever President it comes, as a function of his supreme authority, to
assign this great duty to the worthiest, there is given an opportunity
of immeasurable honor for his own name, and of vast benefits to his
countrymen, outlasting his own brief authority, and perpetuating its
remembrance in the permanent records of justice, "the main interest of
all human society," so long as it holds sway among men. John Adams, from
the Declaration of Independence down, and with the singular felicity of
his line of personal descendants, has many titles to renown, but by no
act of his life has he done more to maintain the constituted liberties
which he joined in declaring, or to confirm his own fame, than by giving
to the United States the great Chief-Justice Marshall, to be to us,
forever, through every storm that shall beset our ship of state--

  "Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw,
    And saving them that eye it."

In this disposition, Mr. Lincoln appointed Mr. Chase to the vacant
seat, and the general voice recognized the great fitness of the
selection.

I may be permitted to borrow from the well-considered and sober words of
an eminent judge, the senior Associate on the bench of the Supreme
Court--words that will carry weight with the country which mine could
not--a judicial estimate of this selection. Mr. Justice Clifford says:
"Appointed, as it were, by common consent, he seated himself easily and
naturally in the chair of justice, and gracefully answered every demand
upon the station, whether it had respect to the dignity of the office,
or to the elevation of the individual character of the incumbent, or to
his firmness, purity, or vigor of mind. From the first moment he drew
the judicial robes around him he viewed all questions submitted to him
as a judge in the calm atmosphere of the bench, and with the deliberate
consideration of one who feels that he is determining issues for the
remote and unknown future of a great people."

_Magistratus ostendit virum_--the magistracy shows out the man. A great
office, by its great requirements and great opportunities, calls out and
displays the great powers and rare qualities which, presumably, have
raised the man to the place. Let us consider this last public service
and last great station, as they exhibit Mr. Chase to a candid estimate.

And, first, I notice the conspicuous fitness for judicial service of the
mental and moral constitution of the man. All through the heady contests
of the vehement politics of his times, his share in them had embodied
decision, moderation, serenity, and inflexible submission to reason as
the master and ruler of all controversies. Force, fraud, cunning, and
all lubric arts and artifices, even the beguilements of rhetoric, found
no favor with him, as modes of warfare or means of victory. So far,
then, from needing to lay down any weapons, or disuse any methods in
which he was practised, or learn or assume new habits of mind or strange
modes of reasoning, Mr. Chase, in the working of his intellect and the
frame of his spirit, was always judicial.

It was not less fortunate for the prompt authority of his new station,
so dependent upon the opinion of the country, that his credit for great
abilities and capacity for large responsibilities was already
established. Great repute, as well as essential character, is justly
demanded for all elevated public stations, and especially for judicial
office, whose prosperous service, in capital junctures, turns mainly on
moral power with the community at large.

Both these preparations easily furnished the Chief-Justice with the
requisite aptitude for the three relations, of prime importance, upon
which his adequacy must finally be tested; I mean, his relation to the
court as its presiding head, his relation to the profession as masters
of the reason and debate over which the court is the arbiter, and his
relation to the people and the State in the exercise of the critical
constitutional duties of the court, as a coördinate department of the
Government.

In a numerous court, that the Chief-Justice should have a prevalent and
gracious authority, as first among equals, to adjust, arrange, and
facilitate the coöperative working of its members, will not be doubted.
For more than sixty years, at least, this court had felt this
authority--_potens et lenis dominatio_--in the presence of the two
celebrated Chief-Justices who filled out this long service. Their great
experience and great age had supported, and general conformity of
political feeling, if not opinion, on the bench, had assisted, this
relation of the Chief-Justice to the court.

When Mr. Chase was called to this station, he found the bench filled
with men of mark and credit, and his accession made an exactly equal
division of the court between the creations of the old and of the new
politics. In these circumstances the proper maintenance of the
traditional relation of the Chief-Justice to the court was of much
importance to its unbroken authority with the public. That it was so
maintained was apparent to observation, and Mr. Justice Clifford,
speaking for the court, has shown it in a most amiable light:

"Throughout his judicial career he always maintained that dignity of
carriage and that calm, noble, and unostentatious presence that
uniformly characterized his manners and deportment in the social circle;
and, in his intercourse with his brethren, his suggestions were always
couched in friendly terms, and were never marred by severity or
harshness."

As for the judgment of the bar of the country, while it gave its full
assent to the appointment of Mr. Chase, as an elevated and wise
selection by the President, upon the general and public grounds which
should always control, there was some hesitancy, on the part of the
lawyers, as to the completeness of Mr. Chase's professional training,
and the special aptitude of his intellect to thread the tangled mazes of
affairs which form the body of private litigations. The doubt was
neither unkind nor unnatural, and it was readily and gladly resolved
under the patient and laborious application, and the accurate and
discriminating investigation, with which the Chief-Justice handled the
diversified subjects, and the manifold complexities, which were brought
into judgment before him. In fact, the original dubitation had
overlooked the earlier distinction of Mr. Chase at the bar in some most
important forensic efforts, and had erred in comparing, for their
estimate, Mr. Chase entering upon judicial employments, with his
celebrated predecessors, as they showed themselves at the close, not at
the outset, of their long judicial service. I feel no fear of dissent
from the profession in saying that those who practised in the Circuit or
in the Supreme Court while he presided, as well as the larger and
widely-diffused body of lawyers who give competent and responsible study
to the reports, recognize the force of his reason, the clearness of his
perceptions, the candor of his opinions, and the lucid rhetoric of his
judgments, as assuring his rank with the eminent judges of our own and
the mother-country.

But, in the most imposing part of the jurisdiction and jurisprudence of
the court; in its dominion over all that belongs to the law of nations,
whether occupied with the weighty questions of peace and war, and the
multitudinous disturbances of public and private law which follow the
change from one to the other; or with the complications of foreign
intercourse and commerce with all the world, which the genius of our
people is constantly expanding; in its control, also, of the lesser
public law of our political system, by which we are a nation of
republics, where the bounds of State and Federal authority need constant
exploration, and require accurate and circumspect adjustment; in its
final arbitrament on all conflicts and encroachments by which the great
coördinate departments of the Government are to be confined to their
appropriate spheres; in that delicate and superb supremacy of judicial
reason whereby the Constitution confides to the deliberations of this
court the determination, even, of the legality of legislation, and
trusts it, nevertheless, to abstain itself from law-making--in all these
transcendent functions of the tribunal the preparation and the adequacy
of the Chief-Justice were unquestioned.

Accordingly, we find in the few years of his service, before his decline
in health, in the crowd of causes bred by the civil war, which pressed
the court with novel embarrassments, and loaded it with unprecedented
labors, that the Chief-Justice gave conspicuous evidence, in repeated
instances, of that union of the faculties of a lawyer and a statesman,
which alone can satisfy the exactions of this highest jurisdiction,
unequaled and unexampled in any judicature in the world. To name these
conspicuous causes merely, without unfolding them, would carry no
impression; and time fails for any demonstrative criticism upon them.

There are two passages in the judicial service of Mr. Chase which,
attracting great attention and exciting some difference of opinion at
the time of the transactions, invite a brief consideration at your
hands.

The first political impeachment in our constitutional history,
involving, as it did, the accusation of the President of the United
States, required the Chief-Justice to preside at the trial before the
Senate, creating thus the tribunal to which the Constitution had
assigned this high jurisdiction. Beyond the injunction that the Senate,
when sitting for the trial of impeachments, should be "on oath,"
the Constitution gave no instruction to fix or ascertain the
character of the procedure, the nature of the duty assigned to the
specially-organized court, or the distribution of authority between the
Chief-Justice and the Senate. The situation lacked no feature of
gravity--no circumstance of solicitude--and the attention of the whole
country, and of foreign nations, watched the transaction at every stage
of its progress. No circumstances could present a greater disparity of
political or popular forces between accuser and accused, and none could
be imagined of more thorough commitment of the body of the court--the
Senate--both in the interests of its members, in their political
feeling, and their pre-judgments; all tending to make the condemnation
of the President, upon all superficial calculations, inevitable. The
effort of the Constitution to guard against mere partisan judgment, by
requiring a two-third vote to convict, was paralyzed by the complexion
of the Senate, showing more than four-fifths of that body of the party
which had instituted the impeachment and was demanding conviction. To
this party, as well, the Chief-Justice belonged, as a founder, a leader,
a recipient of its honors, and a lover of its prosperity and its fame.
The President, raised to the office from that of Vice-President--to
which alone he had been elected--by the deplored event of Mr. Lincoln's
assassination, was absolutely without a party, in the Senate or in the
country; for the party whose suffrages he had received for the
vice-presidency was the hostile force in his impeachment. And, to bring
the matter to the worst, the succession to all the executive power and
patronage of the Government, in case of conviction, was to fall into the
administration of the President of the Senate--the creature, thus, of
the very court invested with the duty of trial and the power of
conviction.

Against all these immense influences, confirmed and inflamed by a storm
of party violence, beating against the Senate-house without abatement
through the trial, the President was acquitted. To what wise or
fortunate protection of the stability of government does the people of
this country owe its escape from this great peril? Solely, I cannot
hesitate to think, to the potency--with a justice-loving, law-respecting
people--of the few decisive words of the Constitution which, to the
common apprehension, had impressed upon the transaction the solemn
character of trial and conviction, under the sanction of the oath to
bind the conscience, and not of the mere exercise of power, of which its
will should be its reason. In short, the Constitution had made the
procedure _judicial_, and not _political_. It was this sacred
interposition that stayed this plague of political resentments which,
with their less sober and intelligent populations, have thwarted so many
struggles for free government and equal institutions.

Over this scene, through all its long agitations, the Chief-Justice
presided, with firmness and prudence, with circumspect comprehension,
and sagacious forecast of the vast consequences which hung, not upon the
result of the trial as affecting any personal fortunes of the
President, but upon the maintenance of its character as a trial--upon
the prevalence of law, and the supremacy of justice, in its methods of
procedure, in the grounds and reasons of its conclusion. That his
authority was greatly influential in fixing the true constitutional
relations of the Chief-Justice to the Senate, and establishing a
precedent of procedure not easily to be subverted; that it was felt,
throughout the trial, with persuasive force, in the maintenance of the
judicial nature of the transaction; and that it never went a step beyond
the office which belonged to him--of presiding over the Senate trying an
impeachment--is not to be doubted.

The President was acquitted. The disappointment of the political
calculations which had been made upon, what was felt by the partisans of
impeachment to be, an assured result, was unbounded; and resentments,
rash and unreasoning, were visited upon the Chief-Justice, who had
influenced the Senate to be judicial, and had not himself been
political. No doubt, this impeachment trial permanently affected the
disposition of the leading managers of the Republican party toward the
Chief-Justice, and his attitude thereafter toward that party, in his
character of a citizen. But the people of the country never assumed any
share of the resentment of party feeling. The charge against him, if it
had any shape or substance, came only to this: that the Chief-Justice
brought into the Senate, under his judicial robes, no concealed weapons
of party warfare, and that he had not plucked from the Bible, on which
he took and administered the judicial oath, the commandment for its
observance.

Not long after Mr. Chase's accession to the bench there came before the
court a question, in substance and in form, as grave and difficult as
any that its transcendent jurisdiction over the validity of the
legislation of Congress, has ever presented, or, in any forecast we can
make of the future, will ever present for its judgment; I mean the
constitutionality of that feature and quality of the issues of United
States notes during the war, which made them a legal tender for the
satisfaction of private debts. This measure was one of the great
administrative expedients for marshaling the wealth of the country, as
rapidly, as equally, and as healthfully, to the energies of production
and industry, as might be, and so as seasonably to meet the
immeasurable demands of the public service, in the stress of the war.
That it was debated and adopted, with full cognizance of its critical
character, and with extreme solicitude that all its bearings should be
thoroughly explored, and upon the same peremptory considerations, upon
which the master of a ship cuts away a mast or jettisons cargo, or the
surgeon amputates a limb, was a matter of history. Mr. Chase, as
Secretary of the Treasury, with a reluctance and repugnance which
enhanced the weight of his counsels, approved the measure, as one of
necessity for the fiscal operations of the Government, which knew no
other seasonable or adequate recourse. Upon this imposing and
authoritative advice of the financial minister, the legal-tender trait
of the paper issues of the Government was adopted by Congress, and
without his sanction, presumptively, it would have been denied.

And now, when, after repeated argument at the bar, and long
deliberations of the court, the decision was announced, the determining
opinion of the Chief-Justice, in an equal division of the six associate
justices, pronounced the legal-tender acts unconstitutional, as not
within the discretion of the political departments of the Government,
Congress, and the Executive, to determine this very question of the
necessity of the juncture, as justifying their enactment.

The singularity of the situation struck everybody, and greatly divided
public sentiment between applause and reproaches of the Chief-Justice,
as the principal figure both in the administrative measure and in its
judicial condemnation. But soon, a new phase of the unsettled agitation
on the merits of the constitutional question, drew public attention, and
created even greater excitement of feeling and diversity of sentiment.
The court, which had been reduced by Congress under particular and
temporary motives, hostile to the appointing power of President Johnson,
had been again opened by Congress to its permanent number, and its
vacancies had been filled. A new case, involving the vexed question, was
heard by the court, and the validity of the disputed laws was sustained
by its judgment. The signal spectacle of the court, which had judged
over Congress and the Secretary, now judging over itself, gave rise to
much satire on one side and the other, and to some coarseness of
contumely as to the motives and the means of these eventful mutations
in matters, where stability and uniformity are, confessedly, of the
highest value to the public interests, and to the dignity of government.

Confessing to a firm approval of the final disposition of the
constitutional question by the court, I concede it to be a subject of
thorough regret that the just result was not reached by less uncertain
steps. But, with this my adverse attitude to the Chief-Justice's
judicial position on the question, I find no difficulty in discarding
all suggestions which would mix up political calculations with his
judicial action. The error of the Chief-Justice, if, under the last
judgment of the court, we may venture so to consider it, was in
following his strong sense of the supreme importance of restoring the
integrity of the currency, and his impatience and despair at the
feebleness of the political departments of the Government in that
direction, to the point of concluding that the final wisdom of this
great question--_inter apices juris_, as well as of the highest reasons
of state--was to deny to the brief exigency of war, what was so
dangerous to the permanent necessities of peace. But a larger reason and
a wider prudence, as it would seem, favor the prevailing judgment, which
refused to cripple the permanent faculties of government for the
unforeseen duties of the future, and drew back the court from the
perilous edge of _law-making_, which, overpassed, must react to cripple,
in turn, the essential judicial power. The past, thus, was not
discredited, nor the future disabled.

I have now carried your attention to the round of public service which
filled the life of Mr. Chase with activity and usefulness, and yet the
survey and the lesson are incomplete without some reference to a station
he never attained, to an office he never administered; I mean, to be
sure, the presidency. It is of the nature of this great place of power
and trust, and the necessity of the method by which alone it can be
reached, to present to the ambition and public spirit of political
leaders, and to the honest hopes and enthusiasm of the great body of the
people, an equally frequent disappointment. This is not the place to
insist upon the reasons of this unquestionable mischief, nor to attempt
to point out the escape from them, if indeed the problem be not, in
itself, too hard for solution. To Mr. Chase, as to all the great
leaders of opinion in the present and perhaps the last generation of our
public men, this disappointment came, and in his case, as in theirs,
brought with it the defeat of the hopes and desires of a large following
of his countrymen, who sought, through his accession to the presidency,
the elevation of the Government, and the welfare of the people.

That the range and dignity of Mr. Chase's public employments and the
large capacity, absolute probity, and unbounded energy which he had
shown in them, justified his aspiration to the presidency, and the
public calculations of great benefit from his accession to it, may not
be doubted. In this state of things it is obvious, that he would
necessarily be greatly in the minds of men, as a candidate for the
candidacy, and this, too, whether they favored or opposed it, without
any implication of undue activity of desire, much less of effort, on his
part, to obtain the nomination. But, it was not in the fortunes of Mr.
Chase's life to take the flood of any tide, in the restless sea of our
politics, which led on to the presidency. In 1860 there was no principle
and no policy of the Republican party which could tolerate the
postponement of Mr. Seward to Mr. Chase, if a political leader was to be
put in nomination. In 1864 the paramount considerations of absolute
supremacy, which dictated the reëlection of Mr. Lincoln, would endure no
competition of candidates in the Republican party. In 1868, when each
party seemed, in an unusual degree, free to seek and find its candidates
where it would, Mr. Chase was Chief-Justice, and no issue of the public
safety existed, which alone, in the settled convictions of this people,
would favor a political canvass by the head of the judiciary.

In a just view of the office of President, as framed in the
Constitution, which he only, in the whole establishment of the
Government, is sworn "to preserve, protect, and defend," and of the
rightful demands of this people from its supreme magistracy, I am sure
most people will agree that Mr. Chase possessed great qualities for the
discharge of its high duties, and for the maintenance of good government
in difficult times. These qualifications I have already unfolded from
his life. If, indeed, the great hold over the Government, which the
Constitution secures to the people by the election of the President,
and his direct and constant responsibility to popular opinion, and the
full powers, thus safely confided to him, in the name and as the trust
of the people at large--if this hold is to be exercised and preserved in
its appropriate vigor, it can only be by the election to the presidency
of true leaders of the political opinion of the country. In this way
alone can power and responsibility be kept in union; and any nation
which, in the working of its government, sees them divorced--sees power
without responsibility, and responsibility without power--must expect
dishonor and disaster in its affairs.

I have, thus, with such success as may be, undertaken to separate the
thread of this individual character and action from that woven tapestry
of human life, whose conciliated colors and collective force make up one
of the noblest chapters of history. I have attempted to present in
prominent points, passing _per fastigia rerum_, the worth, the work, the
duty, and the honor which fill out "the sustained dignity of this
stately life." From his boyhood on the banks of this fair river--famous
as having given birth and nurture to three Chief-Justices of the United
States, Ellsworth, Chase, and Waite; through his first lessons in the
humanities in beautiful Windsor, his fuller instruction in the lap of
this gracious mother, his loved and venerated Dartmouth; through his
lessons in law and in eloquence at the feet of his great master, Wirt,
his study of statesmen and government at the capital; through, his
faithful service to the law, that jealous mistress, and his generous
advocacy of the rights, and resentment of the wrongs, of the unfriended
and the undefended; through his season of stormy politics with its
"estuations of joys and fears;" through the crush and crowd of labors
and solicitudes which beset him as minister of finance in the tensions
and perils of war; through all this steep ascent to the serene height of
supreme jurisprudence, this life, but a span in years, was enough for
the permanent service of his country, and for the assurance of his fame.
"_Etenim, Quirites, exiguum nobis vitæ curriculum natura circumscripsit,
immensum gloriæ._"

If I should attempt to compare Mr. Chase, either in resemblance or
contrast, with the great names in our public life, of our own times, and
in our previous history, I should be inclined to class him, in the
solidity of his faculties, the firmness of his will, and in the
moderation of his temper, and in the quality of his public services,
with that remarkable school of statesmen, who, through the Revolutionary
War, wrought out the independence of their country, which they had
declared, and framed the Constitution, by which the new liberties were
consolidated and their perpetuity insured. Should I point more
distinctly at individual characters, whose traits he most recalls,
Ellsworth as a lawyer and judge, and Madison as a statesman, would seem
not only the most like, but very like, Mr. Chase. In the groups of his
cotemporaries in public affairs, Mr. Chase is always named with the most
eminent. In every triumvirate of conspicuous activity he would be
naturally associated. Thus, in the preliminary agitations which prepared
the triumphant politics, it is Chase and Sumner and Hale; in the
competition for the presidency when the party expected to carry it, it
is Seward and Lincoln and Chase; in administration, it is Stanton and
Seward and Chase; in the Senate, it is Chase and Seward and Sumner. All
these are newly dead, and we accord them a common homage of admiration
and of gratitude, not yet to be adjusted or weighed out to each.

Just a quarter of a century before Mr. Chase left these halls of
learning, the college sent out another scholar of her discipline, with
the same general traits of birth, and condition, and attendant
influences, which we have noted as the basis of the power and influence
of this later son of Dartmouth. He played a famous part in his time as
lawyer, senator, and minister of state, in all the greatest affairs, and
in all the highest spheres of public action; and to his eloquence his
countrymen paid the singular homage, with which the Greeks crowned that
of Pericles, who alone was called Olympian for his grandeur and his
power. He died with the turning tide from the old statesmanship to the
new, then opening, now closed, in which Mr. Chase and his cotemporaries
have done their work and made their fame. Twenty-one years ago this
venerable college, careful of the memory of one who had so greatly
served as well as honored her, heard from the lips of Choate the praise
of Webster. What lover of the college, what admirer of genius and
eloquence, can forget the pathetic and splendid tribute which the
consummate orator paid to the mighty fame of the great statesman? What
mattered it to him, or to the college, that, for the moment, this fame
was checked and clouded, in the divided judgments of his countrymen, by
the rising storms of the approaching struggle? But, instructed by the
experience of the vanquished rebellion, none are now so dull as not to
see that the consolidation of the Union, the demonstration of the true
doctrine of the Constitution, the solicitous observance of every
obligation of the compact, were the great preparations for the final
issue of American politics between freedom and slavery.

To these preparations the life-work of Webster and his associates was
devoted; their completeness and adequacy have been demonstrated; the
force and magnitude of the explosion have justified all their
solicitudes lest it should burst the cohesions of our unity. The general
sense of our countrymen now understands that the statesmen who did the
most to secure the common government for slavery and freedom under the
frame of the Constitution, and who in the next generations did the most
to strengthen the bonds of the Union, and to avert the last test till
that strength was assured; and, in our own latest times, did the most to
make the contest at last become seasonable and safe, thorough and
unyielding and unconditional, have all wrought out the great problem of
our statesmanship, which was to assure to us "Liberty and Union, now and
forever, one and inseparable." They all deserve, as they shall all
receive, each for his share, the gratitude of their countrymen, and the
applause of the world.

To the advancing generations of youth that Dartmouth shall continue to
train for the service of the republic, and the good of mankind, the
lesson of the life we commemorate, to-day, is neither obscure nor
uncertain. The toils and honors of the past generations have not
exhausted the occasions nor the duties of our public life, and the
preparation for them, whatever else it may include, can never omit the
essential qualities which have always marked every prosperous and
elevated career. These are energy, labor, truth, courage, and faith.
These make up that ultimate WISDOM to which the moral constitution of
the world assures a triumph.--"Wisdom is the principal thing; she shall
bring thee to honor; she shall give to thy head an ornament of grace; a
crown of glory shall she deliver to thee."





End of Project Gutenberg's Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase, by William M. Evarts