VI. LEADERS OF THE SENATE IN 1877…

VI. LEADERS OF THE SENATE IN 1877

As I just said, there was no man in the Senate when I entered it who equalled in renown either Webster, Clay or Calhoun, or wielded in the Senate an influence like that of Oliver Ellsworth. With at most but two or three exceptions, no one of them would be counted among the great men of the century in which he lived, or will be remembered long after his death. But the average excellence was high. It was a company of very wise men, fairly representing the best sentiment and aspiration of the Republic. The angers and influences of the Civil War had gradually cooled under the healing influence of Grant. The American people was ready to address itself bravely to the new conditions and new problems, or to old problems under new conditions.

I shall speak briefly here of some of the principal Senators who were there when I took my seat on March 4, 1877, or who came 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 President of the Senate. On the Republican side were: William B. Allison of Iowa, Henry B. Anthony and Ambrose E. Burnside of Rhode Island, James G. Blaine and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Roscoe Conkling of New York, John A. Logan of Illinois, Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, George F. Edmunds and Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, John J. Ingalls of Kansas, John P. Jones of Nevada, Stanley Matthews and John Sherman of Ohio, John H. Mitchell of Oregon, Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, Aaron A. Sargent of California, Henry M. Teller of Colorado, Bainbridge Wadleigh of New Hampshire and William Windom of Minnesota.

On the Democratic side were: Thomas F. Bayard and Eli Saulsbury of Delaware, James B. Beck of Kentucky, Francis M. Cockrell of Missouri, A. H. Garland of Arkansas, John B. Gordon of Georgia, L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, Matt Ransom of North Carolina, 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 when I entered it. When he died he had been a Senator longer than any other man in the country, except Mr. Benton. He had come to be the depository of its traditions, customs and unwritten rules. He was a man of spirit, giving and receiving blows on fit occasions, especially when anybody assailed Rhode Island. He had conducted for many years a powerful newspaper which had taken part in many conflicts. But he seemed somehow the intimate friend of every man in the Senate, on both sides. Every one of his colleagues poured out his heart to him. It seemed that no eulogy or funeral was complete unless Anthony had taken part in it, because he was reckoned the next friend of the man who was dead.

He was fully able to defend himself and his State and any cause which he espoused. No man would attack either with impunity under circumstances which called on him for reply, as he showed on some memorable occasions. But he was of a most gracious and sweet nature. He was a lover and maker of peace. When his own political associates put an indignity upon Charles Sumner, the great leader of emancipation in the Senate, 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 the Senate and in parliamentary law; learned in the history of his country and of foreign countries; learned in the resources of a full, accurate and graceful scholarship. Since Sumner died I suppose no Senator can be compared with him in this respect. Some passages in an almost forgotten political satire show that he possessed a vein which, if he had cultivated it, 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 its kind of literature. He was absolutely simple, modest, courteous and without pretence. He was content to do his share in accomplishing public results, and leave to others whatever of fame or glory might 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 of the famous Dorr Rebellion. The notes, as in the case of the "Biglow Papers," are even funnier than the text. He gives an account of the Dorr War in two cantos, after the manner of Scott's "Marmion." He describes the chieftain addressing his troops on Arcote's Hill, the place where one Arcote, in former days, had been hung for sheep-stealing, and buried at 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 estimate of Roscoe Conkling. I never had any personal difficulty with him. On the other hand, he was good enough to say of a 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 formed an exceedingly unfavorable opinion of him. He was an able man, 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 the latter was familiar, of John Sherman. But he was undoubtedly a strong man. His speech nominating Grant at the National Convention of 1880 was one of very great power. But he was unfit to be the leader of a great party, and was sure, if he were trusted with power, to bring it to destruction. He was possessed of an inordinate vanity. He was unrelenting in his enmities, and at any time was willing to sacrifice to them his party and the interests of the country. He used to get angry with men simply because they voted against him on questions in which he took an interest. Once he would not speak to Justin S. Morrill, one of the wisest and kindliest of men, for months, because of his anger at one of Morrill's votes. I suppose he defeated the Republican Party in New York when General John A. Dix was candidate for Governor. That opinion, however, depends chiefly on common rumor. Governor Boutwell, in this "Recollections," says that Mr. Conkling contributed secretly to the defeat of Mr. Blaine, although he had been willing to support Blaine four years before. He was one of the men whose counsel wrought grievous injury to Grant, and persuaded him to permit the foolish attempt to nominate him for a third term. The deserved respect which the American people had for Grant, and his great influence, would not induce them to bring Conkling and the men who were his associates again into power. I can hardly think of a man of high character in the Republican Party, except Grant, who retained Conkling's friendship. His resignation of the office of Senator showed how utterly lacking he was in sound political wisdom, or in lofty political morality. That a Senator of the United States should vacate his own office because he could not control Executive patronage was a proceeding not likely to be regarded with much respect by the American people. I suppose he expected that he would be returned by the New York Legislature, and that the scene of his coming back would be one of great dramatic effect.

The reason of his action was President Garfield's nomination of Judge Robertson, who had been his own earnest supporter for the Presidency, to the office of Collector of the port of New York. It happened in this way: General Garfield's nomination for the Presidency, of which I have told the story in another place, was brought about in part by the aid of some of the New York delegation, led by Judge Robertson, who had broken away from Conkling's leadership. He was of course angry. After Garfield's election, he demanded that no one of the New York opponents to Grant's nomination should be appointed to office by the incoming Administration. Garfield told 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 which would ensure harmony. He told Conkling that he desired to make one conspicuous appointment of a New York man who had supported him against President Grant, and that thereafter appointments should be made of fit men, without regard to the factional division of the party in New York, between his supporters and those of Grant, and that the Senators would in all cases be consulted. Conkling would not listen to the suggestion, and declared that he would not consent to the appointment of Judge Robertson to any important office in this country; that if the President chose to send him abroad, he would make no objection. President Garfield told me that Conkling's behavior in the interview was so insolent that it was difficult for him to control himself and keep from ordering him out of his presence. Nothing could be more preposterous or insolent than the demand of a Senator from any State that a President just elected, who had received the support of the 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 integrity and great ability among the leaders of the Republican Party who retained Conkling's friendship, to have excepted Hamilton Fish. He was a man of great wisdom, who understood well the importance to the Republican Party of avoiding a breach with the powerful Senator from New York. But Conkling was jealous of all the other able men in the Republican Party in his own State. He could--

Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.

The spirits of good and evil politics have striven with one another in New York from the beginning of her history as Jacob and Esau strove together in the womb. In general the former 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 caught by 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 some time. He gives this account of New York politics.

"After living a dozen years in that State, I don't pretend to comprehend their politics. It is a labyrinth of wheels within wheels, and it is understood only by the managers. Why, these leaders of the opposite parties, who--in the papers and before the world--seem ready to tear each other's eyes out, will meet some rainy night in a dark entry, and agree, whichever way the election goes, they will share the spoils together!"

John G. Palfrey, in his wonderful "Papers on the Slave Power," was led by his natural impatience with the conduct of the great State, which seemed to him such an obstacle in the path of 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 Berkshire hills against the shield which brave Massachusetts held over the New England settlements, through the time of her traitors of the Revolutionary age, down to the time of her Butlers and her Marcys, her Van Burens and Hoyts, poltroonery and corruption have with her ruled the hour. Nature has her freaks, and in one of them she gave a great man, John Jay, to New York. 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 day when they begin to impress any fit influence of theirs upon her counsels, will open a new chapter in the annals of New York."

I am tempted to quote this powerful invective for its literary excellence, and not for its justice. The history of New York, on the whole, has been a noble history. It must be considered that any people that opens its hospitable door of welcome to all mankind, with the elective franchise, must itself, for a time, seem to suffer in the process, and must be strongly tempted to protect itself against evil government by getting control of the powers of Government by unjustifiable methods.

For many years a large majority of the people of the city of New York were of foreign birth or parentage. But how wonderfully most of these have grown in the elements of good citizenship, and of honorable manhood; and how wonderfully their sisters and daughters have grown in the elements of womanhood. Freedom is the best schoolteacher.

Sometimes a political leader in New York who had got power by forbidden ways, has used it for the good of the Republic. I suppose the worst examples of all low political leadership were the Pelhams, the Duke of Newcastle and his brother; yet without them, Lord Chatham's glorious career would have been unknown to the history of English liberty. Chatham used to say: "The Duke of Newcastle lends me his majority to carry on the Government."

Let me not be understood as meaning to compare Roscoe Conkling with such characters. He was fearless. He was a powerful debater. He never flinched in debate from the face of any antagonist. There was something almost sublime in his lofty disdain. He was on the side of the country in her hour of peril. I like Charles Sumner and John Jay and John Adams better. Neither of these men could have lived long on terms of friendship with Conkling. I do not think George Washington could have endured him. But let what was best in him, after all, be remembered, even if we do not forget his great faults.

I ought not, in speaking of the eminent Senators whom I have known, to omit Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi. Except Mr. Revels, from the same State, he is the only negro who ever sat in the Senate of the United States. He conducted himself with great propriety. He was always courteous and sensible. He had a clear understanding of great questions which came up, and was quite influential with his fellow Senators. When the Chinese matter was up, he stated in a few words that he could not, when he recalled the history of his own race, consent to vote for any measure which discriminated against any man by reason of his race or color. He left the Senate Chamber, I believe, with the entire respect of his associates on both sides. He was afterward Register of the Treasury. His speech and vote on the Chinese question were in contrast with those of Senator Jonas, of the neighboring State of Louisiana. In my speech in opposition to the Chinese bill, or that on the Chinese Treaty, I alluded at some length to the treatment of the Jews in the dark ages and down to a very recent time. Senator Jonas, who was a Jew, paid me some compliments about my speech. I said: "Why will you not remember the terrible history of the men of your own race and blood, and help me resist a like savage treatment of another race?" Mr. Jonas rejected the suggestion with a great emphasis, and said: "Mr. Hoar, the Jews are a superior race. They are not to be classed with the Chinese."

There were several negro Representatives from the South when I was in the House of Representatives. All of them behaved with great propriety. They were men who took care of themselves and the interests of their people in any debate. Mr. Rainey, of South Carolina, had a spirited tilt with S. S. Cox, one of the most brilliant of the Democratic leaders, in which he left Cox unhorsed and on his back in the arena. None of them ever said an indiscreet thing, no one of them ever lost his temper or gave any opportunity for an angry or intolerant or contemptuous reply.

Soon after Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, came to the House, in the Congress of 1875-7, unanimous consent was asked that he might address the House at length, without being limited by the hour rule. Judge Hoar, then a member of the House, stipulated that Mr. Elliott, of South Carolina, should, if he liked, have leave to reply. This could not decently be refused, and that was granted also. Thereupon Stephens made a powerful speech, for which he had doubtless made 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 much that 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 Schurz and George William Curtis, and was entirely worthy of the companionship.

Perhaps, on the whole, the ablest of the colored men who served with me in Congress, although each of the gentlemen I have named deserves high commendation, was John R. Lynch of Mississippi. I had a very pleasant acquaintance with him when he was in the House. He was afterward Fourth Auditor of the Treasury.

I was the means of procuring for him a national distinction which very much gratified the men of his color throughout the country. The supporters of Mr. Blaine in the National Convention of 1884 had a candidate of their own for temporary presiding officer. I think it was Mr. Clayton of Arkansas. It was desired to get a Southern man for that purpose. The opponents of Mr. Blaine also desired to have a candidate of their own from the South. The colored Southern men were generally Blaine men. I advised them to nominate Lynch, urging that it would be impossible for the Southern colored people, whatever their preference might be as a candidate for the Presidency, to vote against one of their own color. Lynch was nominated by 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 the first day, and a part of the second. He made an admirable presiding officer.

Quite curiously, I have had something to do with introducing a little more liberal practice in this respect into the policy of the country.

I was the first person who ever invited a colored man to take the Chair in the Senate. I happened to be put in the Chair one afternoon when Vice-President Wheeler was away. I spied Mr. Bruce in his seat, and it occurred to me that it would be a good thing to invite him to take my place, which he did.

When I was presiding over the National Convention of 1880, one of the English Royal Princes, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, son of Victoria, visited the Convention. He was brought up and introduced to me. I suppose that was one of the very rare instances in which a scion of the English Royal House was presented to anybody, instead of having the person presented to him. Wishing to converse with the Prince, I called Mr. Bruce to the Chair. I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to confer an honor upon a worthy colored man in the presence of a representative of this Royal House. Frederick Douglass afterward called on me with a delegation of colored men, and presented me with a letter signed by prominent colored men of 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 Mail Service. This was soon after I entered the House of Representatives in 1869.

Perhaps I may as well add in this connection that I believed I recommended the first married woman ever appointed postmaster in 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 office as Consul at Canton, China, to which he was appointed by President Grant, I urged very strongly upon Grant the appointment of the widow to the place. She had, during her husband's illness, performed a great part of the duties very well, and to the great satisfaction of the merchants doing business there. I told General Grant the story. He said he would make the appointment--to use his own phrase--if Fish would let him. But Mr. Fish was inexorable. He thought it would be a very undignified proceeding. He also urged, with great reason, that a Consul had to hold court for the trial of some grave offences, committed often by very bad characters, and that it was out of the question that a delicate lady should be expected to know or to have anything to do with them. So the 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 did not interrupt our friendly relations. He was a man of a good deal of eloquence, very popular in his own State, and said to have been a very successful and able lawyer, especially in arguing cases to juries. His political speeches in the Senate were carefully prepared, very able statements of his side, and very severe denunciations of his antagonists. But he was a very kind-hearted man indeed, always willing to do a kindness to any of his associates, or to any person in trouble. If he could not be relied on to protect the Treasury against claims of doubtful validity, when they were urged by persons in need, or who in any way excited his sympathy, it ought to be said in defence of him, that he would have been quite as willing to relieve them to the extent of his power from his private resources.

Bainbridge Wadleigh of New Hampshire succeeded to the Chairmanship of the Committee on Privileges and Elections after Mr. Morton's death in the summer of 1869. He was a modest, quiet and unpretending man, of stainless integrity, of great industry in dealing with any matter for which he had direct responsibility, and of great wisdom and practical sense. I formed a very pleasant friendship with him, and regretted it exceedingly when he left the Senate, after serving a single term. There was at the time a very bad practice in New Hampshire of frequently changing her Senators. So few of the very able men who have represented her in the Senate for the last fifty years have made the impression upon the public service, or gained the fame to which their ability would have entitled them, if they had had longer service. Mr. Wadleigh was an excellent lawyer, and the Senate gave him its confidence in all matters with which 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 his State, and a very admirable Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, to which office he was appointed by Abraham Lincoln.

He entered the Senate when I did, and served one term of six years. His service in the Senate did not add at all to his distinction. The one thing he had done in life of which he was very proud and which was of most importance, was bringing about the nomination of Abraham Lincoln at Chicago. Of that he liked to discourse whenever he could get a listener, and his discourses were always so entertaining that everybody listened who could.

David Davis thought that but for him Lincoln would not have been nominated. I have little doubt that he was right. He had many able and bright men to help him. But he was the leader, director and counsellor of all the forces. He threw himself into it with all the zeal of a man fighting for his life. He made pledges right and left, seeming to discover every man's weak point, and used entreaty, flattery and promises without stint, and, if he were himself to be believed, without much scruple. When somebody said to him in my hearing, "You must have used a good deal of diplomacy, Judge, at that Convention." "Diplomacy," replied Davis, "My dear man, I lied like the devil." He had that sense of humor peculiar to Americans, which likes to state in an exaggerated way things that are calculated to shock the listener, which our English and German brethren cannot comprehend. So I do not think this statement of Davis's is to be taken without many grains of salt. I suppose he thought the man to whom he said it would not take it too literally.

Judge Davis was a man of very warm sympathy. He liked to give accounts of cases he had tried, sitting in equity, or I think sometimes in divorce cases, where he had invented a curious rule of law, or had stretched his discretion, to save some poor widow, or wronged wife, or suffering orphan, a share of an estate to which their legal title was in considerable doubt. If he were led by his sympathies ever to be an unjust Judge, at least the poor widow had no need to worry him by her importunities. He avenged her speedily the first time.

He was a Republican before and during the War, and a steadfast supporter of Lincoln's policies. His opinion had been in general in support of the liberal construction of the Constitution, under which the National powers had been exerted to put down the Rebellion.

He was elected to the Senate after resigning his place on the Supreme Court Bench, by a union of Democrats of the Illinois Legislature with a few discontented Republicans, defeating Logan. When he came to the Senate he preserved his position as an Independent. He did not go into the caucuses of either party. He had no sympathy with the more radical element among the Democrats. Yet he liked to be considered a special representative of the Labor Party in the country. I think he hoped that there might be a union or coalition of the Democrats and Labor men in the Presidential election of 1880, and that in that way 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 rose in his seat if there was a rising vote; but when, as not unfrequently happened, he voted with the Democrats, he always left his seat 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, Conkling called 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 majority of two. One Senator only was present from Rhode Island, one only from Nevada, and the two newly elected Senators from New York had not been admitted to their seats. A motion of Mr. Edmunds that the oath prescribed by law be administered to the Senators from New York was laid on the table. On that vote the Democrats had a majority of two, Mr. Davis voting with 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 and inserting a resolution that the oath of office be administered to Mr. Miller and Mr. Lapham of New York, and Mr. Aldrich of Rhode Island, by Mr. Henry B. Anthony the senior Senator of 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 declaring Mr. 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 was chosen President pro tempore, the resolution being carried by a majority of two votes, Mr. Davis not voting. Thereupon Mr. Bayard accepted the office in a speech, brief, but which clearly implied an expectation on his part to continue in it for a considerable period of time.

The next day, being Tuesday, October 11, Mr. Aldrich of Rhode Island, Mr. Lapham and Mr. Miller of New York, were admitted to their seats. This left a majority of two for the Republicans, if Mr. Davis acted with them, and the two parties tied, if Mr. Davis acted with the Democrats.

The Democrats had succeeded in electing their President pro tempore, whom the Republicans could not displace, and there was left before the body a struggle for the organization of 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 called a caucus, in which Senator Logan, Mr. Davis's colleague, appeared with a message from Mr. Davis. This substance of the message was that Mr. Davis thought that the Republicans ought to leave the organization, so far as the executive offices were concerned, in the hands of the Democrats, who had elected the existing officers during the previous Congress, and that the Committees should be appointed with Republican majorities. Mr. Logan further announced that if the Republicans should see fit to elect Mr. Davis President pro tempore, he would vote in accordance with that understanding. Mr. Ingalls of Kansas and I were quite unwilling to accede to this arrangement. But at that time the Committees lasted only for the session for which they were appointed. So the Senate could transact no business of importance, and the office of Secretary, and Sergeant-at-Arms, and Door-keeper, and all the important offices of the Senate would continue in Democratic hands. So, very reluctantly, we yielded to the desire of our associates. Whereupon a resolution was adopted continuing the standing Committees for the session as they had come over from the last session, and indeed from the session before, Mr. Davis voting with the Republicans. This vote was passed by a majority of two votes. General Logan then introduced the following resolution: That David Davis, a Senator from Illinois, is hereby chosen President pro tempore of the Senate. This was also passed by a majority of two votes, Mr. Davis and Mr. Bayard not voting. Mr. Bayard descended from the elevation he had occupied for so short a time, amid general laughter in which he good-naturedly joined, and Mr. Davis ascended the throne. He made a brief speech which began with this sentence: "The honor just conferred upon me comes, as the seat in this body which I now hold did, without the least expectation on my part. If it carried any party obligation, I should be constrained to decline this high compliment. I do not accept it as a tribute to any personal merit, but rather as a recognition of the independent position which I have long occupied in the politics of the country."

So, it was Mr. Davis's fortune to hold in his hands the determination between the two parties of the political power of the country, on two very grave occasions. But for his choice as Senator from Illinois, he would have been on the Electoral Commission. I do not think, in so important a matter, that he would have impaired his great judicial fame by dissenting from the opinion which prevailed. But if he had, he would have given the Presidency to Mr. Tilden. And again, but for the arrangement by which he was elected to the Presidency of the Senate, the Republicans would not have gained control, so far as it depended on the Committees.

He did not make a very good presiding officer. He never called anybody to order. He was not informed as to parliamentary law, or as to the rules of the Senate. He had a familiar and colloquial fashion, if any Senator questioned his ruling, of saying, "But, my dear sir"; or, "But, pray consider." He was very irreverently called by somebody, during a rather disorderly scene in the Senate, where he lost control of the reins, the "Anarch old."

But, after all, the office of presiding over the Senate is commonly not of very great consequence. It is quite important that the President of the Senate should be a pleasant-natured gentleman, and the gentleman in the Senator will almost always respond to the gentleman in the Chair. Senators do not submit easily to any vigorous exercise of authority. Vice-Presidents Wheeler, Morton and Stevenson, and more lately, Mr. Frye, asserted their authority with as little show of force as if they were presiding over a company of guests at their own table. But the order and dignity of the body have been preserved.

Mr. Davis's fame must rest on his long and faithful and able service as a wise, conscientious and learned Judge. In writing these recollections, I have dwelt altogether too much on little foibles and weaknesses, which seem to have something amusing in them, and too little, I am afraid, on the greater qualities of the men with whom I have served. This is perhaps true as to David Davis. But I have said very much what I should have said to him, if I had been chatting with him, as I very frequently did, in the cloak room of the Senate.

He was a man of enormous bulk. No common arm chair would hold him. There is a huge chair, said to have been made for Dixon H. Lewis of Alabama, long before the Civil War, which was brought up from the basement of the Capitol for his use. The newspaper correspondents used to say that he had to be surveyed for a new pair of trousers.

I was one night in the Chair of the Senate when the session lasted to near three o'clock in the morning. It was on the occasion of the passage of the bill for purchasing silver. The night was very dark and stormy and the rain came down in torrents. Just before I put the final question I sent a page for my coat and hat, and, as soon as I declared the Senate adjourned, started for the outer door. There were very few carriages in waiting. I secured one of them and then invited Davis and his secretary and another Senator, when they came along, to get in with me. When we stopped to 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 held tight as in a vise. The hackman and the porters pulled on the outside, and the passengers pushed and struggled from within; but in vain. After fifteen or twenty minutes, it occurred to some one that we within should all squeeze ourselves over to one side of the carriage, and those outside use their whole strength on the opposite door. This was successful. We escaped from our prison. As Davis marched into the hotel the hackman exclaimed, as he stared after him: "By God, I should think you was eight men."

Eli Saulsbury of Delaware was a very worthy Southern gentleman of the old school, of great courage, ability and readiness in debate, absolutely devoted to the doctrines of the Democratic Party, and possessed of a very high opinion of himself. I knew him very intimately. He was Chairman of the Committee on Privileges and Elections, and was a member of it when I was Chairman. We went to New Orleans together to make what was called the Copiah investigation. We used to be fond of talking with each other. He always had a fund of pleasant anecdotes of old times in the South. He liked to set forth his own virtues and proclaim the lofty morality of his own principles of conduct, a habit which he may have got from his eminent colleague, Senator Bayard, who sometimes announced a familiar moral principle as if it were something the people who listened to him were hearing for the first time, and of which he in his youth had been the original discoverer. I once told Saulsbury, when he was discoursing in that way, that he must be descended from Adam by some wife he had before Eve, who had nothing to do with the fall. He was fond of violently denouncing the wicked Republicans on the floor of the Senate, and in Committee. But his bark was worse than his bite.

When the Kellogg case was investigated by the Committee on Privileges and Elections, when I first entered the Senate, Mr. Saulsbury rose in the first meeting of the Committee and proceeded to denounce his Republican associates. He declared they came there with their minds made up on the case, a condition of mind which was absolutely unfit for a grave judicial office, in the discharge of which all party considerations and preconceived opinions should be banished. He said we should have open minds to hear the arguments and the evidence to be introduced, as if it were a solemn trial in a court of justice. When he was in the midst of a very eloquent and violent philippic, the Chairman of the Committee, Bainbridge Wadleigh, said quietly, "Brother Saulsbury, haven't you 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 in New Orleans, when we were there, a restaurant famous all over the country, kept by a very accomplished widow. The members of the Committee thought it would be a good thing if we could have such a restaurant as that in Washington. We passed a unanimous vote requesting Mr. Saulsbury to marry the widow, and bring her to Washington, as a matter of public duty. He took 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 very much in love with a lady in Washington, also a charming widow. It was said that he visited her every evening; that she had a rare gift of making rum punch; that she always gave him a glass, and that afterward, although he was exceedingly temperate in such things, he fell on his knees, offered himself to the widow, and was refused; and that this ceremony had been repeated nightly for many years. I once mentioned this story to him, and he didn't deny it. But, on the other hand, he didn't admit it.

When he was chosen to the Senate he had two brothers who competed with him for the office. One of them was then Senator. The Senate had a good deal of difficulty in getting through its business before the 4th of March, when the new Administration came in, and the term of the elder Mr. Saulsbury ended. There had been an all-night session, so some of the Senators had got worn out and overcome by the loss of sleep. Just before twelve o'clock at noon Senator Willard Saulsbury put his head down on this desk and fell asleep. The Senate was called to order again for the new session, the roll called, and Mr. Saulsbury's brother Eli had been sworn in. Willard waked up, rose, and addressed the Chair. The presiding officer quietly replied: "The gentleman from Delaware is no longer a member of the Senate." Whereupon he quietly withdrew.

Matthew C. Butler of South Carolina was another Southern Democrat, fiery in temper, impatient of control or opposition, ready to do battle if anybody attacked the South, but carrying anger as the flint bears fire. He was zealous for the honor of the country, and never sacrificed the interest of the country to party or sectional feeling. He was quite unpopular with the people of the North when he entered the Senate, partly from the fact that some of his kindred had been zealous Southern champions before the War, at the time of some very bitter sectional strifes, and because he was charged with having been the leader and counsellor in some violent and unlawful conduct toward the colored people after the War. I have not investigated the matter. But I believe the responsibility for a good deal of what was ascribed to him belonged to another person of the same name. But the Republicans of the Senate came to esteem and value Senator Butler very highly. He deserves great credit, among other things, for his hearty and effective support of the policy of enlarging the Navy, which, when he came into public life, was feeble in strength and antiquated in construction. With his departure from the Senate, and that of his colleague, General Wade Hampton, ended the power in South Carolina of the old gentry who, in spite of some grave faults, had given to that State an honorable and glorious career. When the Spanish War broke out, General Butler was prompt to offer his services, although he had lost a leg in the Civil War.

James B. Beck came into the House of Representatives when I did, in 1869. He served there for six years, was out of public life for two years, and in 1877 came to the Senate when I did.

I do not think any two men ever disliked each other more than we did for the first few years of our service. He hated with all the energy of his Scotch soul,--the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum,--everything I believed. He thought the New England Abolitionists had neither love of liberty nor care for the personal or political rights of the negro. Indeed he maintained that the forefathers of the New England abolitionists were guilty of bringing slavery into this continent. He hated the modern New England theological heresies with all the zeal of his Scotch Presbyterian forbears. He hated the Reconstruction policy, which he thought was inspired by a desire to put the white man in the place where the negro had been. He hated with 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 with which the monopolists of the East were trying to squeeze the last drop of blood out of the farmers and workingmen of the South. He thought the public debt was held by men who had paid very little value for it, and who ought to be paid off in the same cheap money which was in vogue when it was originally incurred. He hated New England culture and refinement, which he deemed a very poor crop coming from a barren intellectual soil. He regarded me, I think, as the representative, in a humble way, of all these things, and esteemed me accordingly.

I was not behindhand with him, although I was not quite so frank, probably, in uttering my opinions in public debate. But I found out, after a little while, that the Northern men who 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 kindness to any man, and easily touched by any manifestation of kindly feeling toward him, or toward his Southern neighbors and constituents. My colleague, Mr. Dawes, served with him on some of the great committees of the Senate and in the House, and they established a very close and intimate friendship. I came to know Mr. Beck later. But he had changed his feeling toward me, as I had toward him, long before either found out what the other was thinking about. So one day--it was the time of Mr. Dawes's last reelection to the Senate--he came over to my side of the Chamber, took my hand and said with great emotion: "I congratulate you on the reelection of Mr. Dawes. He is one of my dearest friends, and one of the best men I ever knew in my life." And then, as he turned away, he added: "Mr. Hoar, I have not known you as well. But I shall the same thing about you, when your reelection takes place."

He had a powerful and vigorous frame, and a powerful and vigorous understanding. It seemed as if neither could ever tire. He used to pour out his denunciation of the greed of the capitalists and monopolists and protectionists, with a fund of statistics which it seemed impossible for the industry of any man to have collected, and at a length which it would seem equally impossible for mortal man to endure. He was equally ready on all subjects. He performed with great fidelity the labor of a member of the Committee on Appropriations, first in the House, and afterward in the Senate. I was the author of a small jest, which half amused and half angered him. Somebody asked in my hearing how it was possible that Mr. Beck could make all those long speeches, in addition to his committee work, or get time for the research that was needed, and how it was ever possible for his mind to get any rest; to which I answered, that he rested his intellect while he was making his speeches. But this was a sorry jest, with very little foundation in fact. Anybody who undertook to debate with him, found him a tough customer. He knew the Bible--especially the Psalms of David--and the poems of Burns, by heart. When he died I think there was no other man left in the Senate, on either side, whose loss would have occasioned a more genuine and profound sorrow.

When I came into the Senate one of the most conspicuous characters in American public life was Oliver P. Morton of Indiana. He had been Governor of Indiana during the War. There was a large and powerful body of Copperheads among the Democrats in that State. They were very different from their brethren in the East. They were ugly, defiant and full of a dangerous activity. Few other men could have dealt with them with the vigor and success of Governor Morton. The State at its elections was divided into two hostile camps. If they did not resort to the weapons of war, they were filled with a hatred and bitterness which does not commonly possess military opponents. Gov. Morton, in spite of the great physical infirmity which came upon him before the War ended, held the State in its place in the Union with an iron hand. When he came to the Senate he found there no more powerful, brave or unyielding defender of liberty. He had little regard for Constitutional scruples. I do not think it should be said that he would willingly violate his oath to support the Constitution. But he believed that the Constitution should be interpreted in the light of the Declaration of Independence, so as to be the law of life to a great, powerful and free people. To this principle 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 and personal rights of all citizens, of all races and classes.

As I have said, he interpreted the Constitution in a manner which he thought would best promote these objects. He had little respect for subtilties or refinements or scruples that stood in the way.

He was for going straight to his object. When the Hayes and Tilden contest was up, he was for having the President of the United States put Hayes and Wheeler in power by using all the National forces, military and other, that might be needful. He was a member of the Committee that framed the bill for the Electoral Commission, but refused to give it his support.

I made a very pleasant acquaintance with him during the sessions of that Committee. I suppose it was due to his kindly influence that I was put upon the Committee of Privileges and Elections, of which he was Chairman, when I entered the Senate. But he died in the following summer, so I never had an opportunity to know him better. He was a great party leader. He had in this respect no superior in his time, save Lincoln alone.

It was never my good fortune to be intimate with Zachariah Chandler. But I had a good opportunity for observing him and knowing him well. I met him in 1854, at the Convention held in Buffalo to concert measures for protecting and promoting Free State immigration to Kansas. He was the leading spirit of that Convention, full of wisdom, energy and courage. He was then widely known throughout the country as an enterprising and successful man of business. When I went into the House of Representatives, in 1869, Mr. Chandler was already a veteran in public life. He had organized and led the political forces which overthrew Lewis Cass and the old Democratic Party, not only in Michigan but in the Northwest. He had been in the Senate twelve years. Those twelve years had been crowded with history. The close of the Administration of Buchanan, the disruption of the Democratic Party at Charleston, the election and inauguration of Lincoln, the putting down of the Rebellion, the organizing, directing and disbanding of great armies, the great amendments to the Constitution, and the contest with Andrew Johnson, had been accomplished. The reconstruction of the rebellious States, the payment of the public debt, keeping the national faith under great temptation, reconciliation and the processes of legislation and administration under the restraints which belonged to peace, were well under way. In all these Chandler bore a large part, and a part wise, honest, powerful and on the righteous side. I knew him afterward in the Department of the Interior. He was, in my judgment, the ablest administrative officer without an exception who has been in any executive department during my public life. His sturdy honesty, his sound, rapid, almost instinctive judgment, his tact, his business sense, his love of justice were felt in every fibre and branch of the great Interior Department, then including eight great bureaus each almost important enough to be a Department by itself.

The humblest clerk who complained of injustice was sure to be listened to by the head of that great Department, who, with his quick sympathy and sound judgment, would make it certain that right would be done.

Chandler has little respect for the refinements of speech or for literary polish. He could not endure Mr. Sumner's piling precedent upon precedent and quotation upon quotation, and disliked his lofty and somewhat pompous rhetoric. He used sometimes to leave his seat and make known his disgust in the cloak room, or in the rear of the desks, to visitors who happened to be in the Senate Chamber. But he was strong as a rock, true as steel, fearless and brave, honest and incorruptible. He had a vigorous good sense. He saw through all the foolish sophistries with which the defenders of fiat money, or debased currency, sought to defend their schemes. He had no mercy for treason or rebellion or secession. He was a native of New Hampshire. He had the opinions of New England, combined with the directness and sincerity and energy of the West. He had a very large influence in making the State of Michigan another New England.

He was a sincere, open-hearted, large-hearted and affectionate man. He was the last man in the world of whom it would be proper to speak as a member of an intrigue or cabal. His strategy was a straightforward, downright blow. His stroke was an Abdiel stroke,

This greeting on thy impious crest receive.

His eloquence was simple, rugged, direct, strong. He had but a scanty vocabulary. It contained no word for treason but "treason." He described a lie by a word of three letters. The character of his speech was that which Plutarch ascribes to Demosthenes. He was strongly stirred by simple and great emotions--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 was very impatient of Mr. Sumner's load of ornament and quotation. He had little respect for fine phrases or for fine sentiment or the delicacies of a refined literature. He was rough and plain-spoken. I do not think he would ever have learned to care much for Tennyson or Browning. But the Psalms of David would have moved him.

I suppose he was not much of a civil service reformer. He expected to rule Michigan, and while he would have never bought or bribed an antagonist by giving him an office, he would have expected to fill the public offices, so far as he had his way, by men who were of his way of thinking. He was much shocked and disgusted when Judge Hoar wanted to inquire further concerning a man whom he had recommended for the office of Judge of the Circuit Court. The Judge said something about asking Reuben Rice, a friend he highly respected who had lived long 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 thought of him."

He joined with Conkling and Carpenter and Edmunds in their opposition to the confirmation of Judge Hoar. He came to know the Judge better afterward and declared that he himself had made a mistake.

He was a strong pillar of public faith, public liberty, and of the Union. He had great faults. But without the aid of the men whom he could influence and who honored him, and to whom his great faults were as great virtues, the Union never would have been saved, or slavery abolished, or the faith kept. I hold it one of the chief proofs of the kindness of divine Providence to the American people in a time of very great peril that their leaders were so different in character. They are all dead now--Sumner and Fessenden and Seward and Wilson and Chase and Stanton and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Chandler,--a circle in which Lincoln shines as a diamond in its setting. Not one of them could have been spared.

It is proper that I should add that I have known very well a good many of the most eminent citizens of Michigan. This list includes Governor and Senator Henry P. Baldwin, and Judge Christiancy, who displaced Chandler in the Senate. I have frequently heard them speak of Mr. Chandler. Without an exception I believe they held him in profound esteem and honor. They were proud of him as the most eminent citizen of their State which has been prolific of strong men, speaking of him as we do of Sumner or Webster.

Mr. Chandler was a remarkable example of what I have often noticed, how thoroughly the people come to know the true character of a public man, even when the press of the whole country unite to decry him. I suppose there was not a paper in New England, Republican or Democratic, that spoke kindly of Zach. Chandler for many years. He was disliked by the Democratic press for his unyielding Republicanism. He was disliked by the Republican press that supported Charles Sumner, for his opposition to him. He was represented as a coarse, ignorant and unscrupulous man. In the campaign of 1880 I sent him a telegram, asking him to visit me in Massachusetts and make a few speeches in our campaign. I added: "You will be received with unbounded respect and honor." The telegram was an astonishment and revelation to the old man. He had no idea that the people of New England had that opinion of him. Governor Baldwin told me that he happened to be passing Chandler's house just as he received my message. Chandler knocked on the window for the Governor to come in. He had the telegram in his hand when the Governor entered, and exclaimed: "Look at that; read that; and I did not graduate at Harvard College either." His colleague, Senator Ferry, alludes to his gratification at the receipt of this message, in his obituary delivered in the Senate. He spoke in Worcester and Boston and Lowell, and in one or two other places. His passage through the State was a triumphal march. He was received as I had predicted. In Worcester we had no hall large enough to hold the crowds that thronged to see him, and were compelled to have the meeting in the skating-rink. Chandler went back to Michigan full of satisfaction with his reception. I think he would have been among the most formidable candidates for the Presidency at the next election, but for his sudden death. If he had been nominated, he would undoubtedly have been elected. But, a short time after, he was one morning found dead in his bed at Chicago. In his death a great and salutary force was subtracted from the public life of the country, and especially from the public life of the great State to whose history he had contributed so large and noble a part.

I have found among some old notes a few sentences with which I presented him to a mighty audience in my own city:

"Worcester is here in person to-night to give a welcome from the heart of Massachusetts to the Senator of Michigan. If our guest had nothing of his own to recommend him, it would be enough to stir the blood of Massachusetts that he represents that honored State, another New England in her interests and in her opinions. With her vast forests, her people share with Maine, our own great frontier State, those vast lumber interests, for which it has been our own policy to demand protection. Daughter of three mighty lakes, she takes a large share in our vast inland commerce. Her people are brave, prosperous and free. They have iron in their soil, and iron in their blood. Great as is her wealth and her material interest, she shares with Massachusetts the honor of being among the foremost of American States in educational conditions. Massachusetts is proud to--

Claim kindred there, and have the claim allowed.

"But our guest brings to us more than a representative title to our regard. The memory of some of us goes back to the time when, all over the great free Northwest, the people seemed to have forgotten to what they owed their own prosperity. The Northwest had been the gift of Freedom to the Republic on her birthday. In each of her million homes dwells Liberty, a perpetual guest. But yet that people in Illinois and Michigan and Indiana and Ohio seemed for a time to have forgotten their own history, and to be unworthy of their fair and mighty heritage. They had been the trusted and sturdy allies of the slave power in the great contest for the possession of the vast territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The old leaders, Douglas in Illinois and Cass in Michigan, who ruled those States with an almost despotic power, sought to win the favor of the South for their aspirations for the Presidency by espousing the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, under which the invaders from the slave States hard by, without even becoming residents in good faith, might fix forever the character of that fair domain. At that time a young knight, a figure of manly courage and manly strength, came forward to challenge General Cass to a struggle for the supremacy in Michigan. It was our guest of this evening. As you all know, the young champion vanquished the veteran warrior in a trial by battle for the freedom of the Continent. I met him at Buffalo in 1854, in the height of the conflict, at a gathering of a few gentlemen to concert measures for sustaining, aiding and arming the Free State immigrants in Kansas. He was the leader and the life of the company. Many of those immigrants had gone from Worcester County, where the Emigrants' Aid Society was first devised by Edward Hale and organized by Eli Thayer. I met him again when I went to Washington in 1869. I found him among the foremost of the leaders of the Senate. He had gone through the great period of the Civil War, and the period before the Civil War. He had stood by Lincoln in that time of trouble. He had stood firm as a rock for the financial integrity of the country. Afterward it was my good fortune to know a good deal of his administration of the great Department of the Interior. I have never known, or known of, a better administration of any Department from the beginning of the Government, than his of that great office, with its eight important bureaus.

"He brings to you to-night the news from Maine and the news from Ohio. He can tell you what the Republicans are thinking of and are doing all over the country, as they prepare themselves for the great contest beginning this year, to end, as we hope and believe, with a great Republican victory in 1880."

John James Ingalls was in many respects one of the brightest intellects I ever knew. He was graduated at Williams in 1855. One of the few things, I don't know but I might say the only thing, for which he seemed to have any reverence was the character of Mark Hopkins. He was a very conspicuous figure in the debates in the Senate. He had an excellent English style, always impressive, often on fit occasions rising to great stateliness and beauty. He was for a good while President pro tempore of the Senate, and was the best presiding officer I have ever known there for conducting ordinary business. He maintained in the chair always his stately dignity of bearing and speech. The formal phrases with which he declared the action of the Senate, or stated questions for its decision, seemed to be a fitting part of some stately ceremonial. He did not care much about the principles of parliamentary law, and had never been a very thorough student of the rules. So his decisions did not have the same authority as those of Mr. Wheeler or Mr. Edmunds or Mr. Hamlin.

I said to him one day, "I think you are the best presiding officer I ever knew. But I do not think you know much about parliamentary law." To which he replied: "I think the sting is bigger than the bee."

He never lost an opportunity to indulge his gift of caustic wit, no matter at whose expense. When the morning hour was devoted to acting upon the reports of committees in cases of private claims, or pensions, he used to look over, the night before, the reports which were likely to be on the next day's calendar. When a bill was reached he would get up and make a pretty sharp attack on the measure, full of wit and satire. He generally knew very little about it. When he got through his speech he would disappear into the cloak room and leave the Senator who had reported the bill, and had expected to get it through without any difficulty--the case being very often absolutely clear and just--to spend his time in an elaborate and indignant explanation.

Mr. Ingalls disliked very much the scrupulous administrations of Hayes and Harrison. He yielded to the craze for free silver which swept over parts of the West, and in so doing lost the confidence of the people to whose momentary impulse he had given way. If he had stood stanchly on the New England doctrines and principles in which he was educated, and which I think he believed in his heart, he would have kept his State on the right side. Shortly before the campaign in which he was defeated for Senator, he said in the cloak room, in my hearing, that he did not propose to be a martyr. He was the author or a beautiful poem, entitled "Opportunity," which I think should 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. Somewhere about 1880, being in Boston, he gave an interview to one of the papers in which he commented very severely on the want of able leadership in the Republican Party in Massachusetts. I suppose the criticism was directed at me, although he did not mention my name. In 1880 Massachusetts gave a Republican majority of 48,697, and Kansas a Republican majority of 41,897. Mr. Ingalls's leadership in Kansas had been manifested very largely in the control of official patronage. He said in the Senate that he and his colleague sought to get rid of all Democrats in office in Kansas as with a fine-toothed comb.

So far as I had been concerned, and so far as the Republican leaders in Massachusetts had been concerned, with the exception of General Butler, a different policy had been adopted. We had never attempted to make a political instrument of official patronage. There had never been anything like a "boss" or a machine. Our State politics had been conducted, and our candidates for office nominated, after the old fashion of a 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, ascertained the public sentiment, deferred to it, if it seemed to be right, and did what they could to persuade it and guide it by speech and discussion in the press, if it needed guidance, and trusted, hardly ever in vain, to the intelligence of the people for the result. I do not know but the diminution of the comparative importance of the towns, and the change of the Commonwealth and cluster of cities and manufacturing villages, and the influx of other elements than that of the old New England stock may not bring about, or if indeed it is not already bringing about, a different conduct of affairs. But I have never adopted any other method, and I have never desired that my public life or influence should survive the introduction of any other method in Massachusetts. Mr. Ingalls's methods and mine have been tested by their results. The people of Kansas are largely of Massachusetts origin. I believe if her leading men had pursued Massachusetts methods she would to a great extent have repeated Massachusetts history. Our method of political management and control has been vindicated by the fact that the Commonwealth has been kept true to its ancient faith, except in a very few years when accidental causes have caused the election of a Democratic Governor. Those elections were protests against an attempt to depart from the old-fashioned method of ascertaining the will of the people in selecting Republican candidates. Massachusetts has kept the succession of United States Senators unbroken, and has had a Republican delegation in the House ever since the party came into power, with two exceptions. She has in general maintained her great Republican majority. On the other hand Kansas has been represented in turn by Democrats and Populists and Socialists and the advocates of fiat money and free silver.

Senator Cockrell of Missouri entered the Senate two years before I did, and has been there ever since. He is a man of great sincerity and integrity, of great influence with his own party, and highly esteemed by his Republican associates. He can generally be depended upon for a fair vote, certainly always for an honest and incorruptible vote, and to do full justice to a political opponent. He used for many years to prepare one speech, in each session, in which he went over the political issues of the two parties in a violent and extreme fashion. He would give us the whole history of the year and point out the imperfections and weakness and atrocity of the party in power in a most unsparing fashion. This speech he would frank home to Missouri. He seemed to think his duty as a Democratic politician was done, and he would betake himself to statesmanship the rest of the year. I think he has of late discontinued that practice. I do not want what I have said to be taken too seriously. There is scarcely a member of either side in either House who would be more missed from the public service, if anything were to happen to him, than Mr. Cockrell, nor for whom all men have a kindlier and more affectionate regard. Like Mr. Allison, he knows the mechanism of administration and legislation through and through. He would be entirely competent to fill a chair of public administration in any college, if, as I hope may be done, such chairs shall be established.

When Justin Morrill died, not only a great figure left the Senate Chamber--the image of the ancient virtue of New England-- but an era in our national history came to an end. He knew in his youth the veterans of the Revolution and the generation who declared independence and framed the Constitution, as the young men who are coming to manhood to-day know the veterans who won our victories and the statesmen who conducted our policy in the Civil War. He knew the whole history of his country from the time of her independence, partly from the lips of those who had shaped it, partly because of the large share he had in it himself. When he was born Washington had been dead but ten years. He was sixteen years old when Jefferson and Adams died. He was twenty-two years old when Charles Carroll died. He was born at the beginning of the second year of Madison's Presidency, and was a man of twenty-six when Madison died. In his youth and early manhood the manners of Ethan Allen's time still prevailed in Vermont, and Allen's companions and comrades could be found in every village. He was old enough to feel in his boyish soul something of the thrill of our great naval victories, and of the victory at New Orleans in our last war with England, and, perhaps, to understand something of the significance of the treaty of peace of 1815. He knew many of the fathers of the country as we knew him. In his lifetime the country grew from seventeen hundred thousand to thirty-six hundred thousand square miles, from seventeen States to forty-five States, from four million people to seventy-five million. To the America into which he was born seventeen new Americas had been added before he died.

A great and healthful and beneficent power departed from our country's life. If he had not lived, the history of the country would have been different in some very important particulars; and it is not unlikely that his death changed the result in some matters of great pith and moment, which are to affect profoundly the history of the country in the future. The longer I live, the more carefully I study the former times or observe my own time, the more I am impressed with the sensitiveness of every people, however great or however free, to an individual touch, to the influence of a personal force. There is no such thing as a blind fate; no such thing as an overwhelming and pitiless destiny. The Providence that governs this world leaves 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 were accomplished by the political organization of which he was a leader, which he bore a very large part in accomplishing.

Mr. Morrill's public life was coincident with the advent of the Republican Party to National power. His first important vote in the House of Representatives helped to elect Mr. Banks to the office of Speaker, the first National victory of a party organized to prevent the extension of slavery. From that moment, for nearly half a century, Vermont spoke through him in our National Council, until, one after another, almost every great question affecting the public welfare has been decided in accordance with her opinion.

It would be impossible, even by a most careful study of the history of the country for the last forty years, to determine with exactness what was due to Mr. Morrill's personal influence. Many of the great policies to which we owe the successful result of the Civil War--the abolition of slavery, the restoration of 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 new States, the exaction of apology and reparation from Great Britain, the establishment of the doctrine of expatriation, the achievement of our manufacturing independence, the taking by the United States of its place as the foremost nation in the world in manufacture and in wealth, as it was already foremost in agriculture, the creation of our vast domestic commerce, the extension of our railroad system from one ocean to the other--were carried into effect by narrow majorities, and would have failed but for the wisest counsel. When all these matters were before Congress there may have been men more brilliant or more powerful in debate. But I can not think of any wiser in counsel than Mr. Morrill. Many of them must have been lost but for his powerful support. Many owed 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 rival him. To him is due the great tariff, that of 1861, which will always pass by his name, of which every protective tariff since has been but a modification and adjustment to conditions somewhat changed, conditions which in general, so far as they were favorable, were the result of that measure. To him is due the first antipolygamy bill, which inaugurated the policy under which, as we hope and believe, that great blot on our National life has been forever expunged. The public buildings which ornament Washington, the extension of the Capitol grounds, the great building where the State, War and Navy Departments have their home, the National Museum buildings, are the result of statutes of which he was the author and which he conducted from their introduction to their enactment. He was the leader, as Mr. Winthrop in his noble oration bears witness, of the action of Congress which resulted in the completion of the Washington Monument after so many years' delay. He conceived and accomplished the idea of consecrating the beautiful chamber of the old House of Representatives as a Memorial Hall where should stand forever the statues of the great men of the States. So far, of late, as the prosperity and wise administration of the Smithsonian Institution has depended upon the action of Congress it has been due to him. Above all, the beautiful National Library building, unequalled among buildings of its class in the world, was in a large measure the result of his persistent effort and powerful influence, and stands as an enduring monument to his fame. There can be no more beautiful and enviable memorial to any man than a portrait upon the walls of a great college in the gallery where the figures and faces of its benefactors are collected. Mr. Morrill deserves this expression of honor and gratitude at the hands of at least one great institution of learning in every American State. To his wise foresight is due the ample endowment of Agricultural or Technical colleges in every State in the Union.

He came from a small State, thinly settled--from a frontier State. His advantages of education were those only which the public schools of the neighborhood afforded. All his life, with a brief interval, was spent in the same town, nine miles from any railroad, except when absent in the public service. But there was no touch of provincialism in him. Everything about him was broad, national, American. His intellect and soul, his conceptions of statesmanship and of duty expanded as the country grew and as the demands upon him increased. He was in every respect as competent to legislate for fifty States as for thirteen. He would have been as competent to legislate for an entire continent so long as that legislation were to be governed, restrained, inspired by the principles in which our Union is founded and the maxims of the men who builded it.

He was no dreamer, no idealist, no sentimentalist. He was practical, wise, prudent. In whatever assembly he was found he represented the solid sense of the meeting. But still he never departed from the loftiest ideals. On any question involving righteousness or freedom you would as soon have had doubt of George Washington's position as of his. He had no duplicity, no indirection, no diplomacy. He was frank, plain-spoken, simple-hearted. He had no faculty for swimming under water.

His armor was his honest thought And simple truth his utmost skill.

The Apostle's counsel to his young disciple will serve for a 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 a single word, mind, body, and soul, that word would be Health. He was thoroughly healthy, through and through, to the center of his brain, to his heart's core. Like all healthy souls, he was full of good cheer and sunshine, full of hope for the future, full of pleasant memories of the past. To him life was made up of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows. But with all his friendliness and kindliness, with all his great hold upon the love and respect of the people, with all his large circle of friends, with all his delight in companionship and agreeable converse, he dared to be alone. He found good society enough always, if no other were at hand, in himself. He was many times called upon to espouse unpopular causes and unpopular doctrines. From the time when in his youth he devoted himself to the anti-slavery cause, then odious in the nostrils of his countrymen, to the time when in the last days of his life he raised his brave voice against a policy upon which the majority of his political associates seemed bent, he never yielded the conclusions of his own judgment or the dictates of his own conscience to any majority, to any party dictation, or to any public clamor. When Freedom, Righteousness and Justice were on his side he considered himself in the majority. He was constant in his attendance on the worship of a small and unpopular religious denomination. He never lost his good nature, his courage, or his supreme confidence in the final triumph of truth.

Mr. Morrill was not a great political leader. Great political leaders are not often found in the Senate nowadays. He was contented to be responsible for one man; to cast his share of the vote of one State; to do his duty as he conceived it, and let other men do theirs as they saw it. But at least he was not a great political follower. He never committed himself to the popular currents, nor studied the vanes to see how the winds were blowing, nor sounded the depths and the shallows before he decided on his own course. There was no wire running to his seat from any centre of patronage or power. To use a felicitous phrase, I think of Senator Morgan of 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 never flinched from uttering his thought. He was never afraid to vote alone. He never troubled himself about majorities or administrations, still less about crowds or mobs or spasms of 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 who came to know him well loved him. It seems strange that he never incurred enmities or provoked resentments. I suppose the 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 were uttering judgments. But he seldom or never undertook to reply to the men who differed from him, and he rarely, if ever, used the weapons of ridicule or sarcasm or invective, and he never grew impassioned or angry. He had, in a high degree, what Jeremy Taylor calls "the endearment of prudent and temperate speech."

He was one of the men that Washington would have loved and Washington would have leaned upon. Of course I do not compare my good friend with him to whom no man living or that ever lived on earth can be compared. And Mr. Morrill was never tried or tested by executive or by military responsibilities. But the qualities which belonged to Washington belonged to him--prudence, modesty, sound judgement, simplicity, absolute veracity, absolute integrity, disinterestedness, lofty patriotism. If he is not to be compared with Washington, he was at least worthy to be the countryman of Washington, and to hold a high place among the statesmen of the Republic which Washington founded.

Neither ambition nor hatred, nor the love of ease nor the greed of gain, nor the desire of popularity, nor the love of praise, nor the fear of unpopularity found a place in that simple 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, which ever pointed to the star of day.

As I just said, he was one of the men that Washington would have loved and that Washington would have leaned upon. If we do not speak of him as a man of genius, he had that absolute probity and that sound common sense which are safer and better guides than genius. These gifts are the highest ornaments of a noble and beautiful character; they are surer guides to success and loftier elements of true greatness than what is commonly called genius. It was well said by an early American author,* now too much neglected, that--

"There is no virtue without a characteristic beauty. To do what is right argues superior taste as well as morals; and those whose practice is evil feel and inferiority of intellectual power and enjoyment, even where they take no concern for a principle. Doing well has something more in it than the mere fulfilling of a duty. It is a cause of a just sense of elevation of character; it clears and strengthens the spirits; it gives higher reaches of thought. The world is sensible of these truths, let it act as it may. It is not because 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 greater intellect who go at large without any landmarks of principle. So that virtue seems of a double nature, and to stand oftentimes in 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 England statesmen, that of closing his life in sorrow and in gloom. His last days were days of hope, not of despair. Sumner came to his seat in the Senate Chamber as to a solitude. When he was struck with death there was found upon his table a volume of Shakespeare with this passage, probably the last printed text on which his eyes ever gazed, marked with his own 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 disappointment and sorrow, predicting with dying breath that the end had come to the great party to whose service his life was given.

When John Quincy Adams fell at his post in the House of Representatives a great newspaper declared that there could not be found in the country another bold enough or bad enough to take his place.

But Mr. Morrill's last days were filled with hope and not with 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 century of which he saw almost the beginning. What the future may have in store for us we cannot tell. But we offer this man as an example of an American Senator and American citizen than which, so far, we have none better. Surely that life has been fortunate. He is buried where he was born. His honored grave is hard by the spot where his cradle was rocked. He sleeps where he wished to sleep, in the bosom of his beloved Vermont. No State ever mourned a nobler son; no son was ever mourned by a nobler State. He enjoyed to a ripe old age everything that can make life happy--honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

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 undimmed upon the greatness and the glory of his country, in achieving which he had borne so large a part.

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VII. COMMITTEE 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 Committees on Claims, Indian Affairs and Agriculture. I made a special study in the vacation of 1877, expecting to master, as well as I could, the whole Indian question, so that my service on that Committee might be of some value. But I was removed from the Committee on Indian Affairs, by the Committee who made the appointments, in the following December. This was very 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 the Indians during the remainder of his lifetime. He was ready, at the Department and on the floor of the Senate, and wherever he could exert an influence to protect and baffle any attempt to wrong them. His quiet and unpretending service to this unfortunate and oppressed race entitles him to a very high place 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 it up for some service in which my constituents were more immediately interested.

In December, 1878, I was put on the Committee on Patents, and remained upon it for a little while. The Committee had to deal occasionally with special cases of applications for extension of patents by statute, which demanded a knowledge of the patent law, and industry and sound judgment on the part 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 Revision of the Laws; in December, 1883, on the Joint Committee on the 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, on the Committee on Rules.

I was on the Committee on Claims for ten years, from March 9, 1877, to March 4, 1887. It is impossible to establish by the record the part any man performs, who is a member of a deliberative body consisting of several persons, in influencing its decisions, or in establishing the principles on which they are based. But I believe I may fairly claim, and that I could cite my associates on the Committee to bear testimony, that I had a great deal to do, and much more than any other person, in settling the doctrines upon which the Senate acted in dealing with the great questions of the claims of individuals and States and corporate bodies growing out of the War. Upon the rules then established the Government claims amounting to hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars were decided. The victorious Republic dealt justly and generously with the vanquished and misguided men who had assailed it and sought its destruction.

The general doctrines by which Congress was governed were these:

1. No rightful claim accrued to anybody for the destruction or 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 of the Army in the field (1) to loyal persons, (2) to disloyal persons, if it were shown by a certificate of the officer who took them, or otherwise, that they were taken with the purpose of paying for them. Inhabitants of States in rebellion were presumed to be disloyal, unless their loyalty were shown affirmatively.

3. A like rule was followed in determining the questions of payment for the use of buildings, occupied as soldiers' quarters, or for other official purposes, by the Army, or injury to them caused by such occupation.

4. Property taken by the Army was paid for at its actual value to the Government, and not necessarily at its value to owner.

5. No claim accrued by reason of the destruction of property whether of loyal or disloyal persons, to prevent its falling into the hands of the enemy.

6. An exception to the principle above stated, founded not on any strict principle or established law or conduct of Governments, but on sound public policy, was adopted in the case of institutions of 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 protection to such institutions in all future wars, that it would tend to heal the bitter recollections of the Civil War and the estrangements then existing between the sections of the country. I have lived to see the doctrine thoroughly established, the College of William and Mary rebuilt by the Government, and every church and school and hospital which suffered by the military operations of the Civil War reimbursed, if it has presented its claim.

If I have been able to render any public service, I look upon that I have rendered upon the Committee on Claims, although it has attracted but little attention, and is not of a nature to make great public impression, as perhaps more valuable than any other.

The duties of that Committee, when I was upon it, were very laborious. I find that in the first session of the first Congress, I made reports in seventeen cases, each of them involving a study of the evidence, a finding of the facts, and an investigation, statement and consideration of important principles of law, in most cases to be applied to a novel state of facts. I think that winter's work upon the Committee on Claims alone required more individual labor than that required to perform the duties of his office by any Judge of a State Court, of which I have any knowledge; and that the amount of money, and importance of the principles involved very far exceeded that involved in the aggregate of the cases in the Supreme Court of any State for a like period.

I was a member of the Committee on the Library for several years. For two or three years I was its acting Chairman during the summer, and in that capacity had to approve the accounts of the Congressional Library, and the National Botanic Garden.

To that Committee were referred applications for the erection of monuments and statues and similar works throughout the country, including the District of Columbia, and the purchase of works for art for the Government. They used to have a regular appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars annually, to be expended at their discretion, for works of art. That appropriation was stopped some years ago.

My service on that Committee brought me into very delightful relations with Mr. Sherman and Mr. Evarts. I introduced and got through a bill for a monument and statue to Lafayette and, as acting Chairman of the Library Committee was, with the Secretary of War and the Architect of the Capitol, a member of the Commission who selected the artists and contracted for the statue and monument. A resolution to build the monument passed the Continental Congress, but was not carried into effect by reason of the poverty of the Confederacy in that day. In Washington's first Administration somebody called attention to the fact that the monument had not been built, to which my grandfather, Roger Sherman, answered: "The vote is the monument." I was led by the anecdote to do what I could to have the long-neglected duty performed. The statue and monument, by two French artists of great genius, now stands at one corner of Lafayette Square. The statue of Rochambeau has 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 Department of State. William Temple Franklin, the Doctor's son, died in London, leaving at his lodgings a mass of valuable correspondence of his father, and other papers illustrating his life, especially in France. They were discovered in the possession of the keeper of his lodgings, many years after, by Henry Stevens, the famous antiquary and dealer in rare books. Stevens had got into difficulties about money, and had pledged the collection for about twenty-five thousand dollars. It had been offered to the Government. Several Secretaries of State, in succession, including Mr. Blaine, had urged Congress to buy it, but without avail.

One day Mr. Dwight, Librarian of the State Department, came to see me at the Capitol about some not very important matter. While I was talking with him, he said that the one thing he wished 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 could accomplish the purchase. So I introduced a resolution, had it referred to the Library Committee, and we had a hearing. It happened that Edward Everett Hale, who probably knew as much about the subject and the value of the papers as anybody, was then in Washington. At the same time John Russell Bartlett was here, who had charge of the famous Brown Collection in Rhode Island. They were both summoned before the Committee, and on their statement the Committee voted to recommend the passage of the resolution. It passed the Senate. The provision was then put upon the Sundry Civil Appropriation bill. With it, 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 provision for buying the papers of Vans Murray, Envoy to France in Napoleon's time; and for buying two other quite important manuscript collections. When the bill got to the House, all these things were stricken out. The Conference Committee had a great strife over them, the House refusing to put any of them in, and the Senate insisting upon all. At last they compromised, agreeing to take them alternately, including the first one, rejecting the second; including the third, rejecting the fourth, and so on. In this lottery the Franklin Papers were saved, and Mr. Sherman's Rochambeau Papers were stricken out, much to his disgust. But he got an appropriation for them in a subsequent Congress.

The Committee on Rules have the control of the Capitol, and the not very important power of assigning the rooms to the different Committees. Beyond that they have not, in general, much to do. There have been few important amendments to the rules in my time, of which I was the author of two.

One of them provides that an amendment to any bill may be laid on the table, on special motion, without carrying the bill itself with it. The motion to lay on the table not being debatable, this enables the Senate to dispose promptly of a good many propositions, which otherwise would consume a good deal of time in debate. There had been such a provision as to appropriation bills before. When I first suggested this change, Mr. Edmunds exclaimed in a loud whisper, "we won't do that." But I believe he approved it finally.

The other was an amendment relating to order in debate, made necessary by a very disagreeable occurrence, which ended in the exchange of blows in the Senate, by two Senators from the same State. I had long in mind to propose, when the occasion came, the last clause of this amendment. If Senators are to be considered to any degree as ambassadors of their States, it would seem proper that they should not be compelled to hear any reproachful language about the State they represent. Such attacks have given rise to a great deal of angry debate in both Houses of Congress.

The following is the amendment:

No Senator in debate shall directly or indirectly by any form of words impute to any Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.

No Senator in debate shall refer offensively to any State of the Union.

I was also for several years a member of the Committee on Woman Suffrage. That Committee used to hear the advocates of Woman Suffrage who liked to have their arguments reported and sent through the mails as public documents under the franking privilege.

Although a very decided advocate of the extension of the right of suffrage to women, I have not thought that it was likely that that would be accomplished by an amendment to the National Constitution, or indeed that it was wise to attempt to do it in that way. The Constitution cannot be amended without the consent of three-fourths of the States. If a majority can be got in three-fourths of the States for such an amendment, their people would be undoubtedly ready to amend their State Constitutions by which, so far as each State is concerned, the object would be accomplished. So it seems hardly worth while to take the trouble of plying Congress with petitions or arguments.

But my longest service upon Committees has been upon the two great Law Committees of the Senate,--the Committee on Privileges and Elections, and the Committee on the Judiciary.

I have been a member of the Committee on Privileges and Elections since March 9, 1877. I was Chairman for more than ten years. I have been a member of the Committee on the Judiciary since December, 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 represent and defend in debate the action of these Committees on all the important questions referred to them. I have also, by reason of my long service, now more than twenty-six years, on the Committee of Privileges and Elections, been expected to take part in the discussion of all the Election cases, and of all matters affecting the privileges and dignity of the Senate, and of individual Senators. The investigations into alleged outrages at the South, and wrongs connected with them, have been conducted by that Committee. So it has been my fortune to be prominent in nearly all of the matters that have come up in the Senate since I have been a member of it, which have excited angry sectional or political feeling. Matters of finance and revenue and protection, while deeply interesting the people, do not, in general, cause angry feeling on the part of the political leaders. To this remark, the state of mind of our friends, whom we are in the habit of calling Mugwumps, and who like to call themselves Independents, is an exception. They have commonly discussed the profoundest and subtlest questions with an angry and bitter personality which finds its parallel only in the theological treatises of the dark ages. It is lucky for some of us that they have not had the fires of Smithfield or of the Inquisition at their command.

So, at various times in my life, I have been the object of the most savage denunciation, sometimes from the Independent newspapers, sometimes from the Democratic newspapers, especially those in the South, and sometimes from the press of my own party whom I have offended by differing from a majority of my political friends.

But such things are not to be taken too seriously. I have found in general that the men who deliver themselves with most bitterness and fury on political questions are the men who change their minds most easily, and are in general the most placable, and not uncommonly are the most friendly and pleasant men in the world in private intercourse. I account it my great good fortune that, although I have never flinched from uttering whatever I thought, and acting according to my own conviction of public duty, that, as I am approaching four score years, I have, almost without an exception, the good will of my countrymen, certainly if I may trust what they tell me when I meet in private intercourse men from different parts of the country, or what they are saying of me just now in the press. But it is quite possible that I may say or do something before I get through which will change all that. So whether my sunset, which is to come very soon, is to be clear or under a cloud, it is impossible even to guess.

During this period I have taken a leading part in all questions affecting the security of the right of suffrage conferred by the Constitution of the United States on the colored people, of honesty in elections, of questions affecting disputed titles to 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 at the 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. In March, 1879, there was a Democratic majority in the Senate and in the House, but a Republican President. The Democratic Party chafed exceedingly under the National laws for securing the purity of elections and for securing impartial juries in the courts of the United States. In the December session of 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, Legislative and Judicial Appropriation Bill, unless the Senate and the President would yield to their demand. Mr. Beck of Kentucky, one of the conferrees on the part of the Senate, representing what was then the Democratic minority, but what became at the March session the majority, stated the doctrine of the House, as announced by their conferrees--adding that he agreed with it--that unless the States should be allowed to conduct their own elections in their own way, free from all Federal interference, they would refuse under their Constitutional right to make appropriations to carry on the Government.

This was in defiance of the express provision of the Constitution that Congress might at any time alter the regulations prescribed by the State Legislatures as to time, place and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives.

Mr. Beck declared that that course would be adopted and adhered to, no matter what came of the Appropriation Bills. He was followed by Mr. Thurman of Ohio, the leader of his party in the Senate, and Chairman of the Judiciary when it came into power. He said it was a question upon which he had thought long and deeply, one of the gravest which ever arose for the consideration of the American Congress, and added:

"We claim the right, which the House of Commons in England established after two centuries of contest, to say that we will not grant the money of the people unless there is a redress of grievances . . . . England was saved from despotism and an absolute monarchy by the exercise of the power of the House of Commons to refuse supplies except upon conditions that grievances should be redressed . . . . It is a mistake to suppose that 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 was the rule that the House of Lords had no right to amend a Money Bill."

This startling proposition claimed that it was in the power of the House of Representatives to control the entire legislation of the country. It could, if the doctrine of Mr. Beck and Mr. Thurman had prevailed, impose any condition upon an appropriation for the Judges' salaries, for the salaries of all executive officers, for carrying on the courts, and for all other functions of the Government.

I made a careful study of this question and satisfied the Senate,--and I think I satisfied Mr. Beck and Mr. Thurman, --that the doctrine had no support in this country, and had no support even in England. An examination of Parliamentary history, which I studied carefully, afforded the material for giving a narrative of every occasion when the Commons exerted their power of withholding supplies as a means of compelling a redress of grievances, from the Conquest to the present hour. I did not undertake in a speech in the Senate to recite the authorities in full. But I summed up the result of the English and American doctrine in a few sentences, which may be worth recording here.

"First. The Commons never withheld the supplies as a means of coercing the assent of the Crown or the Lords to legislation.

"Second. The supplies withheld were not the supplies needed for the ordinary functions of government, to which the ordinary revenues of the Crown were sufficient, but were for extraordinary occasions, as to pay the King's debts, or to conduct foreign wars.

"Third. That when the hereditary revenues of the Crown, or those settled on the King for life at the beginning of his reign, ceased to be sufficient for the maintenance of government and for public defence, the practice of withholding supplies ceased.

"Fourth. There has been no instance since the Revolution of 1688 of attaching general legislation to a bill for raising or appropriating money, and scarcely, if ever, such an instance before that date. When such an attempt has been made it has been resisted, denounced and abandoned, and the English Constitutional authorities, without exception, are agreed that such a proceeding is unwarrantable, revolutionary and destructive of the English Constitution.

"It is true that the luxury or ambition of Kings or their indulgent bounty to their favorites led them to assemble Parliament and to ask additional supplies from their subjects. It is also true that these requests furnished the occasion to the Commons to stipulate for redress of grievances. But the grievances so redressed had no relation to the laws of the Realm. These laws were made or altered by the free assent of the three estates in whom the law-making power vested by the Constitution. The grievances of which the Commons sought redress, whether from Tudor, Plantagenet or Stuart, were the improper use of prerogatives, the granting of oppressive monopolies, the waging of costly foreign wars, the misconduct of favorites and 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 the two cases. The mistake, the gross, palpable mistake, which these gentlemen fall into in making this comparison, lies at 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 supplies to the President under any circumstances whatever. The only appropriation of the public money to which that term can properly apply, the provision for the President's compensation, is by design and of purpose placed wholly out of the power of Congress. The provision is peremptory that--

"'The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them.'

"Alexander Hamilton, in No. 72 of the 'Federalist,' declares that the very purpose of this enactment is to put it beyond the power of Congress to compel the President 'to surrender at discretion his judgment to their inclinations.'"

Almost immediately after I entered the Senate the case came up of the title of William Pitt Kellogg to a seat in the Senate from Louisiana.

In January, 1877, a Republican Legislature was organized in Louisiana, which recognized Mr. Packard as the lawful Governor of the State. Packard had been elected, according to the claim of the Republicans, at the same election at which the Republican electors, who cast their votes for President Hayes, had been chosen. That Legislature elected Kellogg. When President Hayes refused to continue his support of the Republican government in Louisiana by military force, the Democrats organized the Legislature, a Democratic Governor took possession of power, and the Republican State Legislature melted away. It had done little or nothing, except to elect Mr. Kellogg.

Under these circumstances, the Democrats on the Committee on Privileges and Elections, and in the Senate, claimed that the recognition of the Democratic Governor had an ex post facto operation which determined the title and right of the Legislature who undertook to elect Mr. Spofford, Mr. Kellogg's competitor. The Republicans, on the other hand, claimed that nothing which occurred afterward could operate to determine the question of the lawfulness of the Kellogg Legislature, or its power to elect a Senator. That must be settled by the law and the fact. Upon these we thought Kellogg's title to be clear. Kellogg was seated. But when the Democrats got a majority, two years later, the Committee on Privileges and 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 able report, setting forth the view taken by himself and by the majority of the Committee, and recommended the admission of Mr. Spofford. I advised the Republican minority to decline to follow the Democrats into the discussion of the evidence, and to put the case alone and squarely on the authority of the previous judgment of the Senate. This I did in the following report:

The undersigned, a minority of the Committee on Privileges and Elections, to whom was referred the memorial of Henry M. Spofford, claiming the seat now occupied by William Pitt Kellogg, submit the following as their views:

On the 30th day of November, 1877, the Senate passed the following resolutions.

"Resolved, That William Pitt Kellogg is, upon the merits of the case, entitled to a seat in the Senate of the United States from the State of Louisiana for the term of six years, commencing on the 4th of March, 1877, and that he be admitted thereto on taking the proper oath.

"Resolved, That Henry M. Spofford is not entitled to a seat in the Senate of the United States."

The party majority in the Senate has changed since Mr. Kellogg took the oath of office in pursuance of the above resolution. Nothing else has changed. The facts which the Senate considered and determined were in existence then, as now. It is sought, by a mere superiority of numbers, for the first time, to thrust a Senator from the seat which he holds by virtue of the express and 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, to be classed with the Rebellion, with the attempt to take possession by fraud of the State Government of Maine, and with the overthrow of State Governments in the South, of which it is the fitting sequence. Political parties have too often been led by partisan zeal 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 Constitution have been trusted by the generous confidence of the American people are now to give evidence of the sincerity of their vows. 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 of the evidence by which the claimant of Mr. Kellogg's seat seeks to establish charges affecting the integrity of that Senator. Such evidence can be found in abundance in the slums of great cities. It is not fit to be trusted in cases affecting the smallest amount of property, much less the honor of an eminent citizen, or the title to an object of so much desire as a seat in the Senate. This evidence is not only unworthy of respect or credit, but it is in many instances wholly irreconcilable with undisputed facts, and Mr. Kellogg has met and overthrown it at every point.

GEORGE F. HOAR, ANGUS CAMERON, JOHN A. LOGAN.

The Democratic majority presented their report, without asking to have it read. Then we of the minority presented ours, and had it read. It attracted the attention of the Senate and of the country. My report contains but a few sentences. That of the Democratic minority occupies eight columns of very fine print in the Congressional Record. The result was that some of the Southern Democrats, including Mr. Bayard of Delaware, General Gordon of Georgia, General Wade Hampton of South Carolina, and Mr. Pendleton, of Ohio, refused to support their associates in the extreme measure of unseating a Senator when nothing had happened to affect the judgment which seated him, except that the majority of the Senate had changed. Some of the Democratic gentlemen, however, while resting upon the old judgment of the Senate, and while refusing to set that aside, thought the Democratic charges made out on the evidence, and that Mr. Kellogg's conduct and character deserved the severest denunciation. Senator Pendleton, of Ohio, however, with a courage and manliness that did him infinite credit, after stating what his Democratic brethren said: "I am bound to say that I have read the evidence carefully, and there is nothing in it that in the least warrants any imputation upon the integrity of that Senator."

In speaking of my Committee service, perhaps I ought to say that I was appointed one of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution 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 science who were its members. After I had been a member a year or two a very eminent Republican Senator complained that I was getting more than my share of the prominent places in the gift of the Senate, and specified the Regency of the Smithsonian Institution as an instance. I thought there was great justice in 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 National Museum building, which I do not think it likely that I could have accomplished. That Museum was then in charge of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

A somewhat similar thing happened to me later. In the year 1885 the Nominating Committee of the Senate, of which Senator Allison was then Chairman, proposed my name for the Committee on Foreign Relations. I should have liked that service very much. 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 then a member of the Committees on the Judiciary, Privileges and Elections, Library, Patents and the Select Committee to Inquire into 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 Republicans of Massachusetts were under special obligations for his services in their campaigns, was not at that time placed in positions on Committee service such as his ability and merit entitled him to. Accordingly I told the Committee I thought they had better amend their report and put Mr. Frye on the Committee on Foreign Relations instead of myself. That was done.

I incline to think that if that had not been done, and I had remained on the Committee for Foreign Relations, that I could have defeated the Spanish Treaty, prevented the destruction of the Republic in the Philippine Islands, and the commitment of this country to the doctrine that we can govern dependencies under our Constitution, in which the people have no political or Constitutional rights but such as Congress choose to recognize.

I am not sure that modesty or disinterestedness has much place 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 consent to stand in their way." This is often said with the utmost sincerity. But anybody who acts on such a feeling ought to remember that if he accept the office, it will not be filled by a worse man than he; if he accept the office, it being a political office, he is sure that the office will be filled by a man who will desire to accomplish, and will do his best to accomplish, the things he thinks for the public good. He should also remember, so far as the matter of ability is concerned, that other men are likely to be much better judges of his capacity than he is himself. If men are likely often to overrate their own capacity, they are also very often likely to underrate it.

Let me not be understood as commending the miserable self- seeking which too often leads men to urge their own claims without regard to the public interests. A man who is his own candidate is commonly a very bad candidate for his party.

One vote, more than once, would have saved the country from what I think its wretched policy in regard to the Philippine Islands. There was just one vote to spare when the Spanish Treaty was ratified. One Senator waited before voting until the roll-call was over and the list of the votes read by the clerk, before the finally voted for the treaty. He said he did not wish to butt his head against the sentiment of his State if he could do no good; but if his vote would defeat it, he should vote against it. If there had been one less vote, his vote would have defeated it. The Treaty would have been lost, in my opinion, if Senator Gray, one of the Commissioners who made it, who earnestly protested against it, but afterward supported it, had not been a member of the Commission. The resolution of Mr. Bacon, declaring our purpose to recognize the independence of the Philippine people, if they desired it, was lost also by a single vote. The Philippine Treaty would have been lost but for Mr. Bryan's personal interposition in its behalf. It would have been defeated, in my judgment, if Speaker Reed, a man second in influence and in power in this country to President McKinley alone, had seen it to be his duty to remain in public life, and lead the fight against it.

So I think it is rarely safe for a man who is in political life for public, and not for personal ends, and who values the political principles which he professes, to decline any position of power, either from modesty, doubt of his own ability, 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 account of the various legal and Constitutional questions which it affected.

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VIII. THE RIVER AND HARBOR BILL

I have throughout my whole public political life acted upon my own judgment. I have done what I thought for the public interest 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 be very much disapproved in Connecticut, to which he replied that he knew but one way to ascertain the public opinion of Connecticut; that was to ascertain what was right. When he had found that out, he was quite sure that it would meet the approval of Connecticut. That in general has been in my judgment absolutely and literally true of Massachusetts. It has required no courage for any representative of hers to do what he thought was right. She is apt to select to speak for her, certainly those she sends to the United States Senate, in whose choice the whole Commonwealth has a part, men who are in general of the same way of thinking, and governed by the same principles as are the majority of her people. When she has chosen them she expects them to act according to their best judgement, and not to be thinking about popularity. She likes independence better than obsequiousness. The one thing the people of Massachusetts will not forgive in a public servant is that he should act against his own honest judgment to please them. I am speaking of her sober, second thought. Her people, like the rest of mankind, are liable to waves of emotion and of prejudice. This is true the world over. It is as true of good men as of bad men, of educated as of ignorant men, whenever they are to act in large masses. Alexander Hamilton said that if every Athenian citizen had been a Socrates, still every Athenian assembly would have been a mob. So I claim no credit that I have voted and spoken as I thought, always without stopping to consider whether public opinion would support me.

The only serious temptation I have ever had in my public life came to me in the summer of 1882, when the measure known as the River and Harbor Bill was pending. The bill provided for an expenditure of about eighteen million dollars. Of this a little more than four million was for the execution of a scheme for the improvement of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which had been recommended by President Arthur in a special message. All the other appropriations put together were a little less than fourteen million dollars. The bill passed both Houses. President Arthur vetoed it, alleging as a reason that the measure was extravagant; that the public works provided for in it were of local interest, not for the advantage of international or interstate commerce; and that it had got through by a system of log-rolling, the friends of bad schemes in one State joining with the friends of bad schemes 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 reasons which applied to each improvement were not well understood by the public. So the conductors of the newspapers naturally supposed the President to be in the right in his facts. The Democratic newspapers were eager to attack Republican measures. Where there were factions in the Republican Party, the Republican papers of one faction were ready to attack the men who belonged to the other. The independent newspapers welcomed any opportunity to support their theory that American public life was rotten and corrupt. So when the question came up whether the bill should pass notwithstanding the objections of the President, there was a storm of indignation throughout the country against the men who supported it.

But the committees who had supported it and who had reported it, and who knew its merits, and the men who had voted for it in either House of Congress, could not well stultify themselves by changing their votes, although some of them did. I was situated very fortunately in that respect. I had been absent on a visit to Massachusetts when the bill passed. So I was not on record for it. I had given it no great attention. The special duties which had been assigned to me related to other subjects. So when the measure came up in the Senate I had only an opinion founded on my general knowledge of the needs of the country and the public policy, that it was all right. My reelection was coming on. I was to have a serious contest, if I were a candidate, with the supporters of General Butler, then very powerful in the State. He, in fact, was elected Governor in the election then approaching. My first thoughts were that I was fortunate to have escaped this rock. But when the vote came on I said to myself: "This measure is right. Is my father's son to sneak home to Massachusetts, having voted against a bill that is clearly righteous and just, 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 believed it to be right, but that it would lose me the support of every newspaper in Massachusetts that had been friendly to me before. I voted accordingly. The vote was met by a storm of indignation from one end of Massachusetts to the other, in which every Republican newspaper in the State, so far as I know, united. The Springfield Republican and the Boston Herald, as will well be believed, were in glory. The conduct of no pick- pocket or bank robber could have been held up to public indignation and contempt in severer language than the supporters of that bill. A classmate of mine, an eminent man of letters, a gentleman of great personal worth, addressed a young ladies' school, or some similar body in Western Massachusetts, on the subject of the decay of public virtue as exemplified by me. He declared that I had separated myself from the best elements in the State.

The measure was passed over the President's veto. But it cost the Republican Party its majority in the House of Representatives. A large number of the member of the House who had voted for it lost their seats. If the question of my reelection had come on within a few weeks thereafter, I doubt whether I should have got forty votes in the whole Legislature. If I had flinched or apologized, I should have been destroyed. But I stood to my guns. I wrote a letter to the people of Massachusetts in which I took up case by case each provision of the bill, and showed how important it was for the interest of commerce between the States, or with foreign countries, and how well it justified the moderate expenditure. I pointed out that the bill had been, in proportion to the resources of the Government, less in amount than those John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster had formerly advocated; that Mr. Webster, with the single exception of his service for preserving the Union, prided himself on his support of this policy of public improvement more than on anything else in his life, and had made more speeches on that subject than on any other. Mr. Adams claimed to be the author of the policy of internal improvements. So that it was a Massachusetts policy, and a Massachusetts doctrine. I asked the people of Massachusetts to consider whether they could reasonably expect to get their living by manufacture, to which nearly the whole State was devoted, bringing their raw material and their fuel and their iron and coal and cotton and wool from across the continent, and then carrying the manufactured article back again to be sold at the very places where the material came from, in competition with States like Pennsylvania and New York and Ohio and Indiana, unless the cost of transportation was, so far as possible, annihilated.

I concluded by saying that I knew they would not come to my way of thinking that afternoon or that week, but that they were sure to come to it in the end. With very few exceptions the letter did not change the course of the newspapers, or of the leading men who had zealously committed themselves to another doctrine. But it convinced the people, and I believe it had a very great effect throughout the country, and was the means of saving the policy of internal improvements from destruction.

Mr. Clapp, of the Boston Journal, with a manliness that did him infinite credit, declared publicly in its columns that he had been all wrong, and that I was right. The Worcester Spy, edited by my dear friend and near kinsman, Evarts Greene, had with the rest of the press attacked my vote. Mr. Greene himself was absent at the time, so the paper was then in charge of an associate. When Mr. Greene returned I asked him to spend an afternoon at my house. That was before my letter came out. I had sent to Washington for all the engineers' reports and other documents showing the necessity of every item of the bill. Mr. Greene made a careful study of the bill and agreed with me.

The Boston Herald also obtained all the material from Washington and sent it to a very able gentleman who, though not taking any part in the ordinary conduct of the Herald, was called upon for services requiring special ability and investigation. They asked him to answer my letter. He spent five days in studying the matter, and then wrote to the managing editor of the paper than Mr. Hoar was entirely right, and that he should not write the article desired. The Herald, however, did not abandon its position. It kept up the war. But I ought to say it so far modified its action that it supported me 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 himself a very severe blow. The Commonwealth was prepared to honor Messrs. Crapo and Hoar anew. To-day it pauses, frowns and reflects." So it kept up the attack. It had previously advocated the selection of Mr. Crapo as candidate for Governor. It bitterly denounced me. Mr. Crapo had himself voted for the River and Harbor Bill. It could not consistently maintain its bitter opposition to me, because of my vote, while supporting Mr. 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 I did. I was received rather coldly when I went forward. But I made no apologies. I began my speech by saying: "It gives me great pleasure to meet this assembly of the representatives of the Republicans of Massachusetts. I have seen these faces before. They are faces into which I am neither afraid nor ashamed to look." The assembly hesitated a little between indignation at the tone of defiance, and approval of a man's standing by his convictions. The latter feeling predominated, and they broke out into applause. But the resolutions which the Committee reported contained a mild but veiled reproof of my action.

Mr. Crapo was defeated in the Convention. I have no doubt he would have been nominated for Governor, but for his vote for the River and Harbor Bill. His successful competitor, Mr. Bishop, was a gentleman of great personal worth, highly esteemed throughout the Commonwealth, and of experience in State administration. But it was thought that his nomination had been secured by very active political management, concerted at the State House, and that the nomination did not fairly represent the desire of the people of the Commonwealth. Whatever truth there may have been in this, I am very sure that Mr. Crapo's defeat could not have been compassed but for his vote for the River and Harbor Bill. The result of the above feeling, however, was that the Republican campaign was conducted without much 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 the River and Harbor Bill. My principal Republican competitors were Mr. Crapo, whose friends rightly thought he had been treated with great injustice; and Governor Long, a great public favorite, who had just ended a brilliant and most acceptable term of service as Governor. Governor Long had presided at a public meeting where President Arthur had been received during the summer, and had assured him that his action had the hearty approval and support of the people of the Commonwealth. I had, of course, no right to find the least fault with the supporters of Governor Long. He would have been in every way a most acceptable and useful Senator. I ought to say that, as I understood it, he hardly assumed the attitude of a candidate for the place, and declared in a public letter or speech that he thought I ought to be reelected. So, after a somewhat earnest struggle I was again chosen.

One curious incident happened during the election. The morning after the result was declared, a story appeared in the papers that Mr. Crapo's supporters had been led to come over to me by the statement that one of them had received a telegram from him withdrawing his name, and advising that course. The correspondent of one of the papers called upon Mr. Crapo, who answered him that he had never sent any such telegram to Boston. So it was alleged that somebody who favored me had brought about the result by this false statement. A newspaper correspondent called on me in Washington, and asked me about the story. I told him that I had not heard of the story, but that if it turned out to be true I, of course, would instantly decline the office. A full investigation was made of the matter, and it turned out that Mr. Crapo had sent such a telegram to a member of the Legislature in New Bedford, who had taken it to Boston and made it known.

The next winter, at my suggestion, a resolution was passed calling upon the Secretary of War, Mr. Lincoln, to specify which items in the River and Harbor Bill of the previous winter were not, in his opinion, advisable, or did not tend to promote international or interstate commerce. He replied specifying a very few items only, amounting altogether to a very few thousand dollars. This reply was made by the Secretary of War, as he told me in private afterward, by the express direction of the President, and after consultation with him. That ended the foolish outcry against the great policy of internal improvement, which has helped to make possible the marvels of our domestic commerce, one of the most wonderful creations of human history. The statistics of its vast extent, greater now, I think, than all the foreign commerce of the world put together, from the nature of the case, never can be precisely ascertained. It is not only wonderful in its amount, but in its origin, its resources, and in its whole conduct. All its instrumentalities are American. It is American at both ends, and throughout all the way. This last year a bill providing for an expenditure of sixty millions, nearly four times the amount of that which President Arthur, and the newspapers that supported him, thought so 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 generosity and affection of Mr. Dawes. He had not voted when his name was called, expecting to vote at the end of the roll-call. He meant to vote against the passage of the bill over the veto. But when he heard my vote for it, he saw that I was bringing down on my head a storm of popular indignation, and made up his mind that he would not throw the weight of his example on the side against me. So, contrary to his opinion of the merits of the bill, he came to my side, and voted with me.

I suppose a good many moralists will think that it is a very wicked thing indeed for a man to vote against his convictions on a grave public question, from a motive like this, of personal friendship. But I think on the whole I like better the people, who will love Mr. Dawes for such an act, than those who will condemn him. I would not, probably, put what I am about to say in an address to a Sunday-school, or into a sermon to the inmates of a jail or house of correction. I cannot, perhaps, defend it by reason. But somehow or other, I am strongly tempted to say there are occasions in life where the meanest thing a man can do is to do perfectly right. But I do not say it. It would be better to say that there are occasions when the instinct is a better guide than the reason. At any rate, I do not believe the recording angel made any trouble for Mr. Dawes for that vote.

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IX. CHINESE 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 been compelled to take an attitude in opposition to a large majority of my own party and to the temporary judgment of my countrymen: that is the proposed legislation in violation of the Treaty with China; the subsequent Treaty modifying that negotiated in 1868 by Mr. Seward on our part, and Mr. Burlingame for China; and the laws which have been enacted since, upon the subject of Chinese immigration. I had the high honor of being hung in effigy in Nevada by reason of the report that I had opposed, in secret Session of the Senate, the Treaty of 1880. My honored colleague, Mr. Dawes, and I were entirely agreed in the matter. Mr. Dawes complained good-naturedly to Senator Jones, of Nevada, that he had been neglected when the Nevada people had singled me out for that sole honor, to which Mr. Jones, with equal good-nature, replied that if Mr. Dawes desired, he would have measures taken to correct the error, which had inadvertently been made.

In 1868 the late Anson Burlingame, an old friend of mine and a man highly esteemed in Massachusetts, who had been sent to China as the American Minister in Mr. Lincoln's time, was appointed by the Chinese Government its Ambassador, or Envoy, to negotiate treaties with the United States and several European powers. He made a journey through this country and Europe, travelling with Oriental magnificence, in a state which he was well calculated to maintain and adorn. It was just 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 doctrines of liberty which Jefferson and the Fathers of our country had 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 Plenipotentiaries Chih-Kang and Sun Chia-Ku. It contained the following clause:

"The United States of American and the Emperor of China cordially recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively from one country to the other for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents."

Article VII. of the same Treaty stipulated that citizens of each power should enjoy all the privileges of the public educational institutions under the control of the government of the other, enjoyed by the citizens or the subjects of the most favored nation, and that the citizens of each might, themselves, establish schools in the others' country. Congress passed an Act, July 27, 1868, to a like effect, to which the following is the preamble to the first section:

"Whereas the right of expatriation is a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and whereas in the recognition of this principle this government has freely received emigrants from all nations, and invested them with the rights of citizenship; and whereas it is claimed that such American citizens, with their descendants, are subjects of foreign states, owing allegiance to the governments thereof; and whereas it is necessary to the maintenance of public peace that this claim of foreign allegiance should be promptly and finally disavowed: Therefore," etc.

Thereafter, in the first term of the Administration of President Hayes, in the December Session of 1878, a bill was introduced which, almost defiantly, as it seemed to me, violated the faith of the country pledged by the Burlingame Treaty. There had been no attempt to induce China to modify that Treaty. I resisted its passage as well as I could. But my objection had little effect in the excited condition of public sentiment. The people of the Pacific coast were, not unnaturally, excited and alarmed by the importation into their principal cities of Chinese laborers, fearing, I think without much reason, that American laboring men could not maintain themselves in the competition with this thrifty and industrious race who lived on food that no American could tolerate, and who had no families to support, and who crowded together, like sardines in a box, in close and unhealthy sleeping apartments.

I supposed that the labor of this inferior class would raise the condition of better and more intelligent laborers. That, however, was a fairly disputable question. But I could not consent to striking at men, as I have just said, because of their occupation. This bill was vetoed by President Hayes, who put his objections solely upon the ground that the bill was in violation of the terms of the existing Treaty. The House, by a vote of 138 yeas to 116 nays, refused to pass the bill over the veto.

But in 1880 a Treaty was negotiated, and approved by the Senate and ratified July 19, 1881, which relieved the United States from the provisions of the Burlingame Treaty, and permitted the exclusion of Chinese laborers. I made a very earnest speech, during a debate on this Treaty in Executive Session of the Senate, in opposition to it. The Senate did me the honor, on the motion of Mr. Dawes, of a vote authorizing my speech to be published, notwithstanding the rule of secrecy. But one Senator from the Pacific coast complained, I think with some reason, that I was permitted to publish my argument on one side when he not only was not permitted to publish his on the other, but his constituents had no means of knowing that he had defended his views or made proper answer to mine. So I thought it hardly fair to make by speech public, and it was not done.

Later, in the spring of 1882, a bill was passed to carry into effect the Treaty of 1880. That I resisted as best I could. In opposition to this bill I made an earnest speech showing it to be in conflict with the doctrines on which our fathers founded the Republic; with the principles of the Constitutions of nearly all the States, including that of California, and with the declarations of leading statesmen down to the year 1868. I showed also that the Chinese race had shown examples of the highest qualities of manhood, of intelligence, probity and industry. I protested against a compact between the two greatest nations of the Pacific, just as we were about to assert our great influence there, which should place in the public law of the world, and in the jurisprudence of America, the principle that it is fitting that there should be hereafter a distinction in the treatment of men by governments and in the recognition of their right to the pursuit of happiness by a peaceful change of their homes, based, not on conduct, not on character, but upon race and occupation; by asserting that you might justly deny to the Chinese what you might not justly deny to the Irish, that you might justly deny to the laborer what you might not deny to the idler. I pointed out that this declaration was extorted from unwilling China by the demand of America; and that laborers were henceforth to be classed, in the enumeration of American public law, with paupers, lazzaroni, harlots, and persons afflicted with pestilential diseases. I ended what I had to say as follows:

"Humanity, capable of infinite depths of degradation, is also capable of infinite heights of excellence. The Chinese, like all other races, has given us its examples of both. To rescue humanity from this degradation is, we are taught to believe, the great object of God's moral government on earth. It is not by injustice, exclusion, caste, but by reverence for 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 Independence came from the same source with the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. We can trust Him who promulgated these laws to keep the country safe that obeys them. The laws of the universe have their own sanction. They will not fail. The power that causes the compass to point to the north, that dismisses the star on its pathway through the skies, promising that in a thousand years it shall return again true to its hour and keeps His word, will vindicate His own moral law. As surely as the path on which our fathers entered a hundred years ago led to safety, to strength, to glory, so surely will the path on which we now propose to enter bring us to shame, to weakness, and to peril."

The Statute then enacted, expired by its own limitations twenty years afterward. Meantime the prejudice against Chinese labor had modified somewhat. The public had become somewhat more considerate of their rights and, at any rate, there was a desire to maintain some show of decency in legislating the matter. So a more moderate Statute was enacted in 1902. I was the only person who voted against it in either House. It was, of course, clear that resistance was useless. It was not worth while, it seemed to me, to undertake to express my objections at length. I contented myself with the following brief remonstrance:

"Mr. President, I think this bill and this debate indicate a great progress in sentiment. The sentiment of the country has passed, certainly so far as it is represented by a majority of the Senate, the stage, if it ever was in it, of a reckless seeking to accomplish the result of Chinese exclusion without regard to constitutional restraints, treaty obligations, or moral duties. There was in some quarters, as it seemed to me, in olden times, a disregard of all these restraints, certainly in the press, certainly in the harangues which were made to excited crowds in various parts of the country. Among others I can remember a visit of the apostle of Chinese exclusion to Boston Common which indicated that spirit.

"Now, that has gone largely, and the Senate has discussed this question with a temperate desire on the part of all classes and all Senators, whatever ways of thinking they have, to do what seemed to them for the benefit of labor, the quality of the citizenship of this country, in a moderate and constitutional fashion.

"But I cannot agree with the principle on which this legislation or any legislation on the subject which we have had in the country since 1870 rests. I feel bound to enter a protest. I believe that everything in the way of Chinese exclusion can be accomplished by reasonable, practical and wise measures which will not involve the principle of striking at labor, and will not involve the principle of striking at any class of human beings merely because of race, without regard to the personal and individual worth of the man struck at. I hold that every human soul has its rights, dependent upon its individual personal worth and not dependent upon color or race, and that all races, all colors, all nationalities contain persons entitled to be recognized everywhere they go on 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 the affectation or the reality of singularity. I know very well that the American people mean to do right, and I believe with all my heart that the men and the party with whom I have acted for fifty years mean to do right. I believe the judgment of both far better than my own. But every man's conscience is given to him as the lamp for his path. He cannot walk by another light.

It is also true that the great political principles which have been in issue for the last thirty years, have been, in general, those that have been debated for centuries, and which cannot be settled by a single vote, in a legislative body, by the result of a single election, or even by the opinion of a single generation. In nearly every one of what I am sorry to say are the numerous instances where I have been compelled 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 opinion of the great men of the great generations of the past. Certainly the Chinese Exclusion Bill and the Chinese Treaty; the Spanish Treaty and the War against the Philippine people could not have lived an hour before the indignation of the American people at any time from the beginning down to the time when, in 1876, they celebrated the centennial of their Independence.

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X. THE WASHINGTON TREATY AND THE GENEVA AWARD

The Treaty of Washington, creditable to all who engaged in it, not to be judged by its details, but by its great effect in securing peace to the world, saved Great Britain from a war with us, in which it is not unlikely that the nations of Europe who hated her would have come to take part on our side. But it saved us from the greater danger of having the war spirit renewed and intensified by this gigantic struggle, from an international hatred which would not have cooled again for a century; or, if we did not declare war, from taking the ignoble attitude of a great and free people lying in wait for an opportunity to revenge itself.

It was the purpose of that Treaty to remove every cause of quarrel. One constant cause of quarrel, for many years, had been the exercise of our right to fish on the shores of Newfoundland. In the Treaty it was agreed that the United States should have, in addition to her existing rights for ten years, and for such further times as the parties should agree, the right to take fish on the sea coast of the British Provinces north of us, with permission to land for the purpose of drying nets and curing fish, and that we were to pay for the privilege a sum to be fixed by arbitrators. Two of these arbitrators were to be appointed by the United States and Great Britain; the other, who would serve as umpire, to be agreed upon by the two powers, or, if not agreed upon within a certain time, then to be appointed by the Emperor of Austria. Great Britain insisted upon having the Belgian Minister to the United States for the third arbitrator, and refused to name or suggest or agree to any other person. So the time expired. Thereupon the Belgian Minister, Mr. Delfosse, was selected by the Emperor of Austria. Mr. Delfosse's own fortune in public life depended upon his Sovereign's favor. We had already notified Great Britain that, if the Belgian Minister were selected, he would probably deem himself disqualified by reason of the peculiar connection of his Government with that of Great Britain. When the Treaty was negotiated, Earl de Grey, Chairman of the Commissioners, said, speaking of the Government to whom the matter might be referred: "I do not name Belgium, because Great Britain has treaty arrangements with that Government which might be supposed to incapacitate it." Belgium, as was notorious, was dependent upon Great Britain to maintain its political existence against the ambitions of France and Germany. Mr. Delfosse's sovereign was the son of the brother of Queen Victoria's mother and Prince Albert's father, 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 Great Britain for this fishery privilege of five million five hundred thousand dollars. We never valued them at all. We abandoned them at the end of ten years. It would have been much better to leave the matter to Great Britain herself. If she had been put upon honor she would not have made such an award. No English Judge who valued his reputation would have suggested such a thing, as it seemed to us.

I would rather the United States should occupy the position of paying that award, after calling the attention of England to its injustice and wrong, than to occupy the position of England when she pocketed the money. A war with England would have been a grievous thing to her workingmen who stood by us in our hour of peril, and to all that class of Englishmen whom we loved, and who loved us. Such a war would have been a war between the only two great English-speaking nations of the world, and the two nations whose policy, under methods largely similar, though somewhat different, were determined by the public opinion of their people.

If however our closer and friendlier relations with England are to result in our adopting her social manners, her deference to rank and wealth, and of adopting her ideas of empire and the method of treating small and weak nations by great and strong ones, it would be better that we had kept aloof, and that the old jealousy and dislike engendered by two wars had continued.

A very interesting question was settled during the Administration of President Hayes as to the disposition of the $15,500,000 recovered from Great Britain by the award of the tribunal of Geneva for the violation of the obligations of neutrality during the Civil War. Great Britain, after what we had claimed what was full notice of what was going on, permitted certain war vessels to be constructed in England for the Confederate Government. She permitted those vessels to leave her ports and, by a preconcerted arrangement, to receive their armament, also procured in Great Britain. She turned a deaf, an almost contemptuous ear, to the remonstrances of Mr. Adams, our Minister. The Foreign Office, after a while, informed him that they did not wish to receive any more representations on that subject. But, as the War went on and the naval and military strength of the United States increased and became more manifest, Great Britain became more careful. At last some Rebel rams were built by the Lairds, ship-builders of Liverpool. Mr. Adams procured what he deemed sufficient evidence 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 that he had submitted the matter to the Law officers of her Majesty's Government, and they could see no reason for interfering. To this Mr. Adams instantly replied that he received the communication with great regret, adding, "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war." Lord Russell hastily reconsidered his opinion, and ordered the rams to be stopped.

He afterward, as appears in his biography by Spencer Walpole, admitted his error in not interfering in the case of the vessels that had gone out before. But the mischief was done. The terror of these Confederate vessels had driven our commerce from the sea, or had compelled our merchant vessels to sail under foreign flags, and had enormously increased the rate of insurance to those who kept the sea under our flag.

After the War had ended a demand for compensation was earnestly pressed upon Great Britain. A demand was made to refer the claims to arbitration, and a Treaty negotiated for that purpose by 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 Commission to deal with this controversy was agreed upon between the two countries, which sat in Washington, in 1871. The Commissioners in behalf of the United States were Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State; Robert C. Schenck, then our Minister to England; Samuel Nelson, Judge of the Supreme Court; Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, lately Attorney-General, and George H. Williams, afterward Attorney-General. On behalf of Great Britain there were Earl de Grey and Ripon, afterward Marquis of Ripon; Sir Stafford H. Northcote, afterward Earl of Idesleigh; Edward Thornton, then the British Minister here; John A. MacDonald, Premier of Canada, and Montague Bernard, Professor of International Law at Oxford. The two countries could not, in all probability, have furnished men more competent for such a purpose. They agreed upon a treaty. The rules by which neutral governments were to be held to be bound for the purposes of the arbitration were agreed on beforehand in the Treaty itself. They agreed to observe these rules between themselves in the future, and to invite other maritime powers to accede to them. The Treaty also contained a statement that Her Britannic Majesty had "authorized her High Commissioners and Plenipotentiaries to express in a friendly spirit the regret felt by Her Majesty's Government for the escape, under whatever circumstances, of the Alabama and other vessels from British ports, and for the depredations committed by those vessels." I am not aware a like apology has ever been made by Great Britain during her history, to any other country. There was a provision also, for the reference of some other matters in dispute between the two countries. One of these related to the fisheries-- a source of irritation between this country and the British possessions 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 growing out of the escape of the Rebel cruisers to a tribunal which was to sit at Geneva. Of this, one member was to be appointed by each of the parties, and the others by certain designated foreign governments. Our Commissioner was Charles Francis Adams, who had borne himself so wisely and patiently during the period of the Civil War. The English Commissioner was Sir Alexander Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice of England. The United States was represented by Caleb Cushing, William M. Evarts and Morrison R. Waite, afterward Chief Justice of the United States, as counsel.

Adams rarely betrayed any deep emotion on any public occasion, however momentous. But it must have been hard for him to conceal the thrill of triumph, after the ignominy to which he had submitted during that long and anxious time, when he heard the tribunal pronounce its judgment, condemning Great Britain to pay $15,500,000 damages for the wrong-doing against which he had so earnestly and vainly protested. Perhaps the feeling of his grandfather when he signed the Treaty of Independence in 1783 might alone be compared to it. Yet his father, John Quincy Adams, had something of the same feeling when, at the close of a war which put an end forever to the impressment of American seamen, and made the sailor in his ship as safe as the farmer in his dwelling, he signed the Treaty which secured our boundary and our fisheries as they had been secured by his father.* John Quincy Adams had struck, by the direction of his father, in 1815, a seal which he gave to his son, with the injunction to give it to his, bearing the motto, "Piscemur, venemur, ut olim,"--We keep our hunting grounds and our fishing grounds as of old. I doubt if three such achievements, by three successive generations, can be found in the annals of any other family however illustrious.

[Footnote] * This story is told more fully at page 147. It seems appropriate in both places. [End of Footnote]

The $15,500,000 was promptly paid. Then came the question what to do with it. There was no doubt anywhere, that the owners of vessels or cargoes that had been captured or destroyed by the cruisers for whose departure from British ports Great Britain was in fault, were entitled to be paid. That, however, would not consume the fund. The fund had been paid in gold coin by Great Britain, September 9, 1873, and had been covered into the Treasury the same day. This sum was invested in a registered bond for the amount, of the five per cent. loan of 1881, dated September 10, 1873, inscribed, "Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State, in trust. To be held subject to the future disposition of Congress, etc." This sum largely exceeded what was necessary to make good the principal of all losses directly resulting from the damages caused by the insurgent cruisers, above what had already been reimbursed from insurance. These claims were popularly termed the "claims for direct damages."

The question what to do with the balance was the subject of great dispute throughout the country, and of much debate in both Houses of Congress. Some persons claimed that the owners directly damaged should receive interest. That would still leave a large part of the fund undisposed of. It was insisted that the remainder belonged to the Government for the benefit of the whole people who had borne the burden and cost of the war. Others claimed that, as nothing but direct damages were lawfully assessable, the balance should be paid back to Great Britain. Still others claimed that the persons who had suffered indirectly by the loss of voyages, the increased rates of insurance, and the breaking up of business, were justly entitled to the money. Still others, perhaps the most formidable and persistent of all, claimed that the underwriters who had paid insurance on vessels or cargoes destroyed, were entitled to the money on the familiar principle that an insurer who pays a loss is subrogated to all the legal and equitable claims of the party insured.

These disputes prevented any disposition of the fund by Congress until 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 direct damage ought to be paid, that it was not fair that they should be kept waiting longer in order to settle the dispute about the rest of the fund. In accordance with his suggestion a Court was provided for by Act of Congress, whose duty it was to receive and examine all claims directly resulting from damages caused by the insurgent cruisers. They were directed, however, not to allow any claim where the party injured had received indemnity from any insurance company, except to the excess of such claim above the indemnity. They were further authorized to allow interest at the rate of four per cent. The Court performed its duty. When its judgments had been paid there still remained a large balance. The ablest lawyers in the Senate, in general, pressed the claim of the insurance companies to the balance of the fund, including Mr. Edmunds, Judge Davis, Judge Thurman and Mr. Bayard. I took up the question with a strong leaning for the insurance companies. I was, of course, impressed by the well-known principle of law that the underwriter who had paid for property destroyed by the cause against which he had insured, was entitled to be substituted to all other rights or remedies which the owner may have for reimbursement of his loss. I was very much impressed also in favor of the insurance companies, who were making what they doubtless believed an honest and just claim, fortified by many of the best legal opinions in Congress and out of it, by the character of the attacks made on them, especially by General Butler. These attacks appealed to the lowest passions and prejudices. It was said that the companies were rich; that they made their money out of the misfortunes of their countrymen; that they were trying to get up to their arm-pits in the National Treasury, and that they employed famous counsel. If there be anything likely to induce a man with legal or judicial 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 the proceedings at Geneva, and from the nature of the submission, that the claim that had been established against Great Britain was a National claim, made by National authority for a National injury. That this was the character of the claim our counsel gave express notice to Great Britain and to the tribunal. This opinion was asserted by Mr. Fish in his instructions to the counsel. When the Government of the United States received it, it seemed to me that it was entitled to apply it in its high discretion; and to give it to such persons entitled to its protection or consideration as it should see fit. I made a careful argument in support of this view. I thought, accordingly, that the balance of the fund, after compensating all persons, not yet paid, for claims directly resulting from damage done on the high seas by Confederate cruisers, and the class of insurance companies above mentioned, should be paid to persons who had paid premiums for war risks after the sailing of any Confederate cruiser. I maintained this doctrine as well as I could against the powerful arguments I have named. There were other very strong arguments on the same side, and I had the gratification of being assured by several Senators that my presentation of the case had convinced them. Mr. Blaine, who had, himself, earnestly engaged in the debate, said that he thought that the opinion of the majority of the Senators had been changed by my argument.

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XI. THE PRESIDENT'S POWER OF REMOVAL

The two most important questions of the construction of the Constitution which came up in our early history have been finally put at rest in our day. I have had something to do with disposing of both of them. With the disposition of one of them I had a leading part.

The first of these questions was whether in executing the powers conferred upon it by the Constitution, Congress must confine itself to such means and instrumentalities as are strictly and indispensably necessary to their accomplishment; or whether it might select, among the measures which fairly promote such Constitutional ends, any method which it shall think for the public interest, exercising this power in a liberal 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 any doubt is raised now as to the Constitutional power of the National Government to accomplish and secure any of the great results which we could not secure before the war, by reason of what is called the doctrine of State Rights. Democrat and Republican, men of the South and men of the North, now agree in exercising without a scruple the power of Congress to protect American interests by the tariff, to endow and to subsidize railroads across the continent, and to build an Oceanic canal.

I have in my possession, in Roger Sherman's and James Madison's handwriting, a paper which contains the first statement of a controversy which divided parties and sections, which inspired Nullification, and which entered largely in the strife which brought on the Civil War.

(In Roger Sherman's handwriting.) "You will admit that Congress have power to provide by law for raising, depositing and applying money for the purposes enumerated in the Constitution." X (and generally of regulating the finances). "That they have power so far as no particular rules are pointed out in the Constitution to make such rules and regulations as they may judge necessary and proper to effect these purposes. The only question that remains is--Is a bank (a necessary and) a proper measure for effecting these purposes? And is not this a question of expediency rather than of right?"

(The following, on the same slip of paper, is in James Madison's handwriting.) "Feb. 4, 1791. This handed to J. M. by Mr. Sherman during the debate on the constitutionality of the bill for a National bank. The line marked X given up by him on 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 two views were advocated. There was a great debate in 1789, which Mr. Evarts declares, "decidedly the most important and best considered debate in the history of Congress." The claim that the power of removal is vested absolutely in the President by the Constitution prevailed in the House of Representatives, under the lead of Madison, by a majority of twelve, and by the casting vote of John Adams in the Senate. Mr. Madison said:

"The decision that is at this time made will become the permanent exposition of the Constitution; and on a permanent exposition of the Constitution will depend the genius and character of the whole Government."

One party claimed that the power of removal was a necessary incident to the power of appointment, and vested in the President by virtue of his power to appoint. It was claimed also on the same side that the President's duty to see the laws faithfully executed could not be discharged if subordinates could be kept in office against his will. In most cases the President never executes the laws himself, but only has to see them executed 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 by Webster, Calhoun and Clay. But there was no attempt to resist it in practice. Mr. Webster in 1835 earnestly dissented from the original decision, while he admitted that he considered it "a settled point; settled by construction, settled by precedent, settled by the practice of the Government, and settled by statute." It remained so settled, until, in the strife which followed the rebellion, a two-thirds majority in Congress was induced by apprehension of a grave public danger to attempt to wrest this portion of the executive power from the hands of Andrew Johnson. The statute of March 2, 1867, as construed by nearly two-thirds of the Senate, enacted that officers appointed by the predecessor of President Johnson, who, by the law in force when they were appointed, and by the express terms of their commission, were removable at the pleasure of the President, should remain in office until the Senate should consent to the appointment of their successors, or approve their removal.

In 1867 Congress undertook to determine by statute the construction of the Constitution as to this disputed question. Some persons claimed that that power existed in the provision--"To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department officer thereof."

The Constitutionality and effect of this statute were debated on the trial of President Johnson. But it served its purpose during the last two years of Johnson's Administration. Five days 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 acquired on the Executive power, but proposed to suspend the law for one year, so that there might be no obstacle in the path of General Grant to the removal of the obnoxious officials who had adhered to Andrew Johnson. So a compromise was agreed upon. It permitted the President to suspend officers during the vacation of the Senate, but restored officers so suspended at the close of the next session, unless, in the meantime, the advice and consent of the Senate had been obtained to a removal or the appointment of a successor.

President Grant, in his message of December, 1869, urged the repeal of this modified act on the ground that--

"It could not have been the intention of the framers of the Constitution that the Senate should have the power to retain in office persons placed there by Federal appointment, against the will of the President. The law is inconsistent with a faithful and efficient administration of the Government. What faith can an Executive put in officials forced on him, and those, too, whom he has suspended for reason? How will such officials be likely to serve an Administration which they know does not trust them?"

The House acted on this recommendation, and passed a bill for the repeal of the statutes of 1867 and 1869 by a vote of 159 to 25. For this bill the whole Massachusetts delegation, including Mr. Dawes and myself, voted. It was never acted on in the Senate. In 1872 a similar bill passed the House without a division.

The Democratic Party has invariably supported the position of Madison and Jackson, that the power of removal is vested by the Constitution in the President, and cannot be controlled by legislation.

This was the condition of matters when Mr. Cleveland came into office March 4, 1885. The Revised Statutes, Sections 1767-1772, contained in substance the law as it was left by the legislation of 1867 and 1869 (Sec. 1767): "Every person holding any civil office to which he has been or hereafter may be appointed by and with the consent of the Senate, and who shall have become duly qualified to act therein, shall be entitled to hold such office during the term for which he was appointed, unless sooner removed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, or by the appointment, with the like advice and consent, of a successor, in his place, except as herein otherwise provided."

The President was however authorized to suspend civil officers during the recess, except Judges, until the next session of the Senate, and to designate a substitute who should discharge the duties of the office, himself being subject to removal by the designation of another.

The President was further required to nominate within thirty days after the commencement of each session of the Senate persons to fill all vacancies in office, which existed at the meeting of the Senate, whether temporarily filled or not, and in place of all officers suspended. If no appointment were made, with the advice and consent of the Senate during such session, the office was to be in abeyance.

It will be seen that this statute required the assent of the Senate to the exercise of the President's power of removal, although without its consent he could suspend the officer so as to deprive him of the emoluments of his office.

So the appointment of a new officer by the advice and consent of the Senate operated in such case as a removal of the person them holding office, and a failure of the Senate to confirm such proposed appointment had the effect to restore the officer suspended, or temporarily removed.

Under these conditions there grew up a very earnest controversy between President Cleveland and the Republican majority in the Senate, led by the Judiciary Committee, of which Mr. Edmunds was then Chairman. It has been, I suppose from the beginning of the Government, the practice of the President to furnish to the Senate all papers and documents in his possession relating to 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 Senate had nothing to do with the exercise of his power of removal, and therefore was not entitled to be informed of the evidence upon which he acted in that. So he refused and sustained the heads of Departments in refusing the request of the Senate to send for its information the documents on file relating to removals.

This position was encountered by the Republican majority, some of them claiming that the Senate had the same rightful share in the removals as in appointments, and that no difference was to be made between the two cases. Others believed, as I did, that although the power of removal might be exercised by the President alone on his own responsibility, without requiring the advice and consent of the Senate, still that while the President was proceeding under the law by which the appointment itself operated as a removal, and a failure to affirm the appointment restored the old officer to his place again, that the Senate whose action was to have that important effect, was entitled not only to know whether the public interest would be served by the appointment of the proposed official on his own merits solely, but also whether it would be best served by the removal of his predecessor or by the restoration to office of his predecessor. Both the President and the Senate were acting under the existing law, treating it as in force and valid. Now suppose it were true that the question of advising and consenting to the appointment proposed by the President were a very doubtful one indeed, the question on its merits being closely balanced; and the officer to be removed or restored according as the Senate should consent or refuse to consent, was a man of conspicuous and unquestioned capacity and character, against whom no reasonable objection was brought, to be removed for political reasons solely. The Senate certainly, in exercising its power had the right to consider all that the President had a right to consider, and therefore it seems to me that we were justified, in that class of cases, in asking for the documents in his possession bearing upon the question of removal.

It will be observed that in none of the arguments of this Constitutional question has it been claimed that the President had the right without statute authority to suspend public officers, even if he had the right to remove them. That right, if he had it at all, he got under the statute under which he and the Senate were acting.

On the 17th of July, 1885, the President issued an order suspending George M. Duskin of Alabama, from the office of Attorney of the United States, by virtue of the authority conferred 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 to the Senate John D. Burnett, vice George M. Duskin, suspended. The Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, as had been usual in such cases, addressed a note to the Attorney-General, asking that all papers and information in the possession of the Department touching the conduct and administration of the officer proposed to be removed, and touching the character and conduct of the person proposed to be appointed, be sent to the Committee for its information. To this the Attorney- General replied that he was directed by the President to say that there been sent already to the Judiciary Committee all papers in the Department relating to the fitness of John D. Burnett, recently nominated, but that it was not considered that the public interests would be promoted by a compliance with said resolution and the transmission of the papers and document therein mentioned to the Senate in Executive session.

That made a direct issue. Thereupon a very powerful report affirming the right of the Senate to require such papers was prepared by Mr. Edmunds, Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, and signed by George F. Edmunds, Chairman, John J. Ingalls, S. J. R. McMillan, George F. Hoar, James F. Wilson and William M. Evarts.

This was accompanied by a dissenting report by the minority of the Committee, signed by James L. Pugh, Richard Coke, George C. Vest and Howell E. Jackson, afterward Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

So it will be seen that the two sides were very powerfully represented. The report of the Committee was encountered by 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, but were deposited there for his convenience. He said: "I suppose if I desired to take them into my custody I might do so with entire propriety, and if I saw fit to destroy them no one could complain." Continuing, the President says that the demands of the Senate "assume the right to sit in judgment upon the exercise of my exclusive discretion and Executive function, for which I am solely responsible to the people from whom I have so lately received the sacred trust of office."

He refers to the laws upon which the Senate based its demand and said: "After an existence of nearly twenty years of almost innocuous desuetude these laws are brought forth--apparently the repealed as well as the unrepealed--and put in the way of an Executive who is willing, if permitted, to attempt an improvement in the methods of administration. The Constitutionality of these laws is by no means admitted."

The President seemed to forget that he had taken action under those laws, and had expressly cited them as the authority for his action, in his message announcing the suspension of the official.

The controversy waxed warm in the Senate, and in the press throughout the country. The effect of it was that the confirmation of Mr. Cleveland's nominees for important offices was postponed for several months, in some cases eight to ten, but as they were exercising their functions under temporary appointments, it made no difference to them. When they were at last confirmed by the Senate, they received commissions dated from the appointment which took place after the advice and consent of the Senate. So the four years, for which they could hold office, began to run then, and when a new Administration of a different politics came into power, they held their office for a period considerably more than four years, except a few who were actually removed by President Harrison.

I do not think the people cared much about the dispute. The sympathy was rather with President Cleveland. The people, both Republicans and Democrats, expected that the political control of the more important offices would be changed when a new party came into power, and considered Mr. Edmunds's Constitutional argument as a mere ingenious device to protract the day when their political fate should overtake the Republican officials.

I united with the majority of the Committee in the report, for the reasons I have stated above. I still think the position of the Senate right, and that of the President wrong. But I never agreed to the claim that the Senate had anything to do with the President's power of removal. So I took the first opportunity to introduce a bill repealing the provisions of the statute relating to the tenure of office, which interfered with the President's power of removal, so that we might go back again to the law which had been in force from the foundation of the Government, in the controversy with President Jackson. A majority of the Republicans had attempted to do that, as I have said, in the first session of Congress under President Grant. But it had been defeated by the Senate. So I introduced in the December session, 1886, a bill which became a law March 3, 1887, as follows:

"Be enacted, etc., That sections 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, and 1772 of the Revised Statutes of the United States are hereby repealed.

"Sec. 2. This repeal shall not affect any officer heretofore suspended under the provisions of said sections, or any designation, nomination or appointment heretofore made by virtue of the provisions thereof.

"Approved, March 3, 1887."

But the blood of my Republican associates was up. I got a few Republican votes for my Bill. It passed the House by a vote of 172 to 67. Every Massachusetts Representative voted for the Bill, as did Speaker Reed. But in general the votes against it were Republican votes. Governor Long made an able speech in its favor.

In the Senate three Republicans only voted with me. Among the 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, declared his approval of the Bill in debate; and so, I think, did Mr. Dawes, although of that I am not sure. Mr. Edmunds opposed it with all his might and main.

Mr. Sherman, always a good friend of mine, remonstrated with me. He asked me with great seriousness, if I was conscious of the extent of the feeling among the Republicans of the Senate at my undertaking to act in opposition to them on this and one or two other important matters, to which he alluded. I replied that I must of course do what seemed to be my duty, and that in my opinion I was rendering a great service to the Republican Party in getting rid of the controversy in which the people sympathized generally with the Democrats, and that I thought the gentlemen who differed from me, would come to my way of thinking pretty soon. The result proved the soundness of my judgment. I do not think a man can be found in the Senate now who would wish to go back to the law which was passed to put fetters on the limbs of Andrew Johnson. I have asked several gentlemen who voted against the repeal whether they did not think so, and they all now agree that the measure was eminently wise and right. The opposition to the statute of 1887 was but the dying embers of the old fires of the Johnson controversy.

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XII. FISHERIES

If, on looking back, I were to select the things which I have done in public life in which I take the most satisfaction, they would be, the speech in the Senate on the Fisheries Treaty, July 10, 1886, the letter denouncing the A. P. A., a secret, political association, organized for the purpose of ostracizing our Catholic fellow-citizens, and the numerous speeches, letters and magazine articles against the subjugation of 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's first Administration. The argument against it was too strong not to have prevailed without any one man's contribution to it; and the Senate was not so strongly inclined to support President Cleveland as to give a two-thirds majority to a measure, unless it seemed clearly for the public interest. He had his Republican opponents to reckon with, and the Democrats in the Senate disliked him very much, and gave him a feeble and half-hearted support.

The question of our New England fisheries has interested the people of the country, especially of New England, from our very early history. Burke spoke of them before the Revolutionary War, as exciting even then the envy of England. One of the best known and most eloquent passages in all literature is his description of the enterprise of our fathers. Burke adds to that description:

"When I reflect upon the effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of Liberty."

The War of the Revolution, of course, interrupted for a time the fisheries of the American colonies. But the fishermen were not idle. They manned the little Navy whose exploits have never yet received from history its due meed of praise. They furnished the ships' companies of Manly and Tucker and Biddle and Abraham Whipple. They helped Paul Jones to strike terror into St. George's Channel. In 1776, in the first year of the Revolutionary War, American privateers, most of them manned by our fishermen, captured three hundred and forty- two British vessels.

The fisheries came up again after the war. Mr. Jefferson commended them to the favor of the nation in an elaborate and admirable report. He said that before the war 8,000 men and 52,000 tons of shipping were annually employed by Massachusetts in the cod and whale fisheries. England and France made urgent efforts and offered large bounties to get our fishermen to move 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 as our representative in 1778, and again when the Treaty of 1783 was negotiated, his knowledge of the fisheries and his sense of 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 claim of mankind to the gifts of Providence on their coast, are specially entitled to the fishery by their charters, which have 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 the next article not ceded, but recognized as a right inherent in the Americans, which though no longer British subjects, they are to continue to enjoy unmolested."

This was denied nowhere in the debate.

John Adams took greater satisfaction in his achievement when he secured our fisheries in the treaty of 1783 than in any other of the great acts of his life.* After the treaty of 1783 he had a seal struck with the figures of the pine tree, the deer and the fish, emblems of the territory and the fisheries secured in 1783. He had it engraved anew in 1815 with the motto, "Piscemur, venemur, ut olim." I have in my possession an impression taken from the original seal of 1815. This letter from John Quincy Adams tells its story:

"QUINCY, September 3, 1836.

"My Dear Son: On this day, the anniversary of the definitive treaty of peace of 1783, whereby the independence of the United States of America was recognized, and the anniversary of your own marriage, I give you a seal, the impression upon which was a device of my father, to commemorate the successful assertion of two great interests in the negotiation for the peace, the liberty of the fisheries, and the boundary securing the acquisition of the western lands. The deer, the pine tree, and the fish are the emblems representing those interests.

"The seal which my father had engraved in 1783 was without the motto. He gave it in his lifetime to your deceased brother John, to whose family it belongs. That which I now give to you I had engraved by his direction at London in 1815, shortly after the conclusion of the treaty of peace at Ghent, on the 24th of December, 1814, at the negotiation of which the same interests, 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 the life of your son, Charles Francis, and make him worthy of your approbation, to give it at your own time to him as a token of remembrance of my father, who gave it to me, and of 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 control of as dauntless and uncompromising a spirit, and one quite as alive to the value of the fisheries and the dishonor of abandoning them as that of John Adams himself. If John Quincy Adams, the senior envoy at Ghent, and the Secretary of State in 1818, had consented to a treaty bearing the construction which is lately claimed he never could have gone home to face his father. When the War of 1812 ended, Great Britain set up the preposterous claim that the war had abrogated all treaties, and that with the treaty of 1783 our rights in the fisheries were gone. There was alarm in New England; but it was quieted by 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 second time."

When someone expressed a fear that the other commissioners would not stand by his son, the old man wrote in 1814, that--

"Bayard, Russell, Clay, or even Gallatin, would cede the fee-simple of the United States as soon as they would cede the fisheries." (pp. 21-22).

These fisheries still support the important city of Gloucester, and are a very valuable source of wealth to the hardy and enterprising people who maintain them. Their story is full of romance. A touching yearly ceremonial is celebrated at the present time in Gloucester in commemoration of the men who are lost in this dangerous employment.

But the value of the fisheries does not consist chiefly in historic association or in the wealth which they contribute to any such community.

They are the nursery of seamen, more valuable and less costly than the Naval School at Annapolis. They train the men who are employed in them to get to be at home on the sea. They are valuable for naval officers and for sailors. Whenever there shall be a war with a naval power, they will be thrown out of employ, and will seek service in our Navy. All the English authorities, I believe, concur in this opinion. I read in my speech a very interesting letter from Admiral Porter who testified strongly to that effect.

While it is true that many of our common sailors engaged in our cod and other fisheries are of foreign birth, it is equally true that they, almost all of them, come to live in this country, get naturalized and become ardent Americans. This is true of the natives of the British Dominions. But it is still more true of the Scandinavians, a hardy and adventurous race, faithful and brave, who become full of the spirit of American nationality.

Mr. Bayard who was, I think, inspired by a patriotic and praiseworthy desire to establish more friendly relations with Great Britain, seemed to me to give away the whole American case, and to have been bamboozled by Joseph Chamberlain at every point. The Treaty gave our markets to Canada without anything of value to us in return, and afforded no just indemnity for the past outrages of which we justly complained, and gave no security for the future.

The Treaty, which required a two-thirds majority for its ratification, was defeated by a vote of twenty-seven yeas to 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 fully into the history of the matter, and the merits of the Treaty. I think I may say without undue vanity that my speech was an important and interesting contribution to a very creditable chapter of our history.

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XIII. THE FEDERAL ELECTIONS BILL

In December, 1889, the Republican Party succeeded to the legislative power in the country for the first time in sixteen years. Since 1873 there had been a Democratic President for four years, and a Democratic House or Senate or both for the rest of the time. There was a general belief on the part of the Republicans, that the House of Representatives, as constituted for fourteen years of that time, and that the Presidency itself when occupied by Mr. Cleveland, represented nothing but usurpation, by which, in large districts of the country, the will of the people had been defeated. There were some faint denials at the time when these claims were made in either House of Congress as to elections in the Southern States. But nobody seems to deny now, that the charges were true. Mr. Senator Tillman of South Carolina stated in my hearing in the Senate:

"We took the Government away. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it. The Senator from Wisconsin would have done the same thing. I see it in his eye right now. He would have done it. With that system--force, tissue ballots, etc.--we got tired ourselves. So we called a Constitutional Convention, and we eliminated, as I said, all of the colored people whom we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

"I want to call your attention to the remarkable change that has come over the spirit of the dream of the Republicans; to remind you, gentlemen of the North, that your slogans of the past--brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God--have gone glimmering down the ages. The brotherhood of man exists no longer, because you shoot negroes in Illinois, when they come in competition with your labor, and we shoot them in South Carolina, when they come in competition with us in the matter of elections. You do not love them any better than we do. You used to pretend that you did; but you no longer pretend it, 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, who had elected President Harrison and a Republican House in 1888, were agreed, with very few exceptions, as to the duty of providing a remedy for this great wrong. Their Presidential Convention, held at Chicago in 1888, passed a resolution demanding, "effective legislation to secure integrity and purity of elections, which are the fountains of all public authority," and charged that the "present Administration and the Democratic majority in Congress owe their existence to the suppression of the ballot by a criminal nullification of the Constitution and the laws of the United States."

In the Senate at the winter session of 1888 and at the beginning of the December session of 1889, a good many Bills were introduced for the security of National elections. Similar Bills were introduced in the House. A special Committee was appointed there to deal with that subject. I had, myself, no doubt of 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 on one introduced by Mr. Sherman, providing for holding, under National authority, separate registrations and elections for Members 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 which would double the cost of elections throughout the country, and which, in States where personal registration every year is required, would demand from every citizen his presence at the place of polling or registration four times every alternate year. That is, in the years when there were Congressmen to be elected he must go twice to be registered--once for the State election, and once for the Congressional--and twice to vote. So I drew another Bill. I say I drew it. But I had the great advantage of consultation with Senator Spooner of Wisconsin, a very able lawyer who had lately come to the Senate, and I can hardly say that the Bill, as it was finally drafted, was more mine or his. This Bill provided, in substance, that there should be National officers of both parties who should be present at the registration and election of Members of Congress, and at the count of the vote, and who should know and report everything which should happen, so that all facts affecting the honesty of the election and the return might be before the House of Representatives. To this were added some section providing for the punishment of bribery, fraud and misconduct of election officers.

In the meantime the House of Representatives had appointed a special Committee charged with a similar duty. Members of that Committee saw me, and insisted, with a good deal of reason, that a measure which concerned the election of members of the House of Representatives, should originate in that body. Accordingly the Senate Committee held back its Bill, and awaited the action of the House, which sent a Bill to the Senate, July 15, 1890. The House Bill dealt not only with the matter of elections, but also with the selection of juries, and some other important kindred subjects. Our Committee struck out from it everything that did not bear directly on elections; mitigated the severity of the penalties, and reduced the bulk of the Bill very considerably. The measure was reported in a new draft by way of substitute. It remained before 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 both parties, had been in force in cities of more than twenty thousand inhabitants, to Congressional districts, when there should be an application to the Court, setting forth the necessity for its protection. That law had received the commendation of many leading Democrats, including S. S. Cox, Secretary Whitney, the four Democratic Congressmen who represented Brooklyn, and General Slocum, then Representative at large from the State of New York. It had been put in force on the application of Democrats quite as often as on that of Republicans. We added to our Bill a provision that in case of a dispute concerning an election certificate, the Circuit Court of the United States in which the district was situated should hear the case and should award a certificate entitling the member to be placed on the Clerk's roll, and to hold his seat until the House itself should act on the case. That provision was copied from the English law of 1868 which has given absolute public satisfaction there. This was the famous Force Bill, and the whole of it--a provision that, if a sufficient petition were made to the court for that purpose, officers, appointed by the court, belonging to both parties should be present and watch the election; that the Judge of the Circuit Court should determine, in case of dispute, what name should be put on the roll of the House of Representatives, in the beginning, subject to the Constitutional power of the House to correct it, and that a moderate punishment for bribery, intimidation and 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 Southern heart." They persuaded their people that there was an attempt to control elections by National authority. They realized that the waning power of their party at the South, many of whose business men saw that the path of prosperity for the South as well as for the North lay in the adoption of Republican policies, might be reestablished by exciting the fear of negro domination. The Northern Democrats, either very ignorantly or wilfuly, united in the outcry. Governor William E. Russell of Massachusetts, a gentleman of large influence and popularity with both parties, telegraphed to President Cleveland a pious thanksgiving 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 existing evils and conditions to be cured by time, and the returning conscience and good sense of the people, rather than have the strife, the result of which must be quite doubtful, which the enactment and enforcement of this law, however moderate and just, would inevitably create.

On reflection, I came myself to the conclusion that, while the Bill was reasonable and there was no reasonable doubt of the power of Congress to enact it, yet the attempt to pass it, if it were to fail, would do the cause infinite mischief. It would be an exhibition of impotence, always injurious to a political party. It would drive back into the Democratic Party many men who were afraid of negro domination; who looked with great dislike on the assertion of National power over elections, and whom other considerations would induce to act with the Republicans. So I thought it was best to ascertain carefully the prevailing opinion and see if we were likely to get the Bill through, and, if we found that unlikely, not to proceed far enough to have a debate in either House.

Accordingly I visited the House of Representatives, saw several of my Massachusetts colleagues and some other leaders. They agreed that, if I found that the Bill could not, in all probability, pass the Senate, it should be arranged to lay it aside in the 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 Committee to consider the whole question of legislation with reference to the security of elections. A gentleman who had recently become a Member of the Senate rose and quite angrily objected to taking up the matter for consideration. He declared that he would not consent to have the subject introduced in a Republican caucus. The proceedings of such caucuses are supposed to be kept from the public. But they are pretty sure to leak out. I could not very well get up and say that my reason for asking for a committee was to see whether the law 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 Senator and obtained his opinion upon it. I have in my possession the original memoranda of the various answers. Not only a majority of the Republican Senators, but a majority of the whole Senate declared emphatically for an Election Bill. I further consulted them whether the authority, in case of a disputed election, to order, upon hearing, the name of the person found to be elected to be placed on the roll should be lodged in the United States Courts, or in some special tribunal. Two or three preferred that the court should not be invoked. But a majority of the whole Senate favored vesting the power in the courts, and those who preferred another way stated that they were willing to abide by the judgment of the Committee.

When the House Bill came up, it was, on the 7th of August, 1890, reported favorably with my Bill as a substitute. Meantime the McKinley Tariff Bill, which Mr. Cleveland had made, so far as he could, the sole issue in the late election, had been matured and reported. It affected all the business interests of the country. They were in a state of uncertainty and alarm. Mr. Quay of Pennsylvania proposed a resolution to the effect that certain enumerated measures, not including the Election Bill, should be considered at that session, and that all others should be postponed. That, I suppose, would have had the entire Democratic support and Republicans enough to give it a majority. It would have postponed the Election Bill without giving any assurance of its consideration at the short session. So a conference of Republicans was held at which an agreement was made, which I drew up, and signed by a majority of the entire Senate. It entitled the friends of the Election Bill to be assured that it would be brought to a vote and passed at the short session, if there were then a majority in its favor. This is the agreement, of which I have the original, with the original signatures annexed, in my possession.

"We will vote: 1. To take up for consideration on the first day of the next session the Federal Election Bill, and to keep it before the Senate to the exclusion of other legislative business, until it shall be disposed of by a vote. 2. To make such provision as to the time and manner of taking the vote as shall be decided, by a majority of the Republican Senators, to be necessary in order to secure such vote, either by a general rule like that proposed by Mr. Hoar, and now pending before the committee on rules, or by special rule of the same purport, applicable only to the Election Bill."

At the next December session the Bill was taken up for consideration and, after a few days' debate, there was a motion to lay it aside. Since the measure had been first introduced, the sentiment in certain parts of the country in favor of the free coinage of silver had been strengthened. Several of the Republican Senators were among its most zealous advocates. There was a motion to lay aside the Election Bill which was adopted by a bare majority--the Democrats voting for it and several of the Silver Republican Senators, so-called. All but one of these had signed their names to the promise I have printed. I never have known by what process of reasoning they reconciled their action with their word. But I know that in heated political strife men of honor, even men of ability, sometimes deceive themselves by a casuistic reasoning which would not convince them at other times.

The Election Bill deeply excited the whole country. Its supporters were denounced by the Democratic papers everywhere, North and South, with a bitterness which I hardly knew before that the English language was capable of expressing. My mail was crowded with letters, many of them anonymous, the rest generally quite as anonymous, even if the writer's name were signed, denouncing me with all the vigor and all the scurrility of which the writers were capable. I think this is the last great outbreak of anger which has spread through the American people.

I got, however, a good deal of consolation from the stanch friendship 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 own hand, "To George F. Hoar, with the love of his old friend, John G. Whittier." I think I would have gone through ten times as much objurgation as I had to encounter for those few words.

There has never since been an attempt to protect National elections by National authority. The last vestige of the National statute for securing purity of elections was repealed in President Cleveland's second Administration, under the lead of Senator Hill of New York. I have reflected very carefully as to my duty in that matter. I am clearly of the opinion that Congress has the power to regulate the matter of elections of Members of the House of Representatives and to make suitable provisions for honest elections and an honest ascertainment of the result, and that such legislation ought to be enacted and kept on the statute book and enforced. But such legislation, to be of any value whatever, must be permanent. If it only be maintained in force while one political party is in power, and repealed when its antagonist comes in, and is to be constant matter of political strife and sectional discussion, it is better, in my judgment, to abandon it than to keep up an incessant, fruitless struggle. It is like legislation to prohibit by law the selling of liquor. I believe that it would be wise to prohibit the sale of liquor, with the exceptions usually made in 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 law the next, and the difficulty all the time in enforcing any of them, it is better to give the attempt at prohibition up and to adopt a local option, or high license, or some other policy. In other words, it is better to have the second best law kept permanently on the statute book than to have the 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 as I had the right to express the opinion of Northern Republicans, I thought the attempt to secure the rights of the colored people by National legislation would be abandoned until there were a considerable change of opinion in the country, and especially in the South, and until it had ceased to be a matter of party strife. To that announcement, Senator Chandler of New Hampshire, who had been one of the most zealous advocates of the National laws, expressed his assent. That statement has been repeated once or twice on the floor of the Senate. So far as I know, no Republican has dissented from it. Certainly there has been no Bill for that purpose introduced in either House of Congress, or proposed, so far as I know, in the Republican press, or in any Republican platform since.

The question upon which the policy of all National election laws depends is, At whose will do you hold your right to be an American citizen? What power can you invoke if that right be withheld from you? If you hold the right at will of your State, then you can invoke no power but the State for its vindication. If you hold it at the will of the Nation, as expressed by the people of the whole Nation under the Constitution of the United States, then you are entitled to invoke the power of the United States for its enforcement whenever necessary. If you hold it at the will of the white Democracy of any State or neighborhood then, as unfortunately seems to be the case in a good many States, you will be permitted to exercise it only if you are a white man, and then only so long as you are a Democrat.

I have had during my whole life to deal with that most difficult of all political problems, the relation to each other, in a Republic, of men of different races. It is a question which has vexed the American people from the beginning of their history. It is, if I am not much mistaken, to vex them still more hereafter. First the Indian, then the Negro, then the Chinese, now the Filipino, disturb our peace. In the near future will come the Italian and the Pole and the great population of Asia, with whom we are soon to be brought into most intimate and close relation.

In my opinion, in all these race difficulties and troubles, the fault has been with the Anglo-Saxons. Undoubtedly the Indian has been a savage; the Negro has been a savage; the lower order of Chinamen have been gross and sometimes bestial. The inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, in their natural rights, which, as we had solemnly declared to be a self-evident truth, were theirs beyond question, have committed acts of barbarism. But in every case, these inferior and alien races, if they had been dealt with justly, in my opinion, would have been elevated by quiet, peaceful and Christian conduct on our 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 which the political majorities, consisting in many communities largely of negroes and led by immigrants from the North, were subdued.

This is not a sectional question.

It is not a race question. The suffrage was conferred on the negro by the Southern States themselves. They can always make their own rules. If the negro be ignorant, you may define ignorance and disfranchise that. If the negro be vicious, you may define vice and disfranchise that. If the negro be poor, you may define poverty and disfranchise that. If the negro be idle, you may define idleness and disfranchise that. If the negro be lazy, you may define laziness and disfranchise that. If you will only disfranchise him for the qualities which you say unfit him to vote and not for his race or the color of his skin there is no Constitutional obstacle in your way.

So it was not wholly a race or color problem. It was largely a question of party supremacy. In three states, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida, white Democrats charged each other with stifling the voice of the majority by fraudulent election processes, and in Alabama they claimed that a majority of white men were disfranchised by a false count of negro votes in the black belt.

It was not wholly unnatural that the men who, in dealing with each other, were men of scrupulous honor and of undoubted courage 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 records of those public crimes is abundant. With the exception of Reverdy Johnson of Maryland there is no record of a single manly remonstrance, or expression of disapproval from the lips of any prominent Southern man. But they had persuaded themselves to believe that a contest for political power with a party largely composed of negroes was a contest for their civilization itself. They thought it like a fight for life with a pack of wolves. In some parts of the South there were men as ready to murder a negro who tried to get an office as to kill a fox they found prowling about a hen roost. These brave and haughty men who had governed the country for half a century, who had held the power of the United States at bay for four years, who had never doffed their hats to any prince or noble on earth, even in whose faults or vices there was nothing mean or petty, never having been suspected of corruption, who as Macaulay said of the younger Pitt, "If in an hour of ambition they might have been tempted to ruin their country, never would have stooped to pilfer from her," could not brook the sight of a Legislature made up of ignorant negroes who had been their own slaves, and of venal carpet- baggers. They could not endure that men, some of whom had been 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 noble and brave history. I myself, although I have always maintained, and do now, the equal right of all men of whatever color or race to a share in the government of the country, felt a thrill of sadness when I saw the Legislature of Louisiana in session in the winter of 1873.

There was a good deal to provoke them also in the character of some of the Northern men who had gone to the South to take an active part in political affairs. Some of them were men of the highest character and honor, actuated by pure and unselfish motives. If they had been met cordially by the communities where they took up their abode they would have brought to them a most valuable quality of citizenship. If Northern immigration and Northern capital had been welcomed at the South it would have had as helpful and influence as it had in California and Oregon. But the Southern men treated them all alike. I incline to think that a large number of the men who got political office in the South, when the men who had taken part in the Rebellion were still disfranchised, and the Republicans were still in power, were of a character that would not have been tolerated in public office in the North. General Willard Warner of Alabama, a brave Union soldier, a Republican Senator from that State, was one of the best and bravest men who ever sat in that body. Governor Packard of Louisiana was I believe a wise and honest man. But in general it was impossible not to feel a certain sympathy with a people, who whatever else had been their faults never were guilty of corruption or meanness, or the desire to make money out of public office, in the intolerable loathing which they felt for these strangers who had taken possession of the high places in their States.

President Grant gave the influence and authority of his Administration toward maintaining in power the lawfully chosen Republican State Governments. But in spite of all he could do they had all been overthrown but two when the Presidential election was held in 1876. Those two were South Carolina and Louisiana. The people of those two States had chosen Republican Governors at the State election held on the same day with the election of the President. But these Governors could not hold their power twenty-four hours without the support of the National administration. When that was withdrawn the negro and carpet- bag majority was powerless as a flock of sheep before a pack of wolves to resist their brave and unscrupulous Democratic enemy, however inferior the latter in numbers.

In attempting to give a dispassionate account of the history of this great question which has entered so deeply into the political and social life of the American people almost from the beginning, it is hard to measure the influence of race prejudice, of sectional feeling, and of that other powerful motive, eagerness for party supremacy.

Suffrage was conferred upon the negro by the Southern States themselves. Under the Constitution every State can prescribe its own qualifications for suffrage, with the single exception that no State can deny or abridge the right of a citizen of the United States to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

But I am bound to say, indeed it is but to repeat what I have said many times, that my long conflict with their leaders has impressed me with an ever-increasing admiration of the great and high qualities of our Southern people. I said at Chicago in February, 1903, what I said, in substance, twenty years before in Faneuil Hall, and at about the same time in the Senate:

"Having said what I thought to say on this question, perhaps I may be indulged in adding that although my life, politically and personally, has been a life of almost constant strife with the leaders of the Southern people, yet as I grow older I have learned, not only to respect and esteem, but to love the great qualities which belong to my fellow citizens of the Southern States. They are a noble race. We may well take pattern from them in some of the great virtues which make up the strength, as they make the glory, of Free States. Their love of home; their chivalrous respect for women; their courage; their delicate sense of honor; their constancy, which can abide by an opinion or a purpose or an interest of their States through adversity and through prosperity, through the years and through the generations, are things by which the people of the more mercurial North may take a lesson. And there is another thing--covetousness, corruption, the low temptation of money has not yet found any place in our Southern politics.

"Now, my friends, we cannot afford to live, we don't wish to live, and we will not live, in a state of estrangement from a 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 State I, for one, if I have a right to speak for Massachusetts, say to her, 'Entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following after thee. For where thou goest I will go, and where thou stayest, I will stay also. And they people shall be my people, and thy God my God.'"

In July, 1898, I was invited to deliver an address before the Virginia Bar Association. I was received by that company of distinguished gentlemen with a hospitality like that I had found in Charleston the year before. Certainly the old estrangements are gone. I took occasion in my address to appeal to the Virginia bar to give the weight of their great influence in sustaining the dignity and authority of the Supreme Court, in spite of their disappointment at some of its decisions of Constitutional questions. They received what I had to say, although they knew I differed from them on some of the gravest matters which concerned the State, and had been an anti-slavery man from my youth, with a respect and courtesy which left nothing to be desired. At the banquet which followed the address, this toast was given by William Wirt Henry, a grandson of Patrick Henry, himself one of the foremost lawyers and historians of the South. I prize very highly the original which 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 to maintain the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, which declares the right of every man to political equality by virtue of his manhood, and of every people to self-government by virtue of its character as a people. This our fathers meant to lay down as the fundamental law of States and of the United States, having its steadfast and immovable foundation in the law of God. It was never their purpose to declare that ignorance or vice or want of experience of the institutions of a country should not disqualify men from a share in the Government. Those things they meant to leave to the discretion of the power, whether State or National, which was to prescribe the qualifications of suffrage. But they did not mean that the accident of birthplace, or the accident of race, or the accident 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, I would prescribe as strict a rule as the strictest for ascertaining whether the immigrant meant in good faith to be an American citizen, whether he meant to end his life here, to bring his wife and children with him, whether he loved American institutions, whether he was fit to understand the political problems with which the people had to deal, whether he had individual worth, or health of body or mind. I would make, if need be, ten years or twenty years, as the necessary period of residence for naturalization.

I would deal with the Negro or the German or the Frenchman or the Italian on the same principle. But the one thing I have never consented to is that a man shall be kept out of this country, or kept in a position of inferiority, while he is in it, because of his color, because of his birthplace, or because of his race.

One matter in connection with the management of the Elections Bill I have never been able to think of since without a shudder. The Democrats in the Senate, led by Mr. Gorman, the most skilful of their leaders, endeavored to defeat the bill by the tactics of delay. If the debate could be prolonged so that it was impossible to get a vote without the loss of the great Appropriations Bills, or some of them, the bill, of course, must be laid aside. So the Republicans, on the other hand, as is usual in such cases, refrained from debate, leaving their antagonists to take up the time. Every afternoon at about five o'clock some Democrat would come to me saying that he was to take the floor, but that he did not feel well, or was not quite ready with some material, and ask me as a personal favor to let the matter go over until the next morning. This happened so often that I became satisfied it was a concerted scheme, and made up my mind that I would not yield to such a request again.

But one afternoon Senator Wilson of Maryland, a quiet and most estimable gentleman, whom I had known very well, and for whom I had a high regard, came to me and said he felt quite unwell; he could go on that afternoon, if I insisted upon it; but he would like much better to put off speaking till the next day. I was just beginning my answer to the effect that I had heard that so often that I had determined I would not yield again to the request. But I said to myself, It cannot be possible that this man would undertake to deceive me. He is a gentleman of high character, absolutely honorable and 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 died suddenly of heart disease. It was an affection of which he had been conscious for some years, and which he had for some time expected would cause sudden death. I dare say if he had been compelled to proceed with his speech that day it would have been fatal. In that case my life would have been embittered 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 very strongly my own hesitation, caused by the fear of the political effect of the defeat of a measure likely to excite so much angry strife throughout the country. After hearing the opinion of those who favored going on with the Bill, Mr. Evarts said: "I spent a Sunday with Judge Kent on the Hudson a good many years ago, with several New York lawyers. We all went to the Episcopal church in the forenoon, and dined with the Judge after church. During the service one of the company kept far behind in the responses, which annoyed the Judge a good deal. At dinner he broke out, 'Davis, why can't you descend into hell with the rest of the congregation?' I will descend into hell with the rest of the congregation."

Mr. Evarts made the descent and stood loyally by the measure in the debate to the best of his great ability.

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