Chapter VI: Leaders of the Senate in 1877 (2)

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.