pre-judgments; all tending to make the condemnation of the President, upon all superficial calculations, inevitable. The effort of the Constitution to guard against mere partisan judgment, by requiring a two-third vote to convict, was paralyzed by the complexion of the Senate, showing more than four-fifths of that body of the party which had instituted the impeachment and was demanding conviction. To this party, as well, the Chief-Justice belonged, as a founder, a leader, a recipient of its honors, and a lover of its prosperity and its fame. The President, raised to the office from that of Vice-President—to which alone he had been elected—by the deplored event of Mr. Lincoln's assassination, was absolutely without a party, in the Senate or in the country; for the party whose suffrages he had received for the vice-presidency was the hostile force in his impeachment. And, to bring the matter to the worst, the succession to all the executive power and patronage of the Government, in case of conviction, was to fall into the administration of the President of the Senate—the creature, thus, of the very court invested with the duty of trial and the power of conviction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confessing to a firm approval of the final disposition of the constitutional question by the court, I concede it to be a subject of thorough regret that the just result was not reached by less uncertain steps. But, with this my adverse attitude to the Chief-Justice's judicial position on the question, I find no difficulty in discarding all suggestions which would mix up political calculations with his judicial action. The error of the Chief-Justice, if,