under the last judgment of the court, we may venture so to consider it, was in following his strong sense of the supreme importance of restoring the integrity of the currency, and his impatience and despair at the feebleness of the political departments of the Government in that direction, to the point of concluding that the final wisdom of this great question—inter apices juris, as well as of the highest reasons of state—was to deny to the brief exigency of war, what was so dangerous to the permanent necessities of peace. But a larger reason and a wider prudence, as it would seem, favor the prevailing judgment, which refused to cripple the permanent faculties of government for the unforeseen duties of the future, and drew back the court from the perilous edge of law-making, which, overpassed, must react to cripple, in turn, the essential judicial power. The past, thus, was not discredited, nor the future disabled.

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

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

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

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

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

Just a quarter of a century before Mr. Chase left these halls of learning, the college sent out another scholar of her discipline, with the same general traits of birth, and condition,