Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase | Page 4

the apprehension of those whose opinion or action it behooved him to influence, by methods direct and sincere, discarding mere ingenuity, and disdaining the subtleness of insinuation. His education had all been of a kind to discipline and invigorate his natural powers; not to encumber them with a besetting weight of learning, or to supplant them by artificial training.
His oratory was vigorous, with those "qualities of clearness, force, and earnestness, which produce conviction." His rhetoric was ample, but not rich; his illustrations apposite, but seldom to the point of wit; his delivery weighty and imposing.
His force of will, whether in respect of peremptoriness or persistency, was prodigious. His courage to brave, and his fortitude to endure, were absolute. His loyalty to every cause in which he enlisted--his fidelity in every warfare in which he took up arms--were proof against peril and disaster.
His estimate of human affairs, and of his own relation to them, was sober and sedate. All their grandeur and splendor, to his apprehension, connected themselves with the immortal life, and with God, as their guide, overseer, and ruler; and the sum of the practical wisdom of all worthy personal purposes seemed to him to be, to discern the path of duty, and to pursue it.
His views of the commonwealth were essentially Puritan. Equality of right, community of interest, reciprocity of duty, were the adequate, and the only adequate, principles with him to maintain the strength and virtue of society, and preserve the power and permanence of the State. With these principles unimpaired and unimpeded he feared nothing for his countrymen or their government, and he made constant warfare upon every assault or menace that endangered them.
It was with these endowments and with this preparation of spirit, that Mr. Chase confronted the realities of life, and assumed to play a part which, whether humble or high in the scale and plane of circumstance, was sure to be elevated and worthy in itself; for the loftiness of his spirit for the conflict of life was
"Such as raised To height of noblest temper heroes old Arming to battle."
Such a character necessarily confers authority among men, and that Mr. Chase was ready, on all occasions arising, to assert his high principles by comporting action was never left in doubt. Whether by interposing his strong arm to save Mr. Birney from the fury of a mob of Cincinnati gentlemen, incensed at the freedom of his press in its defiance of slavery; or by his bold and constant maintenance in the courts of the cause of fugitive slaves in the face of the resentments of the public opinion of the day; or by his fearless desertion of all reigning politics to lead a feeble band of protestants through the wilderness of anti-slavery wanderings, its pillar of cloud by day, its pillar of fire by night; or as Governor of Ohio facing the intimidations of the slave States, backed by Federal power and a storm of popular passion; or in consolidating the triumphant politics on the urgent issue which was to flame out into rebellion and revolt; or in his serene predominance, during the trial of the President, over the rage of party hate which brought into peril the co?rdination of the great departments of Government, and threatened its whole frame--in all these marked instances of public duty, as in the simple routine of his ordinary conduct, Mr. Chase asked but one question to determine his course of action, "Is it right?" If it were, he had strength, and will, and courage to carry him through with it.
In the ten years of professional life which followed his admission to the bar, Mr. Chase established a repute for ability, integrity, elevation of purpose and capacity for labor, which would have surely brought him the highest rewards of forensic prosperity and distinction, and in due course, of eminent judicial station. In this quieter part of his life, as in his public career, it is noticeable that his employments were never common-place, but savored of a public zest and interest. His compilation of the Ohio Statutes was a magnum opus, indeed, for the leisure hours of a young lawyer, and possesses a permanent value, justifying the assurance Chancellor Kent gave him, that this surprising labor would find its "reward in the good he had done, in the talents he had shown, and in the gratitude of his profession."
But this quiet was soon broken, never to be resumed, and though the great office of Chief-Justice was in store for him, it was to be reached by the path of statesmanship and not of jurisprudence.
If it had seemed ever to Mr. Chase and his youthful contemporaries, that they had come upon times when, as Sir Thomas Browne thought two hundred years ago, "it is too late to be ambitious," and