Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase | Page 7

of the masses, and to guide the destinies of a
nation whose institutions were all framed for obedience to law and
perpetual domestic peace, through rebellion, revolt, and civil war; and
to the subversion of the very order of society of a vast territory and a
vast population, finds no parallel in history; and was a puzzle to all the
astrologers and soothsayers. It has been said of George III.--whose
narrow intellect and obstinate temper so greatly helped on the rebellion
of our ancestors to our independence--it has been said of George III.,
that "it was his misfortune that, intended by nature to be a farmer,
accident placed him on a throne." It was the happy fortune of the
American people, that to the manifest advantages of freedom from
jealousies of any rivals; and from commitment, by any record, to
schemes or theories or sects or cabals, pursued by no hatreds, beguiled
by no attachments, Mr. Lincoln added a vigorous, penetrating, and
capacious intellect, and a noble, generous nature which filled his
conduct of the Government, in small things and great, from beginning
to end, "with malice to none and charity to all." These qualities were
indispensable to the safety of the Government and to the prosperous
issue of our civil war. In the great crisis of a nation struggling with
rebellion, the presence or absence of these personal traits in a ruler may
make the turning-point in the balance of its fate. Had Lincoln, in
dealing with the administration of government during the late rebellion,
insisted as George III. did, in his treatment of the American Revolution,
upon "the right of employing as responsible advisers those only whom
he personally liked, and who were ready to consult and execute his
personal wishes," had he excluded from his counsels great statesmen
like Seward and Chase, as King George did Fox and Burke, who can

measure the dishonor, disorder, and disaster into which our affairs
might have fallen? Such narrow intelligence and perversity are as little
consistent with the true working of administration under our
Constitution as they were under the British Constitution, and as little
consonant with the sound sense as they are with the generous spirit of
our people.
By the arrangement of his Cabinet, and his principal appointments for
critical services, Mr. Lincoln showed at once that nature had fitted him
for a ruler, and accident only had hid his earlier life in obscurity. I
cannot hesitate to think that the presence of Mr. Seward and Mr. Chase
in the great offices of State and Treasury, and their faithful concurrence
in the public service and the public repute of the President's conduct of
the Government, gave to the people all the benefits which might have
justly been expected from the election of either to be himself the head
of the Government and much else besides. I know of no warrant in the
qualities of human nature, to have hoped that either of these great
political leaders would have made as good a minister under the
administration of the other, as President, as both of them did under the
administration of Mr. Lincoln. I see nothing in Mr. Lincoln's great
qualities and great authority with this people, which could have
commensurately served our need in any place, in the conduct of affairs,
except at their head.
The general importance, under a form of government where the
confidence of the people is the breath of the life of executive authority,
of filling the great offices of state with men who, besides possessing
the requisite special faculties for their several departments and large
general powers of mind for politics and policies, have also great repute
with the party, and great credit with the country, was well understood
by the President. He knew that the times needed, in the high places of
government, men "who," in Bolingbroke's phrase, "had built about
them the opinion of mankind which, fame after death, is superior
strength and power in life."
Of the great abilities which Mr. Chase, in his administration of the
Treasury, exhibited through the three arduous years of that public

service, no question has ever been made. The exactions of the place
knew no limits. A people, wholly unaccustomed to the pressure of
taxation, and with an absolute horror of a national debt, was to be
rapidly subjected to the first without stint, and to be buried under a
mountain of the last. Taxes which should support military operations
on the largest scale, and yet not break the back of industry which alone
could pay them; loans, in every form that financial skill could devise,
and to the farthest verge of the public credit; and, finally, the extreme
resort of governments under the last stress and necessity, of the
subversion of the legal tender, by