ADDRESS.

Gentlemen of The Graduating Class: It is the office of the schools to develope and discipline the faculties of the mind, and give the student that control over his mental powers which will enable him to accumulate knowledge. These advantages you have enjoyed. To-night ends your schoolbod days, and, as you are about to leave the College, are saying farewell to tutors and professors, and are ready to separate from each other, each to take his own path in life, I come from the practical walks of that profession to which your lives are to be devoted, to welcome you at the threshold, to give you the right hand of fellowship, and to bid you God-speed in your attempt to master our complicated American jurisprudence, and thus to become valiant champions of law, and faithful priests in the temple of justice.

This is to you the most trying, painful, and critical period of your whole lives; and the next ten years will assure your success, or seal your doom, as lawyers. You have already formed and matured your character as students; you are now to hew out your statue, and carve your fortunes, in the profession. Thus far you have been assisted by friendly and almost paternal solicitude; when you have faltered or stumbled in the ascent, gentle hands have guided and lifted you over your difficulties, until now you plainly see the way before you, and are thoroughly qualified to walk therein.

In the proper stage of their development, the lioness leads her young into the wilderness, and there leaves them alone; and the gnawings of hunger, the peltings of pitiless storms, and the desolation of absolute savageness, are the incentives which drive them on to become monarchs of the forest. So your teachers have led you to the field of your life efforts; they have taught you the duties, and shown you the prizes of the profession; they have given you the necessary training, and here they must leave you, each one to himself. You future is your own, and you alone must answer for its failures or its successes. And 0003 2whether you ought to be congratulated or sympathized with on your choice of a calling, depends entirely upon the stuff you are made of. The path before you is steep, rugged, and thorny. Your temptations will be great, your toil prodigious, your success uncertain. But here, where the roads divide, you should choose at once and forever between the objects of conflicting ambitions. If you are fired with a desire to attain great eminence in your profession; if you consent to days of toil and nights of anxiety; if you are willing to wait, and labor unfalteringly while you wait, for the long deferred fruits of hope; if you have a courage which can survive many disappointments and much disaster; if you can bear to see your associates outstrip you in the accumulation of wealth and political honors; if you can endure to see your younger brother lead his bride to the altar, while yours, all wooed and won, is waiting for you to attain success; if, in a word, you have that undying ambition and immortal energy to “bear the constant anguish of patience,” and labor forever; then, sir, you may make a lawyer; and your profession will offer you prizes worthy the contention of gods. But if this picture be too dark, the reality, which will be darker yet, will prove too much for you, and I bid you turn back at once into gentler, more immediately profitable, and infinitely more comfortable pursuits, and waste no more time coquetting with a profession which will not benefit you, and which you will only harm and dishonor.

But to you who, counting the cost, still resolve, I desire to make a few plain and practical suggestions. You are supposed to be as full of theory as is consistent with your mental health; and the question immediately before you is, what to do. So I shall not attempt to burden you with elaborate disquisitions, but tell you a few things that I feel would have been beneficial to me, when, like you, I was ready to go forth and struggle in the great tasks of life.

The first, and a very important matter to be determined, is location. This question, in general, is very easy to be decided; for I assume that every one of you, who has sufficient enterprise to succeed at all, will immediately bend his steps toward the West or South. If you are poor, and I hope you are,—for I regard that as an almost indispensable condition of your success— 0004 3the expenses of living in the large cities of the East will drive you into the current of empire westward; or to the South, which, now released from the incubus of slavery, is destined to unparalleled prosperity within the next quarter of a century. At all events, leave Washington, where a man is estimated according to the place he is in; and not according to the qualities that are in him; let not the grass grow under your feet, nor the sun set upon your going; but flee this town as the beloved of the Lord fled the cities of the plain. Select some town which will grow, and grow with it; some town where the hammer and the saw are constantly heard; and the harmony of various industry will cheer you on. If you find the right place, it is no objection that many lawyers are already there. That fact merely attests the existence of business, and it is a business place you desire to find. There may be a thousand lawyers in a city, but a score of the best of them will do all that business which the real lawyer loves to do; the next hundred will be engaged in preparing business; the balance will be the raiders and bummers of the profession, skirmishing for subsistence, as opportunity offers, within or without the lines. Having fixed on the town, select an office, and furnish it comfortably with the first money you earn; but first of all, immediately store it with all the books you can borrow the money to buy.

The statutes and reports of your adopted State and the best elementary works will, of course, be indispensible. Next, buy the New York reports, which will furnish you with ingeniously reasoned cases on every side of every question; and then, to relieve a little the bewilderment of the inexperienced mind, tossed to and fro by reading New York decisions, you will need the sobering influence and steady support of the Massachusetts reports; and then—if any part of the Constitution of the United States be left—you will need the decisions of the Federal Courts. Next, and before the reports of other States, I would buy all the English Common Law and Chancery reports, and continue them with the present series, bringing the decisions of the English courts within a few weeks after their actual delivery. Then you want the English Statutes and State Trials; and then the reports of the American States not before procured.

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You should also be purchasing, pari passu, and as fast as possible, all those works which belong to the border-land between literature and the law, the best treatises upon the science of politics and of Government, constitutional histories, English and American; especially you should have and know by heart, Lewis on the Reasonings and Methods in Politics, and Austin on the Province of Jurisprudence, together with the works of eminent English and American lawyers and statesmen—Burke, Sheridan, Webster, Calhoun, &c., &c.—by no means neglecting the philosophers and poets, theology and history—and be sure to have the best copies money will buy of Shakespeare and Waverly; so that when the misfortunes of life multiply upon you, and its clouds settle low; when the courts, by horrible blundering, decide a good cause against you, which, decided correctly, would have brought fame and fat fees; when your landlord is impatient for rent, and your heart cast down before the rugged realities of life, you may restore your spirits in the sweet fields of innocent fiction and divine fancy.

But, may be, some of you have rich fathers. If so, this misfortune may be lightened by an immediate understanding of the utmost cent he can furnish you for the next ten years. Take this sum and invest all but five hundred dollars in books, and take your seat in the next train that leaves for the West. Wealth thus employed will not delay your progress. And not to be too hard on the rich, I ought to say that a man with more money than can easily be invested in books, may became a lawyer. A rich man may possibly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven—so a rich man may possibly become a good lawyer; but I always pity him when I think how fearfully the chances are against him.

But, to go back; when you have selected your location, rented an office—a good lawyer never owns one—and gathered as many books as you can to start with, it is possible you will not be retained before breakfast, the first day, in more than fourteen causes. Not to treat so solemn a subject with levity, it is probable that for some time you will not have a case; and for a long time cases will not crowd upon you. And it is to this pause, intervening between the school and the active 0006 5labors of the bar, that I desire to direct your minds. This period will try your patience, your fortitude, your constancy; and then you will lay deep and broad the foundations of great professional acquirements, or prove yourselves unequal to the requirements of professional life. Let these years of waiting for business be devoted to acquiring a thorough and ripe knowledge of the law for which your study thus far has only fitted you to strive.

The most important suggestion I can make to you in this connection is to adopt some definite system of study. Let your first act be to frame rules for your own conduct. Determine how many and what hours of each day you will devote to exercise, to study, and to rest, respectively; and then divide the hours of study systematically between different departments of jurisprudence. For instance, from ten to eleven each day read nothibg but treatises and reports upon equitable jurisprudence. From eleven to twelve devote to evidence. From twelve to one to pleading and practice, and so on. It is not so material what your method may be, as that you should have a method; and then adhere to your rules for one year, and you will be astonished at the result. The mind is relieved by variety of labor, and strengthened by the habit of studying the same subject at the same hour of the day, and under the same surrounding circumstances.

Another suggestion. Devote one hour each day, or two in every evening, to reading the opinions of the most celebrated judges. For example, take the reports of the Supreme Court of the United States, and turn to the first opinion delivered by Chief Justice Marshall, and then to his next, and so on, until in this way you have read every opinion he ever delivered. Mark the growth of his great mind as it steadily developed itself; mark how honestly he reasons. When you are half way through some of his opinions you will be enabled to see which way the case is to be decided; and you will be impressed with the belief that he did not, at that point, even himself know where his reasoning would lead him, or which party, the plaintiff or the defendant, would be successful. He commences with a clear statement of the facts; next, in mathematical method, 0007 6he lays down the axioms or universally conceded principles applicable to the subject; then he begins to reason, turning the mill of his inexorable logic slowly and honestly, as if himself was anxious to see what would come out of it; and, finally, that ascertained, the case is thereby decided, and so decided that no man, recognizing the authority of reason, ever can question the correctness of the decision. Take the opinions of Chief Justices Parsons, or Parker, or Shaw, of Massachusetts; or Kent, or Spencer, of New York; confining yourself to one until you have read, in the order in which they were delivered, every opinion he has written. You will thus become almost personally acquainted with every judge; you will learn his methods, and his defects, if he has any; and, like a personal acquaintance, this will enable you years afterwards, in the confusion of a trial, to appreciate the just force and weight of an opinion from either of your favorites which your opponent will read against you when you have no opportunity to examine it in detail. The opinions of Chief Justice Gibson, thoroughly understood, would make any man a profound lawyer.

But of all the judges, English or American, whose opinions are valuable to the student, Chief Justice Marshall stands pre-eminent. If you will devote two hours of every evening for six months to his opinions, you will master them all. What a mine to bring into possession. Study him especially. Study his methods of reasoning, and make them your methods. And while reading Marshall's opinions, as often as you come to a case that was argued by Mr. Webster, study his argument; study it first, and then go to Marshall's opinion in deciding the case; and see how much that you thought unanswerable in the argument found its way into the opinion. Thus you will obtain pure gold refined by fire.

I recollect reading, while a student, the argument of Mr. Webster upon the question of the constitutionality of State insolvent laws, as fully reported in Mr. Everett's edition of Mr. Webster's works, and before I knew how the case was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. While reading that argument, I was carried along captive through paragraph after paragraph, from proposition to proposition, and when I 0008 7had finished it, I never thought of looking to see how the case was decided, because I would have made my affidavit that Webster's argument was wholly unanswerable, and of course the case must have been decided with him. And when I found, a year or two later, that the Court decided the case the other way, I recollect that I lost confidence in human reasoning for the space of ten days. Nothing finally consoled my disappointment except the fact that the great Chief Justice dissented from the decision of the Court, and canonized the argument of Mr. Webster. But for this, I think I should have concluded that logic was an unsafe guide in the labyrinths of the law; however, I satisfied the wounded pride of my boyish judgment by resolving that Webster and Marshall were greater authority than the rest of mankind combined, and that Webster was right, though he did not succeed.

I have spoken thus far of the means by which you may best qualify yourselves for the labors and responsibilities which belong to active practice at the bar. And although I have dwelt somewhat at length upon the difficulties to be surmounted by the student, hoping to impress upon you the importance of not assuming that you have now acquired your profession, and have only to apply your present fund of knowledge to causes in which you may be retained; nevertheless, you are not to be discouraged. With the fair average of ability, if you will pursue the methods I have indicated, you will rise to eminence in your profession; and looking to the time when your fame will begin to brighten, and your retainers to multiply, I desire to make a few practical suggestions in regard to the conduct of causes by a young lawyer in the courts. And first, let me exhort you to give all your cases a thorough examination, and an elaborate preparation. Your first case may only involve five dollars, and be ultimately determined by the wisdom of a justice of the peace. Nevertheless, it will involve the same principles, and be beset by the same difficulties, as a case, growing out of the same state of facts, involving five millions of dollars, and pending in the Supreme Court of the United States. To illustrate, you may be retained to defend in a justice's court an action founded on a promissory note for fifty dollars, given by a man in New England to a creditor, residing in New York, just before your client failed and ran away to the far west, where he has resided in two or 0009 8three different States. There is not a principle of commercial law, relating to negotiable paper, that may not be involved in your case. The note may have been given upon usurious consideration, or have been obtained by fraud, or duress; and these questions are to be decided upon the same principles that would determine a case involving millions of dollars. Your case too, may involve the most difficult and complicated questions in the conflict of laws. Whether the rate of interest is to be six per cent, according to the law of the place where the note was given, or the higher rate of interest of New York where the creditor resided; or if your client has resided in different States since giving the note, you may have to examine the statutes of limitation in those States, to ascertain whether he has resided long enough in any one State, to make its statute a bar to the claim. I remember one of the earliest cases I tried was of a note for forty dollars, given under the following state of facts; a resident of Massachusetts loaned money in that State to a resident of Wisconsin, to be secured after my client should return to Wisconsin, by mortgage upon land in that State. This loan was clearly usurious, and the creditor subsequently came to Wisconsin, and my client gave him this forty dollar note in part settlement of the original indebtedness, and made the note payable on six months at Chicago, with exchange on Boston. The legal rate of interest in Massachusetts was six per cent., in Wisconsin twelve per cent., and in Illinois, where the last note was payable, ten per cent.; and it so happened that the statutes of these three States provided three different penalties for, or consequences of, usurious transactions. You can see that this case, in a justice court, involving only forty dollars, embraced some of the most complicated and difficult questions that can ever arise in any cause in any court.

Now, this is a long introduction to what I desire to say. Take such a case, with the leisure you will have on your hands, and give it the proper preparation, and you will accomplish several most important things. First, you will fix in your mind with clearness many important legal principles, which will remain with you as long as you live. Second, you will satisfy the court that you are in the habit of preparing your causes, and thus gain greater consideration from the court. And third, and more 0010 9important still, you will acquire a facility for investigating legal questions which can be acquired only in that way, and which will serve you to the end of your professional life. Every successful lawyer who has been in practice for twenty years, will tell you that he can go to his library now and examine more authorities and make more preparation of a cause in three hours, than he could in three weeks when he commenced the practice. In no other way than by preparing causes can you acquire this facility, which is so indispensable to a lawyer in full practice. It is in the mind what the cunning of the fingers is to the musical performer. No man is born with it; any intelligent man may acquire it.

Be honest with the court. I have said that you will be subjected to great temptations. In your early causes you will be far more anxious, and more deeply interested to succeed, than your client. To him it may be ten dollars, or fifty, or a hundred or two; with you it is success or failure, the admiration of the contempt of the by-standers, life or death professionally. In this fearful anxiety you will be sorely tried, and tempted to conceal your blunders by coloring the facts, and to win your cause no matter how. I say you will be tempted to do this, but I assume that you will have the manhood and integrity to rise above the temptation. If not, your failure at the bar is certain. A man who has never been tempted may be honest merely; but virtue, in the profession or out of it, is the fruit of temptation suffered, but overcome. Honesty is the best policy, and no man sees this proverb illustrated so frequently, and so vividly, as the lawyer. A trick or a falsehood may win a point or save a cause; but it is certain of discovery, and it will cost its author ten years of honest practice to allay the indignation it will incite in the breast of an honest judge.

Be always deferential and respectful to the court. Meet their rulings, no matter how adverse or erroneous, with the true dignity of professional obedience. But, while you are always respectful, be always firm. Courts are composed of judges; judges are men; men who dine out late of nights; they come reluctantly at the summons of the court bell, from an unfinished sleep; they are overworked, they are poorly paid, and occasionally come to the bench in that impatient and petulant mood 0011 10which “sometime hath its hour with every man.” A judge in such a mood will “whistle your case down the wind” before he has heard the first half of it. Under such circumstances, while you are to be courteous to the court, you must be as firm as a rock. The best recipe for obtaining your rights before an impatient judge, is to acquire the art of clear and concise narrative. In motions made and incidental questions arising in a cause, half are decided erroneously, because the court does not understand the facts, or the state of the record, upon which the decision depends. I think one of the great deficiencies of the profession, in daily practice, is the want of this art. To train yourselves in this particular, study the best models of historic composition. Take Kinglake's history of the Crimean war, for example, and read the one or two hundred pages in which he describes the charge of the light brigade at Balaklava. Notice the innumerable incidents and trifling occurrences, and mark the consummate art with which they are so grouped and arranged as never to obstruct, but always to heighten the effect of the general narrative. The facts of a case before a jury may be very voluminous and very complicated, and there is nothing which so severely taxes the skill of a master as to make every fact available, without so burthening the mind of the jury that they will forget the facts altogether. The most trifling and insignificant fact which is yet important enough to be given in evidence, should be brought to the mind of the jury in the argument of the cause; but the facts should be so marshalled with regard to subjects and order of time, that the jury can see the precise bearing of each. In an argument to a jury the facts should be stated by chapter and verse, presented by scene and act, as in Othello, one of the most artistic of Shakspeare's plays, where the least circumstance, even Desdemona's dropping her handkerchief, is made to contribute powerfully to the final and fatal catastrophe.

Another important matter is the examination of witnesses. I believe that more causes are lost from unskillful examination, of witnesses, than from all other species of malpractice combined. Always know what your witness is called to prove; direct his mind to that particular object; get through with him as quickly as possible. In cross-examining witnesses, if I were to lay down one, and an invariable rule, it would be not to cross-examine at 0012 11all. In nine cases out of ten, where a witness testifies against you, your cross-examination will make a bad matter worse. If you believe a witness is honest, and only mistaken, treat him courteously, never touch his pride, nor put him on the defensive. If you believe he is swearing falsely, go down upon him like an avalanche. In ordinary cases never put a question in cross-examination, unless it be to call out some new fact favorable to you; and even then, I think, you had better wait and call him as your own witness, and thus win his favor by showing confidence in his integrity; thus you will frequently get from him very comforting things.

Be ever courteous to opposite counsel. You will find all sorts of men at the bar. It is with the profession as with the Church, the wheat and the tares grow together. Your opponent may be a scamp, and you may know it; but if in the particular cause he conducts himself like a gentleman, treat him accordingly. And, above all things, never break an oral stipulation. It is well to be a little chary about making such stipulations, and they never should be made except with a gentleman, because more may be claimed for them than you intended to grant.

Never refuse a case because it will not pay a fee. Remember you go forth to take your place in life, and exercise in all the relations of society the influence of a learned and honorable profession. It is your mission to uphold the right and overthrow the wrong, and, to the extent of your power, to see to it that justice be denied to no man.

But some one, who has listened thus far, may wonder wherein all this economy of professional life the money-making comes in. This is a matter about which, I think, I ought to be perfectly frank, and, in strict professional confidence, I will tell you what the fact is; that, with a good lawyer, it never comes in at all; it never comes into his mind; it never distracts his thoughts; it never unsettles his soul. If money-making be your object in life, go where money can be made; go to the marts of commerce; go to the mines on the Pacific coast; sound for petroleum, or procure a contract for furnishing blankets to the Indians. Go anywhere, do anything, except into court to practice law. Money-changers have no place in the temple of justice. 0013 12But, while money must be discarded as an end with the lawyer, still, as a means, it cannot wholly be disregarded, and you must at least look after enough of the filthy dross to pay your bills. No man can be honest who makes bills without the expectation of paying them; and, as Mr. Webster once said, it cannot be said of any dishonest man that he has the law in his heart; and on another occasion Mr. Webster said that a good lawyer ought, when he died, to leave neither a dollar nor a debt; and, as I have quoted from Mr. Webster, I will quote from one of his friends, Mr. Choate, a remark as characteristic of him as it was descriptive of Mr. Webster. He once said to me, while a student in his office, in that half tragic, half comic manner, which all who knew him so well remember: “My boy, Mr. Webster was a remarkable man; his contempt for cash was equalled only by his contempt for creditors.” This was the defect in Mr. Webster's character, and a departure from his own maxim which I have just quoted. Therefore, it is safe to say, you must make money enough to pay your bills.

Save money if you can. Money is power, and may be employed to advance all the useful ends of life; but how you are to do this, amid the appeals for charity that will come up around your path, with young men on every hand soliciting material aid to acquire education and enter upon the learned professions, with the widows and orphans and maimed soldiers of the war, and with the unknown, unnumbered calls upon your charity, your generosity, and your affections,—if you desire to know how you are to save money, you must inquire of somebody besides me.

And yet the profession has its rewards. “Heaven is above all yet. There sits a judge,” whose approbation is the lawyer's highest reward. And even in this world the profession has its rewards. Who would think of weighing gold against tears of gratitude, trickling down the cheek of poverty, rescued by your ability, your courage, and your fidelity, from unmerited doom? You all remember how Mr. Seward, while at the bar, without fee or reward, and braving the uproar of popular clamor, defended a negro against the charge of murder on the plea of insanity, which, in the popular belief, was a falsehood, although the fact was subsequently verified by the death of the negro in an insane 0014 13asylum. This was years ago—prior to the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th amendments to the Constitution—and before the negro became an object of national justice and political affection. Mr. Seward has since passed through an eventful and illustrious career of public life, during which he has “sounded all the depths and shoals of honor,” and has finally retired to Auburn to collect his thoughts and compose his soul before leaving the shores of time to enter upon an eternal career beyond the celestial gates. And methinks, as he sits in that tranquil retreat, looking out upon the uneasy and stormy world, where “restless mediocrity” is rising to the surface to-day to sink out of sight to-morrow, and looking back over the incidents of his busy life, he would not exchange the recollection—the consciousness of duty performed, in rescuing this unfortunate individual of a degraded race, smitten with mental malady, and in peril of the prejudice, the passions, the rage of the populace, more fearful than maladies—for the largest fee he ever received, or for the memory of the proudest achievement of his political life. This conspicuous act of professional bravery and charity will grow brighter and brighter through Mr. Seward's mortal life, and when he shall stand before the Son of Man at that fearful winnowing which shall separate the wheat from the chaff, that awful judgment which shall forever divide the just from the unjust, he may point to this act of hislife which, eighteen hundred years before it was performed, received the Master's approbation.

“Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was an hungered and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

“Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? Or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? Or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?”

“And the King shall answer, and say unto them, verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

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I am detaining you too long, but in addition to all the things I have admonished you to do, I must warn you of one thing not to do; and I cannot do this in a more effectual way than to quote again from my master whom I loved and almost adored, and who has long since gone to the reward which awaits an honorable career. I recollect upon one occasion, when he had been counselling me as to the course to be pursued by a lawyer, he said, with an emphasis and an energy which thrilled me through and through and which I shall never forget—“Keep out of politics. Things have come to that pass when no man can mingle in American politics without sinking his self-respect.” You may say this advice comes with bad grace from myself, who have in some sense fallen before the great temptation. Shakspeare tells us of a preacher who pointed his flock to the thorny path, himself taking the primrose way. The thorny path was the right way, and the preacher gave his flock sound advice, though he himself failed to practice and profit by it. And if you have the slightest doubt of the soundness of the advice I have offered you, wait till you have achieved a respectable position at the bar, and then accept a seat in the Senate, and I venture the prediction that your judgment will condemn your weakness, as mine does my own. In admonishing you to keep out of politics, of course I do not mean that you are to sink your manhood, or waive the participation which it is the right and duty of every American citizen to exercise in influencing the course of political affairs. What I mean is that you should avoid office-seeking and office-holding. The judicial positions of the country are open to the lawyer. The courts of the States and of the Union must be filled by lawyers. And if you cannot endure to occupy the highest position in American life—an eminent place at the bar—I beseech you stop on the bench, and do not fall into the dirty pools of politics. Should the American passion, ambition for place, seize and master you, let me point you to the highest, the serenest, the grandest seat in the Union, the Chief Justiceship of the judicial department of the United States. Who, in a healthy mental condition, would exchange the calm dignity of the Chief Justiceship for life to be tossed by politicians on an “uneasy blanket” in the White House, for four or eight years!

Gentlemen, there is no limit to what you may suffer from a 0016 15speaker without notes; and I have indulged this license, and have already trespassed upon you unreasonably. And yet there is one subject I must mention in conclusion. In the economy of Providence every generation has its peculiar duties, trials, triumphs. The Church, the only institution on earth with eighteen hundred years of historic unity, has always had the wisdom to train its priesthood to meet imminent danger. When infidelity attacked the truths of religion with the facts developed by material science, the Church instructed its ministry in that speciality; an and when the assaults upon religion were made by verbal criticisms upon the text of the Gospel, the Church sent forth its teachers specially instructed as to the intrinsic evidences of the Gospel's truth.

You go forth to-day, young and strong, and full of hope, to discharge the duties and meet the responsibilities belonging to our profession—and handmaid of free institutions. What, then, is the special evil which you should be charged to correct?

We have but lately emerged from a fearful civil war, which has inflamed the blood of sections, and embittered the passions of the people. During the war whatever was necessary to be done had to be done. Constitutions are made for men—not men for constitutions. Necessity is its own law, and the manifest necessity of certain lines of governmental policy of doubtful legal and constitutional validity, has naturally tended to create a popular indifference to the Constitution and the laws, of which you go forth commissioned defenders. Some of you will be Democrats, and some of you will be Republicans. As to all matters of mere political economy and policy you may divide in opinion and contend in action; but you are to remember that whenever the slightest letter of the Constitution is imperilled you are the sworn champions of that Constitution, and you must forget all political differences and rally to its support like a priesthood rallying to the defence of a holy shrine; and if the Constitution shall be stabbed to death by its foes, let not its expiring spirit turn upon you with the reproach, sharper than a thousand daggers, “ et tu, Brute.”