.H65D4 
 
tes^E/^k^ 
 
 Book 
 
 hujm 
 
 cjr\^ 
 
IN MEIMORIAM. 
 
 L»t.»aj.H J i yii i M T irLH|"' " ■"-■L.m>n»» 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 HON. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW 
 
 OF NEW YORK, 
 
 LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 HON. CxEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 
 
 \ 
 
 (Late a Senator from the State of Massachusetts), 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE 
 
 SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, 
 
 Saturday, January 28, 1905. 
 
 6200 
 
 WA-SHINGTOISI. 
 
 1905. 
 
 Copy -2., 
 

c4 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 OF 
 
 HON. CITAUNCEY M. DEPEW 
 
 MEMOniAL ADDRESSES OX THE LATE SEXATOK HOAIt. 
 
 Mr. LODGE. Mr. President, before sendius the resolutions 
 to the de.sk I wish to state, as I have lieen asked to do, that tlie 
 Senator from AViseonsin [Air. SpooNEn], who was very anxious 
 to be here to-day and to .qieak to the resolutions, and whose 
 Ions friendship with jMr. Hoar is well known to the Senate, is 
 unfortunately prevented suddenly by illness from coming; he is 
 Viuable to leave his house. I now send the resolutions to the 
 desk. 
 
 The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator fi'om Massa- 
 chusetts submits resolutions, which will be read. 
 
 The Secretary read the resolutions, as follows : 
 
 Resolved, That the Senate has heard with profound sorrow of the 
 death of Hon. Geokoe F. IIoak, late a Senator from the State of Mas- 
 sachusetts. 
 
 Resolved, That as a mark of respect to the memory of the deceased 
 the business of the Senate be now siispended to enable his associates 
 to pay propel tribute to his high character and distinguished public 
 services. 
 
 Rcsolred. That the Secretary communnicate these resolutions to the 
 House of Representatives. 
 
 The PPtESIDENT pro tempore. Will the Senate agree to the 
 resolutions V 
 
 The resolutions were unanimously agreed to. 
 
 ]\Ir. DEPEAV. Mr. President, it is asserted by many writers 
 that the Senate has seen its best days. They clain/that the 
 statesmen who made this body famous in the earlier periods of 
 our history have not had any successors of equal merit or genius. 
 The Senate does not change, but the questions which it must 
 discuss and decide are new with each generation. There is a 
 broad distinction between the elucidation and solving of prob- 
 lems which relate to tlie foundations and ui)building of in- 
 stitutions, which are vital to their preservation and perpetuity, 
 and the materialistic issues of finance, commercialism, and in- 
 dustrialism. The one arouses in the orator every faculty of 
 his mind, every possibility of his imagination, every aspira- 
 tion of his soul, and every emotion of his heart, while the others 
 demand mainly the aptitude and experience of the college pro- 
 fessor or the expert or student on subjects which affect the for- 
 tunes of the factory, the mill, the furnace, and the farm. 
 
 Webster could command the attention of listening Senates and 
 
 of an anxious and expectant country with orations which have 
 
 become part of our best literature and educate the vouth of our 
 
 schools on interpretations of the Constitution of the United States 
 
 0200 Q 
 
upon wbiih clopeiid the life or death of liberty. But Webster 
 could bold only temporary interest and a narrow audience on 
 tariff schedules upon wool or lumber, upon iron or cotton fabrics, 
 or upon bimetallism or the single standard. Hamilton and Jef- 
 ferson and their antagonistic schools were creating with little 
 precedent to guide them a form of government in which lilierty 
 and law would give the largest protection to the individual citizen 
 and maintain order and promote the greatest happiness of the 
 mass. The one believed these results could best be obtained by 
 centralized pov>-er, the other by its distribution among the States. 
 There was then brought into play the loftiest creative and con- 
 structive genius which the world has known. 
 
 AVebster, Clay, and Calhoun, the Senatorial triumvirate, who 
 attained the zenith of Senatorial fame, made their reputations 
 and that of this body upon the discussion of inijdied powers in 
 the Constitution, affecting not only the nation's life but the 
 destruction or jiepetuity of human slavery. Webster, in that 
 immortal speech, which educated millions of oiu- youth to rush 
 to arms when the Republic was in danger, preached from the 
 text of " Liberty and union, now and forever, one and insep- 
 arable." Calhoun saw clearly the extinction of slavery with the 
 growth of the country and brought to the defense of the system 
 resources, intellectual and logical, never equaled ; while Clay 
 postponed the inevitable through compromises which weve 
 adopted because of his passionate pleas of marvelous eloquence 
 for peace and unity. So in the acute stage of the controversy, 
 which resulted in the civil war and ended in the enfranchise- 
 ment of tlie slaves, Seward here and Lincoln on the platform, 
 were appealing to that higher law of conscience, which uplifts 
 the orator and audience to a spiritual contemplation of things 
 material. 
 
 Happily the v>-ork of the founders in one age and the saviors 
 in another has left to us mainly the development, upon indus- 
 trial lines, of our country's resources and capabilities. We pro- 
 duced no heroes in over half a century, and yet when the war 
 drums called the nation to arms, Grant, from the tannery, and 
 Lee, from a humble position in the Army, rose to rank among 
 the great captains of all the ages. Had the civil war neA^er 
 occurred. Grant would have lived a peaceful and modest mer- 
 cantile life in a country town of Illinois, and Lee would have 
 passed the evening of his days in equal obscurity upon the 
 retired list of the United States Army. Better, if the contest 
 can be honoi'ably averted, that a hero should never be known 
 than that his discovery should be brought about by the calami- 
 ties of war, the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, and 
 the distress, demoralization, and devastation of civil strife. 
 
 We pay our tribute to-day to one who in any of these great 
 periods would have stood beside the most famous, to one who, 
 having the experience of a longer continuous term in Congress 
 than any other citizen ever enjoyed, testified on all occasions to 
 the increasing ))ower, growth, and beneficent influence of this 
 body, and to the ever advancing purity of American public life. 
 His education and oi>portunities, his singularly intimate con- 
 nection with the glorious past and the activities of the present, 
 made him a unique and in a measure an isolated figure. He 
 was educated under conditions and in surroundings which de- 
 G200 
 
5 
 
 veloped for the public service couscience, beart, aucl imagina- 
 tion. A lawyer of the first rank by heredity, study, and practice, 
 he nevertheless approached public questions, not from the 
 standpoint of the pleader but the orator ; not as an advocate 
 with a brief, but as a patriot with a mission. He cast his first 
 vote in 1847, when all the fire of his youth had been aroused 
 by the slavery agitation. He came actively into politics the 
 year after, when the Democratic party had divided into the 
 Free Soil and slavery men, and the Whig party was split 
 between the adherents of conscience or cotton. He began his 
 career upon the platform and his preparation for the public 
 service as a conscience Whig. 
 
 He saw the preparation, through the American or Know- 
 Nothing party, in which Whigs and Democrats were acting 
 together, of an organization upon broader lines. No one 
 worked harder or more intelligently for the fusion of men of 
 opposite creeds on industrial questions, but of one mind in oppo- 
 sition to slavery, into a National Constitutional Antislavery 
 party. When that party came into existence in 1856 with a 
 Presidential candidate and platform it had no more ardent 
 sponsor for its faith and its future than Senator Hoar. A 
 party whose fundamental creed was liberty for all men of 
 every race and color appealed to the poetic and sentimental 
 side of our friend and to the revolutionary ideas with which he 
 was saturated. He came to believe that the worst which the 
 Republican party might do would be more beneficial to the 
 country than the best which its opp.onent was capable of. 
 Though often differing from his party associates, his combat was 
 to accomplish his purposes within the lines. He bowed to the 
 will of the majority in his action, without surrendering his 
 individual convictions as to the wisdom of the policy. He 
 claimed, and with much reason, that the party had come after 
 repeated trials, in many instances, to his way of thinking, and 
 if those who went .outside of the breastworks and lost all 
 influence had remained with him his ideas would sooner have 
 been adopted. We have here the explanation of the only criti- 
 cism which has ever been passed upon his public acts. As in 
 the Hawaiian and Panama questions, where his eloquence 
 gave comfort to the opposition and grieved his friends, his 
 votes supported the position of the majority and the policies of 
 the Administration. 
 
 It was a high privilege to be a member of the Judiciary Com- 
 mittee of the Senate under his chairmanship. It was a court 
 presided over by a great lawyer. With courteous deference 
 to the members, bills were sent to subcommittees, but when the 
 subcommittee made its report, they found that the questions 
 had been exhaustively examined before by the chairman. The 
 subcommittee which had perfunctorily done its work received 
 in the form of a polite statement and exposition of the case the 
 report which, if they had attended to their duties, tliey ought 
 to have made. This- work required not only vast legal knowl- 
 edge and accurate judgment but prodigious industry. It was 
 that rare condition of mind where work becomes a habit, and 
 with Senator Hoar when the committee or the Senate or law 
 or literature failed to give him occupation, he vcould pass the 
 idle hours in translating Thucydides or some other Greek author 
 into English. 
 6200 
 
6 
 
 In llie oxauiination at the close of the last session, before the 
 Conunittee on I'rivileges and Elections, of the president and 
 apostles of the Mormon Church, himself a close student of all 
 theologies and an eminent Unitarian, he was aroused by the 
 claim of divine inspiration for the words and acts of the Mor- 
 mon iipostles. He drew from President Smith the statement 
 that the action of his predecessor. President Woodruff, in re- 
 versing the doctrine of polygamy, heretofore held by the 
 church, was directly inspired by God, and then made him te.s- 
 tify that though living under the inspiration of the presidency 
 of the church he was also living in direct violation of that 
 revelation by remaining a polygamist. In the course of a long 
 cross-examination he drew from Apostle Lyman statements of 
 doctrine and beliefs, and subsequently contradictions of these 
 positions, and then forced the apostle to swear that both the 
 assertion and the contradiction v,-ere inspired by God. 
 
 At the age of forty-three he was at the cross-roads of his 
 career. He had reached a position at the bar which placed 
 within his grasp the highest rewards of the profession of 
 the law. The country was entering upon an era of specu- 
 lation, of railroad building, the bankruptcy and reorganization 
 of combinations of capital in the creation and consolidation 
 of corporations, which called for the highest talents and 
 the best equipment of lawyers. Questions as to the power 
 of the General Government over corporations created by 
 States and the powers of the States as to limitations and 
 confiscations of corporations engaged in interstate commerce in- 
 terested capital and labor, shippers, and investors. The largest 
 fees and fortunes ever known in the history of the practice of the 
 law came to those who demonstrated their ability during these 
 wonderful years. On the threshold of this temple of fortune 
 and fame at the bar Mr. Hoar was elected to the United States 
 Senate. He knew that he lived in a State whose traditions 
 were to keep its public men who merited its confidence con- 
 tinuously in Congress. He felt that in the great questions still 
 unsolved which had grown out of the civil war and the mar- 
 velous development of the country he could perform signal pub- 
 lie service. His decision v.'as made. The courts lost a great 
 lawyer, the Senate gained a great statesman, and he lived and 
 died a poor man. 
 
 I siient a memorable night with Mr. Gladstone when in a remi- 
 niscent mood, and with a masterful discrimination and eloquence 
 he conversed upon the traditions of the House of Commons dur- 
 ing the sixty years of his membership. As the stately proces- 
 sion of historic men and measures came into view, they were 
 inspired by the speaker with all the characteristics and method.s 
 of their period. The changes which ha.d occurred were detailed 
 ]>y a master who loved and revered the Conmions. Senator HoAit 
 would do this for the thirty-seven years of his activities in 
 Congress, but with a wit and humor which Gladstone lacked. 
 He remembered the sarcasm, or the ridicuU\ or tlie epigram, or 
 the witticism, or the illustration which had not only illumed but 
 ended the debate, and the o])i)osing delmter. 
 
 We read with wonder of the nights when Sanuiel Johnson 
 gathered about him Goldsmith and l>urke and Reynolds and 
 Garrick : and I>os\vell could make inunortal VDluiiies of tlu-ir 
 0200 
 
conversations, especially at this time when conversation is be- 
 coming a lost art, because the shop has Invaded the drawing- 
 room and the dinner table, and cards have captured society. 
 
 But Senator Hoar knew his favorites among the Greek and 
 Roman classics, and the Bible and Shakespeare by heart. He 
 could quote with a familarity of frequent reading and retentive 
 memory from the literature of the period of Queen Elizabeth 
 and of Queen Anne, as well as the best of modern authors, and 
 he was a member of that coterie which met weekly at Parker's, 
 in Boston, where Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, and others 
 reproduced for our day, and in better form, the traditions of the 
 Johnsonian Parliament, and where the Senator and his brother 
 were the quickest and the wittiest of the crowd. 
 
 Whether in conversation or debate there never has been in the 
 American Congress a man so richly cultured and with all his 
 culture so completely at command. 
 
 The statesmen of the Revolution were with Senator Hoab 
 living realities. The men of the present were passing figures, 
 fading into obscurity, compared with these immortals. In a 
 remarkable speech he said of the signers of the Declaration : 
 " We, not they, are the shadows." On his father's side, his 
 grandfather, two great grandfathers, and three uncles were in 
 Lincoln's company at Concord Bridge, and his mother was a 
 daughter of Roger Sherman, whom he thought the wisest and 
 ablest of the members of the Continental Congress. He was 
 the only person who signed all four of the great state papers 
 to which the signatures of the Delegates of the different Col- 
 onies were attached : The Association of 1774, the Articles of 
 Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Con- 
 stitution of the United States. 
 
 His mother remembered, as a little girl, sitting on Wash- 
 ington's knee and hearing him talk, and her sister, the mother 
 of William M. Evarts, when a child of 11, opened the door 
 for General Washington as he was leaving the house after his 
 visit to her father, Roger Sherman. The General, with his 
 stately courtesy, " put his hand on her head and said, ' My little 
 lady, I wish you a better otiice.' She dropped a courtesy and 
 answered, quick as lightning, 'Yes, sir; to let you in.'" He 
 lived all his life in this atmosphere of his youth. The marvelous 
 results of the working of the principles of the charter framed 
 In the cabin of the Maijfloiccr for "just and equal laws." and of 
 the Declaration of Independence in the development of orderly 
 liberty for his countrymen, convinced him that the same rights 
 and privileges would end as happily, after trial, with the negroes 
 of the South and the people of the Philippine Islands and of the 
 Russian Empire. It was a matter with him not of pride or 
 boastfulness, but of sustaining power under responsibilities that 
 in every Congress from the beginning had been a representative 
 of the Sherman clan. I was distantly related to him by the 
 same tie, and he exhibited an elder brotherly and almost 
 fatherly watchfulness and care for me when I entered the 
 Senate. 
 
 His cousins, William M. Evarts and Roger Minot Sherman, 
 Avere the foremost advocates of their periods, his father emi- 
 nent at the bar, and his brother Attorney-General of the United 
 States, and yet he would have been the equal of either as a law- 
 0200 
 
yer if he had cHnibed for its leadership. It has been the hisb 
 privilege of his colleagues here to meet, converse, work, and de- 
 bate \^-ith a Mayflower Puritan, possessed of all the culture and 
 learning of the twentieth century, but with the virtues, the prej- 
 udices, the likes and dislikes, the vigor and courage of the 
 I'ilgrim Fathers, neither softc.ied nor weakened by the looseness 
 of creeds nor the luxury of living of to-day. As our friend the 
 Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Lodge] said in his most dis- 
 criminating and eloquent eulogy — the best. I think. I have ever 
 heard as a tribute of an associate and friend — .Senator Hoar 
 would have died like a martyr for his principles. In ]850 he de- 
 livered a speech in Mechanics' Ilall, at Worcester, upon the evils 
 of slavery and the crime of its extension into the Territories, 
 which attracted general attention and was widely published. 
 Fifty-four years afterwards he AA'as again before an audience 
 in Mechanics' Hall, compcsod of the children and grandchildren 
 of the first. 
 
 The dread summons had then come to him. and he had but few 
 days to lire. The old warrior spoke with the tire of his early 
 manhood, but his message to his neighbors and countrymen after 
 a half century was not of war, as before, but of j^eace, love, and 
 triumph. The progress and development of the Republic during 
 these fifty years of liberty was his theme. He looked joyously 
 upon the past and present and was full of hope and confidence 
 for the futiu'e. He had finished his viork and performed a 
 great part iri great events of great moment for his country and 
 Innnanity. and he left to his contemporaries and posterity the 
 brilliant example of a life nobly lived, 
 C200 
 
 O