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ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 Senate and House of Representatives 
 
 and invited guests 
 On Thursday, Jan. 19, 1905. 
 
 Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge 
 
 IN RESPONSE TO AN INVITATION OF THE 
 
 General Court 
 
 BOSTON. MASS. 
 1905 
 
,\\t«)Lt 
 
 Boston : 
 Wright & Potter Printing Co., 18 Post Office Square. 
 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 Mk. President, Mr. Speaker, Senators and Gentlemen 
 OF THE House of Representatives : — 
 
 I am here by your invitation, which is at once an 
 « honor and a command. I am to speak to you of a 
 
 remarkable man and of a long and distinguished career 
 of public service. I am to speak to you of a man who 
 has taken his place in that noble company who have made 
 Massachusetts what she has been in the past, what she is 
 to-day, and to whom she owes her great part in history 
 and her large influence in the Union of States. Here 
 where Mr. Hoar rendered his first public service, here 
 where he was five times commissioned to represent the 
 State in the great council of the nation, is the fittest place 
 in which to honor his memory and make record of our 
 grief for his death. I cannot hope to do full justice 
 to such a theme, but the sincerity of my endeavor and 
 the affection which inspires it give me confidence to 
 proceed and assure me of your indulgence, 
 g Men distinguished above their fellows, who have won 
 
 I a place in history, may be of interest and importance to 
 
 posterity as individuals or as representatives of their 
 time, or in both capacities. Hobbes and Descartes, for in- 
 stance, are chiefly if not wholly interesting for what they 
 themselves were, and for their contributions to human 
 thought which might conceivably have been made at any 
 
epoch. On the other hand, Pepjs and St. Simon, sub- 
 stantially contemporary with the two philosophers, are 
 primarily of interest and importance as representative 
 men, embodiments and exponents of the life and thought 
 of their time. Benjamin Franklin, to take a later ex- 
 ample, was not only deeply interesting as an individual, 
 but he seemed to embody in himself the tendencies of 
 thought and the entire meaning and attitude of the 
 eighteenth century in its broadest significance. Mr. Hoar 
 belongs to the class which is illustrated in such a high 
 degree by Franklin, for he has won and will hold his 
 place in history not only by what he was and what he 
 did, but because he was a very representative man in a 
 period fruitful in great events and conspicuous for the 
 consolidation of the United States, — the greatest single 
 fact of the last century, measured by its political and 
 economic efl'ect upon the fortunes of mankind and upon 
 the history of the world. 
 
 To appreciate properly and understand intelligently 
 any man who has made substantial achievement in art or 
 letters, in philosophy or science, in war or politics, and 
 who has also lived to the full the life of his time, we must 
 turn first to those conditions over which he himself had 
 no control. In his inheritances in the time and place of 
 birth, in the influences and the atmosphere of childhood 
 and youth, we can often find the key to the mystery 
 which every human existence presents, and obtain a larger 
 explanation of the meaning of the character and career 
 before us than the man's own life and deeds will disclose. 
 
 This is especially true of Mr. Hoar, for his race and 
 descent, his time and place of birth are full of signifi- 
 
cance, if we would riglitly understand one who was at 
 once a remarkable and a highly representative man. He 
 came of a purely English stock. His family in England 
 were people of consideration and substance, possessing 
 both education and established position before America 
 was discovered. Belonging in the seventeenth century 
 to that class of prosperous merchants and tradesmen, of 
 country gentlemen and farmers, which gave to England 
 Cromwell and Hampden, Eliot and Pym, they were Puri- 
 tans in religion, and in politics supporters of the Parlia- 
 ment and opponents of the King. Charles Hoar, sheriff 
 of Gloucester, and enrolled in the record of the city gov- 
 ernment as " Generosus " or "gentleman," died in 1638. 
 Two years later, his widow, Joanna Hoar, with five of 
 her children, emigrated to ]^ew England. One of the 
 sons, Leonard Hoar, chosen by his father to go to Oxford 
 and become a minister, entered Harvard College, then 
 just founded, and graduated there in 1650. He soon 
 after returned to England, where he was presented to 
 a living under the Protectorate. He married Bridget, 
 the daughter of John Lisle, commonly called Lord Lisle, 
 one of the regicides assassinated later at Laiisanne, where 
 he had taken refuge, by royal emissaries after the King 
 had come to his own again. John Lisle's wife, the Lady 
 Alicia, died on the scaffold in 1685, the most famous 
 and pathetic victim in the tragedy of Jeffreys' " Bloody 
 Assize." Her son-in-law, Leonard Hoar, ejected from 
 his living under the Act of Uniformity, studied medicine, 
 and, returning to ISTew England ten years later, became 
 in 1672 president of Harvard College, and died in 1675. 
 Senator Hoar was descended from an elder brother of 
 
6 
 
 the president of Harvard, Jolm Hoar, evidently a man of 
 as strong character and marked abilities as the rest of 
 his family. The old records contain more than one ac- 
 coimt of his clashings with the intolerant and vigorous 
 theocracy which governed Massachusetts, and of the fines 
 and imprisonments which he endured ; but he never seems 
 either to have lost the respect of the community or to 
 have checked his speech. We get a bright glimpse of 
 him in 1690, when Sewall says, in his diary on Novem- 
 ber 8 of that year : — 
 
 Jno. Hoar comes into the lobby and sais he comes from 
 the Lord, by the Lord, to speak for the Lord; complains that 
 sins as bad as Sodom's found here. 
 
 In every generation following we find men of the 
 same marked character, who were graduates of Harvard, 
 active citizens, successful in their callings, taking a full 
 share of public duties and in the life of their times. Sen- 
 ator Hoar's great grandfather, who had served in the 
 old French war, and his grandfather, were both in the 
 fight at Concord bridge. His father, Samuel Hoar, was 
 one of the most distinguished lawyers in Massachusetts. 
 He served in both branches of the State Legislature, and 
 was a member of Congress. Honored throughout the 
 State, his most conspicuous action was his journey to 
 Charleston, S. C, to defend certain negro sailors ; and 
 from that city, where his life was in danger, he was 
 expelled because he desired to give his legal services to 
 protect men of another and an enslaved race. 
 
 On his mother's side Senator Hoar was a descendant 
 
of the John Sherman who landed in Massachusetts in 
 1630, and became the progenitor of a family which has 
 been extraordinarily prolific in men of high ability and 
 distinction. In the century just closed this family gave 
 to the country and to history one of our most brilliant sol- 
 diers, one of our most eminent statesmen and financiers, 
 and through the female line the great lawyer and orator, 
 Mr. Evarts, and E. Rockwood Hoar, distinguished alike 
 as judge, as member of Congress and as Attorney-General 
 of the United States. In the eighteenth century we owe 
 to the same blood and name one of the most conspicuous 
 of the great men who made the revolution and founded 
 the United States, Roger Sherman, signer of the Declara- 
 tion of Independence, signer of the articles of confeder- 
 ation, signer of the Constitution, first Senator from Con- 
 necticut, and grandfather of Mr. Hoar, as he was also 
 of Mr. Evarts. I have touched upon this genealogy 
 more, perhaps, than is usual upon such occasions, not 
 only because it is remarkable, but because it seems to me 
 full of light and meaning in connection with those who, 
 in the years just past, had the right to claim it for their 
 own. 
 
 We see these people, when American history be- 
 gins, identified with the cause of constitutional freedom, 
 and engaged in resistance to what they deemed tyranny 
 in Church and State. They became exiles for their 
 faith, and the blood of the victims of Stuart revenge is 
 sprinkled on their garments. They venture their lives 
 again at the outbreak of our own revolution. They take 
 a continuous part in public affairs. They feel it to be 
 their business to help the desolate and oppressed, from 
 
8 
 
 John Hoar, sheltering and succoring the Christian 
 Indians, in the dark and bloody days of King Philip's 
 war, to Samuel Hoar, going forth into the midst of a 
 bitterly hostile community to defend the helpless negroes. 
 The tradition of sound learning, the profound belief 
 in the highest education, illustrated by Leonard Hoar in 
 the seventeenth century, are never lost or weakened in the 
 succeeding generations. Through all their history runs 
 unchanged the deep sense of public responsibility, of 
 patriotism and of devotion to high ideals of conduct. 
 The stage upon which they played their several parts 
 might be large or small, but the light which guided them 
 was always the same. They were Puritans of the Puri- 
 tans. As the centuries passed, the Puritan was modified 
 in many ways; but the elemental qualities of the power- 
 ful men who had crushed crown and mitre in a common 
 ruin, altered the course of English history and founded 
 a new state in a new world, remained unchanged. 
 
 So parented and so descended, Mr. Hoar inherited 
 certain deep-rooted conceptions of duty, of character and 
 of the conduct of life, which were as much a part of his 
 being as the color of his eyes or the shape of his hand. 
 Where and when was he born to this noble heritage ? 
 We must ask and answer this question, for there is a 
 world of suggestion in the place and time of a man's 
 birth, when that man has come to have a meaning and 
 an importance to his own generation as well as to those 
 which succeed it in the slow procession of the years. 
 
 Concord, proclaimed by Webster as one of the glories 
 of Massachusetts which no imtoward fate could wrest 
 from her, was the place of his birth. About the quiet 
 
village were gathered all the austere traditions of the 
 colonial time. It had witnessed the hardships of the 
 early settlers, it had shared and shuddered in the hor- 
 rors of Indian wars, it had seen the slow and patient 
 conquest of the wilderness. There within its boundaries 
 had blazed high a great event, catching the eyes of a 
 careless world which little dreamed how far the fire then 
 lighted would spread. Along its main road, overarched 
 by elms, the soldiers of England marched that pleasant 
 April morning. There is the bridge where the farmers 
 returned the British fire and advanced. There is the 
 tomb of the two British soldiers who fell in the skirmish, 
 and whose grave marks the spot where the power of Eng- 
 land on the IS'orth American continent first began to ebb. 
 Truly there is no need of shafts of stone or statues of 
 bronze, for the whole place is a monument to the deeds 
 which there were done. The very atmosphere is redolent 
 of great memories; the gentle ripple of the placid river, 
 the low voice of the wind among the trees, all murmur 
 the story of patriotism, and teach devotion to the nation, 
 which, from " the bridge that arched the flood," set forth 
 upon its onward march. 
 
 And then, just as Mr. Hoar began to know his birth- 
 place, the town entered upon a new phase which was to 
 give it a place in literature and in the development of 
 modern thought as eminent as that which it had already 
 gained in the history of the country. Emerson made 
 Concord his home in 1835, Hawthorne came there to 
 live seven years later, and Thoreau, a native of the town, 
 was growing to manhood in those same years. To Mr. 
 Hoar's inheritance of public service, of devotion to duty 
 
10 
 
 and of lofty ideals of conduct, to the family influences 
 which surrounded him and which all pointed to work and 
 achievement as the purpose and rewards of life, were 
 added those of the place where he lived, — the famous 
 little town which drew from the past lessons of pride 
 and love of country, and offered in the present examples 
 of lives given to literature and philosophy, to the study 
 of nature and to the hopes and destiny of man here and 
 hereafter. 
 
 Thus highly gifted in his ancestry, in his family and 
 in his traditions, as well as in the place and the com- 
 munity in which he was to pass the formative years of 
 boyhood and youth, Mr. Hoar was equally fortunate in the 
 time of his birth, which often means so much in the mak- 
 ing of a character and career. He was born on the 29th 
 of August, 1826. Superficially it was one of the 
 most uninteresting periods in the history of western civil- 
 ization; dominated in Europe by small men, mean in its 
 hopes, low in its ambitions. But beneath the surface 
 vast forces were germinating and gathering, which in 
 their development were to affect profoundly both Europe 
 and America. 
 
 The great movement which, beginning with the revolt 
 of the American colonies, had wrought the French revo- 
 lution, convulsed Europe and made Napoleon possible, 
 had spent itseK and sunk into exhaustion at Waterloo. 
 The reaction reigned supreme. It was the age of the 
 Metternichs and Castlereaghs, of the Eldons and Liver- 
 pools, of Spanish and Neapolitan Bourbons. With a 
 stupidity equalled only by their confidence and insensi- 
 bility, these men and others like them sought to establish 
 
11 
 
 again the old tyrannies, and believed that they could re- 
 store a dead system and revive a vanished society. They 
 utterly failed to grasp the fact that where the red-hot 
 plowshares of the French revolution had passed the old 
 crops could never flourish again. The White Terror 
 swept over France, and a little later the Due Decazes, 
 the only man who understood the situation, was driven 
 from power because he tried to establish the conditions 
 upon which alone the Bourbon monarchy could hope to 
 survive. The Holy Alliance was formed to uphold autoc- 
 racy and crush out the aspirations of any people who 
 sought to obtain the simplest rights and the most mod- 
 erate freedom. To us Webster's denunciation of the 
 Holy Alliance sounds like an academic exercise, designed 
 simply to display the orator's power, but to the men of 
 that day it had a most real and immediate meaning. The 
 quiet which Russia and Austria called peace reigned over 
 much wider regions than Warsaw. England cringed and 
 burned incense before the bewigged and padded effigy 
 known as " George the Fourth." France did the bidding 
 of the dullest and most unforgetting of the Bourbons. 
 Any one who ventured to criticise any existing arrange- 
 ment was held up to scorn and hatred as an enemy of 
 society, driven into exile like Byron and Shelley, or cast 
 into prison like Leigh Hunt. 
 
 But the great forces which had caused both the Ameri- 
 can and French revolutions were not dead, — they were 
 only gathering strength for a renewed movement; and 
 the first voices of authority which broke the deadly quiet 
 came from England and the United States. When the 
 Holy Alliance stretched out its hand to thrust back the 
 
12 
 
 Spanish colonies into bondage, Canning declared that he 
 would call in the " New World to redress the balance 
 of the Old; " and Monroe announced that in that New 
 World there should be no further European colonization, 
 and no extension of the monarchical principle. Greece 
 rose against the Turks, and lovers of liberty everywhere 
 went to her aid; for even the Holy Alliance did not 
 dare to make the Sultan a partner in a combination 
 which professed to be the defender of Christianity as 
 well as of despotic goverimient. 
 
 When Mr. Hoar was born the Greek revolution was 
 afoot; the first stirrings of the oppressed and divided 
 nationalities had begun; the liberal movement was again 
 lifting its head and preparing to confront the entrenched, 
 uncompromising forces of the reaction. He was four 
 years old when Concord heard of the fighting in the Paris 
 streets during the three days of July and of the fall of 
 the Bourbon monarchy. When he was six years old 
 the passage of the reform bill brought to England a 
 peaceful revolution, instead of one in arms, and crumbled 
 into dust the system of Castlereagh and Liverpool and 
 Wellington. 
 
 The change and movement thus manifested were not 
 confined to politics. As Mr. Hoar went back and forth 
 to school in the Concord Academy, the new forces were 
 spreading into every field of thought and action. Re- 
 volt against conventions in art and literature and against 
 existing arrangements of society was as ardent as that 
 against political oppression, while creeds and dogmas 
 were called in question as unsparingly as the right of 
 the few to govern the many. In England one vested 
 
13 
 
 abuse after another was swept away by the Reform Par- 
 liament, It was discovered that Shelley and Byron, the 
 outlaws of twenty years before, were among the greatest 
 of England's poets. Dickens startled the world and won 
 thousands of readers by bringing into his novels whole 
 classes of human beings unknown to polite fiction since 
 the days of Fielding, and by plunging into the streets 
 of London, to find among the poor, the downtrodden and 
 the criminal, characters which he made immortal. Car- 
 lyle was crying out against venerated shams in his fierce 
 satire on the philosophy of clothes. Macaulay was vin- 
 dicating the men of the great rebellion to a generation 
 which had been brought up to believe that the Puritans 
 were little better than cut-throats, and Oliver Cromwell 
 a common military usurper. The English establishment 
 was shaken by the Oxford movement, which carried New- 
 man to Rome, drove others to the extreme of scepticism, 
 and breathed life into the torpid church, sending its 
 ministers out into the world of men as missionaries and 
 social reformers. 
 
 In France, after the days of July, the romantic move- 
 ment took full possession of literature, and the Shake- 
 speare whom Voltaire rejected became to the new school 
 the head of the corner. The sacred Alexandrine of the 
 days of Louis XIV. gave way to varied measures which 
 found their inspiration in the poets of the Renaissance. 
 The plays of Hugo and Dumas drove the classical drama 
 from the stage; the verse of De Musset, the marvellous 
 novels of Balzac, were making a new era in the literature 
 of France. 
 
 Italy, alive with conspiracies, was stirring from one 
 
14 
 
 end to the other with aspirations for national unity, and 
 with resistance to the tyranny of Neapolitan Bourbons 
 and Austrian Hapsburgs. Hungary was moving rest- 
 lessly; Poland was struggling vainly with her fetters. 
 Plans, too, for social regeneration were filling the minds 
 of men. St. Simon's works had come into fashion. It 
 was the age of Fourier and Proudhon, of Bentham and 
 Comte. 
 
 Such were the voices and such the influences which 
 then came across the Atlantic, very powerful and very 
 impressive to the young men of that day, especially to 
 those who were beginning to reflect highly and seriously 
 upon the meaning of life. And all about them in Amer- 
 ica the same portents were visible. Everything was ques- 
 tioned. Men dreamed dreams and saw visions. There 
 is a broad, an impassable gulf between the deep and 
 beautiful thought, the mysticism and the transcendental- 
 ism of Emerson, and the wild vagaries of Miller and the 
 Second Adventists or the crude vulgarity of Joseph 
 Smith; yet were they all manifestations of the religious 
 cravings which had succeeded the frigid scepticism of 
 the eighteenth century and the dull torpor of the period 
 of reaction. So, too, Brook Farm and the Oneida Com- 
 munity were widely different attempts to put into prac- 
 tice some of the schemes of social regeneration then 
 swarming in the imagination of men. Literature was 
 uplifting itself to successes never yet reached in the ISTew 
 World. It was the period of Poe and Hawthorne, of 
 Longfellow and Lowell, of Holmes and Whittier. Ban- 
 croft and Prescott were already at work; Motley was 
 beginning his career with romantic novels. And then 
 
15 
 
 behind all this literature, all these social experiments, all 
 these efforts to pierce the mystery of man's existence, 
 was slowly rising the agitation against slavery, — a dread 
 reality destined to take possession of the country's history. 
 
 These influences, these voices, were everywhere when 
 Mr. Hoar, a vigorous, clever, thoughtful boy of sixteen, 
 left his school at Concord and entered Harvard College 
 in 1842. Brook Farm had been started in the previous 
 year; the next was to witness Miller's millennium; he 
 was half way through college when Joseph Smith was 
 killed at iSTauvoo. In his third year the long battle 
 which John Quincy Adams had waged for nearly a dec- 
 ade in behalf of the right of petition and against the 
 slave power, and which had stirred to its depths the con- 
 science of !N^ew England, culminated in the old man's 
 famous victory by the repeal of the " gag rule." 
 
 As Mr. Hoar drew to manhood, the air was full of 
 revolt and questioning in thought, in literature, in re- 
 ligion, in society and in politics. The dominant note 
 was faith in humanity and in the perfectibility of man. 
 Break up impeding, stifling customs, strike down vested 
 abuses, set men free to think, to write, to work, to vote 
 as they chose, and all would be well. To Mr. Hoar, 
 with his strong inheritances, with the powerful influences 
 of his family and home, the spirit of the time came with 
 an irresistible appeal. It was impossible to him to be 
 deaf to its voice, or to shut his ears to the poignant cry 
 against oppression which sounded through the world of 
 Europe and America with a fervor and pathos felt only 
 in the great moments of human history. But he was the 
 child of the Puritans ; their elemental qualities were in 
 
16 
 
 his blood ; and the Puritans joined to the highest ideal- 
 ism the practical attributes which had made them in the 
 days of their glory the greatest soldiers and statesmen in 
 Europe, Macaulay, in a well-known passage, says of 
 Cromwell's soldiers that — 
 
 They moved to victory with the precision of machines, 
 while burning with the wildest fanaticism of Crusaders. 
 
 Mr. Hoar, by nature, by inheritance, by every influence 
 of time and place, an idealist, had also the strong good 
 sense, the practical shrewdness and the reverence for law 
 and precedent which were likewise part of his birthright. 
 He passed through college with distinction, went to his 
 brother's office for a year, to the Harvard Law School, 
 and thence, in 1849, to Worcester, where he cast in his 
 fortune with the young and growing city which ever after 
 was to be his home. But his personal fortunes did not 
 absorb him. He looked out on the world about him with 
 an eager gaze. As he said in his old age, — 
 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. 
 
 The profound conviction that every man had a public 
 duty was strong within him. The spirit of the time was 
 on him. He would fain do his share. When the liberal 
 movement culminated in Europe in 1848, he was deeply 
 stirred. When, a little later, Kossuth came to the United 
 States, the impression then made upon him by the cause 
 and the eloquence of the great Hungarian sank into his 
 heart and was never effaced. He, too, meant to do his 
 part, however humble, in the work of his time. He did 
 not content himself with barren sympathy for the op- 
 
17 
 
 pressed beyond the seas, nor did he give himself to any 
 of the vague schemes then prevalent for the regeneration 
 of society. He turned to the question nearest at hand, to 
 the work of redressing what he believed to be the wrong 
 and the sin of his native land, — human slavery. He 
 did not join the abolitionists, but set himself to fight 
 slavery in the effective manner which finally brought its 
 downfall, — by organized political effort within the pre- 
 cincts of the Constitution and the laws. 
 
 Mr. Hoar had been bred a Whig. His first vote in 
 1847 was for a Whig Governor, and Daniel Webster was 
 the close friend of his father and brother. He had been 
 brought up on Webster's reply to Hayne, and as a col- 
 lege student he had heard him deliver the second Bunker 
 Hill oration. In that day the young Whigs of Massa- 
 chusetts looked to Webster with an adoring admiration. 
 They — 
 
 Followed him, honored him, 
 Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, 
 Learned his great language, caught his clear accents. 
 Made him their pattern to live and to die. 
 
 But the great command of conscience to Mr. Hoar was 
 to resist slavery, and the test of his faith was at hand. 
 He was to break from the dominant party of the State. 
 Webster was to become to him in very truth " The Lost 
 Leader." He was to join with those who called the great 
 Senator " Ichabod," and not until he himself was old 
 was he to revert to his young admiration of that splendid 
 intellect and that unrivalled eloquence. But when the 
 ordeal came, there was no shrinking. Charles Allen of 
 Worcester, amid derisive shouts, announced at Phila- 
 delphia, after the nomination of General Taylor, that the 
 
18 
 
 Whig party was dissolved, and Mr. Hoar went with him. 
 After the delegates had returned to Massachusetts, Mr. 
 Hoar rendered his first political service by addressing 
 and mailing a circular drawn by his elder brother, E. 
 Rockwood Hoar, which invited the anti-slavery Whigs to 
 meet at Worcester and take steps to oppose the election 
 of either General Taylor or of General Cass, the Demo- 
 cratic candidate. The convention was held in Worcester 
 on June 28, became the Free Soil party, and gave their 
 support to Van Buren. The result of the movement 
 nationally was to defeat the Democrats in New York, as 
 the Liberty party had turned the scales against Clay four 
 years before. In Massachusetts the Worcester conven- 
 tion marked the appearance of a group of young men 
 who were to form a new school of statesmen, and who 
 were destined to control Massachusetts and to play a 
 leading part in guiding the fortunes of the nation for 
 forty years to come. 
 
 The Federalists, who had formed and organized the 
 government of the United States, and who were essen- 
 tially constructive statesmen of great power, had followed 
 the men of the revolution, and in turn had been succeeded 
 by the Whigs. Under the lead of Webster and Choate, 
 of Everett and Winthrop and others hardly less distin- 
 guished, the Whigs controlled Massachusetts for a gen- 
 eration. They never had seemed stronger, despite 
 Webster's personal discontent, than on the eve of Tay- 
 lor's election; but it was to be their last triumph. The 
 men, mostly young, who gathered at Worcester, were to 
 displace them and themselves take and hold power for 
 nearly forty years. There at Worcester, with Samuel 
 
19 
 
 Hoar, one of the pioneers of earlier days, presiding, were 
 assembled the men of the future. Charles Sumner, 
 Charles Francis Adams, Henry Wilson, E. R. Hoar, 
 Charles Allen and Richard H. Dana, spoke to the con- 
 vention; while Palfrey the historian, John A. Andrew, 
 then a young, unknown lawyer, and Anson Burlingame, 
 although not present, joined with and supported them. 
 These were not only new men, but they represented a 
 new political school. The Whigs, inheriting the Federal- 
 ist doctrines of liberal construction, were essentially an 
 economic party, devoted to the industrial and material 
 development of the country. The men who supplanted 
 them were primarily and above all human-rights states- 
 men, as befitted the time. To them the rights of 
 humanity came first, and all economic questions second. 
 With these men and with this school Mr. Hoar united 
 himself heart and soul, swayed by the sternest and strong- 
 est convictions, for which no sacrifice was too great, no 
 labors too hard. He was perhaps the youngest of the men 
 destined to high distinction who met in Worcester in 1848 ; 
 he was certainly the last great survivor of this remarkable 
 group in the largest fields of national statesmanship. 
 
 Thus was the beginning made. The next step was an 
 unexpected one. There was a Free-Soil meeting in 
 Worcester in 1850. Charles Allen, who was to speak, 
 was late, and a cry went up from the impatient audience 
 of " Hoar ! " " Hoar ! " ISTeither father nor brother was 
 present, so Mr. Hoar took the platform, and, speaking 
 from the fullness of his heart and with the fervor of his 
 cause, won a success which put him in demand for meet- 
 ings throughout the county. The following year he was 
 
20 
 
 made chairman of the Free-Soil county committee, proved 
 himself a most efficient organizer, and carried all but six 
 of the fifty-two towns in the county. Then, greatly to 
 his surprise, he was nominated for the Legislature. He 
 accepted, was elected, became the leader of the Free Boil- 
 ers in the House, and distinguished himself there by his 
 advocacy of the factory acts limiting the hours of labor, 
 in which Massachusetts was the pioneer. He retired at 
 the end of the year for which he had been chosen. In 
 1857 he was nominated, again unexpectedly, to the State 
 Senate, was elected, served one year with marked dis- 
 tinction, and then retired, as he had from the House. 
 He had, indeed, no desire for office. On coming to 
 Worcester he had been offered a partnership by Emory 
 Washburn, soon after Governor of the State, and later 
 a professor in the Harvard Law School. This connec- 
 tion brought him at once into one of the largest practices 
 in the county ; and his partner's election to the governor- 
 ship, which soon followed, gave him entire responsibility 
 for the business of the firm. He was not only very busy, 
 but he was devoted to his profession, for he possessed 
 legal abilities of the highest order. Yet he was never 
 too busy to give his services freely to the great cause of 
 human rights, which he had so much at heart. He 
 labored unceasingly in his resistance to slavery and in 
 building up the Republican party, which during that 
 time was fast rising into power, both in State and nation. 
 It is impossible to follow him through those eventful 
 years when freedom and slavery clinched in a death 
 struggle far out in Kansas, and the black clouds of civil 
 war were gathering darkly on the horizon. But there 
 
21 
 
 are two incidents of that period which illustrate Mr. 
 Hoar's character so strongly that they cannot be passed 
 over. In 1854 the Know-Nothing movement broke out 
 with all the force of a tropical hurricane. To men pain- 
 fully struggling to bring a great cause to judgment 
 against the resistance of the old and dominant parties, it 
 offered many temptations. The new party was over- 
 whelming in its strength ; it evidently could not last 
 indefinitely; it was sound on the slavery question; and 
 it promised to act as a powerful solvent and disintegrate 
 the old organizations which every Free Soiler rightly 
 thought was vital to their own success. But Mr. Hoar, 
 unmoved by the storm, believing in freedom of con- 
 science as he believed in political freedom, set himseK in 
 stern opposition to a party which rested on the principle 
 of discrimination and ostracism against all men of a 
 certain race or of a given creed. 'No public clamor then 
 or ever was able to sway him from those ideals of faith 
 and conduct which were the guiding stars of his life. 
 
 The other incident was widely different and even more 
 characteristic. If there was one thing more hateful to 
 Mr. Hoar than another in those days it was the return 
 of runaway slaves to the south by the authorities of 
 northern States. Massachusetts was the scene of some 
 of the worst examples of this bad business, and the wrath 
 of the people was deeply stirred. In 1854 a deputy 
 marshal connected with the work of slave catching ar- 
 rived in Worcester. His presence became known, and 
 an angry mob, utterly uncontrollable by the little police 
 force of the town, gathered about the hotel. The man 
 was in imminent danger, and stricken with terror. No 
 
22 
 
 one loathed a slave-catcher more than Mr. Hoar; but the 
 idealist gave way to the lover of law, and ordered liberty. 
 Mr. Hoar went out and addressed the crowd, then gave 
 his arm to the terrified man, walked with him down the 
 street, surrounded by a few friends, and so got him to 
 the station and out of the town, bruised by blows, but 
 alive and in safety. 
 
 So the years of that memorable time went by. Mr. 
 Hoar worked diligently in his profession, rising to the 
 front rank of the bar, and laboring in season and out of 
 season in support of the Republican party and of the ad- 
 ministration of Lincoln when the civil war came. He 
 had neither thought nor desire for public life or public 
 office. He wished to succeed in his profession, to live 
 quietly at home among his books, and he cherished the 
 modest ambition of one day becoming a judge of the 
 supreme court of the State. But it was ordered other- 
 wise. In 1868 Mr. Hoar went to Europe, worn out by 
 hard work at his profession. There were at the moment 
 many candidates for the nomination for Congress in the 
 Worcester district, and most of them were strong and 
 able men. In this condition of affairs Mr. Hoar con- 
 sented to let some of his friends bring his name forward, 
 and then took his departure for Europe. Travel and rest 
 brought back his health, and he returned home eager for 
 his profession, regretting that he had allowed his name to 
 be suggested as that of a candidate for any position, only 
 to find himself nominated for Congress on the first ballot 
 taken in the convention. So his life in Washington began, 
 with no desire or expectation on his part of a service of 
 more than one or two terms. At the end of his second 
 
23 
 
 term he annomiced. his intention of withdrawing, and was 
 persuaded to reconsider it. The fourth time he was 
 obliged again to withdraw a refusal to run, because it was 
 a year of peril to the party. The next time the refusal 
 was final, and his successor was nominated and elected. 
 
 His eight years in the House were crowded with work. 
 He began with a very modest estimate of his own capaci- 
 ties, but his power of eloquent speech and his knowledge 
 and ability as a lawyer soon brought him forward. When 
 S. S. Cox sneered at him one day, saying, " Massachusetts 
 had not sent her Hector to the field," and Mr. Hoar 
 replied that there was no need to send Hector to meet 
 Thersites, the House recognized a quick and biting wit, 
 of which it was well to beware. 
 
 When Mr. Hoar entered the House, Congress was en- 
 gaged in completing the work which by the war and the 
 emancipation of the slaves had marked the triumph of 
 that mighty struggle for human freedom to which he 
 had given his youth and early manhood. He was there- 
 fore absorbed in the questions raised by the reconstruction 
 policy, which involved the future of the race he had 
 helped to free; and he labored especially in the interests 
 of that race for the establishment of national education, 
 which, after years of effort constantly renewed, ulti- 
 mately failed of accomplishment. But the civil war, 
 besides its great triumphs of a Union preserved and a 
 race set free, had left also the inevitable legacy of such 
 convulsions, — great social and political demoralization 
 in all parts of the country and in all phases of public 
 and private life. Political patronage ran riot among 
 the offices, and made Mr. Hoar one of the most ardent. 
 
24 
 
 as he was one of the earliest and most effective, of civil 
 service reformers. Unhappily, however, the poison of the 
 time penetrated much higher in the body politic than 
 the small routine offices so sorely misused under the 
 " spoils system." It was an era when Cabinet officers 
 and party leaders were touched and smirched, and when 
 one Congressional investigation followed hard upon an- 
 other. Mr. Hoar's keenness as a lawyer, his power as 
 a cross-examiner and his fearless and indignant honesty, 
 caused the House to turn to him for this work of punish- 
 ment and purification, which was as painful as it was 
 necessary. He was a member of the committee to inves- 
 tigate the Freedman's Bureau, and took part in the report 
 which exonerated General Howard. He was one of the 
 House managers in the Belknap trial, and the leading 
 member of the committee which investigated the Union 
 Pacific Railroad and the scandals of the Credit Mobilier. 
 But his greatest and most distinguished service came 
 to him just as his career in the House was drawing to a 
 close. The demoralization of the war, the working out 
 of reconstruction, the abnormal conditions which war and 
 reconstruction together had produced, culminated in 1876 
 in a disputed presidential election. Into the events of 
 that agitated winter it is needless and impossible to 
 enter. The situation was in the highest degree perilous, 
 and every one recognized that a grave crisis had arisen 
 in the history of the republic. Finally, an electoral 
 tribunal was established which settled the controversy 
 and removed the danger. Upon that tribunal Mr. Hoar 
 was placed by a Democratic speaker as one of the repre- 
 sentatives of the House, and this appointment alone was 
 
25 
 
 sufficient to fix his place as one of the political leaders 
 of the country. With this great and responsible task ac- 
 complished, his career in the House drew to a close. Yet 
 even while he was thus engaged, a new and larger service 
 came to him by his election to the Senate. He was then, 
 as when he entered the House, without desire for public 
 office. He still longed to return to his library and his 
 profession, and allow the pleasures and honors as well as 
 the trials of public life to pass by. But again it was 
 not to be. There was at that time a strong and deep- 
 rooted opposition to the dominance of General Butler in 
 the politics of Massachusetts, and this opposition, de- 
 termined to have a Senator in full sympathy with them, 
 took up Mr. Hoar as their candidate, and, without effort 
 or even desire on his part, elected him. 
 
 So he passed from the House to the Senate. He en- 
 tered the Senate a leader, and a leader he remained to 
 the end, ever growing in strength and influence, ever 
 filling a larger place, until he was recognized everywhere 
 as one of the first of American statesmen, until his words 
 were listened to by all his countrymen, until there gath- 
 ered about him the warm light of history, and men saw 
 when he rose in debate — 
 
 The past of the nation in battle there. 
 
 !N'either time nor the occasion permits me to trace that 
 long and fine career in the Senate. Mr. Hoar was a 
 great Senator. He brought to his service an intense 
 patriotism, a trained intellect, wide learning, a profound 
 knowledge of law and history, an unsullied character and 
 noble abilities. All these gifts he expended without 
 
26 
 
 measure or stint in his country's service. His industry 
 was extraordinary and unceasing. Whatever he spared 
 in life, he never spared himself in the performance of 
 his public duty. The laws settling the presidential suc- 
 cession, providing for the count of the electoral vote, for 
 the final repeal of the tenure-of-office act, for a uniform 
 system of bankruptcy, are among the more conspicuous 
 monuments of his industry and energy, and of his power 
 as a constructive lawmaker and statesman. N^or did his 
 activity cease with the work of the Senate. He took a 
 large part in public discussion in every political campaign 
 and in the politics of his own State. He was a delegate 
 to four national conventions, a leading figure in all; and 
 in 1880 he presided at Chicago with extraordinary power, 
 tact and success over the stormiest convention, with a 
 single exception, known to our history. 
 
 In the Senate he was a great debater, quick in retort, 
 with all the resources of his mind always at his com- 
 mand. Although he had no marked gifts of presence, 
 voice or delivery, he was none the less a master of brilliant 
 and powerful speech. His style was noble and dignified, 
 with a touch of the stateliness of the eighteenth century; 
 rich in imagery and allusion, full of the apt quotations 
 which an unerring taste, an iron memory and the widest 
 reading combined to furnish. When he was roused, when 
 his imagination was fired, his feelings engaged or his 
 indignation awakened, he was capable of a passionate 
 eloquence which touched every chord of emotion, and left 
 no one who listened to him unmoved. At these moments, 
 whether he spoke on the floor of the Senate, in the pres- 
 ence of a great popular audience or in the intimacy of 
 
27 
 
 private conversation, the words glowed, the sentences 
 marshalled themselves in stately sequence, and the ideal- 
 ism which was the dominant note of his life was heard 
 sounding clear and strong above and beyond all pleas of 
 interest or expediency. 
 
 So we come back to the light which shone upon his 
 early years, and which never failed him to the last. Mr, 
 Hoar was born in the period of revolt. He joined the 
 human-rights statesmen of that remarkable time; he 
 shared in their labors ; he saw the once unpopular cause 
 rise up victorious through the stress and storm of battle; 
 he beheld the visions of his youth change into realities, 
 and his country emerge triumphant from the awful 
 ordeal of civil war. He came into public life in season 
 to join in completing the work of the men who had 
 given themselves up to the destruction of slavery and the 
 preservation of the Union. But even then the mighty 
 emotions of those terrible years were beginning to sub- 
 side; the seas which had been running mountain high 
 were going down ; the tempestuous winds before which 
 the ship of state had driven for long years were dropping, 
 and bid fair to come out from another quarter. The 
 country was passing into a new political period. Ques- 
 tions involving the rights of men and the wrongs of 
 humanity gave place throughout the world of western 
 civilization to those of trade and commerce, of tariffs and 
 currency and finance. The world returned to a period 
 when the issues were economic, industrial and commer- 
 cial, and when the vast organizations of capital and labor 
 opened up a new series of problems. 
 
 In the United States, as the issues of the war faded 
 
28 
 
 into the distance and material prosperity was carried to 
 heights undreamed of before, the nation turned inevi- 
 tably from the completed conquest of its own vast domain 
 to expansion beyond its borders, and to the assertion of 
 the control and authority which were its due among the 
 great powers of the earth. Many years before Mr. Hoar's 
 death the change was complete, and he found himself a 
 leader in the midst of a generation whose interests and 
 whose conceptions differed widely from those to which 
 his own life had been devoted. He took up the new ques- 
 tions with the same zeal and the same power which he 
 had brought to the old. He made himself master of the 
 tariff, aided thereto by his love of the great industrial 
 co mm unity which he had seen grow up about him at 
 Worcester, and whose success he attributed to the policy 
 of protection. In the same way he studied, reflected 
 upon and discussed problems of banking and currency 
 and the conflict of standards. But at bottom all these 
 questions were alien to him. However thoroughly he 
 mastered them, however wisely he dealt with them, they 
 never touched his heart. His inheritance of sound sense, 
 of practical intelligence, of reverence for precedent, ren- 
 dered it easy for him to appreciate and understand the 
 value and importance of matters involving industrial 
 prosperity and the growth of trade; but the underlying 
 idealism made these questions at the same time seem 
 wholly inferior to the nobler aspirations upon which his 
 youth was nurtured. An idealist he was born, and so 
 he lived and died. 
 
 He could say, as John A. Andrew said : " I know not 
 what sins the recording angel may set against me, but 
 
29 
 
 this I know, — I never turned my back on any man 
 because he was poor, or because he was ignorant, or be- 
 cause he was black." This was Mr. Hoar's rule of life. 
 In him the poor, the unfortunate, the oppressed, whether 
 in private or public, always found a friend. Disregard- 
 ing all economic considerations, he resisted the exclusion 
 of the Chinese; he was ready to go to war to rescue 
 Armenia; he beheld in the Filipinos the modern suc- 
 cessors of the men who framed the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence and of the farmers who fought at Concord 
 bridge. To him discrimination on account of race was 
 only less odious than discrimination on account of relig- 
 ious belief. In the name of our common humanity he 
 would permit no distinction to be made which rested on 
 race or religion, and those who attempted to draw one 
 ever found in him an untiring and fearless opponent. 
 
 Neither scepticism nor experience could chill the hopes 
 or dim the visions of his young manhood. He was imbued 
 with the profound and beautiful faith in humanity char- 
 acteristic of that earlier time. He lived to find himself 
 in an atmosphere where this faith was invaded by doubt 
 and questioning. 
 
 How much that great movement, driven forward by 
 faith in humanity and hope for its future, to which Mr. 
 Hoar gave all that was best of his youth and manhood, 
 accomplished, it is not easy to estimate. It is enough to 
 say that the results were vast in their beneficence. But 
 the wrongs and burdens which it swept away were known 
 by the sharp experience of actual suffering only to the 
 generations which had endured them. The succeeding 
 generation had never felt the hardships and oppressions 
 
30 
 
 which had perished, but were keenly alive to all the evils 
 which survived. Hence the inevitable tendency to doubt 
 the worth of any great movement which has come, done 
 its work and gone, asserted itself; for there are no social 
 or political panaceas, although mankind never ceases to 
 look for them and expect them. To a period of enthu- 
 siasm, aspiration and faith, resulting in great changes and 
 in great benefits to humanity, a period of scepticism and 
 reaction almost always succeeds. The work goes on, 
 what has been accomplished is made sure, much good is 
 done, but the spirit of the age alters. 
 
 The new generation inclined to the view of science and 
 history that there were ineradicable differences between 
 the races of men. They questioned the theory that op- 
 portunity was equivalent to capacity; they refused to 
 believe that a people totally ignorant, or to whom freedom 
 and self-government were unknown, could carry on suc- 
 cessfully the complex machinery of constitutional and 
 representative government which it had cost the English- 
 speaking peoples centuries of effort and training to bring 
 forth. To expect this seemed to the new time as un- 
 reasonable as to believe that an Ashantee could regulate 
 a watch because it was given to him, or an Arruwhimi 
 dwarf run a locomotive to anything but wreck because 
 the lever was placed in his hands. Through all these 
 shifting phases of thought and feeling Mr. Hoar re- 
 mained unchanged, a man of '48, his ideals unaltered, 
 his faith in the quick perfectibility of hiunanity un- 
 shaken, his hopes for the world of men still glowing with 
 the warmth and light of eager youth. And when all is 
 said, when science and scepticism and experience have 
 
31 
 
 spoken their last word, the ideals so cherished by him 
 
 still stand as noble and inspiring as the faith upon which 
 
 they rested was beautiful and complete. The man who 
 
 steered his course by stars like these could never lose his 
 
 reckoning, or be at variance with the eternal verities 
 
 which alone can lift us from the earth. 
 
 His own experience, moreover, although mingled with 
 
 disappointments, as is the common fate of man, could but 
 
 confirm his faith and hope. He had dreamed dreams and 
 
 seen visions in his youth, but he had beheld those dreams 
 
 turn to reality and those visions come true in a manner 
 
 rarely vouchsafed. He had seen the slave freed and the 
 
 Union saved. He had shared with his countrymen in 
 
 their marvellous onward march to prosperity and power. 
 
 He had seen rise up from the revolt of 1848 a free and 
 
 united Italy, a united Germany, a French Republic, a 
 
 free Hungary. He would have been a cynic and a sceptic 
 
 indeed if he had wavered in his early faith. And so his 
 
 ideals and the triumphs they had won made him full of 
 
 confidence and courage, even to the end. He, too, could 
 
 say: — 
 
 I find earth not gray, but rosy ; 
 
 Heaven not grim, but fair of hue. 
 Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy. 
 Do I stand and stare ? All's blue. 
 
 This splendid optimism, this lofty faith in his country, 
 this belief in humanity, never failed. They were with 
 him in his boyhood; they were still with him, radiant 
 and vital, in the days when he lay dying in Worcester. 
 It was all part of his philosophy of life, knit in the fibres 
 of his being and pervading his most sacred beliefs. To 
 him the man who could not recognize the limitations of 
 
32 
 
 life on earth was as complete a failure as the man who, 
 knowing the limitations, sat down content among them. 
 To him the man who knew the limitations, but ever strove 
 toward the perfection he could not reach, was the victori- 
 ous soul, the true servant of God. As Browning wrote 
 in his old age, he, too, might have said that he was — 
 
 One who never tamed his back, but marched breast forward, 
 
 Never doubted clouds would break ; 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph ; 
 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake. 
 
 He had an unusually fortunate and happy life. He 
 was fortunate in the knowledge of great work done, happy 
 in never knowing idleness or the distress of wondering 
 painfully how to pass away the short time allowed to us 
 here or the miserable craving for constant excitement so 
 marked at the present moment. His vacations were 
 filled as were his working hours. He travelled wisely 
 and well, and the Old World spoke to him as she only 
 does to those who know her history. He was a lover of 
 nature. He rejoiced in the beauties of hill and stream 
 and forest, of sea and sky, and delighted to watch the 
 flight of the eagle or listen to the note of the song birds 
 in whose name he wrote the charming petition which 
 brought them the protection of the law in Massachusetts. 
 
 He was a scholar in the wide, generous, unspecialized 
 sense of an older and more leisurely age than this. His 
 Greek and Latin went with him through life, and the 
 great poets and dramatists and historians of antiquity 
 were his familiar friends. His knowledge of English 
 literature was extraordinary, as extensive as it was 
 
33 
 
 minute and curious. His books were his companions, an 
 unfailing resource, a pleasure never exhausted. To him 
 history had unrolled her ample page, and as antiquarian 
 and collector he had all the joys which come from research 
 and from the gradual acquisition of those treasures which 
 appeal to the literary, the historic or the artistic sense. 
 
 To those who knew him best it was always a source of 
 disappointment that he wrote so little, — that he never 
 could find time, amid his engrossing cares, to produce a 
 work which would have given him as assured and high a 
 place in American literature as he had won and held in 
 the public life of the United States. His occasional ad- 
 dresses and historical studies have a fine and real literary 
 quality which must make every one who reads them re- 
 gret that they are only fragments disconnected with each 
 other, and that they could not have been woven into a 
 symmetrical whole. His autobiography, fortunately, he 
 found time to write, and it has all the charm of his 
 addresses and essays ; but it also possesses one quality 
 more important even than literary form or historical 
 value, in giving to us not only the picture of a period, 
 but the veracious portrait of the author himself. Many 
 of the memoirs of American public men have the dryness 
 of a public document; but Mr. Hoar's autobiography is 
 thoroughly human. You feel as you read that you are 
 face to face with a real man, who is telling you what he 
 thinks and what he did just as he saw and felt it all. If 
 foibles or prejudices appear, they only add to the truth 
 and honesty of the picture, and make one know that here 
 at least there is neither deception nor parade. The book 
 has humor, historic value, literary qualities; but, above 
 
34 
 
 all, it is true to the writer himself, and that is the at- 
 tribute ruost to be coveted. 
 
 Any man of well-balanced mind who is wedded to 
 high ideals is sure to possess a great loyalty of soul. It 
 is from such men that martyrs have been made, — the 
 true martyrs, whose blood has been the seed of churches, 
 and across whose fallen bodies great causes have marched 
 to triumph. But it is also from men of this stamp, 
 whose minds are warped, that the fanatics, the unreason- 
 ing and mischievous extremists likewise come, — those 
 who at best only ring an alarm bell, and who usually are 
 thoroughly harmful, not only to the especial cause they 
 champion, but to all other good causes, which they en- 
 tirely overlook. There is, therefore, no slight peril in 
 the temperament of the thorough-going idealist, imless 
 it is balanced and controlled, as it was with Mr. Hoar, 
 by sound sense, and by an appreciation of the relation 
 which the idealist and his ideals bear to the universe at 
 large. It was said of a brilliant contemporary of Mr. 
 Hoar, like him, an idealist, that, " if he had lived in the 
 middle ages, he would have gone to the stake for a prin- 
 ciple under a misapprehension as to the facts." Mr. 
 Hoar would have gone to the stake socially, politically 
 and physically, rather than yield certain profound be- 
 liefs; but if he had made this last great sacrifice, he 
 would have known just what he was doing, and would 
 have been under no misapprehension as to the facts. 
 
 Loyalty to his ideals, moreover, was not his only loy- 
 alty. He was by nature a partisan; he could not hold 
 faiths or take sides lightly or indifferently. He loved 
 the great party he had helped to found in that strongest 
 
35 
 
 of all ways, witb. an open-eyed and not a blind affection. 
 He more than once differed from his party; he sometimes 
 opposed it on particular measures; he once, at least, 
 parted with it on a great national issue; but he never 
 would leave it; he never faltered in its support. He be- 
 lieved that two great parties were essential bulwarks of 
 responsible representative government. He felt that a 
 man could do far more and far better by remaining in 
 his party, even if he thought it wrong in some one par- 
 ticular, than by going outside and becoming a mere 
 snarling critic. ISTo man respected and cherished genuine 
 independence more than he, and no man more heartily 
 despised those who gave to hatred, malice and all unchar- 
 itableness the honored name of independence. ITothing 
 could tear him from the great organization he had helped 
 and labored to build up. If any one had ever tried to 
 drive him out, he would have spoken to Republicans as 
 Webster did to the Whigs in 1842 at Faneuil Hall, when 
 he said : — 
 
 I am a Whig, I always have been a Whig, and I always 
 will be one; and if there are any who would turn me out 
 of the pale of that communion, let them see who will get 
 out first. 
 
 Mr. Hoar's high ideals and unswerving loyalty were 
 not confined to public life and public duty. He was not 
 of those who raise lofty standards in the eyes of the 
 world, and then lower and forget them in the privacy of 
 domestic life and in the beaten way of friendship. He 
 was brought up in days when " plain living and high 
 thinking " was not the mere phrase which it has since 
 
36 
 
 become, but a real belief; and to that belief he always 
 adhered. He cast away a large income and all hope of 
 wealth for the sake of the public service. He had no 
 faculty for saving money, and no desire to attempt it. 
 If he made a large fee in an occasional case, if his pen 
 brought him a handsome reward, it all went in books or 
 pictures, in the hospitality he loved to exercise, and in 
 the most private charities, always far beyond his means. 
 He once said that he had been more than thirty years 
 in public life, and all he had accumulated was a few 
 books; but there was no bitterness, no repining in the 
 words. He respected riches wisely used for the public 
 good, but he was as free from vulgar admiration as he 
 was from the equally vulgar hatred of wealth. He was, 
 in a word, simply indifferent to the possession of money, 
 — a fine attitude, never more worthy of consideration 
 and respect than in these very days. 
 
 His love for his native land was an intense and master- 
 ing emotion. His country rose before his imagination 
 like some goddess of the infant world, the light of hope 
 shining in her luminous eyes, a sweet smile upon her 
 lips, the sword of justice in her fearless hand, her broad 
 shield stretched out to shelter the desolate and oppressed. 
 Before that gracious vision he bowed his head in homage. 
 His family and friends, — Massachusetts. Concord, Har- 
 vard College, — he loved and served them all with a 
 passion of affection in which there was no shadow of 
 turning. His pride in the Senate, in its history and its 
 power, and his affection for it, were only excelled by his 
 jealous care for its dignity and its prerogatives. He 
 might at times criticise its actions, but he would permit 
 
37 
 
 no one else to do so, or to reflect in his presence upon what 
 he regarded as the greatest legislative body ever devised 
 by man, wherein the ambassadors of sovereign States met 
 together to guard and to advance the fortunes of the re- 
 public. Beneath a manner sometimes cold, sometimes 
 absent-minded, often indifferent, beat one of the tenderest 
 hearts in the world. He had known many men in his 
 day, — all the great public men, all the men of science, 
 of letters or of art, — and his judgments upon them were 
 just and generous, yet at the same time shrewd, keen 
 and by no means over-lenient. But when he had once 
 taken a man within the circle of his affections, he ideal- 
 ized him immediately; there was thenceforth no fleck or 
 spot upon him, and he would describe him in glowing 
 phrases which depicted a being whom the world perhaps 
 did not know or could not recognize. It was easy to smile 
 at some of his estimates of those who were dear to him; 
 but we can only bow in reverence before the love and 
 loyalty which inspired the thought, for these are beautiful 
 qualities, which can never go out of fashion. 
 
 He was a fearless and ready fighter; he struck hard, 
 and did not flinch from the return. His tongue could 
 utter bitter words, which fell like a whip and left a scar 
 behind; but he cherished no resentments, he nursed no 
 grudges. As the shadows lengthened he softened, and grew 
 ever gentler and more tolerant. The caustic wit gave 
 place more and more to the kindly humor which was one 
 of his greatest attributes. In the latter days he would 
 fain be at peace with aU men, and he sought for that 
 which was good in every one about him. He died in the 
 fullness of years, with his affections unchiUed, his fine 
 
38 
 
 intellect undimmed. He met death with the calm cour- 
 age with which he had faced the trials of life. 
 
 He took his shrivelled hand without resistance, 
 And found him smiling as his step drew near. 
 
 So he passed from among us, a man of noble character 
 and high abilities. He did a great work ; he lived to the 
 full the life of his time. He was a great Senator, — a 
 great public servant, laboring to aid his fellow-men and 
 to uplift humanity. 
 
 He has fought a good fight, he has finished his course, he has kept the faith. 
 
 May we not say of him, in the words of one of the poets 
 who inspired his imagination, in the noble language he 
 so dearly loved : — 
 
 Koti/bi' ToS' axoi naai jroAiTait 
 "HAdev deXiTTus. 
 IIoXAui' SoKpvaiv (<TTai irirvKoi 
 Tuv yap neydXiov a.^ionevdeli 
 4>^/Liai iiaKKov Karexovtriv. 
 
 On all this folk, both low and high, 
 
 A grief has fallen beyond men's fears. 
 
 There cometh a throbbing of many tears, 
 
 A sound as of waters falling. 
 
 For when great men die, 
 
 A mighty name and a bitter cry 
 
 Rise up from a nation calling. 
 
 Note. — This English version of the last chorus in the Hippolytus of 
 Euripides is taken from the remarkable and very beautiful translation 
 of that tragedy by Professor Murray. 
 
 —"■""""""■"■" 
 
013 785 486 7