with a desire to have him try his hand in the neighborhood where Lee was operating.

The truth was, the President was very weary of receiving reports from those Union generals down Richmond-way who were more addicted to the formulation of elaborate plans of campaign than of giving the Confederates sound drubbings.

GRANT KNEW HIS BUSINESS.

Grant was not-as charged by many-a callous, cold, cruel, bloodthirsty man. It being his business to put an end to the Rebellion, he concluded that the only way it could be done was to destroy the Armies of the Confederacy.

War at best is brutal and inhuman, but Grant wasn't in the humor to concoct essays upon the beauties and desirability of peace. He told President Lincoln that if he was expected to carry out the orders given him he must be let alone. He was let alone, to do things in his own way.

When the great movement of the early part of 1864 was begun, Grant's plan was to crush Lee, take Richmond, devastate the Shenandoah Valley, and thus deprive the Confederates of one great source of supplies, and wipe out the Confederate forces in the Southwest.

Sherman was sent into the Shenandoah.

When he came out he said that a crow flying from one end of the valley to the other would have to "take his provisions with him."

Sherman was assigned the task of capturing Atlanta, overthrowing Johnston and ridding the country of the enemy as far as the seashore. He did the work thoroughly.

Grant attended to Lee and Richmond, but the Confederates resisted stubbornly, fighting behind entrenchments raised at every point of vantage. As Lee had to be crushed, the Union casualties were fearful to contemplate.

Grant lost twenty thousand men in three weeks in the Wilderness, battles being of almost daily occurrence.

For every man Grant lost there were two to take his place; Lee had no hope of re-enforcements.

Day by day the iron ring was drawn closer about the troops of the Confederacy; they were allowed no rest; they were compelled to fight night and day.

Grant pressed every advantage with merciless severity, and Richmond fell; and one by one the leading cities in the South were surrendered.

Lee finally realized the folly of further resistance, and on that momentus beautiful April morning he handed his army over to the taciturn soldier commanding the Armies of the United States.

GRANT IS ELECTED PRESIDENT.

Three years later a grateful people elevated the "Old Commander" to the highest office within their gift. He occupied the White House eight years and then retired to private life.

In 1877 Grant began a tour of the world, which continued more than

two years.

It is said that during that time more people looked upon the face of the victorious Republican General than that of any man that ever lived.

His progress through the various countries of the world was one continued triumph.

It was not as a warrior, nor as a statesman, nor former ruler of a great nation, but as a typical representative of a Republic which stood in the front rank among the nations of the earth.

Grant was the embodiment of advanced ideas; in him the peoples of other countries saw a product of the most enlightened and advanced civilization.

He was a man of the people; sprung from the people, who, after all possible honors had been heaped upon him, remained the same-simple, unaffected, modest and unpretentious.

Returning to the United States, he was received with the utmost enthusiasm. The people lavished tokens of affection upon him without stint; they had not forgotten his great services, and demonstrated to the utmost the fact that he retained the first place in their hearts.

PASSING OF THE "OLD COMMANDER."

Then came the tragical and pathetic period of his career. Stricken by a painful, malignant and incurable malady, he bore his sufferings with the same stoicism he had exhibited upon the field of battle. Nothing could be done to alleviate his sufferings, the disease being so deep rooted as to be beyond the powers of the physician and surgeon.

The whole country was filled with sadness at the thought of the passing of their hero.

The South sent frequent messages of inquiry and sympathy to the family of the man who had been so magnanimous in victory, and had, after the fighting was over, said, "Let us have peace.”

Confederate veterans visited him as he lay dying, and he was grateful for their coming. At his request some of them were pall-bearers at the funeral.

No murmurs ever escaped Grant's lips; he made no complaints; and when, at last, in the quiet seclusion of that small cottage on Mount McGregor, after months of agony, he yielded up his life, the nation mourned the loss of its greatest military genius.

Down from the unpretentious house in the mountains the sorrowing people bore his body, and at the close of a magnificent pageant-the last tribute of love and respect his fellow-citizens could pay-he was laid at rest in a beautiful spot on the banks of the Hudson.

A fitting monument to his memory has been erected, beneath the marble dome of which the "Old Commander" lies in an enduring sleep.

In the words of the little maiden-her father a soldier, who had yielded up his life that the Union might not be dissolved-"God bless our Grant."

FOREIGNERS CANNOT UNDERSTAND.

There is one thing the people of foreign countries cannot understand. That is, how the President of the United States, a republic, where the real power of government rests with the citizens of the Nation, can be possessed. of greater authority than any other ruler on earth.

Although a soldier, and accustomed to having his orders obeyed instantly and without question, General Grant, when President, refrained from exercising, as often as possible, the power and authority vested in him. There were times, however, when he was compelled, in order that peace might be preserved in various States of the Union, to use this autocratic authority.

In one instance-in 1876-when President Grant was in Philadelphia in attendance upon the Centennial Exhibition, the report was made to him that the situation in one of the Southern States was extremely critical, the presence of United States troops being necessary to nip a probable battle between the two political factions, both of which were determined to obtain control of the government of the Commonwealth.

President Grant read the report, said nothing (as was his wont), and then, upon a small piece of paper, wrote out an order for the immediate transfer of several thousand regulars to the capital city of the State in which

the outbreak was anticipated. Grant was entirely unmoved, and, to the eye of the average man, was as unconcerned as though he had written a message upon the most unimportant of topics.

A German officer, high in rank, who was in the United States on a tour of the world, exclaimed, "Wonderful! President Grant has transacted most serious business, and it will be attended to; he has ordered the movement. of many thousands of troops without consulting anyone; in short, he has done what no ruler on earth-not even the Emperors of Germany or Russia, or the Sultan of Turkey-would have thought of doing without consultation with his State advisers. Your President has more individual power than any sovereign who sits upon a throne, and yet this is a republic, where the Representatives of the people, in Congress, are supposed to direct the affairs of the country.'"

An officer of the United States Army then proceeded to explain that the people of this Nation, having elected their officers of administration, gave them their fullest confidence. Should that confidence be abused, however, the offending official-even the President of the Republic-would probably be impeached, and, after a fair and impartial trial, removed from office.

During the Spanish-American War of 1898 the two Houses of Congress voted $50,000,000 to President McKinley to be used by him as he saw fit, a mark of confidence no other nation in the world has ever bestowed upon its ruler. President McKinley sent nearly twenty thousand soldiers to Cuba and Porto Rico without the advice or consent of anyone, and despatched almost seventy-five thousand troops to the Philippines without being directed or advised.

President Lincoln, being, by virtue of his office, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, practically directed the movements of the Union forces during the Civil War until General Grant was made Lieutenant-General in command of the Northern forces; after that, he let Grant manage things, because, as he put it, "Grant knows his business better than I do."

JOHN MARSHALL.

CHAPTER XIX.

A MINUTE-MAN OF 1776 WHOSE MOTTO WAS, "LIBERTY OR DEATH" THE BATTLE OF THE GREAT BRIDGE—

MARSHALL AT VALLEY FORGE-THE MAN

WITH ONLY ONE SHIRT-MARSHALL
AS A TRAMP-HOW HE LOST

A BIG FEE.

"TH

HE worthy member (Patrick Henry) has concluded his observations by many eulogiums on the British Constitution. It matters not to us whether it be a wise one or not. I think that, for America at least, the government on your table is very much superior to it," declared John Marshall in the Virginia Convention, referring to the Constitution of the United States which had been submitted for adoption.

It seemed at this time as if the Constitution would be rejected. Patrick Henry, George Mason and William Grayson, a trinity of eloquence and genius, were opposing it; James Madison, Edmund Randolph and John Marshall were urging its adoption. With the latter was James Inness, "a man of such magnificent and splendid eloquence," says Patrick Henry, “that it was sufficient to shake the human mind." But all the eloquence of that convention did not leave as deep an impress upon the minds of the delegates as the sound logic and close reasoning of John Marshall, the tall, gaunt, shambling, loose-jointed lawyer, who was in later years, as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, to construe that Constitution and make it the sure and solid corner-stone of our great Federal system of government. John Marshall came to the Supreme bench with a love for the Union inherited from a patriotic father and acquired by bitter experience in the battles of the Revolution and through intense suffering with Washington's other ragged, hungry and frozen patriots in the huts of Valley Forge. As early as May, 1775, when but a youth of nineteen John Marshall gathered the country boys near his father's plantation, organized them into a company