The only profile portrait of Chief Justice Waite, which we present to our readers on another page, reveals in a remarkable degree that divine quality of good-will toward all men for which he will ever be justly honored. The artist who painted the recent portrait for the Ohio Society of New York says his sitter seemed to be continually studying on his cases, and would frequently excuse himself and go to his library and take down a law book and look up a reference. His industry was untiring. From the beginning to the end of his judicial career his life was one sacrifice of personal ease and pleasure. For fourteen years he was the hardest worked member of the Supreme Court. Every Monday there was a quantity of motions submitted to the court which the chief justice was expected to act upon alone, each requiring more or less looking up of authorities, sometimes involving as much labor as cases calling for more elaborate decisions. He was unwilling to ask his associates to assist him in this class of work, as it was his policy never to shirk any burden, however great, that properly belonged to him. Could he have foreseen in the beginning the number, the variety and the magnitude of the constitutional questions which were to come before the court for consideration and determination during his term of office, he might well have shrunk from the ordeal. The second great period of constitutional interpretation began with his first year on the bench. The post war amendments-thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth-had at the time of his accession but very recently been adopted, and were coming up for judicial exposition. In some respects they were the most important articles in the Constitution, imposing upon the states limitations more radical and far-reaching than are imposed by all the other provisions of the instrument put together. A flood of cases has since arisen, where questions have been raised as to the powers of Congress, the rights of states, and the privileges of citizens. To declare the meaning and determine the scope of amendments that wrought a substantial change in our form of government, enlarging the central power and curtailing state sovereignty, has been the function of the Supreme Court under the chieftainship of Chief Justice Waite; and he met all these obligations, and bore his full share of the responsibilities devolving on this most august of judicial tribunals. One of the associate justices recently said: "His administrative ability was remarkable. None of his predecessors more steadily or more wisely superintended the court, or more carefully observed all that is necessary to its workings. He has written many of the most important opinions of the court-too many to be particularized." Another eminent jurist has said: "He was always on the alert as to the due order and course of business in

the court; he kept vigilant watch of the docket, acquainting himself in advance with the character of the causes about to be reached, and rigidly enforced the rules and precedents of the court in all matters of practice.

He presided with great dignity and with absolute fairness and courtesy, always ready to mitigate, never to aggravate, the harshness of the law, leaving nothing to be desired by his associates or by the Bar in his demeanor and bearing as the highest judicial officer in the land. Chief-Justice Waite was able to keep pace with the growth in wisdom, and with the wondrous growth in other directions, of the country. While Taney advanced over Marshall and Story, whom all men admired as the giants of their time, Waite has advanced over and beyond them all."

Few men in any great office in any country have commanded in so universal a degree the confidence of an entire people. Whether because of his grand, strong, broad cultured judicial mind, his profound learning and dexterity of intellect, or his conspicuous integrity, conscientious impartiality, and lovable personal qualities, it will ever be as has been said of him, that he filled his public career with honor-great honor-and with infinite benefit to his country.

The Produce Exchange of Toledo, in their resolutions of respect immediately after the great national bereavement, paid a high tribute to the public services of the lamented chief justice, adding: "But it is the immense circle of friends who knew him in private life, who are most deeply, tenderly touched, and those who knew him longest, loved him the most. Morrison R. Waite belonged to the people of this valley. For nearly forty years he went out and in amongst us. No citizen was ever more widely known or more sincerely esteemed for the purity, gentleness, and uprightness of his character, for the warm grasp of his hand, and the warmer sincere sympathies of his great heart. His history, well written, would be the history of northwest Ohio. Every young man, especially, is indebted to him for having so faithfully illustrated what has been and may again be accomplished by a well-rounded and well-ordered life."

Martha I Lamb

THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

On the 20th day of January, 1775, in the British House of Lords, the illustrious Lord Chatham delivered a very memorable speech. He was the fast friend and the outspoken defender of the struggling Colonists of America in their protracted controversy with the King of Great Britain and his constitutional advisers. He was no longer the great Prime Minister, who had dominated the counsels of the government with an almost despotic sway. He had descended from power, and had not, as he remarked in his speech," the honor of access to His Majesty." Age also was creeping upon him with its stealthy tread, and a painful malady racked his once stalwart frame with almost unendurable agony.

But neither age nor infirmity could impair the vigor of his intellect, nor quench the bold, and at times, even the defiant spirit with which he uttered his convictions. He vindicated, in the fullest and clearest manner, the right of the Colonists to refuse to be taxed, in the absence of all representation in the national councils, without their consent. "The spirit," said he, "which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship money in England; the same spirit which called all England on its feet, and by its bill of rights vindicated the English Constitution; the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent." On this great principle, and in this cause, the American Colonists, he adds, " are immovably allied; it is the alliance of God and nature, immutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of Heaven."

The Continental Congress, of whose members, acts, and their consequences I propose to speak, was at this time in session in Philadelphia, and hap barely initiated those plans and purposes which not long afterward found expression in the great charter of our rights and liberties, the immortal Declaration of Independence. Of this body of patriotic and illustrious men, Lord Chatham, in this speech from which I have quoted, made this memorable declaration. "When your lordships look at the papers transmitted to us from America; when you consider their decency, firmness and wisdom, you can not but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own. For myself I must declare and avow, that in all my

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reading and observation-and it has been my favorite study, I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world -that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress assembled at Philadelphia."

This is high eulogy; and in the mouth of an Englishman, justly proud of the name and familiar as he was with her grand history and the great men it had given to the world, it is exalted praise. And yet, after a pretty diligent and faithful study of the characters, the acts and the conclusions of that body of men known to us as the Continental Congress, I hardly dare call it an exaggerated estimate. Many circumstances combined to make the assembling together of these men, and the successful outcome of their deliberations, quite remarkable. It was, in many respects, a propitious moment for such a gathering. The ominous outlook of affairs in the Old World, the upheavings that were beginning to shake the appar ently well settled foundations of ancient abuses; above all the almost universal corruption that tainted and infected public and governmental life in England, and which generated and fostered the wrongs under which the American Colonists suffered, all conduced to bring about a unity of sentiment, resulting in a unity of action that contained within itself the promise and the potency of success.

It is difficult for us to conceive, or rather it would be difficult, had we not had the good fortune to have revealed to us, in recent days, something of the inner life of those times, how universally corruption, dishonor and base-born selfishness pervaded the counsels and the Court of England. Thackeray, in his lectures on the reigns of the Four Georges, who successively occupied the throne of Great Britain, let in upon us many gleams of light from those years that inflicted many undeserved stains upon the English name, and finally tore from the third George the brightest jewel in his crown. But a still more recent work, the Life of Charles James Fox, by Trevelyan, who almost rivals Macaulay in the purity and nervousness of his style, and the incisive power of his invective, has given us a more complete and life-like portrait of those days when patriotism was at a fearful discount, and purity an unknown equation. "Every man in Parliament," in Walpole's significant phrase, "had his price." But not in Parliament alone was venality and greed the rule of public life. Nepotism was unblushing and universal. A single extract from this admirable book will illustrate this point as clearly as many pages of dry nar

rative.