EDWIN MCMASTERS STANTON, OHIO. (1814-1869). "The stay of Lincoln, the hope of the country, the terror to dishonesty." Born in Steubenville, Ohio, December 19, 1814, died in Washington, D. C., December 24, 1869, aged fifty-five. His father, a physician, died when he was a child. Entered Kenyon College at seventeen, but left at nineteen to study law. Admit ted at twenty-two, settled in Cadiz, and a year later became Prosecuting Attorney of Harrison county. In 1842-5 he was Supreme Court Reporter, preparing volumes 11, 12 and 13 of the Ohio reports. Moved to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, 1848, and in 1857 to Washington, on acount of his large Federal practice. Upon the advice of Jeremiah S. Black he was made United States Attorney General by Buchanan, whose Cabinet he startled by advising: "The course proposed by Thompson of the Navy, if followed, is treason, and will involve all concerned." Lincoln made him Secretary of War, though a Democrat. President Grant named him, December 20, 1869, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and, though immediately confirmed, he died four days. later. Among his notable suits were the California Government land cases, 1857-8, the first Erie railway litigation, the Wheeling Bridge case, the Manney and McCormick Reaper contest, the Pennsylvania Railroad v. Canal Commissioners, and the successful defense of Daniel E. Sickles for the murder of Philip Barton Key, in which Mr. Stanton's discussion of the law of adultery was masterful, and, perhaps, the most powerful ever attempted upon the subject. He not only shines as the ablest war minister of the United States, but a brilliant, powerful and profound lawyer as well, and, though rather too intense, possessed the qualities of a great judge. Was of ripe learning, wide research and varied experience, joined with large capacity and great brain force. He was thick-set, about five feet eight in height; hair and beard very dark; head slightly thrown back; round, solid face, with blunt features; prompt and practical address; and full, distinct, unmusical voice. He was honest-absolute rectitude being an iron rule-patriotic, brusque, quicktempered, stern, energetic, impetuous, inflexible. Adultery. "When a man has obtained such a power over another man's wife that he can not only entice her from her husband's house, but separate her from her child, for the purpose of guilt, it shows that by some means he has acquired such an unholy mastery over that woman's body and soul that there is no chance of saving her while he lives, and the only hope of her salvation is that God's swift vengeance shall overtake him. The sacred glow of well-placed domestic affection, no man knows better than your honor, grows brighter and brighter as years advance, and the faithful couple whose hands were joined in holy wedlock in the morning of youth find their hearts drawn closer to each other as they descend the hill of life to sleep together at its foot; but lawless love is short-lived as it is criminal, and the neighbor's wife so hotly pursued, by trampling down every human feeling and divine law, is speedily supplanted by the object of some fresher lust, and then the wretched victim is sure to be soon cast off into common prostitution, and swept through a miserable life and a horrible death to the gates of hell, unless a husband's arm shall save her. Who, seeing this thing, would not exclaim to the unhappy husband: 'Hasten, hasten, hasten to save the mother of your child. Although she be lost as a wife, rescue her from the horrid adulterer; and may the Lord, who watches over the home and the family, guide the bullet and direct the stroke!"-Extract from argument to the court upon the law in defense of Daniel E. Sickles for the murder of Philip Barton Key, Washington, D. C., 1859. The Agony of a Cuckold. "What agony is equal to his who knows not whether the children gathered around his board are his own offspring or an adulterous brood, hatched in his bed."-Idem. God Is on Our Side. "Surely God is on our side, for we have done what we could to ruin ourselves, and we have failed to do it."--Said by Stanton after the fight with President Johnson. Sumner's Famous Letter to Stanton. "Stick, C. S." (Charles Sumner), Mr. Sumner wrote Stanton from the Senate when President Johnson was trying to remove him from the office of Secretary of War. This letter, after Mr. Sumner's death, sold for a large sum in New York city. Stanton's Tenderness. "Stanton was as tender as a woman he was as tender as a lover. I had great admiration for him. Being told by a friend just from Washington in 1865 that Stanton was breaking down, I walked into a Wall street office and wrote to him just what I had heard that he was sick and broken down and desponding; that he need not despond, that the coun try was saved, and that if he did not do another thing he had done enough. I sent the letter, and in the course of a few days I got back a letter, and if it had been a woman writing in answer to a proposal it would not have been more tender. And when I went to Washington he treated me with great tenderness, as if I had been his son. He evidently got rest from his great cares through literature; but Lincoln, from the humorists. I understood them both perfectly."Henry Ward Beecher, "Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln," p. 252. Cried When Lincoln Died. "When told at the bedside of the dying Lincoln, by Surgeon General Barnes that the President could not live till morning, Stanton exclaimed: 'Oh, no, General; no-no;' and with an impulse, natural as it was unaffected, sat down and wept like a child.”— "Our First Century," p. 891. His Stand for the Union. "Mr. President, it is my duty, as your legal adviser, to say that you have no right to give up the property of the Government, or abandon the soldiers of the United States to its enemies; and the course proposed by the Secretary of the Interior (Thompson, of Mississippi), if followed, is treason, and will involve you and all concerned.”—The first advice given by Mr. Stanton upon his induction into the office of Attorney General, made vacant by the retirement of |