sent the deputation over to the War Department, and Mr. Stanton sent for me. He said: "All Baltimore is coming here. Sit down here, and hear the discussion we shall have." So they came in, the bank presidents and boss merchants of Baltimore. There must have been at least $50,000,000 in the depu

tation.

The gentlemen sat down around the fire in the Secretary's office, and began to make their speeches, detailing the circumstances and the wickedness of this outrage. There was no ground for it, no justification. After half a dozen of them had spoken, Mr. Stanton asked one after another if he had anything more to say, and they all said no. Then Stanton began and delivered the most

eloquent speech that I ever listened to. He described the beginning of the war, for which he said there was no justification. Being beaten in an election was no reason for destroying the government. Then he went on to the fact that half a million of our young men had been laid in untimely graves by this conspiracy of the slave interest. He described the whole conspiracy in the most solemn and impressive terms, and then he depicted the offense that this man Morse, aided by these several merchants, had committed. He said: "Gentlemen, if you would like to examine the bills of what he was taking to the enemy, here they are." And when he had finished, these gentlemen, without answering a word, got up, and, one

by one, went away. That was the only speech I ever listened to that cleared out the entire audience.

Well, that's the sort of man Stanton was. He was impulsive, warm-blooded, very quick in execution, perhaps not always infallible in judgment. I never knew a man who could do so much work in a given time. He was a nervous man, a man of imagination, a man utterly absorbed in the idea of the republic one and indivisible; and he lived for it, wore himself out in the service, and shortly after he ceased to serve in that office he passed into another world, entirely exhausted, consumed by his devotion to public duties. That was the kind of men that Mr. Lincoln had around him- not all like Stanton, not

all like Cameron, not all like Chase, but all faithful to their duty, all Americans, all patriots.

Mr. Seward, for instance, possessed a great, subtle, far-reaching intelligence. He was an optimist. He had imagination. He was reaching out always toward the future, and dwelling upon it. The treaty by which we acquired Alaska was his doing. He also negotiated and arranged the treaty that Congress would not approve for the acquisition of St. Thomas in the West Indies. He believed that North America should be one and united-one government, one flag, one power. His idea was that the islands of the Antilles, and the whole continent up to the frozen regions of the Arctic Ocean, should all live and

grow great and mighty with that beautiful emblem, the Stars and Stripes, floating over them.

Probably in the administration Mr. Seward had the most cultivated and comprehensive intellect. He was n't equal to Mr. Lincoln, because, as I have said, he was altogether an optimist. He did n't believe any permanent injury could happen to anybody so long as the Stars and Stripes were there. During the war it was always said that he expected to bring back the seceding States by a friendly act of Congress, or some device of negotiation. That was probably a fault in his judgment; yet, take him for all in all, it would be difficult to match him among living statesmen, or among the statesmen of the world.