He seemed to comprehend and to feel from the very outset of his long-continued and determined warfare against slavery, in all its manifestations and pretensions, that it existed as one of the recognized institutions of the country; that it really formed one of the essential compromises upon which the national Constitution was founded and without which it could not, probably, have been obtained; and that it must therefore be encountered by prudent administration and wise reform, instead of denunciation and revolution. Hence we find him, at all times, working diligently and patiently to effect all possible limitations and restrictions upon the institution, on the ground that freedom was national and slavery sectional; that by the long-established and clearly recognized principles of the common law of England, which this country had inherited or adopted in full measure, freedom possessed a charter everywhere within the dominion of the principles of magna charta, and slavery nowhere beyond the limits of its express recognition in the laws of the land.

Hence we have never heard from Mr. Chase, even in his most eloquent and excited harangues, in the courts or in the national Senate, or anywhere else where he was called repeatedly to enforce his antagonism against slavery, any of that violent or profane denunciation against the national Constitution, which, for a time, formed a not insignificant proportion of antislavery literature. It is not important now to inquire wherein consisted this firm and persistent conservatism of Mr. Chase's warfare upon slavery, or how it originated. If it had been a mere stroke of far-seeing and wisely planned policy, it would have been entirely justifiable, and eminently worthy of its author. For no one so wise and so discriminating as Mr. Chase could fail to comprehend that a nation, as stable and prosperous as ours, which had suffered so many hair-breadth escapes as we did in securing so unrivalled a constitution, would feel extreme reluctance, to say the least, in putting the whole in peril in order to initiate a reform so uncertain in its promise of favorable issue, however desirable they might regard it. He naturally felt, therefore, from the first, as a wise master-builder, that if slavery were ever to be expelled from our institutions, it must be done by the healthy and normal action of the vital

forces within the Constitution itself. Some speculations upon the question of Mr. Chase's conservatism, more curious than wise, have attempted to deduce it in large measure from his religious training in the principles of the book of Common Prayer. No doubt the habit through life of asking divine aid, almost daily, in obtaining deliverance "from all heresy and schism," might be expected to have some effect in keeping one from separation and rebellion both in church and state. But Mr. Chase was not at all more conservative in regard to his antislavery action, or anything else, than was Mr. Lincoln, and probably no one will attribute any portion of the latter's conservatism to his religious training. We must therefore conIclude that it was an instinct of self-preservation as to the government, and a far-seeing policy as to reform, in both these eminent men and in all our other most reliable statesmen, that while they have been awake to the necessity of reforms in the government, and especially in regard to the limitation and final extinction of slavery, both for our credit and our progress as a nation, they have all, with rare exceptions, felt the imperious necessity of keeping within the prescribed limits of our organic law.

Revolutionary radicalism is sometimes, no doubt, demanded, in large proportions, to initiate great national reforms, but something more conservative and prudent is commonly required to bring them to a successful issue, without serious detriment to other vital interests. But those who guide the storm and direct the whirlwind of human passion, however indispensable in all successful reforms, are not always the ones to whom the actors in the agitating scenes of the drama, at first, certainly, accord the highest measure of commendation; when the din of battle has passed away, the wise and the prudent will not fail of their due reward. The impartial historian will be compelled to award the largest measure of praise and glory to Mr. Chase, on the whole, as probably the wisest and most earnest of all the workers against slavery in our country.

He seemed to feel very early in his career, that antislavery, in order to be successful, must have the support of a party which did not profess any antagonism with the acknowledged principles of the written Constitution of the government. And

although elected to the United States Senate by the co-operation of the Democratic party, with which he continued to act until he found it committed to the deliberate purpose of repealing the Missouri Compromise, and thus extending slavery or a contest for its establishment in all the Territories where either slave labor or the raising of slaves could be profitably pursued, he finally felt compelled to abandon that party and to constitute the Free-Soil party for the purpose of restricting slavery to the States where it was then tolerated. And notwithstanding his anomalous attitude in the Senate as to party affinities at this time, his position was nevertheless influential and commanding; and he aided, more than any other one man, perhaps, in the formation of the Free-Soil party. We are not disposed to underrate the efforts of that large class of workers and agitators in the same cause, who fell back upon the divine rights of humanity for their basis of action; which, however specious in theory or sometimes effective in rhetoric, has even less practical support in the true theory of civil government, than the much-abused maxim of the divine right of kings and of all governmental authority, which, indeed, receives but small countenance in modern theories of government. Admitting, in the abstract, the full force of all this unorganized and rebellious spirit against wrong and injustice, it is none the less evident to all reflecting persons that no such theory of reform can ever receive much countenance from the truly loyal, whose minds are so far instructed in the principles of government as fully to comprehend that in all their labors of this character they are but giving countenance and support to rebellion and revolution. Mr. Chase, both from education and principle, understood and felt all this, and comprehended fully that the masses of the American people were too conscientious in their religious feelings and too intelligent and well instructed in their allegiance to the Constitution, to initiate a revolution, even for the accomplishment of an end so desirable as the destruction of slavery; knowing, as he did, that the destruction of one of the recognized institutions of the country, by force and violence, could not probably be effected without the speedy destruction also of all government. No man comprehended this fundamental axiom in civil government more thoroughly or felt its force and

truth more profoundly, we believe, than Mr. Chase. To the end, therefore, of establishing a theory, and founding an organization for the limitation and restriction and ultimate peaceful and legal extinction of slavery, he labored, so to speak, night and day, in season and out of season, with precious little aid, he must sometimes have felt, from those radical antislavery workers, not unjustly called the destructives of the party, who claimed to be enlisted, indeed, in the same crusade, but upon the muster-roll of Omnipotence Himself, and who would not therefore stoop to ordinary human agencies in the accomplishment of their purposes. There is always, in all countries, a numerous class of good men, who seem to suppose that the divine mind cannot but look with special favor upon those who defy all human law in the service of what they are pleased to dignify with the high-sounding epithets of "conscience" and "divine law," written, as they tell us, by the finger of Omnipotence upon the human heart; not always remembering that much of this depends upon the reader more than upon the writer. Some men, in all ages and countries, will insist upon reading "self-will" as if it were written "conscience."

But Mr. Chase suffered under no such hallucination or delusion. From the first he resolved to do his best, within the law, to crush the fatal curse of slavery which he knew was to some extent imbedded in the national Constitution. And he was wise enough to see his opportunity in the inauguration of the Free-Soil party in the national form it assumed in 1848, when it presented, as its candidate for President, one of the oldest, most highly honored, and respected of the old national Democratic party, who had already sustained the office of President for one term with the highest credit both to himself and the country, and who had been defeated in his re-election, as his friends believed, by the efforts of the slaveholders. When the constitutional opposition to slavery, of which Mr. Chase was at the time the acknowledged champion and leader, had accomplished all this, it required no prophetic inspiration to comprehend that its days were numbered and its final extinction could not be very remote. And if the spirit of Mr. Chase's constitutional opposition to slavery had been honestly and faithfully followed, there seems to us no great reason to - NO. 251.

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question that slavery might have been abolished with less injustice, with infinitely less cost and suffering, and in little more time than has already elapsed in getting rid of it, without, in fact, in any very perfect manner ridding the nation of its evil consequences.

As evidence of Mr. Chase's conservative determination to demand nothing which he did not regard as strictly legal and constitutional, we may here refer to the theory for restricting slavery, which he maintained with so much zeal and eloquence in his speeches in the Senate and in his official communications as Governor of Ohio. In the Senate he urged the abolishing of slavery and by consequence the slave-trade in the District of Columbia by act of Congress, which was most unquestionably within the constitutional power of Congress, but which so advanced an antislavery advocate as the venerable John Quincy Adams long hesitated to urge, and which was, nevertheless, most unquestionably demanded by the justice, as well as the self-respect, of the national government. He also advocated declaring the inter-state slave-trade illegal by act of Congress, which no man now questions the power of that body to do, or to have done, at any time since the adoption of the national Constitution, and which would have done more, at one blow, to limit the institution within its then present boundaries, and finally to secure its extinction, without convulsion, than any measure ever proposed; but few except the slave-owners seemed then fully to comprehend either its justice or its power. He also urged upon Congress the enactment of laws excluding slavery from the Territories, the right to do which is now regarded as most unquestionable. And he sometimes urged, in the heat of debate, the repeal of all laws for the surrender of fugitives from labor, as not being justified by the provisions of the national Constitution, thus leaving that constitutional provision to be executed by those to whom the service of the fugitives was due. This opinion, although defended by the most plausible arguments, and held by some good lawyers, seems more the result of honest zeal in a good cause than of sound legal principles. But it possessed nothing of the revolutionary character, and one of his chief arguments against the earlier laws for surrendering fugitives from labor, that they attempted to