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and patience which we knew. All of us saw and wondered how domestic sorrows, the toils and trials of his station, old age, infirmity of body, ingratitude, injustice, persecution, still left his intellect unclouded, his courage unsubdued, his fortitude unshaken, his calm and lofty resignation and endurance descending to no murmur nor resentment. These things the sculptor is not called to tell to those who shall come after us. The pen of the biographer has worthily recorded them, and just posterity will read what he has written. The image of the Magistrate and Ruler, as the world was wont to see him, is all that the chisel bequeaths to immortality-his image, as History shall see it, when, ashamed of the passions of our day, she shall be once more reconciled with Truth. With this noblest of the tasks of Art, only genius may deal fitlyyet genius has dealt with it, and its difficulties, overcome, are the glory and the triumph of genius.

Thus, then, to-day, sir, the State of Maryland, with grateful reverence and pride, commemorates a life, than which few greater, and none loftier or purer, shall dignify the annals of our country. It was a life coeval with her own, and a part of her own, and she honors what she knew. It was a life of patriotism, of duty, and of sacrifice; a life whose aim and effort, altogether, were to be, and do, and bear, and not to seem. The monument her people rear to it is scarcely less her monument than his to whom it rises. What changes shall roll round it with the rolling seasons; whether it shall survive the free institutions of which Taney was the worshipper and champion, or shall see them grow in stability, security and splendor; whether it shall witness the development and beneficent expansion of the constitutional system

which it was the labor of his life and love to understand and to administer, or shall behold it,

"Like a circle in the water,

Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,

Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to naught”

are questions which men will answer to themselves, according to their hopes or fears-according to their trust, it may be, in the Mercy and Providence of God. But Maryland has done her part for good, in this at least, that she has made imperishable record, for posterity, of the great example of her son. She has builded as it were a shrine to those high civic qualities and public virtues, without which, in their rulers, republics are a sham, and freedom cannot long abide among a people.

It was, I was about to say, the sad mischance-but, in a higher though more painful sense, the privilege and fortuneof Chief Justice Taney, to fill his place in times of revolution and unparalleled convulsion-when blood boiled in the veins of brethren, till it was red upon a million hands. In such a crisis, no man so conspicuous as he, and yet so bound to shun the rancor of the strife, could hope for freedom from distrust and challenge. A soul, brave and tenacious as his was-so sensitive to duty, and so resolute to do it-provoked injustice not to be appeased, and dared reproaches which he might not His constitutional opinions were already part of the recorded jurisprudence of the country, and he could not change them because the tempest was howling. It was the conviction of his life that the Government under which we lived was of limited powers, and that its Constitution had been

answer.

Though he died, there

framed for war as well as peace. fore, he could not surrender that conviction at the call of the trumpet. He had plighted his troth to the Liberty of the Citizen and the Supremacy of the Laws, and no man could put them asunder. Whatever might be the right of the people to change their Government, or overthrow it, he believed that the duty of the judges was simply to maintain the Constitution, while it lasted, and, if need were, defend it to the death. He knew himself its minister and servant only-not its master-commissioned to obey and not to alter. He stood, therefore, in the very rush of the torrent, and, as he was immovable, it swept over him. He had lived a life so stainless, that to question his integrity was enough to beggar the resources of falsehood and make even shamelessness ashamed. He had given lustre and authority, by his wisdom and learning, to the judgments of the Supreme Tribunal, and had presided over its deliberations with a dignity, impartiality and courtesy which elevated even the administration of justice. Every year of his labors had increased the respect and affection of his brethren and heightened the confidence and admiration of the profession which looked up to him as worthily its chief. And yet he died, traduced and ostracised, and his image was withheld from its place in the chamber which was filled already with his fame.

Against all this, the State of Maryland here registers her protest in the living bronze. She records it in no spirit of resentment or even of contention, but silently and proudlyas her illustrious son, without a word, committed his reputation to the justice of his countrymen. Nor doubts she of the answer that posterity will make to her appeal. Already the

grateful manhood of the people has begun to vindicate itself and him. Already, among those whose passion did him wrong, the voices of the most eminent and worthy have been lifted, in confession of their own injustice and in manly homage to his greatness and his virtues. Already the waters of the torrent have nearly spent their force, and high above them, as they fall, unstained by their pollution and unshaken by their rage, stands where it stood, in grand and reverend simplicity, the august figure of the great Chief Justice!

ADDRESS

ON BEHALF OF THE

LEE MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION,

DELIVERED AT THE

ACADEMY OF MUSIC, BALTIMORE,

APRIL 10TH, 1875.

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