Lamoille newsdealer. [volume] (Hyde Park, Vt.) 1860-1877, 1866-07-25
r.r SENATORIAL CONTEST.

Were there no impending contest for
the successorship to the late Judge Cola
mer's seat in the Senate, would there be a
doubt or question whispered in the car OF
ANYBODY, that Gov. Dillingham;, IN ap-
pointing the Chief Justice of the State,
to use homely phrase, put his best foot
forward ?" Though our State has many
able and eminent citizens, of none is she
more justly proud, and no one OF them is
more deserving of her honors than this
distinguished son of her own loins; the
architect of his own fortunes, who, from
being an obscure and penniless boy, by
his own unaided industry and superior
gifts of mind and heart, won his way by
popular approval and acclaim, to the chief
place upon Vermont Bench.
Not to have accepted such call, in such
an hour of peril, big with the conscquen-
ces to be felt by our children's children
to remote age Of our common country,
would not have been Luke P. Poland, the
humble but noble youth of the slasbes of
Lamoille; the pioneer advocate for univer-
sal freedom, when to be such was to be a
stumbling block to political advancement;
the upright judge; the compeer and equal
in judicial ability and fame of the best ju-
dicial minds in the State aud country. By
10 effort of his own, aud because his high
position, always unanimously bestowed,
and his known and universally recognized
ability and integrity pointed and singled
him out as the proper person, did Judge
Poland lay off the robes of the highest
judicial office in the State, which had
been worn by him as ably, as uprightly
as by any of his predecessors, unpolluted
and unstaiued, and assume the robes of
his compeer upon the Bench and of his
illustrioos predecessor in the Senate. No
man in the State questioned the wisdom of
Gov. Dillingham's choice, 1t is well
known to many, that the late lamented
colleague OF Judge Collamer, the Hon.
Solomon Foot, feeling the Importance of
that crisis to which our country had ar
rived, sensible of the great loss the State
bad met with in the decease of Judge
Collamer, and having only the honor of
his native State and of his country hear
est to his heart, in patriotic letter to the
Governor, urged upon him, by all these
high considerations, to appoint the aJiest
man to be found in the State to succeed
Judge Collnmer, in that Congress now in
session, which would be called upon to
pacify the nation at the same time that it
should secure its freedom and perpetuity.
Acting upon such advice, where else could
Gov Dillingham; have looked but to the
Chief Justice Who else in the State,
without disparagement to other eminent
did not look instinctively in that
direction ? Having thus obeyed the voice
of the people of the State, and transferred
himself at their call to a new place Of
trust and labor, placing the Senatorial
question upon the mere ground of personal
claim, as the friends of Mr. Morrill, are
striving to place it, it would be ungrateful
and unjust now for the people to lay hold
of the shoulders of Judge Poland and turn
him out of the Senate, where a signal
has placed him, and send him
with all his eminent talents and influence.
in the prime ard vigor or manhood, into
private life, unless upon some better rea-
son than that another desires his place,
who is better fitted for the position he
now occupies and who would not be likely
to increase his usefulness, if he did not
lessen it, by going into the Senate.
Whatever may have been urged in GER
tain quarters, at the time of Judge Po-
lands appointment as to the qualification
of Mr. Morrill, to fill respectfully the va
cancy, and the appropriateness of such an
expression of gratitude which the people
of the State felt toward him, on account
of his eminent public services was great.
ly overborne by the fact that in the con-
dition in which the finances of the coun-
try were placed at the close of the war,
1t was important and vital for the State,
in order to retain her ascendency, and her
influence, to keep Mr.. Morrill, in his posi-
tion as one of the leaders in that branch
of Congress, where his peculiar talents
and habits of industry would be brought
into requisition in modelling the financial
policy of the country upon sound basis;
and in that branch where all financial
measures must originate 1t was almost
universally felt that while Judge Poland
by reason of his familiarity with judicial
subjects, was better fitted than Mr.. Nor
rill to discharge the duties of Senator,
which are peculiarly judicial, that on the
other hand Mr.. Morrill, was the right
man in the right place; that there was a
happy adaptivenes of his abilities to the
discharge of the duties he would be called
to perform in the House. Nobody ques
toned this, not even himself. Every
body was convinced that Morrill, could do
the State and country far better service
in the House, where tariff and revenue
bills are minted, than he could in the
Senate. Everybody was convinced that
Chief Justice Poland could do better SER
vice, and the State more honor, in the