Year: 1865

Men are awarded and punished in their
own natures. A bigot or BOBBY can suffer
nothing from the mostingeniously contrly-
ed retribution worse. than to be what he is.
1t is natural that people who are provoked
by the arrogant imbecility of men like Mr.
Charles Summer, or the vehement malignity
of men like Senator Wade, should long to
see the one and the other subjected to
wholesome external discipline. But lit
tie reflection on the laws of human nature
must show us that Mr.. Sumner has already
suffered the worst extremity in being MIR.
Sumner; and that Torquemada himself
could invent no sharper pains or penalties
for the blood-thirsty and indecent course OF
Mr.. Wade than Mr.. Wade daily pays in his
absolute incapacity of knowing what mag
nanimity and justice, and the chivalric
sense of honor and the civilized instincts of
Christian good-breeding, are. Look, for
example, at the proceedings in the Senate
on Thursday last, when motion was made
by Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, to appro-
pirate certain sum of money for bust of
the late Chief Justice Taney, to be placed
in the Supreme Court. Simple, proper, and
inoffensiVe as this motion was, it proved a
very Ithuriels spear to bring out the real
nature of certain radical leaders so clearly
and sharply that history will never need
to 90 beyond that days record to paint
them.


A bust of Chief Justice Taney in the Su-
preme Court room of the United States is
less an honor paid to Chief Justice Taney
than simple recognition of the duty of the
Republic to its own institutions, and to
those to whom it intrusts their administra-
tion. But in the eyes of such purblind and
passionate political bigots as Mr.. Sumner
and Mr.. Wade, every duty OF decency per-
formed toward political opponent is an
attack upon that worship of themselves in
which their whole religion lies. Chief JUS
tice Taney in the exercise of his high func-
tions expressed an opinion nearly ten years
ago concerning the rights of Shareholders
in the territories, which Mr.. Sumner and
Mr.. Wade consider wicked and damnable.
If any moral guilt attached to such a de-
cision, it was their duty while Chief JUS
tice Taney lived to see that he was impeach-
ed for it. This they did not do, and over
his grave at least, it might have been sup
posed that they would respect the judicial
integrity which they had never dared to
challenge, even while reiterating their dis
sent from the soundncss of his judicial
views. Had they done so; had the formal
proposition of q merely customary tribute
to venerable man, gone, after ninety
years, to his rest, been suffered by them to
pass with no more comment or opposition
than might have followed a motion to at
tend his funeral, the Senate, indeed, would
have been spared the shame of recording
upon its journals the most disgraceful re-
marks ever uttered in an American legisla-
tive chamber, but history would have lost
its finest photograph of the men who
have played the basest and the blacklist
part in the sad drama of our times.


Mr. Forster, in his life of Sir John Eliot,
has just brought to light a fact which paints
the character of Charles the First more
fully than whole pages of rhetoric. When
the brave statesman who first stood in the
breach for principle against prerogative had
died in the tower, his young son petitloned
for leave to bear his fathers body into Corn
wall, there to lay it with his ancestors.
Whereto the King answered, writing with
his own hand on the margin of the petition
ITSELF 'Iett Sir John Eliot's body to be
buried in the church of that parish where
he dyed" And $50 he was buried" adds
the historian, sin the Tower Of London"
This touch of the hyena in the foolish
Stuart's fatal nature at once explains to us
his worst crimes and his worst blunders.
In like manner, the unconscious revelation
which the Summers and the Wades made of
themselves in the debate on Mr.. TrumbulPs s
proposition will spare some future Carlyle
deal of pains in the way of hunting down
the real men themselves through the tangled
thicket OF their rank philanthropies and
their lush declamations.