rowth and
strengthen with the strength of the American Union. Nothing can be more
interesting to a student of politics than the masterly efforts of
patriotism and statesmanship, in which all the great men of the country
participated, for many years, to confine the perturbations of our public
life to a controversy with this latter and lesser postulate. Seward with
the Whig party, Chase with the Democratic party, and a host of others in
both, tried hard to conciliate the irreconcilable, and to stultify
astuteness, to the acceptance of the proposition that slavery, its
growth girdled, would not be already struck with death. Quite early,
however, Mr. Chase grappled with the primary postulate, and through
great labors, wise counsels, long-suffering patience, and by the
successive stages of the Liberty party, Independent Democracy, and
Free-Soil party, led up the way to the Republican party, which, made up
by the Whig party dropping its slave State constituency, and the
Democratic party losing its Free-Soil constituents, rent this primary
postulate of our politics in twain, and took possession of the
Government by the election of its candidate, Mr. Lincoln.

This movement in politics was one of prodigious difficulty and
immeasurable responsibility. It was so felt to be by the prime actors in
it, though with greatly varying largeness of survey and depth of
insight. In the system of American politics it created as vast a
disturbance as would a mutation of the earth's axis, or the displacement
of the solar gravitation, in our natural world. This great transaction
filled the twenty years of Mr. Chase's mature manhood, say, from the age
of thirty to that of fifty years. He must be awarded the full credit of
having understood, resolved upon, planned, organized, and executed, this
political movement, and whether himself leading or cooeperating or
following in the array and march of events, his plan, his part, his
service, were all for the cause, its prosperity, and its success. To
one who considers this career, not as completed and triumphant, not with
the glories of power, and dignities, and fame which attended it, not
with the blessings of a liberated race, a consolidated Union, an
ennobled nationality which receive the plaudits of his countrymen, but
as its hazards and renunciations, its toils and its perils, showed at
the outset, in contrast with the ease and splendor of his personal
fortunes which adhesion to the political powe