this people, which
could have commensurately served our need in any place, in the conduct
of affairs, except at their head.

The general importance, under a form of government where the confidence
of the people is the breath of the life of executive authority, of
filling the great offices of state with men who, besides possessing the
requisite special faculties for their several departments and large
general powers of mind for politics and policies, have also great repute
with the party, and great credit with the country, was well understood
by the President. He knew that the times needed, in the high places of
government, men "who," in Bolingbroke's phrase, "had built about them
the opinion of mankind which, fame after death, is superior strength and
power in life."

Of the great abilities which Mr. Chase, in his administration of the
Treasury, exhibited through the three arduous years of that public
service, no question has ever been made. The exactions of the place knew
no limits. A people, wholly unaccustomed to the pressure of taxation,
and with an absolute horror of a national debt, was to be rapidly
subjected to the first without stint, and to be buried under a mountain
of the last. Taxes which should support military operations on the
largest scale, and yet not break the back of industry which alone could
pay them; loans, in every form that financial skill could devise, and to
the farthest verge of the public credit; and, finally, the extreme
resort of governments under the last stress and necessity, of the
subversion of the legal tender, by the substitution of what has been
aptly and accurately called the "coined credit" of the Government for
its coined money--all these exigencies and all these expedients made up
the daily problems of the Secretary's life. We may have some conception
of the magnitude of these financial operations, by considering one of
the subordinate contrivances required to give to the currency of the
country the enormous volume and the ready circulation without which the
tides of revenue and expenditure could not have maintained their flow. I
refer to the transfer of the paper money of the country from the State
to the national banks. This transaction, financially and politically,
transcends in magnitude and difficulty, of itself alone, any single
measure of administrative government found in our history, yet the
conception, the plan, and the execution, under the conduct of Mr. Chase,
too