ion of one who feels that he is determining issues for the
remote and unknown future of a great people."

_Magistratus ostendit virum_--the magistracy shows out the man. A great
office, by its great requirements and great opportunities, calls out and
displays the great powers and rare qualities which, presumably, have
raised the man to the place. Let us consider this last public service
and last great station, as they exhibit Mr. Chase to a candid estimate.

And, first, I notice the conspicuous fitness for judicial service of the
mental and moral constitution of the man. All through the heady contests
of the vehement politics of his times, his share in them had embodied
decision, moderation, serenity, and inflexible submission to reason as
the master and ruler of all controversies. Force, fraud, cunning, and
all lubric arts and artifices, even the beguilements of rhetoric, found
no favor with him, as modes of warfare or means of victory. So far,
then, from needing to lay down any weapons, or disuse any methods in
which he was practised, or learn or assume new habits of mind or strange
modes of reasoning, Mr. Chase, in the working of his intellect and the
frame of his spirit, was always judicial.

It was not less fortunate for the prompt authority of his new station,
so dependent upon the opinion of the country, that his credit for great
abilities and capacity for large responsibilities was already
established. Great repute, as well as essential character, is justly
demanded for all elevated public stations, and especially for judicial
office, whose prosperous service, in capital junctures, turns mainly on
moral power with the community at large.

Both these preparations easily furnished the Chief-Justice with the
requisite aptitude for the three relations, of prime importance, upon
which his adequacy must finally be tested; I mean, his relation to the
court as its presiding head, his relation to the profession as masters
of the reason and debate over which the court is the arbiter, and his
relation to the people and the State in the exercise of the critical
constitutional duties of the court, as a cooerdinate department of the
Government.

In a numerous court, that the Chief-Justice should have a prevalent and
gracious authority, as first among equals, to adjust, arrange, and
facilitate the cooeperative working of its members, will not be doubted.
For more than sixty years, at least, this court had felt this
author