thus, was not
discredited, nor the future disabled.

I have now carried your attention to the round of public service which
filled the life of Mr. Chase with activity and usefulness, and yet the
survey and the lesson are incomplete without some reference to a station
he never attained, to an office he never administered; I mean, to be
sure, the presidency. It is of the nature of this great place of power
and trust, and the necessity of the method by which alone it can be
reached, to present to the ambition and public spirit of political
leaders, and to the honest hopes and enthusiasm of the great body of the
people, an equally frequent disappointment. This is not the place to
insist upon the reasons of this unquestionable mischief, nor to attempt
to point out the escape from them, if indeed the problem be not, in
itself, too hard for solution. To Mr. Chase, as to all the great
leaders of opinion in the present and perhaps the last generation of our
public men, this disappointment came, and in his case, as in theirs,
brought with it the defeat of the hopes and desires of a large following
of his countrymen, who sought, through his accession to the presidency,
the elevation of the Government, and the welfare of the people.

That the range and dignity of Mr. Chase's public employments and the
large capacity, absolute probity, and unbounded energy which he had
shown in them, justified his aspiration to the presidency, and the
public calculations of great benefit from his accession to it, may not
be doubted. In this state of things it is obvious, that he would
necessarily be greatly in the minds of men, as a candidate for the
candidacy, and this, too, whether they favored or opposed it, without
any implication of undue activity of desire, much less of effort, on his
part, to obtain the nomination. But, it was not in the fortunes of Mr.
Chase's life to take the flood of any tide, in the restless sea of our
politics, which led on to the presidency. In 1860 there was no principle
and no policy of the Republican party which could tolerate the
postponement of Mr. Seward to Mr. Chase, if a political leader was to be
put in nomination. In 1864 the paramount considerations of absolute
supremacy, which dictated the reelection of Mr. Lincoln, would endure no
competition of candidates in the Republican party. In 1868, when each
party seemed, in an unusual degree, free to seek and find its candidates
where it would, Mr. Chase was Chie