in the annals of their race; if the
latter, we may yet hope to see them renovated in character and
condition, by our example and instruction, and their exertions.

[Footnote 23: A native of New Hampshire, but for many years a citizen of
Michigan: conspicuous in public life, and a writer of high authority on
Indian and military affairs, and the settlement of the north-west.]

* * * * *

=_Rufus Choate, 1799-1859._= (Manual, p. 487.)

From his "Lectures and Addresses."

=_92._= CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF THE AMERICAN BAR.

Is it not so that in its nature, in its functions, in the intellectual
and practical habits which it forms, in the opinions to which it
conducts, in all its tendencies and influences of speculation and
action, it is, and ought to be, professionally and peculiarly such an
element and such an agent, that it contributes, or ought to be held to
contribute, more than all things else, or as much as anything else, to
preserve our organic forms, our civil and social order, our public and
private justice, our constitutions of government, even the Union itself?
In these crises through which our liberty is to pass, may not, must not,
this function of conservatism become more and more developed, and more
and more operative? May it not one day be written, for the praise of the
American Bar, that it helped to keep the true idea of the state alive
and germinant in the American mind; that it helped to keep alive the
sacred sentiments of obedience, and reverence, and justice, of the
supremacy of the calm and grand reason of the law over the fitful
will of the individual and the crowd; that it helped to withstand the
pernicious sophism that the successive generations, as they come to
life, are but as so many successive flights of summer flies, without
relations to the past or duties to the future, and taught instead that
all--all the dead, the living, the unborn--were one moral person-one for
action, one for suffering, one for responsibility; that the engagements
of one age may bind the conscience of another; the glory or the shame
of a day may brighten or stain the current of a thousand years of
continuous national being?

* * * * *

From the "Address before the New England Society of New York."

=_93._= THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS, OUR HEROIC PERIOD.

I have said that I deemed it a great thing for a nation, in all the
periods of its fortunes, to be able