every person who was elected
Governor and that without regard to his learning, attainments, or
services.* Subsequently, however, I was elected a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences by the votes of those who were
controlling the College. In 1861 I was invited to deliver the Phi
Beta Kappa oration, and I was then made a member of the society. Since
the opening of the war I have been at Cambridge on two or three
occasions only, and my present acquaintance with the persons in power
is very limited.

From 1844 to 1850 I received from Governor Briggs several appointments.
In 1845 or '46 the Legislature passed an Act authorizing the
appointment of railway commissioners. Governor Briggs sent me a
commission, which I declined. The Board was never organized, and the
act was soon repealed. I was also appointed a member of a commission
on Boston Harbor. At the time the public were anxious about the fate
of the harbor in consequence of the drainage into it by Charles River,
and numerous minor channels. It was not then understood that all
deposits by drainage could be removed by dredging. The members of the
Commission were Judges Williams, Hopkinson, Cummins, the Hon. Chas.
Hudson and myself. The three judges had then recently lost their
offices by the abolition of the court of common pleas. Mr. Hudson
had then recently left the United States House of Representatives, but
whether voluntarily or upon compulsion I cannot say. He was a
clergyman, a Universalist, but at an early age he had abandoned his
profession for politics. After serving in the Massachusetts House,
Senate and Council, he was elected to Congress from the Worcester
district, for which he sat during four Congresses. He was a man of
solid qualities without genius of any sort. He was distinguished in
Congress as a Protectionist, and his speeches on the tariff question
were widely circulated by the Whig Party. They were filled with
statistics, and like all arguments based on statistics, they were
subject to a good deal of criticism by the advocates of free trade.

The three judges were respectable, clear-headed gentlemen. Of Cummins
the story is told that, when for the first time a plan of land was
introduced in a real-estate case, he refused to consider the document,
saying: "I will not allow a case to be won in my court by diagrams."
Williams had been chief justice of the common pleas court and he was
estimated as the superior among h