juries, and with the people he was always a favorite.
Such a man could not long be kept out of public life. He was called to
serve seven years in the state legislature, and ten in Congress; then
he was elected governor. He was so beloved that when he was nominated a
second time for the governorship it was taken for granted that he would
be elected, but so few of his friends were at the trouble to vote for
him that he was, to the profound astonishment of everybody, defeated.

It was a joke which no one could enjoy more than Corwin himself; for he
was not only an impassioned orator, but a delightful humorist. He could
put a principle or a reason in the form of a jest so that it would go
farther than even eloquence could carry it with the whimsical Western
people; and perhaps nothing more effective was said against the infamous
Black Laws which forbade the testimony of negroes in the courts than
Corwin put in the form of self-satire. He was of a very dark complexion,
so that he might have been taken for a light mulatto; and he used to say
that it was only when a man got to be of about his color that he could
be expected to tell the truth.

He was sent to the United States Senate soon after his defeat for the
governorship, and it was there that in 1847 he made his great speech
against the war with Mexico, as a war of conquest for the spread of
slavery. It may be that there are more eloquent passages in English than
some of the finest in this speech, where he warned the American people
against the doom of unjust ambition, but I do not know them. It was
the supreme effort of his life, but it was addressed to a time of
unwholesome patriotic frenzy, and Corwin's popularity suffered fatally
from it. He never disowned it; he defended and justified it before the
people; but he declined from the high stand he had taken as the champion
of freedom and justice, and the later years of his political life
were marked by rather an anxious conservatism. His final efforts were
unavailingly made to stay the course of secession by suggestions of
impossible compromise between the North and South. At the close of the
war he was stricken with paralysis while visiting as a private citizen
the Capitol at Washington, where he had triumphed as representative and
senator, and he died almost before the laughter had left the lips of the
delighted groups which hung about him. Of all our public men he was most
distinctively what is called, for want of s