body of the Whigs because of his remaining as Secretary of State in Tyler's Cabinet, and the second a review of the general political situation and of President Tyler's adequacy to meet it, as it was affected by the breaking apart of the two elements of the party. For this disruption of the party, the elevation to the Presidency of Mr. Tyler, through the death of President William Henry Harrison, was largely responsible.

These articles, among the earliest of the young lawyer's essays at political discussion and interesting solely on this account, may appropriately find a place in this collection. Their style reminds one of the Letters of Junius, and one may safely conjecture a conscious or unconscious imitation, as a model, of this unknown writer. His own comments on these early efforts throw an interesting side light on their production and their effect so far as it concerned him. "I have sent you a copy," he writes to his friend, Richard H. Dana, Jr., under date of October 2, 1841, "of this week's 'New World' as containing for its 'leader' an article by me--I am tired of hearing 'Mr. Webster's Position' spoken of in the tone used in Whig circles here, and have written the paper con amore. It is as long as sixteen pages of common pamphleteering and was written after 8 o'clock one evening and in the printer's hands next morning at 7, so that it can hardly be deemed an elaborate production. As I am proposing soon to make my pen venal, I am writing now for practice and facility and am not altogether displeased with this first attempt. If your own judgment should be favorable, suppose you do me the honor to submit it to your father's indulgent opinion."

Again, on October 12, 1841, he writes, "I am obliged to your father for his friendly criticism on my fugitive article. This week I have promised an article on Tyler, but as it must be ready early to-morrow morning and is as yet unwritten I am doubtful whether it appears." Whatever

may have been the judgment of the elder Dana, we may well suppose it to have been for the most part literary. How this young man's efforts impressed others, he with modest pride discloses to his friend Dana, when in January, 1842, he writes: "Professional business has claimed so much of my attention that my 'political pen' (which Professor Felton wrote Benjamin was one of the most powerful ones in the country') has been idle. During my late visit to Washington, I had the honor of an interview (at his desire) with his Excellency the Secretary of State, who, as Mr. Choate informed me, was delighted with my article. I am more amused than seriously gratified at the results of my aimless and casual efforts." "His Excellency the Secretary of State" was of course Daniel Webster and Mr. Choate was Rufus Choate, then occupying Mr. Webster's seat in the Senate.

Mr. Evarts's "political pen" remained idle for the rest of his life; but in every discussion of public affairs his voice was heard where it might affect the course of public opinion.

During the period following the Compromise Measures of 1850 and up to the election of Lincoln there was one dominant subject of either public or private discussion. We refer, of course, to the subject of slavery, its existence in the Southern States, the supremacy of its advocates in the councils of the Government, and their efforts to extend the institution throughout the whole country as a part of the national policy.

At the time of the passage of the Compromise measures, Mr. Evarts, then thirty-two years old, had attained such prominence that, at the great Union meeting at Castle Garden in New York, he was one of the speakers. The meeting was called together to sustain before the people the policy of the Government in the Compromise measures, and Mr. Evarts spoke in maintenance of the Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law and in earnest appeal for obedience to its provisions by the people of the Northern States. This

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'Castle Garden" speech, his first recorded public utterance, was, in a narrower sphere, as much a subject of discussion, as it bore upon his attitude towards the burning question of the day, as that much debated seventh of March speech of his great exemplar in the Senate. In the years that followed, the Castle Garden speech was brought forward against Mr. Evarts as evidence of a leaning in favor of slavery not to be expected and much to be deplored in one of his antecedents. The public mind could not reconcile an abhorrence of slavery as an institution with adherence to the Constitution and the Law, that recognized the institution as a necessary evil and supported the rights, under the Constitution, of slave owners, in the localities where the system of slavery prevailed. No man was ever more hostile to slavery than Mr. Evarts, throughout his life, and it perhaps was fortunate for a final estimate that the Castle Garden speech, unlike the seventh of March speech, was at the beginning and not at the end of a career. In the heated state of the public mind and conscience over this all-absorbing question of slavery it was perhaps natural that everyone who stood for the preservation of the Union and the Constitution and the sanctity of law should be, though illogically and unjustly, suspected of a friendly complacency towards the institution of slavery or at least of indifference to its evils. But any doubt or confused notion of Mr. Evarts's attitude towards slavery was set at rest when he gave one fourth of his property to the Emigrant Aid Company in the "Kansas Crusade," when he spoke at the Broadway Tabernacle in 1856, and when he made his argument in the Lemmon Slave Case.

The circumstances of Mr. Evarts's contribution to the cause of the Emigrant Aid Company is thus related by Mr. Eli Thayer in an account of a meeting of gentlemen at a private house in New York in 1855: "After my address, which occupied a little more than an hour, a young man, tall and thin, arose and began to speak as follows: 'Ever

since my Castle Garden speech, you know I have been called a Hunker Whig. Now, what reason you had to suppose that such a man would care whether slavery were extended or restricted I do not know. Therefore I do not know your reasons for inviting me to attend this meeting. But you did invite me and I have come. I am glad that I am here and I thank you for calling me. I have heard many speeches, on many occasions, upon the slavery question; but never until now have I listened to any practical elucidation of the subject. Like thousands of others I have been waiting for an opportunity to contend successfully against slavery without violating the laws or sacrificing the Constitution and the Union. Such an opportunity is now presented. I rejoice in it and shall embrace it. Now, though I am called a Hunker Whig and though I am poor, for I am not worth four thousand dollars, I joyfully give my cheque to the Emigrant Aid Company for one thousand dollars.' This speaker was William M. Evarts.” *

No method of selection should properly exclude these earliest political speeches. They are as important and as interesting in their representative significance as those more elaborate productions when Mr. Evarts was the sole speaker of the evening before a crowded audience in Cooper Union, upon the invitation of prominent citizens of New York to give his views in public on the issues of the day.

Mr. Evarts's repute as a man of public spirit, as a scholar and an orator soon brought to him invitations to deliver addresses, in the language of the day, "orations," at important celebrations. Of these the first was delivered in 1853 at the centenary of the Linonian Society at Yale, the last in 1888 at the dedication at Auburn of the statue of his political friend and leader, William H. Seward.

Present day readers need to be reminded of the fame of the great debating societies at Yale College that flourished * A History of the Kansas Crusade, by Eli Thayer, p. 203.

from the latter part of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. They furnished to the youth of those generations who sought their education at Yale College a nursery and training ground for the development of those moral and intellectual faculties that best adapt a man to a position of influence and power in the community in which his lot is thrown. Doubtless, in the fuller and more complex life of our universities to-day there may be found, among the student activities, organizations that take the place and have the influence of these old debating societies. But it was with keen and unfeigned regret at the time that the older graduates of Yale saw the uninterrupted decline and final discontinuance of these institutions, beyond the power of all efforts to revive them. The place they filled in the college life of his day, and the purposes they were calculated to accomplish were thus described by Mr. Evarts, in this oration on "Public Life," in the following passage:

"While, then, we greet the college as the gracious mother of our intellectual life, from whose full breasts we drew the nutriment of learning, it is in this LINONIAN SOCIETY that we, who have met for this centennial commemoration, found the playground and arena, the palestra, the forum, the agora, in which the new born vigor was exercised and trained. It was here that the faculties acquired were first applied, and here had the prelude and preparation for the public labors and conflicts of real life."

These commemorative addresses, six in number, include, besides those mentioned above, the New England Society oration, entitled "The Heritage of the Pilgrims," delivered in 1854 before the New England Society of New York, his Eulogy on Chief Justice Chase delivered upon the invitation of the Alumni of Dartmouth College at the commencement of 1874, his centennial oration delivered at Philadelphia, July 4, 1876, and his oration at Newburgh, New York, in 1883, on the invitation of the joint committee of Congress,