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rum, and the manners of New England, and turn upon him every eye in the congregation."

"Where, where, for shelter, shall the guilty flee."

We find no enduring basis of Principle underlying the life of Mr. Choate; nor does he anywhere in his philosophy betray that he honored such a basis, or thought it necessary. He laid his foundation upon the quicksands of Expediency; and everywhere, in theory and practice, in word and deed, openly and in secret, lauded the spot on which his house was built. He was wholly given over to the devil of ambition, and thus to party, to whatever would serve his ends. He who declaimed most loudly against sectionalism was the most sectional; for it was in sectionalism that he found his encouragement and his remuneration. He early committed himself to that class which thinks itself bound by every dollar it owns it knows no higher obligation to perpetuate American slavery. He sold himself to the wealthy party, the mercantile interest, and he never forsook it. He sought to make everything else subservient to that. He was far-sighted in that direction, and knew the interests of the merchants better than they did them

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Poor souls once they were subject to fits of independence, indignation, at the encroachments of the South: they have gotten over that now. It was one of the diseases of mercantile infancy, in which the wise physician saw that the patient only needed to be kept quiet, in order to get well of himself, and to which at a more mature age he would not be subject. In illustration of this, we remember that, when South Carolina, having seized and imprisoned Massachusetts seamen for no crime save that of color, obliged Mr. Hoar, who was sent by that State to secure the legal rights of her citizens -- obliged him to flee for his life, Boston merchants, of respectability and standing," placed in the hands of Senator Choate a petition to Congress, asking that Massachusetts men might be protected in the exercise of their constitutional rights. But Mr. Choate, who, in the language of eloquent eulogy, "never failed to do justice to his client, himself, and the occasion," and who was "never found even partially unprepared" for any emergency, was fully prepared to lose this petition; he "put it into his hat, and, some way or other, it fell out." Nay, even a wellattested copy of the same, afterwards sent him, managed in the same mysterious way to "fall out" or, at least, never to get presented.

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Another circumstance we remember: Charles Sumner had been struck down and brutally beaten in the Senate Chamber; good citizens of Massachusetts were all in a flame about it. "Would Mr. Choate go to Faneuil Hall and help express their indignation?" Oh, no! although possessed of that spirit which "made him true to all time and place," he would not go. But still humane and true to humanity in the broadest acceptation of the word," he is said, with that amenity and unforced courtesy, so graceful and so uniform," to have asked the committee which waited upon him "if blows on the head with a gutta percha stick would hurt a man much?" Ah, yes! was he not far-sighted? Has he not his reward? Was it not yesterday that Massachusetts-shame on her! was it not yesterday, when told she had looked for the last time on all that was mortal of him, that she lifted up her eyes in sad affliction, bathed herself with hot tears, and, like a bereaved mother, consoled herself by recounting and ascribing to him in extravagant language the virtues he never had?

One more illustration of Mr. Choate's political life, and we have done with that. He was a Whig until the Whig party was no longer such an efficient weapon as the Slave Power needs. The Democratic party had in those latter years proved itself equal to anything the South could require. In the mean time the spirit of liberty was diffusing itself; the quarter-of-a-century's work which William Lloyd Garrison and his coadjutors had done made a great national party in favor of freedom possible-not possible only, but actual; and it was in this party that Mr. Choate seemed to find a most terrible adversary- the great bugbear of his life. Results most fearful to the oligarchy were anticipated, if this party should succeed; the peril was imminent; the only defence lay in the ranks of "the unterrified"—even those needed strengthening; and so Mr. Choate, "true to all time and place," constituted himself Recruiting Sergeant Extraordinary on their behalf. We had witnessed the frightful" rending of garments" at Springfield, the inimitable agonies at the Union Meeting, the lachrymose beseechings at the Baltimore Convention all these were now to culminate, and our hero to make his grand last appearance on the political stage, a last dying appeal in a letter to the Whigs of Maine. He implored them to sacrifice party prejudices, and to make common cause with the Democracy; "the duty which comprehended or suspended all others [being] to defeat and dissolve the new geographical party calling itself Republican."

"If it accomplishes its object," said Mr. Choate, "and gives the government to the North, I turn my eyes from the consequences. To the fifteen States of the South that government will appear an alien government. It will appear worse: it will appear a hostile. government; it will represent to their eyes a vast region of States organized upon anti-slavery, flushed by triumph, cheered on by the voices of the pulpit, tribune and press; its mission to inaugurate freedom and put down the oligarchy; its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence. And then and thus is the beginning of the end."

A vast region of States organized upon anti-slavery, its mission to inaugurate freedom, was certainly a thing altogether frightful for Mr. Choate to contemplate; for he had neither faith in nor sympathy with men his faith was in institutions, governments, empires, and his sympathies with those. Even the signers of the Declaration of Independence were, to him, poor, fanatical promulgators of the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right; it was only when, having secured their own freedom, they basely trampled upon the Declaration they had made, and sought to perpetuate the bondage of those who were weaker than they, but who, nevertheless, had helped to fight their battles, it was only when viewed. in this aspect that they became at all tolerable to Rufus Choate.

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Mr. Choate's professional career was as barren of any real virtue as his political. It was not Truth and Justice that were uppermost in his mind, but Conquest and the amount of Wages. His talents, the wealth of his intellect, all his varied culture, his great legal acquirements, the fires of his eloquence, his unsurpassed cunning and contrivance, and immense personal magnetism, were to be bought for a price were at the service of any one who could pay for them. He was a hypocrite: while he loudly and continually asserted the majesty and supremacy of law, he was as ready to defend the blackest and most hardened of criminals as the most innocent and persecuted of men. From the beginning of his career he was in repute as a criminal lawyer. "He took all kinds of business," and never turned away a fee. He was notoriously unscrupulous, both as to means and ends. He never asked whether his client sought justice, and the rights with which his Creator had endowed him, or whether, having committed the grossest outrages upon justice and the rights of his fellow-men, he sought to escape the deserved penalties of the law; and, once having been retained,

there was no meanness, no trick, no shallowest artifice, no falsification of evidence, no perversion of law, to which he would not resort in order to gain the case. With a retainer in his pocket, he seemed to lose all power of moral discrimination. There was no crime against humanity, against law, order, or decency, no murder, however atrocious, no harlotry, however gross, which he would not defend. The criminal world had constructed a new TrinityJustice, Law, and Rufus Choate three in one, one in three; each radically different from the others, and yet the same. Justice was that dreadful being which made (or found) men totally depraved, with a constant desire to do evil, prone to sin against the Holy Ghost, which was the Law; and getting angry with them every day, squelched them beneath its horrid foot; while Rufus Choate was the Lamb in whose blood the wicked were washed, and through whom, though their sins were red as scarlet, they became white as driven snow. Through him the vilest wretch might "pluck Justice by the nose," and laugh at Law. "Men bound him to their service," said Dr. Adams, "as soon as they anticipated trouble, or they bought his promise not to appear against them.”

So notorious was this part of his professional character, that when of two ship-masters on the coast of Sumatra, who contemplated embezzling the cargo of the barque Missouri, one was reluctant to do the deed, and somewhat fearful withal, the other told him that if they were found out they could get Rufus Choate to defend them, and he would get them off if they were caught with the money in their boots! The deed was done; and what we have related came out in the evidence, when the case was tried in Boston, Mr. Choate himself being the counsel who elicited the disgracing avowal. Nay, of so baleful a nature is such a man's influence, that not the criminal alone, not alone wicked ship-masters on the coast of Sumatra, but Doctors of Divinity, in Boston, came to regard this as a sort of virtue. Rev. Dr. Neale told the children of the Public Schools, assembled in Music Hall, that

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Mr. Choate would make the criminal himself feel innocent. The culprit in the dock would look as amiable and lamb-like as if, in the court-room, he was the only person without spot or blemish, or any such thing." There was no word addressed to those tender minds, showing that such a course was immoral on the contrary, the "distinguished divine" found it entirely compatible with Christian morals to pronounce a glowing eulogy on Him of the

Conscience Ossified, and hold him up as a brilliant example, the sun of whose life had "melted away into the light of heaven.”

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We find but one thing worthy of imitation in all Mr. Choate's professional life- his industry. God forbid that any young man should take him for an examplar in other respects. His successes were generally dependent upon a course which no just and true man would employ. His great power over a jury was mainly attributable to what one of his eulogizers has called "his wonderful power of dislocation and confusion," together with great personal magnetism, and a constant resort to the argumentum ad hominem.

Did "not your juries give their verdict

As if they felt the cause, not heard it?"

The causes of shipwreck to men's souls are innumerable, and at times seem to baffle all attempts at elucidation; but there are two instances in American history in which the cause is palpable with Daniel Webster it was an intense animalism, pervading his whole nature, year by year accumulating, culminating, at last, and overpowering the higher and nobler elements of his character;- with Rufus Choate, his worshipper, it was a shameful want of conscience and common honesty. His was a philanthropy which we should call misanthropy a religion which we should call irreligion a morality which we should call shameless immorality.

We come now to speak of what it is proper to call the genius of Mr. Choate- - what of it he was born with, how large a culture it got, and how it was manifested.

It may be well to say that there is something radically wrong in the common estimate of men of genius. It is as base to give homage to mere intellectual wealth, however expended, and by whatever other traits of character accompanied, as it is to honor mere material wealth, however gained, by whomsoever possessed, and to whatever uses turned. Acquisitions never so great, of never so exalted a nature, are not in themselves honorable: it is only when made to serve mankind, in its real needs, that they become so. Then, too, the injury resulting from the example of one morally-diseased man of genius is greater than that from a thousand ordinary cases of depravity; for, admiration once awakened, and through that the instinct of imitation, the mass of mankind has proved itself prone to copy vices as well as virtues. Thus, if

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