which the mountains have given it will abide upon the land forever. Vermont, always Vermont!

And it will behold a society where the great principles of civil and religious liberty on which it is founded shall be slowly but certainly working themselves out to their final maturity. A prosperity more and more widely diffused among common men. An advancing civilization, not without the vicissitudes, the blemishes, the mistakes, the sorrows, through which humanity's path must always lie, but in which the gain shall still surpass the loss, and the better surmount the worse; enlightened, from generation to generation, by an increasing intelligence, a broader knowledge, a higher morality; alleviated and illuminated, as it was in the beginning, by the inexhaustible blessing of our fathers' God.

II

ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT SARATOGA, NEW YORK, AUGUST 21, 1879

BEFORE THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION ON

CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL LAW OF HIS TIME

CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ASSOCIATION,-I had hoped to have offered you, this morning, what you may perhaps regard as due to the occasion, a written address. Circumstances not foreseen when I accepted the invitation of your committee have placed that preparation out of my power, and have reduced me to the necessity either of appearing before you without it, or not appearing at all. I should have accepted the latter alternative, if I had felt myself quite at liberty to disregard such an engagement; and if I had not felt so much solicitude for the success of this, our first annual meeting, that I was reluctant to have any of its announcements fail. It seems to me that if these meetings are to succeed, we should regard such invitations somewhat as politicians profess to regard nominations for the Presidency: not supposed to be sought, but not under any circumstances whatever to be declined.

Allow me one word further on this subject. While we shall always listen, I am sure, with greater pleasure and advantage to the elaborate preparation that produces such admirable papers as we heard yesterday, in the address and the essays that were read to us, I hope that the precedent will not be established among

us that such preparation is indispensable. We all know how difficult in our busy lives it is at all times to command it. I trust, therefore, we shall always feel at liberty, when we are fortunate enough to have anything to say, and to be asked to say it, to address each other in the simple, unpremeditated style that prevails in courts of justice. In other words, if gentlemen cannot always redeem their obligations in gold, let us have the silver, even at ninety-two cents on the dollar; it is much better than total repudiation.

I shall ask your attention to some observations, more desultory than I hoped to make them, on the subject of Chief Justice Marshall and the constitutional law of his time.

If Marshall had been only what I suppose all the world admits he was, a great lawyer and a very great judge, his life, after all, might have had no greater historical significance, in the strict sense of the term, than the lives of many other illustrious Americans who in their day and generation have served and adorned their country.

A soldier of the Revolution-the companion and friend of Washington, as afterwards his complete and elegant biographer-greatly distinguished at the bar and in the public service before he became Chief Justice -and then presiding in that capacity for so long a time with such extraordinary ability, with such unprecedented success-if the field of his labors had been only the ordinary field of elevated judicial duty, his life would still have been, in my judgment, one of the most cherished memories of our profession, and best worthy to be held in perpetual remembrance. Pinkney summed up his whole character when he declared that