Matthew Hale Carpenter as a Lawyer. neither recognizes the other. But, sir, I know the amount of labor performed by him, the number of cases he decides, the time spent by him in holding court, and I know that five thou sand dollars per annum is even less than a just compensation for his services, and I should hold myself entirely unfit for a seat in this body if I were incapable of doing justice to him because he is not' my friend, or because he is my bitter enemy. By refusing to vote a suitable salary to him I should be guilty of doing toward him what I think he has often done towards me — injustice. We ought to vote a salary for the office, without regard to the merits of the accidental present incumbent. "Five thousand dollars a year is not more than proper compensation for the services of any man fit to be a district judge. And without providing an adequate salary, you can not at all times secure the services of a competent man, except from the wealthy men of the country, who might be willing to accept the office with out any salary whatever. This would be closing the door of preferment to the poor, and sur rendering the bench to the rich; which I am op posed to, not only because being a poor man I sympathize with that class, but because such a policy would be anti-republican, and a practical surrender of the bench to the rich." In his address at the founding of the Taylor Orphan Asylum in Racine, he said : "The poor want less talk and more bread. The world needs less of doctrine and more religion; less of form and more substance; less of the pretending and more of the reality of godliness and charity. The money worse than wasted in the superfluities of life, in silk and satin to be draggled by our wives and our daughters through filthy streets, would clothe all the orphans in the world. "The money spent on whiskey to madden the brain, in tobacco to shatter the nerves, in politics to promote the demagogues, would carry all the comforts of life to every hearthstone in the land, educate the ignorant, and lift up the oppressed, and pour oil and wine into all the wounds of suffering humanity. "Of all the duties of life there is none that touches us so near the tender emotions of the
445
heart, none that is commanded by God in lan guage of such solemn aud awful warning, as the duty of protecting the unprotected and befriend ing the fatherless child. In that great code given by God himself to his chosen people, a code which mingles municipal regulations with moral precepts, it is written, ' Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child. If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall be widows and your children father less.'" In Erskine's speech in behalf of John Stockdale, tried on information filed against him by the attorney-general for libel on the House of Commons, the attorney-general having garbled from the supposed libelous publication sentences at random, and tack ing them' together, endeavored to thus prove their libelous character, Erskine in reply said, " I humbly expect that the benevolent Author of our being, holding^ up the great volumes of- our lives in his hands, and re garding the general scope of them; if he discovers benevolence, charity and good will to man beating in the heart, where he alone can look; if he finds that our con duct, though often forced out of the path by our infirmity, has been in general well directed; his all-searching eye will assur edly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives, much less will his justice select them for our punishment, without the gen eral context of our existence, by which faults may be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offenses have been grafted by human imperfection upon the kindest of our affections. No, gentlemen, believe me, this is not the course of divine justice, or there is no truth in the gospels of heaven. If the general tenor of a man's conduct be such as I have represented it, he may walk through the shadow of death with all his faults about him with as much cheerfulness as in the common paths of life; because he
