Chapter II.
"Let me, disclaiming all such slavish awe,
Dive to the very bottom of the law;
Let me (the weak, dead letter left behind)
Search out the principles, the spirit find,
Till, from the parts made master of the whole,
I see the Constitution's very soul."—Gotham.
"Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among the innumerable false, unmoved,
Unspoken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal."—Milton.
"You tread upon the high places of earth and history; you think and feel as an American for America. Her power, her eminence, her consideration, are yours; your competitors, like hers, are kings; your home, like hers, is the world; your path, like hers, is on the highway of empires; your charge, her charge, is of generations and ages; her image, one immortal, golden vision on your eye, as our western star at evening rises on the traveller from his home."—Choate.
"Here my master, interposing, said 'it was a pity that creatures endowed with such prodigious abilities of mind as these lawyers, by the description I gave of them, must certainly be, were not rather encouraged to be instructors of others in wisdom and knowledge;' in answer to which I assured his honor 'that in all points out of their own trade they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning, and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind in every other subject of discourse as in that of their own profession.'"—Swift.
To eliminate and lose sight entirely of the effects of two centuries of slavery; to divorce from our consideration the irrelevant issues usually entangled with every discussion of civil rights; and to present the question in its bare essentials, in the cold light of a dispassionate search after truth, striving at every step to distinguish the right from the wrong, the true from the false; it has occurred to the writer that it might serve the pur-
