of the republic exhibited in the hour of need, the great burdens which they bore under the inspiration of patriotic duty, the public order which they maintained by their instinctive obedience to the command of law, all attest the good government of a self-governing people. Full liberty to criticise the acts of persons in official station, free agitation of all political questions, frequent elections that give opportunity for prompt settlement of all issues, tend to insure popular content and public safety. No government of modern times has encountered the dangers that beset the United States, or achieved the triumphs wherewith the nation is crowned."—Blaine.
"May it please your honors, you know, and I know, and everybody else knows, that it was the intention of the men who founded this republic to put the life, liberty, and property of every person in it under the protection of a regular and permanent judiciary, separate, apart, distinct, from all other branches of the government, whose sole and exclusive business it should be to distribute justice among the people according to the wants of each individual."—J. Black.
"To argue otherwise, is to take up the Machiavelian position, that it is right for the legislature to be an imposture, 'an organized hypocrisy'; that it is necessary for a nation to be cheated by the semblance of virtue when there is no reality; that public opinion ought to be founded in error rather than in truth; or that it is well for the people to believe a lie."—Spencer.
It is matter not wholly unrelated to the issue, and of curious note in connection with the awful fate which, as we have just seen, overtook the Civil-Rights Bill, that just sixteen years before the 17th of July, 1881, one of these great law-givers,—fresh from the scene of the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, that aged civil-rights crusader, whose life was a continuous assertion that the conflict between freedom and slavery was irrepressible,—while standing over the bloody bier of the great father of civil rights, who had issued in her darkest hour her famous monitory Proclamation of Emancipation, spoke, in a clear and impressive voice, these remarkable words: "Clouds and darkness are about Him; His pavilion is dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies. Justice and judgment are the establishment of His throne; mercy and truth shall go before Him. God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives." These historical occurrences, preceding and following the Civil-
