CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHY.
JOHN J. INGALLS,
SENATOR FROM KANSAS.
THE life of a man of genius is active warfare. His words are often half-battles, particularly if ambition, "the last infirmity of noble minds," leads the scholar, the lawyer, or the statesman to follow the path of higher politics, wherein is said to dwell the sum of all the sciences. The secret of genius, whether in public life or in the daily vocations of men of the world, is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, and in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose, and, first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
The statesman whose character and whose public services I shall endeavor to portray, John J. Ingalls, the senior Senator from the State of Kansas, has already made a national record illustrious by reason of the length and strength of his seventeen years' devotion to public duty at the expense of his private interests.
The facts attending his early history are not without interest. He was born in the town of Middleton, Essex County, Massachusetts, on the 29th of December, 1833. His original ancestor in America on his father's side was Eldmund Ingalls,—or Ingall, as it was then written,—who, with his brother Francis, removed from West England in 1628 and founded the city of Lynn in Essex County. His mother, née Eliza Chase, was a descendant of Aquila Chase, who settled in New Hampshire about 1630: so that on both sides the Senator from Kansas has an unbroken strain of Puritan blood without any intermixture. His parents were in the middle condition of life. His father was a man of unusual intelligence, who was intended for one of the learned professions, but on account of failing health entered the mercantile business as a wholesale manufacturer of boots and shoes. He continued his business, attended with varying success, until about 1861, when he retired from active life.
Senator Ingalls is the eldest of nine children, of whom six besides himself survive at this time, two sisters having died in infancy. He was a delicate child, and somewhat precocious in his intellectual developments, so that he was able to read intelligently by the time he was two years old. His disposition was excessively sensitive, shy, diffident, and retiring, and little promise did there seem to be of his one day exthe magnificent audacity displayed in his various battles in the Senate.
He pursued his studies at the public schools at Haverhill until
