separated from him by the long years that have passed, when I learned that he was elected to this Congress and was made a member of my committee I joyfully renewed the old acquaintance, and I found him what he was in the dark days of 1861 to 1865. only broader, and widened, and ripened.
In him the elements were mixed. All the elements were so combined that Nature might stand up and say to all the world. This was a man! That he was a man of broad principle, of profound conviction, and that he had the moral courage to breast all time and all circumstance, I think will be admitted by all who knew him. The Quaker poet Whittier (and in one of the last conversations I had with Mr. Hahn he quoted Whittier) has described the character of this man and his aspirations for what was right and just in the little poem wherein he brings the Angel of Freedom and the Angel of Peace together in the dark time which we call our civil war, when, to the pleadings of the Angel of Peace for a surcease of battle, the Angel of Freedom replied:
No pang nor strife beneath the sun
When human rights are staked and won.
I knelt with Ziska's hunted flock;
I watched in Touissaint's cell of rock;
I walked with Sidney to the block;
The moor of Marston felt my tread;
Through Jersey's snows the march I led;
My voice Magenta's charges sped.
That was the spirit with which Michael Hahn stood up in those dark days in Louisiana. But it happened to him that, as the years went by and age came on, the people of Louisiana came to regard him as he was, as a true citizen of their State, wishing only the best things for the State and for all the Southland and for all the Republic. That the man fought life's battle well, that he was an honored citizen of his Commonwealth and of the nation, was attested by the fact that he was sent as a Representative to this the Forty-ninth Congress,
