seat and his tired look. The light faded from his eyes, his frame became limp; a clerk came in with my letter; Lamar signed it. ' Good-by,' I said. ' Good-by,' he responded. We shook hands. 1 never saw him again. '•I did not fully understand his reference to ' those fellows,' but I inferred that he meant the Democratic members. It was common talk, at that time, that the Democratic House, having no leader, was drifting about like dead wood in an eddy."
While it is doubtless true that Lamar was not fond of office detail, yet he filled consci entiously and ably all the requirements of his position as Secretary. His Reports are equal to any State papers that have ema nated from that department. He was a warm friend of the Indian, and earnestly desired to terminate the "Century of Dis honor." He declared that " the only alter native now presented to the American Indian race is speedy entrance into the pale of American civilization, or absolute extinc tion. . . . After incorporating into our body politic four millions of blacks in a state of slavery, and investing them with citizenship and suffrage, we need not strain at the gnat of two hundred and sixty thousand Indians." Upon his appointment to the Supreme Court by President Cleveland, Lamar took his seat, Jan. t8, 1888. Mr. Carson, in his "History of the Supreme Court," says : " One of his colleagues, upon being asked whether he had met the expectations of his friends, replied : ' Fully. Mr. Cleveland made no mistake in appointing him. Whatever doubts existed as to his fitness for the Supreme Bench, growing out of his long political and parliamentary career and absence from the active practice of his profession, have wholly disappeared.' " It is surprising that any doubt should have been predicated upon the fact first mentioned. To cite only the ChiefJustices as instances, Jay had been Secretary of Foreign Affairs; Ellsworth had been Sena tor; Marshall, Taney, and Chase had all been members of the Cabinet. An analysis of the history of the fifty-four judges who
have occupied the bench, with regard to the manner in which they acquired the eminence that led to their appointment, shows that eighteen acquired their distinction in politics, twenty-two on the bench, while only fourteen can be credited to the bar. Since the pas sage of the Act establishing Circuit Courts of Appeal, — leaving to the Supreme Court almost exclusively federal and constitutional questions, — the value to a judge upon that bench of previous experience in the practical administration of the government will be even greater than it has been heretofore. But while his political career was no dis qualification, — rather the reverse, — the fact that Lamar had never had any extensive practice, and doubtless very little in the Federal Courts, caused the apprehension among his friends that he would be at a dis advantage in association with judges before whom cases are argued on the assumption that the law is already known and its appli cation only is in question. Those who knew his conscientiousness, his capacity for labor, his great intellectual power, never once feared that his decisions would fall below the stand ard of that great court; but they did fear for him that he would find his work on the bench excessively laborious. Such was the fact. Justice Lamar had none of the false pride that would have prompted a conceal ment of it. One of his colleagues alludes to it in a note expressing his admiration of the opinion in Pennoyer v. Connaughy, 140 U. S. i: "Your differentiation of cases where a State may and may not be sued is the best I have seen. The case seemed to me a difficult one, and I should not have sus pected that you did not enjoy writing opin ions. This is excellent." In a conversation with the writer he remarked : " Writing out a decision costs me two or three times the labor it costs a facile worker. Now, there 's Judge Blatchford : he can take a record, master it, and " (with a quick gesture) " there is the whole thing — the decision — produced, in the time that it takes me to determine how I shall set about approaching the case."
