Rufus Choate. formed a partnership in his business. Per haps this custom of carrying his accounts in his head will explain his having left a comparatively small estate. Mr. Choate had little taste for public life. He did, however, take Webster's chair in the Senate when that gentleman was confirmed as a member of William H. Harrison's cabi net.' There is, however, but little doubt that Choate's success while in Washington was not as marked as he had hoped. At any rate he declined, after a service of six years, to remain longer in Congress either in the lower House or in the Senate, and succes sively refused the offer of Law Lecturer at Harvard, made illustrious by the previous service of Judge Story and a nomination to the Supreme Court in our own State, and he also declined a nomination to the Su preme Bench at Washington. Mr. Choate was a firm believer in what is popularly known as Protection, and had an idea that wages were increased and the con dition of the working classes improved by this restrictive system. During the free-soil days I was among the audience in Faneuil Hall when Mr. Choate made a speech in which he remarked that the Constitution was a collection of glittering generalities. In that same speech he offered a slight to Charles Francis Adams, which some of you may remember. After Mr. Choate had been speaking with great respect of John Adams, and had been extravagant in his praises of John Quincy Adams, he remarked, "Alas! the last of the Adamses." This scathing slight to so prominent a man as Mr. Charles Francis Adams made a lasting im pression upon all who heard it. Mr. Choate is said to have attended Uni tarian services during his younger years, but he was afterwards attracted by the personal ity of Dr. Adams, of the Essex Street Church, who was an earnest defender of the Calvinistic faith. However, I do not find in any of Rufus Choate's utterances or writings
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that he ever took a controversial side in re ligious matters. Just as John Milton never shared the bigoted whims of the Puritans, so Mr. Choate was able to take broad theologi cal views. Although he was a devout man, at times a swear word was nat uncommon with him when no other seemed to meet the emergency, or rise to the dignity of the occa sion. No doubt Mr. Choate was also at tracted to Dr. Adams, as they were alike in their pro-slavery views. The former argued that from a constitutional point of view Massachusetts had no right to touch the subject of slavery. A friend of mine, now eighty-five years of age, says that Choate's "devotion to the Constitution was akin TO idolatry." The following is the conclusion of his speech in Faneuil Hall, which states dis tinctly his opinion in this matter: "Is it not possible that a part of what they call the aggressive spirit of slavery may be a reaction against our own aggression? May it not be that in this recrimination of the sections, and in the judgment of history there may be blows to take as well as blows to give? That great man [Daniel Webster] could see and he dared to admit the errors of both sections. In those errors, in the very hate and this very dread which the new party would organize, he saw the supreme danger to his country. To correct those er rors, to allay that dread, to turn that hate to love, was the sublime aim of his last and noblest labor. I am looking out," he said, "not for my own security or safety, for I am looking out for no fragment on which to float away from the wreck, if wreck there must be, but for the good of the whole and the preservation of all. I speak today for the Union. Hear me1 for my cause. Mr. Webster could not have abandoned himself, he never saw an hour in which he could have any more abandoned himself to this gloomy enterprise of sectionalism than Washington could have done it stooping
