Autobiography of Seventy Years Part 44

But he has left many a personal monument in our legislation, in the glory of which no others can rightfully claim to rival him. To him is due the great tariff, that of 1861, which will always pa.s.s by his name, of which every protective tariff since has been but a modification and adjustment to conditions somewhat changed, conditions which in general, so far as they were favorable, were the result of that measure. To him is due the first antipolygamy bill, which inaugurated the policy under which, as we hope and believe, that great blot on our National life has been forever expunged. The public buildings which ornament Washington, the extension of the Capitol grounds, the great building where the State, War and Navy Departments have their home, the National Museum buildings, are the result of statutes of which he was the author and which he conducted from their introduction to their enactment. He was the leader, as Mr. Winthrop in his n.o.ble oration bears witness, of the action of Congress which resulted in the completion of the Washington Monument after so many years' delay. He conceived and accomplished the idea of consecrating the beautiful chamber of the old House of Representatives as a Memorial Hall where should stand forever the statues of the great men of the States.

So far, of late, as the prosperity and wise administration of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution has depended upon the action of Congress it has been due to him. Above all, the beautiful National Library building, unequalled among buildings of its cla.s.s in the world, was in a large measure the result of his persistent effort and powerful influence, and stands as an enduring monument to his fame. There can be no more beautiful and enviable memorial to any man than a portrait upon the walls of a great college in the gallery where the figures and faces of its benefactors are collected. Mr. Morrill deserves this expression of honor and grat.i.tude at the hands of at least one great inst.i.tution of learning in every American State. To his wise foresight is due the ample endowment of Agricultural or Technical colleges in every State in the Union.

He came from a small State, thinly settled--from a frontier State. His advantages of education were those only which the public schools of the neighborhood afforded. All his life, with a brief interval, was spent in the same town, nine miles from any railroad, except when absent in the public service. But there was no touch of provincialism in him.

Everything about him was broad, national, American. His intellect and soul, his conceptions of statesmanship and of duty expanded as the country grew and as the demands upon him increased.

He was in every respect as competent to legislate for fifty States as for thirteen. He would have been as competent to legislate for an entire continent so long as that legislation were to be governed, restrained, inspired by the principles in which our Union is founded and the maxims of the men who builded it.

He was no dreamer, no idealist, no sentimentalist. He was practical, wise, prudent. In whatever a.s.sembly he was found he represented the solid sense of the meeting. But still he never departed from the loftiest ideals. On any question involving righteousness or freedom you would as soon have had doubt of George Washington's position as of his. He had no duplicity, no indirection, no diplomacy. He was frank, plain-spoken, simple-hearted. He had no faculty for swimming under water.

His armor was his honest thought And simple truth his utmost skill.

The Apostle's counsel to his young disciple will serve for a lifelike portraiture of Justin Morrill:

"Be sober-minded: "Speak thou the things which become sound doctrine: "In all things showing thyself a pattern of good works: in doctrine shewing uncorruptness, gravity, sincerity; "Sound speech that can not be condemned; that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you."

If you wish to sum up the quality of Justin Morrill in a single word, mind, body, and soul, that word would be Health.

He was thoroughly healthy, through and through, to the center of his brain, to his heart's core. Like all healthy souls, he was full of good cheer and sunshine, full of hope for the future, full of pleasant memories of the past. To him life was made up of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows.

But with all his friendliness and kindliness, with all his great hold upon the love and respect of the people, with all his large circle of friends, with all his delight in companionship and agreeable converse, he dared to be alone. He found good society enough always, if no other were at hand, in himself.

He was many times called upon to espouse unpopular causes and unpopular doctrines. From the time when in his youth he devoted himself to the anti-slavery cause, then odious in the nostrils of his countrymen, to the time when in the last days of his life he raised his brave voice against a policy upon which the majority of his political a.s.sociates seemed bent, he never yielded the conclusions of his own judgment or the dictates of his own conscience to any majority, to any party dictation, or to any public clamor. When Freedom, Righteousness and Justice were on his side he considered himself in the majority. He was constant in his attendance on the worship of a small and unpopular religious denomination.

He never lost his good nature, his courage, or his supreme confidence in the final triumph of truth.

Mr. Morrill was not a great political leader. Great political leaders are not often found in the Senate nowadays. He was contented to be responsible for one man; to cast his share of the vote of one State; to do his duty as he conceived it, and let other men do theirs as they saw it. But at least he was not a great political follower. He never committed himself to the popular currents, nor studied the vanes to see how the winds were blowing, nor sounded the depths and the shallows before he decided on his own course. There was no wire running to his seat from any centre of patronage or power. To use a felicitous phrase, I think of Senator Morgan of Alabama, he did not "come out of the door and cry 'Cuckoo!'

when any clock struck elsewhere."

Mr. Morrill was a brave man--an independent man. He never flinched from uttering his thought. He was never afraid to vote alone. He never troubled himself about majorities or administrations, still less about crowds or mobs or spasms of popular excitement. His standard of excellence was high.

He was severe, almost austere, in his judgments of other men.

And yet, with all this, everybody liked him. Everybody who came to know him well loved him. It seems strange that he never incurred enmities or provoked resentments. I suppose the reason is that he never had any controversy with anybody.

He did not mingle in the discussion of the Senate as a debater.

He uttered his opinion and gave his reasons as if he were uttering judgments. But he seldom or never undertook to reply to the men who differed from him, and he rarely, if ever, used the weapons of ridicule or sarcasm or invective, and he never grew impa.s.sioned or angry. He had, in a high degree, what Jeremy Taylor calls "the endearment of prudent and temperate speech."

He was one of the men that Washington would have loved and Washington would have leaned upon. Of course I do not compare my good friend with him to whom no man living or that ever lived on earth can be compared. And Mr. Morrill was never tried or tested by executive or by military responsibilities.

But the qualities which belonged to Washington belonged to him--prudence, modesty, sound judgement, simplicity, absolute veracity, absolute integrity, disinterestedness, lofty patriotism.

If he is not to be compared with Washington, he was at least worthy to be the countryman of Washington, and to hold a high place among the statesmen of the Republic which Washington founded.

Neither ambition nor hatred, nor the love of ease nor the greed of gain, nor the desire of popularity, nor the love of praise, nor the fear of unpopularity found a place in that simple and brave heart.

Like as a ship that through the ocean wide By conduct of some star doth make her way--

no local attraction diverted the magnet in his soul, which ever pointed to the star of day.

As I just said, he was one of the men that Washington would have loved and that Washington would have leaned upon. If we do not speak of him as a man of genius, he had that absolute probity and that sound common sense which are safer and better guides than genius. These gifts are the highest ornaments of a n.o.ble and beautiful character; they are surer guides to success and loftier elements of true greatness than what is commonly called genius. It was well said by an early American author,* now too much neglected, that--

"There is no virtue without a characteristic beauty. To do what is right argues superior taste as well as morals; and those whose practice is evil feel and inferiority of intellectual power and enjoyment, even where they take no concern for a principle. Doing well has something more in it than the mere fulfilling of a duty. It is a cause of a just sense of elevation of character; it clears and strengthens the spirits; it gives higher reaches of thought. The world is sensible of these truths, let it act as it may. It is not because of his integrity alone that it relies on an honest man, but it has more confidence in his judgment and wise conduct, in the long run, than in the schemes of those of greater intellect who go at large without any landmarks of principle.

So that virtue seems of a double nature, and to stand oftentimes in the place of what we call talent."

[Footnote]

* Richard H. Dana, the elder.

[End of Footnote]

He was spared the fate of so many of our great New England statesmen, that of closing his life in sorrow and in gloom.

His last days were days of hope, not of despair. Sumner came to his seat in the Senate Chamber as to a solitude. When he was struck with death there was found upon his table a volume of Shakespeare with this pa.s.sage, probably the last printed text on which his eyes ever gazed, marked with his own hand:

Would I were dead! if G.o.d's good will were so; For what is in this world, but care and woe?

The last days of Samuel Adams were embittered by poverty, sickness, and the death of his only son.

Daniel Webster laid wearily down his august head in disappointment and sorrow, predicting with dying breath that the end had come to the great party to whose service his life was given.

When John Quincy Adams fell at his post in the House of Representatives a great newspaper declared that there could not be found in the country another bold enough or bad enough to take his place.

But Mr. Morrill's last days were filled with hope and not with despair. To him life was sweet and immortality a.s.sured.

His soul took its flight

On wings that fear no glance of G.o.d's pure sight, No tempest from his breath.

And so we leave him. His life went out with the century of which he saw almost the beginning. What the future may have in store for us we cannot tell. But we offer this man as an example of an American Senator and American citizen than which, so far, we have none better. Surely that life has been fortunate. He is buried where he was born. His honored grave is hard by the spot where his cradle was rocked.

He sleeps where he wished to sleep, in the bosom of his beloved Vermont. No State ever mourned a n.o.bler son; no son was ever mourned by a n.o.bler State. He enjoyed to a ripe old age everything that can make life happy--honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

The love of friends without a single foe, Unequalled lot below.

He died at home. The desire of the wise man,

Let me die in my nest,

was fulfilled to him. His eyes in his old age looked undimmed upon the greatness and the glory of his country, in achieving which he had borne so large a part.

CHAPTER VII COMMITTEE SERVICE IN THE SENATE

I was appointed upon the Committee on Privileges and Elections, March 9, 1877, and have continued a member of it ever since.

I was appointed on the same day a member of the Committees on Claims, Indian Affairs and Agriculture. I made a special study in the vacation of 1877, expecting to master, as well as I could, the whole Indian question, so that my service on that Committee might be of some value. But I was removed from the Committee on Indian Affairs, by the Committee who made the appointments, in the following December. This was very fortunate, for the country and for the Indians. Mr.

Dawes, my colleague, not long after was placed upon the Committee.

He was a most intelligent, faithful and stanch friend of the Indians during the remainder of his lifetime. He was ready, at the Department and on the floor of the Senate, and wherever he could exert an influence to protect and baffle any attempt to wrong them. His quiet and unpretending service to this unfortunate and oppressed race ent.i.tles him to a very high place in the affectionate remembrance of his countrymen.

The Committee on Agriculture was then of little importance.

I remained a member of it for a few years, and then gave it up for some service in which my const.i.tuents were more immediately interested.

In December, 1878, I was put on the Committee on Patents, and remained upon it for a little while. The Committee had to deal occasionally with special cases of applications for extension of patents by statute, which demanded a knowledge of the patent law, and industry and sound judgment on the part of the Senator to whom they were committed for report.

But they were not of much public interest or importance.

In December, 1879, I was put on the Committee on the Revision of the Laws; in December, 1883, on the Joint Committee on the Library; in December, 1884, on the Committee of the Judiciary, of which I have been a member ever since; in December, 1888, on the Committee on Relations with Canada; in December, 1891, on the Committee on Woman Suffrage; in December, 1895, on the Committee on Rules.

I was on the Committee on Claims for ten years, from March 9, 1877, to March 4, 1887. It is impossible to establish by the record the part any man performs, who is a member of a deliberative body consisting of several persons, in influencing its decisions, or in establishing the principles on which they are based. But I believe I may fairly claim, and that I could cite my a.s.sociates on the Committee to bear testimony, that I had a great deal to do, and much more than any other person, in settling the doctrines upon which the Senate acted in dealing with the great questions of the claims of individuals and States and corporate bodies growing out of the War. Upon the rules then established the Government claims amounting to hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars were decided.

The victorious Republic dealt justly and generously with the vanquished and misguided men who had a.s.sailed it and sought its destruction.

The general doctrines by which Congress was governed were these:

1. No rightful claim accrued to anybody for the destruction or injury to property by military movements, or operations, in a country which was the theatre of war.