Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/133

Rh been at Cambridge on two or three occasions only, and my present acquaintance with the persons in power is very limited.

From 1844 to 1850 I received from Governor Briggs several appointments. In 1845 or ’46 the Legislature passed an Act authorizing the appointment of railway commissioners. Governor Briggs sent me a commission, which I declined. The Board was never organized, and the act was soon repealed. I was also appointed a member of a commission on Boston Harbor. At that time the public were anxious about the fate of the harbor in consequence of the drainage into it by Charles River, and numerous minor channels. It was not then understood that all deposits by drainage could be removed by dredging. The members of the Commission were Judges Williams, Hopkinson, Cummins, the Hon. Chas. Hudson and myself. The three judges had then recently lost their offices by the abolition of the court of common pleas. Mr. Hudson had then recently left the United States House of Representatives, but whether voluntarily or upon compulsion I cannot say. He was a clergyman, a Universalist, but at an early age he had abandoned his profession for politics. After serving in the Massachusetts House, Senate and Council, he was elected to Congress from the Worcester district, for which he sat during four Congresses. He was a man of solid qualities without genius of any sort. He was distinguished in Congress as a Protectionist, and his speeches on the tariff question were widely circulated by the Whig Party. They were filled with statistics, and like all arguments based on statistics, they were subject to a good deal of criticism by the advocates of free trade.

The three judges were respectable, clear-headed gentlemen. Of Cummins the story is told that, when for the first time a plan of land was introduced in a real-estate case, he refused to consider the document, saying: “I will not allow a case to be won in my court by diagrams.” Williams had been