Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 03.pdf/598

 Nathan Dane. he told the father of Robert C. Winthrop, "to prevent mischief," and when he came back he said that if certain persons could have had their own way and carried the mea sures they proposed, he did not know " where we should have been. I rejoice," said he, "that I went to Hartford and helped to avert danger." Under the restraining influences of such men as he, the conclusions unani mously reached by the twenty-six members were crystallized in a report that was firm, straightforward, temperate, clear, and logical. It reviewed the conduct of the administration toward NewEngland, described the consequent helplessness of that section in the face of war, recommended certain measures of present relief, and suggested as a future safeguard a number of constitutional amendments. Dane was one of a committee of seven appointed to draw up a statement that should illustrate the principles and reasons which had led the convention to the results they had agreed on. While they were engaged on this, however, the peace commissioners at Ghent were sign ing the treaty that closed the war. The year after, when President Monroe was making his Northern tour and stopped at Beverly as the guest of Israel Thorndike, Mr. Dane was the local magnate selected to make the President an address of welcome. In 18 1 6 he was one of a committee ap pointed by the Legislature to report on a proposed revision of the probate law; and in that year also Harvard made him a Doctor of Laws. His deafness meanwhile so grew on him that he could not hear debate; but when the Massachusetts Convention of 1820 was held for revising the State Constitution, he was chosen a member for the prestige of his name, although it was understood beforehand that he would not attend it. With all his ex perience in making, compiling, revising, and codifying laws at the formative period of American jurisprudence, and that, too, not only in Congress but in a State that was to set the model, to a great extent, for later law-making throughout the North, and in which, also, the spirit of republican institu72

557

tions was better understood, perhaps, than anywhere else in the country, — and with the special study which he says he had made from his youth, of the development of law in America, there could hardly have been any man so well qualified as he to con struct the first great digest of our statutes and decisions. Like Viner, he used the pro ceeds of the sale of his "Abridgment," in endowing the professorship that bears his name at the Harvard Law School. The en dowment was based on the two conditions that Joseph Story should be the first incum bent of the chair, and that every one who filled it should publish some work upon the law. Viner's professorship gave to the world one unique work, — the matchless Commen taries of Blackstone, — but Dane's has poured forth a profuse stream of treatises, including most of the best-known text-books; for Story's dozen volumes were followed by Greenleaf's standard work on Evidence, and that by another flood of books from Parsons, to be followed by the scant but philosophical productions of Langdell. Dane himself left one other ponderous composition, which re mains in manuscript, — a series of essays on many subjects, under the title " A Moral and Political Survey of America." Indeed, for the last twenty years of his life, he never spent less than twelve hours a day in his library; and this does not except Sundays, although he never stayed away from church, impossible as it was for him to hear a word of the sermon. One cannot help smiling at the evident sincerity with which the old man told Dr. Peabody that he ascribed the preser vation of his working powers to his having always rested on Sunday; for instead of de voting that day to law and American history, it seems that he gave it to the critical study of the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek, and to the reading of sundry Christian Fathers in their original tongues. It may well be im agined that he kept late hours; he gathered his material with the aid of a common-place book, and he is reported to have said that "reading right forward was heavy work," but