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at this time. Yet to pass over that case in silence would be to leave any presentation of Taney's life and character pre-eminently incomplete. Consider the situation. Ever since his admission to the bar he had held the highest conception of his profession as a lawyer, of the cause of justice and of the judicial dignity and function. At the bar he had been the fearless advocate of unpopular causes, the conduct of which he had assumed from a sense of duty and, in some cases, without the hope of financial reward. In the political arena he had uncompromisingly performed what he conceived to be his duty in the face of great obloquy. For the twenty years that he had been upon the bench he had upheld the high dignity of the august tribunal over which he presided, and had most carefully kept the court within the strictest judicial limits. He had ever guarded himself with a jealous eye and mind from passing beyond the well defined barriers of judicial conduct. His personal purity, inde pendence and integrity cannot be questioned. He was not a slaveholder. And yet at the age of eighty, when his intellect was as clear as ever, his reasoning faculties as acute as ever, he committed what seems to be a blunder worse than a crime, and demon strable as such. He threw to the winds the fundamental tenet, to which he had ever held with tenacity, that the opinion of the court should deal only with those points of law which are necessary to the disposal of the case before it, and in a lengthy dictum, characterized by great subtlety of reasoning and misstatements of history, he propounded the most astonishing doctrines of constitu tional powers and construction, which were not and are not and never can be law. That he himself had some qualms in regard to his opinion is shown by the fact that under date of September, 1858, he wrote an elaborate memorandum, extending over thirty closely printed octavo pages, in which he tried to bolster up the opinion which he had filed in the case.

The ordinary explanation that' is given for this extraordinary aberration does not seem to me to be adequate. If, from his patriot ism, he had come to believe that by using the great authority of the Supreme Court and the veneration in which it was held by the public, he could save his country from the impending crisis of civil war and settle the slavery question, he would never have held the plea in abatement good. For, in the first place, there is at least grave doubt whether that plea was before the court. And in the second place so great a technical lawyer as Mr. Justice Curtis thought the plea bad. Apparently a majority of the members of the court thought it either bad or not open to judgment on the record. The Chief Jus tice would never have made his attempt to settle the slavery question into a dictum, when it was more than possible to have made it the direct r.nd binding judgment of the court. There is extant a curious pamphlet of some sixty-eight duodecimo pages, printed in New York in 1865, entitled "The Unjust Judge." In it the anonymous author charges Mr. Chief Justice Taney with being faith less as a man, a Christian and a jurist, speaks of him as a reptile and likens him to Pontius Pilate and Lord Jeffreys, of infamous memory. Its tenor shows the fierce passions that were engendered by slavery, and the mighty horror in which the opinion of the Chief Justice in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford was held by many. To them there could be nothing good or pure or righteous in the man who had perpetrated that fatal error. Indeed, even to-day the name of Taney is clouded and his fair fame tarnished by that blunder. He, who had outlived great political calumny to see his bitterest detractors and maligners personally apolo gize for their words and hostility, died more than blamed by one-half of the country which he had so long, so faithfully and so ably served. It is a tragedy almost as pathetic as GEdipus Tyrannus.