rt while he presided, as well as the larger and
widely-diffused body of lawyers who give competent and responsible study
to the reports, recognize the force of his reason, the clearness of his
perceptions, the candor of his opinions, and the lucid rhetoric of his
judgments, as assuring his rank with the eminent judges of our own and
the mother-country.

But, in the most imposing part of the jurisdiction and jurisprudence of
the court; in its dominion over all that belongs to the law of nations,
whether occupied with the weighty questions of peace and war, and the
multitudinous disturbances of public and private law which follow the
change from one to the other; or with the complications of foreign
intercourse and commerce with all the world, which the genius of our
people is constantly expanding; in its control, also, of the lesser
public law of our political system, by which we are a nation of
republics, where the bounds of State and Federal authority need constant
exploration, and require accurate and circumspect adjustment; in its
final arbitrament on all conflicts and encroachments by which the great
cooerdinate departments of the Government are to be confined to their
appropriate spheres; in that delicate and superb supremacy of judicial
reason whereby the Constitution confides to the deliberations of this
court the determination, even, of the legality of legislation, and
trusts it, nevertheless, to abstain itself from law-making--in all these
transcendent functions of the tribunal the preparation and the adequacy
of the Chief-Justice were unquestioned.

Accordingly, we find in the few years of his service, before his decline
in health, in the crowd of causes bred by the civil war, which pressed
the court with novel embarrassments, and loaded it with unprecedented
labors, that the Chief-Justice gave conspicuous evidence, in repeated
instances, of that union of the faculties of a lawyer and a statesman,
which alone can satisfy the exactions of this highest jurisdiction,
unequaled and unexampled in any judicature in the world. To name these
conspicuous causes merely, without unfolding them, would carry no
impression; and time fails for any demonstrative criticism upon them.

There are two passages in the judicial service of Mr. Chase which,
attracting great attention and exciting some difference of opinion at
the time of the transactions, invite a brief consideration at your
hands.

The first political impeachmen