the seed which ripened into a great popular victory four
years later, while the policy of reconciliation for which they
battled against overwhelming odds was hastened by their labors,
and has been finally accepted by the country. They were still
further and more completely vindicated by the misdeeds of the party
they had sought to defeat. The spectacle of our public affairs
became so revolting that before the middle of General Grant's second
term all the great Republican States in the North were lost to the
party, while leading Republicans began to agitate the question of
remanding the States of the South to territorial rule, on account
of their disordered condition. At the end of this term the Republican
majority in the Senate had dwindled from fifty-four to seventeen,
while in the House the majority of one hundred and four had been
wiped out to give place to a Democratic majority of seventy-seven.
No vindication of the maligned Liberals of 1872 could have been
more complete, while it summoned to the bar of history the party
whose action had thus brought shame upon the Nation and a stain
upon Republican institutions.

After the presidential election I went to Washington, where I met
Chief Justice Chase in the Supreme Court and accepted an invitation
to dine with him. He looked so wasted and prematurely old that I
scarcely knew him. He was very genial, however, and our long
political talk was exceedingly enjoyable. It seemed to afford him
much satisfaction to show me a recently reported dissenting opinion
of his in which he re-asserted his favorite principle of State
rights. I only met him once afterward, and this was at the
inauguration of General Grant. I called on Mr. Sumner the same
evening, and found him in a wretched state of health, which was
aggravated by the free use of poisonous drugs. He seemed very much
depressed, politically. He had lost caste with the great party
that had so long idolized him, and which he had done so much to
create and inspire. He had been deserted by the colored race, to
whose service he had unselfishly dedicated his life. He had been
degraded from his honored place at the head of the Senate Committee
on Foreign Relations, and for no other reason than the faithful
and conscientious performance of his public duty. He had been
rebuked by the Legislature of his own State. His case strikingly
suggested that of John Quincy Adams in 1807, when the anathemas of
Massachusetts we