fore
his court,--save in open war; and there was almost war then. He
well-knew nothing would so force them to desperation,--the desperation
of unlicensed barbarism or the immovable determination of truth and
justice driven to the wall. He knew, or if he did not, was so ignorant
that he was incompetent, that in such a contest on such fundamental
principles, such a decision must end in revolution and civil war. If he
dreamed of peace, then he was ready to seal the doom of four million,
and at the end of this century of ten million souls.

In all these decisions he appeals to no one great principle. There is
little in all his judgments to raise him above the rank of respectable
jurists; and in these, presenting the fairest occasion ever offered to a
true lawyer, to one fit to be called an American, nothing that will not
cover his name with infamy, where, on far lesser occasions, Hale and
Holt, Somers and Mansfield, covered theirs with honor, and added to the
glory of their country, and did good to mankind.

He was not, indeed, of that class of the bad to which the profane
Jeffreys and Scroggs and the obscene Kelyng belong. But he was as prone
to the wrong as was Chief Justice Fleming in sustaining impositions, and
Chancellor Ellesmere in supporting benevolences for King James; as ready
to do it as Hyde and Heath were to legalize "general warrants" "by
expositions of the law"; as Finch and Jones, Brampton and Coventry, were
to legalize "ship-money" for King Charles; as swift as Dudley was under
Andros; as Bernard and Hutchinson and Oliver were in Colonial times to
serve King George III.; as judges have been in later times to do like
evil work. Some of these, perhaps, had no conscious intent to do
specific wrong. Their failure was judicial blindness; their sin,
unconscious love of evil. But this question of Slavery towers above all
others that Taney ever had to consider; America professed a loftier
standard of justice than England ever adopted; the question of the
liberty of a race is more important, the question whether the State is
founded on might or on right is more vital, than those of warrants and
ship-money, benevolences and loans; and Roger Brooke Taney sinks below
all these tools of Tyranny.

Hobbes said, that, "when it should be thought contrary to the interest
of men that have dominion that the three angles of a triangle should
equal two right angles, that truth would be suppressed." Taney did deny
truths far p