e than ten years.
I have been a member of the Committee on the Judiciary since
December, 1884, and have been its Chairman since December,
1891, except for two years, from March 4, 1893, to March 4,
1895, when the Democrats held the Senate.

While I was Chairman it was of course my duty to represent
and defend in debate the action of these Committees on all
the important questions referred to them. I have also, by
reason of my long service, now more than twenty-six years,
on the Committee of Privileges and Elections, been expected
to take part in the discussion of all the Election cases,
and of all matters affecting the privileges and dignity of
the Senate, and of individual Senators. The investigations
into alleged outrages at the South, and wrongs connected with
them, have been conducted by that Committee. So it has been
my fortune to be prominent in nearly all of the matters that
have come up in the Senate since I have been a member of it,
which have excited angry sectional or political feeling. Matters
of finance and revenue and protection, while deeply interesting
the people, do not, in general, cause angry feeling on the
part of the political leaders. To this remark, the state
of mind of our friends, whom we are in the habit of calling
Mugwumps, and who like to call themselves Independents, is
an exception. They have commonly discussed the profoundest
and subtlest questions with an angry and bitter personality
which finds its parallel only in the theological treatises
of the dark ages. It is lucky for some of us that they have
not had the fires of Smithfield or of the Inquisition at their
command.

So, at various times in my life, I have been the object of
the most savage denunciation, sometimes from the Independent
newspapers, sometimes from the Democratic newspapers, especially
those in the South, and sometimes from the press of my own
party whom I have offended by differing from a majority of
my political friends.

But such things are not to be taken too seriously. I have
found in general that the men who deliver themselves with
most bitterness and fury on political questions are the men
who change their minds most easily, and are in general the
most placable, and not uncommonly are the most friendly and
pleasant men in the world in private intercourse. I account
it my great good fortune that, although I have never flinched
from uttering whatever I thought, and acting according to
my own convic