e Massachusetts Constitution of
1780 seemed to him a nearly perfect system of government.
He earnestly resisted, in the Convention of 1820, the abolition
of the property qualification for voters, and of the obligation
of all citizens to be taxed for the support of religious worship.
He took early and deep interest in the temperance reform,
and gave much time, labor, and money to promote it. "The
strength and beauty of the man," says Mr. Emerson, "lay in
the natural goodness and justice of his mind, which in manhood
and in old age, after dealing all his life with weighty private
and public interests, left an infantile innocence of which
we have no second or third example,--the strength of a chief
united to the modesty of a child. He returned from the courts
and Congresses to sit down with unaltered humility, in the
church, or in the town-house, on the plain wooden bench,
where Honor came and sat down beside him. He was a man in
whom so rare a spirit of justice visibly dwelt, that, if one
had met him in a cabin or in a court, he must still seem a
public man answering as a sovereign state to sovereign state;
and might easily suggest Milton's picture of John Bradshaw,
--'that he was a consul from whom the fasces did not depart
with the year, but in private seemed ever sitting in judgment
on kings.'"

But he would have liked better than anything else what was
said of him in his official report by the President of the
College he loved with that deep affection which her children
felt for her in his time. President Walker closes his annual
report of December 31, 1856, as follows: "The undersigned
could not conclude his report without allusion to the recent
lamented death of the Honorable Samuel Hoar, a distinguished
and justly influential member of this board,--venerable alike
for his age and his virtues,--a devoted friend of the College
which he has been able to serve in a thousand ways by the
wisdom of his counsels and the weight of his character."

Mr. Hoar was naturally conservative, as would be expected
as an old Federalist who was educated at Harvard in the beginning
of the nineteenth century. His rules of public and private
conduct were strict and austere. He applied them more strictly
to himself than to others. His classmates in college used
to call him Cato. He favored the suppression of the sale
and use of intoxicating liquors, and desired that the whole
force of the State should be brought to bear to a