attention to parliamentary law; he improved the opportunity that the Senate gave to add to his knowledge, both theoretical and practical; so that he entered the House of Representatives a good general parliamentarian.

Edward Gibbon, while bemoaning his service in the Hampshire militia, said it was of much service to him. in composing his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Much more was President Garfield's service as a soldier of value to him as a legislator and statesman. It made him thoroughly acquainted with the organization and needs of the army, and with the whole military side of the Rebellion. It caused him to reflect the more deeply upon its political side, and to revolve more carefully in his mind the whole question of reconstruction. More than this, his military service added very greatly to his knowledge of men and of public business, and thereby much increased his mental and moral equipment for his civil career. Collateral questions growing out of the war also engaged his attention. somewhat thus, in his paper entitled "The Currency Conflict," he speaks of studying finance with Secretary Chase in the autumn of 1862 (while he was in Washington awaiting orders, and serving on a court-martial).

The only specific political question of the first magnitude that he had mastered before the war mutterings were heard, had become obsolete when he entered Congress. "Slavery in the Territories" was the great question that the Republican party pressed upon the

1 "The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.". Memoirs, etc.

intellect and the conscience of the nation, from its organization in 1854 to its triumph in the Presidential election. of 1860. "What is the constitutional authority of Congress over the domestic institutions of a Territory?" was a question to be answered partly in view of the nature and scope of the national Constitution, and partly in view of the legislative precedents from 1787 onwards. This was an interesting and vivifying line of study and discussion. Parallel with it ran the slavery question as a whole; for, although the Republican party denied to themselves any right or purpose to interfere with slavery in the States, Republican orators and writers did not confine themselves, in discussion, to "Slavery in the Territories," but dwelt also upon the economical, political, and moral features of slavery itself. Before the year 1860, although following other pursuits than politics, Mr. Garfield had possessed himself of all the points in that line of discussion, the Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, the KansasNebraska Act of 1854, the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, "Squatter Sovereignty," together with the points of inferior interest. He was a full master of the Republican argument, and had stated it many times over with much. power and eloquence. The Republican party applied its cherished principle to the Territories in the act of June 19, 1862, and then only slavery in the States remained to be dealt with.

Republican opposition to slavery before 1860, as announced in platforms, was an assertion of the right and duty of Congress to prohibit its spread. This assertion. the Democratic party opposed, at first on old-fashioned State Rights grounds; but afterwards the party divided. into those who asserted that the Constitution of its own

force carried slavery into the Territories, that Congress had nothing to do with it, and that the people .of the Territory even could not prohibit it until they came to form a State government, and those who asserted that the whole question was left to the people of the Territory, and that they could prohibit it either by a law of their local legislature or in the constitution of their State government (which was the "Squatter Sovereignty" doctrine of Mr. Douglas). The contest was, therefore, a revival, in a new form, of the old contest of national and local powers. Many Republicans of that day had been brought up in the Democratic party, but the original and the only original Republican doctrine readily assimilated with what are called "national views " of the

Federal government. As a matter of course the war gave the party a strong impulse in the same direction. How different the spirit and the course of the party would have been had there been no war, is a curious subject of speculation. Here it suffices to say that Mr. Garfield's political training up to 1861, as well as the native cast of his mind, gave him a predisposition in favor of Nationalism, and this predisposition the Rebellion greatly strengthened.

The Southern threat of Secession, which so long hung over the country, was not seriously regarded by Republicans until the winter of 1860-61. They did not believe there was going to be a war until war began; and then their most philosophical statesman, Mr. Seward, said it would be over in ninety days. But just so soon as the Southern demonstrations following the election of President Lincoln began to impress the North, and still more as time wore on and words gave way to blows, the whole Northern people, and especially Republicans,

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fell to studying the origin, history, and nature of our national institutions, just as the American Colonists on the verge of the Revolution, according to Edmund Burke, fell to reading Blackstone's Commentaries and other books of law.1 "How did the Union originate?" “What is the history of the Constitution?" "What is the nature of the Federal bond?" at once became common questions of absorbing interest. It was not suffi cient to oppose physical resistance to Secession; it must be shown that Secession had no support in either constitutional or natural law. Now all patriotic men began to cast about for the real elements of strength in the National Constitution, and for the lessons for the hour which real statesmen had taught. Mr. Garfield shared in this impulse to the full, and was at once led into the middle of a field of political reading and thought which before he had barely touched.

For more than a half-century the country had been moving steadily in one direction. Lord Macaulay wrote to an American in 1857, "There can, I apprehend, be no doubt that your institutions have, during the whole of the nineteenth century, been constantly becoming more Jeffersonian and less Washingtonian."2 "It is surely strange," he added, “that, while this process has been going on, Washington should have been exalted into a god, and Jefferson degraded into a demon." The English lord seems to have understood that Jefferson was

1 "I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations. The Colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England."-Speech on Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775.

2 Letter to H. S. Randall, Esq., dated Holly Lodge, Kensington, January 18, 1857. See Appendix to Harper's edition of Trevelyan's "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay."

the foil to Washington. Indeed, he says his American correspondent intimated as much to him. But an intelligent American need not be told that Jefferson was rather the foil to Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson believed in democracy and in a confederation; Hamilton favored class influence and representation, but beyond any man of his time grasped and set forth the idea of Nationalism. It was in the very beginning of the war that the people of the North, as never before, came to appreciate the fact stated by Guizot: "Hamilton must be classed among the men who have best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a government. . . . . There is not in the Constitution of the United States an element of order, of force, of duration, which he has not powerfully contributed to introduce into it, and to cause to predominate." In the year 1880, Mr. Garfield thus spoke of Hamilton:

"I cannot look upon this great assemblage, and these old veterans that have marched past us, and listen to the words of welcome from our comrade who has just spoken, without remembering how great a thing it is to live in this Union and be a part of it. This is New York; and yonder toward the Battery, more than a hundred years ago, a young student of Columbia College was arguing the ideas of the American Revolution and American Union against the un-American loyalty to monarchy of his college president and professors. By and by he went into the patriot army, was placed on the staff of Washington, to fight the battles of his country, and while in camp, before he was twenty-one years old, upon a drum-head he wrote a letter which contained every germ of the Constitution of the United States. That student, soldier, statesman, and great leader of thought, Alexander Hamilton, of New York, made this Republic glorious by his thinking, and left his lasting impress upon this the foremost State of the Union. And here on this island, the scene of his early triumphs, we gather to-night, soldiers of the new war, representing the same ideas of union,