Turn now to a high and peculiar interest of the nation, the administration of justice. Perhaps no part of our system is regarded with more pride and confidence, especially by the enlightened sense of the country. To this, indeed, all other concerns of Government, with all its complications of machinery, are in a manner subordinate, since it is for the sake of justice that men come together in communities and establish laws. What part of the Government can compare in importance with the National Judiciary, that great balance-wheel of the Constitution, controlling the relations of the several States to each other, the legislation of Congress and of the States, besides private interests to an incalculable amount? Nor can the citizen who discerns the true glory of his country fail to recognize in the immortal judgments of MARSHALL, now departed, and of STORY, who is still spared to us--_serus in coelum redeat!_--a higher claim to admiration and gratitude than can be found in any triumph of battle. The expenses of this great department under the National Government, in 1842, embracing the cost of court-houses, the salaries of judges, the pay of juries, and of all the law officers throughout the United States, in short, all the outlay by which justice, according to the requirement of Magna Charta, is carried to every man's door, amounted to $560,990,--a larger sum than is usually appropriated for this purpose, but how insignificant, compared with the cormorant demands of Army and Navy! Let me allude to one more curiosity of waste. By a calculation founded on the expenses of the Navy it appears that the average cost of each gun carried over the ocean for one year amounts to about fifteen thousand dollars,--a sum sufficient to maintain ten or even twenty professors of Colleges, and equal to the salaries of all the Judges of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts and the Governor combined! * * * * * Such are illustrations of that tax which nations constituting the great Federation of Civilization, including our own country, impose on the people, in time of profound peace, for no permanent productive work, for no institution of learning, for no gentle charity, for no purpose of good. Wearily climbing from expenditure to expenditure, from waste to waste, we seem to pass beyond the region of ordinary measurement; Alps on Alps arise, on whose crowning heights of everlasting cold, far above the habitations of man, where no green thing lives, where no creature draws breath, we behold the sharp, icy, flashing glacier of War.