perceptions, the candor of his opinions, and the lucid rhetoric of his judgments, as assuring his rank with the eminent judges of our own and the mother-country. But, in the most imposing part of the jurisdiction and jurisprudence of the court; in its dominion over all that belongs to the law of nations, whether occupied with the weighty questions of peace and war, and the multitudinous disturbances of public and private law which follow the change from one to the other; or with the complications of foreign intercourse and commerce with all the world, which the genius of our people is constantly expanding; in its control, also, of the lesser public law of our political system, by which we are a nation of republics, where the bounds of State and Federal authority need constant exploration, and require accurate and circumspect adjustment; in its final arbitrament on all conflicts and encroachments by which the great cooerdinate departments of the Government are to be confined to their appropriate spheres; in that delicate and superb supremacy of judicial reason whereby the Constitution confides to the deliberations of this court the determination, even, of the legality of legislation, and trusts it, nevertheless, to abstain itself from law-making--in all these transcendent functions of the tribunal the preparation and the adequacy of the Chief-Justice were unquestioned. Accordingly, we find in the few years of his service, before his decline in health, in the crowd of causes bred by the civil war, which pressed the court with novel embarrassments, and loaded it with unprecedented labors, that the Chief-Justice gave conspicuous evidence, in repeated instances, of that union of the faculties of a lawyer and a statesman, which alone can satisfy the exactions of this highest jurisdiction, unequaled and unexampled in any judicature in the world. To name these conspicuous causes merely, without unfolding them, would carry no impression; and time fails for any demonstrative criticism upon them. There are two passages in the judicial service of Mr. Chase which, attracting great attention and exciting some difference of opinion at the time of the transactions, invite a brief consideration at your hands.