Look now for one moment at a high and peculiar interest of the nation, the administration of justice. Perhaps no part of our system is regarded, by the enlightened sense of the country, with more pride and confidence. To this, indeed, all the other concerns of Government, all its complications of machinery are in a manner subordinate, since it is for the sake of justice that men come together in states and establish laws. What part of the Government can compare in importance, with the Federal Judiciary, that great balance-wheel of the Constitution, controlling the relations of the 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 judicial labors of Marshall, now departed, and in the immortal judgments of Story, who is still spared to us—_cerus in cœlum redeat_—a higher claim to admiration and gratitude than can be found in any triumph of battle. The expenses of the administration of justice throughout the United States, under the Federal Government, in 1842—embracing the salaries of the judges, the cost of juries, court-houses, and all officers thereof, in short, all the outlay by which justice, according to the requirements 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 the Army and Navy! Let me allude to one more _curiosity_ of waste. It appears, by a calculation founded on the expenses of the Navy, that the average cost of each gun, carried over the ocean, for one year, amounts to about fifteen thousand dollars; a sum sufficient to sustain 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 a few brief illustrations of the tax which the nations constituting the great Federation of civilization, and particularly 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. As we wearily climb, in this survey, from expenditure to expenditure, from waste to waste, we seem to pass beyond the region of ordinary calculation; Alps on Alps arise, on whose crowning heights of everlasting ice, far above the habitations of man, where no green thing lives, where no creature draws its breath, we behold the cold, sharp, flashing glacier of War.