The clear and sharp, merciless and logical veracity with which he discriminates between the solemn judgment of a tribunal and a stump speech from the bench,--the startling narration of decisions and statutes, practice and precedent, condensed into a few of the closing pages of the Oration, with which the discussion read by Chief Justice Taney in the famous case of Dred Scott is confronted and exposed,--are among the greater merits of this elaborate and able discourse. It must have required of one not in the arena of political strife, who for a large part of his manhood has occupied himself abroad in the studies of an intelligent scholar and a patriotic American, somewhat of self-denial, to throw away the certainty of almost universal cheers for his performance, by incurring the displeasure of some of his audience and many of his countrymen. It was not, however, in the interest of any opinion of African slavery that the case of Scott was here referred to. It was in the interest of republican liberty everywhere, endangered by all departures in the model republic of the world from fundamental principles of good government, and all the more perilled in proportion to the station, quality, and character of the active offender. And Mr. Sumner was right. The truth of history, the law of this land, and of all lands where there is any law which marks a boundary between legal right and despotic usurpation, unite to denounce, and will forever condemn, the judicial magistrate whose great name is tarnished and whose "great office" is degraded by this political _pronunciamento_, uttered from the loftiest judicial place in America. Stripped of verbiage and technicalities, the case is within the humblest comprehension. The chief justice and a majority of his associates held that Dred Scott, who sued his master for his freedom in the Federal court, had been already legally declared to be the slave of that same master by the highest court of the State of Missouri, in which State Scott resided at the time. They held that this decision of the Missouri court was binding on all other tribunals; and that the Federal court had no authority to reverse it, even if wrong. The _merits_ of the cause then before the court were thus conclusively disposed of, whether the decision be regarded as bearing on the main issue between the parties, or on the plea in abatement filed by the defendant, avowing that Scott was not a _citizen_ of Missouri,--an averment, if true, fatal to his standing in the Federal court,--since its jurisdiction of the cause depended on the citizenship of the litigants. In a word, if he was a _slave_, he was no _citizen_, If he was the slave of Sanford, his doom was fixed, his dream of rights dissolved. If the decision of the Missouri court was finally binding, the functions of the Federal tribunal were at an end.