And of the cause this must be said and agreed by all, that there was never one of which a court could take cognizance in America, England, or the world so utterly evil and infamous as that of Slavery in the United States. Did he realize its extent? Yes, there were "few freedmen compared with the slaves," say only sixty thousand out of seven hundred thousand in 1789. He fully realized that, in repudiating the promise made for those seven hundred thousand, a pledge made with the most solemn appeal to man and to God, he utterly destroyed the rights and hopes of four million men. He knew he was deciding, for a vast empire, weal or woe; and he knew it was woe, or he had no sense of justice. And his motives? He was not venal, not corrupt, not a respecter of persons. But there is something bad besides venality, corruption, and personal partiality. The worst of motives is disposition to serve the cause of evil. The country knows, the world will declare, none served it so well. But was he conscious of serving it? Yes,--unless the traitors so eagerly sought to put all these interests under his jurisdiction without motive,--unless his eager and unnecessary, and, as was declared and is now agreed, assumed jurisdiction over it, his "far-seeing" care and untiring defence of them, their appeal to his decisions, were all mistakes,--unless all these, and his manner, their motives, and the assured results, coincided so as by the law of chances was impossible,--he was conscious. To deny it is to say that he was imbued with the spirit of evil. The world knows by what means he assumed to settle these questions. We have seen something of the nature of his arguments. With these, too, men are somewhat familiar, and by these let them judge of him as a jurist. There is not in them all one faint recognition of the axioms of law,--one position founded on the laws of nature or the rules of eternal justice and the right,--one notice of the great primal rules laid down by all jurists and great judges of ancient and modern times, or of the precepts of religion by which any magistrate in a Christian land must expect to be governed, or to be held infamous forever. Nay, more: he does not recognize at all those fundamental principles of the Constitution and Declaration which are stated in plain terms in the first lines of both. He did worse than torture and pervert language: he reversed its meaning. He denied the undoubted facts of history. He denied the settled truths of science. He slandered the memory of the founders of the government and framers of the Declaration. He was ready to cover the most glorious page of the history of his country with infamy, and insulted the intelligence and virtue of the civilized world.