It is not now the time to discuss Mr.
Choate's political preferences and opinions. No one who knew him well
can hesitate to pronounce his motives pure and patriotic. We could
not come to his conclusions on the policy and duty of our people at
the last Presidential election. Our duties to the Union forced us to
regard as paramount what he regarded as subsidiary. Our fear for the
Union sprang from other sources than his. But we believe he acted
from the highest convictions of duty, and he certainly exposed
himself with unflinching courage to obloquy and misinterpretation
when silence would have been easy and safe.
In what we have said of him as a lawyer we are sure that in every
essential respect we have not overstated or misstated his powers and
characteristics as they were known and conceded by lawyers and judges
in Massachusetts. We have confined ourselves mainly to his
jury-trials, because into them he threw the whole force and vitality of
his nature, and because we could thus more completely indicate the
variety of his accomplishments and the essential characteristics of
his genius and individuality. A knowledge of them is indispensable to
a just estimate of the man, and it must die with him and his hearers,
excepting only as it may be preserved by contemporaneous written
criticism and judgment, and by indeterminate and shadowy tradition.
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