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JEREMIAH MASON ROY ST. GEORGE STUBBS Winnipeg Somerset Maugham, whose career as a master of the art and craft of writing has been inspired by a passion for perfec- tion, confides, "Before I start writing a novel, I read Candide over again so that I may have in the back of my mind the touchstone of that lucidity, grace and wit". The lawyer, inspired by a similar passion, could not do better than to read an argument of Jeremiah Mason before beginning the preparation of a case. In Mason he will find a model in whom are combined qualities as admirable as those sterling qualities which Somerset Maugham admired in Voltaire. With such a model before his mind, his battle should be well begun. One of the giants of the American Bar in the infancy of his country, and an advocate whose name can be mentioned in the same breath as the names of the greatest advocates of any time or place, Jeremiah Mason is today almost a forgotten man. The reason for his neglect can be readily explained. His best energies were given to his labours in the law, and time deals harshly with the lawyer who makes his profession his first and last love, for it can find nothing tangible to seize. The lawyer's achievements are written in water. They must be supported by activity in other fields of endeavour if they are to be preserved for posterity. Mason's great contemporaries, Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, who still occupy front pews in the Temple of History, had a wholesome respect for him. They had reason to know his worth for they broke many a lance with him in the courts and counted it no disgrace to be unhorsed by so worthy a foe. "Of the present bar of the United States", said Daniel Webster when his own star was at its zenith, "I think I am able to form a pretty fair opinion, having an intimate personal knowledge of them in the local and federal courts; and this I can say, that I regard Jeremiah Mason as eminently superior to any other lawyer whom I ever met. I should rather, with my own experience (and I have had some pretty tough experi- ence with him), meet them all combined in a case, than to meet him alone and singlehanded . He was the keenest lawyer that I ever met or read about. If a man had Jeremiah Mason, and he did not get his case, no human ingenuity or learning could get it."

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Rufus Choate's opinion of Mason was equally high. Speaking to the Bar of the County pf Suffolk a few days after Mason's death, he said, "It seems to me, that one of the very greatest men whom this country has produced; a statesman among the foremost in a Senate, of which King, and Giles, and Gore, in the fullness of their strength and fame, were members; a jurist who would have filled the seat of Marshall as Marshall filled it ; of whom it maybe said, that, without ever holding judicial station, he was the author and finisher of the jurisprudence of a State; one whose intellect, wisdom, and uprightness gave him a control over the opinions of all the circles in which he lived and acted, of which we shall scarcely see another example, and for which this generation and the country are the better today: -such seems tome to have been the man who has just gone down to a timely grave." Jeremiah Mason was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, on 27th April, 1765. He came of fine New England stock. As Dr. Wendell Holmes once said, a man is -an omnibus in which all his ancestors are seated. Jeremiah Mason, like George Washington and many another of the giants of early American history, was hewn from the same rock as his ancestors but he was cut on a larger scale. In him their virtues were magnified and their talents carried to . a higher degree of perfection. Mason's childhood was lived in stirring times. Pulses beat fast with indignation and determined men asserted, " Millions for self-government But for .tribute never a cent." That feeble politician, Lord North, was doing his best to lose the proudest jewel in Britain's colonial crown. The stage was being set for the drama of the American Revolution. In his seventy-seventh year Mason wrote a fragment of autobiography in which he says. that his first definite recollec- tion was his memory of the excitement, brought into his life by the Battle of Lexington, fought when he was seven years old. The Revolution cast a direct shadow over his home for his father served in the Revolutionary Army as a colonel in com- mand of a company of minute ,men. During the troubled days when the Thirteen Colonies were struggling to become the masters of their own destiny, many things went by the boards. Education was one of the first to be affected. It was neglected for more immediate problems-such as keeping the wolf from the door and a roof

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overhead . Until he was fourteen Jeremiah Mason had but nine months schooling, and that under teachers who should have been at school themselves. In 1782, with his entry as a pupil at Master Tisdale's School in Lebanon, his education was put on a full-time schedule for the first time. Two years later he was admitted as a Freshman at Yale College. In those less favoured days only those who wanted an education got one and no time was lost in the process of getting it. University courses were not designed to meet the lowest common denominator of a nondescript lot of students. A student's first reason for being at college was to eat of the fruits of the tree of knowledge. Football, and such delights of later years, had not yet come into their own. Mason had industry and a powerful mind. Driven by an inner compulsion, he made the best of his opportunity at Yale to fill in the most obvious gaps in his knowledge. His best subjects were Latin and Mathematics and his worst, strange to say, was English. Try as he did, he never completely mastered the mysteries of English grammar. Discipline came too late. Careless habits of expression had been confirmed by long usage. He never became a polished orator, but nature gave him a force- ful personality and assiduous practice developed in him great powers of speech, which were refreshed and enriched by the frequent use of idiom and the apt colloquial expression. Little blessed with the soft graces of speech himself, he had no patience with the rich tapestries of eloquence that so delighted his word-intoxicated friend, Rufus Choate. He believed that the matter of a speech is the all-important thing. -In a letter of advice he wrote to his daughter, Mary E. Mason, while she was at school, he gives his declaration of faith on the theme of getting one's thoughts across : "After reading and thinking on the subject on which you are to write, express your ideas, in the first instance, rapidly and boldly, as they occur. The great object is to secure the ideas; this must be done without much attention to their dress. You may afterwards, at leisure, dress them in the most appropriate language you can, and if necessary, new-model the sentences. This however is a matter of minor importance. If you have good strong ideas, you will soon learn to express them well enough. In attempting composition you must not suffer yourself to be restrained by diffidence, or false delicacy, but exert boldly all the powers you have." Iri other words-catch your rabbit before you put the pot on the stove to make rabbit soup.

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At commencement exercises, 'when he was graduated from Yale, Jeremiah Mason gave the first demonstration of his ability to handle himself in a war of words. As his part in the exercises he was assigned the task of debating that perennial subject of debate : Is society ever justified in using the weapon of capital punishment in dealing with a criminal offender? He was arguing against the spirit of the times for the ancient precedent of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth had not yet been overruled by the verdict of science. Borrowing his points from Beccaria, the father of modern criminology, who was having a great vogue at the time, he dressed them in the plain garments of his own vigorous speech and won the debate hands down. His heart had been in his brief for he did not believer in capital punishment. As a boy of ten he had witnessed a public hanging and, as he once confided to his daughter, he could not go to bed for years without thinking of the awful spectacle that had shocked his youthful eyes. While a student at Yale, Mason formed the habit of drop- ping into the courts in New Haven whenever he felt that he could steal an hour from his books. The courts were then a focal point in the community, occupying the place in the public affections now shared by the radio, the motion-picture- houses and the sport stadiums. Lawyers played an influential role in community life. And they played it well. Individuals all, they lived in a society that allowed them plenty of room to expand their personalities . Their jagged edges were not rubbed smooth by the cramped habits of life that today hold-us in bondage. Mason's visits to the courts awoke in him the desire to become a lawyer. That desire was stimulated by the belief that the law was his chosen profession. There was a strain of the sentimentalist in him and, having decided on a career at the bar, he conceived it to be the highest calling of man. He was not like the merchant who had no faith in his own wares. Mr. Justice Holmes' eloquent tribute to the profession of the bar would have struck a responsive note in his imagination : "And what a profession it is!" said Mr. Justice Holmes, one of the best representatives the profession has had in its long history. "Nd doubt everything is interesting when it-is understood and seen in its connection with the rest of things. Every calling is great when greatly pursued. But what other gives such scope to realize the spontaneous energy of one's soul? In what other does 'one plunge so deep in the stream of life-so share its passions, its battles, its despair, its triumphs, both as witness and actor?'.'

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Mason began the study of law in difficult times. A war that had dragged its weary length through the months and the years had wasted the resources of the country and diverted into unproductive channels the energies of the people. When peace reigned once more in the land the nation's soul was in good health, for it had maintained its integrity, but its body was sick with exhaustion and needed a long period of convalescence to regain its vigour. The standard of living was pitifully low. Fortunate was the man who could provide his family with more than the bare necessities of life. Lawyers worked hard and long and were lucky if they could make both ends meet. But, per- haps, that made them better lawyers, for it was an age of good lawyers. There is the high authority of Lord Eldon for the proposition that a little starvation never does a lawyer any harm. Jeremiah Mason embarked on his legal studies in Vermont, but because that State was then in a condition of extreme poverty he made up his mind that he would hang out his shingle elsewhere as soon as he had qualified himself for the bar. He was called to the bars of Vermont and New Hampshire in 1791. At the age of twenty-three he bought a law practice and a hundred acres of land at Westmoreland, New Hampshire. In this small community he found himself without intellectual companionship. Forced to fall back on his own resources, he spent long hours with his law books and, while wrestling in solitude with legal conundrums, he stored aretentive memory with a vast fund of knowledge that was to stand him in good stead later in his career. Mason began to make progress in his profession slowly. His first case may well have convinced him that he had not mistaken his calling. "My first cause", he says in his auto biographical note, "was an appeal from the judgment of a justice of the peace in the Common Pleas. Judge Newcombe, an old practising lawyer, had then lately been appointed Chief Justice. I was for the plaintiff and on introducing my evidence, the Chief Justice ruled against me on my own evidence. I insisted on arguing the case to the jury. Mr. West, who was for the defendant, declined to argue it after so decided an opinion in his favour. I went on with my argument; the Chief Justice charged strongly against me, but the jury gave a verdict in my favour. This was final and conclusive, the court then having no power to set aside verdicts of juries." After three years in Westmoreland Mason sought a wider field for his energies in Walpole, a town three miles distant.

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By 1797 he had so added to his stature as a lawyer that he felt justified in moving to Portsmouth, then a center of great activity. Portsmouth had a strong bar but he soon became one of its staunchest pillars. Mason always took a modest view of his own abilities. When he was beginning to feel Walpole too small for him he was . advised by no less a person than that yeasty . character, Aaron Burr, to try his fortunes in New York, but he 'did not take the advice, doubting his ability to get himself established in New York legal circles. In 1799 Jeremiah Mason was married to Mary Means, a woman of great understanding and considerable talent, who shared him with his profession for almost fifty years. He was a real family man. After his daily labours in the law there was no place more attractive to him than his own fireside and no company more 'congenial to him than that of his own., family. He took a real interest in his children as they made their appear- ance on the scene of his- domestic happiness and, devoted as he was to the law, their welfare never had to take second place to his profession. , In 1802 Mason was appointed Attorney-General of his State -a position he held for threë yeats with honour to himself and credit to his profession. He took a'sound view with regard to his duties as prosecutor. He conceived a criminal trial not as a contest in which two antagonists struggled for victory, but (to borrow the words of Mr. Justice R,iddell) as "an investigation to be . conducted without feeling or animus on the part of the prosecution with the single view of determining the truth". This is not to say that he was not an effective prosecutor. As Daniel Webster said of him, "His official course produced exactly the ends it was designed to do. The honest felt safe ; but there was a trembling and fear 'in the evil disposed, that the transgressed law would be vindicated." While following the letter of criminal procedure, Mason never abused its spirit. He knew, only too well, as a later attorney for the people, Arthur Train, has put it, that "theoretical rights may be abused until in practice they become wrongs, and that a prosecutor can be as unfair as a crook, while remaining technically within legal rules". , Jeremiah Mason ran his law office on a strictly business basis. Casual callers and gossipers dying to unburden them- selves of the latest news were not made welcome. His office was a place strictly for work. He attended to all business immedi-

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ately it came to him, never putting off for tomorrow what he could do today, though it kept him at his desk until midnight. He always did his own spadework, not having that happy faculty of being able to delegate routine work to others. He would fritter away his time on matters that any law student could have handled. He was a general doing the work of a private soldier and, while he realized it, yet he could not overcome his habit of putting complete trust only in himself in so far as his professional business was concerned. John P. Lord, who began his career as a student in Mason's office, has left us a picture of him. After commending Mason for his thoroughness and dispatch in attending to his work, and paying tribute to his scrupulous honesty, Lord says, "Mr. Mason magnified his position by exerting all his influence to prevent petty litigation, or commencement of suits upon mere quibbles, or for the purpose of procrastination, or to gratify personal vindictiveness, or retaliation. He was eminently a peacemaker, and was instrumental in healing many wounds, and in preventing the useless expenditure of money, by a set of litigants, who were in the habit of annoying lawyers, to aid them in schemes of malice or revenge." Would that the same could be said of all lawyers! In 1807 Daniel Webster, in the full pride of his genius, searching for newer and larger fields, moved from Boscawen to Portsmouth. Soon he and Mason were on opposing sides in every important case tried in New Hampshire. An admirer of theirs, while waiting in a Portsmouth court- room for court to open, overheard this dialogue between them. "Which side are you on in this case?" said Mason to Webster. "I don't know," came the reply, "take your choice." In their first conflict, a murder trial, Webster substituted at a late hour for the prosecuting attorney. Recalling to memory the trial some years later, Mason paid high tribute to Webster: "He broke upon me like a thunder shower in July, sudden, por- tentous, sweeping all before it. It was the first case in which he appeared at our bar; a criminal prosecution in which I had arranged a very pretty defence, as against the Attorney-General, Atkinson, who was able enough in his way, but whom I knew very well how to take. Atkinson being absent, Webster con- ducted the case for him, and turned, in the most masterly manner, the line of my defences, carrying with him all but one

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of the jurors, so that I barely saved my client by my best exertions." Henry Cabot Lodge, in his biography of Daniel Webster, quotes these generous words of Mason's-and then adds the shrewd comment, "With all his admiration for his young antag onist, however, one cannot help noticing that the generous and modest but astute counsel for the defence ended by winning his case". Jeremiah Mason's methods with a jury were in harmony with his temperament . He was always down to earth, on a level with the ordinary, man. He did not talk poetry to men who knew only prose in their daily lives. f The Duke of Wellington once said, "When Scarlett (Sir James . Scarlett, later Lord Abinger, Lord, Chief Baron of, the Exchequer) is addressing the jury there are thirteen jurymen". The words might have been said with equal truth of Mason, who belonged to the same school of forthright advocacy as did Scarlett. Mason would stand so close to the jury box that he could have reached out his hand and touched the foreman's nose. He talked to a jury as he would have talked to twelve men across his office table. Subordinating everything to clear expression, he used short concrete words, homely illustrations and arguments straight from the shoulder-such as made no calls on the imagination. Above all he never talked too long. He interpreted the first sign of restlessness in the jury-box as an indication that some juror was asking himself, "When is this fellow going to stop?" An enthusiastic fan of his, Rev. J. H. Morison, in a letter to one of the great lawyer's sons, speaks of a case which affords a good illustration of Mason's forthright advocacy. "I remember a case", writes Morison, "in which an attempt was made to break a will by proving mental incompetefïcy on the part of the testator. The testimony, if I remember right, was very strong and not easily to be got rid of. But Mr. Mason's one point was that the testator `had mind enough to know whom he loved'. Clause after clause of the opposing argument was examined. Evidence from different witnesses was reviewed and dissected ; but all in reference to this one point, which remained in spite of all that, could be proved to the contrary. Whatever might be said in regard to the strength or clearness of the testator's mental faculties in other respects, .`he had mind enough to know whom he loved' . The whole argument rested on that.

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The jury could hardly retain anything else in their minds. The weight of reason and of evidence was nothing so long as it left that point untouched. The verdict, of course, was for his client." Mason owed no small measure of his success as an advocate to the speed with which he could put two and two together and get the right answer. Francis L. Wellman, in his volume "The Art of Cross-Examination", cites a good story illustrating how Mason's shrewdness in sizing up a situation enabled him to trap a dishonest witness. The witness spoke in his examination-in- chief of an admission which he alleged that he had heard Mason's client make. He told his story with a wealth of convincing details. The admission, if believed, would have cut the ground from under Mason's case. Mason's sixth sense told him that the witness was lying but he did not know how he could prove it. In his cross-examination he approached the witness warily. He took him over his story again. The witness repeated it parrot- like, using from start to finish the exact words he had used when telling it in his evidence-in-chief. Suddenly Mason pounced on him like a hawk. Pointing an accusing finger at him, he cried, "Let's see that paper you've got in your waistcoat pocket". Spellbound, the witness acted mechanically, drawing a paper from his pocket and handing it, to Mason. On this paper, in the handwriting of the opposing lawyer, was written the witness's story, word for word, as he had told it twice. "How under the sun did you know that paper was there?" Mason was asked. "Well", he replied, "I thought he gave that part of his testimony just as if he'd heard it, and I noticed every time he repeated it he put his hand to his waistcoat pocket, and then let it fall again when he got through. . . ." Jeremiah Mason excelled in the rapid cut and thrust of forensic combat. His presence of mind never deserted him in court. He was once opposed by Ichabod Bartlett, a lawyer with a great reputation in his day, who produced an affidavit from a man well-known to Mason. Mason was criticizing this affidavit most unmercifully when Bartlett, in a playful mood, leaned over to him and said, "There is a report that the witness (who took the affidavit) is dead". Believing that Bartlett was serious, Mason trembled with emotion and Bartlett, thinking he had overstepped the mark, added, "But there is some reason to suppose that it is a mistake".

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"Thank God for that! Thank God for that! The man who gave that affidavit ought to have time for repentance", was Mason's lightning retort. Jeremiah Mason might have had high judicial honours had he been ambitious for them. In 1816 Governor Plumer wrote to him suggesting that he put forward his name for the, office of Chief Justice of the Superior Court of New Hampshire. "It is an office worthy your ambition, and one I hope yon will hold till you are removed to the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States", said Plumer. But Mason in a polite letter advanced personal reasons for his refusal to seek the office. Jeremiah Mason had expected great things of Portsmouth but Portsmouth 'did not answer his expectations. As early as January, 1817, in a letter so . Christopher Gore, he gives a. hint of his discontent. "My winter courts are just commencing", he wrote, "in which I expect to be shut up for the ensuing- five weeks. - I do not greatly . dislike the labor of itself, but, unfortunately, the subjects of litigation in our courts are for the most part too trivial and unimportant to~ excite much interest." Instead of developing into an important metropolis, as Mason had anticipated that it would, Portsmouth began to . lose ground to more aggressive centres. In Portsmouth he' was a giant frog-in a small puddle. His position drew to him the envy'of many of his small-minded fellow-townsmen. He was not a paragon of all the virtues. And the blemishes of a man who lives constantly in' the public eye, as he did, cannot be hidden. He, had a sharp tongue and was not sparing in criticism, and over the years he left behind a trail of bad friends. In 1832 a. combination of circumstances led him to seek new pastures in Boston. The calendar was a constant reminder to him that he was getting on in years but there was as yet no waning of his talents. Boston was then the hub of the New World. It was impossible to throw a stone on Boston Common without hitting half a dozen lawyers of first rank,- but Mason became an imme- diate success at the Boston Bar. Most of his time was taken up with counsel work. Because of his record as a verdict-gettei° many of his brother lawyers gave their difficult legal problems into his care. Commenting on Mason's volume of work, his memorialist, George Stillman Hillard, points out that Mason appears as senior counsel in twenty-six cases reported in the fourteenth to the twenty-third volumes of Pickering's Reports. MAson,was a good lawyer as well as a great advocate. He was in his element in any tribunal, equally at home in making

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a legal argument before an appeal court or in presenting some human problem and its easy solution to a jury. In court he went on the assumption that "it is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right". He never wavered from the course of his argument. When once he had made up his mind there was no room left for doubt. "I may be wrong, I sometimes am, but I never doubt", once said Sir George Jessel. Mason belonged to the same tribe of "Non-doubters" as did Jessel. Judge Joseph Story's dedication to Jeremiah Mason of his commentary on Equity Pleading (first published in 1838) testifies to Mason's worth as a master lawyer. "Your own enviable distinction", says Judge Story, "so long held in the first rank of the profession, and supported by an ability and depth and variety of learning, which have had few equals, and to which no one can bear a more prompt and willing testimony than myself, would alone entitle you to a far higher tribute than any I can bestow. I well know that I speak but the common voice of the profession on this subject ; for they have well understood the vigor and the weight of that lucid argumentation, which has spoken in language for the cause, and not merely for its ornament." Perhaps Mason's greatest legal argument was made before the trial court in the Dartmouth College Case. He did not stay with this case from beginning to end. Armed with Mason's brief, Daniel Webster argued the case before the Supreme Court of the United States and with becoming modesty said that the credit for his success went to Mason, whose arguments, as he phrased it, "he clumsily put together". Mason appeared in but few cases that attracted great popular attention. One of his few causes cél6bres was the Avery trial. Rev. Ephraim K. Avery, a Methodist clergyman, was indicted for murder before the Supreme Court of Rhode Island in May, 1833. In a determined effort to keep its reputation free from blemishes the Methodist association briefed Jeremiah Mason for the defence. Mason developed the theory that the woman alleged to have been murdered had in fact committed suicide. The strain of the trial, which dragged on for twenty- seven days, told heavily on him. He was no longer a young man and the end of each day's work found him exhausted. He left word with the deskman of the hotel at which he was staying that on no condition must he be disturbed at night, since he could not carry on unless his energies were restored by

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a sound sleep. -Despite his instructions, he was awakened one night by the deskman who ushered into his room a Minister who claimed to have an important message bearing on the trial. "Well, what is it", said Mason, shaking the sleep from his eyes. "I had retired to rest about an hour ago", said the preacher, "after having commended this case, Brother Avery, and every- body connected with it to the throne of Grace, in fervent prayer that the truth might be elicited; and I do not know how long I had slept, when I was awakened by an audible vôice. I- saw an angel standing right at the foot of the bed, just as distinctly as I see you; and in a very distinct tone of voice, it said; `Mr. Avery is innocent of this crime', and immediately vanished. ®f this, sir, I am ready to take my oath." "You yourself saw this angel?" asked Mason. "Yes." "And he immediately vanished?" "He did." "Do you think there is a possibility of seeing him again?" "It may be." "Well, if you should happen to see him, you just ask him how. he, could prove it." But Mason did not have to subpoena- an angel to help him win the case. After listening to his three-dimensional advocacy, the jury acquitted his client. It is related that sometime after the trial a friend of Mason's asked him - whether he thought that Avery was guilty. "Upon my word, I never thought of it in that light before", replied Mason, who never conceived it as any part of his duty as an advocate to pass judgment on his client. He knew that a client was entitled to say to him, in the classic words o Baron Bramwell, "I want your advocacy, not your judgment. I prefer that of the court." While he was more than an ordinary, run-of-the-mill poli- tician, Jeremiah Mason never attained the full stature of a statesman. He served in the Senate of the United States from 1813 to 1817, an important period in the history of his country, but did not play the prominent part in the Senate that he might have done had his heart been in politics as it was in his profession. He made two important speeches, one in February, 1814, on the Embargo, and the other in December, 1815, on à Conscription Bill then before the Senate. Now that the life has

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gone out of the issues with which he dealt these speeches are hardly readable without a fee. Daniel Webster thought well of Mason as a Senator. In a letter to his brother, Ezekiel, written on 28th March, 1814, Webster says, "Mr. Mason is growing to be a great man. He ranks in the Senate, I think, next to King and Gore." But Mason disappointed the "godlike" Daniel. The statesman was never hatched from the chrysalis of the politician, because Mason could not get interested in his work at Washington. The constant theme in his letters to his wife is his dislike of political life. In July, 1813, during his first session, he wrote to her : "Public affairs are certainly very gloomy. This I expected. The prospect of change and amendment is quite as promising as I expected. My situation personally is, on the whole, as good as I could expect. The people whom I respect most seem to be disposed to treat me well enough. Were it not for this ugly absence from all I value, I should probably be pretty well satisfied. I travel home twenty times a day to see what you are about, and always find that much more interesting than anything doing here." The man who longs for his own fireside cannot make the affairs of the state his first concern. Mason wanted to be home. He felt an exile in Washington. "The prospect before me is not very promising", he wrote to his wife in December, 1813. "I fear the winter will be long and tedious to me. I intend to engage as soon as I can in study and reading, and perhaps a little in, the business of the Senate. I really fear that I shall not be able to find employment tolerably interesting to occupy my time. All the hours I used to devote to domestic duties and pleasures are to be otherwise disposed of. I shall often think of you, my dear Mary, and our children, around the parlor fireside. May the Author of good protect you and them and grant that we may again meet in health and happiness." Could such a letter have come from the pen of a man who joyed in the thrill of political battle? ' Mason resigned from the Senate in 1817, glad to lay down his political arms to devote his full working hours to his profession. In 1820 he became a member of the New Hampshire Legis- lature, where he sat for several years, devoting his chief energies to a revision of the State Code. In politics Jeremiah Mason was a Federalist. He filled his political dipper at the fountain of the aristocratic Alexander

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Hamilton, not at that of the great democrat Thomas Jefferson. The world as it was suited him well enough. He was one of the strong for whom provision is always made. A man who welcomed "the . warm cocoon of cosy thought", he had no curiosity as to how the other nine-tenths of the people live. He did not appreciate the debt he owed to the past and was under obligation to pay to the future. During his public career he gave no hint that he was aware of the embarrassing fact that "this sad bad world Is given men unfinished and left to men To mold it better". G. S. Hillard well says in his Memoir of Jeremiah Mason : "In all free countries there are two natural parties,the party of progress and the party of stability ; and the history of every free country is a .record of the struggle between these two parties. Mr. Mason belonged to the latter of these parties. By nature and education alike he was a conservative . Anywhere, and under any conditions, he would have been such. In England he would have been a strong but not a bigoted tory. By his natural instincts he was averse to innovation, and inclined to walk in the old ways." Jeremiah Mason gathered no immortal palms in politics because he was too much the conformist, not enough the rebel. 'He believed ' in accepting the ills we have, rather than take a chance on exchanging them for others that we know not of. He was a life-long disciple of the god-of-things-as-they-are and, as Lord Tweedsmuir, who could not have been accused with justification of being even pale pink in colour, once said, "I am inclined to think myself that if a man has not been a revolu- tionary at some time .in his life he, will never come to much. . . ." Jeremiah Mason was a commanding figure of a man. G. S. Hillard describes his personal appearance thus: `Like Saul, the son, of I£ish, he towered in, stature above all his fellows. First in Portsmouth, and afterwards in Boston, he was the tallest,man who walked the streets. In his prime, when he stood erect, his height was six feet and six ;inches; though in declining life, by reason of a slight habitual stoop, he appeared less tall than he really was. His frame, slender in youth, expanded as he grew older, and in his later years assumed a bulk proportioned to his height. His head, well formed and really large, seemed small 'in comparison with the size of his person. His movements were slow; he used no gestures in speaking ; and as far as the body was concerned, his habits

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were inactive. His powerful constitution and temperate habits ensured him long continued and vigorous health without regular exercise or any particular rules as to diet. He was capable of severe and protracted toil to the last. Few men of sixty-five could have borne as he did the exhausting strain and pressure of the Avery trial. It is not work that. kills, but worry ; and Mr. Mason's was one of those happy organizations that burn none of the oil of life in worrying or fretting." Mason's great size was a sensitive point with him. He was once invited by Daniel Webster to visit a Shaker village. The Shakers, whose secluded lives did not bring them into contact with many people, stared at him in open amazement. "Thou must be Jeremiah Mason of Portsmouth", said one of them. "Friend Lucas saw Mr. Mason in Portsmouth, and since he returned he has talked of nothing but his extraordinary stature. We saw thee come in, and we thought thou must be he." "Yes", Mason replied, "I am Jeremiah Mason but I did not come here to be insulted. Come Webster, let's leave this place." Webster tried to pacify his friend and suggested that they accept an invitation to stay to lunch. "No!" cried Mason, who was not going to exhibit himself as a show piece to a colony of curious Shakers, "don't talk to me; come along, I did not come here to be insulted by a pack of broadbrims!" On his seventieth birthday Jeremiah Mason laid down his forensic weapons. Thereafter he never appeared in court but contented himself with chamber work. He knew when to quit and was fortunate enough to be able to quit when the time came. He spent a graceful old age, chatting with his friends and living his life over again in the lives of his children. He was never a great reader. His interests were narrow and his tastes simple. There was no cloud on his horizon. He did not concern himself with the troubles of the world. The delights of philosophy left him cold. Devoutly religious, he did not have an honest doubt as to the mystery of life and the destiny of man. His simple faith answered those eternal questions, whence? whither? and why? to his complete satisfaction. Death overtook him in October, 1848, when he was in his 81st year. As that marvellous man Daniel Webster, who always had the right words for the right occasion, said, "Mr. Mason died in old age ; not by a violent stroke from the hand of death, not by a sudden rupture of the ties of nature, but by a gradual wearing out of his constitution".