If I were asked to name the man to whom the colored people of this country, who were slaves, or were liable to become slaves, are under the greatest obligation for their freedom, I would unhesitatingly say Salmon Portland Chase.

If I were asked to name the man who was the strongest and most useful factor in the Government during the great final contest that ended in the emancipation of the black man, I would say Salmon Portland Chase.

In expressing the opinions above given, no reproach for Abraham Lincoln, nor for any of the distinguished members of his Cabinet, is intended or implied. Inferiority to Salmon P. Chase was not a disgrace. Physically he rose above all his official associates, which was no discredit to them, and in much the same way he towered intellectually and administratively. His was the most trying, the most difficult position, in the entire circle of public departments. It was easy to get men to fight the battles of the union if there was money to pay them. It was easy to furnish ships and arms and supplies in sufficient quantity, notwithstanding the terrible drain of the greatest of civil wars, as long as the funds held out. Everything depended on the treasury. Failure there meant irretrievable disaster. It would not answer to have any serious mistakes in that quarter, and in fact no fatal mistakes were there made. In all other departments there were failures and blunders, but the financial department met every emergency and every requisition. Chase's financial policy it was that carried the country majestically through the war, and that afterwards paid the nation's debts.

There is a circumstance that has not been mentioned, as far as the writer knows, by any of Mr. Chase's biographers, which seems to him to be significant and worth referring to. During the Civil War, Walter Bagehot was editor of the Economist, the great English financial journal. His opinion in financial matters was regarded as the highest authority. It was accepted as infallible. He discussed the plans of Mr. Chase with great elaborateness and great severity. He predicted that they were all destined to failure, and proved this theoretically to his own satisfaction and the satisfaction of many others. The result showed that Mr. Chase was right all the time, and the great English economist was wrong.

The entrance of such a man into the Abolitionist movement marked an era in its history. It was the thing most needed. He gave it a leader who, of all men then living, was most competent for leadership. From that time he was its Moses.

The greatest service rendered to the Abolition cause by Salmon P. Chase was in pushing it forward on political lines. There was a contest for the mastery of the Government from the hour he took command. The movement was to be slow, sometimes halting and apparently falling back, in some respects insignificant, in all respects desperate, but there was to be no permanent defeat and no compromise.

The espousal of Abolitionism by Mr. Chase was a remarkable circumstance. He was not an enthusiast like Garrison and Lundy and many other Anti-Slavery pioneers, but precisely the opposite. He was cold-blooded and cool-headed, a deliberate and conservative man. His speeches were described as giving light but no heat. His sympathies were seemingly weak, but his sense of justice was immense. Apparently, he opposed slavery because it was wrong rather than because it was cruel. He had a big body, a big head, and a big conscience, the combination making a strong man and a good fighter.

That he did, in fact, sympathize with the slaves was shown by his professional work in their behalf, more particularly in pleading without fee or other reward the cases of escaped fugitives in the courts. So numerous were his engagements in this regard that his antagonists spoke of him sneeringly as the "Attorney-General for runaway niggers." Upon some of his Anti-Slavery cases he bestowed an immense amount of work. His argument in the case of Van Zant—the original of Van Tromp in Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,—an old man who was prosecuted and fined until he was financially ruined for giving a "lift" in his farm wagon to a slave family on its way to Canada, was said at the time to have been the most able so far made in the Supreme Court of the United States. That and other similar utterances by Mr. Chase were published for popular reading, and were widely distributed by friends of the cause.

It is possible that, in performing this arduous labor, Mr. Chase, who was not without personal ambition, was able, with his great native sagacity, to foresee, although it must have been but dimly, the possibilities of political development and official promotion, but at the same time, for the same reason, he could the more clearly realize the wearisome, heart-breaking struggle that was before him.

It was an enormous sacrifice that he made. Journeymen printers and saddlers, like Garrison and Lundy, who had never had as much as one hundred dollars at one time in their lives, and who had no social position and no influential kinsfolks, had little to lose. But it was very different with Chase. He had a profession that represented great wealth. He had distinguished and aristocratic family connections. He had a high place in society. All these he risked and largely lost.

In speaking of his sacrifices at that time in a subsequent letter to a friend, he wrote:

"Having resolved on my political course, I devoted all the time and means I could command to the work of spreading the principles and building up the organization of the party of constitutional freedom then inaugurated. Sometimes, indeed, all I could do seemed insignificant, while the labors I had to perform, and the demand upon my very limited resources by necessary contributions, taxed severely all my abilities."

The writer hereof was a witness to one incident that showed something of the los............