Thomas Chandler Haliburton

THE author of Sam Slick has suffered some loss in fair appreciation by the very success of his best known book. The avidity with which readers of The Clockmaker adopted the central figure in bat satirical work as a type of the Yankee people, and their enjoyment of his keen sayings, caused them to overlook the prime intention of his creator; and so thoroughly has Judge Haliburton been identified, in the minds of the reading public, with this typical character that his more serious work as a publicist has been disregarded by all but a few. Yet, of late, he has not been without honor even in his own country. In 1884, a society having for its object the development of Canadian literature was founded at the university town of Windsor, N. S., the birthplace of Judge Haliburton, and the seat of his Alma Mater, King’s College, with which the society is affiliated. It was named The Haliburton in his honor, and its first publication was an essay on his works and characteristics, by the present writer, from which some quotations are made in this article. Of late years lectures upon the judge’s works have not been uncommon in Canada, and some of his yarns have been republished in the newspapers, a réchauffé of one winning a prize in Halifax in 1885.

The existing biographical sketches of Haliburton are not only meagre, but also full of errors, some of which are actuary grotesque. Allibone, following the British Annual Register for 1865, confuses the author with his creation, Sam Slick, and states that Haliburton, “ in 1842, visited England as an attache of the American Legation [ ! ], and in the next year embodied the results of his observations in his amusing work The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England.” The Encyclopædia Britannica says, and Appletons Cyclopædia of American Biography follows it in both errors : “In 1840 he was promoted to be a judge of the Supreme Court; but within two years be resigned his seat on the bench and removed to England.” His promotion was in 1841, his resignation in 1856. The sketch in Stephen’s new Dictionary of National Biography avoids these blunders, and has an accurate list of his works, but contains one or two minor errors.

The comparative lack of appreciation for the judge in his native province, until recent years, has often struck American and British travelers. It was forcibly illustrated by a remark in the Bibliotheca Canadensis, that, while the great University of Oxford gave him the degree of D. C. L., honoris causa, in 1858, his little Alma Mater at Windsor, N. S., had thought him worthy only of an honorary M. A. One of his books, The Season Ticket, was not only unread, but apparently unknown, in Nova Scotia, a couple of years ago. Not one of his kinsfolk there was then aware of its existence ; a near relation of his even doubted its authenticity. It was not in any of the then existing lists of his works, and had at first been published anonymously in the Dublin University Magazine in 1858-59 ; and It had been made into a book in London, with the name of “Sam Slick” as its author, about the time when the judge was most, forgotten by his countrymen.

This past neglect of Haliburton in Nova Scotia was probably due in part to the distasteful truths be told its inhabitants, and in part to the fact that he left his native province to reside abroad. But the lack of due appreciation for the judge among his countrymen savored strongly of ingratitude ; for he has advertised Nova Scotia widely and permanently. Charles Dudley Warner in his Baddeck, Miss Marian Reeves and Miss Emily Read in their Pilot Fortune, Professor De Mille in his " B. O. W. C.” and Grand Pré School, the Abbé Casgrain in his Pèlerinage au Pays d’Évangéline, Miss Grace Dean McLeod in her Stories of the Land of Evangeline, Professor Roberts in several of his poems, have drawn more or less attention to Acadia. But Haliburton has done more to make it known than any writer except Longfellow, who was indeed largely indebted to Haliburton’s History of Nova Scotia for his material when composing Evangeline. Besides writing the history of his country, Haliburton described her scenery, the features of her climate, and her natural resources faithfully and fully. He sketched her social life of half a century ago in The Old Judge and other works. Above all, he drew the attention of his countrymen to their remediable weaknesses. He found among them too much self-satisfaction and too much politics, and too little enterprise and industry. Too many of them were waiting inertly for political panaceas, or wasting their energy in clamoring for them. He strove, shrewdly, to cure these defects by the wholesome example and the caustic comments of a very live Yankee. As a politician, he thought it expedient to tell his countrymen unpalatable truths through the lips of a foreigner. For the clockmaker’s satiric utterances — so often grotesquely and perhaps purposely exaggerated — his constituents could not hold him responsible. “A satirist,” says Sam Slick, in Nature and Human Nature, speaking of his previously published sayings and doings, — “ a satirist, like an Irishman, finds it convenient sometimes to shoot from behind a shelter.”

That the judge’s vicarious sarcasms bore some good fruit in Nova Scotia there can be little doubt. But they had not then, and they have not yet, produced the signal results which Sam Slick complacently notes in Nature and Human Nature. “ I have held the mirror up to these fellows,” he says, “to see themselves in, and it has scared them so they have shaved slick up and made themselves decent. . . . The blisters I have put on their vanity stung ’em so, they jumped high enough to see the right road, and the way they travel ahead now is a caution to snails.”

As a humorist, Haliburton’s chief qualifications were a keen appreciation of the ludicrous, an excellent memory for absurdities, the faculty of hitting off quaint and fancy-tickling phrases, and a most lively imagination. All these characteristics are copiously illustrated in the multitudinous yarns which his characters spin upon the smallest provocation. Indeed, it is evident that he often moots a subject merely to introduce an anecdote; and the very slight main plot of each of the four books narrating Mr. Slick’s career is little more than a thread to string his tales and talks upon. The same may be said of The Old Judge and The Season Ticket.

Artemus Ward was not without warrant in terming Haliburton the founder of the American school of humor, for most of its forms and phases are illustrated in the pages of this pioneer humorist. Specimens of affected simplicity, Mark Twain’s characteristic, occur in the second chapter of Nature and Human Nature, and elsewhere. Undeveloped prototypes of Mrs. Partington may be found in Mrs. Figg, in the female servant in the Letter-Bag, and in an old woman in The Season Ticket.

Several modern jests and jocular phrases were anticipated by Haliburton, if they have not been borrowed from him. In The Old Judge, an Indian explains to the governor, who expresses surprise at seeing him drunk so soon again, that it is “ all same old drunk.” “ Fact, I assure you,” the pet phrase of the liar in Brass, is often used by a character in The Old Judge, and by another in The Season Ticket. Mr. Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby) told me that he made a hit in a stump speech by dividing his hearers into “ men with clean shirts and Democrats.’’ I wonder whether he had read the definitions quoted by Sam Slick of a Tory (" a gentleman every inch of him, . . . and he puts on a clean shirt every day ”) and of a Whig (“ a gentleman every other inch of him, and he puts on an unfrilled shirt every other day ”) ? Fifteen years before Topsy’s famous phrase appeared in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a country girl in The Clockmaker, being asked where she was brought up, replied : “ Why, I guess I was n’t brought up at all. I growed up.”

The temptation to distort words, which led the judge occasionally to perpetrate a double-entendre, also led him into endless punning. How strong this temptation must have been may be gathered from his making a speaker pun while earnestly protesting against the shabby treatment of the loyalists in the little Canadian rebellion of 1837—38, a subject on which Haliburton felt very deeply indeed, and to which he often recurs. “He who quelled the late rebellion amid a shower of balls,” he makes a colonist complain, “ was knighted. He who assented, amid a shower of eggs, to a bill to indemnify the rebels was created an earl. Now, to pelt a governor-general with eggs is an overt act of treason, for it is an attempt to throw off the yolk ! ” Punning, good, bad, and indifferent, was a feature of his conversation as well as of his anecdotal works.

Haliburton’s sarcasm was usually pointed at types and classes, seldom at individuals. He saw an unoccupied field for a satirist at home, and he took possession of it. “ The absurd importance attached in this country to trifles,” one of his characters observes, " the grandiloquent language of rural politicians, the flimsy veil of patriotism under which selfishness strives to hide, . . . present many objects for ridicule and satire.”

Haliburton used dialogue largely in his humorous books, with the definite object of making them popular. " Why is it,” says Mr. Slick in Wise Saws, “if you read a book to a man, you set him to sleep ? Just because it is a book, and the language ain’t common. Why is it, if you talk to him, he will sit up all night with you? Just because it’s talk, the language of natur’.”And written chat, Haliburton thought, was the next best medium to oral chat for holding the attention of all classes. His dialogue, however, is not always consistently suited to his characters, either in matter or in manner. Even the spelling which he uses to represent local mispronunciations is carelessly or capriciously varied.

The fame of Haliburton, as we have intimated, depends largely upon the freaks and tales of his most popular creation, Sam Slick of Slickville. This inconsistent personage is evidently meant to be a typical, wide-awake Yankee. Although not so uniformly representative of New England as Hosea Biglow, in many respects Mr. Slick corresponds to his type. He is full of shifts and dodges. He devises an effective lure to get a passenger on a steamer to leave a comfortable seat, and when the latter reclaims his chair he feigns ignorance of the English language. He has a fast horse in Boston, which will not cross a bridge because it has once fallen through one. He manages to sell it at a high figure, — advertising, with literal truth, that he would not sell it at all if he did not want to leave Boston. When there is a duty of thirty per cent on lead, and no duty on works of art, he makes a large profit by investing in leaden busts of Washington, and melting the Father of his Country after he has passed the custom house. Sam Slick loves to “ best ” anybody in a “ trade,” — particularly when the other party thinks himself knowing. To take in another smart “ Down-Easter ” is an intense joy to him : he compares it to coaxing a sly fish to take the bait. He wants to turn everything to practical use : at Niagara, he is struck first by the waterpower, and secondly by the grandeur of the falls. If he flatters and " softsawders ” everlastingly, he cringes to no man. If he sometimes abuses his country himself, he never lets others do so with impunity. He is especially hard upon tourists in search of facts to verity their prejudices against America, and he loves to “ bam ” them by shocking tales of " gouging-scliools ” and " black stoles,” —garments made of “ niggerhide,” and used to punish refractory slaves, who are etarnally skeered ” at being dressed in dead men’s skins, and can be heard screeching a mile away. Self-conceited, Mr. Slick is too sublimely so to be conscious of the failing. He boasts, of course, but sometimes with a peculiar object. “ Braggin’ saves advertisin’ ,” he remarks ; ” it makes people talk and think of you, and incidentally of your wares. I always do it, for, as the Nova Scotia magistrate said, ' what’s the use of being a justice, if you can’t do yourself justice ? ’ ” Mr. Slick is a cyclopædia of slang, and his sayings are widely quoted, to illustrate colloquialisms, all through Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms.

But in some of his characteristics Sam Slick is far from being a typical New Englander. He satirizes both abolitionists and prohibitionists. He believes that women require " the identical same treatment as horses.” He has an extreme contempt for mock modesty or squeamishness, from which New Englanders, in his time, were not supposed to be specially exempt. He repeatedly casts ridicule upon it. He has little appreciation for Puritanism. " Puritans,” he observes in Nature and Human Nature, “ whether in or out of church, make more sinners than they save, by a long chalk. They ain’t content with real sin. . . . Their eyes are like the great magnifier at the Polytechnic, that shows you awful monsters in a drop of water, which were never intended for us to see, or Providence would have made our eyes like Lord Rosse’s telescope.”

To believe that any human being, much less one who starts life under considerable disadvantages, could know all that Mr. Slick says he knows would tax one’s credulity overmuch. He is equally at home in the politics of England, Canada, and the United States. He paints, he plays the piano and the bugle, he dances, he is skilled in woodcraft and angling, he rows and paddles neatly, lie shoots like Leather-Stocking or Dr. Carver. He can speculate in all lines with equal success. He has a fair smattering of medicine and chemistry. He offers a hawker of patent cement a much better receipt, of his own invention. He has been in almost every country, including Poland, South America, and Persia. In the latter country he has learned the art of stupefying fishes and making them float on the surface. He dyes a drunken hypocrite’s face with a dye which he got from Indians in “the great lone land ; ” and when the hypocrite repents he has a wash ready to efface the stain. " I actilly larned French in a voyage to Calcutta,” he says, " and German on my way home.” He knows a little Gaelic, too, which he has learned from a pretty girl, on a new and agreeable system.

At Rome, in Juvenal’s time, it was the " hungry Greek,” in Johnson’s London it was the “ fasting monsieur,” who knew all the sciences ; and let it be granted that the typical Jack-of-all-trades in this century and on this continent is the inquisitive and acquisitive Yankee. Yet Sam Slick beats the record of his shifty countrymen. He has been wherever a lively reminiscence can be located, and he is endowed with any art or attainment which comes in handy " to point a moral or adorn a tale,” to snub a snob or help a friend. He understands every phase of human nature, male and female, black, white, and red, high and low, rich and poor. He is equally familiar with every social stratum. In Nature and Human Nature he minutely describes two picnics. At one the belles are Indian half-breeds ; at the other they are fashionable Halifax young ladies. If the exclockmaker has obtained the entrée into the illogically exclusive society of Halifax, it is the first time that talent, unaided by modish manners or a scarlet uniform, has ever succeeded in doing so.

As an historian, Haliburton’s style is generally clear and classical, although it has not the uniform polish of a master of style, and sometimes deviates into ponderosity. His reflections are mostly shrewd and philosophical, if sometimes biased by his strong conservatism and love for British institutions. All through his Bubbles of Canada he shows his fondness for the British connection, and points out the dangers that have threatened it in the past, and may threaten it in the future. In his Rule and Misrule of the English in America he labors to prove, and claims to have proved, “that American democracy does not owe its origin to the Revolution and to the great statesmen that formed the federal Constitution ; but that ... a republic de facto was founded at Boston in 1630, which subsisted in full force and vigor for more than half a century.” He was not very painstaking or exhaustive in his researches. Most of his studies for the first of his books, An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1829), were made vicariously. His hasty statement that all records in Halifax relating to the expulsion of the Acadians were “ carefully concealed ” has been amply disproved by the finding of many such records without difficulty by the late Dr. T. B. Akins, while arranging the provincial archives, and by the latter’s admirably chosen Selections from the Public Documents of Nova Scotia, published in 1869. The judge himself does not seem to have thought very highly of his Nova Scotian history, some years after its publication. A character in The Clockinaker describes it as being, “ next to Mr. Josiah Slick’s History of Cutty hunk in five volumes, the most important account of unimportant things I have ever seen.”

Haliburton cut a still more disappointing figure than Macaulay in the British Parliament, where he represented Launceston from 1859 until within a few months of his death, in 1865; and his comparative failure in the House has most unfairly injured his reputation as a man of talent. Though he had made some impressive set speeches in the Nova Scotian Assembly, little, if any, of his fame had rested upon his oratory. Besides, when he entered the House of Commons, he was more than sixty-two years old, — an age at which most celebrities, having regard to their reputation only, would be wise to rest upon their laurels. And Haliburton had been too self-indulgent a liver to be exceptionally vigorous in mind or body at the beginning of his old age. His habitual proneness to wander from his subject had perceptibly increased. Commenting on a speech of his on the 5th of April, 1861, Bernal Osborne, “ the wit of the House,” observed that he had “ touched upon nearly every topic except the issue which is immediately under our consideration. The honorable and learned gentleman,” continued Mr. Osborne, “is a man famous for his literary ability, and as the author of works of fiction which are universally read; but I must say that, after the exhibition which he has made to-night, he had, in my opinion, better undertake another edition of The Rambler.” It is quite likely that, at this time, Haliburton’s success had made him so self-complacent that he thought it needless to give much care or study to his speeches. Only a few months before his election, he had made a gentleman in The Season Ticket speak of “such men as Thackeray, Sam Slick, and Dickens.”

The mottoes of his Wise Saws and Nature and Human Nature avow that the author’s study was mankind ; that his subjects, like Juvenal’s, were human joys, griefs, powers, passions, and pursuits. And in spite of the careless inconsistencies in Sam Slick, Haliburton was an apt student and sound judge of character. His knowledge of human nature is displayed in many of his aphorisms, and the sententious remarks, such as the following, which are made by several of his personages : “ No man nor woman can be a general favorite and be true.” “ Nothing improves a man’s manners like running an election.” “ There is a private spring to every one’s affections.” “A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy: the smile that accepts the lover before words are spoken, and the smile that alights on the first-born baby and assures it of a mother’s love.”

For a man who began life as a provincial lawyer and politician, Haliburton’s horizon was remarkably, almost phenomenally wide. He intuitively recognized the tendencies of the age, noted all the currents of public opinion, and gauged their volume and force with approximate exactness. Indeed, the time may come when his fame as a political and ethical thinker, and forecaster of events and movements, may exceed his fame as a humorist.

He foretold the confederation of the British North American provinces, the building of a trans-continental railroad on Canadian soil, and the rise of a great metropolis at Vancouver, where “ the enterprise, science, and energy of the West will require and command the labor of the East.” His suggestion for a shipway across the isthmus connecting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is now being carried out. He foresaw that there would be a civil war in the United States on the question of States’ rights. “ General government and state government,” Mr. Slick had observed, “ every now and then square off and spar, and the first blow given will bring a genu-ine set-to.”

Haliburton fretted under the cramping influence of belonging to an unrepresented dependency of the British Empire. He has compared the colonies to ponds which rear frogs, but want only outlets and inlets to become lakes and produce fine fish. He observed that the stanzas of Gray’s Elegy beginning, “ Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid,” might be aptly inscribed over the gate of any colonial cemetery ; for to those who rested there, as completely as to the peasants who slept in the churchyard at Stoke Poges, “their lot forbade” either to “ sway the rod of empire,” or to “ read their history in a nation’s eyes.”

It is a curious coincidence that his ablest deprecator, Professor Felton, of Harvard College, shared Haliburton’s views on this subject. In his review of The Attaché, in the North American Review for January, 1844, Felton attributed what he terms “the antiquated political absurdities ” of the judge to “ the belittling effects of the colonial system on the intellects of colonists. A full and complete national existence,” added the Harvard professor, “ is requisite to the formation of a manly, intellectual character. What great work of literature or art has the colonial mind ever produced ? What free, creative action of genius can take place under the withering sense of inferiority that a distant dependency of a great empire can never escape from ? Any consciousness of nationality, however humble the nation may be, is preferable to the second-hand nationality of a colony of the mightiest empire that ever flourished. The intense national pride which acts so forcibly in the United States is something vastly better than the intellectual paralysis that deadens the energies of men in the British North American provinces.”

To give Canadians full national life, with its wider horizon and more stimulating intellectual environment, Haliburton proposed an imperial federation, in which his country should be a full partner. The words “ colonies ” and " dependencies,” he urged, should be disused; all the “ British possessions ” should be “ integral parts of one great whole.” He thought the time was already at hand when “ the treatment of adults should supersede that of children,” in the case of colonies possessing responsible government. But he was not of those who want to obtain all the privileges of manhood, and to shirk its obligations and responsibilities. He did not clamor for the right to make treaties and have them enforced by the imperial services without offering something in return. He did not desire representation without taxation, as some parasitic colonists do to-day. He wanted to see Britons and colonists " united as one people, having the same rights and privileges, each bearing a share of the public burdens, and all having a voice in the general government.” Professor Drummond has strikingly described the deterioration of the hermit crab resulting from its habitually evading the natural responsibility of selfdefense. Haliburton evidently feared an analogous fate for a nation permanently evading the same responsibility ; and he tried sarcasm as well as argument to rouse his countrymen from their ignoble content. “ Don’t use that word ‘ our ’ till you are entitled to it,” said the clockmaker. “ Be formal and everlastin’ polite. Say ‘ your ’ empire. ‘ your ’ army, etc., and never strut under borrowed plumes.”

But Haliburton advocated imperial • federation not only to improve the status of the colonies, but also to strengthen the empire, which, in its present state, he aptly likened to a barrel without hoops, and to a bundle of sticks, which must either be bound together more securely or else fall apart. He was a little too sanguine in expecting an early change. " Things can’t and won’t remain, long as they are,” said Mr. Slick in Nature and Human Nature, which was published in 1855. “ England has three things among which to choose for her North American colonies : First, incorporation with herself, and representation in Parliament. Secondly, independence. Thirdly, annexation with the States.” There are, however, some quiet observers in England, and one or two even in Canada, who hold that the prophecy hazarded by Senator Sherman in 1887, that within ten years Canada would be represented at Westminster or Washington, may yet prove true; but that the longer she defers choosing her path, the more likely she is to decide upon independence.

Having so forcibly pleaded for imperial federation long before the modern movement was either named or started, Judge Haliburton has been erroneously credited with the fatherhood of the idea. A Canadian journalist, named David Chisholme, had published a book in 1832 on the Rights of British Colonists to Representation in the British Parliament. " We desire,” he said, “ to be put on the same footing with the other members of the family. . . . Being now of mature age, we desire that our leading-strings may be cut away from us.” Even before the steam-engine or electric telegraph existed, Governor Thomas Pownall bad proposed making of Great Britain and her dependencies “ a grand marine dominion . . . united into a one empire, in a one centre, where the seat of government is.” Twelve years before the American Revolution. Pownall had argued, in his thoughtful work on the Administration of the Colonies, that " the scheme of giving representatives to the colonies annexes them to and incorporates them with the realm. Their interest is contrary to that of Great Britain only so long as they are continued in the unnatural artificial state of being considered as external provinces ; and they can become rivals only by continuing to increase in their separate state.” During the Revolutionary War, and therefore a little too late, the great thinker, Adam Smith, suggested offering representation with taxation to each State detaching itself from the confederacy. He even contemplated the ultimate removal of the empire’s capital to America. “ In the course of a little more than a century,” he observed, “ perhaps the produce of American might exceed that of the British taxation. The seat of empire would then naturally remove itself to that part of the empire which contributed most to the general defense and support of the whole.” The germ of the idea of imperial federation may be traced as far back as Francis Bacon. His letter to King James, On the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain, recognized the cardinal principle that the stability of a vast empire requires a reciprocity of rights, benefits, and obligations among its parts. The last of his four conditions under which alone " greatness of territory addeth strength ” is " that no part or province of the state be utterly unprofitable, but do confer some use or service to the state.” And, comparing an empire to a tree, Bacon observed that. if the top be overgreat and the stalk too slender, there can be no strength. . . . Therefore we see that when the state of Rome grew great they were enforced to naturalize the Latins or Italians. because the Roman stem could not bear the provinces and Italy both as branches ; and the like they were content after to do to most of the Gauls.”

If Haliimrton hoped to see the British Empire federated, and made what Professor James K. Hosmer gracefully calls “a great world-Venice, through which indeed the seas shall flow, — to unite, however, not to divide,”—he anticipated Professor Hosmer’s belief that this federation would probably lead to a greater fraternity between the two great English-speaking powers. He did not fear, like Mr. Andrew Carnegie, that imperial federation would arouse an implacable jealousy in the United States, but rather trusted that the increasing grandeur of both powers might enlarge their mutual respect and the pride of each in their common race. Indeed, Haliburton’s imagination had conceived the very grandest of all the Schemes propounded for the welfare and civilization of mankind, —an Anglo-American union or alliance, " dominating the world, and dictating peace to the too heavily armed nations.” “Now we are two great nations,” observed Sam Slick in Wise Saws, “ the greatest by a long chalk of any in the world, — speak the same language, have the same religion, and our constitutions don’t differ no great odds. We ought to draw closer than we do. We are big enough, equal enough, and strong enough not to be jealous of each other. United, we are more nor a match for all the other nations put together, and can defy their fleets, armies, and millions. Single, we could n’t stand against all; and if one was to fall, where would the other be ? Mournin’ over the grave that covers a relative whose place can never be filled. It is authors of silly books, editors of silly papers, and demagogues of silly parties that helps to estrange us. I wish there was a gibbet high enough and strong enough to hang up all these enemies of mankind on.”

This warm utterance of Mr. Slick is a conclusive answer to Professor Felton’s charge that Haliburton had conceived “the ingenuous purpose of exciting ill will between the two countries.” The professor based this hasty accusation merely upon a little bit of satire upon Mr. Everett (in the person of Abednego Layman, in The Attaché), and upon an allusion to " American bad faith in the business of the Boundary question.” It is strange that he should have thought this phrase a proof of the author’s dishonesty ; for Haliburton was doubtless alluding to the silence of the United States plenipotentiary as to the existence of the “ red-line map,” — a silence possibly justifiable by the diplomatic code of morality, but concerning which there have always been two opinions. These are the words used by Mr. Webster, in his own justification, at a meeting of the New h ork Historical Society : " I must confess that I did not deem it a very urgent duty on my part to go to Lord Ashburton and tell him that I had found a bit of doubtful evidence in Paris, out of which he might perhaps make something to the prejudice of our claims.” The truth is that, though Haliburton sometimes satirized Americans as freely as he satirized his countrymen, he frequently and warmly referred to thengood qualities ; and it was principally by the notable example of New England energy and enterprise that he strove to reform Nova Scotians. For the Constitution of the United States he had the greatest admiration. “Nothing,”he said of it in his Rule and Misrule of the English in America, " by any possibility could be devised more suited to the situation, feelings, wants, habits, and preconceived ideas of the people. It has conferred happiness and safety on many millions. Esto perpetuo.”

F. Blake Crofton.