was at rest. It is a pleasing achievement, seldom aspired to in our hurried and eager life and still more seldom attained, but redolent of the spirit of an earlier day and not far from the Horatian ideal, reuttered by an English poet two hundred years ago:

"Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air

In his own ground.

"Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire;

Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

In winter fire."

It may well have seemed to him that his race was won, and the remainder of his life was to be securely devoted to serenity. "I had," he said, "a taste for agriculture." So he settled down to the quiet life of tilling a small farm, rearing a few sheep, improving his orchard, growing his flowers, and browsing in the library which it gave him so much pleasure to gather and increase.

The sequel was to prove that he knew neither himself nor his times. He was as much mistaken as Lincoln when he retired from Congress in 1849 convinced that his political career was over, or John Quincy Adams at the close of his Presidency. His greatest service was still to be done and his real career was before him, and though he might thrust it behind him, politics was his dominant interest and would not be subordinated. It is difficult for those of our time who take our politics lightly to realize how grave and absorbing a matter it was to the men of Morrill's day, especially in rural communities. The intensity of political feeling was noted by all visitors. De Tocqueville marvels at it.

The cares of politics [he writes] engross a prominent place in the occupations of a citizen in the United States; and almost the

only pleasure which an American knows is to take a part in the government, and to discuss its measures. This feeling pervades the most trifling habits of life; even the women frequently attend public meetings, and listen to political harangues as a recreation from their household labors. Debating clubs are, to a certain extent, a substitute for theatrical entertainments: an American cannot converse, but he can discuss; and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing. . . . If an American were condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable.

So much was in the air which Morrill breathed in common with all his fellows, but he had in addition spent twenty years in training; for the general store was not only a school of life but a hot-bed and training-school for politics. It had fostered and nourished in him that political instinct which he had inherited and had unconsciously prepared him for a great part on the stage of public affairs. If his experience had something in common with Lincoln's experience in the country store at New Salem, it had also significant differences. The Vermont community was homogeneous, sober, restrained, less given to horseplay and more addicted to argument. Along with tales of Indian fights, encounters with bears, wild-cats, wolves, and other wild animals were stories of the War of 1812 and old memories of the Revolutionary War, for Vermont was a frontier State and had its full share of warlike traditions - a thing which helps one to understand a certain anti-British prejudice which appears in some of Senator Morrill's utterances. How valuable a forum the store at Strafford was appears in the memorial address of Morrill's successor in the Senate himself a Vermonter and familiar with the scene.

The store was the place of common meeting [said Senator Ross]. There the leaders in the community gathered and discussed the history of the State and the Nation and all important and current events.... Among the great questions thus considered were the Missouri Compromise in 1820, the memorable debate... between Hayne and Webster in 1829-30; the nullification ordinance of South Carolina in 1832... the annexation of Texas and War with Mexico in 1846.... All these arose just before and during the time Mr. Morrill was engaged in business. He entered into their discussion and became more or less of a leader among his patrons.

There is no doubt that these daily discussions, inevitable under the circumstances, would have inspired political capacity and inclination in even the dullest of men and matured the convictions of the most neutral. But Morrill was neither dull nor neutral. He had long since, whether he knew it or not, been an influence in the political counsels of both town and county. Though he had schooled himself to put public office out of his mind and had never been, nor, so far as we can tell, ever expected to be, a candidate for any office; though he considered himself immune to that sort of ambition, he was certainly mistaken. A truer instinct was guiding his steps and determining his course.

It is plain to one who looks back over his whole life that the interest in politics was one of the deepest springs of action throughout his youth as well as his later life. Among the fragmentary autobiographical notes left among his papers are the following tell-tale jottings: "I saw Pres. James Monroe in 1818 at Strafford Vt. when I was 8 yrs. old”; “I called on John Quincy Adams on the 4th of July, 1831, at his house in Quincy, Mass., and then on the same day heard him deliver a 4th of July oration at a Church in Quincy. Afterwards saw him at Washington while he was a member of the House of Reps. probably in 1841." The third of these revealing glimpses of the past reads: "Elijah Paine was U.S.

Senator of Vt. from 1795 to 1801, when he was made Judge of U.S. District Court of Vt. and held the same until 1842. I often saw him while he was judge. He always was dressed in the old continental style, with breeches, long black silk stockings, silver buckles at the knee as well as silver shoe buckles. He always called himself one of John Adams's midnight judges, having been so appointed by Adams on the last day of his Presidential term."

When he was in Washington in 1841, which was apparently his second visit to the capital, the fascination of Congress kept him in the city for days after he had planned to go. "House of Representatives adjourned until Monday. ...This will adjourn my departure... for I cannot go until I have seen more of the 'Wisdom of the Nation."" He haunted the Senate and the House.

During these formative years, his first great disappointment, the deprivation of a college education, from which he never wholly recovered, nerved him to continual endeavors in study, in writing, and in speech to supply the lack, as later it inspired his long-sustained efforts to make a college training accessible to the sons of artisans and farmers. Nor did he ever forget the other loss of his boyhood, the thwarted desire for books, and half a century later touched upon it with a note almost of pathos when presenting a library to his native village:

.. It may be asked what will the town profit by a library? ... Ask the boy, taken perhaps by his parents reluctantly from the schoolhouse to the field or the workshop at the age of fifteen, feeling, as I once felt, as though youthful ambition and hopes had been nipped by an early frost and who now at least requests a chance to read the Life of Franklin, or of Columbus, or of Andrew Jackson or of Abraham Lincoln: Ask him. Reject the Town Library, and his modest request may be denied. Behold, as his hopes are postponed, the answer, on his robust face, in the quivering lip.

Though it was years before he conquered the feeling that his prospects had been blighted, he kept himself resolutely at work to make up his deficiencies. "When but a boyclerk," he said, "in a store in this village, I started, in 1827, a subscription for a town library, with shares at two dollars each. There were, I think, about fifty subscribers. The capital was, however, too limited to flourish for any long period, and finally the books went out, like the doves from the Ark of Noah, never to return." After his return from Portland and when he was in business for himself, the spirit of emulation was still strong upon him, and in 1831 he joined with N. S. Young and other young men in starting a debating society of which he was the main support and stay as long as it lived.

Meantime his journeys to Boston and New York, his constant contacts with men and affairs, and the growing harvest from his reading increased his prestige and influence among his neighbors. Almost imperceptibly he became a representative man and was frequently chosen delegate or committeeman to the local conventions. "I was always ready," he said at a later time, recalling this period of his life, "to make a speech or write a political platform resolution, and after a time they began to expect them from me."

For several years at least before he retired from business, he was bearing a part in local politics, though as a plain citizen and without a thought of office-holding. As early as 1844 he was Chairman of the Orange County Whig Committee.

He was early made a bank director, and in the panic of 1837 was one of the committee sent to Boston to represent the Vermont banks. In 1841 he undertook what was then an extensive tour of the West. It occupied three months and carried him to the cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Wheeling, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Chicago,