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JUSTIN S. MORRILL

ILLUSTRATIONS

Photogravure Frontispiece

JUSTIN S. MORRILL'S HOUSE AT STRAFFORD, VERMONT
SENATOR MORRILL'S HOUSE IN THOMAS CIRCLE, WASH-

INGTON

A CORNER OF SENATOR MORRILL'S LIBRARY

DRAWING-ROOM IN SENATOR MORRILL'S WASHINGTON
HOUSE

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JUSTIN SMITH MORRILL

CHAPTER I

HIS ORIGIN AND YOUTH

THE generation that remembers Justin Smith Morrill in the flesh is fast disappearing. He is known to the present as the author of the Morrill Tariff in the Civil War, as the member of House and Senate whose term of service exceeds that of any other in our legislative history, as the defender of a sound currency, and as the father of the land grant colleges.

He was born in the village of Strafford, Vermont, on the 14th of April, 1810, a New-Englander of New-Englanders. "I shall go home," he wrote from Glasgow after a tour of Europe in 1867, "more than ever thankful that God permitted me to be born and have a home in America, and in New England rather than in any other part, and in Vermont rather than even in any other State of New England." His loyalty to Vermont never lessened. He took pride in her history, her beauty of mountain, stream, and valley, and in her people of whom he was himself so splendid a specimen. He used to repeat with pleasure the retort of one of his constituents who, to a stranger's sneering question, "What they managed to raise way up there in Vermont?" answered Men, sir."

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He might well take pride in the men of Vermont - a tall, stalwart, deliberate, enduring type. And such were his own family - he was himself full six feet tall, and of a long-lived stock: his grandfather lived to be ninety-three, his father to

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