THE world has never been governed too little. Kings, from Cæsar to Maximilian, most of whom Carlyle would classify as "chiefly stuffed clothes suits," have fretted their brief hour upon the stage, and then turned to dust.

But, when the millions who toil turn toward the uncrowned kings of thought, among whom were Lincoln and Dayton, these names are never permitted to die. The" still, sad music of humanity" whispers their names through the dim aisles of history, while the common mind, with reverent affection, kindles at, and keeps alive in tender remembrance, the great deeds and the lightest words of

"The simple great ones

Gone forever and forever by."

And biography means nothing unless it says, "O my brother! impart to me truly how it stands with thee in that inner man of thine; what lively images of things past thy memory has painted there; what hopes, what thoughts, affections, knowledge, do now dwell there. For this, and no other object that I can see, was the gift of hearing and speech bestowed on us." Fame no longer consists in having one's name repeated many times in the newspapers, else Vallandigham would be greater than Aristotle. Greatness must think, and act, and feel, and suffer. It must dare, and be ready to die, remembering that, if wrong is sometimes on the throne and right upon the scaffold, it is the dim splendor of

the scaffold where truth dies, and not the gilded throne where wrong lives, that sways the future.

But to the subject of our sketch:

William Lewis Dayton was a statesman, not a politician in the every-day sense of that much abused word, which, by common consent, describes the men who believe the hearts of the people are to be won by the most successful puffer, and that the people themselves are like asses ready saddled and bridled, upon which the most unscrupulous adventurers can safely and speedily ride into power. Mr. Dayton was a politician in the best and noblest sense of that word; a politician such as Cicero delights to describe, dwelling in the higher regions of political thought, meditating upon the principles and policies which make up the life of states and nations, studying and teaching the true foundations of lasting national greatness. He belonged to the old school, the ancien régime of anti-slavery Whig statesmen, who had the sense to see and the courage to declare that the American statesman's controlling purpose was to make politics moral by a union with natural and national justice.

William L. Dayton was born in Somerset county, (Baskingridge,) New-Jersey, February 17th, 1807. He graduated from college in September, 1825, and was admitted to the bar in his native State May, 1830. In pronouncing his eulogy in the Senate of New-Jersey, of which body (then called "The Council") Mr. Dayton was elected a member in 1837, just seven years after his admission to the bar, Senator Little said: "I have heard an eminent jurist declare that Judge Dayton tried his first case as well as he did his last. He was quick in arranging the facts of a case, throwing aside the weak points and seizing the strong ones. Where a crime was to be punished or a wrong redressed, happy the State or the man who secured the weight of his professional strength and wisdom. As a friend, he never allowed political differences to have a feather's weight with him."

These are strong words of praise from a life-time member of a political party adverse to Mr. Dayton's views. No man ever better illustrated the truth of the sentiments which in every-day life make the man and the gentleman; when carried into public life, the hero and the statesman. We may differ in opinion from those with whom we agree in sentiment.

After scarcely a year's service in the State Senate, Mr. Daytor was appointed associate justice of the Supreme Court of New

Jersey, and wore the judicial ermine, the youngest man upon the bench.

This position he resigned in November, 1841. Samuel L. Southard, of whom New-Jersey and the country were justly proud, a man of real power and of wonderful eloquence, died in 1842. William L. Dayton was appointed to fill this vacancy, and in 1845 he was elected to a full term for six years in the United States Senate.

Here he was the youngest member of that body, and was one year younger than Phil Sheridan, though he served in the Senate the companion of Benton, Silas Wright, Choate, Crittenden of Kentucky, and Berrien of Georgia. In this body of great minds he was the peer of the greatest in intellect or eloquence, in integrity or in power.

Here, too, he justified the noble words of Minister Bigelow, who said over his grave: "Mr. Dayton possessed in a conspicuous degree that first of all Christian graces-truthfulness. I do not mean to say by this merely that he would not say what was false. He could not act falsely. He scorned all indirection. This may seem too common a quality among statesmen, and too much a matter of course to be selected for special eulogy. Those who think so have had either a more extensive or a more fortunate experience than mine."

Here, too, how can we forbear to give the truthful and touching words of M. Laboulaye, an eminent French thinker, who once said there was one insanity incurable in a Frenchman-the love of liberty? M. Laboulaye said at the funeral ceremonies in Paris, after stating that it had been nearly one hundred years since the bonds of an irrevocable friendship had been signed between France and America; after naming Jefferson and Franklin, Gouverneur Morris, Edward Livingston, and others who had cemented this alliance, "Mr. Dayton," he says, "will take his place worthily upon this list of glorious names.

"Gentlemen, call to mind the circumstances under which Mr. Dayton came, in 1861, to represent the United States in France.

At such a time

I do not wish to wound the feelings of any one. and in such a place, there is room only for amity and for sorrow. But I must say that the great misfortune of civil war is, that it at the same time enfeebles a nation within and lessens its influence without. In such a case, a minister must feel great inquietude, a more than ordinary susceptibility in defending the interests of his country. Mr. Dayton was fully equal to this delicate task.

Thanks to his frankness and good faith and courtesy, he maintained the relations of the two countries upon the best footing and in equal conditions; that is to say, equally honorable for the two countries. This was a service rendered to France as well as to America, and which will make brilliant in the future the name of Mr. Dayton. The future!' I forget that I am in the presence of the dead-what remains to us but a little dust ?—and yet, for those who survive, it is a consolation, it is a duty, to speak of the virtues of those who are gone. These virtues accompany them to the foot of the Supreme Tribunal, and there, let us hope, obtain for them the mercy of the Eternal. Happy is the man who, like Mr. Dayton, can present himself before that tribunal, with the services he has rendered his country, with his conscience clear of having committed any sin against the great cause of civilization and humanity, the cause he maintained and sustained because he believed it to be (as I believe it to be) the cause of justice and of human liberty."

No prouder record can a statesman leave than words such as these, unless it be the glorious deeds and the unshaken fidelity of which such praise is the fitting monument.

In truthfulness and directness of character, William L. Dayton bore a close resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. The one was only a generation removed from a revolutionary ancestry inured to toil; the other was a laboring man himself; both believing in a government of the people, for the people, by the people, because they themselves lived close to the popular heart, knowing right well that no price was too high to pay for a republican form of government, in which liberty should not be a mockery, a name, and a delusion, but in which liberty was the real, vitalizing, controlling element of power.

What historical propriety there was in these two great men standing in the New-Jersey Senate, animated by the same heroic purpose, to save a sinking Republic. And none that witnessed that scene will soon forget with how much feeling President Lincoln, referring to his early reading of Weems's Life of Washington, said: "I remember all the accounts there given of the battle-fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New-Jersey. I recollect thinking then, boy though I was, that there must have beer something more than common that those men struggled for.”

Mr. Dayton's mind, serene in its strength, was like the peak of Teneriffe, which catches the glow of the morning sun before the day dawns upon the lower level. He sustained the Wilmot proviso; he boldly declared against slavery in the District of Columbia. With equal courage he asserted to the fullest extent the right of Congress to legislate in regard to slavery in the territories of the United States.

And he never went backward. He lived the Latin maxim, Vestigia nulla retrorsum. Mr. Lincoln regarded William L. Dayton as one of the six foremost men in the Senate; and, after hearing a great speech from the senator from New-Jersey, he turned to a congressman, and said: "The destiny of our country is not in peril with such men to defend us."

And from the floor of the House the Great Commoner from Illinois, with great force and considerable wit, ridiculed General Cass's defection on the Wilmot proviso question thus: "When the question was raised in 1846, he (Cass) was in a blustering hurry to take ground for it; . . but soon he began to see glimpses of the great democratic ox-gad waving in his face, and to hear indistinctly a voice, saying, ‘Back, back, sir! back a little.' He shakes his head and bats his eyes, and blunders back to his position of March, 1847; but still the gad waves, and the voice grows more distinct and sharper still, 'Back, back, I say! further back! And back he goes to his position of December, 1847, at which the gad is still, and the voice soothingly says, 'So! stand still at that!" The warm attachment existing between President Lincoln and our minister to France continued till the hour of the latter's death. And, when speaking of New-Jersey, as Mr. Lincoln very often did, the names most frequently on his lips were those of Mr. Dayton and of William A. Newell.

Mr. Dayton served in the Senate with Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. But he never bent the knee to the Baal of slavery; and the ox-gad of the subtle statesmen of the South had no terrors for the polished, courtly, and self-reliant gentleman. With Henry Clay and Daniel Webster both in opposition, perhaps the ablest advocate of General Taylor's administration, on the floor of the Senate, was Mr. Dayton. His sagacity, for that day, was wonderful. He must have regarded compromise then as it has since shown itself to be, the American devil! He opposed the compromise of 1850 bitterly and persistently, and to-day we thank