either in social intercourse or in legal regulations, any more than the Constitution of 1776 did to any one of its officers, judicial, civil, or military, in regard to change, or the recommendation of change, in its own stipulations. In the eyes of this "popular interest," every Quaker was a Tory or traitor; and all social affinities with that body of men, a body of great respectability, wealth, and order, were regarded as implicating the party in a lesser or greater treason, like the bye and the main of Sir Walter Raleigh and his friends. We must read such times with the personal glossary of the writer or speaker at our side, or we shall often fail to understand them. If President Reed meant to describe James Wilson, John Ross, Alexander Wilcocks, William Lewis, Edward Tilghman, and William Bradford, who were all at the Bar in December, 1778, and were undeniably men of "considerable abilities," as being untrue to the Confederation, to independence, or to the success of the country in her struggle, then he wrote from a very partial and prejudiced view. None of these men certainly were of the proscriptive party, nor were they farther from that than from unfaithfulness to the country. Having some knowledge of President Reed's relations in social life, I cannot believe that such was his meaning. I incline to think that he meant no more by it, than that the able part of the Bar was, at that time, on questions of local policy, the losing party at the polls, in which the President was successful. He probably meant no more than to woo his friend's son to his own side in politics, as the best for an opening at the Bar; and as the clause admits of this interpretation, I prefer adopting it. Mr. Lewis was an adherent of the Declaration of Independence, but he was not bitterly proscriptive; and was entitled to much higher praise than that of not refusing his professional aid to those who were hounded by some of the "popular interest," on account of the treason of quiet wishes and preferences for something better than a proscriptive government. He was a republican, and the open and uniform friend of Washington, and of Washington's friends and principles, as were thousands of the best

men in Philadelphia, at the side of Mr. Lewis, who, nevertheless, were not, in a certain sense, in the "popular interest."

The prominence of the City of Philadelphia as the seat of the Congress of the Confederation, and her superiority in population and commerce, up to the removal of the seat of the Federal Government to the City of Washington, in 1801, may account in some degree, for the diffusion of Mr. Lewis's celebrity, which partook of the distinction awarded to the City. But it was not in criminal law alone, that he was deemed by other cities, to be the most able man at the Bar. He was a person of great intellectual ardor, and of a strong grasp of mind; and both in law and politics, and other matters too, he took firm hold of whatever interested him. His great devotion was, of course, to professional studies. He explored every field of law, common, constitutional, international, commercial, and maritime; and with singular predilection, that very intricate close or quarter of the common law in which the doctrine of pleading is, or formerly was, fenced up from easy access, even against many of the profession. If the fences have been lowered, and in some parts prostrated, in modern times, it may be doubted whether it has not been more for the benefit of estrays, than for the culture of the proper flock, and the good of those who profit by their thorough breeding. The abuse of the doctrine has, at times, been excessive, and is properly restrained or remedied; but the abolition of it, supposing it to be possible, would make a Babel of the court-room. It was Mr. Lewis's notion that nothing but good pleading could prevent a confusion of tongues, upon every important trial; and every sound lawyer is probably of his opinion.

He was much interested in the abolition of slavery within the State of Pennsylvania. Since his death, some questions have been raised in regard to the part, whether active or consultative, that he took in promoting the Act of 1st March, 1780, " for the gradual abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania;" and I do not mean to raise any question of my own. But I am perfectly clear that, in his lifetime, and

at the beginning of this century, when others who may now be thought to have been actors in the matter, were living, Mr. Lewis was currently spoken of, at the Bar, as the draughtsman of that Act. Whether the Preamble, as well as the enacting clauses, were said to have come from his pen, I cannot report, because the distinction has first been made since Mr. Lewis's death. Though, in 1779, he was not a lawyer of long standing, he was abundantly mature for the work, and that was the day of young men in the courts and throughout the country. The old men, in general, as they always do, and beneficially too, clung to associations of early life, and did not enter freely upon the responsibilities of the new public life that had sprung up around them.

During the two administrations of Washington, and continuously during life, Mr. Lewis was a thorough Federalist, amusingly anti-gallican, and entirely anti-Jeffersonian; and upon law questions of difficulty that arose in the Executive Department, though he was not an official adviser, he was familiarly consulted by General Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury, with whom he continued on terms of confidence and mutual respect during General Hamilton's life. The memorable argument of Hamilton, in 1791, upon the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, or rather of the Bill to incorporate the Subscribers to the Bank, was read to Mr. Lewis before it was sent to the President, as I have heard from Mr. Lewis himself, as well as from one of General Hamilton's sons; but I have never heard a surmise that it was in any respect altered in consequence of this. Its great principles were discussed between the two, sitting in Mr. Lewis's office, or walking in his garden, until all the reasons of the Secretary of the Treasury, and the answers to the objections of the Secretary of State, and of the Attorney-General, were scrupulously examined and weighed. No lawyer could have been better in such a consultation than Mr. Lewis, who was fertile in the suggestion of doubts, and quick in the solution of them, and had an admirable coup d'œil

to discern the strong and weak points of assault and defence.

That argument of General Hamilton, it should be remembered, first enunciated the great rules of interpretation, by which the powers delegated by the people of the United States to Congress, were to be construed; and they were afterwards tested by the Supreme Tribunal of Federal law, and stood the test then and for sixty years from the adoption of the Constitution. I hope to be excused for thinking that no judicial argument, before or since, has shaken, or ever will shake, those rules of interpretation; and that none other can maintain the constitutional relations of the States and the United States, the one to the other, and give superiority to each in its proper sphere. How much the battleaxe of party may make the lighter scale in some measures the heavier in all, remains for future history. None but a parricidal arm would cast it in; nor can it remain there very long without deranging the orbit of each system, and generating a new centre of gravitation, when both systems may be "folded up as a vesture." If State Rights mean anything to the contrary of that argument, they mean that the United States shall not be administered by a fair construction of the Constitution, but by the platforms of party.

It was a compliment of the first order from the great statesman and constitutional lawyer who elicited the argument, to submit it to the lawyer of Pennsylvania, whom he called into consultation; and Mr. Lewis was justly proud of it, and constantly glorified the man who prostrated, for the time, the political metaphysics of Mr. Jefferson, the first man, on his part, also, who broached the doctrine of strict construction against the United States, and of the most liberal, consequently, for the reserved rights of the people and the States. Mr. Jefferson was a true son of Virginia, in his ambition for State supremacy, until he was elected to the Presidency. After that, he surrendered, with modest diffidence, his doctrine of strict construction, to obtain an empire from France. If his friends were satisfied that Louisiana could be brought into the Union without an

amendment to the Constitution, he "certainly would acquiesce with satisfaction;""but the less that was said about any constitutional difficulty, the better:" "and it would be desirable for Congress to do what was necessary in silence." These are his own words. Happy adaptability! Greatest of managers!

Mr. Lewis was always ready to render the like patriotic service to the administration of the Father of his Country; and it was no doubt from this motive, that he accepted the commission of District Judge of the United States for the Pennsylvania District, in the summer of 1791, and held it until the spring of 1792, when Judge Peters was ap pointed. He must have foregone, for the time, his large professional emoluments, to meet a public exigency on the death of Judge Francis Hopkinson. Mr. Jefferson, in his letter to Mr. Hammond, on the subject of interest on the British debts during the period of the Revolution, cites the opinion of Mr. Lewis in support of his own views; and to meet this question judicially, was perhaps one of his motives for accepting temporarily the appointment.

In February, 1794, he was counsel for the petitioners against the election of Albert Gallatin to the Senate of the United States, by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, and was heard before the Senate: the first occasion on which the Senate opened its doors to professional counsel, or to the public.

The objection to Mr. Gallatin was an alleged defect of citizenship. He was a native of Geneva, in Switzerland. He arrived at Boston, in the United States, in May, 1780; and in October following, he went to reside at Machias, in the District of Maine, where he remained a year, and performed some volunteer military service. He afterwards owned land, and resided in Virginia, and took an oath of allegiance to that State in October, 1785; and supposing this, and not his residence and military service at Machias, to have been the commencement of his citizenship, then he had not been a citizen nine years, which the Constitution requires, when elected. The question has ceased to be of