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PROCEEDINGS IN SANDERS THEATRE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

Introductory Remarks by Henry Pickering Walcott, Acting President of Harvard University.

One hundred years ago President John Adams of Massachusetts nominated John Marshall of Virginia, then Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. For more than a generation he presided there, and largely in consequence of his influence it became the most august judicial tribunal on the face of the earth, of which De Tocqueville wrote, "In the hands of the Supreme Court repose unceasingly the peace, the prosperity, the existence even, of the Union." In the year 1806 Harvard College bestowed upon Marshall its highest honorary degree, and now, in another century, we meet here in this Memorial Hall to again do honor to the undiminished memory of John Marshall.

I have the honor of presenting to you the orator of this afternoon, James Bradley Thayer, Weld Professor of Law.

Address of Professor Thayer.1

It is one hundred years ago to-day since the Supreme Court of the United States first sat at Washington, the new capital, that "wilderness city, set in a mud-hole," of whose beginnings we have lately been reading. The Court sat with a new Chief Justice, John Marshall of Virginia. It is in commemoration of him and of this

1 This address of Professor Thayer is printed by kind permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, publishers of a volume entitled "John Marshall," by the same author, in which most of this address is contained.

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event, so auspicious, the beginning of inestimable benefits to his country, that we have gathered now, moved by an impulse that brings together others of our countrymen all over the United States. Outside of Virginia, few have a better right to celebrate this event than we who are here assembled; for the President who selected and commissioned Marshall was John Adams of Massachusetts, alumnus of Harvard and member of the Suffolk bar.

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At that time Marshall was something over forty-five years old. He was born on September 24, 1755. His home had always been in Virginia. The first twenty years of his life were passed wholly in that part of Prince William county which became, two or three years after his birth, the new, wide-spreading frontier county of Fauquier, so named, after a Virginia fashion, from the new royal Governor of 1758. He was born in the eastern part of it, and after some ten years went with his father to the western part, at Oakhill and the neighborhood, just under the Blue Ridge. They show you still at Midland, on the Southern Railroad, a little south of Manassas, a small, rude heap of bricks and rubbish, as being all that is left of the house where Marshall was born; and children on the farm reach out to you a handful of the bullets with which that sacred spot and the whole region were thickly sown before a generation had passed, after Marshall's death. His education was got partly from his father, a man of character and marked courage and capacity, who served as colonel in the War of Independence, and partly from such teachers as the neighborhood furnished. For about a year, also, he was at a school in Westmoreland county, where his father and George Washington had attended; and there James.

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