But before entering that field so flowery fair which society now seemed to open before me perhaps I had better continue my recollections of a man whose public career has its peculiar pathos. It was his constant, his intense, his very just desire to be President; no man of his long time was fitter to be President, unless his ambition was a foible that unfitted him. He accepted not the first place, but the second place, in the administration of the man whose place as President he had so ardently longed to fill, and after he had resigned his governorship of Ohio and gone to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln I saw him there when I went to look after the facts of the consulship which had been offered me. His fellow Ohioans must have swarmed upon him in the eagerness for public service afterward much noted in them, and I do not blame him for imagining that I had called upon him in the hope that he would urge my case upon the President. He said, rather eagerly, that he had no influence with the administration (it likewise became Lincoln's own humorous complaint) quite before I had asked it, and was sorry that he could not help me; and when I thanked him and remarked that I believed the President's private secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, were interested in my affair, he said, with visible relief, Oh well, then, I was in the best possible hands; as indeed it turned out. I had heard before that he had spoken to the President in my behalf, and he may very well have felt that he had done his best.
Four years later, and ten years after my first acquaintance with Chase, I went to call upon him at his hotel in New York, when I was lately returned from my consular post in Venice, and ventured to offer him my congratulations upon his accession to the chief-justiceship of the Supreme Court. He answered bluntly that it was not the sort of office he had aspired to, and intimated that it was a defeat of his real aspirations. He was not commonly a frank man, I believe, but perhaps he felt that he could be frank with the boy I must still have seemed even at twenty-eight, bringing the devotion he possibly over-imagined in me. Since then those words of his, which were the last I was to hear from him, have been of an increasing appeal with me; and if the Republicans had not had Lincoln I still think it was a pity they could not have had Chase. At the end, the Democrats would not have him.