state and the people; and when he spoke he never failed to command the attention of all, for he spoke squarely to the point and with the earnestness of absolute conviction, seldom failing to impress his hearers with the soundness of his views and the strength of his position.

With the manipulation of machine politics, as ordinarily understood, Mr. Bingham had nothing to do, either for his own advancement or that of any other man. His political services were always rendered in a straightforward manner, from devotion to principle and for the good of the cause alone. Indeed, his utter self abnegation was often the occasion of deep regret on the part of his friends. His party, however, did not fail to manifest, repeatedly, its appreciation of his sterling worth and commanding abilities. He received the Democratic nomination for representative in Congress from his district (the old Third) in 1865 and again in 1867, his successful Republican opponents having been, respectively, James W. Patterson and Jacob Benton. He was the nominee of the Democratic party in the Legislature, for United States senator, in 1870 against Aaron H. Cragin; in 1872 against Bainbridge Wadleigh; in 1879 against Henry W. Blair and again in 1885; against Austin F. Pike in 1883, and against William E. Chandler in 1887 and 1889. As no man of his time had served his party, his town and the state so frequently and so ably in the Legislature, so no man in the state had been so often honored by his party with its nomination for the highest office which that body has at its disposal. Nor is it too much to add that thousands of independent citizens have regretted the arbitrary partisan considerations that deprived the state and nation of his services in that greatest legislative body in the country and the world-the Senate of the United States -where his commanding legal ability, intellectual power and comprehensive knowledge of the history and science of government would shortly have given him rank with its foremost members. In these respects, and in all the essential elements of real statesmanship he was the peer of Trumbull, Edmunds, Bayard, Thurman, Carpenter, Hendricks, Conkling or Hoar, and had he been called, through the mutations of party politics, to represent New Hampshire in that exalted body, the influence of the Granite

State would have been felt, through his incumbency and service, as in former days, surpassing that of many a larger state.

Mr. Bingham held no appointive office, state or national, except that of special agent of the Treasury Department, for a time under the administration of President Johnson. He was nominated by Governor Weston, in 1874, for chief justice of the Superior Court of Judicature created by the Legislature when the judiciary system of the state was remodelled by the Legislature that year, but the nomination failed to secure the requisite support in the executive council, through factional hostility controlling the action of certain members, and the appointment finally went to the Hon. Edmund L. Cushing of Charlestown. Subsequently he declined an appointment as associate justice, tendered by Governor Head in 1880. Aside from the positions previously mentioned, he held no public office whatever, except that of member of the board of education in Union School District of Littleton for the first three years after its organization, that of quartermaster of the Thirty-Second Regiment in the old state militia in 1849, and as aide-de-camp on the brigade staff of Gen. E. O. Kenney in 1851.

In the councils of the Democratic party of New Hampshire, in conventions and committees, he was prominent for forty years, because his services in such connection were sought and commanded. While seldom heard upon the stump, it being a field of effort decidedly foreign to his taste or inclination, whenever he did appear before the people to advocate the cause of his party or the claims of its candidates, he spoke with the plainness of diction, the logical power and the straightforward earnestness that carried conviction. He was almost invariably a delegate from his town in the Democratic State Convention, and a member of its committee on resolutions, his judgment largely controlling in the shaping of the platform when any question arose. He served as a member of the Democratic State Committee many years. He was a delegate from New Hampshire to the famous Union or Peace Convention in Philadelphia, during the administration of President Johnson. He was a member of the National Democratic Convention in New York, in 1868, which nominated Horatio Seymour for president, serving as an alternate

in the place of Hon. Josiah Minot, then the New Hampshire member of the National Democratic Committee, to which place he was himself at that time chosen for the next four years. He was a delegate to the Baltimore convention in 1872, which nominated Horace Greeley; to the Cincinnati convention which nominated General Hancock, in 1880, and to the Chicago conventions nominating Grover Cleveland in 1884 and 1892. In all these national conventions he was the New Hampshire member of the committee on resolutions. He presided over the regular state conventions of his party in 1870 and 1878, and the delegate and electoral conventions in 1872 and 1896. A prominent feature of his address on assuming the chair in the latter convention was an able and earnest presentation of the "sound currency" or gold standard doctrine to which the Democracy of the East was so devotedly attached, believing its maintenance fundamentally essential to the national welfare. When, therefore, the national convention of the party, at Chicago, soon after, adopted a platform in direct contravention of this doctrine, in compliance with the preponderating demands of the West and South, Mr. Bingham with thousands of other Democrats, not only in the East but in all sections, was sorely disappointed and deeply grieved, regarding such action as inconsistent and in contravention of genuine Democratic principles. He had never before broken with his party, whatever his dissatisfaction with its course in some directions; but when, later, the state convention, against his earnest protest and that of prominent associates, specifically endorsed the platform adopted by the national convention, he, with other life-long Democrats, withdrew from the convention, not in anger but in sorrow, and was afterwards identified with the so-called "gold" Democratic movement which organized the convention at Indianapolis, that nominated Generals John M. Palmer and Simon B. Buckner for president and vice president on a gold standard platform. Mr. Bingham presided at a mass convention in Manchester ratifying this ticket and platform and headed the Palmer and Buckner electoral ticket in this state. He had also been one of the Democratic nominees for presidential elector in 1864 and 1888.

Mr. Bingham was a member of the Kappa Kappa Kappa

Greek letter society at Dartmouth College, of the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Pilgrim Society, the New Hampshire Bar Association and the American Bar Association. He was also president of the Grafton and Coos County Bar Association from 1893 till his decease. He was for a time a director of the Boston, Concord and Montreal Railroad. In 1880 he received from Dartmouth College the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. In his early life at college Mr. Bingham's associates gave him the title or appellation of "Judge," and through all his life he continued to be more frequently addressed by that name than any other. Indeed, it was rarely that any one-friend, acquaintance or comparative stranger-aware of his identity, ever accosted him in any other way. Although he had two brothers who were judges in important courts, were the three ever together, in a room full of people, and the name "Judge Bingham" called, nobody would have thought of any other than Harry Bingham as being addressed. And his presence, bearing and manner confirmed the fitness of the appellation. Eminently fitted as he was for service in the National Senate, he would have been no less an ornament to the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, and a power for justice in that august tribunal, had it been his lot to be called to such service.

In his later years he devoted much attention and labor to constructive literature and was the author of many addresses and essays upon various topics covering a wide range of thought and investigation. It is unnecessary to repeat the titles or subjects considered, in this connection, since the various productions, so far as they have been found available, are presented in full in the following pages of this volume, along with such other of his writings as have been deemed appropriate for preservation. It is to be regretted that there is practically no record of many of his best and strongest intellectual efforts. A large proportion of his speeches in the Legislature, the constitutional convention, and elsewhere, as well as of his legal arguments, addresses to the jury, etc., were entirely oral, never having been reduced to writing, and no stenographic report of the same ever having been made. Indeed, some of his most powerful and effective speeches, in the argument of questions arising during the prog

ress of trials at law, and especially in legislative debate were necessarily entirely unpremeditated, made upon the spur of the moment, yet never failing to disclose the wealth and power of the resources at his command. Of his final argument before the Supreme Court, in the celebrated case of the State v. Jewett, in January, 1901, involving the right or duty of the clerk of the House of Representatives in making up the roll of that body as regarded the names of the so-called "if-entitled" members, there is absolutely no report preserved, beyond the most meager newspaper outline.

Mr. Bingham was unmarried, and, naturally, did not enter so generally into the pleasures of social life, or form so many of the ties of acquaintanceship and the more intimate relations growing out of the same, as might otherwise have been the case. Yet he was in no sense a recluse, nor of the reserved, uncompanionable spirit which some may have imagined. However he may have at first impressed the stranger, he was known by his friends, and found by any with whom he came in close contact, to be one of the most approachable of men, genial, frank, open-hearted, companionable, and thoroughly democratic, in the full sense of the term. He obtruded his opinions or advice upon no one, but when the same were sought, in any proper direction, they were freely given, and found, almost invariably, of more than ordinary value, whether bearing upon matters of private interest or public concern. No man ever had the welfare of the community in which he lived more thoroughly at heart, or took a deeper interest in all measures calculated to promote its material prosperity, educational progress and moral uplift.

Reared in the country, inured to farm labor in youth, and spending his entire life practically in the midst of an agricultural people, his clientele being composed largely of the farmers of his own and surrounding towns, the interests of agriculture ever found in him a strong and ready champion. Indeed, for more than forty years he had been himself the owner of a fine farm in the town of Bethlehem, some three miles out from Littleton village, and to the management and improvement of which he directed his own attention in such leisure time as he found at command. Toward the close of his life he became interested in