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blood runs in our veins; in common with whom, we claim Shakspeare, and Newton, and Chatham, for our countrymen; whose government is the freest on earth, our own only excepted; from whom every valuable principle of our own institutions has been borrowed - representation, trial by jury, voting the supplies, writ of habeas corpus - our whole civil and criminal jurisprudence; - against our fellow-Protestants, identified in blood, in language, in religion, with ourselves! In what school did the worthies of our land, the Washingtons, Henrys, Hancocks, Franklins, Rutledges, of America, learn those principles of civil liberty which were so nobly asserted by their wisdom and valor? American resistance to British usurpation has not been more warmly cherished by these great men and their compatriots—not more by Washington, Hancock and Henry-than by Chatham and his illustrious associates in the British parliament.

It ought to be remembered, too, that the heart of the English people was with us. It was a selfish and corrupt ministry, and their servile tools, to whom we were not more opposed than they were. I trust that none such may ever exist among us; for tools will never be wanting to subserve the purposes, however ruinous or wicked, of kings and ministers of state. I acknowledge the influence of a Shakspeare and a Milton upon my imagination, of a Locke upon my understanding, of a Sidney upon my political principles, of a Chatham upon qualities which, would to God, I possessed in common with that illustrious man! of a Tillotson, a Sherlock, and a Porteus, upon my religious principles and convictions! This is a British influence which I can never shake off.

MORE MAY BE MEANT THAN SAID.

R. CHOATE.

SIR, I have been exceedingly struck, while listening to gentlemen, with the fact, that while the ends and objects at which they aim are all so pacific, their speeches are strewn and sown thick, broad-cast, with so much of the food and nourishment of war. Their ends and objects are peace. a treaty of peace; but their means and their topics wear a certain incongruous grimness of aspect. The "bloom is on the rye;" but as you go near, you see bayonet-points sparkling beneath; and are fired upon by a thousand men in ambush! The end they aim at is peace; but the means of attaining it are an offensive and

absurd threat. Their ends and their objects are peace; yet how full have they stuffed the speeches we have been hearing with every single topic the best calculated to blow up the passions of kindred races to the fever heat of battle!

I declare, sir, that while listening to senators whose sincerity and patriotism I cannot doubt, and to this conflict of topics and objects with which they half bewilder me, I was forcibly reminded of that consummate oration in the streets of Rome, by one who "came to bury Cæsar, not to praise him." He did not wish to stir up anybody to mutiny and rage! O, no! He would not have a finger lifted against the murderers of his and the people's friend-not he! He feared he wronged them; yet who has not admired the exquisite address and the irresistible effect with which he returns again and again to "sweet Cæsar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths," and put a tongue in each-to the familiar mantle, first worn on the evening of the day his great friend overcame the Nervii, now pierced by the cursed steel of Cassius, of the envious Casca, of the well-beloved Brutus to his legacy of drachmas, arbors, and orchards, to the people of Rome, whose friend, whose benefactor, he shows to them, all marred by traitors, till the mob break away from his words of more than fire, with

Revenge! About!

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"We will be revenged!
Seek-burn-fire-kill-slay! - let not a traitor live!"

Antony was insincere. Senators are wholly sincere. Yet the contrast between their pacific professions and that revelry of belligerent topics and sentiments which rings and flashes in their speeches here, half suggests a doubt to me, sometimes, whether they or I perfectly know what they mean or what they desire. They promise to show you a garden, and you look up to see nothing but a wall "with dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms!" They propose to teach you how peace is to be preserved; and they do it so exquisitely, that you go away half inclined to issue letters of marque and reprisal to-morrow morning.

The proposition is peace; but the audience rises and goes off with a sort of bewildered and unpleasing sensation, that if there were a thousand men in all America as well disposed as the orator, peace might be preserved; but that, as the case stands, it is just about hopeless! I ascribe it altogether to their anxious and tender concern for peace, that senators have not a word to say about the good she does, but only about the dangers she is in. They have the love of compassion; not the love of desire. Not a word about the countless blessings she scatters from her golden urn; but only "the pity of it,

Iago! the pity of it!" to think how soon the dissonant clangor of a thousand brazen throats may chase that bloom from her cheek,

"And death's pale flag be quick advancéd there."

Sir, no one here can say one thing, and mean another; yet much may be meant, and nothing directly said. "The dial spoke not, but pointed full upon the stroke of murder."

THE FEDERAL UNION.

D. WEBSTER.

I PROFESS, sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in view the prosperity and the honor of the whole country, and the preservation of our Federal Union. I have not allowed myself to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union should be preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it shall be broken up and destroyed.

Be

While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. yond that, I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant, that, in my day, at least, that curtain may not rise! God grant, that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as What is all this worth? those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and

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union afterwards; but everywhere spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea, and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart: -LIBERTY AND UNION, NOW AND FOREVER, ONE

AND INSEPARABLE.

THE STABILITY OF OUR GOVERNMENT.

C. SPRAGUE.

If there be on the earth one nation more than another, whose institutions must draw their life-blood from the individual purity of its citizens, that nation is our own. Rulers by divine right, and nobles by hereditary succession, may, perhaps, tolerate with impunity those depraving indulgences which keep the great mass abject. Where the many enjoy little or no power, it were a trick of policy to wink at those enervating vices, which would rob them of both the ability and the inclination to enjoy it. But in our country, where almost every man, however humble, bears to the omnipotent ballot-box his full portion of the sovereignty-where at regular periods the ministers of authority, who went forth to rule, return to be ruled, and lay down their dignities at the feet of the monarch multitude-where, in short, public sentiment is the absolute lever that moves the political world, the purity of the people is the rock of political safety.

We may boast, if we please, of our exalted privileges, and fondly imagine that they will be eternal; but whenever those vices shall abound, which undeniably tend to debasement, steeping the poor and ignorant still lower in poverty and ignorance, and thereby destroying that wholesome mental equality which can alone sustain a self-ruled people, it will be found, by woful experience, that our happy system of government, the best ever devised for the intelligent and good, is the very worst to be intrusted to the degraded and vicious. The great majority will then truly become a many-headed monster, to be tamed and led at will. The tremendous power of suffrage, like the strength of the eyeless Nazarite, so far from being their protection, will but serve to pull down upon their heads the temple their ancestors reared for them. Caballers and demagogues will find it an easy task to delude those who have deluded themselves; and the freedom of the people will finally be buried in the grave of their virtues. National greatness may survive; splendid talents and bril

liant victories may fling their delusive lustre abroad; — these can illumine the darkness that hangs round the throne of a despot; but their light will be like the baleful flame that hovers over decaying mortality, and tells of the corruption. that festers beneath. The immortal spirit will have gone; and along our shores, and among our hills,—those shores made sacred by the sepulchre of the pilgrim, those hills hallowed by the uncoffined bones of the patriot, even there, in the ears of their degenerate descendants, shall ring the last knell of departed Liberty!

VIRGINIA AND MASSACHUSETTS.*

J. MC DOWELL.

MR. CHAIRMAN, When I pass by the collective parties in this case, and recall the particular ones: when I see that my own state is as deeply implicated in the trouble and the danger of it as any other, and shares, to the full, with all of her southern colleagues, in the most painful apprehensions of its issue; when I see this, I turn involuntarily, and with unaffected deference of spirit, and ask, What, in this exigent moment to Virginia, will Massachusetts do? Will you, too, (I speak to her as present in her representatives) — will you, too, forgetting all the past, put forth a hand to smite her ignominiously upon the cheek? In your own early day of deepest extremity and distress - the day of the Boston Port Billwhen your beautiful capital was threatened with extinction, and England was collecting her gigantic power to sweep your liberties away, Virginia, caring for no odds and counting no cost, bravely, generously, instantly, stepped forth for your deliverance. Addressing her through the justice of your cause and the agonies of your condition, you asked for her heart. She gave it; with scarce the reservation of a throb, she gave it freely and gave it all. You called upon her for her blood; she took her children from her bosom, and offered them to supply it with her spirit, with appreciation of the great principles of representation and of popular government which your cause involved; and with her holy enthusiasm in their support, Virginia would have been utterly recreant to herself if she had done anything else, or anything less, than

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she did.

But in all this she felt and knew that she was more than

your political ally more than your political friend. She felt and knew that she was your near, natural born relation

* Extracted from a speech delivered Feb. 23, 1849, on a bill to establish a territorial government for Upper California.

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