BOOK III.. Great Speeches on Great Issues.

GREAT SPEECHES ON GREAT ISSUES.

Speech of James Wilson,

January, 1775, in the Convention for the Province of Pennsylvania,

IN VINDICATION OF THE COLONIES.

“A most daring spirit of resistance and disobedience still prevails in Massachusetts, and has broken forth in fresh violences of a criminal nature. The most proper and effectual methods have been taken to prevent these mischiefs; and the parliament may depend upon a firm resolution to withstand every attempt to weaken or impair the supreme authority of parliament over all the dominions of the crown.”—Speech of the King of Great Britain to Parliament, Nov., 1774.

MR. CHAIRMAN:—Whence, sir, proceeds all the invidious and ill-grounded clamor against the colonists of America? Why are they stigmatized in Britain as licentious and ungovernable? Why is their virtuous opposition to the illegal attempts of their governors, represented under the falsest colors, and placed in the most ungracious point of view? This opposition, when exhibited in its true light, and when viewed, with unjaundiced eyes, from a proper situation, and at a proper distance, stands confessed the lovely offspring of freedom. It breathes the spirit of its parent. Of this ethereal spirit, the whole conduct, and particularly the late conduct, of the colonists has shown them eminently possessed. It has animated and regulated every part of their proceedings. It has been recognized to be genuine, by all those symptoms and effects by which it has been distinguished in other ages and other countries. It has been calm and regular: it has not acted without occasion: it has not acted disproportionably to the occasion. As the attempts, open or secret, to undermine or to destroy it, have been repeated or enforced, in a just degree, its vigilance and its vigor have been exerted to defeat or to disappoint them. As its exertions have been sufficient for those purposes hitherto, let us hence draw a joyful prognostic, that they will continue sufficient for those purposes hereafter. It is not yet exhausted: it will still operate irresistibly whenever a necessary occasion shall call forth its strength.

Permit me, sir, by appealing, in a few instances, to the spirit and conduct of the colonists, to evince that what I have said of them is just. Did they disclose any uneasiness at the proceedings and claims of the British parliament, before those claims and proceedings afforded a reasonable cause for it? Did they even disclose any uneasiness, when a reasonable cause for it was first given? Our rights were invaded by their regulations of our internal policy. We submitted to them: we were unwilling to oppose them. The spirit of liberty was slow to act. When those invasions were renewed; when the efficacy and malignancy of them were attempted to be redoubled by the stamp act; when chains were formed for us; and preparations were made for riveting them on our limbs, what measures did we pursue? The spirit of liberty found it necessary now to act; but she acted with the calmness and decent dignity suited to her character. Were we rash or seditious? Did we discover want of loyalty to our sovereign? Did we betray want of affection to our brethren in Britain? Let our dutiful and reverential petitions to the throne; let our respectful, though firm, remonstrances to the parliament; let our warm and affectionate addresses to our brethren and (we will still call them) our friends in Great Britain,—let all those, transmitted from every part of the continent, testify the truth. By their testimony let our conduct be tried.

As our proceedings, during the existence and operation of the stamp act, prove fully and incontestably the painful sensations that tortured our breasts from the prospect of disunion with Britain; the peals of joy, which burst forth universally, upon the repeal of that odious statute, loudly proclaim the heartfelt delight produced in us by a reconciliation with her. Unsuspicious, because undesigning, we buried our complaints, and the causes of them, in oblivion, and returned, with eagerness, to our former unreserved confidence. Our connection with our parent country, and the reciprocal blessings resulting from it to her and to us, were the favorite and pleasing topics of our public discourses and our private conversations. Lulled into delightful security, we dreamed of nothing but increasing fondness and friendship, cemented and strengthened by a kind and perpetual communication of good offices. Soon, however, too soon, were we awakened from the soothing dreams! Our enemies renewed their designs against us, not with less malice, but with more art. Under the plausible pretence of regulating our trade, and, at the same time, of making provision for the administration of justice, and the support of government, in some of the colonies, they pursued their scheme of depriving us of our property without our consent. As the attempts to distress us, and to degrade us to a rank inferior to that of freemen, appeared now to be reduced into a regular system, it became proper, on our part, to form a regular system for counteracting them. We ceased to import goods from Great Britain. Was this measure dictated by selfishness or by licentiousness? Did it not injure ourselves, while it injured the British merchants and manufacturers? Was it inconsistent with the peaceful demeanor of subjects to abstain from making purchases, when our freedom and our safety rendered it necessary for us to abstain from them? A regard for our freedom and our safety was our only motive; for no sooner had the parliament, by repealing part of the revenue laws, inspired us with the flattering hopes, that they had departed from their intentions of oppressing and of taxing us, than we forsook our plan for defeating those intentions, and began to import as formerly. Far from being peevish or captious, we took no public notice even of their declaratory law of dominion over us: our candor led us to consider it as a decent expedient of retreating from the actual exercise of that dominion.

But, alas! the root of bitterness still remained. The duty on tea was reserved to furnish occasion to the ministry for a new effort to enslave and to ruin us; and the East India Company were chosen, and consented to be the detested instruments of ministerial despotism and cruelty. A cargo of their tea arrived at Boston. By a low artifice of the governor, and by the wicked activity of the tools of government, it was rendered impossible to store it up, or to send it back, as was done at other places. A number of persons, unknown, destroyed it.

Let us here make a concession to our enemies: let us suppose, that the transaction deserves all the dark and hideous colors in which they have painted it: let us even suppose (for our cause admits of an excess of candor) that all their exaggerated accounts of it were confined strictly to the truth: what will follow? Will it follow, that every British colony in America, or even the colony of Massachusetts Bay, or even the town of Boston, in that colony, merits the imputation of being factious and seditious? Let the frequent mobs and riots, that have happened in Great Britain upon much more trivial occasions, shame our calumniators into silence. Will it follow, because the rules of order and regular government were, in that instance, violated by the offenders, that, for this reason, the principles of the constitution, and the maxims of justice, must be violated by their punishment? Will it follow, because those who were guilty could not be known, that, therefore, those who were known not to be guilty must suffer? Will it follow, that even the guilty should be condemned without being heard—that they should be condemned upon partial testimony, upon the representations of their avowed and embittered enemies? Why were they not tried in courts of justice known to their constitution, and by juries of their neighborhood? Their courts and their juries were not, in the case of captain Preston, transported beyond the bounds of justice by their resentment: why, then, should it be presumed, that, in the case of those offenders, they would be prevented from doing justice by their affection? But the colonists, it seems, must be stripped of their judicial, as well as of their legislative powers. They must be bound by a legislature, they must be tried by a jurisdiction, not their own. Their constitutions must be changed: their liberties must be abridged: and those who shall be most infamously active in changing their constitutions and abridging their liberties, must, by an express provision, be exempted from punishment.

I do not exaggerate the matter, sir, when I extend these observations to all the colonists. The parliament meant to extend the effects of their proceedings to all the colonists. The plan, on which their proceedings are formed, extends to them all. From an incident of no very uncommon or atrocious nature, which happened in one colony, in one town in that colony, and in which only a few of the inhabitants of that town took a part, an occasion has been taken by those, who probably intended it, and who certainly prepared the way for it, to impose upon that colony, and to lay a foundation and a precedent for imposing upon all the rest, a system of statutes, arbitrary, unconstitutional, oppressive, in every view, and in every degree subversive of the rights, and inconsistent with even the name, of freemen.

Were the colonists so blind as not to discern the consequences of these measures? Were they so supinely inactive, as to take no steps for guarding against them? They were not. They ought not to have been so. We saw a breach made in those barriers, which our ancestors, British and American, with so much care, with so much danger, with so much treasure, and with so much blood, had erected, cemented and established for the security of their liberties, and—with filial piety let us mention it—of ours. We saw the attack actually begun upon one part: ought we to have folded our hands in indolence, to have lulled our eyes in slumbers, till the attack was carried on, so as to become irresistible, in every part? Sir, I presume to think not. We were roused; we were alarmed, as we had reason to be. But still our measures have been such as the spirit of liberty and of loyalty directed; not such as the spirit of sedition or of disaffection would pursue. Our counsels have been conducted without rashness and faction: our resolutions have been taken without phrensy or fury.

That the sentiments of every individual concerning that important object, his liberty, might be known and regarded, meetings have been held, and deliberations carried on, in every particular district. That the sentiments of all those individuals might gradually and regularly be collected into a single point, and the conduct of each inspired and directed by the result of the whole united, county committees, provincial conventions, a continental congress, have been appointed, have met and resolved. By this means, a chain—more inestimable, and, while the necessity for it continues, we hope, more indissoluble than one of gold—a chain of freedom has been formed, of which every individual in these colonies, who is willing to preserve the greatest of human blessings, his liberty, has the pleasure of beholding himself a link.

Are these measures, sir, the brats of disloyalty, of disaffection? There are miscreants among us, wasps that suck poison from the most salubrious flowers, who tell us they are. They tell us that all those assemblies are unlawful, and unauthorized by our constitutions; and that all their deliberations and resolutions are so many transgressions of the duty of subjects. The utmost malice brooding over the utmost baseness, and nothing but such a hated commixture, must have hatched this calumny. Do not those men know—would they have others not to know—that it was impossible for the inhabitants of the same province, and for the legislatures of the different provinces, to communicate their sentiments to one another in the modes appointed for such purposes, by their different constitutions? Do not they know—would they have others not to know—that all this was rendered impossible by those very persons, who now, or whose minions now, urge this objection against us? Do not they know—would they have others not to know—that the different assemblies, who could be dissolved by the governors, were in consequence of ministerial mandates, dissolved by them, whenever they attempted to turn their attention to the greatest objects, which, as guardians of the liberty of their constituents, could be presented to their view? The arch enemy of the human race torments them only for those actions to which he has tempted, but to which he has not necessarily obliged them. Those men refine even upon infernal malice: they accuse, they threaten us, (superlative impudence!) for taking those very steps, which we were laid under the disagreeable necessity of taking by themselves, or by those in whose hateful service they are enlisted. But let them know, that our counsels, our deliberations, our resolutions, if not authorized by the forms, because that was rendered impossible by our enemies, are nevertheless authorized by that which weighs much more in the scale of reason—by the spirit of our constitutions. Was the convention of the barons at Runnymede, where the tyranny of John was checked, and magna charta was signed, authorized by the forms of the constitution? Was the convention parliament, that recalled Charles the Second, and restored the monarchy, authorized by the forms of the constitution? Was the convention of lords and commons, that placed king William on the throne, and secured the monarchy and liberty likewise, authorized by the forms of the constitution? I cannot conceal my emotions of pleasure, when I observe, that the objections of our adversaries cannot be urged against us, but in common with those venerable assemblies, whose proceedings formed such an accession to British liberty and British renown.

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We can be at no loss in resolving, that the king cannot, by his prerogative, alter the charter or constitution of the colony of Massachusetts Bay. Upon what principle could such an exertion of prerogative be justified? On the acts of parliament? They are already proved to be void. On the discretionary power which the king has of acting where the laws are silent? That power must be subservient to the interest and happiness of those concerning whom it operates. But I go further. Instead of being supported by law, or the principles of prerogative, such an alteration is totally and absolutely repugnant to both. It is contrary to express law. The charter and constitution, we speak of, are confirmed by the only legislative power capable of confirming them; and no other power, but that which can ratify, can destroy. If it is contrary to express law, the consequence is necessary, that it is contrary to the principles of prerogative; for prerogative can operate only when the law is silent.

In no view can this alteration be justified, or so much as excused. It cannot be justified or excused by the acts of parliament; because the authority of parliament does not extend to it; it cannot be justified or excused by the operation of prerogative; because this is none of the cases in which prerogative can operate: it cannot be justified or excused by the legislative authority of the colony; because that authority never has been, and, I presume, never will be given for any such purpose.

If I have proceeded hitherto, as I am persuaded I have, upon safe and sure ground, I can, with great confidence, advance a step farther, and say that all attempts to alter the charter or constitution of that colony, unless by the authority of its own legislature, are violations of its rights, and illegal.

If those attempts are illegal, must not all force, employed to carry them into execution, be force employed against law, and without authority? The conclusion is unavoidable.

Have not British subjects, then, a right to resist such force—force acting without authority—force employed contrary to law—force employed to destroy the very existence of law and of liberty? They have, sir, and this right is secured to them both by the letter and the spirit of the British constitution, by which the measures and the conditions of their obedience are appointed. The British liberties, sir, and the means and the right of defending them, are not the grants of princes; and of what our princes never granted they surely can never deprive us.

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“Id rex potest,” says the law, “quod de jure potest.” The king’s power is a power according to law. His commands, if the authority of lord chief justice Hale may be depended upon, are under the directive power of the law; and consequently invalid, if unlawful. “Commissions,” says my lord Coke, “are legal; and are like the king’s writs; and none are lawful, but such as are allowed by the common law, or warranted by some act of parliament.”

And now, sir, let me appeal to the impartial tribunal of reason and truth; let me appeal to every unprejudiced and judicious observer of the laws of Britain, and of the constitution of the British government; let me appeal, I say, whether the principles on which I argue, or the principles on which alone my arguments can be opposed, are those which ought to be adhered to and acted upon; which of them are most consonant to our laws and liberties; which of them have the strongest, and are likely to have the most effectual tendency to establish and secure the royal power and dignity.

Are we deficient in loyalty to his majesty? Let our conduct convict, for it will fully convict, the insinuation that we are, of falsehood. Our loyalty has always appeared in the true form of loyalty; in obeying our sovereign according to law; let those, who would require it in any other form, know, that we call the persons who execute his commands, when contrary to law, disloyal and traitors. Are we enemies to the power of the crown? No, sir, we are its best friends: this friendship prompts us to wish, that the power of the crown may be firmly established on the most solid basis: but we know, that the constitution alone will perpetuate the former, and securely uphold the latter. Are our principles irreverent to majesty? They are quite the reverse: we ascribe to it perfection almost divine. We say, that the king can do no wrong: we say, that to do wrong is the property, not of power, but of weakness. We feel oppression, and will oppose it; but we know, for our constitution tells us, that oppression can never spring from the throne. We must, therefore, search elsewhere for its source: our infallible guide will direct us to it. Our constitution tells us, that all oppression springs from the ministers of the throne. The attributes of perfection, ascribed to the king, are, neither by the constitution, nor in fact, communicable to his ministers. They may do wrong; they have often done wrong; they have been often punished for doing wrong.

Here we may discern the true cause of all the impudent clamor and unsupported accusations of the ministers and of their minions, that have been raised and made against the conduct of the Americans. Those ministers and minions are sensible, that the opposition is directed, not against his majesty, but against them; because they have abused his majesty’s confidence, brought discredit upon his government, and derogated from his justice. They see the public vengeance collected in dark clouds around them: their consciences tell them, that it should be hurled, like a thunderbolt, at their guilty heads. Appalled with guilt and fear, they skulk behind the throne. Is it disrespectful to drag them into public view, and make a distinction between them and his majesty, under whose venerable name they daringly attempt to shelter their crimes? Nothing can more effectually contribute to establish his majesty on the throne, and to secure to him the affections of his people, than this distinction. By it we are taught to consider all the blessings of government as flowing from the throne; and to consider every instance of oppression as proceeding, which, in truth, is oftenest the case, from the ministers.

If, now, it is true, that all force employed for the purposes so often mentioned, is force unwarranted by any act of parliament; unsupported by any principle of the common law; unauthorized by any commission from the crown; that, instead of being employed for the support of the constitution and his majesty’s government, it must be employed for the support of oppression and ministerial tyranny; if all this is true (and I flatter myself it appears to be true), can any one hesitate to say, that to resist such force is lawful; and that both the letter and the spirit of the British constitution justify such resistance?

Resistance, both by the letter and the spirit of the British constitution, may be carried further, when necessity requires it, than I have carried it. Many examples in the English history might be adduced, and many authorities of the greatest weight might be brought to show, that when the king, forgetting his character and his dignity, has stepped forth, and openly avowed and taken a part in such iniquitous conduct as has been described; in such cases, indeed, the distinction above mentioned, wisely made by the constitution for the security of the crown, could not be applied; because the crown had unconstitutionally rendered the application of it impossible. What has been the consequence? The distinction between him and his ministers has been lost; but they have not been raised to his situation: he has sunk to theirs.

Speech of Patrick Henry,

March 23, 1775, in the Convention of Delegates of Virginia, On the following resolutions, introduced by himself:

“Resolved, That a well regulated militia, composed of gentlemen and yeomen, is the natural strength and only security of a free government; that such a militia in this colony, would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us, for the purpose of our defence, any standing army of mercenary soldiers, always subversive of the quiet, and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of taxing us for their support.

“That the establishment of such a militia is, at this time, peculiarly necessary, by the state of our laws for the protection and defence of the country, some of which are already expired, and others will shortly be so; and that the known remissness of government in calling us together in legislative capacity, renders it too insecure, in this time of danger and distress, to rely, that opportunity will be given of renewing them, in general assembly, or making any provision to secure our inestimable rights and liberties from those further violations with which they are threatened:

“Resolved, therefore, That this colony be immediately put into a state of defence, and that be a committee to prepare a plan for imbodying, arming and disciplining such a number of men as may be sufficient for that purpose.”

MR. PRESIDENT:—No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the house. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen, if, entertaining, as I do, opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve. This is no time for ceremony. The question before the house is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfil the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offence, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty towards the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.

Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till he transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the house? Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled, that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation; the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible motive for it? Has Great Britain any enemy, in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us: they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains, which the British ministry have been so long forging. And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we any thing new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find, which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer. Sir, we have done every thing that could be done, to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne! In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon, until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!

They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance, by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat, but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable—and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale, that sweeps from the north, will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Supposed Speech of John Adams in favor of the Declaration of Independence.

As given by Daniel Webster.

Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning we aimed not at independence. But there’s a divinity which shapes our ends. The injustice of England has driven us to arms; and, blinded to her own interest for our good, she has obstinately persisted, till independence is now within our grasp. We have but to reach forth to it, and it is ours.

Why then should we defer the declaration? Is any man so weak as now to hope for a reconciliation with England, which shall leave either safety to the country and its liberties, or safety to his own life and his own honor? Are not you, sir, who sit in that chair, is not he, our venerable colleague near you, are you not both already the proscribed and predestined objects of punishment and of vengeance? Cut off from all hope of royal clemency, what are you, what can you be, while the power of England remains, but outlaws?

If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on, or to give up the war? Do we mean to submit to the measures of parliament, Boston port bill and all? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we ourselves shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights trodden down in the dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We never shall submit.

Do we intend to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that plighting, before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when putting him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of the times, we promised to adhere to him, in every extremity, with our fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the ground.

For myself, having, twelve months ago, in this place, moved you that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces, raised or to be raised, for defence of American liberty, may my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver in the support I give him. The war, then, must go on. We must fight it through. And if the war must go on, why put off longer the declaration of independence? That measure will strengthen us. It will give us character abroad.

The nations will then treat with us, which they never can do while we acknowledge ourselves subjects, in arms against our sovereign. Nay, I maintain that England, herself, will sooner treat for peace with us on the footing of independence, than consent, by repealing her acts, to acknowledge that her whole conduct toward us has been a course of injustice and oppression. Her pride will be less wounded by submitting to that course of things which now predestinates our independence, than by yielding the points in controversy to her rebellious subjects. The former she would regard as the result of fortune; the latter she would feel as her own deep disgrace. Why then, why then, sir, do we not as soon as possible change this from a civil to a national war? And since we must fight it through, why not put ourselves in a state to enjoy all the benefits of victory, if we gain the victory?

If we fail, it can be no worse for us. But we shall not fail. The cause will raise up armies; the cause will create navies. The people, the people, if we are true to them, will carry us, and will carry themselves, gloriously, through this struggle. I care not how fickle other people have been found. I know the people of these colonies, and I know that resistance to British aggression is deep and settled in their hearts and cannot be eradicated. Every colony, indeed, has expressed its willingness to follow, if we but take the lead. Sir, the declaration will inspire the people with increased courage. Instead of a long and bloody war for restoration of privileges, for redress of grievances, for chartered immunities, held under a British king, set before them the glorious object of entire independence, and it will breathe into them anew the breath of life.

Read this declaration at the head of the army; every sword will be drawn from its scabbard, and the solemn vow uttered to maintain it, or to perish on the bed of honor. Publish it from the pulpit; religion will approve it, and the love of religious liberty will cling round it, resolved to stand with it, or fall with it. Send it to the public halls; proclaim it there; let them hear it, who heard the first roar of the enemy’s cannon; let them see it, who saw their brothers and their sons fall on the field of Bunker hill, and in the streets of Lexington and Concord, and the very walls will cry out in its support.

Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs, but I see, I see clearly through this day’s business. You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not live to the time when this declaration shall be made good. We may die; die, colonists; die, slaves; die, it may be, ignominiously and on the scaffold. Be it so. Be it so. If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready, at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But while I do live, let me have a country, or at least the hope of a country, and that a free country.

But whatever may be our fate, be assured, be assured, that this declaration will stand. It may cost treasure, and it may cost blood; but it will stand, and it will richly compensate for both. Through the thick gloom of the present, I see the brightness of the future, as the sun in heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we are in our graves, our children will honor it. They will celebrate it with thanksgiving, with festivity, with bonfires and illuminations. On its annual return they will shed tears, copious, gushing tears, not of subjection and slavery, not of agony and distress, but of exultation, of gratitude, and of joy.

Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come. My judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it. All that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope, in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it; and I leave off as I begun, that live or die, survive or perish, I am for the declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment; independence now; and INDEPENDENCE FOR EVER.

Speech of Patrick Henry,

On the expediency of adopting the Federal Constitution delivered in the convention of Virginia, June 24, 1788. Enunciating views which have ever since been accepted by the Democratic party.

MR. CHAIRMAN:—The proposal of ratification is premature. The importance of the subject requires the most mature deliberation. The honorable member must forgive me for declaring my dissent from it, because, if I understand it rightly, it admits that the new system is defective, and most capitally; for, immediately after the proposed ratification, there comes a declaration, that the paper before you is not intended to violate any of these three great rights—the liberty of religion, liberty of the press, and the trial by jury. What is the inference, when you enumerate the rights which you are to enjoy? That those not enumerated are relinquished. There are only three things to be retained—religion, freedom of the press, and jury trial. Will not the ratification carry every thing, without excepting these three things? Will not all the world pronounce, that we intended to give up all the rest? Every thing it speaks of, by way of rights, is comprised in these three things. Your subsequent amendments only go to these three amendments. I feel myself distressed, because the necessity of securing our personal rights seems not to have pervaded the minds of men; for many other valuable things are omitted. For instance: general warrants, by which an officer may search suspected places without evidence of the commission of a fact, or seize any person without evidence of his crime, ought to be prohibited. As these are admitted, any man may be seized; any property may be taken, in the most arbitrary manner, without any evidence or reason. Every thing, the most sacred, may be searched and ransacked by the strong hand of power. We have infinitely more reason to dread general warrants here, than they have in England; because there, if a person be confined, liberty may be quickly obtained by the writ of habeas corpus. But here, a man living many hundred miles from the judges may rot in prison before he can get that writ.

Another most fatal omission is, with respect to standing armies. In your bill of rights of Virginia, they are said to be dangerous to liberty; and it tells you, that the proper defence of a free state consists in militia; and so I might go on to ten or eleven things of immense consequence secured in your bill of rights, concerning which that proposal is silent. Is that the language of the bill of rights in England? Is it the language of the American bill of rights, that these three rights, and these only, are valuable? Is it the language of men going into a new government? Is it not necessary to speak of those things before you go into a compact? How do these three things stand? As one of the parties, we declare we do not mean to give them up. This is very dictatorial; much more so than the conduct which proposes alterations as the condition of adoption. In a compact, there are two parties—one accepting, and another proposing. As a party, we propose that we shall secure these three things; and before we have the assent of the other contracting party, we go into the compact, and leave these things at their mercy. What will be the consequence? Suppose the other states will call this dictatorial: they will say, Virginia has gone into the government, and carried with her certain propositions, which, she says, ought to be concurred in by the other states. They will declare, that she has no right to dictate to other states the conditions on which they shall come into the union. According to the honorable member’s proposal, the ratification will cease to be obligatory unless they accede to these amendments. We have ratified it. You have committed a violation, they will say. They have not violated it. We say we will go out of it. You are then reduced to a sad dilemma—to give up these three rights, or leave the government. This is worse than our present confederation, to which we have hitherto adhered honestly and faithfully. We shall be told we have violated it, because we have left it for the infringement and violation of conditions, which they never agreed to be a part of the ratification. The ratification will be complete. The proposal is made by one party. We, as the other, accede to it, and propose the security of these three great rights; for it is only a proposal. In order to secure them, you are left in that state of fatal hostility, which I shall as much deplore as the honorable gentleman. I exhort gentlemen to think seriously before they ratify this constitution, and persuade themselves that they will succeed in making a feeble effort to get amendments after adoption. With respect to that part of the proposal which says that every power not granted remains with the people, it must be previous to adoption, or it will involve this country in inevitable destruction. To talk of it is a thing subsequent, not as one of your inalienable rights, is leaving it to the casual opinion of the congress who shall take up the consideration of the matter. They will not reason with you about the effect of this constitution. They will not take the opinion of this committee concerning its operation. They will construe it as they please. If you place it subsequently, let me ask the consequences. Among ten thousand implied powers which they may assume, they may, if we be engaged in war, liberate every one of your slaves, if they please. And this must and will be done by men, a majority of whom have not a common interest with you. They will, therefore, have no feeling for your interests.

It has been repeatedly said here that the great object of a national government is national defence. That power which is said to be intended for security and safety, may be rendered detestable and oppressive. If you give power to the general government to provide for the general defence, the means must be commensurate to the end. All the means in the possession of the people must be given to the government which is intrusted with the public defence. In this state there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states; but there are few or none in the Northern States; and yet, if the Northern States shall be of opinion that our numbers are numberless, they may call forth every national resource. May congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this in the last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general: but acts of assembly passed, that every slave who would go to the army should be free. Another thing will contribute to bring this event about: slavery is detested; we feel its fatal effects; we deplore it with all the pity of humanity. Let all these considerations, at some future period, press with full force on the minds of congress. Let that urbanity, which I trust will distinguish America, and the necessity of national defence—let all these things operate on their minds, and they will search that paper, and see if they have power of manumission. And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? There is no ambiguous implication, or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point. They have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it. As much as I deplore slavery, I see that prudence forbids its abolition. I deny that the general government ought to set them free, because a decided majority of the states have not the ties of sympathy and fellow-feeling for those whose interest would be affected by their emancipation. The majority of congress is to the north, and the slaves are to the south. In this situation, I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquillity gone away. I repeat it again, that it would rejoice my very soul that every one of my fellow-beings was emancipated. As we ought with gratitude to admire that decree of Heaven which has numbered us among the free, we ought to lament and deplore the necessity of holding our fellow-men in bondage. But is it practicable, by any human means, to liberate them, without producing the most dreadful and ruinous consequences? We ought to possess them in the manner we have inherited them from our ancestors, as their manumission is incompatible with the felicity of the country. But we ought to soften, as much as possible, the rigor of their unhappy fate. I know that in a variety of particular instances, the legislature, listening to complaints, have admitted their emancipation. Let me not dwell on this subject. I will only add, that this, as well as every other property of the people of Virginia, is in jeopardy, and put in the hands of those who have no similarity of situation with us. This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to congress.

Anxious as I am to be as little troublesome as possible, I cannot leave this part of the subject without adverting to one remark of the honorable gentleman. He says, that, rather than bring the union into danger, he will adopt it with its imperfections. A great deal is said about disunion, and consequent dangers. I have no claim to a greater share of fortitude than others; but I can see no kind of danger. I form my judgment on a single fact alone, that we are at peace with all the world; nor is there any apparent cause of a rupture with any nation in the world. Is it among the American states that the cause of disunion is to be feared? Are not the states using all their efforts for the promotion of union? New England sacrifices local prejudices for the purposes of union. We hear the necessity of the union, and predilection for the union, re-echoed from all parts of the continent; and all at once disunion is to follow! If gentlemen dread disunion, the very thing they advocate will inevitably produce it. A previous ratification will raise insurmountable obstacles to union. New York is an insurmountable obstacle to it, and North Carolina also. They will never accede to it till it be amended. A great part of Virginia is opposed, most decidedly, to it, as it stands. This very spirit which will govern us in these three states, will find a kindred spirit in the adopting states. Give me leave to say, that it is very problematical whether the adopting states can stand on their own legs. I hear only on one side, but as far as my information goes, there are heart-burnings and animosities among them. Will these animosities be cured by subsequent amendments?

Turn away from American, and consider European politics. The nations there, which can trouble us, are France, England, and Spain. But at present we know for a certainty, that those nations are engaged in a very different pursuit from American conquests. We are told by our intelligent ambassador, that there is no such danger as has been apprehended. Give me leave then to say, that dangers from beyond the Atlantic are imaginary. From these premises, then, it may be concluded, that, from the creation of the world to this time, there never was a more fair and proper opportunity than we have at this day to establish such a government as will permanently establish the most transcendent political felicity. Since the revolution there has not been so much experience. Since then, the general interests of America have not been better understood, nor the union more ardently loved, than at this present moment. I acknowledge the weakness of the old confederation. Every man says, that something must be done. Where is the moment more favorable than this? During the war, when ten thousand dangers surrounded us, America was magnanimous. What was the language of the little state of Maryland? “I will have time to consider. I will hold out three years. Let what may come I will have time to reflect.” Magnanimity appeared everywhere. What was the upshot?—America triumphed. Is there any thing to forbid us to offer these amendments to the other states? If this moment goes away unimproved, we shall never see its return. We now act under a happy system, which says, that a majority may alter the government when necessary. But by the paper proposed, a majority will forever endeavor in vain to alter it. Three-fourths may. Is not this the most promising time for securing the necessary alterations? Will you go into that government, where it is a principle, that a contemptible minority may prevent an alteration? What will be the language of the majority?—Change the government—Nay, seven eighths of the people of America may wish the change; but the minority may come with a Roman Veto, and object to the alteration. The language of a magnanimous country and of freemen is, Till you remove the defects, we will not accede. It would be in vain for me to show, that there is no danger to prevent our obtaining those amendments, if you are not convinced already. If the other states will not agree to them, it is not an inducement to union. The language of this paper is not dictatorial, but merely a proposition for amendments. The proposition of Virginia met with a favorable reception before. We proposed that convention which met at Annapolis. It was not called dictatorial. We proposed that at Philadelphia. Was Virginia thought dictatorial? But Virginia is now to lose her pre-eminence. Those rights of equality, to which the meanest individual in the community is entitled, are to bring us down infinitely below the Delaware people. Have we not a right to say, Hear our propositions? Why, sir, your slaves have a right to make their humble requests. Those who are in the meanest occupations of human life, have a right to complain. What do we require? Not pre-eminence, but safety; that our citizens may be able to sit down in peace and security under their own fig-trees. I am confident that sentiments like these will meet with unison in every state; for they will wish to banish discord from the American soil. I am certain that the warmest friend of the constitution wishes to have fewer enemies—fewer of those who pester and plague him with opposition. I could not withhold from my fellow-citizens anything so reasonable. I fear you will have no union, unless you remove the cause of opposition. Will you sit down contented with the name of union without any solid foundation?

Speech of John Randolph

Against the Tariff Bill, delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, April 15, 1824.

I AM, Mr. Speaker, practising no deception upon myself, much less upon the house, when I say, that if I had consulted my own feelings and inclinations, I should not have troubled the house, exhausted as it is, and as I am, with any further remarks upon this subject. I come to the discharge of this task, not merely with reluctance, but with disgust; jaded, worn down, abraded, I may say, as I am by long attendance upon this body, and continued stretch of the attention upon this subject. I come to it, however, at the suggestion, and in pursuance of the wishes of those, whose wishes are to me, in all matters touching my public duty, paramount law; I speak with those reservations, of course, which every moral agent must be supposed to make to himself.

It was not more to my surprise, than to my disappointment, that on my return to the house, after a necessary absence of a few days, on indispensable business, I found it engaged in discussing the general principle of the bill, when its details were under consideration. If I had expected such a turn in the debate, I would, at any private sacrifice, however great, have remained a spectator and auditor of that discussion. With the exception of the speech, already published, of my worthy colleague on my right (Mr. P. P. Barbour), I have been nearly deprived of the benefit of the discussion which has taken place. Many weeks have been occupied with this bill (I hope the house will pardon me for saying so) before I took the slightest part in the deliberations of the details; and I now sincerely regret that I had not firmness enough to adhere to the resolution which I had laid down to myself, in the early stage of the debate, not to take any part in the discussion of the details of the measure. But, as I trust, what I now have to say upon this subject, although more and better things have been said by others, may not be the same that they have said, or may not be said in the same manner. I here borrow the language of a man who has been heretofore conspicuous in the councils of the country; of one who was unrivalled for readiness and dexterity in debate; who was long without an equal on the floor of this body; who contributed as much to the revolution of 1801, as any man in this nation, and derived as little benefit from it; as, to use the words of that celebrated man, what I have to say is not that which has been said by others, and will not be said in their manner, the house will, I trust, have patience with me during the time that my strength will allow me to occupy their attention. And I beg them to understand, that the notes which I hold in my hand are not the notes on which I mean to speak, but of what others have spoken, and from which I will make the smallest selection in my power.

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Sir, when are we to have enough of this tariff question? In 1816 it was supposed to be settled. Only three years thereafter, another proposition for increasing it was sent from this house to the senate, baited with a tax of four cents per pound on brown sugar. It was fortunately rejected in that body. In what manner this bill is baited, it does not become me to say; but I have too distinct a recollection of the vote in committee of the whole, on the duty upon molasses, and afterwards of the vote in the house on the same question; of the votes of more than one of the states on that question, not to mark it well. I do not say that the change of the vote on that question was affected by any man’s voting against his own motion; but I do not hesitate to say that it was effected by one man’s electioneering against his own motion. I am very glad, Mr. Speaker, that old Massachusetts Bay, and the province of Maine and Sagadahock, by whom we stood in the days of the revolution, now stand by the south, and will not aid in fixing on us this system of taxation, compared with which the taxation of Mr. Grenville and Lord North was as nothing. I speak with knowledge of what I say, when I declare, that this bill is an attempt to reduce the country, south of Mason and Dixon’s line and east of the Alleghany mountains, to a state of worse than colonial bondage; a state to which the domination of Great Britain was, in my judgment, far preferable; and I trust I shall always have the fearless integrity to utter any political sentiment which the head sanctions and the heart ratifies; for the British parliament never would have dared to lay such duties on our imports, or their exports to us, either “at home” or here, as is now proposed to be laid upon the imports from abroad. At that time we had the command of the market of the vast dominions then subject, and we should have had those which have since been subjected, to the British empire; we enjoyed a free trade eminently superior to any thing that we can enjoy, if this bill shall go into operation. It is a sacrifice of the interests of a part of this nation to the ideal benefit of the rest. It marks us out as the victims of a worse than Egyptian bondage. It is a barter of so much of our rights, of so much of the fruits of our labor, for political power to be transferred to other hands. It ought to be met, and I trust it will be met, in the southern country, as was the stamp act, and by all those measures, which I will not detain the house by recapitulating, which succeeded the stamp act, and produced the final breach with the mother country, which it took about ten years to bring about, as I trust, in my conscience, it will not take as long to bring about similar results from this measure, should it become a law.

Sir, events now passing elsewhere, which plant a thorn in my pillow and a dagger in my heart, admonish me of the difficulty of governing with sobriety any people who are over head and ears in debt. That state of things begets a temper which sets at nought every thing like reason and common sense. This country is unquestionably laboring under great distress; but we cannot legislate it out of that distress. We may, by your legislation, reduce all the country south and east of Mason and Dixon’s line, the whites as well as the blacks, to the condition of Helots: you can do no more. We have had placed before us, in the course of this discussion, foreign examples and authorities; and among other things, we have been told, as an argument in favor of this measure, of the prosperity of Great Britain. Have gentlemen taken into consideration the peculiar advantages of Great Britain? Have they taken into consideration that, not excepting Mexico, and that fine country which lies between the Orinoco and Caribbean sea, England is decidedly superior, in point of physical advantages, to every country under the sun? This is unquestionably true. I will enumerate some of those advantages. First, there is her climate. In England, such is the temperature of the air, that a man can there do more days’ work in the year, and more hours’ work in the day, than in any other climate in the world; of course I include Scotland and Ireland in this description. It is in such a climate only, that the human animal can bear without extirpation the corrupted air, the noisome exhalations, the incessant labor of these accursed manufactories. Yes, sir, accursed; for I say it is an accursed thing, which I will neither taste, nor touch, nor handle. If we were to act here on the English system, we should have the yellow fever at Philadelphia and New York, not in August merely, but from June to January, and from January to June. The climate of this country alone, were there no other natural obstacle to it, says aloud, You shall not manufacture! Even our tobacco factories, admitted to be the most wholesome of any sort of factories, are known to be, where extensive, the very nidus (if I may use the expression) of yellow fever and other fevers of similar type. In another of the advantages of Great Britain, so important to her prosperity, we are almost on a par with her, if we know how properly to use it. Fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint—for, as regards defence, we are, to all intents and purposes, almost as much an island as England herself. But one of her insular advantages we can never acquire. Every part of that country is accessible from the sea. There, as you recede from the sea, you do not get further from the sea. I know that a great deal will be said of our majestic rivers, about the father of floods, and his tributary streams; but, with the Ohio, frozen up all the winter and dry all the summer, with a long tortuous, difficult, and dangerous navigation thence to the ocean, the gentlemen of the west may rest assured that they will never derive one particle of advantage from even a total prohibition of foreign manufactures. You may succeed in reducing us to your own level of misery; but if we were to agree to become your slaves, you never can derive one farthing of advantage from this bill. What parts of this country can derive any advantage from it? Those parts only, where there is a water power in immediate contact with navigation, such as the vicinities of Boston, Providence, Baltimore, and Richmond. Petersburg is the last of these as you travel south. You take a bag of cotton up the river to Pittsburg, or to Zanesville, to have it manufactured and sent down to New Orleans for a market, and before your bag of cotton has got to the place of manufacture, the manufacturer of Providence has received his returns for the goods made from his bag of cotton purchased at the same time that you purchased yours. No, sir, gentlemen may as well insist that because the Chesapeake bay, mare nostrum, our Mediterranean sea, gives us every advantage of navigation, we shall exclude from it every thing but steam-boats and those boats called κατ’ ἐξοχὴν, per emphasin, par excellence, Kentucky boats—a sort of huge square, clumsy, wooden box. And why not insist upon it? Hav’n’t you “the power to REGULATE COMMERCE”? Would not that too be a “REGULATION OF COMMERCE?” It would, indeed, and a pretty regulation it is; and so is this bill. And, sir, I marvel that the representation from the great commercial state of New York should be in favor of this bill. If operative—and if inoperative why talk of it?—if operative, it must, like the embargo of 1807–1809, transfer no small portion of the wealth of the London of America, as New York has been called, to Quebec and Montreal. She will receive the most of her imports from abroad, down the river. I do not know any bill that could be better calculated for Vermont than this bill; because, through Vermont, from Quebec, Montreal, and other positions on the St. Lawrence, we are, if it passes, unquestionably to receive our supplies of foreign goods. It will, no doubt, suit the Niagara frontier.

But, sir, I must not suffer myself to be led too far astray from the topic of the peculiar advantages of England as a manufacturing country. Her vast beds of coal are inexhaustible; there are daily discoveries of quantities of it, greater than ages past have yet consumed; to which beds of coal her manufacturing establishments have been transferred, as any man may see who will compare the present population of her towns with what it was formerly. It is to these beds of coal that Birmingham, Manchester, Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Leeds, and other manufacturing towns, owe their growth. If you could destroy her coal in one day, you would cut at once the sinews of her power. Then, there are her metals, and particularly tin, of which she has the exclusive monopoly. Tin, I know, is to be found in Japan, and perhaps elsewhere; but, in practice, England has now the monopoly of that article. I might go further, and I might say, that England possesses an advantage, quoad hoc, in her institutions; for there men are compelled to pay their debts. But here, men are not only not compelled to pay their debts, but they are protected in the refusal to pay them, in the scandalous evasion of their legal obligations; and, after being convicted of embezzling the public money, and the money of others, of which they were appointed guardians and trustees, they have the impudence to obtrude their unblushing fronts into society, and elbow honest men out of their way. There, though all men are on a footing of equality on the high way, and in the courts of law, at will and at market, yet the castes in Hindoostan are not more distinctly separated, one from the other, than the different classes of society are in England. It is true that it is practicable for a wealthy merchant or manufacturer, or his descendants, after having, through two or three generations, washed out, what is considered the stain of their original occupation, to emerge, by slow degrees, into the higher ranks of society; but this rarely happens. Can you find men of vast fortune, in this country, content to move in the lower circles—content as the ox under the daily drudgery of the yoke? It is true that, in England, some of these wealthy people take it into their heads to buy seats in parliament. But, when they get there, unless they possess great talents, they are mere nonentities; their existence is only to be found in the red book which contains a list of the members of parliament. Now, sir, I wish to know if, in the western country, where any man may get beastly drunk for three pence sterling—in England, you cannot get a small wine-glass of spirits under twenty-five cents; one such drink of grog as I have seen swallowed in this country, would there cost a dollar—in the western country, where every man can get as much meat and bread as he can consume, and yet spend the best part of his days, and nights too, perhaps, on the tavern benches, or loitering at the cross roads asking the news, can you expect the people of such a country, with countless millions of wild land and wild animals besides, can be cooped up in manufacturing establishments, and made to work sixteen hours a day, under the superintendence of a driver, yes, a driver, compared with whom a southern overseer is a gentleman and man of refinement; for, if they do not work, these work people in the manufactories, they cannot eat; and, among all the punishments that can be devised (put death even among the number), I defy you to get as much work out of a man by any of them, as when he knows that he must work before he can eat.

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In the course of this discussion, I have heard, I will not say with surprise, because nil admirari is my motto—no doctrine that can be broached on this floor, can ever, hereafter, excite surprise in my mind—I have heard the names of Say, Ganilh, Adam Smith, and Ricardo, pronounced not only in terms, but in a tone of sneering contempt, visionary theorists, destitute of practical wisdom, and the whole clan of Scotch and Quarterly Reviewers lugged in to boot. This, sir, is a sweeping clause of proscription. With the names of Say, Smith, and Ganilh, I profess to be acquainted, for I, too, am versed in title-pages; but I did not expect to hear, in this house, a name, with which I am a little further acquainted, treated with so little ceremony; and by whom? I leave Adam Smith to the simplicity, the majesty, and strength of his own native genius, which has canonized his name—a name which will be pronounced with veneration, when not one in this house will be remembered. But one word as to Ricardo, the last mentioned of these writers—a new authority, though the grave has already closed upon him, and set its seal upon his reputation. I shall speak of him in the language of a man of as great a genius as this, or perhaps any, age has ever produced; a man remarkable for the depth of his reflections and the acumen of his penetration. “I had been led,” says this man, “to look into loads of books—my understanding had for too many years been intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of the herd of modern economists. I sometimes read chapters from more recent works, or part of parliamentary debates. I saw that these [ominous words!] were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” [I am very glad, sir, he did not read our debates. What would he have said of ours?] “At length a friend sent me Mr. Ricardo’s book, and, recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator on this science, I said, Thou art the man. Wonder and curiosity had long been dead in me; yet I wondered once more. Had this profound work been really written in England during the 19th century? Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities and a century of thought had failed to advance by one hair’s breadth? All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents: Mr. Ricardo had deduced, a priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions, into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.”

I pronounce no opinion of my own on Ricardo; I recur rather to the opinion of a man inferior, in point of original and native genius, and that highly cultivated, too, to none of the moderns, and few of the ancients. Upon this subject, what shall we say to the following fact? Butler, who is known to gentlemen of the profession of the law, as the annotator, with Hargrave, on lord Coke, speaking with Fox as to political economy—that most extraordinary man, unrivalled for his powers of debate, excelled by no man that ever lived, or probably ever will live, as a public debater, and of the deepest political erudition, fairly confessed that he had never read Adam Smith. Butler said to Mr. Fox, “that he had never read Adam Smith’s work on the Wealth of Nations.” “To tell you the truth,” replied Mr. Fox, “nor I neither. There is something in all these subjects that passes my comprehension—something so wide that I could never embrace them myself, or find any one who did.” And yet we see how we, with our little dividers, undertake to lay off the scale, and with our pack-thread to take the soundings, and speak with a confidence peculiar to quacks (in which the regular-bred professor never indulges) on this abstruse and perplexing subject. Confidence is one thing, knowledge another; of the want of which, overweening confidence is notoriously the indication. What of that? Let Ganilh, Say, Ricardo, Smith, all Greek and Roman fame be against us; we appeal to Dionysius in support of our doctrines; and to him, not on the throne of Syracuse, but at Corinth—not in absolute possession of the most wonderful and enigmatical city, as difficult to comprehend as the abstrusest problem of political economy which furnished not only the means but the men for supporting the greatest wars—a kingdom within itself, under whose ascendant the genius of Athens, in her most high and palmy state, quailed, and stood rebuked. No; we follow the pedagogue to the schools—dictating in the classic shades of Longwood—(lucus a non lucendo)—to his disciples. * * *

But it is said, a measure of this sort is necessary to create employment for the people. Why, sir, where are the handles of the plough? Are they unfit for young gentlemen to touch? Or will they rather choose to enter your military academies, where the sons of the rich are educated at the expense of the poor, and where so many political janissaries are every year turned out, always ready for war, and to support the powers that be—equal to the strelitzes of Moscow or St. Petersburg. I do not speak now of individuals, of course, but of the tendency of the system—the hounds follow the huntsman because he feeds them, and bears the whip. I speak of the system. I concur most heartily, sir, in the censure which has been passed upon the greediness of office, which stands a stigma on the present generation. Men from whom we might expect, and from whom I did expect, better things, crowd the ante-chamber of the palace, for every vacant office; nay, even before men are dead, their shoes are wanted for some barefooted office-seeker. How mistaken was the old Roman, the old consul, who, whilst he held the plough by one hand, and death held the other, exclaimed, “Diis immortalibus sero!”

Our fathers, how did they acquire their property? By straightforward industry, rectitude, and frugality. How did they become dispossessed of their property? By indulging in speculative hopes and designs; seeking the shadow whilst they lost the substance; and now, instead of being, as they were, men of respectability, men of substance, men capable and willing to live independently and honestly, and hospitably too—for who so parsimonious as the prodigal who has nothing to give?—what have we become? A nation of sharks, preying on one another through the instrumentality of this paper system, which, if Lycurgus had known of it, he would unquestionably have adopted, in preference to his iron money, if his object had been to make the Spartans the most accomplished knaves as well as to keep them poor.

The manufacturer of the east may carry his woolens or his cottons, or his coffins, to what market he pleases—I do not buy of him. Self-defence is the first law of nature. You drive us into it. You create heats and animosities among this great family, who ought to live like brothers; and, after you have got this temper of mind roused among the southern people, do you expect to come among us to trade, and expect us to buy your wares? Sir, not only shall we not buy them, but we shall take such measures (I will not enter into the detail of them now) as shall render it impossible for you to sell them. Whatever may be said here of the “misguided counsels,” as they have been termed, “of the theorists of Virginia,” they have, so far as regards this question, the confidence of united Virginia. We are asked—Does the south lose any thing by this bill—why do you cry out? I put it, sir, to any man from any part of the country, from the gulf of Mexico, from the Balize, to the eastern shore of Maryland—which, I thank Heaven, is not yet under the government of Baltimore, and will not be, unless certain theories should come into play in that state, which we have lately heard of, and a majority of men, told by the head, should govern—whether the whole country between the points I have named, is not unanimous in opposition to this bill. Would it not be unexampled, that we should thus complain, protest, resist, and that all the while nothing should be the matter? Are our understandings (however low mine may be rated, much sounder than mine are engaged in this resistance), to be rated so low, as that we are to be made to believe that we are children affrighted by a bugbear? We are asked, however, why do you cry out? it is all for your good. Sir, this reminds me of the mistresses of George II., who, when they were insulted by the populace on arriving in London (as all such creatures deserve to be, by every mob), put their heads out of the window, and said to them in their broken English, “Goot people, we be come for your goots;” to which one of the mob rejoined—“Yes, and for our chattels too, I fancy.” Just so it is with the oppressive exactions proposed and advocated by the supporters of this bill, on the plea of the good of those who are its victims. * * *

I had more to say, Mr. Speaker, could I have said it, on this subject. But I cannot sit down without asking those, who were once my brethren of the church, the elders of the young family of this good old republic of the thirteen states, if they can consent to rivet upon us this system, from which no benefit can possibly result to themselves. I put it to them as descendants of the renowned colony of Virginia; as children sprung from her loins; if for the sake of all the benefits, with which this bill is pretended to be freighted to them, granting such to be the fact for argument’s sake, they could consent to do such an act of violence to the unanimous opinion, feelings, prejudices, if you will, of the whole Southern States, as to pass it? I go farther. I ask of them what is there in the condition of the nation at this time, that calls for the immediate adoption of this measure? Are the Gauls at the gate of the capitol? If they are, the cacklings of the Capitoline geese will hardly save it. What is there to induce us to plunge into the vortex of those evils so severely felt in Europe from this very manufacturing and paper policy? For it is evident that, if we go into this system of policy, we must adopt the European institutions also. We have very good materials to work with; we have only to make our elective king president for life, in the first place, and then to make the succession hereditary in the family of the first that shall happen to have a promising son. For a king we can be at no loss—ex quovis ligno—any block will do for him. The senate may, perhaps, be transmuted into a house of peers, although we should meet with more difficulty than in the other case; for Bonaparte himself was not more hardly put to it, to recruit the ranks of his mushroom nobility, than we should be to furnish a house of peers. As for us, we are the faithful commons, ready made to hand; but with all our loyalty, I congratulate the house—I congratulate the nation—that, although this body is daily degraded by the sight of members of Congress manufactured into placemen, we have not yet reached such a point of degradation as to suffer executive minions to be manufactured into members of congress. We have shut that door; I wish we could shut the other also. I wish we could have a perpetual call of the house in this view, and suffer no one to get out from its closed doors. The time is peculiarly inauspicious for the change in our policy which is proposed by this bill. We are on the eve of an election that promises to be the most distracted that this nation has ever yet undergone. It may turn out to be a Polish election. At such a time, ought any measure to be brought forward which is supposed to be capable of being demonstrated to be extremely injurious to one great portion of this country, and beneficial in proportion to another? Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. There are firebrands enough in the land, without this apple of discord being cast into this assembly. Suppose this measure is not what it is represented to be; that the fears of the south are altogether illusory and visionary; that it will produce all the good predicted of it—an honorable gentleman from Kentucky said yesterday—and I was sorry to hear it, for I have great respect for that gentleman, and for other gentlemen from that state—that the question was not whether a bare majority should pass the bill, but whether the majority or the minority should rule. The gentleman is wrong, and, if he will consider the matter rightly, he will see it. Is there no difference between the patient and the actor? We are passive: we do not call them to act or to suffer, but we call upon them not so to act as that we must necessarily suffer; and I venture to say, that in any government, properly constituted, this very consideration would operate conclusively, that if the burden is to be laid on 102, it ought not to be laid by 105. We are the eel that is being flayed, while the cook-maid pats us on the head, and cries, with the clown in King Lear, “Down, wantons, down.” There is but one portion of the country which can profit by this bill, and from that portion of the country comes this bare majority in favor of it. I bless God that Massachusetts and old Virginia are once again rallying under the same banner, against oppressive and unconstitutional taxation; for, if all the blood be drawn from out the body, I care not whether it be by the British parliament or the American congress; by an emperor or a king abroad, or by a president at home.

Under these views, and with feelings of mortification and shame at the very weak opposition I have been able to make to this bill, I entreat gentlemen to consent that it may lie over, at least, until the next session of congress. We have other business to attend to, and our families and affairs need our attention at home; and indeed I, sir, would not give one farthing for any man who prefers being here to being at home; who is a good public man and a bad private one. With these views and feelings, I move you, sir, that the bill be indefinitely postponed.

Edward Everett.

The example of the Northern to the Southern Republics of America.

THE great triumphs of constitutional freedom, to which our independence has furnished the example, have been witnessed in the southern portion of our hemisphere. Sunk to the last point of colonial degradation, they have risen at once into the organization of three republics. Their struggle has been arduous; and eighteen years of checkered fortune have not yet brought it to a close. But we must not infer, from their prolonged agitation, that their independence is uncertain; that they have prematurely put on the toga virilis of freedom. They have not begun too soon; they have more to do. Our war of independence was shorter;—happily we were contending with a government, that could not, like that of Spain, pursue an interminable and hopeless contest, in defiance of the people’s will. Our transition to a mature and well adjusted constitution was more prompt than that of our sister republics; for the foundations had long been settled, the preparation long made. And when we consider that it is our example, which has aroused the spirit of independence from California to Cape Horn; that the experiment of liberty, if it had failed with us, most surely would not have been attempted by them; that even now our counsels and acts will operate as powerful precedents in this great family of republics, we learn the importance of the post which Providence has assigned us in the world. A wise and harmonious administration of the public affairs,—a faithful, liberal, and patriotic exercise of the private duties of the citizen,—while they secure our happiness at home, will diffuse a healthful influence through the channels of national communication, and serve the cause of liberty beyond the Equator and the Andes. When we show a united, conciliatory, and imposing front to their rising states we show them, better than sounding eulogies can do, the true aspect of an independent republic; we give them a living example that the fireside policy of a people is like that of the individual man. As the one, commencing in the prudence, order, and industry of the private circle, extends itself to all the duties of social life, of the family, the neighborhood, the country; so the true domestic policy of the republic, beginning in the wise organization of its own institutions, pervades its territories with a vigilant, prudent, temperate administration; and extends the hand of cordial interest to all the friendly nations, especially to those which are of the household of liberty.

It is in this way that we are to fulfil our destiny in the world. The greatest engine of moral power, which human nature knows, is an organized, prosperous state. All that man, in his individual capacity, can do—all that he can effect by his fraternities—by his ingenious discoveries and wonders of art,—or by his influence over others—is as nothing, compared with the collective, perpetuated influence on human affairs and human happiness of a well constituted, powerful commonwealth. It blesses generations with its sweet influence;—even the barren earth seems to pour out its fruits under a system where property is secure, while her fairest gardens are blighted by despotism;—men, thinking, reasoning men, abound beneath its benignant sway;—nature enters into a beautiful accord, a better, purer asiento with man, and guides an industrious citizen to every rood of her smiling wastes;—and we see, at length, that what has been called a state of nature, has been most falsely, calumniously so denominated; that the nature of man is neither that of a savage, a hermit, nor a slave; but that of a member of a well-ordered family, that of a good neighbor, a free citizen, a well informed, good man, acting with others like him. This is the lesson which is taught in the charter of our independence; this is the lesson which our example is to teach the world.

The epic poet of Rome—the faithful subject of an absolute prince—in unfolding the duties and destinies of his countrymen, bids them look down with disdain on the polished and intellectual arts of Greece, and deem their arts to be

To rule the nations with imperial sway; To spare the tribes that yield; fight down the proud; And force the mood of peace upon the world.

A nobler counsel breathes from the charter of our independence; a happier province belongs to our republic. Peace we would extend, but by persuasion and example,—the moral force, by which alone it can prevail among the nations. Wars we may encounter, but it is in the sacred character of the injured and the wronged; to raise the trampled rights of humanity from the dust; to rescue the mild form of liberty from her abode among the prisons and the scaffolds of the elder world, and to seat her in the chair of state among her adoring children; to give her beauty for ashes; a healthful action for her cruel agony; to put at last a period to her warfare on earth; to tear her star-spangled banner from the perilous ridges of battle, and plant it on the rock of ages. There be it fixed for ever,—the power of a free people slumbering in its folds, their peace reposing in its shade!

Close of the Speech of Daniel Webster

On the Greek question, in the House of Representatives of the United States, January, 1824.

The house had gone into committee of the whole, Mr. Taylor in the chair, on the resolution offered by Mr. Webster, which is in the words following:

“Resolved, That provision ought to be made by law for defraying the expense incident to the appointment of an agent, or commissioner, to Greece, whenever the President shall deem it expedient to make such appointment.”

MR. CHAIRMAN,—It may be asked, will this resolution do the Greeks any good? Yes, it will do them much good. It will give them courage and spirit, which is better than money. It will assure them of the public sympathy, and will inspire them with fresh constancy. It will teach them that they are not forgotten by the civilized world, and to hope one day to occupy, in that world, an honorable station.

A farther question remains. Is this measure pacific? It has no other character. It simply proposes to make a pecuniary provision for a mission, when the president shall deem such mission expedient. It is a mere reciprocation to the sentiments of his message; it imposes upon him no new duty; it gives him no new power; it does not hasten or urge him forward; it simply provides, in an open and avowed manner, the means of doing, what would else be done out of the contingent fund. It leaves him at the most perfect liberty, and it reposes the whole matter in his sole discretion. He might do it without this resolution, as he did in the case of South America,—but it merely answers the query, whether on so great and interesting a question as the condition of the Greeks, this house holds no opinion which is worth expressing? But, suppose a commissioner is sent, the measure is pacific still. Where is the breach of neutrality? Where a just cause of offence? And besides, Mr. Chairman, is all the danger in this matter on one side? may we not inquire, whose fleets cover the Archipelago? may we not ask, what would be the result to our trade should Smyrna be blockaded? A commissioner could at least procure for us what we do not now possess—that is, authentic information of the true state of things. The document on your table exhibits a meagre appearance on this point—what does it contain? Letters of Mr. Luriottis and paragraphs from a French paper. My personal opinion is, that an agent ought immediately to be sent; but the resolution I have offered by no means goes so far.

Do gentlemen fear the result of this resolution in embroiling us with the Porte? Why, sir, how much is it ahead of the whole nation, or rather let me ask how much is the nation ahead of it? Is not this whole people already in a state of open and avowed excitement on this subject? Does not the land ring from side to side with one common sentiment of sympathy for Greece, and indignation toward her oppressors? nay, more, sir—are we not giving money to this cause? More still, sir—is not the secretary of state in open correspondence with the president of the Greek committee in London? The nation has gone as far as it can go, short of an official act of hostility. This resolution adds nothing beyond what is already done—nor can any of the European governments take offence at such a measure. But if they would, should we be withheld from an honest expression of liberal feelings in the cause of freedom, for fear of giving umbrage to some member of the holy alliance? We are not, surely, yet prepared to purchase their smiles by a sacrifice of every manly principle. Dare any Christian prince even ask us not to sympathize with a Christian nation struggling against Tartar tyranny? We do not interfere—we break no engagements—we violate no treaties; with the Porte we have none.

Mr. Chairman, there are some things which, to be well done, must be promptly done. If we even determine to do the thing that is now proposed, we may do it too late. Sir, I am not of those who are for withholding aid when it is most urgently needed, and when the stress is past, and the aid no longer necessary, overwhelming the sufferers with caresses. I will not stand by and see my fellow man drowning without stretching out a hand to help him, till he has by his own efforts and presence of mind reached the shore in safety, and then encumber him with aid. With suffering Greece now is the crisis of her fate,—her great, it may be, her last struggle. Sir, while we sit here deliberating, her destiny may be decided. The Greeks, contending with ruthless oppressors, turn their eyes to us, and invoke us by their ancestors, slaughtered wives and children, by their own blood, poured out like water, by the hecatombs of dead they have heaped up as it were to heaven, they invoke, they implore us for some cheering sound, some look of sympathy, some token of compassionate regard. They look to us as the great republic of the earth—and they ask us by our common faith, whether we can forget that they are struggling, as we once struggled, for what we now so happily enjoy? I cannot say, sir, that they will succeed; that rests with heaven. But for myself, sir, if I should to-morrow hear that they have failed—that their last phalanx had sunk beneath the Turkish cimeter, that the flames of their last city had sunk in its ashes, and that naught remained but the wide melancholy waste where Greece once was, I should still reflect, with the most heartfelt satisfaction, that I have asked you in the name of seven millions of freemen, that you would give them at least the cheering of one friendly voice.

John Randolph on the other side of Same Question.

MR. CHAIRMAN,—It is with serious concern and alarm, that I have heard doctrines broached in this debate, fraught with consequences more disastrous to the best interests of this people than any that I have ever heard advanced during the five-and-twenty years that I have been honored with a seat on this floor. They imply, to my apprehension, a total and fundamental change of the policy pursued by this government, ab urbe condita—from the foundation of the republic, to the present day. Are we, sir, to go on a crusade, in another hemisphere, for the propagation of two objects—objects as dear and delightful to my heart as to that of any gentleman in this, or in any other assembly—liberty and religion—and, in the name of these holy words—by this powerful spell, is this nation to be conjured and persuaded out of the highway of heaven—out of its present comparatively happy state, into all the disastrous conflicts arising from the policy of European powers, with all the consequences which flow from them?

Liberty and religion, sir! I believe that nothing similar to this proposition is to be found in modern history, unless in the famous decree of the French national assembly, which brought combined Europe against them, with its united strength, and, after repeated struggles, finally effected the downfall of the French power. Sir, I am wrong—there is another example of like doctrine; and you find it among that strange and peculiar people—in that mysterious book, which is of the highest authority with them, (for it is at once their gospel and their law,) the Koran, which enjoins it to be the duty of all good Moslems to propagate its doctrines at the point of the sword—by the edge of the cimeter. The character of that people is a peculiar one: they differ from every other race. It has been said, here, that it is four hundred years since they encamped in Europe. Sir, they were encamped, on the spot where we now find them, before this country was discovered, and their title to the country which they occupy is at least as good as ours. They hold their possessions there by the same title by which all other countries are held—possession, obtained at first by a successful employment of force, confirmed by time, usage, prescription—the best of all possible titles. Their policy has been not tortuous, like that of other states of Europe, but straightforward: they had invariably appealed to the sword, and they held by the sword. The Russ had, indeed, made great encroachments on their empire, but the ground had been contested inch by inch; and the acquisitions of Russia on the side of Christian Europe—Livonia, Ingria, Courland—Finland, to the Gulf of Bothnia—Poland!—had been greater than that of the Mahometans. And, in consequence of this straightforward policy to which I before referred, this peculiar people could boast of being the only one of the continental Europe, whose capital had never been insulted by the presence of a foreign military force. It was a curious fact, well worthy of attention, that Constantinople was the only capital in continental Europe—for Moscow was the true capital of Russia—that had never been in possession of an enemy. It is, indeed, true, that the Empress Catharine did inscribe over the gate of one of the cities that she had won in the Krimea, (Cherson, I think,) “the road to Byzantium;” but, sir, it has proved—perhaps too low a word for the subject—but a stumpy road for Russia. Who, at that day, would have been believed, had he foretold to that august (for so she was) and illustrious woman that her Cossacks of the Ukraine, and of the Don, would have encamped in Paris before they reached Constantinople? Who would have been believed, if he had foretold that a French invading force—such as the world never saw before, and, I trust, will never again see—would lay Moscow itself in ashes? These are considerations worthy of attention, before we embark in the project proposed by this resolution, the consequences of which no human eye can divine.

I would respectfully ask the gentleman from Massachusetts, whether in his very able and masterly argument—and he has said all that could be said upon the subject, and more than I supposed could be said by any man in favor of his resolution—whether he himself has not furnished an answer to his speech—I had not the happiness myself to hear his speech, but a friend has read it to me. In one of the arguments in that speech, toward the conclusion, I think, of his speech, the gentleman lays down, from Puffendorf, in reference to the honeyed words and pious professions of the holy alliance, that these are all surplusage, because nations are always supposed to be ready to do what justice and national law require. Well, sir, if this be so, why may not the Greeks presume—why are they not, on this principle, bound to presume, that this government is disposed to do all, in reference to them, that they ought to do, without any formal resolutions to that effect? I ask the gentleman from Massachusetts, whether the doctrine of Puffendorf does not apply as strongly to the resolution as to the declaration of the allies—that is, if the resolution of the gentleman be indeed that almost nothing he would have us suppose, if there be not something behind this nothing which divides this house (not horizontally, as the gentleman has ludicrously said—but vertically) into two unequal parties, one the advocate of a splendid system of crusades, the other the friends of peace and harmony; the advocates of a fireside policy—for, as had been truly said, as long as all is right at the fireside, there cannot be much wrong elsewhere—whether, I repeat, does not the doctrine of Puffendorf apply as well to the words of the resolution as to the words of the holy alliance?

But, sir, we have already done more than this. The president of the United States, the only organ of communication which the people have seen fit to establish between us and foreign powers, has already expressed all, in reference to Greece, that the resolution goes to express actum est—it is done—it is finished—there is an end. Not, that I would have the house to infer, that I mean to express any opinion as to the policy of such a declaration—the practice of responding to presidential addresses and messages had gone out for, now, these two or three-and-twenty years.

Extract from Mr. Hayne’s Speech against the Tariff Bill, in Congress,

January, 1832.

MR. PRESIDENT,—The plain and seemingly obvious truth, that in a fair and equal exchange of commodities all parties gained, is a noble discovery of modern times. The contrary principle naturally led to commercial rivalries, wars, and abuses of all sorts. The benefits of commerce being regarded as a stake to be won, or an advantage to be wrested from others by fraud or by force, governments naturally strove to secure them to their own subjects; and when they once set out in this wrong direction, it was quite natural that they should not stop short till they ended in binding, in the bonds of restriction, not only the whole country, but all of its parts. Thus we are told that England first protected by her restrictive policy, her whole empire against all the world, then Great Britain against the colonies, then the British islands against each other, and ended by vainly attempting to protect all the great interests and employment of the state by balancing them against each other. Sir, such a system, carried fully out, is not confined to rival nations, but protects one town against another, considers villages, and even families as rivals; and cannot stop short of “Robinson Crusoe in his goat skins.” It takes but one step further to make every man his own lawyer, doctor, farmer, and shoemaker—and, if I may be allowed an Irishism, his own seamstress and washerwoman. The doctrine of free trade, on the contrary, is founded on the true social system. It looks on all mankind as children of a common parent—and the great family of nations as linked together by mutual interests. Sir, as there is a religion, so I believe there is a politics of nature. Cast your eyes over this various earth—see its surface diversified by hills and valleys, rocks, and fertile fields. Notice its different productions—its infinite varieties of soil and climate. See the mighty rivers winding their way to the very mountain’s base, and thence guiding man to the vast ocean, dividing, yet connecting nations. Can any man who considers these things with the eye of a philosopher, not read the design of the great Creator (written legibly in his works) that his children should be drawn together in a free commercial intercourse, and mutual exchanges of the various gifts with which a bountiful Providence has blessed them. Commerce, sir, restricted even as she has been, has been the great source of civilization and refinement all over the world. Next to the Christian religion, I consider free trade in its largest sense as the greatest blessing that can be conferred upon any people. Hear, sir, what Patrick Henry, the great orator of Virginia, whose soul was the very temple of freedom, says on this subject:—

“Why should we fetter commerce? If a man is in chains, he droops and bows to the earth, because his spirits are broken, but let him twist the fetters from his legs, and he will stand erect. Fetter not commerce! Let her be as free as the air. She will range the whole creation, and return on the four winds of heaven to bless the land with plenty.”

But, it has been said, that free trade would do very well, if all nations would adopt it; but as it is, every nation must protect itself from the effect of restrictions by countervailing measures. I am persuaded, sir, that this is a great, a most fatal error. If retaliation is resorted to for the honest purpose of producing a redress of the grievance, and while adhered to no longer than there is a hope of success, it may, like war itself, be sometimes just and necessary. But if it have no such object, “it is the unprofitable combat of seeing which can do the other the most harm.” The case can hardly be conceived in which permanent restrictions, as a measure of retaliation, could be profitable. In every possible situation, a trade, whether more or less restricted, is profitable, or it is not. This can only be decided by experience, and if the trade be left to regulate itself, water would not more naturally seek its level, than the intercourse adjust itself to the true interest of the parties. Sir, as to this idea of the regulation by government of the pursuits of men, I consider it as a remnant of barbarism disgraceful to an enlightened age, and inconsistent with the first principles of rational liberty. I hold government to be utterly incapable, from its position, of exercising such a power wisely, prudently, or justly. Are the rulers of the world the depositories of its collected wisdom? Sir, can we forget the advice of a great statesman to his son—“Go, see the world, my son, that you may learn with how little wisdom mankind is governed.” And is our own government an exception to this rule, or do we not find here, as every where else, that

“Man, proud man, Robed in a little brief authority, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep?”

The gentleman has appealed to the example of other nations. Sir, they are all against him. They have had restrictions enough, to be sure; but they are getting heartily sick of them, and in England, particularly, would willingly get rid of them if they could. We have been assured, by the declaration of a minister of the crown, from his place in parliament, “that there is a growing conviction, among all men of sense and reflection in that country, that the true policy of all nations is to be found in unrestricted industry.” Sir, in England they are now retracing their steps, and endeavoring to relieve themselves of the system as fast as they can. Within a few years past, upwards of three hundred statutes, imposing restrictions in that country, have been repealed; and a case has recently occurred there, which seems to leave no doubt that, if Great Britain has grown great, it is, as Mr. Huskisson has declared, “not in consequence of, but in spite of their restrictions.” The silk manufacture, protected by enormous bounties, was found to be in such a declining condition, that the government was obliged to do something to save it from total ruin. And what did they do? They considerably reduced the duty on foreign silks, both on the raw material and the manufactured article. The consequence was the immediate revival of the silk manufacture, which has since been nearly doubled.

Sir, the experience of France is equally decisive. Bonaparte’s effort to introduce cotton and sugar has cost that country millions; and, but the other day, a foolish attempt to protect the iron mines spread devastation through half of France, and nearly ruined the wine trade, on which one-fifth of her citizens depend for subsistence. As to Spain, unhappy Spain, “fenced round with restrictions,” her experience, one would suppose, would convince us, if anything could, that the protecting system in politics, like bigotry in religion, was utterly at war with sound principles and a liberal and enlightened policy. Sir, I say, in the words of the philosophical statesman of England, “leave a generous nation free to seek their own road to perfection.” Thank God, the night is passing away, and we have lived to see the dawn of a glorious day. The cause of free trade must and will prosper, and finally triumph. The political economist is abroad; light has come into the world; and, in this instance at least, men will not “prefer darkness rather than light.” Sir, let it not be said, in after times, that the statesmen of America were behind the age in which they lived—that they initiated this young and vigorous country into the enervating and corrupting practices of European nations—and that, at the moment when the whole world were looking to us for an example, we arrayed ourselves in the castoff follies and exploded errors of the old world, and, by the introduction of a vile system of artificial stimulants and political gambling, impaired the healthful vigor of the body politic, and brought on a decrepitude and premature dissolution.

Mr. Clay’s Speech on his Public Lands Bill.

MR. PRESIDENT,—Although I find myself borne down by the severest affliction with which Providence has ever been pleased to visit me, I have thought that my private griefs ought not longer to prevent me from attempting, ill as I feel qualified, to discharge my public duties. And I now rise, in pursuance of the notice which has been given, to ask leave to introduce a bill to appropriate, for a limited time, the proceeds of the sales of the public lands of the United States, and for granting land to certain states.

I feel it incumbent on me to make a brief explanation of the highly important measure which I have now the honor to propose. The bill which I desire to introduce, provides for the distribution of the proceeds of the public lands in the years 1833, 1834, 1835, 1836 and 1837, among the twenty-four states of the union, and conforms substantially to that which passed in 1833. It is therefore of a temporary character; but if it shall be found to have salutary operation, it will be in the power of a future congress to give it an indefinite continuance; and if otherwise, it will expire by its own terms. In the event of war unfortunately breaking out with any foreign power, the bill is to cease, and the fund which it distributes is to be applied to the prosecution of the war. The bill directs that ten per cent. of the net proceeds of the public lands sold within the limits of the seven new states, shall be first set apart for them, in addition to the five per cent. reserved by their several compacts with the United States; and that the residue of the proceeds, whether from sales made in the states or territories, shall be divided among the twenty-four states in proportion to their respective federal population. In this respect the bill conforms to that which was introduced in 1832. For one, I should have been willing to have allowed the new states twelve and a half instead of ten per cent.; but as that was objected to by the president, in his veto message, and has been opposed in other quarters, I thought it best to restrict the allowance to the more moderate sum. The bill also contains large and liberal grants of land to several of the new states, to place them upon an equality with others to which the bounty of congress has been heretofore extended, and provides that, when other new states shall be admitted into the union, they shall receive their share of the common fund.

* * * * *

Mr. President, I have ever regarded, with feelings of the profoundest regret, the decision which the president of the United States felt himself induced to make on the bill of 1833. If the bill had passed, about twenty millions of dollars would have been, during the last three years, in the hands of the several states, applicable by them to the beneficent purposes of internal improvement, education or colonization. What immense benefits might not have been diffused throughout the land by the active employment of that large sum? What new channels of commerce and communication might not have been opened? What industry stimulated, what labor rewarded? How many youthful minds might have received the blessings of education and knowledge, and been rescued from ignorance, vice, and ruin? How many descendants of Africa might have been transported from a country where they never can enjoy political or social equality, to the native land of their fathers, where no impediment exists to their attainment of the highest degree of elevation, intellectual, social and political! where they might have been successful instruments, in the hands of God, to spread the religion of His Son, and to lay the foundation of civil liberty.

But, although we have lost three precious years, the secretary of the treasury tells us that the principal of this vast sum is yet safe; and much good may still be achieved with it. The spirit of improvement pervades the land in every variety of form, active, vigorous and enterprising, wanting pecuniary aid as well as intelligent direction. The states are strengthening the union by various lines of communication thrown across and through the mountains. New York has completed one great chain. Pennsylvania another, bolder in conception and more arduous in the execution. Virginia has a similar work in progress, worthy of all her enterprise and energy. A fourth, further south, where the parts of the union are too loosely connected, has been projected, and it can certainly be executed with the supplies which this bill affords, and perhaps not without them.

This bill passed, and these and other similar undertakings completed, we may indulge the patriotic hope that our union will be bound by ties and interests that render it indissoluble. As the general government withholds all direct agency from these truly national works, and from all new objects of internal improvement, ought it not to yield to the states, what is their own, the amount received from the public lands? It would thus but execute faithfully a trust expressly created by the original deeds of cession, or resulting from the treaties of acquisition. With this ample resource, every desirable object of improvement, in every part of our extensive country, may in due time be accomplished.—Placing this exhaustless fund in the hands of the several members of the confederacy, their common federal head may address them in the glowing language of the British bard, and,

Bid harbors open, public ways extend, Bid temples worthier of the God ascend. Bid the broad arch the dangerous flood contain, The mole projecting break the roaring main. Back to his bounds their subject sea command, And roll obedient rivers through the land.

I confess I feel anxious for the fate of this measure, less on account of any agency I have had in proposing it, as I hope and believe, than from a firm, sincere and thorough conviction, that no one measure ever presented to the councils of the nation, was fraught with so much unmixed good, and could exert such powerful and enduring influence in the preservation of the union itself and upon some of its highest interests. If I can be instrumental, in any degree, in the adoption of it, I shall enjoy, in that retirement into which I hope shortly to enter, a heart-feeling satisfaction and a lasting consolation. I shall carry there no regrets, no complaints, no reproaches on my own account. When I look back upon my humble origin, left an orphan too young to have been conscious of a father’s smiles and caresses; with a widowed mother, surrounded by a numerous offspring, in the midst of pecuniary embarrassments; without a regular education, without fortune, without friends, without patrons, I have reason to be satisfied with my public career. I ought to be thankful for the high places and honors to which I have been called by the favor and partiality of my countrymen, and I am thankful and grateful. And I shall take with me the pleasing consciousness that in whatever station I have been placed, I have earnestly and honestly labored to justify their confidence by a faithful, fearless, and zealous discharge of my public duties. Pardon these personal allusions.

Speech of John C. Calhoun,

Against the Public Lands Bill, January 23, 1841.

“Whether the government can constitutionally distribute the revenue from the public lands among the states must depend on the fact whether they belong to them in their united federal character, or individually and separately. If in the former, it is manifest that the government, as their common agent or trustee, can have no right to distribute among them, for their individual, separate use, a fund derived from property held in their united and federal character, without a special power for that purpose which is not pretended. A position so clear of itself and resting on the established principles of law, when applied to individuals holding property in like manner, needs no illustration. If, on the contrary, they belong to the states in their individual and separate character, then the government would not only have the right but would be bound to apply the revenue to the separate use of the states. So far is incontrovertible, which presents the question: In which of the two characters are the lands held by the state?

“To give a satisfactory answer to this question, it will be necessary to distinguish between the lands that have been ceded by the states, and those that have been purchased by the government out of the common funds of the Union.

“The principal cessions were made by Virginia and Georgia. The former of all the tract of country between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the lakes, including the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, and the territory of Wisconsin; and the latter, of the tract included in Alabama and Mississippi. I shall begin with the cession of Virginia, as it is on that the advocates for the distribution mainly rely to establish the right.

“I hold in my hand an extract of all that portion of the Virginia deed of cession which has any bearing on the point at issue, taken from the volume lying on the table before me, with the place marked, and to which any one desirous of examining the deed may refer. The cession is ‘to the United States in Congress assembled, for the benefit of said states.’ Every word implies the states in their united federal character. That is the meaning of the phrase United States. It stands in contradistinction to the states taken separately and individually; and if there could be, by possibility, any doubt on that point, it would be removed by the expression ‘in Congress assembled’—an assemblage which constituted the very knot that united them. I regard the execution of such a deed to the United States, so assembled, so conclusive that the cession was to them in their united and aggregate character, in contradistinction to their individual and separate character, and, by necessary consequence, that the lands so ceded belonged to them in their former and not in their latter character, that I am at a loss for words to make it clearer. To deny it, would be to deny that there is any truth in language.

“But strong as this is, it is not all. The deed proceeds and says, that all the lands so ceded ‘shall be considered a common fund for the use and benefit of such of the United States as have become, or shall become, members of the confederation or federal alliance of said states, Virginia inclusive,’ and concludes by saying, ‘and shall be faithfully and bona fide disposed of for that purpose, and for no other use or purpose whatever.’ If it were possible to raise a doubt before, those full, clear, and explicit terms would dispel it. It is impossible for language to be clearer. To be ‘considered a common fund’ is an expression directly in contradistinction to separate or individual, and is, by necessary implication, as clear a negative of the latter as if it had been positively expressed. This common fund to ‘be for the use and benefit of such of the United States as have become, or shall become, members of the confederation or federal alliance.’ That is as clear as language can express it, for their common use in their united federal character, Virginia being included as the grantor, out of abundant caution.”

“The Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Clay), and, as I now understand, the Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Webster), agree, that the revenue from taxes can be applied only to the objects specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Thus repudiating the general welfare principle, as applied to the money power, so far as the revenue may be derived from that source. To this extent they profess to be good State Rights Jeffersonian Republicans. Now, sir, I would be happy to be informed by either of the able senators, by what political alchemy the revenue from taxes, by being vested in land, or other property, can, when again turned into revenue by sales, be entirely freed from all the constitutional restrictions to which they were liable before the investment, according to their own confessions. A satisfactory explanation of so curious and apparently incomprehensible a process would be a treat.

“When I look, Mr. President, to what induced the states, and especially Virginia, to make this magnificent cession to the Union, and the high and patriotic motives urged by the old Congress to induce them to do it, and turn to what is now proposed, I am struck with the contrast and the great mutation to which human affairs are subject. The great and patriotic men of former times regarded it as essential to the consummation of the Union and the preservation of the public faith that the lands should be ceded as a common fund; but now, men distinguished for their ability and influence are striving with all their might to undo their holy work. Yes, sir; distribution and cession are the very reverse, in character and effect; the tendency of one is to union, and the other to disunion. The wisest of modern statesmen, and who had the keenest and deepest glance into futurity (Edmund Burke), truly said that the revenue is the state; to which I add, that to distribute the revenue, in a confederated community, amongst its members, is to dissolve the community—that is, with us, the Union—as time will prove, if ever this fatal measure should be adopted.”

Speech of Hon. Robt. Y. Hayne

Senator from South Carolina, delivered in the Senate Chamber January 21, 1830, on Mr. Foot’s resolution relating to the sales of the public lands.

Mr. Hayne said, when he took occasion, two days ago, to throw out some ideas with respect to the policy of the government, in relation to the public lands, nothing certainly could have been further from his thoughts, than that he should have been compelled again to throw himself upon the indulgence of the Senate. Little did I expect, said Mr. H., to be called upon to meet such an argument as was yesterday urged by the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Webster.) Sir, I questioned no man’s opinions; I impeached no man’s motives; I charged no party, or state, or section of country with hostility to any other, but ventured, as I thought, in a becoming spirit to put forth my own sentiments in relation to a great national question of public policy. Such was my course. The gentleman from Missouri, (Mr. Benton,) it is true, had charged upon the Eastern States an early and continued hostility towards the west, and referred to a number of historical facts and documents in support of that charge. Now, sir, how have these different arguments been met? The honorable gentleman from Massachusetts, after deliberating a whole night upon his course, comes into this chamber to vindicate New England; and instead of making up his issue with the gentleman from Missouri, on the charges which he had preferred, chooses to consider me as the author of those charges, and losing sight entirely of that gentleman, selects me as his adversary, and pours out all the vials of his mighty wrath upon my devoted head. Nor is he willing to stop there. He goes on to assail the institutions and policy of the south, and calls in question the principles and conduct of the state which I have the honor to represent. When I find a gentleman of mature age and experience, of acknowledged talents and profound sagacity, pursuing a course like this, declining the contest offered from the west, and making war upon the unoffending south, I must believe, I am bound to believe, he has some object in view which he has not ventured to disclose. Mr. President, why is this? Has the gentleman discovered in former controversies with the gentleman from Missouri, that he is overmatched by that senator? And does he hope for an easy victory over a more feeble adversary? Has the gentleman’s distempered fancy been disturbed by gloomy forebodings of “new alliances to be formed,” at which he hinted? Has the ghost of the murdered COALITION come back, like the ghost of Banquo, to “sear the eyeballs of the gentleman,” and will it not down at his bidding? Are dark visions of broken hopes, and honors lost forever, still floating before his heated imagination? Sir, if it be his object to thrust me between the gentleman from Missouri and himself, in order to rescue the east from the contest it has provoked with the west, he shall not be gratified. Sir, I will not be dragged into the defence of my friend from Missouri. The south shall not be forced into a conflict not its own. The gentleman from Missouri is able to fight his own battles. The gallant west needs no aid from the south to repel any attack which may be made on them from any quarter. Let the gentleman from Massachusetts controvert the facts and arguments of the gentleman from Missouri, if he can—and if he win the victory, let him wear the honors; I shall not deprive him of his laurels.

The gentleman from Massachusetts, in reply to my remarks on the injurious operations of our land system on the prosperity of the west, pronounced an extravagant eulogium on the paternal care which the government had extended towards the west, to which he attributed all that was great and excellent in the present condition of the new states. The language of the gentleman on this topic fell upon my ears like the almost forgotten tones of the tory leaders of the British Parliament, at the commencement of the American revolution. They, too, discovered that the colonies had grown great under the fostering care of the mother country; and I must confess, while listening to the gentleman, I thought the appropriate reply to his argument was to be found in the remark of a celebrated orator, made on that occasion: “They have grown great in spite of your protection.”

The gentleman, in commenting on the policy of the government in relation to the new states, has introduced to our notice a certain Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, to whom he attributes the celebrated ordinance of ’87, by which he tells us, “slavery was forever excluded from the new states north of the Ohio.” After eulogizing the wisdom of this provision in terms of the most extravagant praise, he breaks forth in admiration of the greatness of Nathan Dane—and great indeed he must be, if it be true, as stated by the senator from Massachusetts, that “he was greater than Solon and Lycurgus, Minos, Numa Pompilius, and all the legislators and philosophers of the world,” ancient and modern. Sir, to such high authority it is certainly my duty, in a becoming spirit of humility, to submit. And yet, the gentleman will pardon me, when I say, that it is a little unfortunate for the fame of this great legislator, that the gentleman from Missouri should have proved that he was not the author of the ordinance of ’87, on which the senator from Massachusetts has reared so glorious a monument to his name. Sir, I doubt not the senator will feel some compassion for our ignorance, when I tell him, that so little are we acquainted with the modern great men of New England, that until he informed us yesterday that we possessed a Solon and a Lycurgus in the person of Nathan Dane, he was only known to the south as a member of a celebrated assembly, called and known by the name of the “Hartford Convention.” In the proceedings of that assembly, which I hold in my hand, (at p. 19,) will be found in a few lines, the history of Nathan Dane; and a little farther on, there is conclusive evidence of that ardent devotion to the interest of the new states, which, it seems, has given him a just claim to the title of “Father of the West.” By the 2d resolution of the “Hartford Convention,” it is declared, “that it is expedient to attempt to make provision for restraining Congress in the exercise of an unlimited power to make new states, and admitting them into the Union.” So much for Nathan Dane, of Beverly, Massachusetts.

In commenting upon my views in relation to the public lands, the gentleman insists, that it being one of the conditions of the grants that these lands should be applied to “the common benefit of all the states, they must always remain a fund for revenue;” and adds, “they must be treated as so much treasure.” Sir, the gentleman could hardly find language strong enough to convey his disapprobation of the policy which I had ventured to recommend to the favorable consideration of the country. And what, sir, was that policy, and what is the difference between that gentleman and myself on that subject? I threw out the idea that the public lands ought not to be reserved forever, as “a great fund for revenue;” that they ought not to be “treated as a great treasure;” but that the course of our policy should rather be directed toward the creation of new states, and building up great and flourishing communities.

Now, sir, will it be believed, by those who now hear me,—and who listened to the gentleman’s denunciation of my doctrines yesterday,—that a book then lay open before him—nay, that he held it in his hand, and read from it certain passages of his own speech, delivered to the House of Representatives in 1825, in which speech he himself contended for the very doctrine I had advocated, and almost in the same terms? Here is the speech of the Hon. Daniel Webster, contained in the first volume of Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, (p. 251,) delivered in the House of Representatives on the 18th of January, 1825, in a debate on the Cumberland road—the very debate from which the senator read yesterday. I shall read from the celebrated speech two passages, from which it will appear that both as to the past and the future policy of the government in relation to the public lands, the gentleman from Massachusetts maintained, in 1825, substantially the same opinions which I have advanced, but which he now so strongly reprobates. I said, sir, that the system of credit sales by which the west had been kept constantly in debt to the United States, and by which their wealth was drained off to be expended elsewhere, had operated injuriously on their prosperity. On this point the gentleman from Massachusetts, in January, 1825, expressed himself thus: “There could be no doubt, if gentlemen looked at the money received into the treasury from the sale of the public lands to the west, and then looked to the whole amount expended by government, (even including the whole amount of what was laid out for the army,) the latter must be allowed to be very inconsiderable, and there must be a constant drain of money from the west to pay for the public lands.” It might indeed be said that this was no more than the refluence of capital which had previously gone over the mountains. Be it so. Still its practical effect was to produce inconvenience, if not distress, by absorbing the money of the people.

I contended that the public lands ought not to be treated merely as “a fund for revenue;” that they ought not to be hoarded “as a great treasure.” On this point the senator expressed himself thus: “Government, he believed, had received eighteen or twenty millions of dollars from the public lands, and it was with the greatest satisfaction he adverted to the change which had been introduced in the mode of paying for them; yet he could never think the national domain was to be regarded as any great source of revenue. The great object of the government, in respect of these lands, was not so much the money derived from their sale, as it was the getting them settled. What he meant to say was, he did not think they ought to hug that domain AS A GREAT TREASURE, to enrich the Exchequer.”

Now, Mr. President, it will be seen that the very doctrines which the gentleman so indignantly abandons were urged by him in 1825; and if I had actually borrowed my sentiments from those which he then avowed, I could not have followed more closely in his footsteps. Sir, it is only since the gentleman quoted this book, yesterday, that my attention has been turned to the sentiments he expressed in 1825; and if I had remembered them, I might possibly have been deterred from uttering sentiments here, which, it might well be supposed, I had borrowed from that gentleman.

In 1825, the gentleman told the world that the public lands “ought not to be treated as a treasure.” He now tells us that “they must be treated as so much treasure.” What the deliberate opinion of the gentleman on this subject may be, belongs not to me to determine; but I do not think he can, with the shadow of justice or propriety, impugn my sentiments, while his own recorded opinions are identical with my own. When the gentleman refers to the conditions of the grants under which the United States have acquired these lands, and insists that, as they are declared to be “for the common benefit of all the states,” they can only be treated as so much treasure, I think he has applied a rule of construction too narrow for the case. If in the deeds of cession it has been declared that the grants were intended for “the common benefit of all the states,” it is clear, from other provisions, that they were not intended merely as so much property; for it is expressly declared, that the object of the grants is the erection of new states; and the United States, in accepting this trust, bind themselves to facilitate the foundation of these states, to be admitted into the Union with all the rights and privileges of the original states. This, sir, was the great end to which all parties looked, and it is by the fulfillment of this high trust that “the common benefit of all the states” is to be best promoted. Sir, let me tell the gentleman, that in the part of the country in which I live, we do not measure political benefits by the money standard. We consider as more valuable than gold liberty, principle, and justice. But, sir, if we are bound to act on the narrow principles contended for by the gentleman, I am wholly at a loss to conceive how he can reconcile his principles with his own practice. The lands are, it seems, to be treated “as so much treasure,” and must be applied to the “common benefit of all the states.” Now, if this be so, whence does he derive the right to appropriate them for partial and local objects? How can the gentleman consent to vote away immense bodies of these lands for canals in Indiana and Illinois, to the Louisville and Portland Canal, to Kenyon College in Ohio, to Schools for the Deaf and Dumb, and other objects of a similar description? If grants of this character can fairly be considered as made “for the common benefit of all the states,” it can only be, because all the states are interested in the welfare of each—a principle which, carried to the full extent, destroys all distinction between local and national objects, and is certainly broad enough to embrace the principles for which I have ventured to contend. Sir, the true difference between us I take to be this: the gentleman wishes to treat the public lands as a great treasure, just as so much money in the treasury, to be applied to all objects, constitutional and unconstitutional, to which the public money is constantly applied. I consider it as a sacred trust which we ought to fulfil, on the principles for which I have contended.

The senator from Massachusetts has thought proper to present, in strong contrast, the friendly feelings of the east towards the west, with sentiments of an opposite character displayed by the south in relation to appropriations for internal improvements. Now, sir, let it be recollected that the south have made no professions; I have certainly made none in their behalf, of regard for the west. It has been reserved for the gentleman from Massachusetts, while he vaunts over his own personal devotion to western interests, to claim for the entire section of country to which he belongs an ardent friendship for the west, as manifested by their support of the system of internal improvement, while he casts in our teeth the reproach that the south has manifested hostility to western interests in opposing appropriations for such objects. That gentleman, at the same time, acknowledged that the south entertains constitutional scruples on this subject. Are we then, sir, to understand that the gentleman considers it a just subject of reproach that we respect our oaths, by which we are bound “to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the U. States?” Would the gentleman have us manifest our love to the west by trampling under foot our constitutional scruples? Does he not perceive, if the south is to be reproached with unkindness to the west, in voting against appropriations which the gentleman admits they could not vote for without doing violence to their constitutional opinions, that he exposes himself to the question, whether, if he was in our situation, he could vote for these appropriations, regardless of his scruples? No, sir, I will not do the gentleman so great injustice. He has fallen into this error from not having duly weighed the force and effect of the reproach which he was endeavoring to cast upon the south. In relation to the other point, the friendship manifested by New England towards the west, in their support of the system of internal improvement, the gentleman will pardon me for saying, that I think he is equally unfortunate in having introduced that topic. As that gentleman has forced it upon us, however, I cannot suffer it to pass unnoticed. When the gentleman tells us that the appropriations for internal improvement in the west would, in almost every instance, have failed but for New England votes, he has forgotten to tell us the when, the how, and the wherefore this new-born zeal for the west sprung up in the bosom of New England. If we look back only a few years, we will find in both houses of Congress a uniform and steady opposition on the part of the members from the Eastern States, generally, to all appropriations of this character. At the time I became a member of this house, and for some time afterwards, a decided majority of the New England senators were opposed to the very measures which the senator from Massachusetts tells us they now cordially support. Sir, the Journals are before me, and an examination of them will satisfy every gentleman of that fact.

It must be well known to every one whose experience dates back as far as 1825, that up to a certain period, New England was generally opposed to appropriations for internal improvements in the west. The gentleman from Massachusetts may be himself an exception, but if he went for the system before 1825, it is certain that his colleagues did not go with him.

In the session of 1824 and ’25, however, (a memorable era in the history of this country,) a wonderful change took place in New England, in relation to western interests. Sir, an extraordinary union of sympathies and of interests was then effected, which brought the east and the west into close alliance. The book from which I have before read contains the first public annunciation of that happy reconciliation of conflicting interests, personal and political, which brought the east and west together and locked in a fraternal embrace the two great orators of the east and the west. Sir, it was on the 18th of January, 1825, while the result of the presidential election, in the House of Representatives, was still doubtful, while the whole country was looking with intense anxiety to that legislative hall where the mighty drama was so soon to be acted, that we saw the leaders of two great parties in the house and in the nation, “taking sweet counsel together,” and in a celebrated debate on the Cumberland road, fighting side by side for western interests. It was on that memorable occasion that the senator from Massachusetts held out the white flag to the west, and uttered those liberal sentiments which he yesterday so indignantly repudiated. Then it was, that that happy union between the two members of the celebrated coalition was consummated, whose immediate issue was a president from one quarter of the Union, with the succession (as it was supposed) secured to another. The “American system,” before a rude, disjointed, and misshapen mass, now assumed form and consistency. Then it was that it became “the settled policy of the government,” that this system should be so administered as to create a reciprocity of interests and a reciprocal distribution of government favors, east and west, (the tariff and internal improvements,) while the south—yes, sir, the impracticable south—was to be “out of your protection.” The gentleman may boast as much as he pleases of the friendship of New England for the west, as displayed in their support of internal improvement; but when he next introduces that topic, I trust that he will tell us when that friendship commenced, how it was brought about, and why it was established. Before I leave this topic, I must be permitted to say that the true character of the policy now pursued by the gentleman from Massachusetts and his friends, in relation to appropriations of land and money, for the benefit of the west, is in my estimation very similar to that pursued by Jacob of old towards his brother Esau: “it robs them of their birthright for a mess of pottage.”

The gentleman from Massachusetts, in alluding to a remark of mine, that before any disposition could be made of the public lands, the national debt, for which they stand pledged, must be first paid, took occasion to intimate “that the extraordinary fervor which seems to exist in a certain quarter, (meaning the south, sir,) for the payment of the debt, arises from a disposition to weaken the ties which bind the people to the Union.” While the gentleman deals us this blow, he professes an ardent desire to see the debt speedily extinguished. He must excuse me, however, for feeling some distrust on that subject until I find this disposition manifested by something stronger than professions. I shall look for acts, decided and unequivocal acts; for the performance of which an opportunity will very soon (if I am not greatly mistaken) be afforded. Sir, if I were at liberty to judge of the course which that gentleman would pursue, from the principles which he has laid down in relation to this matter, I should be bound to conclude that he will be found acting with those with whom it is a darling object to prevent the payment of the public debt. He tells us he is desirous of paying the debt, “because we are under an obligation to discharge it.” Now, sir, suppose it should happen that the public creditors, with whom we have contracted the obligation, should release us from it, so far as to declare their willingness to wait for payment for fifty years to come, provided only the interest shall be punctually discharged. The gentleman from Massachusetts will then be released from the obligation which now makes him desirous of paying the debt; and, let me tell the gentleman, the holders of the stock will not only release us from this obligation, but they will implore, nay, they will even pay us not to pay them. But, adds the gentleman, so far as the debt may have an effect in binding the debtors to the country, and thereby serving as a link to hold the states together, he would be glad that it should exist forever. Surely then, sir, on the gentleman’s own principles, he must be opposed to the payment of the debt.

Sir, let me tell that gentleman, that the south repudiates the idea that a pecuniary dependence on the federal government is one of the legitimate means of holding the states together. A moneyed interest in the government is essentially a base interest; and just so far as it operates to bind the feelings of those who are subjected to it to the government,—just so far as it operates in creating sympathies and interests that would not otherwise exist,—is it opposed to all the principles of free government, and at war with virtue and patriotism. Sir, the link which binds the public creditors, as such, to their country, binds them equally to all governments, whether arbitrary or free. In a free government, this principle of abject dependence, if extended through all the ramifications of society, must be fatal to liberty. Already have we made alarming strides in that direction. The entire class of manufacturers, the holders of stocks, with their hundreds of millions of capital, are held to the government by the strong link of pecuniary interests; millions of people—entire sections of country, interested, or believing themselves to be so, in the public lands, and the public treasure—are bound to the government by the expectation of pecuniary favors. If this system is carried much further, no man can fail to see that every generous motive of attachment to the country will be destroyed, and in its place will spring up those low, grovelling, base, and selfish feelings which bind men to the footstool of a despot by bonds as strong and enduring as those which attach them to free institutions. Sir, I would lay the foundation of this government in the affections of the people—I would teach them to cling to it by dispensing equal justice, and above all, by securing the “blessings of liberty” to “themselves and to their posterity.”

The honorable gentleman from Massachusetts has gone out of his way to pass a high eulogium on the state of Ohio. In the most impassioned tones of eloquence, he described her majestic march to greatness. He told us, that, having already left all the other states far behind, she was now passing by Virginia and Pennsylvania, and about to take her station by the side of New York. To all this, sir, I was disposed most cordially to respond. When, however, the gentleman proceeded to contrast the state of Ohio with Kentucky, to the disadvantage of the latter, I listened to him with regret; and when he proceeded further to attribute the great, and, as he supposed, acknowledged superiority of the former in population, wealth, and general prosperity, to the policy of Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, which had secured to the people of Ohio (by the ordinance of ’87) a population of freemen, I will confess that my feelings suffered a revulsion which I am now unable to describe in any language sufficiently respectful towards the gentleman from Massachusetts. In contrasting the state of Ohio with Kentucky, for the purpose of pointing out the superiority of the former, and of attributing that superiority to the existence of slavery in the one state, and its absence in the other, I thought I could discern the very spirit of the Missouri question, intruded into this debate, for objects best known to the gentleman himself. Did that gentleman, sir, when he formed the determination to cross the southern border, in order to invade the state of South Carolina, deem it prudent or necessary to enlist under his banners the prejudices of the world, which, like Swiss troops, may be engaged in any cause, and are prepared to serve under any leader? Did he desire to avail himself of those remorseless allies, the passions of mankind, of which it may be more truly said than of the savage tribes of the wilderness, “that their known rule of warfare is an indiscriminate slaughter of all ages, sexes, and conditions?” Or was it supposed, sir, that, in a premeditated and unprovoked attack upon the south, it was advisable to begin by a gentle admonition of our supposed weakness, in order to prevent us from making that firm and manly resistance due to our own character and our dearest interests? Was the significant hint of the weakness of slaveholding states, when contrasted with the superior strength of free states,—like the glare of the weapon half drawn from its scabbard,—intended to enforce the lessons of prudence and of patriotism, which the gentleman had resolved, out of his abundant generosity, gratuitously to bestow upon us? Mr. President, the impression which has gone abroad of the weakness of the south, as connected with the slave question, exposes us to such constant attacks, has done us so much injury, and is calculated to produce such infinite mischiefs, that I embrace the occasion presented by the remarks of the gentleman of Massachusetts, to declare that we are ready to meet the question promptly and fearlessly. It is one from which we are not disposed to shrink, in whatever form or under whatever circumstances it may be pressed upon us.

We are ready to make up the issue with the gentleman, as to the influence of slavery on individual or national character—on the prosperity and greatness, either of the United States or of particular states. Sir, when arraigned before the bar of public opinion, on this charge of slavery, we can stand up with conscious rectitude, plead not guilty, and put ourselves upon God and our country. Sir, we will not consent to look at slavery in the abstract. We will not stop to inquire whether the black man, as some philosophers have contended, is of an inferior race, nor whether his color and condition are the effects of a curse inflicted for the offences of his ancestors. We deal in no abstractions. We will not look back to inquire whether our fathers were guiltless in introducing slaves into this country. If an inquiry should ever be instituted in these matters, however, it will be found that the profits of the slave trade were not confined to the south. Southern ships and southern sailors were not the instruments of bringing slaves to the shores of America, nor did our merchants reap the profits of that “accursed traffic.” But, sir, we will pass over all this. If slavery, as it now exists in this country, be an evil, we of the present day found it ready made to our hands. Finding our lot cast among a people whom God had manifestly committed to our care, we did not sit down to speculate on abstract questions of theoretical liberty. We met it as a practical question of obligation and duty. We resolved to make the best of the situation in which Providence had placed us, and to fulfil the high trusts which had devolved upon us as the owners of slaves, in the only way in which such a trust could be fulfilled, without spreading misery and ruin throughout the land. We found that we had to deal with a people whose physical, moral, and intellectual habits and character totally disqualified them from the enjoyment of the blessings of freedom. We could not send them back to the shores from whence their fathers had been taken; their numbers forbade the thought, even if we did not know that their condition here is infinitely preferable to what it possibly could be among the barren sands and savage tribes of Africa; and it was wholly irreconcilable with all our notions of humanity to tear asunder the tender ties which they had formed among us, to gratify the feelings of a false philanthropy. What a commentary on the wisdom, justice, and humanity of the southern slave owner is presented by the example of certain benevolent associations and charitable individuals elsewhere! Shedding weak tears over sufferings which had existence in their own sickly imaginations, these “friends of humanity” set themselves systematically to work to seduce the slaves of the south from their masters. By means of missionaries and political tracts, the scheme was in a great measure successful. Thousands of these deluded victims of fanaticism were seduced into the enjoyment of freedom in our northern cities. And what has been the consequence? Go to these cities now and ask the question. Visit the dark and narrow lanes, and obscure recesses, which have been assigned by common consent as the abodes of those outcasts of the world, the free people of color. Sir, there does not exist, on the face of the whole earth, a population so poor, so wretched, so vile, so loathsome, so utterly destitute of all the comforts, conveniences, and decencies of life, as the unfortunate blacks of Philadelphia, and New York, and Boston. Liberty has been to them the greatest of calamities, the heaviest of curses. Sir, I have had some opportunities of making comparison between the condition of the free negroes of the north and the slaves of the south, and the comparison has left not only an indelible impression of the superior advantages of the latter, but has gone far to reconcile me to slavery itself. Never have I felt so forcibly that touching description, “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head,” as when I have seen this unhappy race, naked and houseless, almost starving in the streets, and abandoned by all the world. Sir, I have seen in the neighborhood of one of the most moral, religious, and refined cities of the north, a family of free blacks, driven to the caves of the rocks, and there obtaining a precarious subsistence from charity and plunder.

When the gentleman from Massachusetts adopts and reiterates the old charge of weakness as resulting from slavery, I must be permitted to call for the proof of those blighting effects which he ascribes to its influence. I suspect that when the subject is closely examined, it will be found that there is not much force even in the plausible objection of the want of physical power in slaveholding states. The power of a country is compounded of its population and its wealth, and in modern times, where, from the very form and structure of society, by far the greater portion of the people must, even during the continuance of the most desolating wars, be employed in the cultivation of the soil and other peaceful pursuits, it may be well doubted whether slaveholding states, by reason of the superior value of their productions, are not able to maintain a number of troops in the field fully equal to what could be supported by states with a larger white population, but not possessed of equal resources.

It is a popular error to suppose that, in any possible state of things, the people of a country could ever be called out en masse, or that a half, or a third, or even a fifth part of the physical force of any country could ever be brought into the field. The difficulty is, not to procure men, but to provide the means of maintaining them; and in this view of the subject, it may be asked whether the Southern States are not a source of strength and power, and not of weakness, to the country—whether they have not contributed, and are not now contributing, largely to the wealth and prosperity of every state in this Union. From a statement which I hold in my hand, it appears that in ten years—from 1818 to 1827, inclusive—the whole amount of the domestic exports of the United States was $521,811,045; of which three articles, (the product of slave labor,) viz., cotton, rice, and tobacco, amounted to $339,203,232—equal to about two-thirds of the whole. It is not true, as has been supposed, that the advantage of this labor is confined almost exclusively to the Southern States. Sir, I am thoroughly convinced that, at this time, the states north of the Potomac actually derive greater profits from the labor of our slaves than we do ourselves. It appears from our public documents, that in seven years—from 1821 to 1827, inclusive—the six Southern States exported $190,337,281, and imported only $55,646,301. Now, the difference between these two sums (near $140,000,000) passed through the hands of the northern merchants, and enabled them to carry on their commercial operations with all the world. Such part of these goods as found its way back to our hands came charged with the duties, as well as the profits, of the merchant, the ship owner, and a host of others, who found employment in carrying on these immense exchanges; and for such part as was consumed at the north, we received in exchange northern manufactures, charged with an increased price, to cover all the taxes which the northern consumer had been compelled to pay on the imported article. It will be seen, therefore, at a glance, how much slave labor has contributed to the wealth and prosperity of the United States, and how largely our northern brethren have participated in the profits of that labor. Sir, on this subject I will quote an authority, which will, I doubt not, be considered by the Senator from Massachusetts as entitled to high respect. It is from the great father of the “American System,” honest Matthew Carey—no great friend, it is true, at this time, to southern rights and southern interests, but not the worst authority on that account, on the point in question.

Speaking of the relative importance to the Union of the SOUTHERN and the EASTERN STATES, Matthew Carey, in the sixth edition of his Olive Branch, (p. 278,) after exhibiting a number of statistical tables to show the decided superiority of the former, thus proceeds:—

“But I am tired of this investigation—I sicken for the honor of the human species. What idea must the world form of the arrogance of the pretensions of the one side, [the east,] and of the folly and weakness of the rest of the Union, to have so long suffered them to pass without exposure and detection. The naked fact is, that the demagogues in the Eastern States, not satisfied with deriving all the benefit from the southern section of the Union that they would from so many wealthy colonies—with making princely fortunes by the carriage and exportation of its bulky and valuable productions, and supplying it with their own manufactures, and the productions of Europe and the East and West Indies, to an enormous amount, and at an immense profit, have uniformly treated it with outrage, insult, and injury. And, regardless of their vital interests, the Eastern States were lately courting their own destruction, by allowing a few restless, turbulent men to lead them blindfolded to a separation which was pregnant with their certain ruin. Whenever that event takes place, they sink into insignificance. If a separation were desirable to any part of the Union, it would be to the Middle and Southern States, particularly the latter, who have been so long harassed with the complaints, the restlessness, the turbulence, and the ingratitude of the Eastern States, that their patience has been tried almost beyond endurance. ‘Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked’—and he will be severely punished for his kicking, in the event of a dissolution of the Union.” Sir, I wish it to be distinctly understood that I do not adopt these sentiments as my own. I quote them to show that very different sentiments have prevailed in former times as to the weakness of the slaveholding states from those which now seem to have become fashionable in certain quarters. I know it has been supposed by certain ill-informed persons, that the south exists only by the countenance and protection of the north. Sir, this is the idlest of all idle and ridiculous fancies that ever entered into the mind of man. In every state of this Union, except one, the free white population actually preponderates; while in the British West India Islands, (where the average white population is less than ten per cent. of the whole,) the slaves are kept in entire subjection: it is preposterous to suppose that the Southern States could ever find the smallest difficulty in this respect. On this subject, as in all others, we ask nothing of our northern brethren but to “let us alone.” Leave us to the undisturbed management of our domestic concerns, and the direction of our own industry, and we will ask no more. Sir, all our difficulties on this subject have arisen from interference from abroad, which has disturbed, and may again disturb, our domestic tranquillity just so far as to bring down punishment upon the heads of the unfortunate victims of a fanatical and mistaken humanity.

There is a spirit, which, like the father of evil, is constantly “walking to and fro about the earth, seeking whom it may devour:” it is the spirit of FALSE PHILANTHROPY. The persons whom it possesses do not indeed throw themselves into the flames, but they are employed in lighting up the torches of discord throughout the community. Their first principle of action is to leave their own affairs, and neglect their own duties, to regulate the affairs and duties of others. Theirs is the task to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, of other lands, while they thrust the naked, famished, and shivering beggar from their own doors; to instruct the heathen, while their own children want the bread of life. When this spirit infuses itself into the bosom of a statesman, (if one so possessed can be called a statesman,) it converts him at once into a visionary enthusiast. Then it is that he indulges in golden dreams of national greatness and prosperity. He discovers that “liberty is power,” and not content with vast schemes of improvement at home, which it would bankrupt the treasury of the world to execute, he flies to foreign lands, to fulfil obligations to “the human race” by inculcating the principles of “political and religious liberty,” and promoting the “general welfare” of the whole human race. It is a spirit which has long been busy with the slaves of the south; and is even now displaying itself in vain efforts to drive the government from its wise policy in relation to the Indians. It is this spirit which has filled the land with thousands of wild and visionary projects, which can have no effect but to waste the energies and dissipate the resources of the country. It is the spirit of which the aspiring politician dexterously avails himself, when, by inscribing on his banner the magical words LIBERTY AND PHILANTHROPY, he draws to his support that class of persons who are ready to bow down at the very name of their idols.

But, sir, whatever difference of opinion may exist as to the effect of slavery on national wealth and prosperity, if we may trust to experience, there can be no doubt that it has never yet produced any injurious effect on individual or national character. Look through the whole history of the country, from the commencement of the revolution down to the present hour; where are there to be found brighter examples of intellectual and moral greatness than have been exhibited by the sons of the south? From the FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY down to the DISTINGUISHED CHIEFTAIN who has been elevated by a grateful people to the highest office in their gift, the interval is filled up by a long line of orators, of statesmen, and of heroes, justly entitled to rank among the ornaments of their country, and the benefactors of mankind. Look at the “Old Dominion,” great and magnanimous Virginia, “whose jewels are her sons.” Is there any state in this Union which has contributed so much to the honor and welfare of the country? Sir, I will yield the whole question—I will acknowledge the fatal effects of slavery upon character, if any one can say, that for noble disinterestedness, ardent love of country, exalted virtue, and a pure and holy devotion to liberty, the people of the Southern States have ever been surpassed by any in the world. I know, sir, that this devotion to liberty has sometimes been supposed to be at war with our institutions; but it is in some degree the result of those very institutions. Burke, the most philosophical of statesmen, as he was the most accomplished of orators, well understood the operation of this principle, in elevating the sentiments and exalting the principles of the people in slaveholding states. I will conclude my remarks on this branch of the subject, by reading a few passages from his speech “on moving his resolutions for conciliation with the colonies,” the 22d of March, 1775.

“There is a circumstance attending the southern colonies which makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the northward. It is, that in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case, in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, as in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, that it may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks among them like something more noble and liberal. I do not mean, sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has, at least, as much pride as virtue in it—but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty than those to the northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths—such were our Gothic ancestors—such, in our days, were the Poles—and such will be all masters of slaves who are not slaves themselves. In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.”

In the course of my former remarks, Mr. President, I took occasion to deprecate, as one of the greatest evils, the consolidation of this government. The gentleman takes alarm at the sound. “Consolidation,” “like the tariff,” grates upon his ear. He tells us, “we have heard much of late about consolidation; that it is the rallying word of all who are endeavoring to weaken the Union, by adding to the power of the states.” But consolidation (says the gentleman) was the very object for which the Union was formed; and, in support of that opinion, he read a passage from the address of the president of the convention to Congress, which he assumes to be authority on his side of the question. But, sir, the gentleman is mistaken. The object of the framers of the constitution, as disclosed in that address, was not the consolidation of the government, but “the consolidation of the Union.” It was not to draw power from the states, in order to transfer it to a great national government, but, in the language of the constitution itself, “to form a more perfect Union;”—and by what means? By “establishing justice, promoting domestic tranquillity, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” This is the true reading of the constitution. But, according to the gentleman’s reading, the object of the constitution was, to consolidate the government, and the means would seem to be, the promotion of injustice, causing domestic discord, and depriving the states and the people “of the blessings of liberty” forever.

The gentleman boasts of belonging to the party of NATIONAL REPUBLICANS. National Republicans! A new name, sir, for a very old thing. The National Republicans of the present day were the Federalists of ’98, who became Federal Republicans during the war of 1812, and were manufactured into National Republicans somewhere about the year 1825.

As a party, (by whatever name distinguished,) they have always been animated by the same principles, and have kept steadily in view a common object, the consolidation of the government. Sir, the party to which I am proud of having belonged, from the very commencement of my political life to the present day, were the Democrats of ’98, (Anarchists, Anti-Federalists, Revolutionists, I think they were sometimes called.) They assumed the name of Democratic-Republicans in 1822, and have retained their name and principles up to the present hour. True to their political faith, they have always, as a party, been in favor of limitations of power; they have insisted that all powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved, and have been constantly struggling, as they now are, to preserve the rights of the states, and to prevent them from being drawn into the vortex, and swallowed up by one great consolidated government.

Sir, any one acquainted with the history of parties in this country will recognize in the points now in dispute between the senator from Massachusetts and myself the very grounds which have, from the beginning, divided the two great parties in this country, and which (call these parties by what names you will, and amalgamate them as you may) will divide them forever. The true distinction between those parties is laid down in a celebrated manifesto, issued by the convention of the Federalists of Massachusetts, assembled in Boston, in February, 1824, on the occasion of organizing a party opposition to the reëlection of Governor Eustis. The gentleman will recognize this as “the canonical book of political scripture;” and it instructs us that, when the American colonies redeemed themselves from British bondage, and became so many independent nations, they proposed to form a NATIONAL UNION, (not a Federal Union, sir, but a national Union.) Those who were in favor of a union of the states in this form became known by the name of Federalists; those who wanted no union of the states, or disliked the proposed form of union, became known by the name of Anti-Federalists. By means which need not be enumerated, the Anti-Federalists became (after the expiration of twelve years) our national rulers, and for a period of sixteen years, until the close of Mr. Madison’s administration, in 1817, continued to exercise the exclusive direction of our public affairs. Here, sir, is the true history of the origin, rise, and progress of the party of National Republicans, who date back to the very origin of the government, and who, then, as now, chose to consider the constitution as having created, not a Federal, but a National Union; who regarded “consolidation” as no evil, and who doubtless considered it “a consummation devoutly to be wished” to build up a great “central government,” “one and indivisible.” Sir, there have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men—the lovers of freedom, and the devoted advocates of power.

The same great leading principles, modified only by the peculiarities of manners, habits, and institutions, divided parties in the ancient republics, animated the whigs and tories of Great Britain, distinguished in our own times the liberals and ultras of France, and may be traced even in the bloody struggles of unhappy Spain. Sir, when the gallant Riego, who devoted himself, and all that he possessed, to the liberties of his country, was dragged to the scaffold followed by the tears and lamentations of every lover of freedom throughout the world, he perished amid the deafening cries of “Long live the absolute king!” The people whom I represent, Mr. President, are the descendants of those who brought with them to this country, as the most precious of their possessions, “an ardent love of liberty;” and while that shall be preserved, they will always be found manfully struggling against the consolidation of the government—AS THE WORST OF EVILS.

The senator from Massachusetts, in alluding to the tariff, becomes quite facetious. He tells us that “he hears of nothing but tariff, tariff, tariff; and, if a word could be found to rhyme with it, he presumes it would be celebrated in verse, and set to music.” Sir, perhaps the gentleman, in mockery of our complaints, may be himself disposed to sing the praises of the tariff, in doggerel verse, to the tune of “Old Hundred.” I am not at all surprised, however, at the aversion of the gentleman to the very name of tariff. I doubt not that it must always bring up some very unpleasant recollections to his mind. If I am not greatly mistaken, the senator from Massachusetts was a leading actor at a great meeting got up in Boston, in 1820, against the tariff. It has generally been supposed that he drew up the resolutions adopted by that meeting, denouncing the tariff system as unequal, oppressive, and unjust, and if I am not much mistaken, denying its constitutionality. Certain it is, that the gentleman made a speech on that occasion in support of those resolutions, denouncing the system in no very measured terms; and, if my memory serves me, calling its constitutionality in question. I regret that I have not been able to lay my hands on those proceedings; but I have seen them, and cannot be mistaken in their character. At that time, sir, the senator from Massachusetts entertained the very sentiments in relation to the tariff which the south now entertains. We next find the senator from Massachusetts expressing his opinion on the tariff, as a member of the House of Representatives from the city of Boston, in 1824. On that occasion, sir, the gentleman assumed a position which commanded the respect and admiration of his country. He stood forth the powerful and fearless champion of free trade. He met, in that conflict, the advocates of restriction and monopoly, and they “fled from before his face.” With a profound sagacity, a fulness of knowledge, and a richness of illustration that have never been surpassed, he maintained and established the principles of commercial freedom, on a foundation never to be shaken. Great indeed was the victory achieved by the gentleman on that occasion; most striking the contrast between the clear, forcible, and convincing arguments by which he carried away the understandings of his hearers, and the narrow views and wretched sophistry of another distinguished orator, who may be truly said to have “held up his farthing candle to the sun.”

Sir, the Senator from Massachusetts, on that, the proudest day of his life, like a mighty giant, bore away upon his shoulders the pillars of the temple of error and delusion, escaping himself unhurt, and leaving his adversaries overwhelmed in its ruins. Then it was that he erected to free trade a beautiful and enduring monument, and “inscribed the marble with his name.” Mr. President, it is with pain and regret that I now go forward to the next great era in the political life of that gentleman when he was found on this floor, supporting, advocating, and finally voting for the tariff of 1828—that “bill of abominations.” By that act, sir, the senator from Massachusetts has destroyed the labors of his whole life, and given a wound to the cause of free trade never to be healed. Sir, when I recollect the position which that gentleman once occupied, and that which he now holds in public estimation, in relation to this subject, it is not at all surprising that the tariff should be hateful to his ears. Sir, if I had erected to my own fame so proud a monument as that which the gentleman built up in 1824, and I could have been tempted to destroy it with my own hands, I should hate the voice that should ring “the accursed tariff” in my ears. I doubt not the gentleman feels very much, in relation to the tariff, as a certain knight did to “instinct,” and with him would be disposed to exclaim,—

“Ah! no more of that, Hal, an thou lovest me.”

But, Mr. President, to be more serious; what are we of the south to think of what we have heard this day? The senator from Massachusetts tells us that the tariff is not an eastern measure, and treats it as if the east had no interest in it. The senator from Missouri insists it is not a western measure, and that it has done no good to the west. The south comes in, and, in the most earnest manner, represents to you that this measure, which we are told “is of no value to the east or the west,” is “utterly destructive of our interests.” We represent to you that it has spread ruin and devastation through the land, and prostrated our hopes in the dust. We solemnly declare that we believe the system to be wholly unconstitutional, and a violation of the compact between the states and the Union; and our brethren turn a deaf ear to our complaints, and refuse to relieve us from a system “which not enriches them, but makes us poor indeed.” Good God! Mr. President, has it come to this? Do gentlemen hold the feelings and wishes of their brethren at so cheap a rate, that they refuse to gratify them at so small a price? Do gentlemen value so lightly the peace and harmony of the country, that they will not yield a measure of this description to the affectionate entreaties and earnest remonstrances of their friends? Do gentlemen estimate the value of the Union at so low a price, that they will not even make one effort to bind the states together with the cords of affection? And has it come to this? Is this the spirit in which this government is to be administered? If so, let me tell, gentlemen, the seeds of dissolution are already sown, and our children will reap the bitter fruit.

The honorable gentleman from Massachusetts, (Mr. Webster,) while he exonerates me personally from the charge, intimates that there is a party in the country who are looking to disunion. Sir, if the gentleman had stopped there, the accusation would have “passed by me like the idle wind, which I regard not.” But when he goes on to give to his accusation “a local habitation and a name,” by quoting the expression of a distinguished citizen of South Carolina, (Dr. Cooper,) “that it was time for the south to calculate the value of the Union,” and in the language of the bitterest sarcasm, adds, “Surely then the Union cannot last longer than July, 1831,” it is impossible to mistake either the allusion or the object of the gentleman. Now, Mr. President, I call upon every one who hears me to bear witness that this controversy is not of my seeking. The Senate will do me the justice to remember that, at the time this unprovoked and uncalled-for attack was made on the south, not one word had been uttered by me in disparagement of New England; nor had I made the most distant allusion either to the senator from Massachusetts or the state he represents. But, sir, that gentleman has thought proper, for purposes best known to himself, to strike the south, through me, the most unworthy of her servants. He has crossed the border, he has invaded the state of South Carolina, is making war upon her citizens, and endeavoring to overthrow her principles and her institutions. Sir, when the gentleman provokes me to such a conflict, I meet him at the threshold; I will struggle, while I have life, for our altars and our firesides; and, if God gives me strength, I will drive back the invader discomfited. Nor shall I stop there. If the gentleman provokes the war, he shall have war. Sir, I will not stop at the border; I will carry the war into the enemy’s territory, and not consent to lay down my arms until I have obtained “indemnity for the past and security for the future.” It is with unfeigned reluctance, Mr. President, that I enter upon the performance of this part of my duty; I shrink almost instinctively from a course, however necessary, which may have a tendency to excite sectional feelings and sectional jealousies. But, sir, the task has been forced upon me; and I proceed right onward to the performance of my duty. Be the consequences what they may, the responsibility is with those who have imposed upon me this necessity. The senator from Massachusetts has thought proper to cast the first stone; and if he shall find, according to a homely adage, “that he lives in a glass house,” on his head be the consequences. The gentleman has made a great flourish about his fidelity to Massachusetts. I shall make no professions of zeal for the interests and honor of South Carolina; of that my constituents shall judge. If there be one state in the Union, Mr. President, (and I say it not in a boastful spirit,) that may challenge comparison with any other, for a uniform, zealous, ardent, and uncalculating devotion to the Union, that state is South Carolina. Sir, from the very commencement of the revolution up to this hour, there is no sacrifice, however great, she has not cheerfully made, no service she has ever hesitated to perform. She has adhered to you in your prosperity; but in your adversity she has clung to you with more than filial affection. No matter what was the condition of her domestic affairs, though deprived of her resources, divided by parties, or surrounded with difficulties, the call of the country has been to her as the voice of God. Domestic discord ceased at the sound; every man became at once reconciled to his brethren, and the sons of Carolina were all seen crowding together to the temple, bringing their gifts to the altar of their common country.

What, sir, was the conduct of the South during the revolution? Sir, I honor New England for her conduct in that glorious struggle. But great as is the praise which belongs to her, I think, at least, equal honor is due to the south. They espoused the quarrel of their brethren with a generous zeal, which did not suffer them to stop to calculate their interest in the dispute. Favorites of the mother country, possessed of neither ships nor seamen to create a commercial rivalship, they might have found in their situation a guarantee that their trade would be forever fostered and protected by Great Britain. But, trampling on all considerations either of interest or of safety, they rushed into the conflict and fighting for principle, perilled all, in the sacred cause of freedom. Never was there exhibited in the history of the world higher examples of noble daring, dreadful suffering, and heroic endurance, than by the Whigs of Carolina during the revolution. The whole state, from the mountains to the sea, was overrun by an overwhelming force of the enemy. The fruits of industry perished on the spot where they were produced, or were consumed by the foe. The “plains of Carolina” drank up the most precious blood of her citizens. Black and smoking ruins marked the places which had been the habitations of her children. Driven from their homes into the gloomy and almost impenetrable swamps, even there the spirit of liberty survived, and South Carolina (sustained by the example of her Sumpters and her Marions) proved, by her conduct, that though her soil might be overrun, the spirit of her people was invincible.

But, sir, our country was soon called upon to engage in another revolutionary struggle, and that, too, was a struggle for principle. I mean the political revolution which dates back to ’98, and which, if it had not been successfully achieved, would have left us none of the fruits of the revolution of ’76. The revolution of ’98 restored the constitution, rescued the liberty of the citizens from the grasp of those who were aiming at its life, and in the emphatic language of Mr. Jefferson, “saved the constitution at its last gasp.” And by whom was it achieved? By the south, sir, aided only by the democracy of the north and west.

I come now to the war of 1812—a war which, I will remember, was called in derision (while its event was doubtful) the southern war, and sometimes the Carolina war; but which is now universally acknowledged to have done more for the honor and prosperity of the country than all other events in our history put together. What, sir, were the objects of that war? “Free trade and sailors’ rights!” It was for the protection of northern shipping and New England seamen that the country flew to arms. What interest had the south in that contest? If they had sat down coldly to calculate the value of their interest involved in it, they would have found that they had every thing to lose, and nothing to gain. But, sir, with that generous devotion to country so characteristic of the south, they only asked if the rights of any portion of their fellow-citizens had been invaded; and when told that northern ships and New England seamen had been arrested on the common highway of nations, they felt that the honor of their country was assailed; and acting on that exalted sentiment “which feels a stain like a wound,” they resolved to seek, in open war, for a redress of those injuries which it did not become freemen to endure. Sir, the whole south, animated as by a common impulse, cordially united in declaring and promoting that war. South Carolina sent to your councils, as the advocates and supporters of that war, the noblest of her sons. How they fulfilled that trust let a grateful country tell. Not a measure was adopted, not a battle fought, not a victory won, which contributed, in any degree, to the success of that war, to which southern councils and southern valor did not largely contribute. Sir, since South Carolina is assailed, I must be suffered to speak it to her praise, that at the very moment when, in one quarter, we heard it solemnly proclaimed, “that it did not become a religious and moral people to rejoice at the victories of our army or our navy,” her legislature unanimously

“Resolved, That we will cordially support the government in the vigorous prosecution of the war, until a peace can be obtained on honorable terms, and we will cheerfully submit to every privation that may be required of us, by our government, for the accomplishment of this object.”

South Carolina redeemed that pledge. She threw open her treasury to the government. She put at the absolute disposal of the officers of the United States all that she possessed—her men, her money, and her arms. She appropriated half a million of dollars, on her own account, in defence of her maritime frontier, ordered a brigade of state troops to be raised, and when left to protect herself by her own means, never suffered the enemy to touch her soil, without being instantly driven off or captured.

Such, sir, was the conduct of the south—such the conduct of my own state in that dark hour “which tried men’s souls.”

When I look back and contemplate the spectacle exhibited at that time in another quarter of the Union—when I think of the conduct of certain portions of New England, and remember the part which was acted on that memorable occasion by the political associates of the gentleman from Massachusetts—nay, when I follow that gentleman into the councils of the nation, and listen to his voice during the darkest period of the war, I am indeed astonished that he should venture to touch upon the topics which he has introduced into this debate. South Carolina reproached by Massachusetts! And from whom does this accusation come? Not from the democracy of New England; for they have been in times past, as they are now, the friends and allies of the south. No, sir, the accusation comes from that party whose acts, during the most trying and eventful period of our national history, were of such a character, that their own legislature, but a few years ago, actually blotted them out from their records, as a stain upon the honor of the country. But how can they ever be blotted out from the recollection of any one who had a heart to feel, a mind to comprehend, and a memory to retain, the events of that day! Sir, I shall not attempt to write the history of the party in New England to which I have alluded—the war party in peace, and the peace party in war. That task I shall leave to some future biographer of Nathan Dane, and I doubt not it will be found quite easy to prove that the peace party of Massachusetts were the only defenders of their country during their war, and actually achieved all our victories by land and sea. In the meantime, sir, and until that history shall be written, I propose, with the feeble and glimmering lights which I possess, to review the conduct of this party, in connection with the war, and the events which immediately preceded it.

It will be recollected, sir, that our great causes of quarrel with Great Britain were her depredations on the northern commerce, and the impressment of New England seamen. From every quarter we were called upon for protection. Importunate as the west is now represented to be on another subject, the importunity of the east on that occasion was far greater. I hold in my hands the evidence of the fact. Here are petitions, memorials, and remonstrances from all parts of New England, setting forth the injustice, the oppressions, the depredations, the insults, the outrages committed by Great Britain against the unoffending commerce and seamen of New England, and calling upon Congress for redress. Sir, I cannot stop to read these memorials. In that from Boston, after stating the alarming and extensive condemnation of our vessels by Great Britain, which threatened “to sweep our commerce from the face of the ocean,” and “to involve our merchants in bankruptcy,” they call upon the government “to assert our rights, and to adopt such measures as will support the dignity and honor of the United States.

From Salem we heard a language still more decisive; they call explicitly for “an appeal to arms,” and pledge their lives and property in support of any measures which Congress might adopt. From Newbury-port an appeal was made “to the firmness and justice of the government to obtain compensation and protection.” It was here, I think, that, when the war was declared, it was resolved “to resist our own government even unto blood.” (Olive Branch, p. 101.)

In other quarters the common language of that day was, that our commerce and our seamen were entitled to protection; and that it was the duty of the government to afford it at every hazard. The conduct of Great Britain, we were then told, was “an outrage upon our national independence.” These clamors, which commenced as early as January, 1806, were continued up to 1812. In a message from the governor of one of the New England States, as late as the 10th October, 1811, this language is held: “A manly and decisive course has become indispensable; a course to satisfy foreign nations, that, while we desire peace, we have the means and the spirit to repel aggression. We are false to ourselves when our commerce, or our territory, is invaded with impunity.”

About this time, however, a remarkable change was observable in the tone and temper of those who had been endeavoring to force the country into a war. The language of complaint was changed into that of insult, and calls for protection converted into reproaches. “Smoke, smoke!” says one writer; “my life on it, our executive has no more idea of declaring war than my grandmother.” “The committee of ways and means,” says another, “have come out with their Pandora’s box of taxes, and yet nobody dreams of war.” “Congress do not mean to declare war; they dare not.” But why multiply examples? An honorable member of the other house, from the city of Boston, [Mr. Quincy,] in a speech delivered on the 3d April, 1812, says, “Neither promises, nor threats, nor asseverations, nor oaths will make me believe that you will go to war. The navigation states are sacrificed, and the spirit and character of the country prostrated by fear and avarice.” “You cannot,” said the same gentleman, on another occasion, “be kicked into a war.”

Well, sir, the war at length came, and what did we behold? The very men who had been for six years clamorous for war, and for whose protection it was waged, became at once equally clamorous against it. They had received a miraculous visitation; a new light suddenly beamed upon their minds; the scales fell from their eyes, and it was discovered that the war was declared from “subserviency to France;” and that Congress, and the executive, “had sold themselves to Napoleon;” that Great Britain had in fact “done us no essential injury;” that she was “the bulwark of our religion;” that where “she took one of our ships, she protected twenty;” and that, if Great Britain had impressed a few of our seamen, it was because “she could not distinguish them from their own.” And so far did this spirit extend, that a committee of the Massachusetts legislature actually fell to calculation, and discovered, to their infinite satisfaction, but to the astonishment of all the world besides, that only eleven Massachusetts sailors had ever been impressed. Never shall I forget the appeals that had been made to the sympathies of the south in behalf of the “thousands of impressed Americans, who had been torn from their families and friends, and immured in the floating dungeons of Britain.” The most touching pictures were drawn of the hard condition of the American sailor, “treated like a slave,” forced to fight the battles of his enemy, “lashed to the mast, to be shot at like a dog.” But, sir, the very moment we had taken up arms in their defence, it was discovered that all these were mere “fictions of the brain;” and that the whole number in the state of Massachusetts was but eleven; and that even these had been “taken by mistake.” Wonderful discovery! The secretary of state had collected authentic lists of no less than six thousand impressed Americans. Lord Castlereagh himself acknowledged sixteen hundred. Calculations on the basis of the number found on board of the Guerriere, the Macedonian, the Java, and other British ships, (captured by the skill and gallantry of those heroes whose achievements are the treasured monuments of their country’s glory,) fixed the number at seven thousand; and yet, it seems, Massachusetts had lost but eleven! Eleven Massachusetts sailors taken by mistake! A cause of war indeed! Their ships too, the capture of which had threatened “universal bankruptcy,” it was discovered that Great Britain was their friend and protector; “where she had taken one she had protected twenty.” Then was the discovery made, that subserviency to France, hostility to commerce, “a determination, on the part of the south and west, to break down the Eastern States,” and especially as reported by a committee of the Massachusetts legislature “to force the sons of commerce to populate the wilderness,” were the true causes of the war. (Olive Branch, pp. 134, 291.) But let us look a little further into the conduct of the peace party of New England at that important crisis. Whatever difference of opinion might have existed as to the causes of the war, the country had a right to expect, that, when once involved in the contest, all America would have cordially united in its support. Sir, the war effected, in its progress, a union of all parties at the south. But not so in New England; there great efforts were made to stir up the minds of the people to oppose it. Nothing was left undone to embarrass the financial operations of the government, to prevent the enlistment of troops, to keep back the men and money of New England from the service of the Union, to force the president from his seat. Yes, sir, “the Island of Elba, or a halter!” were the alternatives they presented to the excellent and venerable James Madison. Sir, the war was further opposed by openly carrying on illicit trade with the enemy, by permitting that enemy to establish herself on the very soil of Massachusetts, and by opening a free trade between Great Britain and America, with a separate custom house. Yes, sir, those who cannot endure the thought that we should insist on a free trade, in time of profound peace, could, without scruple, claim and exercise the right of carrying on a free trade with the enemy in a time of war; and finally by getting up the renowned “Hartford Convention,” and preparing the way for an open resistance to the government, and a separation of the states. Sir, if I am asked for the proof of those things, I fearlessly appeal to the contemporary history, to the public documents of the country, to the recorded opinion and acts of public assemblies, to the declaration and acknowledgments, since made, of the executive and legislature of Massachusetts herself.

Sir, the time has not been allowed me to trace this subject through, even if I had been disposed to do so. But I cannot refrain from referring to one or two documents, which have fallen in my way since this debate began. I read, sir, from the Olive Branch of Matthew Carey, in which are collected “the actings and doings” of the peace party in New England, during the continuance of the embargo and the war. I know the senator from Massachusetts will respect the high authority of his political friend and fellow-laborer in the great cause of “domestic industry.”

In p. 301, et seq., 309 of this work, is a detailed account of the measures adopted in Massachusetts during the war, for the express purpose of embarrassing the financial operations of the government, by preventing loans, and thereby driving our rulers from their seats, and forcing the country into a dishonorable peace. It appears that the Boston banks commenced an operation, by which a run was to be made upon all the banks of the south; at the same time stopping their own discounts; the effect of which was to produce a sudden and almost alarming diminution of the circulating medium, and universal distress over the whole country—“a distress which they failed not to attribute to the unholy war.”

To such an extent was this system carried, that it appears, from a statement of the condition of the Boston banks, made up in January, 1814, that with nearly $5,000,000 of specie in their vaults, they had but $2,000,000 of bills in circulation. It is added by Carey, that at this very time an extensive trade was carried on in British government bills, for which specie was sent to Canada, for the payment of the British troops, then laying waste our northern frontier; and this too at the very moment when New England ships, sailing under British licenses, (a trade declared to be lawful by the courts both of Great Britain and Massachusetts,) were supplying with provisions those very armies destined for the invasion of our own shores. Sir, the author of the Olive Branch, with a holy indignation, denounces these acts as “treasonable;” “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” I shall not follow his example. But I will ask, With what justice or propriety can the south be accused of disloyalty from that quarter? If we had any evidence that the senator from Massachusetts had admonished his brethren then, he might, with a better grace, assume the office of admonishing us now.

When I look at the measures adopted in Boston, at that day, to deprive the government of the necessary means for carrying on the war, and think of the success and the consequences of these measures, I feel my pride, as an American, humbled in the dust. Hear, sir, the language of that day. I read from pages 301 and 302 of the Olive Branch. “Let no man who wishes to continue the war, by active means, by vote, or lending money, dare to prostrate himself at the altar on the fast day.” “Will federalists subscribe to the loan? Will they lend money to our national rulers? It is impossible. First, because of principle, and secondly, because of principal and interest.” “Do not prevent the abusers of their trust from becoming bankrupt. Do not prevent them from becoming odious to the public, and being replaced by better men.” “Any federalist who lends money to government must go and shake hands with James Madison, and claim fellowship with Felix Grundy.” (I beg pardon of my honorable friend from Tennessee—but he is in good company. I had thought it was “James Madison, Felix Grundy, and the devil.”) Let him no more “call himself a federalist, and a friend to his country: he will be called by others infamous,” &c.

Sir, the spirit of the people sunk under these appeals. Such was the effect produced by them on the public mind, that the very agents of the government (as appears from their public advertisements, now before me) could not obtain loans without a pledge that “the names of the subscribers should not be known.” Here are the advertisements: “The names of all subscribers” (say Gilbert and Dean, the brokers employed by government) “shall be known only to the undersigned.” As if those who came forward to aid their country, in the hour of her utmost need, were engaged in some dark and foul conspiracy, they were assured “that their names should not be known.” Can any thing show more conclusively the unhappy state of public feeling which prevailed at that day than this single fact? Of the same character with these measures was the conduct of Massachusetts in withholding her militia from the service of the United States, and devising measures for withdrawing her quota of the taxes, thereby attempting, not merely to cripple the resources of the country, but actually depriving the government (as far as depended upon her) of all the means of carrying on the war—of the bone, and muscle, and sinews of war—“of man and steel—the soldier and his sword.” But it seems Massachusetts was to reserve her resources for herself—she was to defend and protect her own shores. And how was that duty performed? In some places on the coast neutrality was declared, and the enemy was suffered to invade the soil of Massachusetts, and allowed to occupy her territory until the peace, without one effort to rescue it from his grasp. Nay, more—while our own government and our rulers were considered as enemies, the troops of the enemy were treated like friends—the most intimate commercial relations were established with them, and maintained up to the peace. At this dark period of our national affairs, where was the senator from Massachusetts? How were his political associates employed? “Calculating the value of the Union?” Yes, sir, that was the propitious moment, when our country stood alone, the last hope of the world, struggling for her existence against the colossal power of Great Britain, “concentrated one mighty effort to crush us at a blow;” that was the chosen hour to revive the grand scheme of building up “a great northern confederacy”—a scheme which, it is stated in the work before me, had its origin as far back as the year 1796, and which appears never to have been entirely abandoned.

In the language of the writers of that day, (1796,) “rather than have a constitution such as the anti-federalists were contending for, (such as we are now contending for,) the Union ought to be dissolved;” and to prepare the way for that measure, the same methods were resorted to then that have always been relied on for that purpose, exciting prejudice against the south. Yes, sir, our northern brethren were then told, “that if the negroes were good for food, their southern masters would claim the right to destroy them at pleasure.” (Olive Branch, p. 267.) Sir, in 1814, all these topics were revived. Again we hear of “northern confederacy.” “The slave states by themselves;” “the mountains are the natural boundary;” we want neither “the counsels nor the power of the west,” &c., &c. The papers teemed with accusations against the south and the west, and the calls for a dissolution of all connection with them were loud and strong. I cannot consent to go through the disgusting details. But to show the height to which the spirit of disaffection was carried, I will take you to the temple of the living God, and show you that sacred place, which should be devoted to the extension of “peace on earth and good will towards men,” where “one day’s truce ought surely to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind,” converted into a fierce arena of political strife, where, from the lips of the priest, standing between the horns of the altar, there went forth the most terrible denunciations against all who should be true to their country in the hour of her utmost need.

“If you do not wish,” said a reverend clergyman, in a sermon preached in Boston, on the 23d of July, 1812, “to become the slaves of those who own slaves, and who are themselves the slaves of French slaves, you must either, in the language of the day, CUT THE CONNECTION or so far alter the national compact as to insure to yourselves a due share in the government.” (Olive Branch, p. 319.) “The Union,” says the same writer, (p. 320,) “has been long since virtually dissolved, and it is full time that this part of the disunited states should take care of itself.”

Another reverend gentleman, pastor of a church at Medford, (p. 321,) issues his anathema—“LET HIM STAND ACCURSED”—against all, all who by their “personal services,” for “loans of money,” “conversation,” or “writing,” or “influence,” give countenance or support to the righteous war, in the following terms: “That man is an accomplice in the wickedness—he loads his conscience with the blackest crimes—he brings the guilt of blood upon his soul, and in the sight of God and his law, he is a MURDERER.”

One or two more quotations, sir, and I shall have done. A reverend doctor of divinity, the pastor of a church at Byfield, Massachusetts, on the 7th of April, 1814, thus addresses his flock, (p. 321:) “The Israelites became weary of yielding the fruit of their labor to pamper their splendid tyrants. They left their political woes. THEY SEPARATED; where is our Moses? Where the rod of his miracles? Where is our Aaron? Alas! no voice from the burning bush has directed them here.”

“We must trample on the mandates of despotism, or remain slaves forever,” (p. 322.) “You must drag the chains of Virginian despotism, unless you discover some other mode of escape.” “Those Western States which have been violent for this abominable war—those states which have thirsted for blood—God has given them blood to drink,” (p. 323.) Mr. President, I can go no further. The records of the day are full of such sentiments, issued from the press, spoken in public assemblies, poured out from the sacred desk. God forbid, sir, that I should charge the people of Massachusetts with participating in these sentiments. The south and the west had there their friends—men who stood by their country, though encompassed all around by their enemies. The senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Silsbee) was one of them; the senator from Connecticut (Mr. Foot) was another; and there are others now on this floor. The sentiments I have read were the sentiments of a party embracing the political associates of the gentleman from Massachusetts. If they could only be found in the columns of a newspaper, in a few occasional pamphlets, issued by men of intemperate feeling, I should not consider them as affording any evidence of the opinions even of the peace party of New England. But, sir, they were the common language of that day; they pervaded the whole land; they were issued from the legislative hall, from the pulpit, and the press. Our books are full of them; and there is no man who now hears me but knows that they were the sentiments of a party, by whose members they were promulgated. Indeed, no evidence of this would seem to be required beyond the fact that such sentiments found their way even into the pulpits of New England. What must be the state of public opinion, where any respectable clergyman would venture to preach, and to print, sermons containing the sentiments I have quoted? I doubt not the piety or moral worth of these gentlemen. I am told they were respectable and pious men. But they were men, and they “kindled in a common blaze.” And now, sir, I must be suffered to remark that, at this awful and melancholy period of our national history, the gentleman from Massachusetts, who now manifests so great a devotion to the Union, and so much anxiety lest it should be endangered from the south, was “with his brethren in Israel.” He saw all these things passing before his eyes—he heard these sentiments uttered all around him. I do not charge that gentleman with any participation in these acts, or with approving of these sentiments.

But I will ask, why, if he was animated by the same sentiments then which he now professes, if he can “augur disunion at a distance, and snuff up rebellion in every tainted breeze,” why did he not, at that day, exert his great talents and acknowledged influence with the political associates by whom he was surrounded, and who then, as now, looked up to him for guidance and direction, in allaying this general excitement, in pointing out to his deluded friends the value of the Union, in instructing them that, instead of looking “to some prophet to lead them out of the land of Egypt,” they should become reconciled to their brethren, and unite with them in the support of a just and necessary war? Sir, the gentleman must excuse me for saying, that if the records of our country afforded any evidence that he had pursued such a course, then, if we could find it recorded in the history of those times, that, like the immortal Dexter, he had breasted that mighty torrent which was sweeping before it all that was great and valuable in our political institutions—if like him he had stood by his country in opposition to his party, sir, we would, like little children, listen to his precepts, and abide by his counsels.

As soon as the public mind was sufficiently prepared for the measure, the celebrated Hartford Convention was got up; not as the act of a few unauthorized individuals, but by the authority of the legislature of Massachusetts; and, as has been shown by the able historian of that convention, in accordance with the views and wishes of the party of which it was the organ. Now, sir, I do not desire to call in question the motives of the gentlemen who composed that assembly. I knew many of them to be in private life accomplished and honorable men, and I doubt not there were some among them who did not perceive the dangerous tendency of their proceedings. I will even go further, and say, that if the authors of the Hartford Convention believed that “gross, deliberate, and palpable violations of the constitution” had taken place, utterly destructive of their rights and interests, I should be the last man to deny their right to resort to any constitutional measures for redress. But, sir, in any view of the case, the time when and the circumstances under which that convention assembled, as well as the measures recommended, render their conduct, in my opinion wholly indefensible. Let us contemplate, for a moment, the spectacle then exhibited to the view of the world. I will not go over the disasters of the war, nor describe the difficulties in which the government was involved. It will be recollected that its credit was nearly gone, Washington had fallen, the whole coast was blockaded, and an immense force, collected in the West Indies, was about to make a descent, which it was supposed we had no means of resisting. In this awful state of our public affairs, when the government seemed almost to be tottering on its base, when Great Britain, relieved from all her other enemies, had proclaimed her purpose of “reducing us to unconditional submission,” we beheld the peace party of New England (in the language of the work before us) pursuing a course calculated to do more injury to their country, “and to render England more effective service than all her armies.” Those who could not find it in their hearts to rejoice at our victories sang Te Deum at the King’s Chapel in Boston, for the restoration of the Bourbons. Those who could not consent to illuminate their dwellings for the capture of the Guerriere could give no visible tokens of their joy at the fall of Detroit. The “beacon fires” of their hills were lighted up, not for the encouragement of their friends, but as signals to the enemy; and in the gloomy hours of midnight, the very lights burned blue. Such were the dark and portentous signs of the times, which ushered into being the renowned Hartford Convention. That convention met, and, from their proceedings, it appears that their chief object was to keep back the money and men of New England from the service of the Union, and to effect radical changes in the government—changes that can never be effected without a dissolution of the Union.

Let us now, sir, look at their proceedings. I read from “A Short Account of the Hartford Convention,” (written by one of its members,) a very rare book, of which I was fortunate enough, a few years ago, to obtain a copy. [Here Mr. H. read from the proceedings.]

It is unnecessary to trace the matter further, or to ask what would have been the next chapter in this history, if the measures recommended had been carried into effect; and if, with the men and money of New England withheld from the government of the United States, she had been withdrawn from the war; if New Orleans had fallen into the hands of the enemy; and if, without troops and almost destitute of money, the Southern and the Western States had been thrown upon their own resources, for the prosecution of the war, and the recovery of New Orleans.

Sir, whatever may have been the issue of the contest, the Union must have been dissolved. But a wise and just Providence, which “shapes our ends, roughhew them as we will,” gave us the victory, and crowned our efforts with a glorious peace. The ambassadors of Hartford were seen retracing their steps from Washington, “the bearers of the glad tidings of great joy.” Courage and patriotism triumphed—the country was saved—the Union was preserved. And are we, Mr. President, who stood by our country then, who threw open our coffers, who bared our bosoms, who freely perilled all in that conflict, to be reproached with want of attachment to the Union? If, sir, we are to have lessons of patriotism read to us, they must come from a different quarter. The senator from Massachusetts, who is now so sensitive on all subjects connected with the Union, seems to have a memory forgetful of the political events that have passed away. I must therefore refresh his recollection a little further on these subjects. The history of disunion has been written by one whose authority stands too high with the American people to be questioned; I mean Thomas Jefferson. I know not how the gentleman may receive this authority. When that great and good man occupied the presidential chair, I believe he commanded no portion of the gentleman’s respect.

I hold in my hand a celebrated pamphlet on the embargo, in which language is held, in relation to Mr. Jefferson, which my respect for his memory will prevent me from reading, unless any gentleman should call for it. But the senator from Massachusetts has since joined in singing hosannas to his name; he has assisted at his apotheosis, and has fixed him as “a brilliant star in the clear upper sky.” I hope, therefore, he is now prepared to receive with deference and respect the high authority of Mr. Jefferson. In the fourth volume of his Memoirs, which has just issued from the press, we have the following history of disunion from the pen of that illustrious statesman: “Mr. Adams called on me pending the embargo, and while endeavors were making to obtain its repeal: he spoke of the dissatisfaction of the eastern portion of our confederacy with the restraints of the embargo then existing, and their restlessness under it; that there was nothing which might not be attempted to rid themselves of it; that he had information of the most unquestionable authority, that certain citizens of the Eastern States (I think he named Massachusetts particularly) were in negotiation with agents of the British government, the object of which was an agreement that the New England States should take no further part in the war (the commercial war, the ‘war of restrictions,’ as it was called) then going on, and that, without formally declaring their separation from the Union, they should withdraw from all aid and obedience to them, &c. From that moment,” says Mr. J., “I saw the necessity of abandoning it, [the embargo,] and, instead of effecting our purpose by this peaceful measure, we must fight it out or break the Union.” In another letter Mr. Jefferson adds, “I doubt whether a single fact known to the world will carry as clear conviction to it of the correctness of our knowledge of the treasonable views of the federal party of that day, as that disclosed by this, the most nefarious and daring attempt to dissever the Union, of which the Hartford Convention was a subsequent chapter; and both of these having failed, consolidation becomes the fourth chapter of the next book of their history. But this opens with a vast accession of strength, from their younger recruits, who, having nothing in them of the feelings and principles of ’76, now look to a single and splendid government, &c., riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.” (vol. iv. pp. 419, 422.)

The last chapter, says Mr. Jefferson, of that history, is to be found in the conduct of those who are endeavoring to bring about consolidation; ay, sir, that very consolidation for which the gentleman from Massachusetts is contending—the exercise by the federal government of powers not delegated in relation to “internal improvements” and “the protection of manufactures.” And why, sir, does Mr. Jefferson consider consolidation as leading directly to disunion? Because he knew that the exercise, by the federal government, of the powers contended for, would make this “a government without limitation of powers,” the submission to which he considered as a greater evil than disunion itself. There is one chapter in this history, however, which Mr. Jefferson has not filled up; and I must therefore supply the deficiency. It is to be found in the protests made by New England against the acquisition of Louisiana. In relation to that subject, the New England doctrine is thus laid down by one of her learned doctors of that day, now a doctor of laws, at the head of the great literary institution of the east; I mean Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard College. I quote from the speech delivered by that gentleman on the floor of Congress, on the occasion of the admission of Louisiana into the Union.

“Mr. Quincy repeated and justified a remark he had made, which, to save all misapprehension, he had committed to writing, in the following words: If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of the Union; that it will free the states from their moral obligation; and as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must.”

Mr. President, I wish it to be distinctly understood, that all the remarks I have made on this subject are intended to be exclusively applied to a party, which I have described as the “peace party of New England”—embracing the political associates of the senator from Massachusetts—a party which controlled the operations of that state during the embargo and the war, and who are justly chargeable with all the measures I have reprobated. Sir, nothing has been further from my thoughts than to impeach the character or conduct of the people of New England. For their steady habits and hardy virtues I trust I entertain a becoming respect. I fully subscribe to the truth of the description given before the revolution, by one whose praise is the highest eulogy, “that the perseverance of Holland, the activity of France, and the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, have been more than equalled by this recent people.” The hardy people of New England of the present day are worthy of their ancestors. Still less, Mr. President, has it been my intention to say anything that could be construed into a want of respect for that party, who, have been true to their principles in the worst of times; I mean the democracy of New England.

Sir, I will declare that, highly as I appreciate the democracy of the south, I consider even higher praise to be due to the democracy of New England, who have maintained their principles “through good and through evil report,” who, at every period of our national history, have stood up manfully for “their country, their whole country, and nothing but their country.” In the great political revolution of ’98, they were found united with the democracy of the south, marching under the banner of the constitution, led on by the patriarch of liberty, in search of the land of political promise, which they lived not only to behold, but to possess and to enjoy. Again, sir, in the darkest and most gloomy period of the war, when our country stood singlehanded against “the conqueror of the conquerors of the world,” when all about and around them was dark and dreary, disastrous and discouraging, they stood a Spartan band in that narrow pass, where the honor of their country was to be defended, or to find its grave. And in the last great struggle, involving, as we believe, the very existence of the principle of popular sovereignty, where were the democracy of New England? Where they always have been found, sir, struggling side by side, with their brethren of the south and the west for popular rights, and assisting in that triumph, by which the man of the people was elevated to the highest office in their gift.

Who, then, Mr. President, are the true friends of the Union? Those who would confine the federal government strictly within the limits prescribed by the constitution; who would preserve to the states and the people all powers not expressly delegated; who would make this a federal and not a national Union, and who, administering the government in a spirit of equal justice, would make it a blessing, and not a curse. And who are its enemies? Those who are in favor of consolidation; who are constantly stealing power from the states, and adding strength to the federal government; who, assuming an unwarrantable jurisdiction over the states and the people, undertake to regulate the whole industry and capital of the country. But, sir, of all descriptions of men, I consider those as the worst enemies of the Union, who sacrifice the equal rights which belong to every member of the confederacy to combinations of interested majorities, for personal or political objects. But the gentleman apprehends no evil from the dependence of the states on the federal government; he can see no danger of corruption from the influence of money or of patronage. Sir, I know that it is supposed to be a wise saying that “patronage is a source of weakness;” and in support of that maxim, it has been said, that “every ten appointments make a hundred enemies.” But I am rather inclined to think, with the eloquent and sagacious orator now reposing on his laurels on the banks of the Roanoke, that “the power of conferring favors creates a crowd of dependants;” he gave a forcible illustration of the truth of the remark, when he told us of the effect of holding up the savory morsel to the eager eyes of the hungry hounds gathered around his door. It mattered not whether the gift was bestowed on Towzer or Sweetlips, “Tray, Blanche, or Sweetheart;” while held in suspense, they were governed by a nod, and when the morsel was bestowed, expectation of favors of to-morrow kept up the subjection of to-day.

The senator from Massachusetts, in denouncing what he is pleased to call the Carolina doctrine, has attempted to throw ridicule upon the idea that a state has any constitutional remedy, by the exercise of its sovereign authority, against “a gross, palpable, and deliberate violation of the constitution.” He calls it “an idle” or “a ridiculous notion,” or something to that effect, and added, that it would make the Union a “mere rope of sand.” Now, sir, as the gentleman has not condescended to enter into any examination of the question, and has been satisfied with throwing the weight of his authority into the scale, I do not deem it necessary to do more than to throw into the opposite scale the authority on which South Carolina relies; and there, for the present, I am perfectly willing to leave the controversy. The South Carolina doctrine, that is to say, the doctrine contained in an exposition reported by a committee of the legislature in December, 1828, and published by their authority, is the good old republican doctrine of ’98—the doctrine of the celebrated “Virginia Resolutions” of that year, and of “Madison’s Report” of ’99. It will be recollected that the legislature of Virginia, in December, ’98, took into consideration the alien and sedition laws, then considered by all republicans as a gross violation of the constitution of the United States, and on that day passed, among others, the following resolutions,—

“The General Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact, as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, authorities, rights, and liberties, belonging to them.”

In addition to the above resolution, the General Assembly of Virginia “appealed to the other states, in the confidence that they would concur with that commonwealth, that the acts aforesaid [the alien and sedition laws] are unconstitutional, and that the necessary and proper measures would be taken by each for co-operating with Virginia in maintaining unimpaired the authorities, rights, and liberties reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

The legislatures of several of the New England States, having, contrary to the expectation of the legislature of Virginia, expressed their dissent from these doctrines, the subject came up again for consideration during the session of 1799, 1800, when it was referred to a select committee, by whom was made that celebrated report which is familiarly known as “Madison’s Report,” and which deserves to last as long as the constitution itself. In that report, which was subsequently adopted by the legislature, the whole subject was deliberately re-examined, and the objections urged against the Virginia doctrines carefully considered. The result was, that the legislature of Virginia reaffirmed all the principles laid down in the resolutions of 1798, and issued to the world that admirable report which has stamped the character of Mr. Madison as the preserver of that constitution which he had contributed so largely to create and establish. I will here quote from Mr. Madison’s report one or two passages which bear more immediately on the point in controversy. “The resolutions, having taken this view of the federal compact, proceed to infer ‘that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers the states who are parties thereto have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them.’”

“It appears to your committee to be a plain principle, founded in common sense, illustrated by common practice, and essential to the nature of compacts, that, where resort can be had to no tribunal superior to the authority of the parties, the parties themselves must be the rightful judges in the last resort, whether the bargain made has been pursued or violated. The constitution of the United States was formed by the sanction of the states, given by each in its sovereign capacity. It adds to the stability and dignity, as well as to the authority, of the constitution, that it rests upon this legitimate and solid foundation. The states, then, being the parties to the constitutional compact, and in their sovereign capacity, it follows of necessity that there can be no tribunal above their authority, to decide, in the last resort, whether the compact made by them be violated, and consequently that, as the parties to it, they must decide, in the last resort, such questions as may be of sufficient magnitude to require their interposition.”

“The resolution has guarded against any misapprehension of its object by expressly requiring for such an interposition ‘the case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous breach of the constitution, by the exercise of powers not granted by it.’ It must be a case, not of a light and transient nature, but of a nature dangerous to the great purposes for which the constitution was established.

“But the resolution has done more than guard against misconstructions, by expressly referring to cases of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous nature. It specifies the object of the interposition, which it contemplates, to be solely that of arresting the progress of the evil of usurpation, and of maintaining the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to the states, as parties to the constitution.

“From this view of the resolution, it would seem inconceivable that it can incur any just disapprobation from those who, laying aside all momentary impressions, and recollecting the genuine source and object of the federal constitution, shall candidly and accurately interpret the meaning of the General Assembly. If the deliberate exercise of dangerous powers, palpably withheld by the constitution, could not justify the parties to it in interposing even so far as to arrest the progress of the evil, and thereby to preserve the constitution itself, as well as to provide for the safety of the parties to it, there would be an end to all relief from usurped power, and a direct subversion of the rights specified or recognized under all the state constitutions, as well as a plain denial of the fundamental principles on which our independence itself was declared.”

But, sir, our authorities do not stop here. The state of Kentucky responded to Virginia, and on the 10th of November, 1798, adopted those celebrated resolutions, well known to have been penned by the author of the Declaration of American Independence. In those resolutions, the legislature of Kentucky declare, “that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge, for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.”

At the ensuing session of the legislature, the subject was re-examined, and on the 14th of November, 1799, the resolutions of the preceding year were deliberately reaffirmed, and it was, among other things, solemnly declared,—

“That, if those who administer the general government be permitted to transgress the limits fixed by that compact, by a total disregard to the special delegations of power therein contained, an annihilation of the state governments, and the erection upon their ruins of a general consolidated government, will be the inevitable consequence. That the principles of construction contended for by sundry of the state legislatures, that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it, stop nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the constitution, would be the measure of their powers. That the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction, and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.”

Time and experience confirmed Mr. Jefferson’s opinion on this all important point. In the year 1821, he expressed himself in this emphatic manner: “It is a fatal heresy to suppose that either our state governments are superior to the federal, or the federal to the state; neither is authorized literally to decide which belongs to itself or its copartner in government; in differences of opinion, between their different sets of public servants, the appeal is to neither, but to their employers peaceably assembled by their representatives in convention.” The opinion of Mr. Jefferson on this subject has been so repeatedly and so solemnly expressed, that they may be said to have been the most fixed and settled convictions of his mind.

In the protest prepared by him for the legislature of Virginia, in December, 1825, in respect to the powers exercised by the federal government in relation to the tariff and internal improvements, which he declares to be “usurpations of the powers retained by the states, mere interpolations into the compact, and direct infractions of it,” he solemnly reasserts all the principles of the Virginia Resolutions of ’98, protests against “these acts of the federal branch of the government as null and void, and declares that, although Virginia would consider a dissolution of the Union as among the greatest calamities that could befall them, yet it is not the greatest. There is one yet greater—submission to a government of unlimited powers. It is only when the hope of this shall become absolutely desperate, that further forbearance could not be indulged.”

In his letter to Mr. Giles, written about the same time, he says,—

“I see as you do, and with the deepest affliction, the rapid strides with which the federal branch of our government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the states, and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic, and that too by constructions which leave no limits to their powers, &c. Under the power to regulate commerce, they assume, indefinitely, that also over agriculture and manufactures, &c. Under the authority to establish post roads, they claim that of cutting down mountains for the construction of roads, and digging canals, &c. And what is our resource for the preservation of the constitution? Reason and argument? You might as well reason and argue with the marble columns encircling them, &c. Are we then to stand to our arms with the hot-headed Georgian? No; [and I say no, and South Carolina has said no;] that must be the last resource. We must have patience and long endurance with our brethren, &c., and separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left are a dissolution of our Union with them, or submission. Between these two evils, when we must make a choice, there can be no hesitation.”

Such, sir, are the high and imposing authorities in support of “The Carolina doctrine,” which is, in fact, the doctrine of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798.

Sir, at that day the whole country was divided on this very question. It formed the line of demarcation between the federal and republican parties; and the great political revolution which then took place turned upon the very questions involved in these resolutions. That question was decided by the people, and by that decision the constitution was, in the emphatic language of Mr. Jefferson, “saved at its last gasp.” I should suppose, sir, it would require more self-respect than any gentleman here would be willing to assume, to treat lightly doctrines derived from such high resources. Resting on authority like this, I will ask gentlemen whether South Carolina has not manifested a high regard for the Union, when, under a tyranny ten times more grievous than the alien and sedition laws, she has hitherto gone no further than to petition, remonstrate, and to solemnly protest against a series of measures which she believes to be wholly unconstitutional and utterly destructive of her interests. Sir, South Carolina has not gone one step further than Mr. Jefferson himself was disposed to go, in relation to the present subject of our present complaints—not a step further than the statesman from New England was disposed to go, under similar circumstances; no further than the senator from Massachusetts himself once considered as within “the limits of a constitutional opposition.” The doctrine that it is the right of a state to judge of the violations of the constitution on the part of the federal government, and to protect her citizens from the operations of unconstitutional laws, was held by the enlightened citizens of Boston, who assembled in Faneuil Hall, on the 25th of January, 1809. They state, in that celebrated memorial, that “they looked only to the state legislature, who were competent to devise relief against the unconstitutional acts of the general government. That your power (say they) is adequate to that object, is evident from the organization of the confederacy.”

A distinguished senator from one of the New England States, (Mr. Hillhouse,) in a speech delivered here, on a bill for enforcing the embargo, declared, “I feel myself bound in conscience to declare, (lest the blood of those who shall fall in the execution of this measure shall be on my head,) that I consider this to be an act which directs a mortal blow at the liberties of my country—an act containing unconstitutional provisions, to which the people are not bound to submit, and to which, in my opinion, they will not submit.”

And the senator from Massachusetts himself, in a speech delivered on the same subject in the other house, said, “This opposition is constitutional and legal; it is also conscientious. It rests on settled and sober conviction, that such policy is destructive to the interests of the people, and dangerous to the being of government. The experience of every day confirms these sentiments. Men who act from such motives are not to be discouraged by trifling obstacles, nor awed by any dangers. They know the limit of constitutional opposition; up to that limit, at their own discretion, they will walk, and walk fearlessly.” How “the being of the government” was to be endangered by “constitutional opposition” to the embargo, I leave the gentleman to explain.

Thus it will be seen, Mr. President, that the South Carolina doctrine is the republican doctrine of ’98—that it was promulgated by the fathers of the faith—that it was maintained by Virginia and Kentucky in the worst of times—that it constituted the very pivot on which the political revolution of that day turned—that it embraces the very principles, the triumph of which, at that time, saved the constitution at its last gasp, and which New England statesmen were not unwilling to adopt, when they believed themselves to be the victims of unconstitutional legislation. Sir, as to the doctrine that the federal government is the exclusive judge of the extent as well as the limitations of its powers, it seems to me to be utterly subversive of the sovereignty and independence of the states. It makes but little difference, in my estimation, whether Congress or the Supreme Court are invested with this power. If the federal government, in all, or any, of its departments, is to prescribe the limits of its own authority, and the states are bound to submit to the decision, and are not to be allowed to examine and decide for themselves, when the barriers of the constitution shall be overleaped, this is practically “a government without limitation of powers.” The states are at once reduced to mere petty corporations, and the people are entirely at your mercy. I have but one word more to add. In all the efforts that have been made by South Carolina to resist the unconstitutional laws which Congress has extended over them, she has kept steadily in view the preservation of the Union, by the only means by which she believes it can be long preserved—a firm, manly, and steady resistance against usurpation. The measures of the federal government have, it is true, prostrated her interests, and will soon involve the whole south in irretrievable ruin. But even this evil, great as it is, is not the chief ground of our complaints. It is the principle involved in the contest—a principle which, substituting the discretion of Congress for the limitations of the constitution, brings the states and the people to the feet of the federal government, and leaves them nothing they can call their own. Sir, if the measures of the federal government were less oppressive, we should still strive against this usurpation. The south is acting on a principle she has always held sacred—resistance to unauthorized taxation. These, sir, are the principles which induced the immortal Hampden to resist the payment of a tax of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have ruined his fortune? No! but the payment of half twenty shillings, on the principle on which it was demanded, would have made him a slave. Sir, if acting on these high motives—if animated by that ardent love of liberty which has always been the most prominent trait in the southern character—we should be hurried beyond the bounds of a cold and calculating prudence, who is there, with one noble and generous sentiment in his bosom, that would not be disposed, in the language of Burke, to exclaim, “You must pardon something to the spirit of liberty?”

Webster’s Great Reply to Hayne,

In which he “Expounds the Constitution,” delivered in Senate, January 26, 1830.

Following Mr. Hayne in the debate, Mr. Webster addressed the Senate as follows:—

Mr. President: When the mariner has been tossed, for many days, in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float farther, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolution.

“Resolved, That the committee on public lands be instructed to inquire and report the quantity of the public lands remaining unsold within each state and territory, and whether it be expedient to limit, for a certain period, the sales of the public lands to such lands only as have heretofore been offered for sale, and are now subject to entry at the minimum price. And, also, whether the office of surveyor general, and some of the land offices, may not be abolished without detriment to the public interest; or whether it be expedient to adopt measures to hasten the sales, and extend more rapidly the surveys of the public lands.”]

We have thus heard, sir, what the resolution is, which is actually before us for consideration; and it will readily occur to every one that it is almost the only subject about which something has not been said in the speech, running through two days, by which the Senate has been now entertained by the gentleman from South Carolina. Every topic in the wide range of our public affairs, whether past or present,—every thing, general or local, whether belonging to national politics or party politics,—seems to have attracted more or less of the honorable member’s attention, save only the resolution before us. He has spoken of every thing but the public lands. They have escaped his notice. To that subject, in all his excursions, he has not paid even the cold respect of a passing glance.

When this debate, sir, was to be resumed, on Thursday morning, it so happened that it would have been convenient for me to be elsewhere. The honorable member, however, did not incline to put off the discussion to another day. He had a shot, he said, to return, and he wished to discharge it. That shot, sir, which it was kind thus to inform us was coming, that we might stand out of the way, or prepare ourselves to fall before it, and die with decency, has now been received. Under all advantages, and with expectation awakened by the tone which preceded it, it has been discharged, and has spent its force. It may become me to say no more of its effect than that, if nobody is found, after all, either killed or wounded by it, it is not the first time in the history of human affairs that the vigor and success of the war have not quite come up to the lofty and sounding phrase of the manifesto.

The gentleman, sir, in declining to postpone the debate, told the Senate, with the emphasis of his hand upon his heart, that there was something rankling here, which he wished to relieve. [Mr. Hayne rose and disclaimed having used the word rankling.] It would not, Mr. President, be safe for the honorable member to appeal to those around him, upon the question whether he did, in fact, make use of that word. But he may have been unconscious of it. At any rate, it is enough that he disclaims it. But still, with or without the use of that particular word, he had yet something here, he said, of which he wished to rid himself by an immediate reply. In this respect, sir, I have a great advantage over the honorable gentleman. There is nothing here, sir, which gives me the slightest uneasiness; neither fear, nor anger, nor that which is sometimes more troublesome than either, the consciousness of having been in the wrong. There is nothing either originating here, or now received here, by the gentleman’s shot. Nothing original, for I had not the slightest feeling of disrespect or unkindness towards the honorable member. Some passages, it is true, had occurred, since our acquaintance in this body, which I could have wished might have been otherwise; but I had used philosophy, and forgotten them. When the honorable member rose, in his first speech, I paid him the respect of attentive listening; and when he sat down, though surprised, and I must say even astonished, at some of his opinions, nothing was farther from my intention than to commence any personal warfare; and through the whole of the few remarks I made in answer, I avoided, studiously and carefully, every thing which I thought possible to be construed into disrespect. And, sir, while there is thus nothing originating here, which I wished at any time, or now wish to discharge, I must repeat, also, that nothing has been received here which rankles, or in any way gives me annoyance. I will not accuse the honorable member of violating the rules of civilized war—I will not say that he poisoned his arrows. But whether his shafts were, or were not, dipped in that which would have caused rankling if they had reached, there was not, as it happened, quite strength enough in the bow to bring them to their mark. If he wishes now to find those shafts, he must look for them elsewhere; they will not be found fixed and quivering in the object at which they were aimed.

The honorable member complained that I had slept on his speech. I must have slept on it, or not slept at all. The moment the honorable member sat down, his friend from Missouri arose, and, with much honeyed commendation of the speech, suggested that the impressions which it had produced were too charming and delightful to be disturbed by other sentiments or other sounds, and proposed that the Senate should adjourn. Would it have been quite amiable in me, sir, to interrupt this excellent good feeling? Must I not have been absolutely malicious, if I could have thrust myself forward to destroy sensations thus pleasing? Was it not much better and kinder, both to sleep upon them myself, and to allow others, also, the pleasure of sleeping upon them? But if it be meant, by sleeping upon his speech, that I took time to prepare a reply to it, it is quite a mistake; owing to other engagements, I could not employ even the interval between the adjournment of the Senate and its meeting the next morning in attention to the subject of this debate. Nevertheless, sir, the mere matter of fact is undoubtedly true—I did sleep on the gentleman’s speech, and slept soundly. And I slept equally well on his speech of yesterday, to which I am now replying. It is quite possible that, in this respect, also, I possess some advantage over the honorable member, attributable, doubtless, to a cooler temperament on my part; for in truth I slept upon his speeches remarkably well. But the gentleman inquires why he was made the object of such a reply. Why was he singled out? If an attack had been made on the east, he, he assures us, did not begin it—it was the gentleman from Missouri. Sir, I answered the gentleman’s speech, because I happened to hear it; and because, also, I choose to give an answer to that speech, which, if unanswered, I thought most likely to produce injurious impressions. I did not stop to inquire who was the original drawer of the bill. I found a responsible endorser before me, and it was my purpose to hold him liable, and to bring him to his just responsibility without delay. But, sir, this interrogatory of the honorable member was only introductory to another. He proceeded to ask me whether I had turned upon him in this debate from the consciousness that I should find an overmatch if I ventured on a contest with his friend from Missouri. If, sir, the honorable member, ex gratia modestiæ, had chosen thus to defer to his friend, and to pay him a compliment, without intentional disparagement to others, it would have been quite according to the friendly courtesies of debate, and not at all ungrateful to my own feelings. I am not one of those, sir, who esteem any tribute of regard, whether light and occasional, or more serious and deliberate, which may be bestowed on others, as so much unjustly withholden from themselves. But the tone and manner of the gentleman’s question, forbid me thus to interpret it. I am not at liberty to consider it as nothing more than a civility to his friend. It had an air of taunt and disparagement, a little of the loftiness of asserted superiority, which does not allow me to pass it over without notice. It was put as a question for me to answer, and so put as if it were difficult for me to answer, whether I deemed the member from Missouri an overmatch for myself in debate here. It seems to me, sir, that is extraordinary language, and an extraordinary tone for the discussions of this body.

Matches and overmatches? Those terms are more applicable elsewhere than here, and fitter for other assemblies than this. Sir, the gentleman seems to forget where and what we are. This is a Senate; a Senate of equals; of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters; we acknowledge no dictators. This is a hall of mutual consultation and discussion, not an arena for the exhibition of champions. I offer myself, sir, as a match for no man; I throw the challenge of debate at no man’s feet. But, then, sir, since the honorable member has put the question in a manner that calls for an answer. I will give him an answer; and I tell him that, holding myself to be the humblest of the members here, I yet know nothing in the arm of his friend from Missouri, either alone or when aided by the arm of his friend from South Carolina, that need deter even me from espousing whatever opinions I may choose to espouse, from debating whenever I may choose to debate, or from speaking whatever I may see fit to say on the floor of the Senate. Sir, when uttered as matter of commendation or compliment, I should dissent from nothing which the honorable member might say of his friend. Still less do I put forth any pretensions of my own. But when put to me as a matter of taunt, I throw it back, and say to the gentleman that he could possibly say nothing less likely than such a comparison to wound my pride of personal character. The anger of its tone rescued the remark from intentional irony, which otherwise, probably, would have been its general acceptation. But, sir, if it be imagined that by this mutual quotation and commendation; if it be supposed that, by casting the characters of the drama, assigning to each his part,—to one the attack, to another the cry of onset,—or if it be thought that by a loud and empty vaunt of anticipated victory any laurels are to be won here; if it be imagined, especially, that any or all these things will shake any purpose of mine, I can tell the honorable member, once for all, that he is greatly mistaken, and that he is dealing with one of whose temper and character he has yet much to learn. Sir, I shall not allow myself, on this occasion—I hope on no occasion—to be betrayed into any loss of temper; but if provoked, as I trust I never shall allow myself to be, into crimination and recrimination, the honorable member may, perhaps, find that in that contest there will be blows to take as well as blows to give; that others can state comparisons as significant, at least, as his own; and that his impunity may, perhaps, demand of him whatever powers of taunt and sarcasm he may possess. I commend him to a prudent husbandry of his resources.

But, sir, the coalition! The coalition! Aye, “the murdered coalition!” The gentleman asks if I were led or frighted into this debate by the spectre of the coalition. “Was it the ghost of the murdered coalition,” he exclaims, “which haunted the member from Massachusetts, and which, like the ghost of Banquo, would never down?” “The murdered coalition!” Sir, this charge of a coalition, in reference to the late administration, is not original with the honorable member. It did not spring up in the Senate. Whether as a fact, as an argument, or as an embellishment, it is all borrowed. He adopts it, indeed, from a very low origin, and a still lower present condition. It is one of the thousand calumnies with which the press teemed during an excited political canvass. It was a charge of which there was not only no proof or probability, but which was, in itself, wholly impossible to be true. No man of common information ever believed a syllable of it. Yet it was of that class of falsehoods which, by continued repetition through all the organs of detraction and abuse, are capable of misleading those who are already far misled, and of further fanning passion already kindling into flame. Doubtless it served its day, and, in a greater or less degree, the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very castoff slough of a polluted and shameless press. Incapable of further mischief, it lies in the sewer lifeless and despised. It is not now, sir, in the power of the honorable member to give it dignity or decency, by attempting to elevate it, and to introduce it into the Senate. He cannot change it from what it is—an object of general disgust and scorn. On the contrary, the contact, if he choose to touch it, is more likely to drag him down, down, to the place where it lies itself.

But, sir, the honorable member was not, for other reasons, entirely happy in his allusion to the story of Banquo’s murder and Banquo’s ghost. It was not, I think, the friends, but the enemies of the murdered Banquo, at whose bidding his spirit would not down. The honorable gentleman is fresh in his reading of the English classics, and can put me right if I am wrong; but according to my poor recollection, it was at those who had begun with caresses, and ended with foul and treacherous murder, that the gory locks were shaken. The ghost of Banquo, like that of Hamlet, was an honest ghost. It disturbed no innocent man. It knew where its appearance would strike terror, and who would cry out. A ghost! It made itself visible in the right quarter, and compelled the guilty, and the conscience-smitten, and none others, to start, with,

“Prithee, see there! behold!—look! lo! If I stand here, I saw him!”

Their eyeballs were seared—was it not so, sir?—who had thought to shield themselves by concealing their own hand and laying the imputation of the crime on a low and hireling agency in wickedness; who had vainly attempted to stifle the workings of their own coward consciences, by circulating, through white lips and chattering teeth, “Thou canst not say I did it!” I have misread the great poet, if it was those who had no way partaken in the deed of the death, who either found that they were, or feared that they should be, pushed from their stools by the ghost of the slain, or who cried out to a spectre created by their own fears, and their own remorse, “Avaunt! and quit our sight!”

There is another particular, sir, in which the honorable member’s quick perception of resemblances might, I should think, have seen something in the story of Banquo, making it not altogether a subject of the most pleasant contemplation. Those who murdered Banquo, what did they win by it? Substantial good? Permanent power? Or disappointment, rather, and sore mortification—dust and ashes—the common fate of vaulting ambition overleaping itself? Did not even-handed justice, ere long, commend the poisoned chalice to their own lips? Did they not soon find that for another they had “filed their mind?” that their ambition though apparently for the moment successful, had but put a barren sceptre in their grasp? Aye, sir,—

“A barren sceptre in their gripe, Thence to be wrenched by an unlineal hand, No son of theirs succeeding.”

Sir, I need pursue the allusion no further. I leave the honorable gentleman to run it out at his leisure, and to derive from it all the gratification it is calculated to administer. If he finds himself pleased with the associations, and prepared to be quite satisfied, though the parallel should be entirely completed, I had almost said I am satisfied also—but that I shall think of. Yes, sir, I will think of that.

In the course of my observations the other day, Mr. President, I paid a passing tribute of respect to a very worthy man, Mr. Dane, of Massachusetts. It so happened that he drew the ordinance of 1787 for the government of the Northwestern Territory. A man of so much ability, and so little pretence; of so great a capacity to do good, and so unmixed a disposition to do it for its own sake; a gentleman who acted an important part, forty years ago, in a measure the influence of which is still deeply felt in the very matter which was the subject of debate, might, I thought, receive from me a commendatory recognition.

But the honorable gentleman was inclined to be facetious on the subject. He was rather disposed to make it a matter of ridicule that I had introduced into the debate the name of one Nathan Dane, of whom he assures us he had never before heard. Sir, if the honorable member had never before heard of Mr. Dane, I am sorry for it. It shows him less acquainted with the public men of the country than I had supposed. Let me tell him, however, that a sneer from him at the mention of the name of Mr. Dane is in bad taste. It may well be a high mark of ambition, sir, either with the honorable gentleman or myself, to accomplish as much to make our names known to advantage, and remembered with gratitude, as Mr. Dane has accomplished. But the truth is, sir, I suspect that Mr. Dane lives a little too far north. He is of Massachusetts, and too near the north star to be reached by the honorable gentleman’s telescope. If his sphere had happened to range south of Mason and Dixon’s line, he might, probably, have come within the scope of his vision!

I spoke, sir, of the ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in all future times northwest of the Ohio, as a measure of great wisdom and foresight, and one which had been attended with highly beneficial and permanent consequences. I suppose that on this point no two gentlemen in the Senate could entertain different opinions. But the simple expression of this sentiment has led the gentleman, not only into a labored defence of slavery in the abstract, and on principle, but also into a warm accusation against me, as having attacked the system of slavery now existing in the Southern States. For all this there was not the slightest foundation in anything said or intimated by me. I did not utter a single word which any ingenuity could torture into an attack on the slavery of the South. I said only that it was highly wise and useful in legislating for the northwestern country, while it was yet a wilderness, to prohibit the introduction of slaves; and added, that I presumed, in the neighboring state of Kentucky, there was no reflecting and intelligent gentleman who would doubt that, if the same prohibition had been extended, at the same early period, over that commonwealth, her strength and population would, at this day, have been far greater than they are. If these opinions be thought doubtful, they are, nevertheless, I trust, neither extraordinary nor disrespectful. They attack nobody and menace nobody. And yet, sir, the gentleman’s optics have discovered, even in the mere expression of this sentiment, what he calls the very spirit of the Missouri question! He represents me as making an attack on the whole south, and manifesting a spirit which would interfere with and disturb their domestic condition. Sir, this injustice no otherwise surprises me than as it is done here, and done without the slightest pretence of ground for it. I say it only surprises me as being done here; for I know full well that it is and has been the settled policy of some persons in the south, for years, to represent the people of the north as disposed to interfere with them in their own exclusive and peculiar concerns. This is a delicate and sensitive point in southern feeling; and of late years it has always been touched, and generally with effect, whenever the object has been to unite the whole south against northern men or northern measures. This feeling, always carefully kept alive, and maintained at too intense a heat to admit discrimination or reflection, is a lever of great power in our political machine. It moves vast bodies, and gives to them one and the same direction. But the feeling is without adequate cause, and the suspicion which exists wholly groundless. There is not, and never has been, a disposition in the north to interfere with these interests of the south. Such interference has never been supposed to be within the power of the government, nor has it been in any way attempted. It has always been regarded as a matter of domestic policy, left with the states themselves, and with which the federal government had nothing to do. Certainly, sir, I am, and ever had been, of that opinion. The gentleman, indeed, argues that slavery in the abstract is no evil. Most assuredly I need not say I differ with him altogether and most widely on that point. I regard domestic slavery as one of the greatest evils, both moral and political. But, though it be a malady, and whether it be curable, and if so, by what means; or, on the other hand, whether it be the culnus immedicabile of the social system, I leave it to those whose right and duty it is to inquire and to decide. And this I believe, sir, is, and uniformly has been, the sentiment of the north. Let us look a little at the history of this matter.

When the present constitution was submitted for the ratification of the people, there were those who imagined that the powers of the government which it proposed to establish might, perhaps, in some possible mode, be exerted in measures tending to the abolition of slavery. This suggestion would, of course, attract much attention in the southern conventions. In that of Virginia, Governor Randolph said:—

“I hope there is none here, who, considering the subject in the calm light of philosophy, will make an objection dishonorable to Virginia—that, at the moment they are securing the rights of their citizens, an objection is started, that there is a spark of hope that those unfortunate men now held in bondage may, by the operation of the general government, be made free.”

At the very first Congress, petitions on the subject were presented, if I mistake not, from different states. The Pennsylvania Society for promoting the Abolition of Slavery, took a lead, and laid before Congress a memorial, praying Congress to promote the abolition by such powers as it possessed. This memorial was referred, in the House of Representatives, to a select committee, consisting of Mr. Foster, of New Hampshire, Mr. Gerry, of Massachusetts, Mr. Huntington, of Connecticut, Mr. Lawrence, of New York, Mr. Dickinson, of New Jersey, Mr. Hartley, of Pennsylvania, and Mr. Parker, of Virginia; all of them, sir, as you will observe, northern men, but the last. This committee made a report, which was committed to a committee of the whole house, and there considered and discussed on several days; and being amended, although in no material respect, it was made to express three distinct propositions on the subjects of slavery and the slave trade. First, in the words of the constitution, that Congress could not, prior to the year 1808, prohibit the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states then existing should think proper to admit. Second, that Congress had authority to restrain the citizens of the United States from carrying on the African slave trade for the purpose of supplying foreign countries. On this proposition, our early laws against those who engage in that traffic are founded. The third proposition, and that which bears on the present question, was expressed in the following terms:—

“Resolved, That Congress have no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or of the treatment of them in any of the states; it remaining with the several states alone to provide rules and regulations therein, which humanity and true policy may require.”

This resolution received the sanction of the House of Representatives so early as March, 1790. And, now, sir, the honorable member will allow me to remind him, that not only were the select committee who reported the resolution, with a single exception, all northern men, but also that of the members then composing the House of Representatives, a large majority, I believe nearly two-thirds, were northern men also.

The house agreed to insert these resolutions in its journal; and, from that day to this, it has never been maintained or contended that Congress had any authority to regulate or interfere with the condition of slaves in the several states. No northern gentleman, to my knowledge, has moved any such question in either house of Congress.

The fears of the south, whatever fears they might have entertained, were allayed and quieted by this early decision; and so remained, till they were excited afresh, without cause, but for collateral and indirect purposes. When it became necessary, or was thought so, by some political persons, to find an unvarying ground for the exclusion of northern men from confidence and from lead in the affairs of the republic, then, and not till then, the cry was raised, and the feeling industriously excited, that the influence of northern men in the public councils would endanger the relation of master and slave. For myself, I claim no other merit, than that this gross and enormous injustice towards the whole north has not wrought upon me to change my opinions, or my political conduct. I hope I am above violating my principles, even under the smart of injury and false imputations. Unjust suspicions and undeserved reproach, whatever pain I may experience from them, will not induce me, I trust, nevertheless, to overstep the limits of constitutional duty, or to encroach on the rights of others. The domestic slavery of the south I leave where I find it—in the hands of their own governments. It is their affair, not mine. Nor do I complain of the peculiar effect which the magnitude of that population has had in the distribution of power under this federal government. We know, sir, that the representation of the states in the other house is not equal. We know that great advantage, in that respect, is enjoyed by the slaveholding states; and we know, too, that the intended equivalent for that advantage—that is to say, the imposition of direct taxes in the same ratio—has become merely nominal; the habit of the government being almost invariably to collect its revenues from other sources, and in other modes. Nevertheless, I do not complain; nor would I countenance any movement to alter this arrangement of representation. It is the original bargain, the compact—let it stand; let the advantage of it be fully enjoyed. The Union itself is too full of benefit to be hazarded in propositions for changing its original basis. I go for the constitution as it is, and for the Union as it is. But I am resolved not to submit, in silence, to accusations, either against myself individually, or against the north, wholly unfounded and unjust—accusations which impute to us a disposition to evade the constitutional compact, and to extend the power of the government over the internal laws and domestic condition of the states. All such accusations, wherever and whenever made, all insinuations of the existence of any such purposes, I know and feel to be groundless and injurious. And we must confide in southern gentlemen themselves; we must trust to those whose integrity of heart and magnanimity of feeling will lead them to a desire to maintain and disseminate truth, and who possess the means of its diffusion with the southern public; we must leave it to them to disabuse that public of its prejudices. But, in the mean time, for my own part, I shall continue to act justly, whether those towards whom justice is exercised receive it with candor or with contumely.

Having had occasion to recur to the ordinance of 1787, in order to defend myself against the inferences which the honorable member has chosen to draw from my former observations on that subject, I am not willing now entirely to take leave of it without another remark. It need hardly be said, that that paper expresses just sentiments on the great subject of civil and religious liberty. Such sentiments were common, and abound in all our state papers of that day. But this ordinance did that which was not so common, and which is not, even now, universal; that is, it set forth and declared, as a high and binding duty of government itself, to encourage schools and advance the means of education; on the plain reason that religion, morality and knowledge are necessary to good government, and to the happiness of mankind. One observation further. The important provision incorporated into the constitution of the United States, and several of those of the states, and recently, as we have seen, adopted into the reformed constitution of Virginia, restraining legislative power, in questions of private right, and from impairing the obligation of contracts, is first introduced and established, as far as I am informed, as matter of express written constitutional law, in this ordinance of 1787. And I must add, also, in regard to the author of the ordinance, who has not had the happiness to attract the gentleman’s notice heretofore, nor to avoid his sarcasm now, that he was chairman of that select committee of the old Congress, whose report first expressed the strong sense of that body, that the old confederation was not adequate to the exigencies of the country, and recommending to the states to send delegates to the convention which formed the present constitution.

An attempt has been made to transfer from the north to the south the honor of this exclusion of slavery from the Northwestern territory. The journal, without argument or comment, refutes such attempt. The session of Virginia was made March, 1784. On the 19th of April following, a committee, consisting of Messrs. Jefferson, Chase and Howell, reported a plan for a temporary government of the territory, in which was this article: “That after the year 1800, there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been convicted.” Mr. Speight, of North Carolina, moved to strike out this paragraph. The question was put according to the form then practiced: “Shall, these words stand, as part of the plan?” &c. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania—seven states—voted in the affirmative; Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, in the negative. North Carolina was divided. As the consent of nine states was necessary, the words could not stand, and were struck out accordingly. Mr. Jefferson voted for the clause, but was overruled by his colleagues.

In March of the next year (1785) Mr. King, of Massachusetts, seconded by Mr. Ellery, of Rhode Island, proposed the formerly rejected article, with this addition: “And that this regulation shall be an article of compact, and remain a fundamental principle of the constitution between the thirteen original states and each of the states described in the resolve,” &c. On this clause, which provided the adequate and thorough security, the eight Northern States, at that time, voted affirmatively, and the four Southern States negatively. The votes of nine states were not yet obtained, and thus the provision was again rejected by the Southern States. The perseverance of the north held out, and two years afterwards the object was attained. It is no derogation from the credit, whatever that may be, of drawing the ordinance, that its principles had before been prepared and discussed, in the form of resolutions. If one should reason in that way, what would become of the distinguished honor of the author of the declaration of Independence? There is not a sentiment in that paper which had not been voted and resolved in the assemblies, and other popular bodies in the country, over and over again.

But the honorable member has now found out that this gentleman, Mr. Dane, was a member of the Hartford Convention. However uninformed the honorable member may be of characters and occurrences at the north, it would seem that he has at his elbows, on this occasion, some highminded and lofty spirit, some magnanimous and true-hearted monitor, possessing the means of local knowledge, and ready to supply the honorable member with every thing, down even to forgotten and moth-eaten twopenny pamphlets, which may be used to the disadvantage of his own country. But, as to the Hartford Convention, sir, allow me to say that the proceedings of that body seem now to be less read and studied in New England than farther south. They appear to be looked to, not in New England, but elsewhere, for the purpose of seeing how far they may serve as a precedent. But they will not answer the purpose—they are quite too tame. The latitude in which they originated was too cold. Other conventions, of more recent existence, have gone a whole bar’s length beyond it. The learned doctors of Colleton and Abbeville have pushed their commentaries on the Hartford collect so far that the original text writers are thrown entirely into the shade. I have nothing to do, sir, with the Hartford Convention. Its journal, which the gentleman has quoted, I never read. So far as the honorable member may discover in its proceedings a spirit in any degree resembling that which was avowed and justified in those other conventions to which I have alluded, or so far as those proceedings can be shown to be disloyal to the constitution, or tending to disunion, so far I shall be as ready as any one to bestow on them reprehension and censure.

Having dwelt long on this convention, and other occurrences of that day, in the hope, probably, (which will not be gratified,) that I should leave the course of this debate to follow him at length in those excursions, the honorable member returned, and attempted another object. He referred to a speech of mine in the other house, the same which I had occasion to allude to myself the other day; and has quoted a passage or two from it, with a bold though uneasy and laboring air of confidence, as if he had detected in me an inconsistency. Judging from the gentleman’s manner, a stranger to the course of the debate, and to the point in discussion, would have imagined, from so triumphant a tone, that the honorable member was about to overwhelm me with a manifest contradiction. Any one who heard him, and who had not heard what I had, in fact, previously said, must have thought me routed and discomfited, as the gentleman had promised. Sir, a breath blows all this triumph away. There is not the slightest difference in the sentiments of my remarks on the two occasions. What I said here on Wednesday is in exact accordance with the opinions expressed by me in the other house in 1825. Though the gentleman had the metaphysics of Hudibras—though he were able

“to sever and divide A hair ’twixt north and north west side,”

he could not yet insert his metaphysical scissors between the fair reading of my remarks in 1825 and what I said here last week. There is not only no contradiction, no difference, but, in truth, too exact a similarity, both in thought and language, to be entirely in just taste. I had myself quoted the same speech; had recurred to it, and spoke with it open before me; and much of what I said was little more than a repetition from it. In order to make finishing work with this alleged contradiction, permit me to recur to the origin of this debate, and review its course. This seems expedient, and may be done as well now as at any time.

Well, then, its history is this: the honorable member from Connecticut moved a resolution, which constituted the first branch of that which is now before us; that is to say, a resolution instructing the committee on public lands to inquire into the expediency of limiting, for a certain period, the sales of public lands to such as have heretofore been offered for sale; and whether sundry offices, connected with the sales of the lands, might not be abolished without detriment to the public service.

In the progress of the discussion which arose on this resolution, an honorable member from New Hampshire moved to amend the resolution, so as entirely to reverse its object; that is to strike it all out, and insert a direction to the committee to inquire into the expediency of adopting measures to hasten the sales, and extend more rapidly the surveys of the lands.

The honorable member from Maine (Mr. Sprague) suggested that both these propositions might well enough go, for consideration, to the committee; and in this state of the question, the member from South Carolina addressed the Senate in his first speech. He rose, he said, to give his own free thoughts on the public lands. I saw him rise, with pleasure, and listened with expectation, though before he concluded I was filled with surprise. Certainly, I was never more surprised than to find him following up, to the extent he did, the sentiments and opinions which the gentleman from Missouri had put forth, and which it is known he has long entertained.

I need not repeat, at large, the general topics of the honorable gentleman’s speech. When he said, yesterday, that he did not attack the Eastern States, he certainly must have forgotten not only particular remarks, but the whole drift and tenor of his speech; unless he means by not attacking, that he did not commence hostilities, but that another had preceded him in the attack. He, in the first place, disapproved of the whole course of the government for forty years, in regard to its dispositions of the public land; and then, turning northward and eastward, and fancying he had found a cause for alleged narrowness and niggardliness in the “accursed policy” of the tariff, to which he represented the people of New England as wedded, he went on, for a full hour, with remarks, the whole scope of which was to exhibit the results of this policy, in feelings and in measures unfavorable to the west. I thought his opinions unfounded and erroneous, as to the general course of the government, and ventured to reply to them.

The gentleman had remarked on the analogy of other cases, and quoted the conduct of European governments towards their own subjects, settling on this continent, as in point, to show that we had been harsh and rigid in selling when we should have given the public lands to settlers. I thought the honorable member had suffered his judgment to be betrayed by a false analogy; that he was struck with an appearance of resemblance where there was no real similitude. I think so still. The first settlers of North America were enterprising spirits, engaging in private adventure, or fleeing from tyranny at home. When arrived here, they were forgotten by the mother country, or remembered only to be oppressed. Carried away again by the appearance of analogy, or struck with the eloquence of the passage, the honorable member yesterday observed that the conduct of government towards the western emigrants, or my representation of it, brought to his mind a celebrated speech in the British Parliament. It was, sir, the speech of Colonel Barre. On the question of the stamp act, or tea tax, I forget which, Colonel Barre had heard a member on the treasury bench argue, that the people of the United States, being British colonists, planted by the maternal care, nourished by the indulgence, and protected by the arms of England, would not grudge their mite to relieve the mother country from the heavy burden under which she groaned. The language of Colonel Barre, in reply to this, was, “They planted by your care? Your oppression planted them in America. They fled from your tyranny, and grew by your neglect of them. So soon as you began to care for them, you showed your care by sending persons to spy out their liberties, misrepresent their character, prey upon them, and eat out their substance.”

And does this honorable gentleman mean to maintain that language like this is applicable to the conduct of the government of the United States towards the western emigrants, or to any representation given by me of that conduct? Were the settlers in the west driven thither by our oppression? Have they flourished only by our neglect of them? Has the government done nothing but prey upon them, and eat out their substance? Sir, this fervid eloquence of the British speaker, just when and where it was uttered, and fit to remain an exercise for the schools, is not a little out of place, when it was brought thence to be applied here, to the conduct of our own country towards her own citizens. From America to England it may be true; from Americans to their own government it would be strange language. Let us leave it to be recited and declaimed by our boys against a foreign nation; not introduce it here, to recite and declaim ourselves against our own.

But I come to the point of the alleged contradiction. In my remarks on Wednesday, I contended that we could not give away gratuitously all the public lands; that we held them in trust; that the government had solemnly pledged itself to dispose of them as a common fund for the common benefit, and to sell and settle them as its discretion should dictate. Now, sir, what contradiction does the gentleman find to this sentiment in the speech of 1825? He quotes me as having then said, that we ought not to hug these lands as a very great treasure. Very well, sir; supposing me to be accurately reported in that expression, what is the contradiction? I have not now said, that we should hug these lands as a favorite source of pecuniary income. No such thing. It is not my view. What I have said, and what I do say, is, that they are a common fund—to be disposed of for the common benefit—to be sold at low prices, for the accommodation of settlers, keeping the object of settling the lands as much in view as that of raising money from them. This I say now, and this I have always said. Is this hugging them as a favorite treasure? Is there no difference between hugging and hoarding this fund, on the one hand, as a great treasure, and on the other of disposing of it at low prices, placing the proceeds in the general treasury of the Union? My opinion is, that as much is to be made of the land, as fair and reasonably may be, selling it all the while at such rates as to give the fullest effect to settlement. This is not giving it all away to the states, as the gentleman would propose, nor is it hugging the fund closely and tenaciously, as a favorite treasure; but it is, in my judgment, a just and wise policy, perfectly according with all the various duties which rest on government. So much for my contradiction. And what is it? Where is the ground of the gentleman’s triumph? What inconsistency, in word or doctrine, has he been able to detect? Sir, if this be a sample of that discomfiture with which the honorable gentleman threatened me, commend me to the word discomfiture for the rest of my life.

But, after all, this is not the point of the debate; and I must bring the gentleman back to that which is the point.

The real question between me and him is, Where has the doctrine been advanced, at the south or the east, that the population of the west should be retarded, or, at least, need not be hastened, on account of its effect to drain off the people from the Atlantic States? Is this doctrine, as has been alleged, of eastern origin? That is the question. Has the gentleman found anything by which he can make good his accusation? I submit to the Senate, that he has entirely failed; and as far as this debate has shown, the only person who has advanced such sentiments is a gentleman from South Carolina, and a friend to the honorable member himself. This honorable gentleman has given no answer to this; there is none which can be given. This simple fact, while it requires no comment to enforce it, defies all argument to refute it. I could refer to the speeches of another southern gentleman, in years before, of the same general character, and to the same effect, as that which has been quoted; but I will not consume the time of the Senate by the reading of them.

So then, sir, New England is guiltless of the policy of retarding western population, and of all envy and jealousy of the growth of the new states. Whatever there be of that policy in the country, no part of it is hers. If it has a local habitation, the honorable member has probably seen, by this time, where he is to look for it; and if it now has received a name, he himself has christened it.

We approach, at length, sir, to a more important part of the honorable gentleman’s observations. Since it does not accord with my views of justice and policy, to vote away the public lands altogether, as mere matter of gratuity, I am asked, by the honorable gentleman, on what ground it is that I consent to give them away in particular instances. How, he inquires, do I reconcile with these professed sentiments my support of measures appropriating portions of the lands to particular roads, particular canals, particular rivers, and particular institutions of education in the west? This leads, sir, to the real and wide difference in political opinions between the honorable gentleman and myself. On my part, I look upon all these objects as connected with the common good, fairly embraced in its objects and its terms; he, on the contrary, deems them all, if good at all, only local good. This is our difference. The interrogatory which he proceeded to put, at once explains this difference. “What interest,” asks he, “has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio?” Sir, this very question is full of significance. It develops the gentleman’s whole political system; and its answer expounds mine. Here we differ toto cœlo. I look upon a road over the Alleghany, a canal round the falls of the Ohio, or a canal or railway from the Atlantic to the western waters, as being objects large and extensive enough to be fairly said to be for the common benefit. The gentleman thinks otherwise, and this is the key to open his construction of the powers of the government. He may well ask, upon his system, What interest has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio? On that system, it is true, she has no interest. On that system, Ohio and Carolina are different governments and different countries, connected here, it is true, by some slight and ill-defined bond of union, but in all main respects separate and diverse. On that system, Carolina has no more interest in a canal in Ohio than in Mexico. The gentleman, therefore, only follows out his own principles; he does no more than arrive at the natural conclusions of his own doctrines; he only announces the true results of that creed which he has adopted himself, and would persuade others to adopt, when he thus declares that South Carolina has no interest in a public work in Ohio. Sir, we narrow-minded people of New England do not reason thus. Our notion of things is entirely different. We look upon the states not as separated, but as united. We love to dwell on that Union, and on the mutual happiness which it has so much promoted, and the common renown which it has so greatly contributed to acquire. In our contemplation, Carolina and Ohio are parts of the same country—states united under the same general government, having interests common, associated, intermingled. In whatever is within the proper sphere of the constitutional power of this government, we look upon the states as one. We do not impose geographical limits to our patriotic feeling or regard; we do not follow rivers, and mountains, and lines of latitude, to find boundaries beyond which public improvements do not benefit us. We, who come here as agents and representatives of those narrow-minded and selfish men of New England, consider ourselves as bound to regard, with equal eye, the good of the whole, in whatever is within our power of legislation. Sir, if a railroad or canal, beginning in South Carolina, appeared to me to be of national importance and national magnitude, believing as I do that the power of government extends to the encouragement of works of that description, if I were to stand up here and ask, “What interest has Massachusetts in a railroad in South Carolina?” I should not be willing to face my constituents. These same narrow-minded men would tell me that they had sent me to act for the whole country, and that one who possessed too little comprehension, either of intellect or feeling—one who was not large enough, in mind and heart, to embrace the whole—was not fit to be intrusted with the interest of any part. Sir, I do not desire to enlarge the powers of government by unjustifiable construction, nor to exercise any not within a fair interpretation. But when it is believed that a power does exist, then it is, in my judgment, to be exercised for the general benefit of the whole: so far as respects the exercise of such a power, the states are one. It was the very great object of the constitution to create unity of interests to the extent of the powers of the general government. In war and peace we are one; in commerce one; because the authority of the general government reaches to war and peace, and to the regulation of commerce. I have never seen any more difficulty in erecting lighthouses on the lakes than on the ocean; in improving the harbors of inland seas, than if they were within the ebb and flow of the tide; or of removing obstructions in the vast streams of the west, more than in any work to facilitate commerce on the Atlantic coast. If there be power for one, there is power also for the other; and they are all and equally for the country.

There are other objects, apparently more local, or the benefit of which is less general, towards which, nevertheless, I have concurred with others to give aid by donations of land. It is proposed to construct a road in or through one of the new states in which the government possesses large quantities of land. Have the United States no right, as a great and untaxed proprietor—are they under no obligation—to contribute to an object thus calculated to promote the common good of all the proprietors, themselves included? And even with respect to education, which is the extreme case, let the question be considered. In the first place, as we have seen, it was made matter of compact with these states that they should do their part to promote education. In the next place, our whole system of land laws proceeds on the idea that education is for the common good; because, in every division, a certain portion is uniformly reserved and appropriated for the use of schools. And, finally have not these new states singularly strong claims, founded on the ground already stated, that the government is a great untaxed proprietor in the ownership of the soil? It is a consideration of great importance that probably there is in no part of the country, or of the world, so great a call for the means of education as in those new states, owing to the vast number of persons within those ages in which education and instruction are usually received, if received at all. This is the natural consequence of recency of settlement and rapid increase. The census of these states shows how great a proportion of the whole population occupies the classes between infancy and childhood. These are the wide fields, and here is the deep and quick soil for the seeds of knowledge and virtue; and this is the favored season, the spring time for sowing them. Let them be disseminated without stint. Let them be scattered with a bountiful broadcast. Whatever the government can fairly do towards these objects, in my opinion, ought to be done.

These, sir, are the grounds, succinctly stated, on which my vote for grants of lands for particular objects rest, while I maintain, at the same time, that it is all a common fund, for the common benefit. And reasons like these, I presume, have influenced the votes of other gentlemen from New England. Those who have a different view of the powers of the government, of course, come to different conclusions on these as on other questions. I observed, when speaking on this subject before, that if we looked to any measure, whether for a road, a canal, or any thing else intended for the improvement of the west, it would be found, that if the New England ayes were struck out of the list of votes, the southern noes would always have rejected the measure. The truth of this has not been denied, and cannot be denied. In stating this, I thought it just to ascribe it to the constitutional scruples of the south, rather than to any other less favorable or less charitable cause. But no sooner had I done this, than the honorable gentleman asks if I reproach him and his friends with their constitutional scruples. Sir, I reproach nobody. I stated a fact, and gave the most respectful reason for it that occurred to me. The gentleman cannot deny the fact—he may, if he choose, disclaim the reason. It is not long since I had occasion, in presenting a petition from his own state, to account for its being intrusted to my hands by saying, that the constitutional opinions of the gentleman and his worthy colleague prevented them from supporting it. Sir, did I state this as a matter of reproach? Far from it. Did I attempt to find any other cause than an honest one for these scruples? Sir, I did not. It did not become me to doubt, nor to insinuate that the gentleman had either changed his sentiments, or that he had made up a set of constitutional opinions, accommodated to any particular combination of political occurrences. Had I done so, I should have felt, that while I was entitled to little respect in thus questioning other people’s motives, I justified the whole world in suspecting my own.

But how has the gentleman returned this respect for others’ opinions? His own candor and justice, how have they been exhibited towards the motives of others, while he has been at so much pains to maintain—what nobody has disputed—the purity of his own? Why, sir, he has asked when, and how, and why New England votes were found going for measures favorable to the west; he has demanded to be informed whether all this did not begin in 1825, and while the election of President was still pending. Sir, to these questions retort would be justified; and it is both cogent and at hand. Nevertheless, I will answer the inquiry not by retort, but by facts. I will tell the gentleman when, and how, and why New England has supported measures favorable to the west. I have already referred to the early history of the government—to the first acquisition of the lands—to the original laws for disposing of them and for governing the territories where they lie; and have shown the influence of New England men and New England principles in all these leading measures. I should not be pardoned were I to go over that ground again. Coming to more recent times, and to measures of a less general character, I have endeavored to prove that every thing of this kind designed for western improvement has depended on the votes of New England. All this is true beyond the power of contradiction.

And now, sir, there are two measures to which I will refer, not so ancient as to belong to the early history of the public lands, and not so recent as to be on this side of the period when the gentleman charitably imagines a new direction may have been given to New England feeling and New England votes. These measures, and the New England votes in support of them, may be taken as samples and specimens of all the rest. In 1820, (observe, Mr. President, in 1820,) the people of the west besought Congress for a reduction in the price of lands. In favor of that reduction, New England, with a delegation of forty members in the other house, gave thirty-three votes, and one only against it. The four Southern States, with fifty members, gave thirty-two votes for it, and seven against it. Again, in 1821, (observe again, sir, the time,) the law passed for the relief of the purchasers of the public lands. This was a measure of vital importance to the west, and more especially to the southwest. It authorized the relinquishment of contracts for lands, which had been entered into at high prices, and a reduction, in other cases, of not less than 37½ per cent. on the purchase money. Many millions of dollars, six or seven I believe at least,—probably much more,—were relinquished by this law. On this bill New England, with her forty members, gave more affirmative votes than the four Southern States with their fifty-two or three members. These two are far the most important measures respecting the public lands which have been adopted within the last twenty years. They took place in 1820 and 1821. That is the time when. And as to the manner how, the gentleman already sees that it was by voting, in solid column, for the required relief; and lastly, as to the cause why, I tell the gentleman, it was because the members from New England thought the measures just and salutary; because they entertained towards the west neither envy, hatred, nor malice; because they deemed it becoming them, as just and enlightened public men, to meet the exigency which had arisen in the west with the appropriate measure of relief; because they felt it due to their own characters of their New England predecessors in this government, to act towards the new states in the spirit of a liberal, patronizing, magnanimous policy. So much, sir, for the cause why; and I hope that by this time, sir, the honorable gentleman is satisfied; if not, I do not know when, or how, or why, he ever will be.

Having recurred to these two important measures, in answer to the gentleman’s inquiries, I must now beg permission to go back to a period still something earlier, for the purpose still further of showing how much, or rather how little reason there is for the gentleman’s insinuation that political hopes, or fears, or party associations, were the grounds of these New England votes. And after what has been said, I hope it may be forgiven me if I allude to some political opinions and votes of my own, of very little public importance, certainly, but which, from the time at which they were given and expressed, may pass for good witnesses on this occasion.

This government, Mr. President, from its origin to the peace of 1815, had been too much engrossed with various other important concerns to be able to turn its thoughts inward, and look to the development of its vast internal resources. In the early part of President Washington’s administration, it was fully occupied with organizing the government, providing for the public debt, defending the frontiers, and maintaining domestic peace. Before the termination of that administration, the fires of the French revolution blazed forth, as from a new opened volcano, and the whole breadth of the ocean did not entirely secure us from its effects. The smoke and the cinders reached us, though not the burning lava. Difficult and agitating questions, embarrassing to government, and dividing public opinion, sprung out of the new state of our foreign relations, and were succeeded by others, and yet again by others, equally embarrassing, and equally exciting division and discord, through the long series of twenty years, till they finally issued in the war with England. Down to the close of that war, no distinct, marked and deliberate attention had been given, or could have been given, to the internal condition of the country, its capacities of improvement, or the constitutional power of the government, in regard to objects connected with such improvement.

The peace, Mr. President, brought about an entirely new and a most interesting state of things; it opened to us other prospects, and suggested other duties; we ourselves were changed, and the whole world was changed. The pacification of Europe, after June, 1815, assumed a firm and permanent aspect. The nations evidently manifested that they were disposed for peace: some agitation of the waves might be expected, even after the storm had subsided; but the tendency was, strongly and rapidly, towards settled repose.

It so happened, sir, that I was at that time a member of Congress, and, like others, naturally turned my attention to the contemplation of the newly-altered condition of the country, and of the world. It appeared plainly enough to me, as well as to wiser and more experienced men, that the policy of the government would necessarily take a start in a new direction, because new directions would necessarily be given to the pursuits and occupations of the people. We had pushed our commerce far and fast, under the advantage of a neutral flag. But there were now no longer flags, either neutral or belligerent. The harvest of neutrality had been great, but we had gathered it all. With the peace of Europe, it was obvious there would spring up, in her circle of nations, a revived and invigorated spirit of trade, and a new activity in all the business and objects of civilized life. Hereafter, our commercial gains were to be earned only by success in a close and intense competition. Other nations would produce for themselves, and carry for themselves, and manufacture for themselves, to the full extent of their abilities. The crops of our plains would no longer sustain European armies, nor our ships longer supply those whom war had rendered unable to supply themselves. It was obvious that under these circumstances, the country would begin to survey itself, and to estimate its own capacity of improvement. And this improvement, how was it to be accomplished, and who was to accomplish it?

We were ten or twelve millions of people, spread over almost half a world. We were twenty-four states, some stretching along the same seaboard, some along the same line of inland frontier, and others on opposite banks of the same vast rivers. Two considerations at once presented themselves, in looking at this state of things, with great force. One was that that great branch of improvement, which consisted in furnishing new facilities of intercourse, necessarily ran into different states, in every leading instance, and would benefit the citizens of all such states. No one state therefore, in such cases, would assume the whole expense, nor was the co-operation of several states to be expected. Take the instance of the Delaware Breakwater. It will cost several millions of money. Would Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware have united to accomplish it at their joint expense? Certainly not, for the same reason. It could not be done, therefore, but by the general government. The same may be said of the large inland undertakings, except that, in them, government, instead of bearing the whole expense, co-operates with others to bear a part. The other consideration is, that the United States have the means. They enjoy the revenues derived from commerce, and the states have no abundant and easy sources of public income. The custom houses fill the general treasury, while the states have scanty resources, except by resort to heavy direct taxes.

Under this view of things, I thought it necessary to settle, at least for myself, some definite notions, with respect to the powers of government, in regard to internal affairs. It may not savor too much of self-commendation to remark, that, with this object, I considered the constitution, its judicial construction, its contemporaneous exposition, and the whole history of the legislation of Congress under it; and I arrived at the conclusion that government had power to accomplish sundry objects, or aid in their accomplishment, which are now commonly spoken of as INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS. That conclusion, sir, may have been right or it may have been wrong. I am not about to argue the grounds of it at large. I say only that it was adopted, and acted on, even so early as in 1816. Yes, Mr. President, I made up my opinion, and determined on my intended course of political conduct on these subjects, in the 14th Congress in 1816. And now, Mr. President, I have further to say, that I made up these opinions, and entered on this course of political conduct, Teucro duce. Yes, sir, I pursued, in all this, a South Carolina track. On the doctrines of internal improvement, South Carolina, as she was then represented in the other house, set forth, in 1816, under a fresh and leading breeze; and I was among the followers. But if my leader sees new lights, and turns a sharp corner, unless I see new lights also, I keep straight on in the same path. I repeat, that leading gentlemen from South Carolina were first and foremost in behalf of the doctrines of internal improvements, when those doctrines first came to be considered and acted upon in Congress. The debate on the bank question, on the tariff of 1816, and on the direct tax, will show who was who, and what was what, at that time. The tariff of 1816, one of the plain cases of oppression and usurpation, from which, if the government does not recede, individual states may justly secede from the government, is, sir, in truth, a South Carolina tariff, supported by South Carolina votes. But for those votes, it could not have passed in the form in which it did pass; whereas, if it had depended on Massachusetts votes, it would have been lost. Does not the honorable gentleman well know all this? There are certainly those who do full well know it all. I do not say this to reproach South Carolina; I only state the fact, and I think it will appear to be true, that among the earliest and boldest advocates of the tariff, as a measure of protection, and on the express ground of protection, were leading gentlemen of South Carolina in Congress. I did not then, and cannot now, understand their language in any other sense. While this tariff of 1816 was under discussion in the House of Representatives, an honorable gentleman from Georgia, now of this house, (Mr. Forsyth,) moved to reduce the proposed duty on cotton. He failed by four votes, South Carolina giving three votes (enough to have turned the scale) against his motion. The act, sir, then passed, and received on its passage the support of a majority of the representatives of South Carolina present and voting. This act is the first, in the order of those now denounced as plain usurpations. We see it daily in the list by the side of those of 1824 and 1828, as a case of manifest oppression, justifying disunion. I put it home to the honorable member from South Carolina, that his own state was not only “art and part” in this measure, but the causa causans. Without her aid, this seminal principle of mischief, this root of upas, could not have been planted. I have already said—and, it is true—that this act preceded on the ground of protection. It interfered directly with existing interests of great value and amount. It cut up the Calcutta cotton trade by the roots. But it passed, nevertheless, and it passed on the principle of protecting manufactures, on the principle against free trade, on the principle opposed to that which lets us alone.

Such, Mr. President, were the opinions of important and leading gentlemen of South Carolina, on the subject of internal improvement, in 1816. I went out of Congress the next year, and returning again in 1823, thought I found South Carolina where I had left her. I really supposed that all things remained as they were, and that the South Carolina doctrine of internal improvements would be defended by the same eloquent voices, and the same strong arms as formerly. In the lapse of these six years, it is true, political associations had assumed a new aspect and new divisions. A party had arisen in the south, hostile to the doctrine of internal improvements, and had vigorously attacked that doctrine. Anti-consolidation was the flag under which this party fought, and its supporters inveighed against internal improvements, much after the same manner in which the honorable gentleman has now inveighed against them, as part and parcel of the system of consolidation.

Whether this party arose in South Carolina herself, or in her neighborhood, is more than I know. I think the latter. However that may have been, there were those found in South Carolina ready to make war upon it, and who did make intrepid war upon it. Names being regarded as things, in such controversies, they bestowed on the anti-improvement gentlemen the appellation of radicals. Yes, sir, the name of radicals, as a term of distinction, applicable and applied to those who defended the liberal doctrines of internal improvements, originated, according to the best of my recollection, somewhere between North Carolina and Georgia. Well, sir, those mischievous radicals were to be put down, and the strong arm of South Carolina was stretched out to put them down. About this time, sir, I returned to Congress. The battle with the radicals had been fought, and our South Carolina champions of the doctrine of internal improvements had nobly maintained their ground, and were understood to have achieved a victory. They had driven back the enemy with discomfiture; a thing, by the way, sir, which is not always performed when it is promised. A gentleman, to whom I have already referred in this debate, had come into Congress, during my absence from it, from South Carolina, and had brought with him a high reputation for ability. He came from a school with which we had been acquainted, et noscitur a sociis. I hold in my hand, sir, a printed speech of this distinguished gentleman, (Mr. MCDUFFIE,) “ON INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS,” delivered about the period to which I now refer, and printed with a few introductory remarks upon consolidation; in which, sir, I think he quite consolidated the arguments of his opponents, the radicals, if to crush be to consolidate. I give you a short but substantive quotation from these remarks. He is speaking of a pamphlet, then recently published, entitled, “Consolidation;” and having alluded to the question of re-chartering the former Bank of the United States, he says: “Moreover, in the early history of parties, and when Mr. Crawford advocated the renewal of the old charter, it was considered a federal measure; which internal improvement never was, as this author erroneously states. This latter measure originated in the administration of Mr. Jefferson, with the appropriation for the Cumberland road; and was first proposed, as a system, by Mr. Calhoun, and carried through the House of Representatives by a large majority of the republicans, including almost every one of the leading men who carried us through the late war.”

So, then, internal improvement is not one of the federal heresies. One paragraph more, sir.

“The author in question, not content with denouncing as federalists Gen. Jackson, Mr. Adams, Mr. Calhoun, and the majority of the South Carolina delegation in Congress, modestly extends the denunciation to Mr. Monroe and the whole republican party. Here are his words. ‘During the administration of Mr. Monroe, much has passed which the republican party would be glad to approve, if they could!! But the principal feature, and that which has chiefly elicited these observations, is the renewal of the SYSTEM OF INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.’ Now, this measure was adopted by a vote of 115 to 86, of a republican Congress, and sanctioned by a republican president. Who, then, is this author, who assumes the high prerogative of denouncing, in the name of the republican party, the republican administration of the country—a denunciation including within its sweep Calhoun, Lowndes, and Cheves; men who will be regarded as the brightest ornaments of South Carolina, and the strongest pillars of the republican party, as long as the late war shall be remembered, and talents and patriotism shall be regarded as the proper objects of the admiration and gratitude of a free people!!”

Such are the opinions, sir, which were maintained by South Carolina gentlemen in the House of Representatives on the subject of internal improvements, when I took my seat there as a member from Massachusetts, in 1823. But this is not all; we had a bill before us, and passed it in that house, entitled, “An act to procure the necessary surveys, plans, and estimates upon the subject of roads and canals.” It authorized the president to cause surveys and estimates to be made of the routes of such roads and canals as he might deem of national importance in a commercial or military point of view, or for the transportation of the mail; and appropriated thirty thousand dollars out of the treasury to defray the expense. This act, though preliminary in its nature, covered the whole ground. It took for granted the complete power of internal improvement, as far as any of its advocates had ever contended for it. Having passed the other house, the bill came up to the Senate, and was here considered and debated in April, 1824. The honorable member from South Carolina was a member of the Senate at that time. While the bill was under consideration here, a motion was made to add the following proviso:—

“Provided, That nothing herein contained shall be construed to affirm or admit a power in Congress, on their own authority, to make roads or canals within any of the states of the Union.”

The yeas and nays were taken on this proviso, and the honorable member voted in the negative. The proviso failed.

A motion was then made to add this proviso, viz:—

“Provided, That the faith of the United States is hereby pledged, that no money shall ever be expended for roads or canals except it shall be among the several states, and in the same proportion as direct taxes are laid and assessed by the provisions of the constitution.”

The honorable member voted against this proviso also, and it failed.

The bill was then put on its passage, and the honorable member voted for it, and it passed, and became a law.

Now, it strikes me, sir, that there is no maintaining these votes but upon the power of internal improvement, in its broadest sense. In truth, these bills for surveys and estimates have always been considered as test questions. They show who is for and who against internal improvement. This law itself went the whole length, and assumed the full and complete power. The gentleman’s vote sustained that power, in every form in which the various propositions to amend presented it. He went for the entire and unrestrained authority, without consulting the states, and without agreeing to any proportionate distribution. And now, suffer me to remind you, Mr. President, that it is this very same power, thus sanctioned, in every form, by the gentleman’s own opinion, that is so plain and manifest a usurpation, that the state of South Carolina is supposed to be justified in refusing submission to any laws carrying the power into effect. Truly, sir, is not this a little too hard? May we not crave some mercy, under favor and protection of the gentleman’s own authority? Admitting that a road or a canal must be written down flat usurpation as ever was committed, may we find no mitigation in our respect for his place, and his vote, as one that knows the law?

The tariff which South Carolina had an efficient hand in establishing in 1816, and this asserted power of internal improvement—advanced by her in the same year, and, as we have seen, approved and sanctioned by her representatives in 1824,—these two measures are the great grounds on which she is now thought to be justified in breaking up the Union, if she sees fit to break it up.

I may now safely say, I think, that we have had the authority of leading and distinguished gentlemen from South Carolina in support of the doctrine of internal improvement. I repeat that, up to 1824, I, for one, followed South Carolina; but when that star in its ascension veered off in an unexpected direction, I relied on its light no longer. [Here the Vice-President said, Does the Chair understand the gentleman from Massachusetts to say that the person now occupying the chair of the Senate has changed his opinion on the subject of internal improvement?] From nothing ever said to me, sir, have I had reason to know of any change in the opinions of the person filling the chair of the Senate. If such change has taken place, I regret it; I speak generally of the state of South Carolina. Individuals we know there are who hold opinions favorable to the power. An application for its exercise in behalf of a public work in South Carolina itself is now pending, I believe, in the other house, presented by members from that state.

I have thus, sir, perhaps not without some tediousness of detail, shown that, if I am in error on the subject of internal improvements, how and in what company I fell into that error. If I am wrong, it is apparent who misled me.

I go to other remarks of the honorable member—and I have to complain of an entire misapprehension of what I said on the subject of the national debt—though I can hardly perceive how any one could misunderstand me. What I said was, not that I wished to put off the payment of the debt, but, on the contrary, that I had always voted for every measure for its reduction, as uniformly as the gentleman himself. He seems to claim the exclusive merit of a disposition to reduce the public charge; I do not allow it to him. As a debt, I was, I am, for paying it; because it is a charge on our finances, and on the industry of the country. But I observed that I thought I perceived a morbid fervor on that subject; an excessive anxiety to pay off the debt; not so much because it is a debt simply, as because, while it lasts, it furnishes one objection to disunion. It is a tie of common interest while it lasts. I did not impute such motive to the honorable member himself; but that there is such a feeling in existence I have not a particle of doubt. The most I said was, that if one effect of the debt was to strengthen our Union, that effect itself was not regretted by me, however much others might regret it. The gentleman has not seen how to reply to this otherwise than by supposing me to have advanced the doctrine that a national debt is a national blessing. Others, I must hope, will find less difficulty in understanding me. I distinctly and pointedly cautioned the honorable member not to understand me as expressing an opinion favorable to the continuance of the debt. I repeated this caution, and repeated it more than once—but it was thrown away.

On yet another point I was still more unaccountably misunderstood. The gentleman had harangued against “consolidation.” I told him, in reply, that there was one kind of consolidation to which I was attached, and that was, the CONSOLIDATION OF OUR UNION; and that this was precisely that consolidation to which I feared others were not attached; that such consolidation was the very end of the constitution—the leading object, as they had informed us themselves, which its framers had kept in view. I turned to their communication, and read their very words,—“the consolidation of the Union,”—and expressed my devotion to this sort of consolidation. I said in terms that I wished not, in the slightest degree, to augment the powers of this government; that my object was to preserve, not to enlarge; and that, by consolidating the Union, I understood no more than the strengthening of the Union and perpetuating it. Having been thus explicit; having thus read, from the printed book, the precise words which I adopted, as expressing my own sentiments, it passes comprehension, how any man could understand me as contending for an extension of the powers of the government, or for consolidation in the odious sense in which it means an accumulation, in the federal government, of the powers properly belonging to the states.

I repeat, sir, that, in adopting the sentiments of the framers of the constitution, I read their language audibly, and word for word; and I pointed out the distinction, just as fully as I have now done, between the consolidation of the Union and that other obnoxious consolidation which I disclaimed; and yet the honorable gentleman misunderstood me. The gentleman had said that he wished for no fixed revenue—not a shilling. If, by a word, he could convert the Capitol into gold, he would not do it. Why all this fear of revenue? Why, sir, because, as the gentleman told us, it tends to consolidation. Now, this can mean neither more or less than that a common revenue is a common interest, and that all common interests tend to hold the union of the states together. I confess I like that tendency; if the gentleman dislikes it, he is right in deprecating a shilling’s fixed revenue. So much, sir, for consolidation.

As well as I recollect the course of his remarks, the honorable gentleman next recurred to the subject of the tariff. He did not doubt the word must be of unpleasant sound to me, and proceeded, with an effort neither new nor attended with new success, to involve me and my votes in inconsistency and contradiction. I am happy the honorable gentleman has furnished me an opportunity of a timely remark or two on that subject. I was glad he approached it, for it is a question I enter upon without fear from any body. The strenuous toil of the gentleman has been to raise an inconsistency between my dissent to the tariff, in 1824 and my vote in 1828. It is labor lost. He pays undeserved compliment to my speech in 1824; but this is to raise me high, that my fall, as he would have it, in 1828 may be the more signal. Sir, there was no fall at all. Between the ground I stood on in 1824 and that I took in 1828, there was not only no precipice, but no declivity. It was a change of position, to meet new circumstances, but on the same level. A plain tale explains the whole matter. In 1816, I had not acquiesced in the tariff, then supported by South Carolina. To some parts of it, especially, I felt and expressed great repugnance. I held the same opinions in 1821, at the meeting in Faneuil Hall, to which the gentleman has alluded. I said then, and say now, that, as an original question, the authority of Congress to exercise the revenue power, with direct reference to the protection of manufactures, is a questionable authority, far more questionable in my judgment, than the power of internal improvements. I must confess, sir, that, in one respect, some impression has been made on my opinions lately. Mr. Madison’s publication has put the power in a very strong light. He has placed it, I must acknowledge, upon grounds of construction and argument which seem impregnable. But even if the power were doubted, on the face of the constitution itself, it had been assumed and asserted in the first revenue law ever passed under the same constitution; and, on this ground, as a matter settled by contemporaneous practice, I had refrained from expressing the opinion that the tariff laws transcended constitutional limits, as the gentleman supposes. What I did say at Faneuil Hall, as far as I now remember, was, that this was originally matter of doubtful construction. The gentleman himself, I suppose, thinks there is no doubt about it, and that the laws are plainly against the constitution. Mr. Madison’s letters, already referred to, contain, in my judgment, by far the most able exposition extant of this part of the constitution. He has satisfied me, so far as the practice of the government had left it an open question.

With a great majority of the representatives of Massachusetts, I voted against the tariff of 1824. My reasons were then given, and I will not now repeat them. But notwithstanding our dissent, the great states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky went for the bill, in almost unbroken column, and it passed. Congress and the president sanctioned it, and it became the law of the land. What, then, were we to do? Our only option was either to fall in with this settled course of public policy, and to accommodate ourselves to it as well as we could, or to embrace the South Carolina doctrine, and talk of nullifying the statute by state interference.

The last alternative did not suit our principles, and, of course, we adopted the former. In 1827, the subject came again before Congress, on a proposition favorable to wool and woolens. We looked upon the system of protection as being fixed and settled. The law of 1824 remained. It had gone into full operation, and in regard to some objects intended by it, perhaps most of them had produced all its expected effects. No man proposed to repeal it—no man attempted to renew the general contest on its principle. But, owing to subsequent and unforeseen occurrences, the benefit intended by it to wool and woolen fabrics had not been realized. Events, not known here when the law passed, had taken place, which defeated its object in that particular respect. A measure was accordingly brought forward to meet this precise deficiency, to remedy this particular defect. It was limited to wool and woolens. Was ever any thing more reasonable? If the policy of the tariff laws had become established in principle as the permanent policy of the government, should they not be revised and amended, and made equal, like other laws, as exigencies should arise, or justice require? Because we had doubted about adopting the system, were we to refuse to cure its manifest defects after it became adopted, and when no one attempted its repeal? And this, sir, is the inconsistency so much bruited. I had voted against the tariff of 1824—but it passed; and in 1827 and 1828, I voted to amend it in a point essential to the interest of my constituents. Where is the inconsistency? Could I do otherwise?

Sir, does political consistency consist in always giving negative votes? Does it require of a public man to refuse to concur in amending laws because they passed against his consent? Having voted against the tariff originally, does consistency demand that I should do all in my power to maintain an unequal tariff, burdensome to my own constituents, in many respects,—favorable in none? To consistency of that sort I lay no claim; and there is another sort to which I lay as little—and that is, a kind of consistency by which persons feel themselves as much bound to oppose a proposition after it has become the law of the land as before.

The bill of 1827, limited, as I have said, to the single object in which the tariff of 1824 had manifestly failed in its effects, passed the House of Representatives, but was lost here. We had then the act of 1828. I need not recur to the history of a measure so recent. Its enemies spiced it with whatsoever they thought would render it distasteful; its friends took it, drugged as it was. Vast amounts of property, many millions, had been invested in manufactures, under the inducements of the act of 1824. Events called loudly, I thought, for further regulations to secure the degree of protection intended by that act. I was disposed to vote for such regulations and desired nothing more; but certainly was not to be bantered out of my purpose by a threatened augmentation of duty on molasses, put into the bill for the avowed purpose of making it obnoxious. The vote may have been right or wrong, wise or unwise; but it is a little less than absurd to allege against it an inconsistency with opposition to the former law.

Sir, as to the general subject of the tariff, I have little now to say. Another opportunity may be presented. I remarked, the other day, that this policy did not begin with us in New England; and yet, sir, New England is charged with vehemence as being favorable, or charged with equal vehemence as being unfavorable, to the tariff policy, just as best suits the time, place, and occasion for making some charge against her. The credulity of the public has been put to its extreme capacity of false impression relative to her conduct in this particular. Through all the south, during the late contest, it was New England policy, and a New England administration, that was inflicting the country with a tariff policy beyond all endurance, while on the other side of the Alleghany, even the act of 1828 itself—the very sublimated essence of oppression, according to southern opinions—was pronounced to be one of those blessings for which the west was indebted to the “generous south.”

With large investments in manufacturing establishments, and various interests connected with and dependent on them, it is not to be expected that New England, any more than other portions of the country, will now consent to any measures destructive or highly dangerous. The duty of the government, at the present moment, would seem to be to preserve, not to destroy; to maintain the position which it has assumed; and for one, I shall feel it an indispensable obligation to hold it steady, as far as in my power, to that degree of protection which it has undertaken to bestow. No more of the tariff.

Professing to be provoked by what he chose to consider a charge made by me against South Carolina, the honorable member, Mr. President, has taken up a new crusade against New England. Leaving altogether the subject of the public lands, in which his success, perhaps, had been neither distinguished nor satisfactory, and letting go, also, of the topic of the tariff, he sallied forth in a general assault on the opinions, politics, and parties of New England, as they have been exhibited in the last thirty years. This is natural. The “narrow policy” of the public lands had proved a legal settlement in South Carolina, and was not to be removed. The “accursed policy” of the tariff, also, had established the fact of its birth and parentage in the same state. No wonder, therefore, the gentleman wished to carry the war, as he expressed it, into the enemy’s country. Prudently willing to quit these subjects, he was doubtless desirous of fastening others, which could not be transferred south of Mason and Dixon’s line. The politics of New England became his theme; and it was in this part of his speech, I think, that he menaced me with such sore discomfiture.

Discomfiture! why, sir, when he attacks anything which I maintain, and overthrows it; when he turns the right or left of any position which I take up; when he drives me from any ground I choose to occupy, he may then talk of discomfiture, but not till that distant day. What has he done? Has he maintained his own charges? Has he proved what he alleged? Has he sustained himself in his attack on the government, and on the history of the north, in the matter of the public lands? Has he disproved a fact, refuted a proposition, weakened an argument maintained by me? Has he come within beat of drum of any position of mine? O, no; but he has “carried the war into the enemy’s country!” Carried the war into the enemy’s country! Yes, sir, and what sort of a war has he made of it? Why, sir, he has stretched a dragnet over the whole surface of perished pamphlets, indiscreet sermons, frothy paragraphs, and fuming popular addresses; over whatever the pulpit in its moments of alarm, the press in its heats, and parties in their extravagances, have severally thrown off, in times of general excitement and violence. He has thus swept together a mass of such things, as, but they are not now old, the public health would have required him rather to leave in their state of dispersion.

For a good long hour or two, we had the unbroken pleasure of listening to the honorable member, while he recited, with his usual grace and spirit, and with evident high gusto, speeches, pamphlets, addresses, and all that et ceteras of the political press, such as warm heads produce in warm times, and such as it would be “discomfiture” indeed for any one, whose taste did not delight in that sort of reading, to be obliged to peruse. This is his war. This is to carry the war into the enemy’s country. It is in an invasion of this sort that he flatters himself with the expectation of gaining laurels fit to adorn a senator’s brow.

Mr. President, I shall not, it will, I trust, not be expected that I should, either now or at any time, separate this farrago into parts, and answer and examine its components. I shall hardly bestow upon it all a general remark or two. In the run of forty years, sir, under this constitution, we have experienced sundry successive violent party contests. Party arose, indeed, with the constitution itself, and in some form or other has attended through the greater part of its history.

Whether any other constitution than the old articles of confederation was desirable, was itself, a question on which parties divided; if a new constitution was framed, what powers should be given to it was another question; and when it had been formed, what was, in fact, the just extent of the powers actually conferred was a third. Parties, as we know, existed under the first administration, as distinctly marked as those which manifested themselves at any subsequent period.

The contest immediately preceding the political change in 1801, and that, again, which existed at the commencement of the late war, are other instances of party excitement, of something more than usual strength and intensity. In all these conflicts there was, no doubt, much of violence on both and all sides. It would be impossible, if one had a fancy for such employment, to adjust the relative quantum of violence between these two contending parties. There was enough in each, as must always be expected in popular governments. With a great deal of proper and decorous discussion there was mingled a great deal, also, of declamation, virulence, crimination, and abuse.

In regard to any party, probably, at one of the leading epochs in the history of parties, enough may be found to make out another equally inflamed exhibition as that with which the honorable member has edified us. For myself, sir, I shall not rake among the rubbish of by-gone times to see what I can find or whether I cannot find something by which I can fix a blot on the escutcheon of any state, any party, or any part of the country. General Washington’s administration was steadily and zealously maintained, as we all know, by New England. It was violently opposed elsewhere. We know in what quarter he had the most earnest, constant and persevering support, in all his great and leading measures. We know where his private and personal character was held in the highest degree of attachment and veneration; and we know, too, where his measures were opposed, his services slighted, and his character vilified.

We know, or we might know, if we turn to the journals, who expressed respect, gratitude, and regret, when he retired from the chief magistracy; and who refused to express either respect, gratitude or regret. I shall not open those journals. Publications more abusive or scurrilous never saw the light than were sent forth against Washington, and all his leading measures, from presses south of New England; but I shall not look them up. I employ no scavengers—no one is in attendance on me, tendering such means of retaliation; and if there were, with an ass’s load of them, with a bulk as huge as that which the gentleman himself has produced, I would not touch one of them. I see enough of the violence of our own times to be no way anxious to rescue from forgetfulness the extravagances of times past. Besides, what is all this to the present purpose? It has nothing to do with the public lands, in regard to which the attack was begun; and it has nothing to do with those sentiments and opinions, which I have thought tend to disunion, and all of which the honorable member seems to have adopted himself, and undertaken to defend. New England has, at times—so argues the gentleman,—held opinions as dangerous as those which he now holds. Be it so. But why, therefore, does he abuse New England? If he finds himself countenanced by acts of hers, how is it that, while he relies on these acts, he covers, or seeks to cover, their authors with reproach?

But, sir, if, in the course of forty years, there have been undue effervescences of party in New England, has the same thing happened no where else? Party animosity and party outrage, not in New England, but elsewhere, denounced President Washington, not only as a federalist, but as a tory, a British agent, a man who, in his high office, sanctioned corruption. But does the honorable member suppose that, if I had a tender here, who should put such an effusion of wickedness and folly in my hand, that I would stand up and read it against the south? Parties ran into great heats, again, in 1799. What was said, sir, or rather what was not said, in those years, against John Adams, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and its admitted ablest defender on the floor of Congress? If the gentleman wants to increase his stores of party abuse and frothy violence, if he has a determined proclivity to such pursuits, there are treasures of that sort south of the Potomac, much to his taste, yet untouched. I shall not touch them.

The parties which divided the country, at the commencement of the late war, were violent. But, then, there was violence on both sides, and violence in every state. Minorities and majorities were equally violent. There was no more violence against the war in New England than in other states; nor any more appearance of violence, except that, owing to a dense population, greater facility for assembling, and more presses, there may have been more, in quantity, spoken and printed there than in some other places. In the article of sermons, too, New England is somewhat more abundant than South Carolina: and for that reason, the chance of finding here and there an exceptionable one may be greater. I hope, too, there are more good ones. Opposition may have been more formidable in New England, as it embraced a larger portion of the whole population: but it was no more unrestrained in its principle, or violent in manner. The minorities dealt quite as harshly with their own state governments as the majorities dealt with the administration here. There were presses on both sides, popular meetings on both sides, ay, and pulpits on both sides, also. The gentleman’s purveyors have only catered for him among the productions of one side. I certainly shall not supply the deficiency by furnishing samples of the other. I leave to him, and to them, the whole concern.

It is enough for me to say, that if, in any part of this, their grateful occupation—if in all their researches—they find anything in the history of Massachusetts, or New England, or in the proceedings of any legislative or other public body, disloyal to the Union, speaking slightly of its value, proposing to break it up, or recommending non-intercourse with neighboring states, on account of difference of political opinion, then, sir, I give them all up to the honorable gentleman’s unrestrained rebuke; expecting, however, that he will extend his buffetings, in like manner, to all similar proceedings, wherever else found.

The gentleman, sir, has spoken at large of former parties, now no longer in being, by their received appellations, and has undertaken to instruct us, not only in the knowledge of their principles, but of their respective pedigrees also. He has ascended to their origin and run out their genealogies. With most exemplary modesty, he speaks of the party to which he professes to have belonged himself, as the true, pure, the only honest, patriotic party, derived by regular descent, from father to son, from the time of the virtuous Romans! Spreading before us the family tree of political parties, he takes especial care to show himself snugly perched on a popular bough! He is wakeful to the expediency of adopting such rules of descent, for political parties, as shall bring him in, in exclusion of others, as an heir to the inheritance of all public virtue, and all true political principles. His doxy is always orthodoxy. Heterodoxy is confined to his opponents. He spoke, sir, of the federalists, and I thought I saw some eyes begin to open and stare a little, when he ventured on that ground. I expected he would draw his sketches rather lightly, when he looked on the circle round him, and especially if he should cast his thoughts to the high places out of the Senate. Nevertheless, he went back to Rome, ad annum urbs condita, and found the fathers of the federalists in the primeval aristocrats of that renowned empire! He traced the flow of federal blood down through successive ages and centuries, till he got into the veins of the American tories, (of whom, by the way, there were twenty in the Carolinas for one in Massachusetts.) From the tories, he followed it to the federalists; and as the federal party was broken up, and there was no possibility of transmitting it farther on this side of the Atlantic, he seems to have discovered that it has gone off, collaterally, though against all the canons of descent, into the ultras of France, and finally became extinguished, like exploded gas, among the adherents of Don Miguel.

This, sir, is an abstract of the gentleman’s history of federalism. I am not about to controvert it. It is not, at present, worth the pains of refutation, because, sir, if at this day one feels the sin of federalism lying heavily on his conscience, he can easily obtain remission. He may even have an indulgence, if he is desirous of repeating the transgression. It is an affair of no difficulty to get into this same right line of patriotic descent. A man, nowadays, is at liberty to choose his political parentage. He may elect his own father. Federalist or not, he may, if he choose, claim to belong to the favored stock, and his claim will be allowed. He may carry back his pretensions just as far as the honorable gentleman himself; nay, he may make himself out the honorable gentleman’s cousin, and prove satisfactorily that he is descended from the same political great-grandfather. All this is allowable. We all know a process, sir, by which the whole Essex Junto could, in one hour be all washed white from their ancient federalism, and come out every one of them, an original democrat, dyed in the wool! Some of them have actually undergone the operation, and they say it is quite easy. The only inconvenience it occasions, as they tell us, is a slight tendency of the blood to the face, a soft suffusion, which, however, is very transient, since nothing is said calculated to deepen the red on the cheek, but a prudent silence observed in regard to all the past. Indeed, sir, some smiles of approbation have been bestowed, and some crumbs of comfort have fallen, not a thousand miles from the door of the Hartford Convention itself. And if the author of the ordinance of 1787 possessed the other requisite qualifications, there is no knowing, notwithstanding his federalism, to what heights of favor he might not yet attain.

Mr. President, in carrying his warfare, such as it was, into New England, the honorable gentleman all along professes to be acting on the defensive. He desires to consider me as having assailed South Carolina and insists that he comes forth only as her champion, and in her defence. Sir, I do not admit that I made any attack whatever on South Carolina. Nothing like it. The honorable member, in his first speech, expressed opinions, in regard to revenue, and some other topics, which I heard both with pain and surprise. I told the gentleman that I was aware that such sentiments were entertained OUT of the government, but had not expected to find them advanced in it; that I knew there were persons in the south who speak of our Union with indifference, or doubt, taking pains to magnify its evils, and to say nothing of its benefits; that the honorable member himself, I was sure, could never be one of these; and I regretted the expression of such opinions as he had avowed, because I thought their obvious tendency was to encourage feelings of disrespect to the Union, and to weaken its connection. This, sir, is the sum and substance of all I said on the subject. And this constitutes the attack which called on the chivalry of the gentleman, in his opinion, to harry us with such a forage among the party pamphlets and party proceedings of Massachusetts. If he means that I spoke with dissatisfaction or disrespect of the ebullitions of individuals in South Carolina, it is true. But, if he means that I had assailed the character of the state, her honor, or patriotism, that I had reflected on her history or her conduct, he had not the slightest ground for any such assumption. I did not even refer, I think, in my observations, to any collection of individuals. I said nothing of the recent conventions. I spoke in the most guarded and careful manner, and only expressed my regret for the publication of opinions which I presumed the honorable member disapproved as much as myself. In this, it seems, I was mistaken.

I do not remember that the gentleman has disclaimed any sentiment, or any opinion, of a supposed anti-Union tendency, which on all or any of the recent occasions has been expressed. The whole drift of his speech has been rather to prove, that, in divers times and manners, sentiments equally liable to objection have been promulgated in New England. And one would suppose that his object, in this reference to Massachusetts, was to find a precedent to justify proceedings in the south, were it not for the reproach and contumely with which he labors, all along, to load his precedents.

By way of defending South Carolina from what he chooses to think an attack on her, he first quotes the example of Massachusetts, and then denounces that example, in good set terms. This twofold purpose, not very consistent with itself, one would think, was exhibited more than once in the course of his speech. He referred, for instance, to the Hartford Convention. Did he do this for authority, or for a topic of reproach? Apparently for both; for he told us that he should find no fault with the mere fact of holding such a convention, and considering and discussing such questions as he supposes were then and there discussed; but what rendered it obnoxious was the time it was holden, and the circumstances of the country then existing. We were in a war, he said, and the country needed all our aid; the hand of government required to be strengthened, not weakened; and patriotism should have postponed such proceedings to another day. The thing itself, then, is a precedent; the time and manner of it, only, subject of censure.

Now, sir, I go much farther, on this point, than the honorable member. Supposing, as the gentleman seems to, that the Hartford Convention assembled for any such purpose as breaking up the Union, because they thought unconstitutional laws had been passed, or to concert on that subject, or to calculate the value of the Union; supposing this to be their purpose, or any part of it, then I say the meeting itself was disloyal, and obnoxious to censure, whether held in time of peace, or time of war, or under whatever circumstances. The material matter is the object. Is dissolution the object? If it be, external circumstances may make it a more or less aggravated case, but cannot affect the principle. I do not hold, therefore, that the Hartford Convention was pardonable, even to the extent of the gentleman’s admission, if its objects were really such as have been imputed to it. Sir, there never was a time, under any degree of excitement, in which the Hartford Convention, or any other convention, could maintain itself one moment in New England, if assembled for any such purpose as the gentleman says would have been an allowable purpose. To hold conventions to decide questions of constitutional law! to try the validity of statutes, by votes in a convention! Sir, the Hartford Convention, I presume, would not desire that the honorable gentleman should be their defender or advocate, if he puts their case upon such untenable and extravagant grounds.

Then, sir, the gentleman has no fault to find with these recently-promulgated South Carolina opinions. And, certainly, he need have none; for his own sentiments, as now advanced, and advanced on reflection, as far as I have been able to comprehend them, go the full length of all these opinions. I propose, sir, to say something on these, and to consider how far they are just and constitutional. Before doing that, however, let me observe, that the eulogium pronounced on the character of the state of South Carolina, by the honorable gentleman, for her revolutionary and other merits, meets my hearty concurrence. I shall not acknowledge that the honorable member goes before me in regard for whatever of distinguished talent or distinguished character South Carolina has produced. I claim part of the honor, I partake in the pride, of her great names. I claim them for countrymen, one and all. The Laurenses, the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, the Sumpters, the Marions—Americans all—whose fame is no more to be hemmed in by state lines than their talents and their patriotism were capable of being circumscribed within the same narrow limits. In their day and generation, they served and honored the country, and the whole country; and their renown is of the treasures of the whole country. Him whose honored name the gentleman himself bears—does he suppose me less capable of gratitude for his patriotism, or sympathy for his sufferings, than if his eyes had first opened upon the light in Massachusetts instead of South Carolina? Sir, does he suppose it is in his power to exhibit a Carolina name so bright as to produce envy in my bosom? No, sir, increased gratification and delight, rather.

Sir, I thank God that if I am gifted with little of the spirit which is said to be able to raise mortals to the skies, I have yet none, as I trust, of that other spirit, which would drag angels down. When I shall be found, sir, in my place here in the Senate, or elsewhere, to sneer at public merit, because it happened to spring up beyond the little limits of my own state, or neighborhood; when I refuse, for any such cause, or for any cause, the homage due to American talent, to elevated patriotism, to sincere devotion to liberty and the country; or if I see an uncommon endowment of Heaven, if I see extraordinary capacity and virtue in any son of the south, and if, moved by local prejudice, or gangrened by state jealousy, I get up here to abate the tithe of a hair from his just character and just fame,—may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth! Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections; let me indulge in refreshing remembrance of the past; let me remind you that in early times no states cherished greater harmony, both of principle and feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that harmony might again return. Shoulder to shoulder they went through the revolution; hand in hand they stood round the administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. Unkind feeling, if it exist, alienation, and distrust are the growth, unnatural to such soils, of false principles since sown. They are weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered.

Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts—she needs none. There she is—behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history—the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, fallen in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every state from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it; if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure,—it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm, with whatever vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather around it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

There yet remains to be performed, Mr. President, by far the most grave and important duty; which I feel to be devolved on me by this occasion. It is to state, and to defend, what I conceive to be the true principles of the constitution under which we are here assembled. I might well have desired that so weighty a task should have fallen into other and abler hands. I could have wished that it should have been executed by those whose character and experience give weight and influence to their opinions, such as cannot possibly belong to mine. But, sir, I have met the occasion, not sought it; and I shall proceed to state my own sentiments, without challenging for them any particular regard, with studied plainness and as much precision as possible.

I understand the honorable gentleman from South Carolina to maintain that it is a right of the state legislatures to interfere, whenever in their judgment, this government transcends its constitutional limits, and to arrest the operation of its laws.

I understand him to maintain this right as a right existing under the constitution, not as a right to overthrow it, on the ground of extreme necessity, such as would justify violent revolution.

I understand him to maintain an authority, on the part of the states, thus to interfere for the purpose of correcting the exercise of power by the general government, of checking it, and of compelling it to conform to their opinion of the extent of its power.

I understand him to maintain that the ultimate power of judging of the constitutional extent of its own authority is not lodged exclusively in the general government or any branch of it; but that, on the contrary, the states may lawfully decide for themselves, and each state for itself, whether, in a given case, the act of the general government transcends its power.

I understand him to insist that, if the exigency of the case, in the opinion of any state government, require it, such state government may, by its own sovereign authority, annul an act of the general government which it deems plainly and palpably unconstitutional.

This is the sum of what I understand from him to be the South Carolina doctrine. I propose to consider it, and to compare it with the constitution. Allow me to say, as a preliminary remark, that I call this the South Carolina doctrine, only because the gentleman himself has so denominated it. I do not feel at liberty to say that South Carolina, as a state, has ever advanced these sentiments. I hope she has not, and never may. That a great majority of her people are opposed to the tariff laws is doubtless true. That a majority, somewhat less than that just mentioned, conscientiously believe these laws unconstitutional, may probably be also true. But that any majority holds to the right of direct state interference, at state discretion, the right of nullifying acts of Congress by acts of state legislation, is more than I know, and what I shall be slow to believe.

That there are individuals, besides the honorable gentleman, who do maintain these opinions, is quite certain. I recollect the recent expression of a sentiment which circumstances attending its utterance and publication justify us in supposing was not unpremeditated—“The sovereignty of the state; never to be controlled, construed, or decided on, but by her own feelings of honorable justice.”

“That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact, as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that, in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers not granted by the same compact, the states who are parties thereto have the right and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties pertaining to them.”]

Mr. WEBSTER resumed:—

I am quite aware, Mr. President, of the existence of the resolution which the gentleman read, and has now repeated, and that he relies on it as his authority. I know the source, too, from which it is understood to have proceeded. I need not say, that I have much respect for the constitutional opinions of Mr. Madison; they would weigh greatly with me, always. But, before the authority of his opinion be vouched for the gentleman’s proposition, it will be proper to consider what is the fair interpretation of that resolution, to which Mr. Madison is understood to have given his sanction. As the gentleman construes it, it is an authority for him. Possibly he may not have adopted the right construction. That resolution declares, that in the case of the dangerous exercise of powers not granted by the general government, the states may interpose to arrest the progress of the evil. But how interpose? and what does this declaration purport? Does it mean no more than that there may be extreme cases in which the people, in any mode of assembling, may resist usurpation, and relieve themselves from a tyrannical government? No one will deny this. Such resistance is not only acknowledged to be just in America, but in England also. Blackstone admits as much, in the theory and practice, too, of the English constitution. We, sir, who oppose the Carolina doctrine, do not deny that the people may, if they choose, throw off any government, when it becomes oppressive and intolerable, and erect a better in its stead. We all know that civil institutions are established for the public benefit, and that, when they cease to answer the ends of their existence they may be changed.

But I do not understand the doctrine now contended for to be that which, for the sake of distinctness, we may call the right of revolution. I understand the gentleman to maintain, that without revolution, without civil commotion, without rebellion, a remedy for supposed abuse and transgression of the powers of the general government lies in a direct appeal to the interference of the state governments. [Mr. HAYNE here rose: He did not contend, he said, for the mere right of revolution, but for the right of constitutional resistance. What he maintained was, that, in case of a plain, palpable violation of the constitution by the general government, a state may interpose; and that this interposition is constitutional.]

Mr. WEBSTER resumed:

So, sir, I understood the gentleman, and am happy to find that I did not misunderstand him. What he contends for is, that it is constitutional to interrupt the administration of the constitution itself, in the hands of those who are chosen and sworn to administer it, by the direct interference, in form of law, of the states, in virtue of their sovereign capacity. The inherent right in the people to reform their government I do not deny; and that they have another right, and that is, to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government. It is no doctrine of mine, that unconstitutional laws bind the people. The great question is, Whose prerogative is it to decide on the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of the laws? On that the main debate hinges. The proposition that, in the case of a supposed violation of the constitution by Congress, the states have a constitutional right to interfere, and annul the law of Congress, is the proposition of the gentleman; I do not admit it. If the gentleman had intended no more than to assert the right of revolution for justifiable cause, he would have said only what all agree to.—But I cannot conceive that there can be a middle course between submission to the laws, when regularly pronounced constitutional, on the one hand, and open resistance, which is revolution or rebellion, on the other. I say the right of a state to annul a law of Congress cannot be maintained but on the ground of the unalienable right of man to resist oppression; that is to say, upon the ground of revolution. I admit that there is no ultimate violent remedy, above the constitution, and defiance of the constitution, which may be resorted to, when a revolution is to be justified. But I do not admit that under the constitution, and in conformity with it, there is any mode in which a state government, as a member of the Union can interfere and stop the progress of the general government, by force of her own laws, under any circumstances whatever.

This leads us to inquire into the origin of this government, and the source of its power. Whose agent is it? Is it the creature of the state legislatures, or the creature of the people? If the government of the United States be the agent of the state governments, then they may control it, provided they can agree in the manner of controlling it; if it is the agent of the people, then the people alone can control it, restrain it, modify or reform it. It is observable enough, that the doctrine for which the honorable gentleman contends leads him to the necessity of maintaining, not only that this general government is the creature of the states, but that it is the creature of each of the states severally; so that each may assert the power, for itself, of determining whether it acts within the limits of its authority. It is the servant of four and twenty masters, of different wills and different purposes; and yet bound to obey all. This absurdity (for it seems no less) arises from a misconception as to the origin of this government, and its true character. It is, sir, the people’s constitution, the people’s government; made for the people; made by the people; and answerable to the people. The people of the United States have declared that this constitution shall be the supreme law. We must either admit the proposition, or dispute their authority. The states are unquestionably sovereign, so far as their sovereignty is not affected by this supreme law. The state legislatures, as political bodies, however sovereign, are yet not sovereign over the people. So far as the people have given power to the general government, so far the grant is unquestionably good, and the government holds of the people, and not of the state governments. We are all agents of the same supreme power, the people. The general government and the state governments derive their authority from the same source. Neither can, in relation to the other, be called primary; though one is definite and restricted, and the other general and residuary.

The national government possesses those powers which it can be shown the people have conferred on it, and no more. All the rest belongs to the state governments, or to the people themselves. So far as the people have restrained state sovereignty by the expression of their will, in the constitution of the United States, so far, it must be admitted, state sovereignty is effectually controlled. I do not contend that it is, or ought to be, controlled further. The sentiment to which I have referred propounds that state sovereignty is only to be controlled by its own “feelings of justice;” that is to say, it is not to be controlled at all; for one who is to follow his feelings, is under no legal control. Now, however men may think this ought to be, the fact is, that the people of the United States have chosen to impose control on state sovereignties. The constitution has ordered the matter differently from what this opinion announces. To make war, for instance, is an exercise of sovereignty; but the constitution declares that no state shall make war. To coin money is another exercise of sovereign power; but no state is at liberty to coin money. Again: the constitution says, that no sovereign state shall be so sovereign as to make a treaty. These prohibitions, it must be confessed, are a control on the state sovereignty of South Carolina, as well as of the other states, which does not arise “from feelings of honorable justice.” Such an opinion, therefore, is in defiance of the plainest provisions of the constitution.

There are other proceedings of public bodies which have already been alluded to, and to which I refer again for the purpose of ascertaining more fully what is the length and breadth of that doctrine, denominated the Carolina doctrine, which the honorable member has now stood up on this floor to maintain.

In one of them I find it resolved that “the tariff of 1828, and every other tariff designed to promote one branch of industry at the expense of others, is contrary to the meaning and intention of the federal compact; and as such a dangerous, palpable, and deliberate usurpation of power, by a determined majority, wielding the general government beyond the limits of its delegated powers, as calls upon the states which compose the suffering minority, in their sovereign capacity, to exercise the powers which, as sovereigns, necessarily devolve upon them, when their compact is violated.”

Observe, sir, that this resolution holds the tariff of 1828, and every other tariff, designed to promote one branch of industry at the expense of another, to be such a dangerous, palpable, and deliberate usurpation of power, as calls upon the states, in their sovereign capacity, to interfere, by their own power. This denunciation, Mr. President, you will please to observe, includes our old tariff of 1816, as well as all others; because that was established to promote the interest of the manufacturers of cotton, to the manifest and admitted injury of the Calcutta cotton trade. Observe, again, that all the qualifications are here rehearsed, and charged upon the tariff, which are necessary to bring the case within the gentleman’s proposition. The tariff is a usurpation; it is a dangerous usurpation; it is a palpable usurpation; it is a deliberate usurpation. It is such a usurpation as calls upon the states to exercise their right of interference. Here is a case, then, within the gentleman’s principles, and all his qualifications of his principles. It is a case for action. The constitution is plainly, dangerously, palpably, and deliberately violated; and the states must interpose their own authority to arrest the law. Let us suppose the state of South Carolina to express this same opinion, by the voice of her legislature. That would be very imposing; but what then? Is the voice of one state conclusive? It so happens that, at the very moment when South Carolina resolves that the tariff laws are unconstitutional, Pennsylvania and Kentucky resolve exactly the reverse. They hold those laws to be both highly proper and strictly constitutional. And now, sir, how does the honorable member propose to deal with this case? How does he get out of this difficulty, upon any principle of his? His construction gets us into it; how does he propose to get us out?

In Carolina the tariff is a palpable, deliberate usurpation; Carolina, therefore, may nullify it, and refuse to pay the duties. In Pennsylvania, it is both clearly constitutional and highly expedient; and there the duties are to be paid. And yet we live under a government of uniform laws, and under a constitution, too, which contains an express provision, as it happens, that all duties shall be equal in all the states! Does not this approach absurdity?

If there be no power to settle such questions, independent of either of the states, is not the whole Union a rope of sand? Are we not thrown back again precisely upon the old confederation?

It is too plain to be argued. Four and twenty interpreters of constitutional law, each with a power to decide for itself, and none with authority to bind anybody else, and this constitutional law the only bond of their union! What is such a state of things but a mere connection during pleasure, or, to use the phraseology of the times, during feeling? And that feeling, too, not the feeling of the people who established the constitution, but the feeling of the state governments.

In another of the South Carolina addresses, having premised that the crisis requires “all the concentrated energy of passion,” an attitude of open resistance to the laws of the Union is advised. Open resistance to the laws, then, is the constitutional remedy, the conservative power of the state, which the South Carolina doctrines teach for the redress of political evils, real or imaginary. And its authors further say that, appealing with confidence to the constitution itself to justify their opinions, they cannot consent to try their accuracy by the courts of justice. In one sense, indeed, sir, this is assuming an attitude of open resistance in favor of liberty. But what sort of liberty? The liberty of establishing their own opinions, in defiance of the opinions of all others; the liberty of judging and of deciding exclusively themselves, in a matter in which others have as much right to judge and decide as they; the liberty of placing their opinions above the judgment of all others, above the laws, and above the constitution. This is their liberty, and this is the fair result of the proposition contended for by the honorable gentleman. Or it may be more properly said, it is identical with it, rather than a result from it. In the same publication we find the following: “Previously to our revolution, when the arm of oppression was stretched over New England, where did our northern brethren meet with a braver sympathy than that which sprung from the bosom of Carolinians? We had no extortion, no oppression, no collision with the king’s ministers, no navigation interest springing up, in envious rivalry of England.”

This seems extraordinary language. South Carolina no collision with the king’s ministers in 1775! no extortion! no oppression! But, sir, it is also most significant language. Does any man doubt the purpose for which it was penned? Can any one fail to see that it was designed to raise in the reader’s mind the question, whether, at this time,—that is to say, in 1828,—South Carolina has any collision with the king’s ministers, any oppression, or extortion, to fear from England? whether, in short, England is not as naturally the friend of South Carolina as New England, with her navigation interests springing up in envious rivalry of England?

Is it not strange, sir, that an intelligent man in South Carolina, in 1828, should thus labor to prove, that in 1775, there was no hostility, no cause of war, between South Carolina and England? that she had no occasion, in reference to her own interest, or from regard to her own welfare, to take up arms in the revolutionary contest? Can any one account for the expression of such strange sentiments, and their circulation through the state, otherwise than by supposing the object to be, what I have already intimated, to raise the question, if they had no “collision” (mark the expression) with the ministers of King George the Third, in 1775, what collision have they, in 1828, with the ministers of King George the Fourth? What is there now, in the existing state of things, to separate Carolina from Old, more, or rather less, than from New England?

Resolutions, sir, have been recently passed by the legislature of South Carolina. I need not refer to them; they go no further than the honorable gentleman himself has gone—and I hope not so far. I content myself therefore, with debating the matter with him.

And now, sir, what I have first to say on this subject is, that at no time, and under no circumstances, has New England, or any state in New England, or any respectable body of persons in New England, or any public man of standing in New England, put forth such a doctrine as this Carolina doctrine.

The gentleman has found no case—he can find none—to support his own opinions by New England authority. New England has studied the constitution in other schools, and under other teachers. She looks upon it with other regards, and deems more highly and reverently, both of its just authority and its utility and excellence. The history of her legislative proceedings may be traced—the ephemeral effusions of temporary bodies, called together by the excitement of the occasion, may be hunted up—they have been hunted up. The opinions and votes of her public men, in and out of Congress, may be explored—it will all be in vain. The Carolina doctrine can derive from her neither countenance nor support. She rejects it now; she always did reject it. The honorable member has referred to expressions on the subject of the embargo law, made in this place by an honorable and venerable gentleman (MR. HILLHOUSE) now favoring us with his presence. He quotes that distinguished senator as saying, that in his judgment the embargo law was unconstitutional, and that, therefore, in his opinion, the people were not bound to obey it.

That, sir, is perfectly constitutional language. An unconstitutional law is not binding; but then it does not rest with a resolution or a law of a state legislature to decide whether an act of Congress be or be not constitutional. An unconstitutional act of Congress would not bind the people of this district although they have no legislature to interfere in their behalf; and, on the other hand, a constitutional law of Congress does bind the citizens of every state, although all their legislatures should undertake to annul it, by act or resolution. The venerable Connecticut senator is a constitutional lawyer, of sound principles and enlarged knowledge; a statesman practiced and experienced, bred in the company of Washington, and holding just views upon the nature of our governments. He believed the embargo unconstitutional, and so did others; but what then? Who did he suppose was to decide that question? The state legislature? Certainly not. No such sentiment ever escaped his lips. Let us follow up, sir, this New England opposition to the embargo laws; let us trace it, till we discern the principle which controlled and governed New England throughout the whole course of that opposition. We shall then see what similarity there is between the New England school of constitutional opinions and this modern Carolina school. The gentleman, I think, read a petition from some single individual, addressed to the legislature of Massachusetts, asserting the Carolina doctrine—that is, the right of state interference to arrest the laws of the Union. The fate of that petition shows the sentiment of the legislature. It met no favor. The opinions of Massachusetts were otherwise. They had been expressed in 1798, in answer to the resolutions of Virginia, and she did not depart from them, nor bend them to the times. Misgoverned, wronged, oppressed, as she felt herself to be, she still held fast her integrity to the Union. The gentleman may find in her proceedings much evidence of dissatisfaction with the measures of government, and great and deep dislike, she claimed no right still to sever asunder the bonds of the Union. There was heat, and there was anger in her political feeling. Be it so. Her heat or her anger did not, nevertheless, betray her into infidelity to the government. The gentleman labors to prove that she disliked the embargo as much as South Carolina dislikes the tariff, and expressed her dislike as strongly. Be it so; but did she propose the Carolina remedy? Did she threaten to interfere, by state authority, to annul the laws of the Union? That is the question for the gentleman’s consideration.

No doubt, sir, a great majority of the people of New England conscientiously believe the embargo law of 1807 unconstitutional—as conscientiously, certainly, as the people of South Carolina hold that opinion of the tariff.—They reasoned thus: Congress has power to regulate commerce; but here is a law, they said, stopping all commerce, and stopping it indefinitely. The law is perpetual, therefore, as the law against treason or murder. Now, is this regulating commerce, or destroying it? Is it guiding, controlling, giving the rule to commerce, as a subsisting thing, or is it putting an end to it altogether? Nothing is more certain than that a majority in New England deemed this law a violation of the constitution. This very case required by the gentleman to justify state interference had then arisen. Massachusetts believed this law to be “a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of a power not granted by the constitution.” Deliberate it was, for it was long continued; palpable she thought it, as no words in the constitution gave the power, and only a construction, in her opinion most violent, raised it; dangerous it was, since it threatened utter ruin to her most important interests. Here, then, was a Carolina case. How did Massachusetts deal with it? It was, as she thought, a plain, manifest, palpable violation of the constitution; and it brought ruin to her doors. Thousands of families, and hundreds of thousands of individuals, were beggared by it. While she saw and felt all this, she saw and felt, also, that as a measure of national policy, it was perfectly futile; that the country was no way benefited by that which caused so much individual distress; that it was efficient only for the production of evil, and all that evil inflicted on ourselves. In such a case, under such circumstances, how did Massachusetts demean herself? Sir, she remonstrated, she memorialized, she addressed herself to the general government, not exactly “with the concentrated energy of passion,” but with her strong sense, and the energy of sober conviction. But she did not interpose the arm of her power to arrest the law, and break the embargo. Far from it. Her principles bound her to two things; and she followed her principles, lead where they might. First, to submit to every constitutional law of Congress; and secondly, if the constitutional validity of the law be doubted, to refer that question to the decision of the proper tribunals. The first principle is vain and ineffectual without the second. A majority of us in New England believe the embargo law unconstitutional; but the great question was, and always will be in such cases, Who is to decide this? Who is to judge between the people and the government? And, sir, it is quite plain, that the constitution of the United States confers on the government itself, to be exercised by its appropriate department, this power of deciding, ultimately and conclusively, upon the just extent of its own authority. If this had not been done, we should not have advanced a single step beyond the old confederation.

Being fully of opinion that the embargo law was unconstitutional, the people of New England were yet equally clear in the opinion—it was a matter they did not doubt upon—that the question, after all, must be decided by the judicial tribunals of the United States. Before those tribunals, therefore, they brought the question. Under the provisions of the law, they had given bonds, to millions in amount, and which were alleged to be forfeited. They suffered the bonds to be sued, and thus raised the question. In the old-fashioned way of settling disputes, they went to law. The case came to hearing and solemn argument; and he who espoused their cause and stood up for them against the validity of the act, was none other than that great man, of whom the gentleman has made honorable mention, SAMUEL DEXTER. He was then, sir, in the fulness of his knowledge and the maturity of his strength. He had retired from long and distinguished public service here, to the renewed pursuit of professional duties; carrying with him all that enlargement and expansion, all the new strength and force, which an acquaintance with the more general subjects discussed in the national councils is capable of adding to professional attainment, in a mind of true greatness and comprehension. He was a lawyer, and he was also a statesman. He had studied the constitution, when he filled public station, that he might defend it; he had examined its principles, that he might maintain them. More than all men, or at least as much as any man, he was attached to the general government, and to the union of the states. His feelings and opinions all ran in that direction. A question of constitutional law, too, was, of all subjects, that one which was best suited to his talents and learning. Aloof from technicality, and unfettered by artificial rule, such a question gave opportunity for that deep and clear analysis, that mighty grasp of principle, which so much distinguished his higher efforts. His very statement was argument; his inference seemed demonstration. The earnestness of his own conviction wrought conviction in others. One was convinced, and believed, and consented, because it was gratifying, delightful, to think, and feel, and believe, in unison with an intellect of such evident superiority.

Mr. Dexter, sir, such as I have described him, argued the New England cause. He put into his effort his whole heart, as well as all the powers of his understanding; for he had avowed, in the most public manner, his entire concurrence with his neighbors, on the point in dispute. He argued the cause; it was lost, and New England submitted. The established tribunals pronounced the law constitutional, and New England acquiesced. Now, sir, is not this the exact opposite of the doctrine of the gentleman from South Carolina? According to him, instead of referring to the judicial tribunals, we should have broken up the embargo, by laws of our own; we should have repealed it, quoad New England; for we had a strong, palpable, and oppressive case. Sir, we believe the embargo unconstitutional; but still, that was matter of opinion, and who was to decide it? We thought it a clear case; but, nevertheless, we did not take the laws into our hands, because we did not wish to bring about a revolution, nor to break up the Union; for I maintain, that, between submission to the decision of the constituted tribunals, and revolution, or disunion, there is no middle ground—there is no ambiguous condition, half allegiance and half rebellion. There is no treason, madcosy. And, sir, how futile, how very futile it is, to admit the right of state interference, and then to attempt to save it from the character of unlawful resistance, by adding terms of qualification to the causes and occasions, leaving all the qualifications, like the case itself in the discretion of the state governments. It must be a clear case, it is said; a deliberate case; a palpable case; a dangerous case. But, then, the state is still left at liberty to decide for herself what is clear, what is deliberate, what is palpable, what is dangerous.

Do adjectives and epithets avail any thing? Sir, the human mind is so constituted, that the merits of both sides of a controversy appear very clear, and very palpable, to those who respectively espouse them, and both sides usually grow clearer, as the controversy advances. South Carolina sees unconstitutionality in the tariff—she sees oppression there, also, and she sees danger. Pennsylvania, with a vision not less sharp, looks at the same tariff, and sees no such thing in it—she sees it all constitutional, all useful, all safe. The faith of South Carolina is strengthened by opposition, and she now not only sees, but resolves, that the tariff is palpably unconstitutional, oppressive, and dangerous; but Pennsylvania, not to be behind her neighbors, and equally willing to strengthen her own faith by a confident asseveration, resolves also, and gives to every warm affirmative of South Carolina, a plain downright Pennsylvania negative. South Carolina, to show the strength and unity of her opinions, brings her assembly to a unanimity, within seven votes; Pennsylvania, not to be outdone in this respect more than others, reduces her dissentient fraction to one vote. Now, sir, again I ask the gentleman, what is to be done? Are these states both right? Is he bound to consider them both right? If not, which is in the wrong? or, rather, which has the best right to decide?

And if he, and if I, are not to know what the constitution means, and what it is, till those two state legislatures, and the twenty-two others, shall agree in its construction what have we sworn to, when we have sworn to maintain it? I was forcibly struck, sir, with one reflection, as the gentleman went on with his speech. He quoted Mr. Madison’s resolutions to prove that a state may interfere, in a case of deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of a power not granted. The honorable member supposes the tariff law to be such an exercise of power, and that consequently, a case has risen in which the state may, if it see fit, interfere by its own law. Now, it so happens, nevertheless, that Madison himself deems this same tariff law quite constitutional. Instead of a clear and palpable violation, it is, in his judgment, no violation at all. So that, while they use his authority for a hypothetical case, they reject it in the very case before them. All this, sir, shows the inherent futility. I had almost used a stronger word—of conceding this power of interference to the states, and then attempting to secure it from abuse by imposing qualifications of which the states themselves are to judge. One of two things is true: either the laws of the Union are beyond the control of the states, or else we have no constitution of general government, and are thrust back again to the days of the confederacy.

Let me here say, sir, that if the gentleman’s doctrine had been received and acted upon in New England, in the times of the embargo and non-intercourse, we should probably not now have been here. The government would very likely have gone to pieces and crumbled into dust. No stronger case can ever arise than existed under those laws; no states can ever entertain a clearer conviction than the New England States then entertained; and if they had been under the influence of that heresy of opinion, as I must call it, which the honorable member espouses, this Union would, in all probability have been scattered to the four winds. I ask the gentleman, therefore, to apply his principles to that case; I ask him to come forth and declare whether, in his opinion, the New England States would have been justified in interfering to break up the embargo system, under the conscientious opinions which he held upon it. Had they a right to annul that law? Does he admit, or deny? If that which is thought palpably unconstitutional in South Carolina justifies that state in arresting the progress of the law, tell me whether that which was thought palpably unconstitutional also in Massachusetts would have justified her in doing the same thing. Sir, I deny the whole doctrine. It has not a foot of ground in the constitution to stand on. No public man of reputation ever advanced it in Massachusetts, in the warmest times, or could maintain himself upon it there at any time.

I wish now, sir, to make a remark upon the Virginia resolutions of 1798. I cannot undertake to say how these resolutions were understood by those who passed them. Their language is not a little indefinite. In the case of the exercise, by Congress, of a dangerous power, not granted to them, the resolutions assert the right, on the part of the state to interfere, and arrest the progress of the evil. This is susceptible of more than one interpretation. It may mean no more than that the states may interfere by complaint and remonstrance, or by proposing to the people an alteration of the federal constitution. This would all be quite unobjectionable; or it may be that no more is meant than to assert the general right of revolution, as against all governments, in cases of intolerable oppression. This no one doubts; and this, in my opinion, is all that he who framed these resolutions could have meant by it; for I shall not readily believe that he was ever of opinion that a state, under the constitution, and in conformity with it, could, upon the ground of her own opinion of its unconstitutionality, however clear and palpable she might think the case, annul a law of Congress, so far as it should operate on herself, by her own legislative power.

I must now beg to ask, sir, Whence is this supposed right of the states derived? Where do they get the power to interfere with the laws of the Union? Sir, the opinion which the honorable gentleman maintains is a notion founded in a total misapprehension, in my judgment, of the origin of this government, and of the foundation on which it stands. I hold it to be a popular government, erected by the people, those who administer it responsible to the people, and itself capable of being amended and modified, just as the people may choose it should be. It is as popular, just as truly emanating from the people, as the state governments. It is created for one purpose; the state governments for another. It has its own powers; they have theirs. There is no more authority with them to arrest the operation of a law of Congress, than with Congress to arrest the operation of their laws. We are here to administer a constitution emanating immediately from the people, and trusted by them to our administration. It is not the creature of the state governments. It is of no moment to the argument that certain acts of the state legislatures are necessary to fill our seats in this body. That is not one of their original state powers, a part of the sovereignty of the state. It is a duty which the people, by the constitution itself, have imposed on the state legislatures, and which they might have left to be performed elsewhere, if they had seen fit. So they have left the choice of president with electors; but all this does not affect the proposition that this whole government—President, Senate and House of Representatives—is a popular government. It leaves it still all its popular character. The governor of a state (in some of the states) is chosen not directly by the people for the purpose of performing, among other duties, that of electing a governor. Is the government of the state on that account not a popular government? This government, sir, is the independent offspring of the popular will. It is not the creature of state legislatures; nay, more, if the whole truth must be told, the people brought it into existence, established it, and have hitherto supported it, for the very purpose, amongst others, of imposing certain salutary restraints on state sovereignties. The states cannot now make war; they cannot contract alliances; they cannot make, each for itself, separate regulations of commerce; they cannot lay imposts; they cannot coin money. If this constitution, sir, be the creature of state legislatures, it must be admitted that it has obtained a strange control over the volition of its creators.

The people then, sir, erected this government. They gave it a constitution, and in that constitution they have enumerated the powers which they bestow on it. They have made it a limited government. They have defined its authority. They have restrained it to the exercise of such powers as are granted; and all others, they declare, are reserved to the states or the people. But, sir, they have not stopped here. If they had, they would have accomplished but half their work. No definition can be so clear as to avoid possibility of doubt; no limitation so precise as to exclude all uncertainty. Who, then, shall construe this grant or the people? Who shall interpret their will, where it may be supposed they have left it doubtful? With whom do they leave this ultimate right of deciding on the powers of the government? Sir, they have settled all this in the fullest manner. They have left it with the government itself, in its appropriate branches. Sir, the very chief end, the main design for which the whole constitution was framed and adopted, was to establish a government that should not be obliged to act through state agency, or depend on state opinion and discretion. The people had had quite enough of that kind of government under the confederacy. Under that system, the legal action—the application of law to individuals—belonged exclusively to the states. Congress could only recommend—their acts were not of binding force till the states had adopted and sanctioned them. Are we in that condition still? Are we yet at the mercy of state discretion and state construction? Sir, if we are, then vain will be our attempt to maintain the constitution under which we sit.

But, sir, the people have wisely provided, in the constitution itself, a proper, suitable mode and tribunal for settling questions of constitutional law. There are, in the constitution, grants of powers to Congress, and restrictions on those powers. There are also prohibitions on the states. Some authority must therefore necessarily exist, having the ultimate jurisdiction to fix and ascertain the interpretation of these grants, restrictions and prohibitions. The constitution has itself pointed out, ordained, and established that authority. How has it accomplished this great and essential end? By declaring, sir, that “the constitution and the laws of the United States, made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.”

This, sir, was the first great step. By this, the supremacy of the constitution and laws of the United States is declared. The people so will it. No state law is to be valid which comes in conflict with the constitution or any law of the United States. But who shall decide this question of interference? To whom lies the last appeal? This, sir, the constitution itself decides also, by declaring “that the judicial power shall extend to all cases arising under the constitution and laws of the United States.” These two provisions, sir, cover the whole ground. They are, in truth, the keystone of the arch. With these it is a government; without them it is a confederacy. In pursuance of these clear and express provisions, Congress established, at its very first session, in the judicial act, a mode for carrying them into full effect, and for bringing all questions of constitutional power to the final decision of the Supreme Court. It then, sir, became a government. It then had the means of self-protection; and but for this, it would, in all probability, have been now among things which are passed. Having constituted the government, and declared its powers, the people have further said, that since somebody must decide on the extent of these powers, the government shall itself decide—subject always like other popular governments, to its responsibility to the people. And now, sir, I repeat, how is it that a state legislature acquires any right to interfere? Who, or what, gives them the right to say to the people, “We, who are your agents and servants for one purpose, will undertake to decide, that your other agents and servants, appointed by you for another purpose, have transcended the authority you gave them”? The reply would be, I think, not impertinent, “Who made you a judge over another’s servants. To their own masters they stand or fall.”

Sir, I deny this power of state legislatures altogether. It cannot stand the test of examination. Gentlemen may say, that, in an extreme case, a state government might protect the people from intolerable oppression. Sir, in such a case the people might protect themselves, without the aid of the state governments. Such a case warrants revolution. It must make, when it comes, a law for itself. A nullifying act of a state legislature cannot alter the case, nor make resistance any more lawful. In maintaining these sentiments, sir, I am but asserting the rights of the people. I state what they have declared, and insist on their right to declare it. They have chosen to repose this power in the general government, and I think it my duty to support it, like other constitutional powers.

For myself, sir, I doubt the jurisdiction of South Carolina, or any other state, to prescribe my constitutional duty, or to settle, between me and the people, the validity of laws of Congress for which I have voted. I decline her umpirage. I have not sworn to support the constitution according to her construction of its clauses. I have not stipulated, by my oath of office or otherwise, to come under any responsibility, except to the people and those whom they have appointed to pass upon the question, whether the laws, supported by my votes, conform to the constitution of the country. And, sir, if we look to the general nature of the case, could any thing have been more preposterous than to have made a government for the whole Union, and yet left its powers subject, not to one interpretation, but to thirteen or twenty-four interpretations? Instead of one tribunal, established by all, responsible to all, with power to decide for all, shall constitutional questions be left to four and twenty popular bodies, each at liberty to decide for itself, and none bound to respect the decisions of others; and each at liberty, too, to give a new construction, on every new election of its own members? Would any thing, with such a principle in it, or rather with such a destitution of all principle, be fit to be called a government? No, sir. It should not be denominated a constitution. It should be called, rather, a collection of topics for everlasting controversy; heads of debate for a disputatious people. It would not be a government. It would not be adequate to any practical good, nor fit for any country to live under. To avoid all possibility of being misunderstood, allow me to repeat again, in the fullest manner, that I claim no powers for the government by forced or unfair construction. I admit that it is a government of strictly limited powers, of enumerated, specified, and particularized powers; and that whatsoever is not granted is withheld. But, notwithstanding all this, and however the grant of powers may be expressed, its limits and extent may yet, in some cases, admit of doubt; and the general government would be good for nothing, it would be incapable of long existence, if some mode had not been provided in which those doubts, as they should arise, might be peaceably, but not authoritatively solved.

And now, Mr. President, let me run the honorable gentleman’s doctrine a little into its practical application. Let us look at his probable modus operandi. If a thing can be done, an ingenious man can tell how it is to be done. Now, I wish to be informed how this state interference is to be put in practice. We will take the existing case of the tariff law. South Carolina is said to have made up her opinion upon it. If we do not repeal it, (as we probably shall not,) she will then apply to the case the remedy of her doctrine. She will, we must suppose, pass a law of her legislature, declaring the several acts of Congress, usually called the tariff laws, null and void, so far as they respect South Carolina, or the citizens thereof. So far, all is a paper transaction, and easy enough. But the collector at Charleston is collecting the duties imposed by these tariff laws—he, therefore, must be stopped. The collector will seize the goods if the tariff duties are not paid. The state authorities will undertake their rescue: the marshal, with his posse, will come to the collector’s aid; and here the contest begins. The militia of the state will be called out to sustain the nullifying act. They will march, sir, under a very gallant leader; for I believe the honorable member himself commands the militia of that part of the state. He will raise the NULLIFYING ACT on his standard, and spread it out as his banner. It will have a preamble, bearing that the tariff laws are palpable, deliberate, and dangerous violations of the constitution. He will proceed, with his banner flying, to the custom-house in Charleston,—

“all the while Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds.”

Arrived at the custom-house, he will tell the collector that he must collect no more duties under any of the tariff laws. This he will be somewhat puzzled to say, by the way, with a grave countenance, considering what hand South Carolina herself had in that of 1816. But, sir, the collector would, probably, not desist at his bidding. Here would ensue a pause; for they say, that a certain stillness precedes the tempest. Before this military array should fall on custom-house, collector, clerks, and all, it is very probable some of those composing it would request of their gallant commander-in-chief to be informed a little upon the point of law; for they have doubtless a just respect for his opinion as a lawyer, as well as for his bravery as a soldier. They know he has read Blackstone and the constitution, as well as Turenne and Vauban. They would ask him, therefore, something concerning their rights in this matter. They would inquire whether it was not somewhat dangerous to resist a law of the United States. What would be the nature of their offence, they would wish to learn, if they, by military force and array, resisted the execution in Carolina of a law of the United States, and it should turn out, after all, that the law was constitutional. He would answer, of course, treason. No lawyer could give any other answer. John Fries, he would tell them, had learned that some years ago. How, then, they would ask, do you propose to defend us? We are not afraid of bullets, but treason has a way of taking people off that we do not much relish. How do you propose to defend us? “Look at my floating banner,” he would reply; “see there the nullifying law!” Is it your opinion, gallant commander, they would then say, that if we should be indicted for treason, that same floating banner of yours would make a good plea in bar? “South Carolina is a sovereign state,” he would reply. That is true; but would the judge admit our plea? “These tariff laws,” he would repeat, “are unconstitutional, palpably, deliberately, dangerously.” That all may be so; but if the tribunals should not happen to be of that opinion, shall we swing for it? We are ready to die for our country, but it is rather an awkward business, this dying without touching the ground. After all, this is a sort of hemp-tax, worse than any part of the tariff.

Mr. President, the honorable gentleman would be in a dilemma like that of another great general. He would have a knot before him which he could not untie. He must cut it with his sword. He must say to his followers, Defend yourselves with your bayonets; and this is war—civil war.

Direct collision, therefore, between force and force, is the unavoidable result of that remedy for the revision of unconstitutional laws which the gentleman contends for. It must happen in the very first case to which it is applied. Is not this the plain result? To resist, by force, the execution of a law, generally, is treason. Can the courts of the United States take notice of the indulgence of a state to commit treason? The common saying, that a state cannot commit treason herself, is nothing to the purpose. Can it authorize others to do it? If John Fries had produced an act of Pennsylvania, annulling the law of Congress, would it have helped his case? Talk about it as we will, these doctrines go the length of revolution. They are incompatible with any peaceable administration of the government. They lead directly to disunion and civil commotion; and therefore it is, that at the commencement, when they are first found to be maintained by respectable men, and in a tangible form, that I enter my public protest against them all.

The honorable gentleman argues, that if this government be the sole judge of the extent of its own powers, whether that right of judging be in Congress or the Supreme Court, it equally subverts state sovereignty. This the gentleman sees, or thinks he sees, although he cannot perceive how the right of judging in this matter, if left to the exercise of state legislatures, has any tendency to subvert the government of the Union. The gentleman’s opinion may be that the right ought not to have been lodged with the general government; he may like better such a constitution as we should have under the right of state interference; but I ask him to meet me on the plain matter of fact—I ask him to meet me on the constitution itself—I ask him if the power is not there—clearly and visibly found there.

But, sir, what is this danger, and what the grounds of it? Let it be remembered, that the constitution of the United States is not unalterable. It is to continue in its present form no longer than the people who established it shall choose to continue it. If they shall become convinced that they have made an injudicious or inexpedient partition and distribution of power between the state governments and the general government, they can alter that distribution at will.

If anything be found in the national constitution, either by original provision or subsequent interpretation, which ought not to be in it, the people know how to get rid of it. If any construction be established, unacceptable to them, so as to become, practically, a part of the constitution, they will amend it at their own sovereign pleasure. But while the people choose to maintain it as it is, while they are satisfied with it, and refuse to change it, who has given, or who can give, to the state legislatures a right to alter it, either by interference, construction, or otherwise? Gentlemen do not seem to recollect that the people have any power to do anything for themselves; they imagine there is no safety for them any longer than they are under the close guardianship of the state legislatures. Sir, the people have not trusted their safety, in regard to the general constitution, to these hands they have required other security, and taken other bonds. They have chosen to trust themselves, first to the plain words of the instrument, and to such construction as the government itself, in doubtful cases, should put on its own powers, under their oaths of office, and subject to their responsibility to them; just as the people of a state trust their own state governments with a similar power. Secondly, they have reposed their trust in the efficacy of frequent elections, and in their own power to remove their own servants and agents, whenever they see cause. Thirdly, they have reposed trust in the judicial power, which, in order that it might be trustworthy, they have made as respectable, as disinterested, and as independent as practicable. Fourthly, they have seen fit to rely, in case of necessity, or high expediency, on their known and admitted power to alter or amend the constitution, peaceably and quietly, whenever experience shall point out defects or imperfections. And finally, the people of the United States have at no time, in no way, directly or indirectly, authorized any state legislature to construe or interpret their instrument of government; much less to interfere, by their own power, to arrest its course and operation.

If sir, the people, in these respects, had done otherwise than they have done, their constitution could neither have been preserved, nor would it have been worth preserving. And if its plain provision shall now be disregarded, and these new doctrines interpolated in it, it will become as feeble and helpless a being as enemies, whether early or more recent, could possibly desire. It will exist in every state, but as a poor dependant on state permission. It must borrow leave to be, and will be, no longer than state pleasure, or state discretion, sees fit to grant the indulgence, and to prolong its poor existence.

But, sir, although there are fears, there are hopes also. The people have preserved this, their own chosen constitution, for forty years, and have seen their happiness, prosperity, and renown grow with its growth and strengthen with its strength. They are now, generally, strongly attached to it. Overthrown by direct assault it cannot be; evaded, undermined, NULLIFIED, it will not be, if we, and those who shall succeed us here, as agents and representatives of the people, shall conscientiously and vigilantly discharge the two great branches of our public trust—faithfully to preserve and wisely to administer it.

Mr. President, I have thus stated the reasons of my dissent to the doctrines which have been advanced and maintained. I am conscious of having detained you, and the Senate, much too long. I was drawn into the debate with no previous deliberation such as is suited to the discussion of so grave and important a subject. But it is a subject of which my heart is full, and I have not been willing to suppress the utterance of its spontaneous sentiments.

I cannot, even now, persuade myself to relinquish it, without expressing once more, my deep conviction, that since it respects nothing less than the union of the states, it is of most vital and essential importance to the public happiness. I profess, sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in view the prosperity and honor of the whole country, and the preservation of our Federal Union. It is to that Union we owe our safety at home and our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union we are chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country. That Union we reached only by the discipline of our virtues in the severe school of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its benign influences, these great interests immediately awoke, as from the dead, and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its duration has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings; and although our territory has stretched out wider and wider, and our population spread farther and farther, they have not outrun its protection or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious fountain of national, social, personal happiness. I have not allowed myself, sir, 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 best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it shall be broken up and destroyed. While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond 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 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? nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards; but every where, 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!

John C. Calhoun on the Rights of the States.

Delivered July 26, 1831.

The question of the relation which the states and general government bear to each other, is not one of recent origin. From the commencement of our system, it has divided public sentiment. Even in the convention, while the Constitution was struggling into existence, there were two parties, as to what this relation should be, whose different sentiments constituted no small impediment in forming that instrument. After the general government went into operation, experience soon proved that the question had not terminated with the labors of the convention. The great struggle that preceded the political revolution of 1801, which brought Mr. Jefferson into power, turned essentially on it; and the doctrines and arguments on both sides were embodied and ably sustained; on the one, in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions and the report to the Virginia legislature; and on the other, in the replies of the legislature of Massachusetts and some of the other states. These resolutions and this report, with the decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania about the same time (particularly in the case of Cobbett, delivered by Chief Justice McKean, and concurred in by the whole bench), contain what I believe to be the true doctrine on this important subject. I refer to them in order to avoid the necessity of presenting my views, with the reasons in support of them in detail.

As my object is simply to state my opinions, I might pause with this reference to documents that so fully and ably state all the points immediately connected with this deeply important subject; but as there are many who may not have the opportunity or leisure to refer to them, and, as it is possible, however clear they may be, that different persons may place different interpretations on their meaning, I will, in order that my sentiments may be fully known, and to avoid all ambiguity, proceed to state, summarily, the doctrines which I conceive they embrace.

The great and leading principle is, that the general government emanated from the people of the several states, forming distinct political communities, and acting in their separate and sovereign capacity, and not from all of the people forming one aggregate political community; that the Constitution of the United States is in fact a compact, to which each state is a party, in the character already described; and that the several states, or parties, have a right to judge of its infractions, and in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of power not delegated, they have the right, in the last resort, to use the language of the Virginia resolutions; “to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them.” This right of interposition thus solemnly asserted by the state of Virginia, be it called what it may—state right, veto, nullification, or by any other name—I conceive to be the fundamental principle of our system, resting on facts, historically as certain as our revolution itself, and deductions as simple and demonstrative as that of any political or moral truth whatever; and I firmly believe that on its recognition depends the stability and safety of our political institutions.

I am not ignorant that those opposed to the doctrine have always, now and formerly, regarded it in a very different light, as anarchical and revolutionary. Could I believe such in fact to be its tendency, to me it would be no recommendation. I yield to none, I trust, in a deep and sincere attachment to our political institutions, and the union of these states. I never breathed an opposite sentiment; but, on the contrary, I have ever considered them the great instruments of preserving our liberty, and promoting the happiness of ourselves and our posterity; and next to these, I have ever held them most dear. Nearly half my life has passed in the service of the Union, and whatever public reputation I have acquired, is indissolubly identified with it. To be too national has, indeed, been considered, by many, even of my friends, to be my greatest political fault. With these strong feelings of attachment, I have examined, with the utmost care, the bearing of the doctrine in question; and so far from anarchical or revolutionary, I solemnly believe it to be the only solid foundation of our system, and of the Union itself, and that the opposite doctrine, which denies to the states the right of protecting their reserved powers, and which would vest in the general government (it matters not through what department) the right of determining exclusively and finally the powers delegated to it, is incompatible with the sovereignty of the states, and of the Constitution itself, considered as the basis of a Federal Union. As strong as this language is, it is not stronger than that used by the illustrious Jefferson, who said, to give to the general government the final and exclusive right to judge of its powers, is to make “its discretion and not the Constitution the measure of its powers;” and that “in all cases of compact between parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the operation, as of the mode and measure of redress.” Language cannot be more explicit; nor can higher authority be adduced.

That different opinions are entertained on this subject, I consider but as an additional evidence of the great diversity of the human intellect. Had not able, experienced, and patriotic individuals, for whom I have the highest respect, taken different views, I would have thought the right too clear to admit of doubt; but I am taught by this, as well as by many similar instances, to treat with deference opinions differing from my own. The error may possibly be with me; but, if so, I can only say, that after the most mature and conscientious examination, I have not been able to detect it. But with all proper deference, I must think that theirs is the error, who deny what seems to be an essential attribute of the conceded sovereignty of the states; and who attribute to the general government a right utterly incompatible with what all acknowledge to be its limited and restricted character; an error originating principally, as I must think, in not duly reflecting on the nature of our institutions, and on what constitutes the only rational object of all political constitutions.

It has been well said by one of the most sagacious men of antiquity, that the object of a constitution is to restrain the government, as that of laws is to restrain individuals. The remark is correct, nor is it less true where the government is vested in a majority, than where it is in a single or a few individuals; in a republic, than a monarchy or aristocracy. No one can have a higher respect for the maxim that the majority ought to govern than I have, taken in its proper sense, subject to the restrictions imposed by the Constitution, and confined to subjects in which every portion of the community have similar interests; but it is a great error to suppose, as many do, that the right of a majority to govern is a natural and not a conventional right; and, therefore, absolute and unlimited. By nature every individual has the right to govern himself; and governments, whether founded on majorities or minorities, must derive their right from the assent, expressed or implied, of the governed, and be subject to such limitations as they may impose. Where the interests are the same, that is, where the laws that may benefit one will benefit all, or the reverse, it is just and proper to place them under the control of the majority; but where they are dissimilar, so that the law that may benefit one portion may be ruinous to another, it would be, on the contrary, unjust and absurd to subject them to its will: and such I conceive to be the theory on which our Constitution rests.

That such dissimilarity of interests may exist it is impossible to doubt. They are to be found in every community, in a greater or less degree, however small or homogeneous, and they constitute, everywhere, the great difficulty of forming and preserving free institutions. To guard against the unequal action of the laws, when applied to dissimilar and opposing interests, is in fact what mainly renders a constitution indispensable; to overlook which in reasoning on our Constitution, would be to omit the principal element by which to determine its character. Were there no contrariety of interests, nothing would be more simple and easy than to form and preserve free institutions. The right of suffrage alone would be a sufficient guarantee. It is the conflict of opposing interests which renders it the most difficult work of man.

Where the diversity of interests exists in separate and distinct classes of the community, as is the case in England, and was formerly the case in Sparta, Rome, and most of the free states of antiquity, the rational constitutional provision is, that each should be represented in the government as a separate estate, with a distinct voice, and a negative on the acts of its co-estates, in order to check their encroachments. In England the constitution has assumed expressly this form, while in the governments of Sparta and Rome the same thing was effected, under different but not much less efficacious forms. The perfection of their organization, in this particular, was that which gave to the constitutions of these renowned states all of their celebrity, which secured their liberty for so many centuries, and raised them to so great a height of power and prosperity. Indeed, a constitutional provision giving to the great and separate interests of the community the right of self-protection, must appear to those who will duly reflect on the subject, not less essential to the preservation of liberty than the right of suffrage itself. They in fact have a common object, to effect which the one is as necessary as the other—to secure responsibility; that is, that those who make and execute the laws should be accountable to those on whom the laws in reality operate; the only solid and durable foundation of liberty. If without the right to suffrage our rulers would oppress us, so without the right of self-protection, the major would equally oppress the minor interests of the community. The absence of the former would make the governed the slaves of the rulers, and of the latter the feebler interests the victim of the stronger.

Happily for us we have no artificial and separate classes of society. We have wisely exploded all such distinctions; but we are not, on that account, exempt from all contrariety of interests, as the present distracted and dangerous condition of our country unfortunately but too clearly proves. With us they are almost exclusively geographical, resulting mainly from difference of climate, soil, situation, industry, and production, but are not, therefore, less necessary to be protected by an adequate constitutional provision than where the distinct interests exist in separate classes. The necessity is, in truth, greater, as such separate and dissimilar geographical interests are more liable to come into conflict, and more dangerous when in that state than those of any other description; so much so, that ours is the first instance on record where they have not formed in an extensive territory separate and independent communities, or subjected the whole to despotic sway. That such may not be our unhappy fate also, must be the sincere prayer of every lover of his country.

So numerous and diversified are the interests of our country, that they could not be fairly represented in a single government, organized so as to give to each great and leading interest a separate and distinct voice, as in governments to which I have referred. A plan was adopted better suited to our situation, but perfectly novel in its character. The powers of the government were divided, not as heretofore, in reference to classes, but geographically. One general government was formed for the whole, to which was delegated all of the powers supposed to be necessary to regulate the interests common to all of the states, leaving others subject to the separate control of the states, being from their local and peculiar character such that they could not be subject to the will of the majority of the whole Union, without the certain hazard of injustice and oppression. It was thus that the interests of the whole were subjected, as they ought to be, to the will of the whole, while the peculiar and local interests were left under the control of the states separately, to whose custody only they could be safely confided. This distribution of power, settled solemnly by a constitutional compact, to which all of the states are parties, constitutes the peculiar character and excellence of our political system. It is truly and emphatically American, without example or parallel.

To realize its perfection, we must view the general government and the states as a whole, each in its proper sphere, sovereign and independent; each perfectly adapted to their respective objects; the states acting separately, representing and protecting the local and peculiar interests; acting jointly, through one general government, with the weight respectively assigned to each by the Constitution, representing and protecting the interest of the whole, and thus perfecting, by an admirable but simple arrangement, the great principle of representation and responsibility, without which no government can be free or just. To preserve this sacred distribution as originally settled, by coercing each to move in its prescribed orb, is the great and difficult problem, on the solution of which the duration of our Constitution, of our Union, and, in all probability our liberty, depends. How is this to be effected?

The question is new when applied to our peculiar political organization, where the separate and conflicting interests of society are represented by distinct but connected governments; but is in reality an old question under a new form, long since perfectly solved. Whenever separate and dissimilar interests have been separately represented in any government; whenever the sovereign power has been divided in its exercise, the experience and wisdom of ages have devised but one mode by which such political organization can be preserved; the mode adopted in England, and by all governments, ancient or modern, blessed with constitutions deserving to be called free; to give to each co-estate the right to judge of its powers, with a negative or veto on the acts of the others, in order to protect against encroachments the interests it particularly represents; a principle which all of our constitutions recognize in the distribution of power among their respective departments, as essential to maintain the independence of each, but which, to all who will duly reflect on the subject, must appear far more essential, for the same object, in that great and fundamental distribution of powers between the states and general government. So essential is the principle, that to withhold the right from either, where the sovereign power is divided, is, in fact, to annul the division itself, and to consolidate in the one left in the exclusive possession of the right, all of the powers of the government; for it is not possible to distinguish practically between a government having all power, and one having the right to take what powers it pleases. Nor does it in the least vary the principle, whether the distribution of power between co-estates, as in England, or between distinctly organized but connected governments, as with us. The reason is the same in both cases, while the necessity is greater in our case, as the danger of conflict is greater where the interests of a society are divided geographically than in any other, as has already been shown.

These truths do seem to me to be incontrovertible; and I am at a loss to understand how any one, who has maturely reflected on the nature of our institutions, or who has read history or studied the principles of free government to any purpose, can call them in question. The explanation must, it appears to me, be sought in the fact, that in every free state, there are those who look more to the necessity of maintaining power, than guarding against its abuses. I do not intend reproach, but simply to state a fact apparently necessary to explain the contrariety of opinions, among the intelligent, where the abstract consideration of the subject would seem scarcely to admit of doubt. If such be the true cause, I must think the fear of weakening the government too much in this case to be in a great measure unfounded, or at least that the danger is much less from that than the opposite side. I do not deny that a power of so high a nature may be abused by a state, but when I reflect that the states unanimously called the general government into existence with all of its powers, which they freely surrendered on their part, under the conviction that their common peace, safety and prosperity required it; that they are bound together by a common origin, and the recollection of common suffering and common triumph in the great and splendid achievement of their independence; and the strongest feelings of our nature, and among them, the love of national power and distinction, are on the side of the Union; it does seem to me, that the fear which would strip the states of their sovereignty, and degrade them, in fact, to mere dependent corporations, lest they should abuse a right indispensable to the peaceable protection of those interests which they reserved under their own peculiar guardianship when they created the general government, is unnatural and unreasonable. If those who voluntarily created the system, cannot be trusted to preserve it, what power can?

So far from extreme danger, I hold that there never was a free state, in which this great conservative principle, indispensable in all, was ever so safely lodged. In others, when the co-estates, representing the dissimilar and conflicting interests of the community, came into contact, the only alternative was compromise, submission or force. Not so in ours. Should the general government and a state come into conflict, we have a higher remedy; the power which called the general government into existence, which gave it all its authority, and can enlarge, contract, or abolish its powers at its pleasure, may be invoked. The states themselves may be appealed to, three-fourths of which, in fact, form a power, whose decrees are the constitution itself, and whose voice can silence all discontent. The utmost extent then of the power is, that a state acting in its sovereign capacity, as one of the parties to the constitutional compact, may compel the government, created by that compact, to submit a question touching its infraction to the parties who created it; to avoid the supposed dangers of which, it is proposed to resort to the novel, the hazardous, and, I must add, fatal project of giving to the general government the sole and final right of interpreting the Constitution, thereby reserving the whole system, making that instrument the creature of its will, instead of a rule of action impressed on it at its creation, and annihilating in fact the authority which imposed it, and from which the government itself derives its existence.

That such would be the result, were the right in question vested in the legislative or executive branch of the government, is conceded by all. No one has been so hardy as to assert that Congress or the President ought to have the right, or to deny that, if vested finally and exclusively in either, the consequences which I have stated would not necessarily follow; but its advocates have been reconciled to the doctrine, on the supposition that there is one department of the general government, which, from its peculiar organization, affords an independent tribunal through which the government may exercise the high authority which is the subject of consideration, with perfect safety to all.

I yield, I trust, to few in my attachment to the judiciary department. I am fully sensible of its importance, and would maintain it to the fullest extent in its constitutional powers and independence; but it is impossible for me to believe that it was ever intended by the Constitution, that it should exercise the power in question, or that it is competent to do so, and, if it were, that it would be a safe depository of the power.

Its powers are judicial and not political, and are expressly confined by the Constitution “to all cases in law and equity arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and the treaties made, or which shall be made, under its authority;” and which I have high authority in asserting, excludes political questions, and comprehends those only where there are parties amenable to the process of the court. Nor is its incompetency less clear, than its want of constitutional authority. There may be many and the most dangerous infractions on the part of Congress, of which it is conceded by all, the court, as a judicial tribunal, cannot from its nature take cognisance. The tariff itself is a strong case in point; and the reason applies equally to all others, where Congress perverts a power from an object intended to one not intended, the most insidious and dangerous of all the infractions; and which may be extended to all of its powers, more especially to the taxing and appropriating. But supposing it competent to take cognisance of all infractions of every description, the insuperable objection still remains, that it would not be a safe tribunal to exercise the power in question.

It is an universal and fundamental political principle, that the power to protect, can safely be confided only to those interested in protecting, or their responsible agents—a maxim not less true in private than in public affairs. The danger in our system is, that the general government, which represents the interests of the whole, may encroach on the states, which represent the peculiar and local interests, or that the latter may encroach on the former.

In examining this point, we ought not to forget that the government, through all of its departments, judicial as well as others, is administered by delegated and responsible agents; and that the power which really controls ultimately all the movements, is not in the agents, but those who elect or appoint them. To understand then its real character, and what would be the action of the system in any supposable case, we must raise our view from the mere agents, to this high controlling power which finally impels every movement of the machine. By doing so, we shall find all under the control of the will of a majority, compounded of the majority of the states, taken as corporate bodies, and the majority of the people of the states estimated in federal numbers. These united constitute the real and final power, which impels and directs the movements of the general government. The majority of the states elect the majority of the Senate; of the people of the states, that of the House of Representatives; the two united, the President; and the President and a majority of the Senate appoint the judges, a majority of whom and a majority of the Senate and the House with the President, really exercise all of the powers of the government with the exception of the cases where the Constitution requires a greater number than a majority. The judges are, in fact, as truly the judicial representatives of this united majority, as the majority of Congress itself, or the President, is its legislative or executive representative; and to confide the power to the judiciary to determine finally and conclusively what powers are delegated and what reserved, would be in reality to confide it to the majority, whose agents they are, and by whom they can be controlled in various ways; and, of course, to subject (against the fundamental principle of our system, and all sound political reasoning) the reserved powers of the states, with all of the local and peculiar interests they were intended to protect, to the will of the very majority against which the protection was intended. Nor will the tenure by which the judges hold their office, however valuable the provision in many other respects, materially vary the case. Its highest possible effect would be to retard, and not finally to resist, the will of a dominant majority.

But it is useless to multiply arguments. Were it possible that reason could settle a question where the passions and interests of men are concerned, this point would have been long since settled for ever, by the state of Virginia. The report of her legislature, to which I have already referred, has really, in my opinion, placed it beyond controversy. Speaking in reference to this subject, it says, “It has been objected” (to the right of a state to interpose for the protection of her reserved rights), “that the judicial authority is to be regarded as the sole expositor of the Constitution; on this subject it might be observed first that there may be instances of usurped powers which the forms of the Constitution could never draw within the control of the judicial department; secondly, that if the decision of the judiciary be raised above the sovereign parties to the Constitution, the decisions of the other departments, not carried by the forms of the Constitution before the judiciary, must be equally authoritative and final with the decision of that department. But the proper answer to the objection is, that the resolution of the General Assembly relates to those great and extraordinary cases, in which all of the forms of the Constitution may prove ineffectual against infraction dangerous to the essential rights of the parties to it. The resolution supposes that dangerous powers not delegated, may not only be usurped and executed by the other departments, but that the judicial department may also exercise or sanction dangerous powers beyond the grant of the Constitution, and consequently that the ultimate right of the parties to the Constitution to judge whether the compact has been dangerously violated, must extend to violations by one delegated authority, as well as by another—by the judiciary, as well as by the executive or legislative.”

Against these conclusive arguments, as they seem to me, it is objected, that if one of the parties has the right to judge of infractions of the Constitution, so has the other, and that consequently in cases of contested powers between a state and the general government, each would have a right to maintain its opinion, as is the case when sovereign powers differ in the construction of treaties or compacts, and that of course it would come to be a mere question of force. The error is in the assumption that the general government is a party to the constitutional compact. The states, as has been shown, formed the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities. The general government is but its creature; and though in reality a government with all the rights and authority which belong to any other government, within the orb of its powers, it is, nevertheless, a government emanating from a compact between sovereigns, and partaking, in its nature and object, of the character of a joint commission, appointed to superintend and administer the interests in which all are jointly concerned, but having, beyond its proper sphere, no more power than if it did not exist. To deny this would be to deny the most incontestable facts, and the clearest conclusions; while to acknowledge its truth, is to destroy utterly the objection that the appeal would be to force, in the case supposed. For if each party has a right to judge, then under our system of government, the final cognisance of a question of contested power would be in the states, and not in the general government. It would be the duty of the latter, as in all similar cases of a contest between one or more of the principals and a joint commission or agency, to refer the contest to the principals themselves. Such are the plain dictates of reason and analogy both. On no sound principle can the agents have a right to final cognisance, as against the principals, much less to use force against them, to maintain their construction of their powers. Such a right would be monstrous; and has never, heretofore, been claimed in similar cases.

That the doctrine is applicable to the case of a contested power between the states and the general government, we have the authority not only of reason and analogy, but of the distinguished statesman already referred to. Mr. Jefferson, at a late period of his life, after long experience and mature reflection, says, “With respect to our state and federal governments, I do not think their relations are correctly understood by foreigners. They suppose the former subordinate to the latter. This is not the case. They are co-ordinate departments of one simple and integral whole. But you may ask if the two departments should claim each the same subject of power, where is the umpire to decide between them? In cases of little urgency or importance, the prudence of both parties will keep them aloof from the questionable ground; but if it can neither be avoided nor compromised, a convention of the states must be called to ascribe the doubtful power to that department which they may think best.”—It is thus that our Constitution, by authorizing amendments, and by prescribing the authority and mode of making them, has by a simple contrivance, with its characteristic wisdom, provided a power which, in the last resort, supersedes effectually the necessity and even the pretext for force; a power to which none can fairly object; with which the interests of all are safe; which can definitely close all controversies in the only effectual mode, by freeing the compact of every defect and uncertainty, by an amendment of the instrument itself. It is impossible for human wisdom, in a system like ours, to devise another mode which shall be safe and effectual, and at the same time consistent with what are the relations and acknowledged powers of the two great departments of our government. It gives a beauty and security peculiar to our system, which, if duly appreciated, will transmit its blessings to the remotest generations; but, if not, our splendid anticipations of the future will prove but an empty dream. Stripped of all its covering, and the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or a consolidated government: a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting ultimately on the solid basis of the sovereignty of the states, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice and violence, and force, must finally prevail. Let it never be forgotten, that where the majority rules, the minority is the subject; and that if we should absurdly attribute to the former the exclusive right of construing the Constitution, there would be in fact between the sovereign and subject, under such a government, no constitution; or at least nothing deserving the name, or serving the legitimate object of so sacred an instrument.

How the states are to exercise this high power of interposition which constitutes so essential a portion of their reserved rights that it cannot be delegated without an entire surrender of their sovereignty, and converting our system from a federal into a consolidated government, is a question that the states only are competent to determine. The arguments which prove that they possess the power, equally prove that they are, in the language of Jefferson, “the rightful judges of the mode and measure of redress.” But the spirit of forbearance, as well as the nature of the right itself, forbids a recourse to it, except in cases of dangerous infractions of the Constitution; and then only in the last resort, when all reasonable hope of relief from the ordinary action of the government has failed; when, if the right to interpose did not exist, the alternative would be submission and oppression on the one side, or resistance by force on the other. That our system should afford, in such extreme cases, an intermediate point between these dire alternatives, by which the government may be brought to a pause, and thereby an interval obtained to compromise differences, or, if impracticable, be compelled to submit the question to a constitutional adjustment, through an appeal to the states themselves, is an evidence of its high wisdom; an element not, as is supposed by some, of weakness, but of strength; not of anarchy or revolution, but of peace and safety. Its general recognition would of itself, in a great measure, if not altogether, supersede the necessity of its exercise, by impressing on the movements of the government that moderation and justice so essential to harmony and peace, in a country of such vast extent and diversity of interests as ours; and would, if controversy should come, turn the resentment of the aggrieved from the system to those who had abused its powers (a point all important), and cause them to seek redress, not in revolution or overthrow, but in reformation. It is, in fact, properly understood, a substitute where the alternative would be force, tending to prevent, and if that fails, to correct peaceably the aberrations to which all political systems are liable, and which, if permitted to accumulate, without correction, must finally end in a general catastrophe.

Speech of Henry Clay

In Defence of the American System in which is given the Previous History of Tariff Contests in the Senate of the United States, February 2d, 3d and 6th, 1832.

In one sentiment, Mr. President, expressed by the honorable gentleman from South Carolina, (General Hayne,) though perhaps not in the sense intended by him, I entirely concur. I agree with him, that the decision on the system of policy embraced in this debate, involves the future destiny of this growing country. One way I verily believe, it would lead to deep and general distress, general bankruptcy and national ruin, without benefit to any part of the Union: the other, the existing prosperity will be preserved and augmented, and the nation will continue rapidly to advance in wealth, power, and greatness, without prejudice to any section of the confederacy.

Thus viewing the question, I stand here as the humble but zealous advocate, not of the interests of one State, or seven States only, but of the whole Union. And never before have I felt more intensely, the overpowering weight of that share of responsibility which belongs to me in these deliberations. Never before have I had more occasion than I now have to lament my want of those intellectual powers, the possession of which might enable me to unfold to this Senate, and to illustrate to this people great truths, intimately connected with the lasting welfare of my country. I should, indeed, sink overwhelmed and subdued beneath the appalling magnitude of the task which lies before me, if I did not feel myself sustained and fortified by a thorough consciousness of the justness of the cause which I have espoused, and by a persuasion I hope not presumptuous, that it has the approbation of that Providence who has so often smiled upon these United States.

Eight years ago it was my painful duty to present to the other House of Congress, an unexaggerated picture of the general distress pervading the whole land. We must all yet remember some of its frightful features. We all know that the people were then oppressed and borne down by an enormous load of debt; that the value of property was at the lowest point of depression; that ruinous sales and sacrifices were everywhere made of real estate; that stop laws, and relief laws, and paper money were adopted to save the people from impending destruction; that a deficit in the public revenue existed, which compelled government to seize upon, and divert from its legitimate object the appropriations to the sinking fund, to redeem the national debt; and that our commerce and navigation were threatened with a complete paralysis. In short, sir, if I were to select any term of seven years since the adoption of the present constitution which exhibited a scene of the most widespread dismay and desolation, it would be exactly that term of seven years which immediately preceded the establishment of the tariff of 1824.

I have now to perform the more pleasing task of exhibiting an imperfect sketch of the existing state of the unparalleled prosperity of the country. On a general survey, we behold cultivation extended, the arts flourishing, the face of the country improved, our people fully and profitably employed, and the public countenance exhibiting tranquillity, contentment and happiness. And if we descend into particulars, we have the agreeable contemplation of a people out of debt, land rising slowly in value, but in a secure and salutary degree; a ready though not extravagant market for all the surplus productions of our industry; innumerable flocks and herds browsing and gamboling on ten thousand hills and plains, covered with rich and verdant grasses; our cities expanded, and whole villages springing up, as it were, by enchantment; our exports and imports increased and increasing; our tonnage, foreign and coastwise, swelling and fully occupied; the rivers of our interior animated by the perpetual thunder and lightning of countless steam-boats; the currency sound and abundant; the public debt of two wars nearly redeemed; and, to crown all, the public treasury overflowing, embarrassing Congress, not to find subjects of taxation, but to select the objects which shall be liberated from the impost. If the term of seven years were to be selected, of the greatest prosperity which this people have enjoyed since the establishment of their present constitution, it would be exactly that period of seven years which immediately followed the passage of the tariff of 1824.

This transformation of the condition of the country from gloom and distress to brightness and prosperity, has been mainly the work of American legislation, fostering American industry, instead of allowing it to be controlled by foreign legislation, cherishing foreign industry. The foes of the American System, in 1824, with great boldness and confidence, predicted, 1st. The ruin of the public revenue, and the creation of a necessity to resort to direct taxation. The gentleman from South Carolina, (General Hayne,) I believe, thought that the tariff of 1824 would operate a reduction of revenue to the large amount of eight millions of dollars. 2d. The destruction of our navigation. 3d. The desolation of commercial cities. And 4th. The augmentation of the price of objects of consumption, and further decline in that of the articles of our exports. Every prediction which they made has failed—utterly failed. Instead of the ruin of the public revenue, with which they then sought to deter us from the adoption of the American System, we are now threatened with its subversion, by the vast amount of the public revenue produced by that system. Every branch of our navigation has increased.

* * * * *

Whilst we thus behold the entire failure of all that was foretold against the system, it is a subject of just felicitation to its friends, that all their anticipations of its benefits have been fulfilled, or are in progress of fulfillment. The honorable gentleman from South Carolina has made an allusion to a speech made by me, in 1824, in the other House, in support of the tariff, and to which, otherwise, I should not have particularly referred. But I would ask any one, who can now command the courage to peruse that long production, what principle there laid down is not true? what prediction then made has been falsified by practical experience?

It is now proposed to abolish the system, to which we owe so much of the public prosperity, and it is urged that the arrival of the period of the redemption of the public debt has been confidently looked to as presenting a suitable occasion to rid the country of evils with which the system is alleged to be fraught. Not an inattentive observer of passing events, I have been aware that, among those who were most early pressing the payment of the public debt, and upon that ground were opposing appropriations to other great interests, there were some who cared less about the debt than the accomplishment of other objects. But the people of the United States have not coupled the payment of their public debt with the destruction of the protection of their industry, against foreign laws and foreign industry. They have been accustomed to regard the extinction of the public debt as relief from a burthen, and not as the infliction of a curse. If it is to be attended or followed by the subversion of the American system, and an exposure of our establishments and our productions to the unguarded consequences of the selfish policy of foreign powers, the payment of the public debt will be the bitterest of curses. Its fruit will be like the fruit

“Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden.”

If the system of protection be founded on principles erroneous in theory, pernicious in practice—above all if it be unconstitutional, as is alleged, it ought to be forthwith abolished, and not a vestige of it suffered to remain. But, before we sanction this sweeping denunciation, let us look a little at this system, its magnitude, its ramifications, its duration, and the high authorities which have sustained it. We shall see that its foes will have accomplished comparatively nothing, after having achieved their present aim of breaking down our iron-foundries, our woolen, cotton, and hemp manufactories, and our sugar plantations. The destruction of these would, undoubtedly, lead to the sacrifice of immense capital, the ruin of many thousands of our fellow-citizens, and incalculable loss to the whole community. But their prostration would not disfigure, nor produce greater effect upon the whole system of protection, in all its branches, than the destruction of the beautiful domes upon the capitol would occasion to the magnificent edifice which they surmount. Why, sir, there is scarcely an interest, scarcely a vocation in society, which is not embraced by the beneficence of this system.

It comprehends our coasting tonnage and trade, from which all foreign tonnage is absolutely excluded.

It includes all our foreign tonnage, with the inconsiderable exception made by treaties of reciprocity with a few foreign powers.

It embraces our fisheries, and all our hardy and enterprising fishermen.

It extends to almost every mechanic art: * * *

It extends to all lower Louisiana, the Delta of which might as well be submerged again in the Gulf of Mexico, from which it has been a gradual conquest, as now to be deprived of the protecting duty upon its great staple.

It affects the cotton planter himself, and the tobacco planter, both of whom enjoy protection.

Such are some of the items of this vast system of protection, which it is now proposed to abandon. We might well pause and contemplate, if human imagination could conceive the extent of mischief and ruin from its total overthrow, before we proceed to the work of destruction. Its duration is worthy also of serious consideration. Not to go behind the constitution, its date is coeval with that instrument. It began on the ever memorable fourth day of July—the fourth day of July, 1789. The second act which stands recorded in the statute book, bearing the illustrious signature of George Washington, laid the corner-stone of the whole system. That there might be no mistake about the matter, it was then solemnly proclaimed to the American people and to the world, that it was necessary for “the encouragement and protection of manufactures,” that duties should be laid. It is in vain to urge the small amount of the measure of the protection then extended. The great principle was then established by the fathers of the constitution, with the father of his country at their head. And it cannot now be questioned, that, if the government had not then been new and the subject untried, a greater measure of protection would have been applied, if it had been supposed necessary. Shortly after, the master minds of Jefferson and Hamilton were brought to act on this interesting subject. Taking views of it appertaining to the departments of foreign affairs and of the treasury, which they respectively filled, they presented, severally, reports which yet remain monuments of their profound wisdom, and came to the same conclusion of protection to American industry. Mr. Jefferson argued that foreign restrictions, foreign prohibitions, and foreign high duties, ought to be met at home by American restrictions, American prohibitions, and American high duties. Mr. Hamilton, surveying the entire ground, and looking at the inherent nature of the subject, treated it with an ability, which, if ever equalled, has not been surpassed, and earnestly recommended protection.

The wars of the French revolution commenced about this period, and streams of gold poured into the United States through a thousand channels, opened or enlarged by the successful commerce which our neutrality enabled us to prosecute. We forgot or overlooked, in the general prosperity, the necessity of encouraging our domestic manufactures. Then came the edicts of Napoleon, and the British orders in council; and our embargo, non-intercourse, non-importation, and war, followed in rapid succession. These national measures, amounting to a total suspension, for the period of their duration, of our foreign commerce, afforded the most efficacious encouragement to American manufactures; and accordingly they everywhere sprung up. While these measures of restriction, and this state of war continued, the manufacturers were stimulated in their enterprise by every assurance of support, by public sentiment, and by legislative resolves. It was about that period (1808) that South Carolina bore her high testimony to the wisdom of the policy, in an act of her legislature, the preamble of which, now before me, reads:

“Whereas, the establishment and encouragement of domestic manufactures, is conducive to the interests of a State, by adding new incentives to industry, and as being the means of disposing to advantage the surplus productions of the agriculturist: and whereas, in the present unexampled state of the world, their establishment in our country is not only expedient, but politic in rendering us independent of foreign nations.”

The legislature, not being competent to afford the most efficacious aid, by imposing duties on foreign rival articles, proceeded to incorporate a company.

Peace, under the treaty of Ghent, returned in 1815, but there did not return with it the golden days which preceded the edicts levelled at our commerce by Great Britain and France. It found all Europe tranquilly resuming the arts and business of civil life. It found Europe no longer the consumer of our surplus, and the employer of our navigation, but excluding, or heavily burthening, almost all the productions of our agriculture, and our rivals in manufactures, in navigation, and in commerce. It found our country, in short, in a situation totally different from all the past—new and untried. It became necessary to adapt our laws, and especially our laws of impost, to the new circumstances in which we found ourselves. Accordingly, that eminent and lamented citizen, then at the head of the treasury, (Mr. Dallas,) was required, by a resolution of the House of Representatives, under date the twenty-third day of February, 1815, to prepare and report to the succeeding session of Congress, a system of revenue conformable with the actual condition of the country. He had the circle of a whole year to perform the work, consulted merchants, manufacturers, and other practical men, and opened an extensive correspondence. The report which he made at the session of 1816, was the result of his inquiries and reflections, and embodies the principles which he thought applicable to the subject. It has been said, that the tariff of 1816 was a measure of mere revenue, and that it only reduced the war duties to a peace standard. It is true that the question then was, how much and in what way should the double duties of the war be reduced? Now, also, the question is, on what articles shall the duties be reduced so as to subject the amounts of the future revenue to the wants of the government? Then it was deemed an inquiry of the first importance, as it should be now, how, the reduction should be made, so as to secure proper encouragement to our domestic industry. That this was a leading object in the arrangement of the tariff of 1816, I well remember, and it is demonstrated by the language of Mr. Dallas. He says in his report:

“There are few, if any governments, which do not regard the establishment of domestic manufactures as a chief object of public policy. The United States have always so regarded it. * * * The demands of the country, while the acquisitions of supplies from foreign nations was either prohibited or impracticable, may have afforded sufficient inducement for this investment of capital, and this application of labor; but the inducement, in its necessary extent, must fail when the day of competition returns. Upon that change in the condition of the country, the preservation of the manufactures, which private citizens under favorable auspices have constituted the property of the nation, becomes a consideration of general policy, to be resolved by a recollection of past embarrassments; by the certainty of an increased difficulty of reinstating, upon any emergency, the manufactures which shall be allowed to perish and pass away,” &c.

The measure of protection which he proposed was not adopted, in regard to some leading articles, and there was great difficulty in ascertaining what it ought to have been. But the principle was then distinctly asserted and fully sanctioned.

The subject of the American system was again brought up in 1820, by the bill reported by the chairman of the committee of manufactures, now a member of the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the principle was successfully maintained by the representatives of the people; but the bill which they passed was defeated in the Senate. It was revived in 1824; the whole ground carefully and deliberately explored, and the bill then introduced, receiving all the sanctions of the constitution, became the law of the land. An amendment of the system was proposed in 1828, to the history of which I refer with no agreeable recollections. The bill of that year, in some of its provisions, was framed on principles directly adverse to the declared wishes of the friends of the policy of protection. I have heard, without vouching for the fact, that it was so framed, upon the advice of a prominent citizen, now abroad, with the view of ultimately defeating the bill, and with assurances that, being altogether unacceptable to the friends of the American system, the bill would be lost. Be that as it may, the most exceptional features of the bill were stamped upon it, against the earnest remonstrances of the friends of the system, by the votes of southern members, upon a principle, I think, as unsound in legislation as it is reprehensible in ethics. The bill was passed, notwithstanding all this, it having been deemed better to take the bad along with the good which it contained, than reject it altogether. Subsequent legislation has corrected the error then perpetrated, but still that measure is vehemently denounced by gentlemen who contributed to make it what it was.

Thus, sir, has this great system of protection been gradually built, stone upon stone, and step by step, from the fourth of July, 1789, down to the present period. In every stage of its progress it has received the deliberate sanction of Congress. A vast majority of the people of the United States has approved and continue to approve it. Every chief magistrate of the United States, from Washington to the present, in some form or other, has given to it the authority of his name; and however the opinions of the existing President are interpreted South of Mason’s and Dixon’s line, on the north they are at least understood to favor the establishment of a judicious tariff.

The question, therefore, which we are now called upon to determine, is not whether we shall establish a new and doubtful system of policy, just proposed, and for the first time presented to our consideration, but whether we shall break down and destroy a long established system, patiently and carefully built up and sanctioned, during a series of years, again and again, by the nation and its highest and most revered authorities. Are we not bound deliberately to consider whether we can proceed to this work of destruction without a violation of the public faith? The people of the United States have justly supposed that the policy of protecting their industry against foreign legislation and foreign industry was fully settled, not by a single act, but by repeated and deliberate acts of government, performed at distant and frequent intervals. In full confidence that the policy was firmly and unchangeably fixed, thousands upon thousands have invested their capital, purchased a vast amount of real and other estate, made permanent establishments, and accommodated their industry. Can we expose to utter and irretrievable ruin this countless multitude, without justly incurring the reproach of violating the national faith?

Such are the origin, duration, extent and sanctions of the policy which we are now called upon to subvert. Its beneficial effects, although they may vary in degree, have been felt in all parts of the Union. To none, I verily believe, has it been prejudicial. In the North, every where, testimonials are borne to the high prosperity which it has diffused. There, all branches of industry are animated and flourishing. Commerce, foreign and domestic, active; cities and towns springing up, enlarging and beautifying; navigation fully and profitably employed, and the whole face of the country smiling with improvement, cheerfulness and abundance.

* * * * *

When gentlemen have succeeded in their design of an immediate or gradual destruction of the American System, what is their substitute? Free trade! Free trade! The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child, in its nurse’s arms, for the moon, or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven. It never has existed, it never will exist. Trade implies, at least two parties. To be free, it should be fair, equal and reciprocal. But if we throw our ports wide open to the admission of foreign productions, free of all duty, what ports of any other foreign nation shall we find open to the free admission of our surplus produce? We may break down all barriers to free trade on our part, but the work will not be complete until foreign powers shall have removed theirs. There would be freedom on one side, and restrictions, prohibitions and exclusions on the other. The bolts, and the bars, and the chains of all other nations will remain undisturbed. It is, indeed, possible, that our industry and commerce would accommodate themselves to this unequal and unjust state of things; for, such is the flexibility of our nature, that it bends itself to all circumstances. The wretched prisoner incarcerated in a jail, after a long time becomes reconciled to his solitude, and regularly notches down the passing days of his confinement.

Gentlemen deceive themselves. It is not free trade that they are recommending to our acceptance. It is in effect, the British colonial system that we are invited to adopt; and, if their policy prevail, it will lead substantially to the re-colonization of these States, under the commercial dominion of Great Britain. And whom do we find some of the principal supporters, out of Congress, of this foreign system? Mr. President, there are some foreigners who always remain exotics, and never become naturalized in our country; whilst, happily, there are many others who readily attach themselves to our principles and our institutions. The honest, patient and industrious German readily unites with our people, establishes himself upon some of our fat land, fills his capacious barn, and enjoys in tranquillity, the abundant fruits which his diligence gathers around him, always ready to fly to the standard of his adopted country, or of its laws, when called by the duties of patriotism. The gay, the versatile, the philosophic Frenchman, accommodating himself cheerfully to all the vicissitudes of life, incorporates himself without difficulty in our society. But, of all foreigners, none amalgamate themselves so quickly with our people as the natives of the Emerald Isle. In some of the visions which have passed through my imagination, I have supposed that Ireland was originally, part and parcel of this continent, and that, by some extraordinary convulsion of nature, it was torn from America, and drifting across the ocean, was placed in the unfortunate vicinity of Great Britain. The same open-heartedness; the same generous hospitality; the same careless and uncalculating indifference about human life, characterize the inhabitants of both countries. Kentucky has been sometimes called the Ireland of America. And I have no doubt, that if the current of emigration were reversed, and set from America upon the shores of Europe, instead of bearing from Europe to America, every American emigrant to Ireland would there find, as every Irish emigrant here finds, a hearty welcome and a happy home!

But I have said that the system nominally called “free trade,” so earnestly and eloquently recommended to our adoption, is a mere revival of the British colonial system, forced upon us by Great Britain during the existence of our colonial vassalage. The whole system is fully explained and illustrated in a work published as far back as the year 1750, entitled “The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain considered, by Joshua Gee,” with extracts from which I have been furnished by the diligent researches of a friend. It will be seen from these, that the South Carolina policy now, is identical with the long cherished policy of Great Britain, which remains the same as it was when the thirteen colonies were part of the British empire.

I regret, Mr. President, that one topic has, I think, unnecessarily been introduced into this debate. I allude to the charge brought against the manufacturing system, as favoring the growth of aristocracy. If it were true, would gentlemen prefer supporting foreign accumulations of wealth, by that description of industry, rather than in their own country? But is it correct? The joint stock companies of the north, as I understand them, are nothing more than associations, sometimes of hundreds, by means of which the small earnings of many are brought into a common stock, and the associates, obtaining corporate privileges, are enabled to prosecute, under one superintending head, their business to better advantage. Nothing can be more essentially democratic or better devised to counterpoise the influence of individual wealth. In Kentucky, almost every manufactory known to me, is in the hands of enterprising and self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor. Comparisons are odious, and but in defence, would not be made by me. But is there more tendency to aristocracy in a manufactory supporting hundreds of freemen, or in a cotton plantation, with its not less numerous slaves, sustaining perhaps only two white families—that of the master and the overseer?

I pass, with pleasure, from this disagreeable topic, to two general propositions, which cover the entire ground of debate. The first is, that under the operation of the American System, the objects which it protects and fosters are brought to the consumer at cheaper prices than they commanded prior to its introduction, or, than they would command if it did not exist. If that be true, ought not the country to be contented and satisfied with the system, unless the second proposition, which I mean presently also to consider, is unfounded? And that is, that the tendency of the system is to sustain, and that it has upheld the prices of all our agricultural and other produce, including cotton.

And is the fact not indisputable, that all essential objects of consumption effected by the tariff, are cheaper and better since the act of 1824, than they were for several years prior to that law? I appeal for its truth to common observation and to all practical men. I appeal to the farmer of the country, whether he does not purchase on better terms his iron, salt, brown sugar, cotton goods, and woolens, for his laboring people? And I ask the cotton planter if he has not been better and more cheaply supplied with his cotton bagging? In regard to this latter article, the gentleman from South Carolina was mistaken in supposing that I complained that, under the existing duty the Kentucky manufacturer could not compete with the Scotch. The Kentuckian furnishes a more substantial and a cheaper article, and at a more uniform and regular price. But it was the frauds, the violations of law of which I did complain; not smuggling, in the common sense of that practice, which has something bold, daring, and enterprising in it, but mean, barefaced cheating, by fraudulent invoices and false denomination.

I plant myself upon this fact, of cheapness and superiority, as upon impregnable ground. Gentlemen may tax their ingenuity and produce a thousand speculative solutions of the fact, but the fact itself will remain undisturbed.

This brings me to consider what I apprehend to have been the most efficient of all the causes in the reduction of the prices of manufactured articles—and that is COMPETITION. By competition, the total amount of the supply is increased, and by increase of the supply, a competition in the sale ensues, and this enables the consumer to buy at lower rates. Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition. It is action and reaction. It operates between individuals in the same nation, and between different nations. It resembles the meeting of the mountain torrent, grooving by its precipitous motion, its own channel, and ocean’s tide. Unopposed, it sweeps everything before it; but, counterpoised, the waters become calm, safe and regular. It is like the segments of a circle or an arch; taken separately, each is nothing; but in their combination they produce efficiency, symmetry, and perfection. By the American System this vast power has been excited in America, and brought into being to act in co-operation or collision with European industry. Europe acts within itself, and with America; and America acts within itself, and with Europe. The consequence is, the reduction of prices in both hemispheres. Nor is it fair to argue from the reduction of prices in Europe, to her own presumed skill and labor, exclusively. We affect her prices, and she affects ours. This must always be the case, at least in reference to any articles as to which there is not a total non-intercourse; and if our industry, by diminishing the demand for her supplies, should produce a diminution in the price of those supplies, it would be very unfair to ascribe that reduction to her ingenuity instead of placing it to the credit of our own skill and excited industry.

The great law of price is determined by supply and demand. Whatever affects either, affects the price. If the supply is increased, the demand remaining the same, the price declines; if the demand is increased, the supply remaining the same, the price advances; if both supply and demand are undiminished, the price is stationary, and the price is influenced exactly in proportion to the degree of disturbance to the demand or supply. It is therefore a great error to suppose that an existing or new duty necessarily becomes a component element to its exact amount of price. If the proportion of demand and supply are varied by the duty, either in augmenting the supply, or diminishing the demand, or vice versa, price is affected to the extent of that variation. But the duty never becomes an integral part of the price, except in the instances where the demand and the supply remain after the duty is imposed, precisely what they were before, or the demand is increased, and the supply remains stationary.

Competition, therefore, wherever existing, whether at home or abroad, is the parent cause of cheapness. If a high duty excites production at home, and the quantity of the domestic article exceeds the amount which had been previously imported the price will fall. This accounts for an extraordinary fact stated by a Senator from Missouri. Three cents were laid as a duty upon a pound of lead, by the act of 1828. The price at Galena, and the other lead mines, afterwards fell to one and a half cents per pound. Now it is obvious that the duty did not, in this case, enter into the price: for it was twice the amount of the price. What produced the fall? It was stimulated production at home, excited by the temptation of the exclusive possession of the home market. This state of things could not last. Men would not continue an unprofitable pursuit; some abandoned the business, or the total quantity produced was diminished, and living prices have been the consequence. But, break down the domestic supply, place us again in a state of dependence on the foreign source, and can it be doubted that we should ultimately have to supply ourselves at dearer rates? It is not fair to credit the foreign market with the depression of prices produced there by the influence of our competition. Let the competition be withdrawn, and their prices would instantly rise.

But, it is argued that if, by the skill, experience, and perfection which we have acquired in certain branches of manufacture, they can be made as cheap as similar articles abroad, and enter fairly into competition with them, why not repeal the duties as to those articles? And why should we? Assuming the truth of the supposition the foreign article would not be introduced in the regular course of trade, but would remain excluded by the possession of the home market, which the domestic article had obtained. The repeal, therefore, would have no legitimate effect. But might not the foreign article be imported in vast quantities, to glut our markets, break down our establishments, and ultimately to enable the foreigner to monopolize the supply of our consumption? America is the greatest foreign market for European manufactures. It is that to which European attention is constantly directed. If a great house becomes bankrupt there, its storehouses are emptied, and the goods are shipped to America, where, in consequence of our auctions, and our custom-house credits, the greatest facilities are afforded in the sale of them. Combinations among manufacturers might take place, or even the operations of foreign governments might be directed to the destruction of our establishments. A repeal, therefore, of one protecting duty, from some one or all of these causes, would be followed by flooding the country with the foreign fabric, surcharging the market, reducing the price, and a complete prostration of our manufactories; after which the foreigner would leisurely look about to indemnify himself in the increased prices which he would be enabled to command by his monopoly of the supply of our consumption. What American citizen, after the government had displayed this vacillating policy, would be again tempted to place the smallest confidence in the public faith, and adventure once more in this branch of industry?

Gentlemen have allowed to the manufacturing portions of the community no peace; they have been constantly threatened with the overthrow of the American System. From the year 1820, if not from 1816, down to this time, they have been held in a condition of constant alarm and insecurity. Nothing is more prejudicial to the great interests of a nation than unsettled and varying policy. Although every appeal to the national legislature has been responded to in conformity with the wishes and sentiments of the great majority of the people, measures of protection have only been carried by such small majorities as to excite hopes on the one hand, and fears on the other. Let the country breathe, let its vast resources be developed, let its energies be fully put forth, let it have tranquillity, and my word for it, the degree of perfection in the arts which it will exhibit, will be greater than that which has been presented, astonishing as our progress has been. Although some branches of our manufactures might, and in foreign markets now do, fearlessly contend with similar foreign fabrics, there are many others yet in their infancy, struggling with the difficulties which encompass them. We should look at the whole system, and recollect that time, when we contemplate the great movements of a nation, is very different from the short period which is allotted for the duration of individual life. The honorable gentleman from South Carolina well and eloquently said, in 1824, “No great interest of any country ever yet grew up in a day; no new branch of industry can become firmly and profitably established but in a long course of years; every thing, indeed, great or good, is matured by slow degrees: that which attains a speedy maturity is of small value, and is destined to a brief existence. It is the order of Providence, that powers gradually developed, shall alone attain permanency and perfection. Thus must it be with our national institutions, and national character itself.”

I feel most sensibly, Mr. President, how much I have trespassed upon the Senate. My apology is a deep and deliberate conviction, that the great cause under debate involves the prosperity and the destiny of the Union. But the best requital I can make, for the friendly indulgence which has been extended to me by the Senate, and for which I shall ever retain sentiments of lasting gratitude, is to proceed with as little delay as practicable, to the conclusion of a discourse which has not been more tedious to the Senate than exhausting to me. I have now to consider the remaining of the two propositions which I have already announced. That is:

Secondly. That under the operation of the American System, the products of our agriculture command a higher price than they would do without it, by the creation of a home market; and by the augmentation of wealth produced by manufacturing industry, which enlarges our powers of consumption both of domestic and foreign articles. The importance of the home market is among the established maxims which are universally recognized by all writers and all men. However some may differ as to the relative advantages of the foreign and the home market, none deny to the latter great value and high consideration. It is nearer to us; beyond the control of foreign legislation; and undisturbed by those vicissitudes to which all international intercourse is more or less exposed. The most stupid are sensible of the benefit of a residence in the vicinity of a large manufactory, or of a market town, of a good road, or of a navigable stream, which connects their farms with some great capital. If the pursuits of all men were perfectly the same, although they would be in possession of the greatest abundance of the particular produce of their industry, they might, at the same time, be in extreme want of other necessary articles of human subsistence. The uniformity of the general occupation would preclude all exchanges, all commerce. It is only in the diversity of the vocations of the members of a community that the means can be found for those salutary exchanges which conduce to the general prosperity. And the greater that diversity, the more extensive and the more animating is the circle of exchange. Even if foreign markets were freely and widely open to the reception of our agricultural produce, from its bulky nature, and the distance of the interior, and the dangers of the ocean, large portions of it could never profitably reach the foreign market. But let us quit this field of theory, clear as it is, and look at the practical operation of the system of protection, beginning with the most valuable staple of our agriculture.

But if all this reasoning were totally fallacious—if the price of manufactured articles were really higher, under the American system, than without it, I should still argue that high or low prices were themselves relative—relative to the ability to pay them. It is in vain to tempt, to tantalize us with the lower prices of European fabrics than our own, if we have nothing wherewith to purchase them. If, by the home exchanges, we can be supplied with necessary, even if they are dearer and worse, articles of American production than the foreign, it is better than not to be supplied at all. And how would the large portion of our country which I have described be supplied, but for the home exchanges? A poor people, destitute of wealth or of exchangeable commodities, has nothing to purchase foreign fabrics. To them they are equally beyond their reach, whether their cost be a dollar or a guinea. It is in this view of the matter that Great Britain, by her vast wealth—her excited and protected industry—is enabled to bear a burden of taxation which, when compared to that of other nations, appears enormous; but which, when her immense riches are compared to theirs, is light and trivial. The gentleman from South Carolina has drawn a lively and flattering picture of our coasts, bays, rivers, and harbors; and he argues that these proclaimed the design of Providence, that we should be a commercial people. I agree with him. We differ only as to the means. He would cherish the foreign, and neglect the internal trade. I would foster both. What is navigation without ships, or ships without cargoes? By penetrating the bosoms of our mountains, and extracting from them their precious treasures; by cultivating the earth, and securing a home market for its rich and abundant products; by employing the water power with which we are blessed; by stimulating and protecting our native industry, in all its forms; we shall but nourish and promote the prosperity of commerce, foreign and domestic.

I have hitherto considered the question in reference only to a state of peace; but a season of war ought not to be entirely overlooked. We have enjoyed near twenty years of peace; but who can tell when the storm of war shall again break forth? Have we forgotten so soon, the privations to which, not merely our brave soldiers and our gallant tars were subjected, but the whole community, during the last war, for the want of absolute necessaries? To what an enormous price they rose! And how inadequate the supply was, at any price! The statesman who justly elevates his views, will look behind, as well as forward, and at the existing state of things; and he will graduate the policy which he recommends, to all the probable exigencies which may arise in the Republic. Taking this comprehensive range, it would be easy to show that the higher prices of peace, if prices were higher in peace, were more than compensated by the lower prices of war, during which supplies of all essential articles are indispensable to its vigorous, effectual and glorious prosecution. I conclude this part of the argument with the hope that my humble exertions have not been altogether unsuccessful in showing—

1. That the policy which we have been considering ought to continue to be regarded as the genuine American System.

2. That the Free Trade System, which is proposed as its substitute, ought really to be considered as the British Colonial System.

3. That the American System is beneficial to all parts of the Union, and absolutely necessary to much the larger portion.

4. That the price of the great staple of cotton, and of all our chief productions of agriculture, has been sustained and upheld, and a decline averted by the Protective System.

5. That if the foreign demand for cotton has been at all diminished by the operation of that system, the diminution has been more than compensated in the additional demand created at home.

6. That the constant tendency of the system, by creating competition among ourselves, and between American and European industry, reciprocally acting upon each other, is to reduce prices of manufactured objects.

7. That in point of fact, objects within the scope of the policy of protection have greatly fallen in price.

8. That if, in a season of peace, these benefits are experienced, in a season of war, when the foreign supply might be cut off, they would be much more extensively felt.

9. And finally, that the substitution of the British Colonial System for the American System, without benefiting any section of the Union, by subjecting us to a foreign legislation, regulated by foreign interests, would lead to the prostration of our manufactures, general impoverishment, and ultimate ruin.

The danger to our Union does not lie on the side of persistence in the American System, but on that of its abandonment. If, as I have supposed and believe, the inhabitants of all north and east of James river, and all west of the mountains, including Louisiana, are deeply interested in the preservation of that system, would they be reconciled to its overthrow? Can it be expected that two-thirds, if not three-fourths, of the people of the United States, would consent to the destruction of a policy, believed to be indispensably necessary to their prosperity? When, too, the sacrifice is made at the instance of a single interest, which they verily believe will not be promoted by it? In estimating the degree of peril which may be incident to two opposite courses of human policy, the statesman would be shortsighted who should content himself with viewing only the evils, real or imaginary, which belong to that course which is in practical operation. He should lift himself up to the contemplation of those greater and more certain dangers which might inevitably attend the adoption of the alternative course. What would be the condition of this Union, if Pennsylvania and New York, those mammoth members of our confederacy, were firmly persuaded that their industry was paralyzed, and their prosperity blighted, by the enforcement of the British colonial system, under the delusive name of free trade? They are now tranquil and happy, and contented, conscious of their welfare, and feeling a salutary and rapid circulation of the products of home manufactures and home industry throughout all their great arteries. But let that be checked, let them feel that a foreign system is to predominate, and the sources of their subsistence and comfort dried up; let New England and the west, and the middle States, all feel that they too are the victims of a mistaken policy, and let these vast portions of our country despair of any favorable change, and then indeed might we tremble for the continuance and safety of this Union!

And now, sir, I would address a few words to the friends of the American System in the Senate. The revenue must—ought to be reduced. The country will not, after, by the payment of the public debt, ten or twelve millions of dollars become unnecessary, bear such an annual surplus. Its distribution would form a subject of perpetual contention. Some of the opponents of the system understand the stratagem by which to attack it, and are shaping their course accordingly. It is to crush the system by the accumulation of revenue, and by the effort to persuade the people that they are unnecessarily taxed, while those would really tax them who would break up the native sources of supply, and render them dependent upon the foreign. But the revenue ought to be reduced, so as to accommodate it to the fact of the payment of the public debt. And the alternative is or may be, to preserve the protecting system, and repeal the duties on the unprotected articles, or to preserve the duties on unprotected articles, and endanger if not destroy the system. Let us then adopt the measure before us, which will benefit all classes; the farmer, the professional man, the merchant, the manufacturer, the mechanic; and the cotton planter more than all. A few mouths ago there was no diversity of opinion as to the expediency of this measure. All, then, seemed to unite in the selection of these objects for a repeal of duties which were not produced within the country. Such a repeal did not touch our domestic industry, violated no principle, offended no prejudice.

Can we not all, whatever may be our favorite theories, cordially unite on this neutral ground? When that is occupied, let us look beyond it, and see if anything can be done in the field of protection, to modify, or improve it, or to satisfy those who are opposed to the system. Our southern brethren believe that it is injurious to them, and ask its repeal. We believe that its abandonment will be prejudicial to them, and ruinous to every other section of the Union. However strong their convictions may be, they are not stronger than ours. Between the points of the preservation of the system and its absolute repeal, there is no principle of union. If it can be shown to operate immoderately on any quarter—if the measure of protection to any article can be demonstrated to be undue and inordinate, it would be the duty of Congress to interpose and apply a remedy. And none will co-operate more heartily than I shall in the performance of that duty. It is quite probable that beneficial modifications of the system may be made without impairing its efficacy. But to make it fulfill the purposes of its institution, the measure of protection ought to be adequate. If it be not, all interests will be injuriously affected. The manufacturer, crippled in his exertions, will produce less perfect and dearer fabrics, and the consumer will feel the consequence. This is the spirit, and these are the principles only, on which, it seems to me, that a settlement of the great question can be made, satisfactorily to all parts of our Union.

Mr. Buchanan’s Speech on the Independent Treasury,

January 22, 1840, which gave rise to the “ten cent” charge.

“We are also charged by the Senator from Kentucky with a desire to reduce the wages of the poor man’s labor. We have often been termed agrarians on our side of the House. It is something new under the sun, to hear the Senator and his friends attribute to us a desire to elevate the wealthy manufacturer, at the expense of the laboring man and the mechanic. From my soul, I respect the laboring man. Labor is the foundation of the wealth of every country; and the free laborers of the North deserve respect, both for their probity and their intelligence. Heaven forbid that I should do them wrong! Of all the countries on the earth, we ought to have the most consideration for the laboring man. From the very nature of our institutions, the wheel of fortune is constantly revolving, and producing such mutations in property, that the wealthy man of to-day may become the poor laborer of to-morrow. Truly, wealth often takes to itself wings and flies away. A large fortune rarely lasts beyond the third generation, even if it endure so long. We must all know instances of individuals obliged to labor for their daily bread, whose grandfathers were men of fortune. The regular process of society would almost seem to consist of the efforts of one class to dissipate the fortunes which they have inherited, whilst another class, by their industry and economy, are regularly rising to wealth. We have all, therefore, a common interest, as it is our common duty, to protect the rights of the laboring man: and if I believed for a moment that this bill would prove injurious to him, it should meet my unqualified opposition.

“Although this bill will not have as great an influence as I could desire, yet, as far as it goes, it will benefit the laboring man as much, and probably more than any other class of society. What is it he ought most to desire? Constant employment, regular wages, and uniform reasonable prices for the necessaries and comforts of life which he requires. Now, sir, what has been his condition under our system of expansions and contractions? He has suffered more by them than any other class of society. The rate of his wages is fixed and known; and they are the last to rise with the increasing expansion and the first to fall when the corresponding revulsion occurs. He still continues to receive his dollar per day, whilst the price of every article which he consumes is rapidly rising. He is at length made to feel that, although he nominally earns as much, or even more than he did formerly, yet, from the increased price of all the necessaries of life, he cannot support his family. Hence the strikes for higher wages, and the uneasy and excited feelings which have at different periods, existed among the laboring classes. But the expansion at length reaches the exploding point, and what does the laboring man now suffer? He is for a season thrown out of employment altogether. Our manufactures are suspended; our public works are stopped; our private enterprises of different kinds are abandoned; and, whilst others are able to weather the storm, he can scarcely procure the means of bare subsistence.

“Again, sir; who, do you suppose, held the greater part of the worthless paper of the one hundred and sixty-five broken banks to which I have referred? Certainly it was not the keen and wary speculator, who snuffs danger from afar. If you were to make the search, you would find more broken bank notes in the cottages of the laboring poor than anywhere else. And these miserable shinplasters, where are they? After the revulsion of 1837, laborers were glad to obtain employment on any terms; and they often received it upon the express condition that they should accept this worthless trash in payment. Sir, an entire suppression of all bank notes of a lower denomination than the value of one week’s wages of the laboring man is absolutely necessary for his protection. He ought always to receive his wages in gold and silver. Of all men on the earth, the laborer is most interested in having a sound and stable currency.

“All other circumstances being equal, I agree with the Senator from Kentucky that that country is most prosperous where labor commands the highest wages. I do not, however, mean by the terms ‘highest wages,’ the greatest nominal amount. During the revolutionary war, one day’s work commanded a hundred dollars of continental paper; but this would have scarcely purchased a breakfast. The more proper expression would be, to say that that country is most prosperous where labor commands the greatest reward; where one day’s labor will procure not the greatest nominal amount of a depreciated currency, but most of the necessaries and comforts of life. If, therefore, you should, in some degree, reduce the nominal price paid for labor, by reducing the amount of your bank issues within reasonable and safe limits, and establishing a metallic basis for your paper circulation, would this injure the laborer? Certainly not; because the price of all the necessaries and comforts of life are reduced in the same proportion, and he will be able to purchase more of them for one dollar in a sound state of the currency, than he could have done, in the days of extravagant expansion, for a dollar and a quarter. So far from injuring, it will greatly benefit the laboring man. It will insure to him constant employment and regular prices, paid in a sound currency, which, of all things, he ought most to desire; and it will save him from being involved in ruin by a recurrence of those periodical expansions and contractions of the currency, which have hitherto convulsed the country.

“This sound state of the currency will have another most happy effect upon the laboring man. He will receive his wages in gold and silver; and this will induce him to lay up, for future use, such a portion of them as he can spare, after satisfying his immediate wants. This he will not do at present, because he knows not whether the trash which he is now compelled to receive as money, will continue to be of any value a week or a month hereafter. A knowledge of this fact tends to banish economy from his dwelling, and induces him to expend all his wages as rapidly as possible, lest they may become worthless on his hands.

“Sir, the laboring classes understand this subject perfectly. It is the hard-handed and firm-fisted men of the country on whom we must rely in the day of danger, who are the most friendly to the passage of this bill. It is they who are the most ardently in favor of infusing into the currency of the country a very large amount of the precious metals.”

Lewis Cass on the Missouri Compromise.

From a speech made on the 20th of February, 1854.

Mr. President: I have not withheld the expression of my regret elsewhere, nor shall I withhold it here, that this question of repeal of the Missouri compromise, which opens all the disputed points connected with the subject of Congressional action upon slavery in the territories of the United States, has been brought before us. I do not think the practical advantages to result from the measure will outweigh the injury which the ill-feeling, fated to accompany the discussion of this subject through the country, is sure to produce. And I was confirmed in this impression from what was said by the Senator from Tennessee, (Mr. Jones,) by the Senator from Kentucky, (Mr. Dixon,) and from North Carolina, (Mr. Badger,) and also by the remarks which fell from the Senator from Virginia, (Mr. Hunter,) and in which I fully concur, that the South will never receive any benefit from this measure, so far as respects the extension of slavery; for, legislate as we may, no human power can establish it in the regions defined by these bills. And such were the sentiments of two eminent patriots, to whose exertions we are greatly indebted for the satisfactory termination of the difficulties of 1850, and who since passed from their labors, and, I trust, to their reward. Thus believing, I should have been better content had the whole subject been left as it was by the bill when first introduced by the Senator from Illinois, without any provision regarding the Missouri compromise. I am aware that it was reported that I intended to propose the repeal of that measure, but it was an error. My intentions were wholly misunderstood. I had no design whatever to take such a step, and thus resuscitate a deed of conciliation which had done its work, and done it well, and which was hallowed by patriotism, by success, and by its association with great names, now transferred to history. It belonged to a past generation; and in the midst of a political tempest which appalled the wisest and firmest in the land, it had said to the waves of agitation, Peace, be still, and they became still. It would have been better, in my opinion, not to disturb its slumber, as all useful and practical objects could have been attained without it. But the question is here without my agency.

Clement L. Vallandigham on Slavery.

October 29, 1855.

“Slavery, gentlemen, older in other countries also, than the records of human society, existed in America at the date of its discovery. The first slaves of the European, were natives of the soil: and a Puritan governor of Massachusetts, founder of the family of Winthrop, bequeathed his soul to God, and his Indian slaves to the lawful heirs of his body. Negro slavery was introduced into Hispaniola in 1501: more than a century before the colonization of America by the English. Massachusetts, by express enactment in 1641 punishing ‘manstealing’ with death:—and it is so punished to this day under the laws of the United States—legalized yet the enslaving of captives taken in war, and of such ‘strangers,’ foreigners, as should be acquired by purchase: while confederate New England, two years later, providing for the equitable division of lands, goods and ‘persons,’ as equally a part of the ‘spoils’ of war, enacted also the first fugitive slave law in America. White slaves—convicts and paupers some of them; others at a later day, prisoners taken at the battles of Dunbar and Worcester, and of Sedgemoor—were at the first, employed in Virginia and the British West Indies. Bought in England by English dealers, among whom was the queen of James II., with many of his nobles and courtiers, some of them perhaps of the house of Sutherland; they were imported and sold at auction to the highest bidder. In 1620, a Dutch man-of-war first landed a cargo of slaves upon the banks of James River. But the earliest slave ship belonging to English colonists, was fitted out in 1645, by a member of the Puritan church of Boston. Fostered still by English princes and nobles: confirmed and cherished by British legislation and judicial decisions, even against the wishes and in spite of the remonstrances of the Colonies, the traffic increased; slaves multiplied, and on the Fourth of July, 1776, every colony was now become a slave state; and the sun went down that day upon four hundred and fifty thousand of those who in the cant of eighty years later, are styled ‘human chattels,’ but who were not by the act of that day emancipated.

“Eleven years afterwards, delegates assembled at Philadelphia, from every state except Rhode Island, ignoring the question of the sinfulness and immorality of slavery, as a subject with which they as the representatives of separate and independent states had no concern, founded a union and framed a constitution, which leaving with each state the exclusive control and regulation of its own domestic institutions, and providing for the taxation and representation of slaves, gave no right to Congress to debate or to legislate concerning slavery in the states or territories, except for the interdiction of the slave trade and the extradition of fugitive slaves. The Plan of Union proposed by Franklin in 1754, had contained no allusion even to slavery; and the articles of Confederation of 1778, but a simple recognition of its existence—so wholly was it regarded then, a domestic and local concern. In 1787 every state, except perhaps Massachusetts, tolerated slavery either absolutely or conditionally.—But the number of slaves north of Maryland, never great, was even yet comparatively small; not exceeding forty thousand in a total slave population of six hundred thousand. In the North, chief carrier of slaves to others even as late as 1807, slavery never took firm root. Nature warred against it in that latitude; otherwise every state in the Union would have been a slaveholding state to this day. It was not profitable there; and it died out—lingering indeed in New York till July, 1827. It died out: but not so much by the manumission of slaves, as by their transportation and sale in the South: and thus New England, sir, turned an honest penny with her left hand, and with her right, modestly wrote herself down in history, as both generous and just.

“In the South, gentlemen, all this was precisely reversed. The earliest and most resolute enemies to slavery, were Southern men. But climate had fastened the institution upon them; and they found no way to strike it down. From the beginning indeed, the Southern colonies especially had resisted the introduction of African slaves; and at the very outset of the revolution, Virginia and North Carolina interdicted the slave trade. The Continental Congress soon after, on the sixth of April, 1776, three months earlier than the Declaration of Independence, resolved that no more slaves ought to be imported into the thirteen colonies. Jefferson, in his draught of the Declaration, had denounced the King of England alike for encouraging the slave trade, and for fomenting servile insurrection in the provinces. Ten years later, he boldly attacked slavery in his “Notes on Virginia;” and in the Congress of the Confederation, prior to the adoption of the Constitution, with its solemn compacts and compromises upon the subject of slavery, proposed to exclude it from the territory northwest the river Ohio. Colonel Mason of Virginia vehemently condemned it, in the convention of 1787. Nevertheless it had already become manifest that slavery must soon die away in the North, but in the South continue and harden into perhaps a permanent, ineradicable system. Hostile interests and jealousies sprang up, therefore, in bitterness even in the convention. But the blood of the patriot brothers of Carolina and Massachusetts smoked yet upon the battle fields of the revolution. The recollection of their kindred language, and common dangers and sufferings, burned still fresh in their hearts. Patriotism proved more powerful than jealousy, and good sense stronger than fanaticism. There were no Sewards, no Hales, no Sumners, no Greeleys, no Parkers, no Chase, in that convention. There was a Wilson; but he rejoiced not in the name of Henry; and he was a Scotchman. There was a clergyman—no, not in the convention of ’87, but in the Congress of ’76; but it was the devout, the learned, the pious, the patriotic Witherspoon; of foreign birth also, a native of Scotland, too. The men of that day and generation, sir, were content to leave the question of slavery just where it belonged. It did not occur to them, that each one among them was accountable for ‘the sin of slaveholding’ in his fellow; and that to ease his tender conscience of the burden, all the fruits of revolutionary privation and blood and treasure; all the recollections of the past; all the hopes of the future: nay the Union, and with it, domestic tranquillity and national independence, ought to be offered up as a sacrifice. They were content to deal with political questions; and to leave cases of conscience to the church and the schools, or to the individual man. And accordingly to this Union and Constitution, based upon these compromises—execrated now as ‘covenants with death and leagues with hell’—every state acceded: and upon these foundations, thus broad and deep, and stable, a political superstructure has, as if by magic, arisen, which in symmetry and proportion—and, if we would but be true to our trust, in strength and durability—finds no parallel in the world’s history.

“Patriotic sentiments, sir, such as marked the era of ’89, continued to guide the statesmen and people of the country for more than thirty years, full of prosperity; till in a dead political calm, consequent upon temporary extinguishment of the ancient party lines and issues, the MISSOURI QUESTION resounded through the land with the hollow moan of the earthquake, shook the pillars of the republic even to their deep foundations.

“Within these thirty years, gentlemen, slavery as a system, had been abolished by law or disuse, quietly and without agitation, in every state north of Mason and Dixon’s line—in many of them, lingering, indeed, in individual cases, so late as the census of 1840. But except in half a score of instances, the question had not been obtruded upon Congress. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 had been passed without opposition and without a division, in the Senate; and by a vote of forty-eight to seven, in the House. The slave trade had been declared piracy punishable with death. Respectful petitions from the Quakers of Pennsylvania, and others, upon the slavery question, were referred to a committee, and a report made thereon, which laid the matter at rest. Other petitions afterwards were quietly rejected, and, in one instance, returned to the petitioner. Louisiana and Florida, both slaveholding countries, had without agitation been added to our territory. Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, slave states each one of them, had been admitted into the Union without a murmur. No Missouri Restriction, no Wilmot Proviso had as yet reared its discordant front to terrify and confound. NON-INTERVENTION was then both the practice and the doctrine of the statesmen and people of that period: though, as yet, no hollow platform enunciated it as an article of faith, from which, nevertheless, obedience might be withheld, and the platform ‘spit upon,’ provided the tender conscience of the recusant did not forbid him to support the candidate and help to secure the ‘spoils.’

“I know, sir, that it is easy, very easy, to denounce all this as a defence of slavery itself. Be it so: be it so. But I have not discussed the institution in any respect; moral, religious, or political. Hear me. I express no opinion in regard to it: and as a citizen of the north, I have ever refused, and will steadily refuse, to discuss the system in any of these particulars. It is precisely this continued and persistent discussion and denunciation in the North, which has brought upon us this present most perilous crisis: since to teach men to hate, is to prepare them to destroy, at every hazard, the object of their hatred. Sir, I am resolved only to look upon slavery outside of Ohio, just as the founders of the constitution and Union regarded it. It is no concern of mine; none, none: nor of yours, Abolitionist. Neither of us will attain heaven, by denunciations of slavery: nor shall we, I trow, be cast into hell for the sin of others who may hold slaves. I have not so learned the moral government of the universe: nor do I presumptuously and impiously aspire to the attributes of Godhead; and seek to bear upon my poor body the iniquities of the world.

“I know well indeed, Mr. President, that in the evil day which has befallen us, all this and he who utters it, shall be denounced as ‘pro-slavery;’ and already from ribald throats, there comes up the slavering, drivelling, idiot epithet of ‘dough-face.’ Again, be it so. These, Abolitionist, are your only weapons of warfare: and I hurl them back defiantly into your teeth. I speak thus boldly, because I speak in and to and for the North. It is time that the truth should be known, and heard, in this the age of trimming and subterfuge. I speak this day not as a northern man, nor a southern man; but, God, be thanked, still as a United States man, with United States principles;—and though the worst happen which can happen—though all be lost, if that shall be our fate; and I walk through the valley of the shadow of political death, I will live by them and die by them. If to love my country; to cherish the Union; to revere the Constitution: if to abhor the madness and hate the treason which would lift up a sacrilegious hand against either; if to read that in the past, to behold it in the present, to foresee it in the future of this land, which is of more value to us and the world for ages to come, than all the multiplied millions who have inhabited Africa from the creation to this day:—if this it is to be pro-slavery, then, in every nerve, fibre, vein, bone, tendon, joint and ligament, from the topmost hair of the head to the last extremity of the foot, I am all over and altogether a PRO-SLAVERY MAN.”

Speech of Horace Greeley on the Grounds of Protection.

MR. PRESIDENT AND RESPECTED AUDITORS:—It has devolved on me, as junior advocate for the cause of Protection, to open the discussion of this question. I do this with less diffidence than I should feel in meeting able opponents and practiced disputants on almost any other topic, because I am strongly confident that you, my hearers, will regard this as a subject demanding logic rather than rhetoric, the exhibition and proper treatment of homely truths, rather than the indulgence of flights of fancy. As sensible as you can be of my deficiencies as a debater, I have chosen to put my views on paper, in order that I may present them in as concise a manner as possible, and not consume my hour before commencing my argument. You have nothing of oratory to lose by this course; I will hope that something may be gained to my cause in clearness and force. And here let me say that, while the hours I have been enabled to give to preparation for this debate have been few indeed, I feel the less regret in that my life has been in some measure a preparation. If there be any subject to which I have devoted time, and thought, and patient study, in a spirit of anxious desire to learn and follow the truth, it is this very question of Protection; if I have totally misapprehended its character and bearings, then am I ignorant, hopelessly ignorant indeed. And, while I may not hope to set before you, in the brief space allotted me, all that is essential to a full understanding of a question which spans the whole arch of Political Economy,—on which able men have written volumes without at all exhausting it—I do entertain a sanguine hope that I shall be able to set before you considerations conclusive to the candid and unbiased mind of the policy and necessity of Protection. Let us not waste our time on non-essentials. That unwise and unjust measures have been adopted under the pretence of Protection, I stand not here to deny; that laws intended to be Protective have sometimes been injurious in their tendency, I need not dispute. The logic which would thence infer the futility or the danger of Protective Legislation would just as easily prove all laws and all policy mischievous and destructive. Political Economy is one of the latest born of the Sciences; the very fact that we meet here this evening to discuss a question so fundamental as this proves it to be yet in its comparative infancy. The sole favor I shall ask of my opponents, therefore, is that they will not waste their efforts and your time in attacking positions that we do not maintain, and hewing down straw giants of their own manufacture, but meet directly the arguments which I shall advance, and which, for the sake of simplicity and clearness, I will proceed to put before you in the form of Propositions and their Illustrations, as follows:—

PROPOSITION I. A Nation which would be prosperous, must prosecute various branches of Industry, and supply its vital Wants mainly by the Labor of its own Hands.

Cast your eyes where you will over the face of the earth, trace back the History of Man and of Nations to the earliest recorded periods, and I think you will find this rule uniformly prevailing, that the nation which is eminently Agricultural and Grain-exporting,—which depends mainly or principally on other nations for its regular supplies of Manufactured fabrics,—has been comparatively a poor nation, and ultimately a dependent nation. I do not say that this is the instant result of exchanging the rude staples of Agriculture for the more delicate fabrics of Art; but I maintain that it is the inevitable tendency. The Agricultural nation falls in debt, becomes impoverished, and ultimately subject. The palaces of “merchant princes” may emblazon its harbors and overshadow its navigable waters; there may be a mighty Alexandria, but a miserable Egypt behind it; a flourishing Odessa or Dantzic, but a rude, thinly peopled southern Russia or Poland; the exchangers may flourish and roll in luxury, but the producers famish and die. Indeed, few old and civilized countries become largely exporters of grain until they have lost, or by corruption are prepared to surrender, their independence; and these often present the spectacle of the laborer starving on the fields he has tilled, in the midst of their fertility and promise. These appearances rest upon and indicate a law, which I shall endeavor hereafter to explain. I pass now to my

PROPOSITION II. There is a natural tendency in a comparatively new Country to become and continue an Exporter of Grain and other rude Staples and an Importer of Manufactures.

I think I hardly need waste time in demonstrating this proposition, since it is illustrated and confirmed by universal experience, and rests on obvious laws. The new country has abundant and fertile soil, and produces Grain with remarkable facility; also, Meats, Timber, Ashes, and most rude and bulky articles. Labor is there in demand, being required to clear, to build, to open roads, &c., and the laborers are comparatively few; while, in older countries, Labor is abundant and cheap, as also are Capital, Machinery, and all the means of the cheap production of Manufactured fabrics. I surely need not waste words to show that, in the absence of any counteracting policy, the new country will import, and continue to import, largely of the fabrics of older countries, and to pay for them, so far as she may, with her Agricultural staples. I will endeavor to show hereafter that she will continue to do this long after she has attained a condition to manufacture them as cheaply for herself, even regarding the money cost alone. But that does not come under the present head. The whole history of our country, and especially from 1782 to ’90, when we had no Tariff and scarcely any Paper Money,—proves that, whatever may be the Currency or the internal condition of the new country, it will continue to draw its chief supplies from the old,—large or small according to its measure of ability to pay or obtain credit for them; but still, putting Duties on Imports out of the question, it will continue to buy its Manufactures abroad, whether in prosperity or adversity, inflation or depression.

I now advance to my

PROPOSITION III. It is injurious to the New Country thus to continue dependent for its supplies of Clothing and Manufactured Fabrics on the Old.

As this is probably the point on which the doctrines of Protection first come directly in collision with those of Free Trade, I will treat it more deliberately, and endeavor to illustrate and demonstrate it.

I presume I need not waste time in showing that the ruling price of Grain (as any Manufacture) in a region whence it is considerably exported, will be its price at the point to which it is exported, less the cost of such transportation. For instance: the cost of transporting Wheat hither from large grain-growing sections of Illinois was last fall sixty cents; and, New York being their most available market, and the price here ninety cents, the market there at once settled at thirty cents. As this adjustment of prices rests on a law obvious, immutable as gravitation, I presume I need not waste words in establishing it.

I proceed, then, to my next point. The average price of Wheat throughout the world is something less than one dollar per bushel; higher where the consumption largely exceeds the adjacent production, lower where the production largely exceeds the immediate consumption (I put out of view in this statement the inequalities created by Tariffs, as I choose at this point to argue the question on the basis of universal Free Trade, which is of course the basis most favorable to my opponents). I say, then, if all Tariffs were abolished to-morrow, the price of Wheat in England—that being the most considerable ultimate market of surpluses, and the chief supplier of our manufactures—would govern the price in this country, while it would be itself governed by the price at which that staple could be procured in sufficiency from other grain-growing regions. Now, Southern Russia and Central Poland produce Wheat for exportation at thirty to fifty cents per bushel; but the price is so increased by the cost of transportation that at Dantzic it averages some ninety and at Odessa some eighty cents per bushel. The cost of importation to England from these ports being ten and fifteen cents respectively, the actual cost of the article in England, all charges paid, and allowing for a small increase of price consequent on the increased demand, would not in the absence of all Tariffs whatever, exceed one dollar and ten cents per bushel; and this would be the average price at which we must sell it in England in order to buy thence the great bulk of our Manufactures. I think no man will dispute or seriously vary this calculation. Neither can any reflecting man seriously contend that we could purchase forty or fifty millions’ worth or more of Foreign Manufactures per annum, and pay for them in additional products of our Slave Labor—in Cotton and Tobacco. The consumption of these articles is now pressed to its utmost limit,—that of Cotton especially is borne down by the immense weight of the crops annually thrown upon it, and almost constantly on the verge of a glut. If we are to buy our Manufactures principally from Europe, we must pay for the additional amount mainly in the products of Northern Agricultural industry,—that is universally agreed on. The point to be determined is, whether we could obtain them abroad cheaper—really and positively cheaper, all Tariffs being abrogated—than under an efficient system of Protection.

Let us closely scan this question. Illinois and Indiana, natural grain-growing States, need cloths; and, in the absence of all tariffs, these can be transported to them from England for two to three per cent. of their value. It follows, then, that, in order to undersell any American competition, the British manufacturer need only put his cloths at his factory five per cent. below the wholesale price of such cloths in Illinois, in order to command the American market. That is, allowing a fair broadcloth to be manufactured in or near Illinois for three dollars and a quarter per yard, cash price, in the face of British rivalry, and paying American prices for materials and labor, the British manufacturer has only to make that same cloth at three dollars per yard in Leeds or Huddersfield, and he can decidedly undersell his American rival, and drive him out of the market. Mind, I do not say that he would supply the Illinois market at that price after the American rivalry had been crushed; I know he would not; but, so long as any serious effort to build up or sustain manufactures in this country existed, the large and strong European establishments would struggle for the additional market which our growing and plenteous country so invitingly proffers. It is well known that in 1815–16, after the close of the last war, British manufactures were offered for sale in our chief markets at the rate of “pound for pound,”—that is, fabrics of which the first cost to the manufacturer was $4.44 were offered in Boston market at $3.33, duty paid. This was not sacrifice—it was dictated by a profound forecast. Well did the foreign fabricants know that their self-interest dictated the utter overthrow, at whatever cost, of the young rivals which the war had built up in this country, and which our government and a majority of the people had blindly or indolently abandoned to their fate. William Cobbett, the celebrated radical, but with a sturdy English heart, boasted upon his first return to England that he had been actively engaged here in promoting the interests of his country by compassing the destruction of American manufactories in various ways which he specified—“sometimes (says he) by Fire.” We all know that great sacrifices are often submitted to by a rich and long established stage owner, steamboat proprietor, or whatever, to break down a young and comparatively penniless rival. So in a thousand instances, especially in a rivalry for so large a prize as the supplying with manufactures of a great and growing nation. But I here put aside all calculations of a temporary sacrifice; I suppose merely that the foreign manufacturers will supply our grain-growing states with cloths at a trifling profit so long as they encounter American rivalry; and I say it is perfectly obvious that, if it cost three dollars and a quarter a yard to make a fair broadcloth in or near Illinois in the infancy of our arts and a like article could be made in Europe for three dollars, then the utter destruction of the American manufacture is inevitable. The foreign drives it out of the market and its maker into bankruptcy; and now our farmers, in purchasing their cloths, “buy where they can buy cheapest,” which is the first commandment of free trade, and get their cloth of England at three dollars a yard. I maintain that this would not last a year after the American factories had been silenced—that then the British operator would begin to think of profits as well as bare cost for his cloth, and to adjust his prices so as to recover what it had cost him to put down the dangerous competition. But let this pass for the present, and say the foreign cloth is sold to Illinois for three dollars per yard. We have yet to ascertain how much she has gained or lost by the operation.

This, says Free Trade, is very plain and easy. The four simple rules of arithmetic suffice to measure it. She has bought, say a million yards of foreign cloth for three dollars, where she formerly paid three and a quarter for American; making a clear saving of a quarter of a million dollars.

But not so fast—we have omitted one important element of the calculation. We have yet to see what effect the purchase of her cloth in Europe, as contrasted with its manufacture at home, will have on the price of her Agricultural staples. We have seen already that, in case she is forced to sell a portion of her surplus product in Europe, the price of that surplus must be the price which can be procured for it in England, less the cost of carrying it there. In other words: the average price in England being one dollar and ten cents, and the average cost of bringing it to New York being at least fifty cents and then of transporting it to England at least twenty-five more, the net proceeds to Illinois cannot exceed thirty-five cents per bushel. I need not more than state so obvious a truth as that the price at which the surplus can be sold governs the price of the whole crop; nor, indeed, if it were possible to deny this, would it at all affect the argument. The real question to be determined is, not whether the American or the British manufacturers will furnish the most cloth for the least cash, but which will supply the requisite quantity of Cloth for the least Grain in Illinois. Now we have seen already that the price of Grain at any point where it is readily and largely produced is governed by its nearness to or remoteness from the market to which its surplus tends, and the least favorable market in which any portion of it must be sold. For instance: If Illinois produces a surplus of five million bushels of Grain, and can sell one million of bushels in New York, and two millions in New England, and another million in the West Indies, and for the fifth million is compelled to seek a market in England, and that, being the remotest point at which she sells, and the point most exposed to disadvantageous competition, is naturally the poorest market, that farthest and lowest market to which she sends her surplus will govern, to a great extent if not absolutely, the price she receives for the whole surplus. But, on the other hand, let her Cloths, her wares, be manufactured in her midst, or on the junctions and waterfalls in her vicinity, thus affording an immediate market for her Grain, and now the average price of it rises, by an irresistible law, nearly or quite to the average of the world. Assuming that average to be one dollar, the price in Illinois, making allowance for the fertility and cheapness of her soil, could not fall below an average of seventy-five cents. Indeed, the experience of the periods when her consumption of Grain has been equal to her production, as well as that of other sections where the same has been the case, proves conclusively that the average price of her Wheat would exceed that sum.

We are now ready to calculate the profit and loss. Illinois, under Free Trade, with her “workshops in Europe,” will buy her cloth twenty-five cents per yard cheaper, and thus make a nominal saving of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in her year’s supply; but, she thereby compels herself to pay for it in Wheat at thirty-five instead of seventy-five cents per bushel, or to give over nine and one third bushels of Wheat for every yard under Free Trade, instead of four and a third under a system of Home Production. In other words, while she is making a quarter of a million dollars by buying her Cloth “where she can buy cheapest,” she is losing nearly Two Millions of Dollars on the net product of her Grain. The striking of a balance between her profit and her loss is certainly not a difficult, but rather an unpromising, operation.

Or, let us state the result in another form: She can buy her cloth a little cheaper in England,—Labor being there lower, Machinery more perfect, and Capital more abundant; but, in order to pay for it, she must not merely sell her own products at a correspondingly low price, but enough lower to overcome the cost of transporting them from Illinois to England. She will give the cloth-maker in England less Grain for her Cloth than she would give to the man who made it on her own soil; but for every bushel she sends him in payment for his fabric, she must give two to the wagoner, boatman, shipper, and factor who transport it thither. On the whole product of her industry, two-thirds is tolled out by carriers and bored out by Inspectors, until but a beggarly remnant is left to satisfy the fabricator of her goods.

And here I trust I have made obvious to you the law which dooms an Agricultural Country to inevitable and ruinous disadvantage in exchanging its staples for Manufactures, and involves it in perpetual and increasing debt and dependence. The fact, I early alluded to; is not the reason now apparent? It is not that Agricultural communities are more extravagant or less industrious than those in which Manufactures or Commerce preponderate,—it is because there is an inevitable disadvantage to Agriculture in the very nature of all distant exchanges. Its products are far more perishable than any other; they cannot so well await a future demand; but in their excessive bulk and density is the great evil. We have seen that, while the English Manufacturer can send his fabrics to Illinois for less than five per cent. on their first cost, the Illinois farmer must pay two hundred per cent. on his Grain for its transportation to English consumers. In other words: the English manufacturer need only produce his goods five per cent. below the American to drive the latter out of the Illinois market, the Illinoisan must produce wheat for one-third of its English price in order to compete with the English and Polish grain-grower in Birmingham and Sheffield.

And here is the answer to that scintillation of Free Trade wisdom which flashes out in wonder that Manufactures are eternally and especially in want of Protection, while Agriculture and Commerce need none. The assumption is false in any sense,—our Commerce and Navigation cannot live without Protection,—never did live so,—but let that pass. It is the interest of the whole country which demands that that portion of its Industry which is most exposed to ruinous foreign rivalry should be cherished and sustained. The wheat-grower, the grazier, is protected by ocean and land; by the fact that no foreign article can be introduced to rival his except at a cost for transportation of some thirty to one hundred per cent. on its value; while our Manufactures can be inundated by foreign competition at a cost of some two to ten per cent. It is the grain-grower, the cattle-raiser, who is protected by a duty on Foreign Manufactures, quite as much as the spinner or shoemaker. He who talks of Manufactures being protected and nothing else, might just as sensibly complain that we fortify Boston and New York and not Pittsburg and Cincinnati.

Again: You see here our answer to those philosophers who modestly tell us that their views are liberal and enlightened, while ours are benighted, selfish, and un-Christian. They tell us that the foreign factory-laborer is anxious to exchange with us the fruits of his labor,—that he asks us to give him of our surplus of grain for the cloth that he is ready to make cheaper than we can now get it, while we have a superabundance of bread. Now, putting for the present out of the question the fact that, though our Tariff were abolished, his could remain,—that neither England, nor France, nor any great manufacturing country, would receive our Grain untaxed though we offered so to take their goods,—especially the fact that they never did so take of us while we were freely taking of them,—we say to them, “Sirs, we are willing to take Cloth of you for Grain; but why prefer to trade at a ruinous disadvantage to both? Why should there be half the diameter of the earth between him who makes coats and him who makes bread, the one for the other? We are willing to give you bread for clothes; but we are not willing to pay two-thirds of our bread as the cost of transporting the other third to you, because we sincerely believe it needless and greatly to our disadvantage. We are willing to work for and buy of you, but not to support the useless and crippling activity of a falsely directed Commerce; not to contribute by our sweat to the luxury of your nobles, the power of your kings. But come to us, you who are honest, peaceable, and industrious; bring hither your machinery, or, if that is not yours, bring out your sinews; and we will aid you to reproduce the implements of your skill. We will give you more bread for your cloth here than you can possibly earn for it where you are, if you will but come among us and aid us to sustain the policy that secures steady employment and a fair reward to Home Industry. We will no longer aid to prolong your existence in a state of semi-starvation where you are; but we are ready to share with you our Plenty and our Freedom here.” Such is the answer which the friends of Protection make to the demand and the imputation; judge ye whether our policy be indeed selfish, un-Christian, and insane.

I proceed now to set forth my

PROPOSITION IV. That Equilibrium between Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce, which we need, can only be maintained by means of Protective Duties.

You will have seen that the object we seek is not to make our country a Manufacturer for other nations, but for herself,—not to make her the baker and brewer and tailor of other people, but of her own household. If I understand at all the first rudiments of National Economy, it is best for each and all nations that each should mainly fabricate for itself, freely purchasing of others all such staples as its own soil or climate proves ungenial to. We appreciate quite as well as our opponents the impolicy of attempting to grow coffee in Greenland or glaciers in Malabar,—to extract blood from a turnip or sunbeams from cucumbers. A vast deal of wit has been expended on our stupidity by our acuter adversaries, but it has been quite thrown away, except as it has excited the hollow laughter of the ignorant as well as thoughtless. All this, however sharply pushed, falls wide of our true position. To all the fine words we hear about “the impossibility of counteracting the laws of Nature,” “Trade Regulating itself,” &c., &c., we bow with due deference, and wait for the sage to resume his argument. What we do affirm is this, that it is best for every nation to make at home all those articles of its own consumption that can just as well—that is, with nearly or quite as little labor—be made there as anywhere else. We say it is not wise, it is not well, to send to France for boots, to Germany for hose, to England for knives and forks, and so on; because the real cost of them would be less,—even though the nominal price should be slightly more,—if we made them in our own country; while the facility of paying for them would be much greater. We do not object to the occasional importation of choice articles to operate as specimens and incentives to our own artisans to improve the quality and finish of their workmanship,—where the home competition does not avail to bring the process to its perfection, as it often will. In such cases, the rich and luxurious will usually be the buyers of these choice articles, and can afford to pay a good duty. There are gentlemen of extra polish in our cities and villages who think no coat good enough for them which is not woven in an English loom,—no boot adequately transparent which has not been fashioned by a Parisian master. I quarrel not with their taste: I only say that, since the Government must have Revenue and the American artisan should have Protection, I am glad it is so fixed that these gentlemen shall contribute handsomely to the former, and gratify their aspirations with the least possible detriment to the latter. It does not invalidate the fact nor the efficiency of Protection that foreign competition with American workmanship is not entirely shut out. It is the general result which is important, and not the exception. Now, he who can seriously contend, as some have seemed to do, that Protective Duties do not aid and extend the domestic production of the articles so protected might as well undertake to argue the sun out of the heavens at mid-day. All experience, all common sense, condemn him. Do we not know that our Manufactures first shot up under the stringent Protection of the Embargo and War? that they withered and crumbled under the comparative Free Trade of the few succeeding years? that they were revived and extended by the Tariffs of 1824 and ’28? Do we not know that Germany, crippled by British policy, which inundated her with goods yet excluded her grain and timber, was driven, years since, to the establishment of her “Zoll-Verein” or Tariff Union,—a measure of careful and stringent Protection, under which Manufactures have grown up and flourished through all her many States? She has adhered steadily, firmly, to her Protective Policy, while we have faltered and oscillated; and what is the result? She has created and established her Manufactures; and in doing so has vastly increased her wealth and augmented the reward of her industry. Her public sentiment, as expressed through its thousand channels, is almost unanimous in favor of the Protective Policy; and now, when England, finding at length that her cupidity has overreached itself,—that she cannot supply the Germans with clothes refuse to buy their bread,—talks of relaxing her Corn-Laws in order to coax back her ancient and profitable customer, the answer is, “No; it is now too late. We have built up Home Manufactures in repelling your rapacity,—we cannot destroy them at your caprice. What guarantee have we that, should we accede to your terms, you would not return again to your policy of taking all and giving none so soon as our factories had crumbled into ruin? Besides, we have found that we can make cheaper—really cheaper—than we were able to buy,—can pay better wages to our laborers, and secure a better and steadier market for our products. We are content to abide in the position to which you have driven us. Pass on!”

But this is not the sentiment of Germany alone. All Europe acts on the principle of self-protection; because all Europe sees its benefits. The British journals complain that, though they have made a show of relaxation in their own Tariff, and their Premier has made a Free Trade speech in Parliament, the chaff has caught no birds; but six hostile Tariffs—all Protective in their character, and all aimed at the supremacy of British Manufactures—were enacted within the year 1842. And thus, while schoolmen plausibly talk of the adoption and spread of Free Trade principles, and their rapid advances to speedy ascendency, the practical man knows that the truth is otherwise, and that many years must elapse before the great Colossus of Manufacturing monopoly will find another Portugal to drain of her life-blood under the delusive pretence of a commercial reciprocity. And, while Britain continues to pour forth her specious treatises on Political Economy, proving Protection a mistake and an impossibility through her Parliamentary Reports and Speeches in Praise of Free Trade, the shrewd statesmen of other nations humor the joke with all possible gravity, and pass it on to the next neighbor; yet all the time take care of their own interests, just as though Adam Smith had never speculated nor Peel soberly expatiated on the blessings of Free Trade, looking round occasionally with a curious interest to see whether anybody was really taken in by it.

I have partly anticipated, yet I will state distinctly, my

PROPOSITION V. Protection is necessary and proper to sustain as well as to create a beneficent adjustment of our National Industry.

“Why can’t our Manufacturers go alone?” petulantly asks a Free-Trader; “they have had Protection long enough. They ought not to need it any more.” To this I answer that, if Manufactures were protected as a matter of special bounty or favor to the Manufacturers, a single day were too long. I would not consent that they should be sustained one day longer than the interests of the whole Country required. I think you have already seen that, not for the sake of Manufacturers, but for the sake of all Productive Labor, should Protection be afforded. If I have been intelligible, you will have seen that the purpose and essence of Protection is LABOR-SAVING,—the making two blades of grass grow instead of one. This it does by “planting the Manufacturer as nearly as may be by the side of the Farmer,” as Mr. Jefferson expressed it, and thereby securing to the latter a market for which he had looked to Europe in vain. Now, the market of the latter is certain as the recurrence of appetite; but that is not all. The Farmer and the Manufacturer, being virtually neighbors, will interchange their productions directly, or with but one intermediate, instead of sending them reciprocally across half a continent and a broad ocean, through the hands of many holders, until the toll taken out by one after another has exceeded what remains of the grist. “Dear-bought and far-fetched” is an old maxim, containing more essential truth than many a chapter by a modern Professor of Political Economy. Under the Protective policy, instead of having one thousand men making Cloth in one hemisphere, and an equal number raising Grain in the other, with three thousand factitiously employed in transporting and interchanging these products, we have over two thousand producers of Grain, and as many of Cloth, leaving far too little employment for one thousand in making the exchanges between them. This consequence is inevitable; although the production on either side is not confined to the very choicest locations, the total product of their labor is twice as much as formerly. In other words, there is a double quantity of food, clothing, and all the necessaries and comforts of life, to be shared among the producers of wealth, simply from the diminution of the number of non-producers. If all the men now enrolled in Armies and Navies were advantageously employed in Productive Labor, there would doubtless be a larger dividend of comforts and necessaries of life for all, because more to be divided than now and no greater number to receive it; just so in the case before us. Every thousand persons employed in needless Transportation and in factitious Commerce are so many subtracted from the great body of Producers, from the proceeds of whose labor all must be subsisted. The dividend for each must, of course, be governed by the magnitude of the quotient.

But, if this be so advantageous, it is queried, why is any legislation necessary? Why would not all voluntarily see and embrace it? I answer, because the apparent individual advantage is often to be pursued by a course directly adverse to the general welfare. We know that Free Trade asserts the contrary of this; maintaining that, if every man pursues that course most conducive to his individual interest, the general good will thereby be most certainly and signally promoted. But, to say nothing of the glaring exceptions to this law which crowd our statute books with injunctions and penalties, we are everywhere met with pointed contradictions of its assumption, which hallows and blesses the pursuits of the gambler, the distiller, and the libertine, making the usurer a saint and the swindler a hero. Adam Smith himself admits that there are avocations which enrich the individual but impoverish the community. So in the case before us. A B is a farmer in Illinois, and has much grain to sell or exchange for goods. But, while it is demonstrable that, if all the manufactures consumed in Illinois were produced there, the price of grain must rise nearly to the average of the world, it is equally certain that A B’s single act, in buying and consuming American cloth, will not raise the price of grain generally, nor of his grain. It will not perceptibly affect the price of grain at all. A solemn compact of the whole community to use only American fabrics would have some effect; but this could never be established, or never enforced. A few Free-Traders standing out, selling their grain at any advance which might accrue, and buying “where they could buy cheapest,” would induce one after another to look out for No. 1, and let the public interests take care of themselves: so the whole compact would fall to pieces like a rope of sand. Many a one would say, “Why should I aid to keep up the price of Produce? I am only a consumer of it,”—not realizing or caring for the interest of the community, even though it less palpably involved his own; and that would be an end. Granted that it is desirable to encourage and prefer Home Production and Manufacture, a Tariff is the obvious way, and the only way, in which it can be effectively and certainly accomplished.

But why is a Tariff necessary after Manufactures are once established? “You say,” says a Free-Trader, “that you can Manufacture cheaper if Protected than we can buy abroad: then why not do it without Protection, and save all trouble?” Let me answer this cavil:—

I will suppose that the Manufactures of this Country amount in value to One Hundred Millions of Dollars per annum, and those of Great Britain to Three Hundred Millions. Let us suppose also that, under an efficient Protective Tariff, ours are produced five per cent. cheaper than those of England, and that our own markets are supplied entirely from the Home Product. But at the end of this year, 1843, we,—concluding that our Manufactures have been protected long enough and ought now to go alone,—repeal absolutely our Tariff, and commit our great interests thoroughly to the guidance of “Free Trade.” Well: at this very time the British Manufacturers, on making up the account and review of their year’s business, find that they have manufactured goods costing them Three Hundred Millions, as aforesaid, and have sold to just about that amount, leaving a residue or surplus on hand of Fifteen or Twenty Millions’ worth. These are to be sold; and their net proceeds will constitute the interest on their capital and the profit on their year’s business. But where shall they be sold? If crowded on the Home or their established Foreign Markets, they will glut and depress those markets, causing a general decline of prices and a heavy loss, not merely on this quantity of goods, but on the whole of their next year’s business. They know better than to do any such thing. Instead of it, they say, “Here is the American Market just thrown open to us by a repeal of their Tariff: let us send thither our surplus, and sell it for what it will fetch.” They ship it over accordingly, and in two or three weeks it is rattling off through our auction stores, at prices first five, then ten, fifteen, twenty, and down to thirty per cent. below our previous rates. Every jobber and dealer is tickled with the idea of buying goods of novel patterns so wonderfully cheap; and the sale proceeds briskly, though, at constantly declining prices, till the whole stock is disposed of and our market is gorged to repletion.

Now, the British manufacturers may not have received for the whole Twenty Millions’ worth of Goods over Fourteen or Fifteen Millions; but what of it? Whatever it may be is clear profit on their year’s business in cash or its full equivalent. All their established markets are kept clear and eager; and they can now go on vigorously and profitably with the business of the new year. But more: they have crippled an active and growing rival; they have opened a new market, which shall erelong be theirs also.

Let us now look at our side of the question:—

The American Manufacturers have also a stock of goods on hand, and they come into our market to dispose of them. But they suddenly find that market forestalled and depressed by rival fabrics of attractive novelty, and selling in profusion at prices which rapidly run down to twenty-five per cent. below cost. What are they to do? They cannot force sales at any price not utterly ruinous; there is no demand at any rate. They cannot retaliate upon England the mischief they must suffer,—her Tariff forbids; and the other markets of the world are fully supplied, and will bear but a limited pressure. The foreign influx has created a scarcity of money as well as a plethora of goods. Specie has largely been exported in payment, which has compelled the Banks to contract and deny loans. Still, their obligations must be met; if they cannot make sales, the Sheriff will, and must. It is not merely their surplus, but their whole product, which has been depreciated and made unavailable at a blow. The end is easily foreseen: our Manufacturers become bankrupt and are broken up; their works are brought to a dead stand; the Laborers therein, after spending months in constrained idleness, are driven by famine into the Western wilderness, or into less productive and less congenial vocations; their acquired skill and dexterity, as well as a portion of their time, are a dead loss to themselves and the community; and we commence the slow and toilsome process of rebuilding and rearranging our industry on the one-sided or Agricultural basis. Such is the process which we have undergone twice already. How many repetitions shall satisfy us?

Now, will any man gravely argue that we have made Five or Six Millions by this cheap purchase of British goods,—by “buying where we could buy cheapest?” Will he not see that, though the price was low, the cost is very great? But the apparent saving is doubly deceptive; for the British manufacturers, having utterly crushed their American rivals by one or two operations of this kind, soon find here a market, not for a beggarly surplus of Fifteen or Twenty Millions, but they have now a demand for the amount of our whole consumption, which, making allowance for our diminished ability to pay, would probably still reach Fifty Millions per annum. This increased demand would soon produce activity and buoyancy in the general market; and now the foreign Manufacturers would say in their consultations, “We have sold some millions’ worth of goods to America for less than cost, in order to obtain control of that market; now we have it, and must retrieve our losses,”—and they would retrieve them, with interest. They would have a perfect right to do so. I hope no man has understood me as implying any infringement of the dictates of honesty on their part, still less of the laws of trade. They have a perfect right to sell goods in our markets on such terms as we prescribe and they can afford; it is we, who set up our own vital interests to be bowled down by their rivalry, who are alone to be blamed.

Who does not see that this sending out our great Industrial Interests unarmed and unshielded to battle against the mailclad legions opposed to them in the arena of Trade is to insure their destruction? It were just as wise to say that, because our people are brave, therefore they shall repel any invader without fire-arms, as to say that the restrictions of other nations ought not to be opposed by us because our artisans are skilful and our manufactures have made great advances. The very fact that our manufactures are greatly extended and improved is the strong reason why they should not be exposed to destruction. If they were of no amount or value, their loss would be less disastrous; but now the Five or Six Millions we should make on the cheaper importation of goods would cost us One Hundred Millions in the destruction of Manufacturing Property alone.

Yet this is but an item of our damage. The manufacturing classes feel the first effect of the blow, but it would paralyze every muscle of society. One hundred thousand artisans and laborers, discharged from our ruined factories, after being some time out of employment, at a waste of millions of the National wealth, are at last driven by famine to engage in other avocations,—of course with inferior skill and at an inferior price. The farmer, gardener, grocer, lose them as customers to meet them as rivals. They crowd the labor-markets of those branches of industry which we are still permitted to pursue, just at the time when the demand for their products has fallen off, and the price is rapidly declining. The result is just what we have seen in a former instance: all that any man may make by buying Foreign goods cheap, he loses ten times over by the decline of his own property, product, or labor; while to nine-tenths of the whole people the result is unmixed calamity. The disastrous consequences to a nation of the mere derangement and paralysis of its Industry which must follow the breaking down of any of its great Producing Interests have never yet been sufficiently estimated. Free Trade, indeed, assures us that every person thrown out of employment in one place or capacity has only to choose another; but almost every workingman knows from experience that such is not the fact,—that the loss of situation through the failure of his business is oftener a sore calamity. I know a worthy citizen who spent six years in learning the trade of a hatter, which he had just perfected in 1798, when an immense importation of foreign hats utterly paralyzed the manufacture in this country. He traveled and sought for months, but could find no employment at any price, and at last gave up the pursuit, found work in some other capacity, and has never made a hat since. He lives yet, and now comfortably, for he is industrious and frugal; but the six years he gave to learn his trade were utterly lost to him,—lost for the want of adequate and steady Protection to Home Industry. I insist that the Government has failed of discharging its proper and rightful duty to that citizen and to thousands, and tens of thousands who have suffered from like causes. I insist that, if the Government had permitted without complaint a foreign force to land on our shores and plunder that man’s house of the savings of six years of faithful industry, the neglect of duty would not have been more flagrant. And I firmly believe that the people of this country are One Thousand Millions of Dollars poorer at this moment than they would have been had their entire Productive Industry been constantly protected, on the principles I have laid down, from the formation of the Government till now. The steadiness of employment and of recompense thus secured, the comparative absence of constrained idleness, and the more efficient application of the labor actually performed, would have vastly increased the product,—would have improved and beautified the whole face of the country; and the Moral and Intellectual advantages thence accruing would alone have been inestimable. A season of suspension of labor in a community is usually one of aggravated dissipation, drunkenness, and crime.

But let me more clearly illustrate the effect of foreign competition in raising prices to the consumer. To do this, I will take my own calling for an example, because I understand that best; though any of you can apply the principle to that with which he may be better acquainted. I am a publisher of newspapers, and suppose I afford them at a cheap rate. But the ability to maintain that cheapness is based on the fact that I can certainly sell a large edition daily, so that no part of that edition shall remain a dead loss on my hands. Now, if there were an active and formidable Foreign competition in newspapers,—if the edition which I printed during the night were frequently rendered unsalable by the arrival of a foreign ship freighted with newspapers early in the morning,—the present rates could not be continued: the price must be increased or the quality would decline. I presume this holds equally good of the production of calicoes, glass, and penknives as of newspapers, though it may be somewhat modified by the nature of the article to which it is applied. That it does hold true of sheetings, nails, and thousands of articles, is abundantly notorious.

I have not burdened you with statistics,—you know they are the reliance, the stronghold, of the cause of Protection, and that we can produce them by acres. My aim has been to exhibit not mere collections of facts, however pertinent and forcible, but the laws on which those facts are based,—not the immediate manifestation, but the ever-living necessity from which it springs. The contemplation of these laws assures me that those articles which are supplied to us by Home Production alone are relatively cheaper than those which are rivalled and competed with from abroad. And I am equally confident that the shutting out of Foreign competition from our markets for other articles of general necessity and liberal consumption which can be made here with as little labor as anywhere would be followed by a corresponding result,—a reduction of the price to the consumer at the same time with increased employment and reward to our Producing Classes.

But, Mr. President, were this only on one side true,—were it certain that the price of the Home product would be permanently higher than that of the Foreign, I should still insist on efficient Protection, and for reasons I have sufficiently shown. Grant that a British cloth costs but $3 per yard, and a corresponding American fabric $4, I still hold that the latter would be decidedly the cheaper for us. The Fuel, Timber, Fruits, Vegetables, &c., which make up so large a share of the cost of the Home product, would be rendered comparatively valueless by having our workshops in Europe. I look not so much to the nominal price as to the comparative facility of payment. And, where cheapness is only to be attained by a depression of the wages of Labor to the neighborhood of the European standard, I prefer that it should be dispensed with. One thing must answer to another; and I hold that the farmers of this country can better afford, as a matter of pecuniary advantage, to pay a good price for manufactured articles than to obtain them lower through the depression and inadequacy of the wages of the artisan and laborer.

You will understand me, then, to be utterly hostile to that idol of Free Trade worship, known as Free or unlimited Competition. The sands of my hour are running low, and I cannot ask time to examine this topic more closely; yet I am confident I could show that this Free Competition is a most delusive and dangerous element of Political Economy. Bear with a brief illustration: At this moment, common shirts are made in London at the incredibly low price of three cents per pair. Should we admit these articles free of duty and buy them because they are so cheap? Free trade says Yes; but I say No! Sound Policy as well as Humanity forbids it. By admitting them, we simply reduce a large and worthy and suffering class of our population from the ability they now possess of procuring a bare subsistence by their labor to unavoidable destitution and pauperism. They must now subsist upon the charity of relatives or of the community,—unless we are ready to adopt the demoniac doctrine of the Free Trade philosopher Malthus, that the dependent Poor ought to be rigorously starved to death. Then what have we gained by getting these articles so exorbitantly cheap? or, rather, what have we not lost? The labor which formerly produced them is mainly struck out of existence; the poor widows and seamstresses among us must still have a subsistence; and the imported garments must be paid for: where are the profits of our speculation?

But even this is not the worst feature of the case. The labor which we have here thrown out of employment by the cheap importation of this article is now ready to be employed again at any price,—if not one that will afford bread and straw, then it must accept one that will produce potatoes and rubbish; and with the product some Free-Trader proceeds to break down the price and destroy the reward of similar labor in some other portion of the earth. And thus each depression of wages produces another, and that a third, and so on, making the circuit of the globe,—the aggravated necessities of the Poor acting and reacting upon each other, increasing the omnipotence of Capital and deepening the dependence of Labor, swelling and pampering a bloated and factitious Commerce, grinding down and grinding down the destitute, until Malthus’s remedy for Poverty shall become a grateful specific, and, amid the splendors and luxuries of an all-devouring Commercial Feudalism, the squalid and famished Millions, its dependants and victims, shall welcome death as a deliverer from their sufferings and despair.

I wish time permitted me to give a hasty glance over the doctrines and teachings of the Free Trade sophists, who esteem themselves the Political Economists, christen their own views liberal and enlightened, and complacently put ours aside as benighted and barbarous. I should delight to show you how they mingle subtle fallacy with obvious truth, how they reason acutely from assumed premises, which, being mistaken or incomplete, lead to false and often absurd conclusions,—how they contradict and confound each other, and often, from Adam Smith, their patriarch, down to McCulloch and Ricardo, either make admissions which undermine their whole fabric, or confess themselves ignorant or in the dark on points the most vital to a correct understanding of the great subject they profess to have reduced to a Science. Yet even Adam Smith himself expressly approves and justifies the British Navigation Act, the most aggressively Protective measure ever enacted,—a measure which, not being understood and seasonably counteracted by other nations, changed for centuries the destinies of the World,—which silently sapped and overthrew the Commercial and Political greatness of Holland,—which silenced the thunder of Van Tromp, and swept the broom from his mast-head. But I must not detain you longer. I do not ask you to judge of this matter by authority, but from facts which come home to your reason and your daily experience. There is not an observing and strong-minded mechanic in our city who could not set any one of these Doctors of the Law right on essential points. I beg you to consider how few great practical Statesmen they have ever been able to win to their standard,—I might almost say none; for Huskisson was but a nominal disciple, and expressly contravened their whole system upon an attempt to apply it to the Corn Laws; and Calhoun is but a Free-Trader by location, and has never yet answered his own powerful arguments in behalf of Protection. On the other hand, we point you to the long array of mighty names which have illustrated the annals of Statesmanship of modern times,—to Chatham, William Pitt, and the Great Frederick of Prussia; to the whole array of memorable French Statesmen, including Napoleon the first of them all; to our own WASHINGTON, HAMILTON, JEFFERSON, and MADISON; to our two CLINTONS, TOMPKINS, to say nothing of the eagle-eyed and genial-hearted LIVING master-spirit [Henry Clay] of our time. The opinions and the arguments of all these are on record; it is by hearkening to and heeding their counsels that we shall be prepared to walk in the light of experience and look forward to a glorious National destiny. My friends! I dare not detain you longer. I commit to you the cause of the Nation’s Independence, of her Stability and her Prosperity. Guard it wisely and shield it well; for it involves your own happiness and the enduring welfare of your countrymen!

Henry A. Wise

Against Know-Nothingism, Sept. 18, 1852.

The laws of the United States—federal and state laws—declare and defend the liberties of our people. They are free in every sense—free in the sense of Magna Charta and beyond Magna Charta; free by the surpassing franchise of American charters, which makes them sovereign and their wills the sources of constitutions and laws.

In this country, at this time, does any man think anything? Would he think aloud? Would he speak anything? Would he write anything? His mind is free; his person is safe; his property is secure; his house is his castle; the spirit of the laws is his body-guard and his house-guard; the fate of one is the fate of all measured by the same common rule of right; his voice is heard and felt in the general suffrage of freemen; his trial is in open court, confronted by witnesses and accusers; his prison house has no secrets, and he has the judgment of his peers; and there is nought to make him afraid, so long as he respects the rights of his equals in the eye of the law. Would he propagate truth? Truth is free to combat error. Would he propagate error? Error itself may stalk abroad and do her mischief, and make night itself grow darker, provided truth is left free to follow, however slowly, with her torches to light up the wreck! Why, then, should any portion of the people desire to retire in secret, and by secret means to propagate a political thought, or word, or deed, by stealth? Why band together, exclusive of others, to do something which all may not know of, towards some political end? If it be good, why not make the good known? Why not think it, speak it, write it, act it out openly and aloud? Or, is it evil, which loveth darkness rather than light? When there is no necessity to justify a secret association for political ends, what else can justify it? A caucus may sit in secret to consult on the general policy of a great public party. That may be necessary or convenient; but that even is reprehensible, if carried too far. But here is proposed a great primary, national organization, in its inception—What? Nobody knows. To do what? Nobody knows. How organized? Nobody knows. Governed by whom? Nobody knows. How bound? By what rites? By what test oaths? With what limitations and restraints? Nobody, nobody knows! All we know is that persons of foreign birth and of Catholic faith are proscribed; and so are all others who don’t proscribe them at the polls. This is certainly against the spirit of Magna Charta.

* * * * *

A Prussian born subject came to this country. He complied with our naturalization laws in all respects of notice of intention, residence, oath of allegiance, and proof of good moral character. He remained continuously in the United States the full period of five years. When he had fully filled the measure of his probation and was consummately a naturalized citizen of the United States, he then, and not until then, returned to Prussia to visit an aged father. He was immediately, on his return, seized and forced into the Landwehr, or militia system of Prussia, under the maxim: “Once a citizen, always a citizen!” There he is forced to do service to the king of Prussia at this very hour. He applies for protection to the United States. Would the Know-Nothings interpose in his behalf or not? Look at the principles involved. We, by our laws, encouraged him to come to our country, and here he was allowed to become naturalized, and to that end required to renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to the king of Prussia, and to swear allegiance and fidelity to the United States. The king of Prussia now claims no legal forfeiture from him—he punishes him for no crime—he claims of him no legal debt—he claims alone that very allegiance and fidelity which we required the man to abjure and renounce. Not only so, but he hinders the man from returning to the United States, and from discharging the allegiance and fidelity we required him to swear to the United States. The king of Prussia says he should do him service for seven years, for this was what he was born to perform; his obligations were due to him first, and his laws were first binding him. The United States say—true, he was born under your laws, but he had a right to expatriate himself; he owed allegiance first to you, but he had a right to forswear it and to swear allegiance to us; your laws first applied, but this is a case of political obligation, not of legal obligation; it is not for any crime or debt you claim to bind him, but it is for allegiance; and the claim you set up to his services on the ground of his political obligation, his allegiance to you, which we allow him to abjure and renounce, is inconsistent with his political obligation, his allegiance, which we required him to swear to the United States; he has sworn fidelity to us, and we have, by our laws, pledged protection to him.

Such is the issue. Now, with which will the Know-Nothings take sides? With the king of Prussia against our naturalized citizen and against America, or with America and our naturalized citizen? Mark, now, Know-Nothingism is opposed to all foreign influence—against American institutions. The king of Prussia is a pretty potent foreign influence—he was one of the holy alliance of crowned heads. Will they take part with him, and not protect the citizen? Then they will aid a foreign influence against our laws! Will they take sides with our naturalized citizen? If so, then upon what grounds? Now, they must have a good cause of interposition to justify us against all the received dogmas of European despotism.

Don’t they see, can’t they perceive, that they have no other grounds than those I have urged? He is our citizen, nationalized, owing us allegiance and we owing him protection. And if we owe him protection abroad, because of his sworn allegiance to us as a naturalized citizen, what then can deprive him of his privileges at home among us when he returns? If he be a citizen at all, he must be allowed the privileges of citizenship, or he will not be the equal of his fellow-citizens. And must not Know-Nothingism strike at the very equality of citizenship, or allow him to enjoy all its lawful privileges? If Catholics and naturalized citizens are to be citizens and yet to be proscribed from office, they must be rated as an inferior class—an excluded class of citizens. Will it be said that the law will not make this distinction? Then are we to understand that Know-Nothings would not make them equal by law? If not by law, how can they pretend to make them unequal, by their secret order, without law and against law? For them, by secret combination, to make them unequal, to impose a burthen or restriction upon their privileges which the law does not, is to set themselves up above the law, and to supersede by private and secret authority, intangible and irresponsible, the rule of public, political right. Indeed, is this not the very essence of the “Higher Law” doctrine? It cannot be said to be legitimate public sentiment and the action of its authority. Public sentiment, proper, is a concurrence of the common mind in some conclusion, conviction, opinion, taste, or action in respect to persons or things subject to its public notice. It will, and it must control the minds and actions of men, by public and conventional opinion. Count Molé said that in France it was stronger than statutes. It is so here. That it is which should decide at the polls of a republic. But, here is a secret sentiment, which may be so organized as to contradict the public sentiment. Candidate A. may be a native and a Protestant, and may concur with the community, if it be a Know-Nothing community, on every other subject except that of proscribing Catholics and naturalized citizens: and candidate B. may concur with the community on the subject of this proscription alone, and upon no other subject; and yet the Know-Nothings might elect B. by their secret sentiment against the public sentiment. Thus it attacks not only American doctrines of expatriation, allegiance, and protection, but the equality of citizenship, and the authority of public sentiment. In the affair of Koszta, how did our blood rush to his rescue? Did the Know-Nothing side with him and Mr. Marcy, or with Hulseman and Austria? If with Koszta, why? Let them ask themselves for the rationale, and see if it can in reason abide with their orders. There is no middle ground in respect to naturalization. We must either have naturalization laws and let foreigners become citizens, on equal terms of capacities and privileges, or we must exclude them altogether. If we abolish naturalization laws, we return to the European dogma: “Once a citizen, always a citizen.” If we let foreigners be naturalized and don’t extend to them equality of privileges, we set up classes and distinctions of persons wholly opposed to republicanism. We will, as Rome did, have citizens who may be scourged. The three alternatives are presented—Our present policy, liberal, and just, and tolerant, and equal: or the European policy of holding the noses of native born slaves to the grind-stone of tyranny all their lives; or, odious distinctions of citizenship tending to social and political aristocracy. I am for the present laws of naturalization.

As to religion, the Constitution of the United States, art. 6, sec. 3, especially provides that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. The state of Virginia has, from her earliest history, passed the most liberal laws, not only towards naturalization, but towards foreigners. But I have said enough to show the spirit of American laws and the true sense of American maxims.

3d. Know-Nothingism is against the spirit of Reformation and of Protestantism.

What was there to reform?

Let the most bigoted Protestant enumerate what he defines to have been the abominations of the church of Rome. What would he say were the worst? The secrets of Jesuitism, of the Auto da fe, of the Monasteries and of the Nunneries. The private penalties of the Inquisition’s Scavenger’s Daughter. Proscription, persecution, bigotry, intolerance, shutting up of the book of the word. And do Protestants now mean to out-Jesuit the Jesuits? Do they mean to strike and not be seen? To be felt and not to be heard? To put a shudder upon humanity by the masks of mutes? Will they wear the monkish cowls? Will they inflict penalties at the polls without reasoning together with their fellows at the hustings? Will they proscribe? Persecute? Will they bloat up themselves into that bigotry which would burn nonconformists? Will they not tolerate freedom of conscience, but doom dissenters, in secret conclave, to a forfeiture of civil privileges for a religious difference? Will they not translate the scripture of their faith? Will they visit us with dark lanterns and execute us by signs, and test oaths, and in secrecy? Protestantism! forbid it!

If anything was ever open, fair, and free—if anything was ever blatant even—it was the Reformation. To quote from a mighty British pen: “It gave a mighty impulse and increased activity to thought and inquiry, agitated the inert mass of accumulated prejudices throughout Europe. The effect of the concussion was general, but the shock was greatest in this country” (England). It toppled down the full grown intolerable abuses of centuries at a blow; heaved the ground from under the feet of bigoted faith and slavish obedience; and the roar and dashing of opinions, loosened from their accustomed hold, might be heard like the noise of an angry sea, and has never yet subsided. Germany first broke the spell of misbegotten fear, and gave the watchword; but England joined the shout, and echoed it back, with her island voice, from her thousand cliffs and craggy shores, in a longer and louder strain. With that cry the genius of Great Britain rose, and threw down the gauntlet to the nations. There was a mighty fermentation: the waters were out; public opinion was in a state of projection; liberty was held out to all to think and speak the truth; men’s brains were busy; their spirits stirring; their hearts full; and their hands not idle. Their eyes were opened to expect the greatest things, and their ears burned with curiosity and zeal to know the truth, that the truth might make them free. The death-blow which had been struck at scarlet vice and bloated hypocrisy, loosened tongues, and made the talismans and love tokens of popish superstitions with which she had beguiled her followers and committed abominations with the people, fall harmless from their necks.

The translation of the Bible was the chief engine in the great work. It threw open, by a secret spring, the rich treasures of religion and morality, which had then been locked up as in a shrine. It revealed the visions of the Prophets, and conveyed the lessons of inspired teachers to the meanest of the people. It gave them a common interest in a common cause. Their hearts burnt within them as they read. It gave a mind to the people, by giving them common subjects of thought and feeling. It cemented their Union of character and sentiment; it created endless diversity and collision of opinion. They found objects to employ their faculties, and a motive in the magnitude of the consequences attached to them, to exert the utmost eagerness in the pursuit of truth, and the most daring intrepidity in maintaining it. Religious controversy sharpens the understanding by the subtlety and remoteness of the topics it discusses, and braces the will by their infinite importance. We perceive in the history of this period a nervous, masculine intellect. No levity, no feebleness, no indifference; or, if there were, it is a relaxation from the intense activity which gives a tone to its general character. But there is a gravity approaching to piety, a seriousness of impression, a conscientious severity of argument, an habitual fervor of enthusiasm in their method of handling almost every subject. The debates of the schoolmen were sharp and subtle enough: but they wanted interest and grandeur, and were besides confined to a few. They did not affect the general mass of the community. But the Bible was thrown open to all ranks and conditions “to own and read,” with its wonderful table of contents, from Genesis to the Revelation. Every village in England would present the scene so well described in Burns’s “Cotter’s Saturday Night.” How unlike this agitation, this shock, this angry sea, this fermentation, this shout and its echoes, this impulse and activity, this concussion, this general effect, this blow, this earthquake, this roar and dashing, this longer and louder strain, this public opinion, this liberty to all to think and speak the truth, this stirring of spirits, this opening of eyes, this zeal to know—not nothing—but the truth, that the truth might make them free. How unlike to this is Know-Nothingism, sitting and brooding in secret to proscribe Catholics and naturalized citizens! Protestantism protested against secrecy, it protested against shutting out the light of truth, it protested against proscription, bigotry, and intolerance. It loosened all tongues, and fought the owls and bats of night with the light of meridian day. The argument of Know-Nothings is the argument of silence. The order ignores all knowledge. And its proscription can’t arrest itself within the limit of excluding Catholics and naturalized citizens. It must proscribe natives and Protestants both, who will not consent to unite in proscribing Catholics and naturalized citizens. Nor is that all; it must not only apply to birth and religion, it must necessarily extend itself to the business of life as well as to political preferments.

Kenneth Raynor, of North Carolina, on Fusion of Fremont and Fillmore Forces.

Extracts from his Speech at Philadelphia, November 1, 1856.

My brother Americans, do you intend to let these mischief-makers put you and me together by the ears? [Many voices; “no, no.”] Then let us beat James Buchanan for the Presidency. [“We will—we will,” and great applause.] He is the representative of slavery agitation; he is the representative of discord between sections; he is the man whom Northern and Southern agitators have agreed to present as their candidate. If he be elected now, and the difficulties in Kansas be healed, at the end of four years they will spring upon you another question of slavery agitation. It will be the taking of Cuba from Spain, or cutting off another slice from Mexico for the purpose of embroiling the North against the South; and then, if I shall resist that agitation, I shall be called an Abolitionist, again.

* * * * *

My countrymen, God forbid that I should attempt to dictate to you or even advise you. I am not competent to do so. I know that divisions exist among you, while I feel also confident that the same purpose animates all your hearts. Do not suppose for one moment that I am the representative of any clique or faction.

Unfortunately, I find that our friends here are in the same condition in which the Jews were, when besieged by the Roman general, Titus. Whilst the battering-rams of the Romans were beating down their walls, and the firebrand of the heathen was consuming their temple, the historian tells us that that great people were engaged in intestine commotions, some advocating the claims of one, and some of another, to the high priesthood of that nation; and instead of the Romans devouring them, they devoured each other. God forbid that my brother Americans should devour each other, at a time when every heart and every hand should be enlisted in the same cause, of overthrowing the common enemy of us all.

Who is that common enemy? [Voices, “The Democratic party.”] Yes, that party have reviled us, abused us, persecuted us, and all only because we are determined to adhere to the Constitution of our country. Give Buchanan a lease of power for four years, and we must toil through persecution, submit to degradation, or cause the streets of our cities to run blood. But we will submit to degradation provided we can see the end of our troubles. We are willing to go through a pilgrimage, not only of four years, but of ten, or twenty, or forty years, provided we can have an assurance that at last we shall reach the top of Pisgah, and see the promised land which our children are to inherit. God has not given to us poor frail mortals the power, at all times, of controlling events. When we cannot control events, should we not, where no sacrifice of honor is involved, pursue the policy of Lysander, and where the lion’s skin is too short, eke it out with the fox’s [applause]—not where principle is involved—not where a surrender of our devotion to our country is at stake. No; never, never!

I know nothing of your straight-out ticket; I know nothing of your Union ticket; I know nothing of Fremont. I do know something of Fillmore; but I would not give my Americanism, and the hopes which I cherish of seeing Americanism installed as the policy of this nation, for all the Fillmores, or Fremonts, or Buchanans, that ever lived on the face of the earth.

St. Paul says, “if it offends my brother, I will eat no meat;” and if it offends my brother here, I will not open my mouth. Nobody can suspect me. [Voices: “certainly not.”] Then I say, can’t you combine the vote of this state, and beat Buchanan? [This question was responded to in the affirmative, with the greatest enthusiasm.] Repeated cheers were proposed for the straight ticket, but the responding voices were by no means numerous, and were mingled with hisses. Such was the universal excitement, that for some minutes the speaker was obliged to pause. He finally raised his voice above the subsiding storm, and said:—

Come, my friends, we are all brothers; we are all seeking the same end. Our object is the same. We are all struggling to reach the same haven of safety. The only difference of opinion is as to the proper means by which to accomplish our common end. Will not Americans learn prudence from the past? Misfortune should have taught us charity for each other. We have passed through the ordeal of persecution together; we have been subjected to the same difficulties, and the same oppression; we have been baptized (I may say) in the same stream of calumny. Then, in the name of God—in the name of our common country—in the name of Americanism—in the name of American nationality—in the name of religious freedom—in the name of the Union, I beseech you to learn charity for the difference of opinion which prevails among you. Let brethren forbear with brethren. Let us recollect that it is not by vituperation, by the censure of our brethren, that we can ever accomplish this great end of conquering a common enemy. My friends, how long are we to suffer? How long will it be before we shall learn that it is only by a union of counsels, a concentration of energy, a combination of purpose, that we can destroy the common enemy of every conservative man. [Great applause.]

I shall not attempt to advise you, for I am not competent to do it. You have information which I do not possess. You know all the undercurrents of opinion which prevail here in your community, with which I am unacquainted; but will you allow an humble man to express his opinion to brethren whom he loves? May I do it? I am a Fillmore man—nothing but a Fillmore man, and if I resided here, I would vote no ticket which had not the name of Millard Fillmore at its head, and I would advise no Fillmore man to vote a ticket with Fremont’s name on it; but I would vote for that ticket which would make my voice tell at the polls.

Now let us look at this thing practically. In reading history I have always admired the character of Oliver Cromwell. What was the great motive by which he was actuated in overthrowing the house of Stuart? It was unfailing devotion to principle. His motto was, “Put your trust in God, and keep your powder dry.” I admire the devotion to principle in every man who says that he does not intend to vote any but the straight ticket, for it shows that Americanism has such a lodgment in his heart, that he cannot bear even seemingly to compromise it. That is “putting your trust in God;” but, my friends, is it “keeping your powder dry?” The enemy may steal into the camp while you are asleep, and may pour water upon your cartridges, so that when the day of battle shall come, you may shoot, but you will kill nobody. I want the vote of every American, on Tuesday next, to tell. Would to God that you could give the twenty-seven electoral votes of Pennsylvania to Fillmore. Then vote the straight ticket, if that will give him the twenty-seven votes. But suppose it will not (and I am afraid it will not), then the question is, had you better give Buchanan the twenty-seven votes, or give Fillmore eight, ten, twelve, or twenty, as the case may be. I go for beating Buchanan.

Gentlemen, you do not know what we Americans suffer at the South. I am abused and reviled for standing up in defence of you. When I hear the whole North denounced as a set of Abolitionists, whose purpose it is to interfere with the peculiar institutions of the South, I brand such charges as slanders on the Northern people. I tell them that the great mass of the Northern people are sound on this question; that they are opposed to slavery, as I should be if I were a Northern man; but that I do not believe that the great mass of the Northern people have any idea of interfering with the constitutional rights of the people of the South. I know that such men as Garrison and Forney have. I know that Garrison believes the Constitution to be a “league with hell,” and would therefore destroy it if he could; and I know that Forney loves office so well, that even at the risk of snapping the Union, he will keep alive slavery agitation. But Garrison does not represent New England, and Forney does not represent you.

As much as I have been reviled for standing by you, I am so anxious to have Buchanan beaten, that were I residing here, if I could not give Fillmore the whole twenty-seven votes, I would give him all I could, by giving him the number to which he might be entitled by the numerical proportion of the votes at the ballot-box. Yet, if there is a brother American here who feels in his “heart of hearts,” that by voting that Union ticket, he would compromise his Americanism, I say to such an one, “do not vote that ticket.” At the same time, candor compels me to say, that I differ in opinion with him. If I believed that that ticket was a fusion, or that it called upon any Fillmore man to vote for Fremont, I would advise no one to vote it. I would not vote a ticket that had on it the name of Fremont; but I would vote a ticket with Fillmore’s name upon it, and which would give him (if not the twenty-seven electoral votes) seven, or ten, or twenty, just as the numerical proportion of the votes might decide.

I appeal to every conservative, Union-loving man in this nation, who is disposed to give to the South all the constitutional privileges to which she is entitled, and who wishes to rebuke the Democratic party for the repeal of the Missouri compromise, and for keeping up the eternal agitation of slavery. I appeal to you as a southern man—as a slaveholder. I do not ask you to be pro-slavery men, to be the advocates of slavery, when I say to you that we, your brethren of the South, expect you to preserve our constitutional rights—and, God knows, we ask nothing more—against fanatics, either north or south. Will you do it?

My friends, the election is fast approaching. There is but little time for deliberation left. Is there no way by which the votes of the anti-Buchanan party can be concentrated on the same ticket? I would shed tears of blood—God knows I would—if I could be instrumental in prevailing on all true Americans to combine. I cannot tell you how to combine; but is it yet too late? If it is too late to do it throughout the state, cannot you in Philadelphia do it? The Presidential election may depend upon the state of Pennsylvania, and the state of Pennsylvania may depend upon the city of Philadelphia. On the vote of the city of Philadelphia may depend not only our own rights, but the rights of our children and our children’s children. I appeal to my brother Americans, for I have no right to appeal to anybody else; I cannot address the Fremont party, for I have no affiliation with them; I cannot address the Buchanan party, for my object is to destroy them if possible. To my American brethren, then, I appeal, for God’s sake, do not let the sun rise upon that wrath, which I see divides you. Your object is the same—to rescue your common country.

Let me advise you who know nothing of your divisions—who belong neither to one clique or the other. I say with the deepest sincerity that I think all parties ought to have concentrated upon the Fillmore ticket. Mr. Fillmore is a northern man. Your southern brethren were willing to support him. He had guided the ship of state safely through the storm, and it was but reasonable to suppose that in time of difficulty he would again be found the same good pilot. But if we cannot get all others to unite on Mr. Fillmore, each of us must inquire, “What is my duty? If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, shall not Mahomet go to the mountain; and if he will not go to the mountain, in heaven’s name, shall he not go half way?”

I am fighting for the victory which we may obtain in this contest. And what an issue is now pending! We read in the Iliad how, for ten long years, a great people of antiquity were engaged in the siege of Troy. What was the stake for which they contended? It was nothing more than a beautiful woman, who had been ravished by a sprig of the royal line of Troy. What is the stake for which we contend? It is constitutional liberty—the right of the American people to govern their own country—the right of every citizen to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. The great issue is, whether the American flag shall still wave in glory when we shall have gone to our graves, or whether it shall be trailed in dishonor—whether the “blackness of darkness” which would follow the dissolution of this Union, shall cover the land.

I do not tell you how to combine: but I urge you to resort to that mode (if there is such a mode possible), by which you can get together—by which your votes can be made effectual at the polls—by which Millard Fillmore can go before the House of Representatives with the strong moral power which a large electoral vote will give him.

That is the way in which we must view the question as practical men. Yet so different are the conditions of our nature, so different the sentiments which actuate us, that I will not be guilty of such presumption, as to tell any man what particular course he should take. You know my opinions; if they are worth anything, receive them into your hearts, simply as the sentiments of a brother American; if they are worth nothing, let them pass as the idle wind.

In conclusion I will only say that whether we be defeated or whether we be victorious, the only reward I ask for in the labor in which I am engaged is, that you may recollect me as one who had at heart only the welfare of his country, and who endeavored to promote it by appealing to the associations of the past, and all the hopes of the future.

Religious Test.

Debate in the Convention on that article in the Constitution in regard to it.

MR. PINKNEY moved that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

MR. SHERMAN thought it unnecessary, the prevailing liberality being a sufficient security against all such tests.

REV. MR. BACKUS of Mass. I beg leave to offer a few thoughts upon the Constitution proposed to us; and I shall begin with the exclusion of any religious test. Many appear to be much concerned about it; but nothing is more evident, both in reason and the Holy Scriptures, than that religion is ever a matter between God and individuals; and that, therefore, no man or set of men can impose any religious test without invading the essential prerogatives of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ministers first assumed this power under the Christian name, and then Constantine approved of the practice when he adopted the profession of Christianity as an engine of state policy. And let the history of all nations be searched, from that day to this, and it will appear that the imposing of religious tests hath been the greatest engine of tyranny in the world.

OLIVER WOLCOTT of Conn. For myself I should be content either with or without that clause in the Constitution which excludes test laws. Knowledge and liberty are so prevalent in this country, that I do not believe that the United States would ever be disposed to establish one religious sect and lay all others under legal disabilities. But as we know not what may take place hereafter, and any such test would be destructive of the rights of free citizens, I cannot think it superfluous to have added a clause which secures us from the possibility of such oppression.

MR. MADISON of Va. I confess to you, sir, that were uniformity of religion to be introduced by this system, it would, in my opinion, be ineligible; but I have no reason to conclude that uniformity of government will produce that of religion. This subject is, for the honor of America, left perfectly free and unshackled. The government has no jurisdiction over it—the least reflection will convince us there is no danger on this ground. Happily for the states, they enjoy the utmost freedom of religion. This freedom arises from that multiplicity of sects which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For, where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.

MR. IREDELL of N. C. used this language: “Every person in the least conversant with the history of mankind, knows what dreadful mischiefs have been committed by religious persecution. Under the color of religious tests, the utmost cruelties have been exercised. Those in power have generally considered all wisdom centred in themselves, that they alone had the right to dictate to the rest of mankind, and that all opposition to their tenets was profane and impious. The consequence of this intolerant spirit has been that each church has in turn set itself up against every other, and persecutions and wars of the most implacable and bloody nature have taken place in every part of the world. America has set an example to mankind to think more rationally—that a man may be of religious sentiments differing from our own, without being a bad member of society. The principles of toleration, to the honor of this age, are doing away those errors and prejudices which have so long prevailed even in the most intolerant countries. In Roman Catholic lands, principles of moderation are adopted, which would have been spurned a century or two ago. It will be fatal, indeed, to find, at the time when examples of toleration are set even by arbitrary governments, that this country, so impressed with the highest sense of liberty, should adopt principles on this subject that were narrow, despotic, and illiberal.”

Speech of Henry W. Davis, of Maryland,

On the Mission of the American Party.

EXTRACT from Mr. Davis’s speech in the House of Representatives, on the 6th of Jan., 1857, on the results of the recent Presidential election:—

* * * * *

“The great lesson is taught by this election that both the parties which rested their hopes on sectional hostility, stand at this day condemned by the great majority of the country, as common disturbers of the public peace of the country.

“The Republican party was a hasty levy, en masse, of the Northern people to repel or revenge an intrusion by Northern votes alone. With its occasion it must pass away. The gentlemen of the Republican side of the House can now do nothing. They can pass no law excluding slavery from Kansas in the next Congress—for they are in a minority. Within two years Kansas must be a state of the Union. She will be admitted with or without slavery, as her people prefer. Beyond Kansas there is no question that is practically open. I speak to practical men. Slavery does not exist in any other territory,—it is excluded by law from several, and not likely to exist anywhere; and the Republican party has nothing to do and can do nothing. It has no future. Why cumbers it the ground?

“Between these two stand the firm ranks of the American party, thinned by desertions, but still unshaken. To them the eye of the country turns in hope. The gentleman from Georgia saluted the Northern Democrats with the title of heroes—who swam vigorously down the current. The men of the American party faced, in each section, the sectional madness. They would cry neither free nor slave Kansas; but proposed a safe administration of the laws, before which every right would find protection. Their voice was drowned amid the din of factions. The men of the North would have no moderation, and they have paid the penalty. The American party elected a majority of this House: had they of the North held fast to the great American principle of silence on the negro question, and, firmly refusing to join either agitation, stood by the American candidate, they would not now be writhing, crushed beneath an utter overthrow. If they would now destroy the Democrats, they can do it only by returning to the American party. By it alone can a party be created strong at the South as well as at the North. To it alone belongs a principle accepted wherever the American name is heard—the same at the North as at the South, on the Atlantic or the Pacific shore. It alone is free from sectional affiliations at either end of the Union which would cripple it at the other. Its principle is silence, peace, and compromise. It abides by the existing law. It allows no agitation. It maintains the present condition of affairs. It asks no change in any territory, and it will countenance no agitation for the aggrandizement of either section. Though thousands fell off in the day of trial—allured by ambition, or terrified by fear—at the North and at the South, carried away by the torrent of fanaticism in one part of the Union, or driven by the fierce onset of the Democrats in another, who shook Southern institutions by the violence of their attack, and half waked the sleeping negro by painting the Republican as his liberator, still a million of men, on the great day, in the face of both factions, heroically refused to bow the knee to either Baal. They knew the necessities of the times, and they set the example of sacrifice, that others might profit by it. They now stand the hope of the nation, around whose firm ranks the shattered elements of the great majority may rally and vindicate the right of the majority to rule, and of the native of the land to make the law of the land.

The recent election has developed, in an aggravated form, every evil against which the American party protested. Again in the war of domestic parties, Republican and Democrat have rivalled each other in bidding for the foreign vote to turn the balance of a domestic election. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country—men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election—eagerly struggled for by competing parties, mad with sectional fury, and grasping any instrument which would prostrate their opponents. Again, in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present result.

The high mission of the American is to restore the influence of the interests of the people in the conduct of affairs; to exclude appeals to foreign birth or religious feeling as elements of power in politics; to silence the voice of sectional strife—not by joining either section, but by recalling the people from a profitless and maddening controversy which aids no interest, and shakes the foundation not only of the common industry of the people, but of the Republic itself; to lay a storm amid whose fury no voice can be heard in behalf of the industrial interests of the country, no eye can watch and guard the foreign policy of the government, till our ears may be opened by the crash of foreign war waged for purposes of political and party ambition, in the name, but not by the authority nor for the interests, of the American people.

Return, then, Americans of the North, from the paths of error to which in an evil hour fierce passions and indignation have seduced you, to the sound position of the American party—silence on the slavery agitation. Leave the territories as they are—to the operation of natural causes. Prevent aggression by excluding from power the aggressors, and there will be no more wrong to redress. Awake the national spirit to the danger and degradation of having the balance of power held by foreigners. Recall the warnings of Washington against foreign influence—here in our midst—wielding part of our sovereignty; and with these sound words of wisdom let us recall the people from paths of strife and error to guard their peace and power; and when once the mind of the people is turned from the slavery agitation, that party which waked the agitation will cease to have power to disturb the peace of the land.

This is the great mission of the American party. The first condition of success is to prevent the administration from having a majority in the next Congress; for, with that, the agitation will be resumed for very different objects. The Ostend manifesto is full of warning; and they who struggle over Kansas may awake and find themselves in the midst of an agitation compared to which that of Kansas was a summer’s sea; whose instruments will be, not words, but the sword.

Joshua R. Giddings Against the Fugitive Slave Law.

In the House of Representatives, April 25, 1848.

“Why, sir, I never saw a panting fugitive speeding his way to a land of freedom, that an involuntary invocation did not burst from my lips, that God would aid him in his flight! Such are the feelings of every man in our free states, whose heart has not become hardened in iniquity. I do not confine this virtue to Republicans, nor to Anti-Slavery men; I speak of all men, of all parties, in all Christian communities. Northern Democrats feel it; they ordinarily bow to this higher law of their natures, and they only prove recreant to the law of the ‘Most High,’ when they regard the interests of the Democratic party as superior to God’s law and the rights of mankind.

“Gentlemen will bear with me when I assure them and the President that I have seen as many as nine fugitives dining at one time in my own house—fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, parents, and children. When they came to my door, hungry and faint, cold and but partially clad, I did not turn round to consult the Fugitive Law, nor to ask the President what I should do. I knew the constitution of my country, and would not violate it. I obeyed the divine mandate, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. I fed them. I clothed them, gave them money for their journey, and sent them on their way rejoicing. I obeyed God rather than the President. I obeyed my conscience, the dictates of my heart, the law of my moral being, the commands of Heaven, and, I will add, the constitution of my country; for no man of intelligence ever believed that the framers of that instrument intended to involve their descendants of the free states in any act that should violate the teachings of the Most High, by seizing a fellow-being, and returning him to the hell of slavery. If that be treason, make the most of it.

“MR. BENNETT, of Mississippi. I want to know if the gentleman would not have gone one step farther?

“MR. GIDDINGS. Yes, sir; I would have gone one step farther. I would have driven the slave-catcher who dared pursue them from my premises. I would have kicked him from my door-yard, if he had made his appearance there; or, had he attempted to enter my dwelling, I would have stricken him down upon the threshold of my door.

Robert Toombs on Slavery,

At Tremont Temple, Boston, January 24th, 1856.

In 1790 there were less than seven hundred thousand slaves in the United States; in 1850 the number exceeded three and one quarter millions. The same authority shows their increase, for the ten years preceding the last census, to have been above twenty-eight per cent., or nearly three per cent. per annum, an increase equal, allowing for the element of foreign immigration, to the white race, and nearly three times that of the free blacks of the North. But these legal rights of the slave embrace but a small portion of the privileges actually enjoyed by him. He has, by universal custom, the control of much of his own time, which is applied, at his own choice and convenience, to the mechanic arts, to agriculture, or to some other profitable pursuit, which not only gives him the power of purchase over many additional necessaries of life, but over many of its luxuries, and in numerous cases, enables him to purchase his freedom when he desires it. Besides, the nature of the relation of master and slave begets kindnesses, imposes duties (and secures their performance), which exist in no other relation of capital and labor. Interest and humanity co-operate in harmony for the well-being of slave labor. Thus the monster objection to our institution of slavery, that it deprives labor of its wages, cannot stand the test of a truthful investigation. A slight examination of the true theory of wages, will further expose its fallacy. Under a system of free labor, wages are usually paid in money, the representative of products—under ours, in products themselves. One of your most distinguished statesmen and patriots, President John Adams, said that the difference to the state was “imaginary.” “What matters it (said he) whether a landlord, employing ten laborers on his farm, gives them annually as much money as will buy them the necessaries of life, or gives them those necessaries at short hand?” All experience has shown that if that be the measure of the wages of labor, it is safer for the laborer to take his wages in products than in their fluctuating pecuniary value. Therefore, if we pay in the necessaries and comforts of life more than any given amount of pecuniary wages will buy, then our laborer is paid higher than the laborer who receives that amount of wages. The most authentic agricultural statistics of England show that the wages of agricultural and unskilled labor in that kingdom, not only fail to furnish the laborer with the comforts of our slave, but even with the necessaries of life; and no slaveholder could escape a conviction for cruelty to his slaves who gave his slave no more of the necessaries of life for his labor than the wages paid to their agricultural laborers by the noblemen and gentlemen of England would buy. Under their system man has become less valuable and less cared for than domestic animals; and noble dukes will depopulate whole districts of men to supply their places with sheep, and then with intrepid audacity lecture and denounce American slaveholders.

The great conflict between labor and capital, under free competition, has ever been how the earnings of labor shall be divided between them. In new and sparsely settled countries, where land is cheap, and food is easily produced, and education and intelligence approximate equality, labor can successfully struggle in this warfare with capital. But this is an exceptional and temporary condition of society. In the Old World this state of things has long since passed away, and the conflict with the lower grades of labor has long since ceased. There the compensation of unskilled labor, which first succumbs to capital, is reduced to a point scarcely adequate to the continuance of the race. The rate of increase is scarcely one per cent. per annum, and even at that rate, population, until recently, was considered a curse; in short, capital has become the master of labor, with all the benefits, without the natural burdens of the relation.

In this division of the earnings of labor between it and capital, the southern slave has a marked advantage over the English laborer, and is often equal to the free laborer of the North. Here again we are furnished with authentic data from which to reason. The census of 1850 shows that, on the cotton estates of the South, which is the chief branch of our agricultural industry, one-half of the arable lands are annually put under food crops. This half is usually wholly consumed on the farm by the laborers and necessary animals; out of the other half must be paid all the necessary expenses of production, often including additional supplies of food beyond the produce of the land, which usually equals one-third of the residue, leaving but one-third for net rent. The average rent of land in the older non-slaveholding states is equal to one-third of the gross product, and it not unfrequently amounts to one-half of it (in England it is sometimes even greater), the tenant, from his portion, paying all expenses of production and the expenses of himself and family. From this statement it is apparent that the farm laborers of the South receive always as much, and frequently a greater portion of the produce of the land, than the laborer in the New or Old England. Besides, here the portion due the slave is a charge upon the whole product of capital and the capital itself; it is neither dependent upon seasons nor subject to accidents, and survives his own capacity for labor, and even the ruin of his master.

But it is objected that religious instruction is denied the slave—while it is true that religious instruction and privileges are not enjoined by law in all of the states, the number of slaves who are in connection with the different churches abundantly proves the universality of their enjoyment of those privileges. And a much larger number of the race in slavery enjoy the consolations of religion than the efforts of the combined Christian world have been able to convert to Christianity out of all the millions of their countrymen who remained in their native land.

The immoralities of the slaves, and of those connected with slavery, are constant themes of abolition denunciation. They are lamentably great; but it remains to be shown that they are greater than with the laboring poor of England, or any other country. And it is shown that our slaves are without the additional stimulant of want to drive them to crime—we have at least removed from them the temptation and excuse of hunger. Poor human nature is here at least spared the wretched fate of the utter prostration of its moral nature at the feet of its physical wants. Lord Ashley’s report to the British Parliament shows that in the capital of that empire, perhaps within the hearing of Stafford House and Exeter Hall, hunger alone daily drives its thousands of men and women into the abyss of crime.

It is also objected that our slaves are debarred the benefits of education. This objection is also well taken, and is not without force. And for this evil the slaves are greatly indebted to the abolitionists. Formerly in none of the slaveholding states was it forbidden to teach slaves to read and write; but the character of the literature sought to be furnished them by the abolitionists caused these states to take counsel rather of their passions than their reason, and to lay the axe at the root of the evil; better counsels will in time prevail, and this will be remedied. It is true that the slave, from his protected position, has less need of education than the free laborer, who has to struggle for himself in the warfare of society; yet it is both useful to him, his master, and society.

The want of legal protection to the marriage relation is also a fruitful source of agitation among the opponents of slavery. The complaint is not without foundation. This is an evil not yet removed by law; but marriage is not inconsistent with the institution of slavery as it exists among us, and the objection, therefore, lies rather to an incident than to the essence of the system. But in the truth and fact marriage does exist to a very great extent among slaves, and is encouraged and protected by their owners; and it will be found, upon careful investigation, that fewer children are born out of wedlock among slaves than in the capitals of two of the most civilized countries of Europe—Austria and France; in the former, one-half of the children are thus born; in the latter, more than one-fourth. But even in this we have deprived the slave of no pre-existing right. We found the race without any knowledge of or regard for the institution of marriage, and we are reproached with not having as yet secured to it that, with all other blessings of civilization. To protect that and other domestic ties by laws forbidding, under proper regulations, the separation of families, would be wise, proper, and humane; and some of the slaveholding states have already adopted partial legislation for the removal of these evils. But the objection is far more formidable in theory than in practice. The accidents and necessities of life, the desire to better one’s condition, produce infinitely a greater amount of separation in families of the white than ever happens to the colored race. This is true even in the United States, where the general condition of the people is prosperous. But it is still more marked in Europe. The injustice and despotism of England towards Ireland has produced more separation of Irish families, and sundered more domestic ties within the last ten years, than African slavery has effected since its introduction into the United States. The twenty millions of freemen in the United States are witnesses of the dispersive injustice of the Old World. The general happiness, cheerfulness, and contentment of slaves attest both the mildness and humanity of the system and their natural adaptation to their condition. They require no standing armies to enforce their obedience; while the evidence of discontent, and the appliances of force to repress it, are everywhere visible among the toiling millions of the earth; even in the northern states of this Union, strikes and mobs, unions and combinations against employers, attest at once the misery and discontent of labor among them. England keeps one hundred thousand soldiers in time of peace, a large navy, and an innumerable police, to secure obedience to her social institutions; and physical force is the sole guarantee of her social order, the only cement of her gigantic empire.

I have briefly traced the condition of the African race through all ages and all countries, and described it fairly and truly under American slavery, and I submit that the proposition is fully proven, that his position in slavery among us is superior to any which he has ever attained in any age or country. The picture is not without shade as well as light; evils and imperfections cling to man and all of his works, and this is not exempt from them.

Judah P. Benjamin, of Louisiana,

On Slave Property, in U. S. Senate, March 11, 1858.

Examine your Constitution; are slaves the only species of property there recognized as requiring peculiar protection? Sir, the inventive genius of our brethren of the north is a source of vast wealth to them and vast benefit to the nation. I saw a short time ago in one of the New York journals, that the estimated value of a few of the patents now before us in this Capitol for renewal was $40,000,000. I cannot believe that the entire capital invested in inventions of this character in the United States can fall short of one hundred and fifty or two hundred million dollars. On what protection does this vast property rest? Just upon that same constitutional protection which gives a remedy to the slave owner when his property is also found outside of the limits of the state in which he lives.

Without this protection what would be the condition of the northern inventor? Why, sir, the Vermont inventor protected by his own law would come to Massachusetts, and there say to the pirate who had stolen his property, “render me up my property, or pay me value for its use.” The Senator from Vermont would receive for answer, if he were the counsel of this Vermont inventor, “Sir, if you want protection for your property go to your own state; property is governed by the laws of the state within whose jurisdiction it is found; you have no property in your invention outside of the limits of your state; you cannot go an inch beyond it.” Would not this be so? Does not every man see at once that the right of the inventor to his discovery, that the right of the poet to his inspiration, depends upon those principles of eternal justice which God has implanted in the heart of man, and that wherever he cannot exercise them, it is because man, faithless to the trust that he has received from God, denies them the protection to which they are entitled?

Sir, follow out the illustration which the Senator from Vermont himself has given; take his very case of the Delaware owner of a horse riding him across the line into Pennsylvania. The Senator says: “Now, you see that slaves are not property like other property; if slaves were property like other property, why have you this special clause in your constitution to protect a slave? You have no clause to protect the horse, because horses are recognized as property everywhere.” Mr. President, the same fallacy lurks at the bottom of this argument, as of all the rest. Let Pennsylvania exercise her undoubted jurisdiction over persons and things within her own boundary; let her do as she has a perfect right to do—declare that hereafter, within the state of Pennsylvania, there shall be no property in horses, and that no man shall maintain a suit in her courts for the recovery of property in a horse; and where will your horse owner be then? Just where the English poet is now; just where the slaveholder and the inventor would be if the Constitution, foreseeing a difference of opinion in relation to rights in these subject-matters, had not provided the remedy in relation to such property as might easily be plundered. Slaves, if you please, are not property like other property in this: that you can easily rob us of them; but as to the right in them, that man has to overthrow the whole history of the world, he has to overthrow every treatise on jurisprudence, he has to ignore the common sentiment of mankind, he has to repudiate the authority of all that is considered sacred with man, ere he can reach the conclusion that the person who owns a slave, in a country where slavery has been established for ages, has no other property in that slave than the mere title which is given by the statute law of the land where it is found.

William Lloyd Garrison Upon the Slavery Question.

“Tyrants! confident of its overthrow, proclaim not to your vassals, that the American Union is an experiment of freedom, which, if it fails, will forever demonstrate the necessity of whips for the backs, and chains for limbs of people. Know that its subversion is essential to the triumph of justice, the deliverance of the oppressed, the vindication of the brotherhood of the race. It was conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniquity; and its career has been marked by unparalleled hypocrisy, by high-handed tyranny, by a bold defiance of the omniscience and omnipotence of God. Freedom indignantly disowns it, and calls for its extinction; for within its borders are three millions of slaves, whose blood constitutes its cement, whose flesh forms a large and flourishing branch of its commerce, and who are ranked with four-footed beasts and creeping things. To secure the adoption of the constitution of the United States, first, that the African slave trade—till that time a feeble, isolated, colonial traffic—should, for at least twenty years, be prosecuted as a national interest, under the American flag, and protected by the national arm; secondly, that slavery holding oligarchy, created by allowing three-fifths of the slaveholding population to be represented by their taskmasters, should be allowed a permanent seat in congress; thirdly, that the slave system should be secured against internal revolt and external invasion, by the united physical force of the country; fourthly, that not a foot of national territory should be granted, on which the panting fugitive from slavery might stand, and be safe from his pursuers, thus making every citizen a slave-hunter and slave catcher. To say that this ‘covenant with death’ shall not be annulled—that this ‘agreement with hell’ shall continue to stand—that this refuge of lies shall not be swept away—is to hurl defiance at the eternal throne, and to give the lie to Him that sits thereon. It is an attempt, alike monstrous and impracticable, to blend the light of heaven with the darkness of the bottomless pit, to unite the living with the dead, to associate the Son of God with the Prince of Evil. Accursed be the American Union, as a stupendous, republican imposture!”

* * * * *

“I am accused of using hard language. I admit the charge. I have been unable to find a soft word to describe villainy, or to identify the perpetrator of it. The man who makes a chattel of his brother—what is he? The man who keeps back the hire of his laborers by fraud—what is he? They who prohibit the circulation of the Bible—what are they? They who compel three millions of men and women to herd together like brute beasts—what are they? They who sell mothers by the pound, and children in lots to suit purchasers—what are they? I care not what terms are applied to them, provided they do apply. If they are not thieves, if they are not tyrants, if they are not men stealers, I should like to know what is their true character, and by what names they may be called. It is as mild an epithet to say that a thief is a thief, as to say that a spade is a spade. Words are but the signs of ideas. ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ Language may be misapplied, and so be absurd or unjust; as for example, to say that an abolitionist is a fanatic, or that a slaveholder is an honest man. But to call things by their right names is to use neither hard nor improper language. Epithets may be rightly applied, it is true, and yet be uttered in a hard spirit, or with a malicious design. What then? Shall we discard all terms which are descriptive of crime, because they are not always used with fairness and propriety? He who, when he sees oppression, cries out against it—who, when he beholds his equal brother trodden under foot by the iron hoof of despotism, rushes to his rescue—who, when he sees the weak overborne by the strong, takes his side with the former, at the imminent peril of his own safety—such a man needs no certificate to the excellence of his temper, or the sincerity of his heart, or the disinterestedness of his conduct. Or is the apologist of slavery, he who can see the victim of thieves lying bleeding and helpless on the cold earth, and yet turn aside, like the callous-hearted priest or Levite, who needs absolution. Let us call tyrants, tyrants; not to do so is to misuse language, to deal treacherously with freedom, to consent to the enslavement of mankind. It is neither amiable nor virtuous, but a foolish and pernicious thing, not to call things by their right names. ‘Woe unto them,’ says one of the world’s great prophets, ‘that call evil good, and good evil;’ that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”

Theodore Parker Against the Fugitive Slave Law.

His Protest Against the Return of Simms by the U. S. Commissioner at Boston.

“Come with me, my friends, a moment more, pass over this golgotha of human history, treading reverent as you go, for our feet are on our mother’s graves, and our shoes defile our father’s hallowed bones. Let us not talk of them; go farther on, look and pass by. Come with me into the inferno of the nations, with such poor guidance as my lamp can lend. Let us disquiet and bring up the awful shadows of empires buried long ago, and learn a lesson from the tomb.” “Come, old Assyria, with the Ninevitish dove upon thy emerald crown! what laid thee low? ‘I fell by my own injustice. Thereby Nineveh and Babylon came with me also to the ground.’” “Oh, queenly Persia, flame of the nations, wherefore art thou so fallen, who troddest the people under thee, bridgest the Hellespont with ships, and pouredst thy temple-wasting millions on the world? Because I trod the people under me, and bridged the Hellespont with ships, and poured my temple-wasting millions on the western world, I fell by my own misdeeds.” “Thou muse-like Grecian queen, fairest of all thy classic sisterhood of states, enchanting yet the world with thy sweet witchery, speaking in art and most seductive song, why liest thou there, with beauteous yet dishonored brow, reposing on thy broken harp? ‘I scorned the law of God; banished and poisoned wisest, justest men; I loved the loveliness of thought, and treasured that in more than Parian speech. But the beauty of justice, the loveliness of love, I trod them down to earth! Lo, therefore have I become as those barbarian states—as one of them!’” “Oh, manly and majestic Rome, thy seven-fold mural crown all broken at thy feet, why art thou here? It was not injustice brought thee low; for thy great book of law is prefaced with these words—justice is the unchanged, everlasting will to give each man his right! ‘It was not the saint’s ideal; it was the hypocrite’s pretense.’ I made iniquity my law. I trod the nations under me. Their wealth gilded my palaces—where thou mayest see the fox and hear the owl—it fed my courtiers and my courtesans. Wicked men were my cabinet counselors, the flatterer breathed his poison in my ear. Millions of bondsmen wet the soil with tears and blood. Do you not hear it crying yet to God? Lo, here have I my recompense, tormented with such downfall as you see! Go back and tell the new-born child who sitteth on the Alleghanies, laying his either hand upon a tributary sea, a crown of thirty stars upon his youthful brow—tell him that there are rights which states must keep, or they shall suffer wrongs! Tell him there is a God who keeps the black man and the white, and hurls to earth the loftiest realm that breaks his just, eternal law! Warn the young empire, that he come not down dim and dishonored to my shameful tomb! Tell him that justice is the unchanging, everlasting will to give each man his right. I knew it, broke it, and am lost. Bid him know it, keep it, and be safe.”

* * * * *

The same speaker protests against the return of Simms.

“Where shall I find a parallel with men who will do such a deed—do it in Boston? I will open the tombs and bring up most hideous tyrants from the dead. Come, brood of monsters, let me bring up from the deep damnation of the graves wherein your hated memories continue for all time their never-ending rot. Come, birds of evil omen! come, ravens, vultures, carrion crows, and see the spectacle! come, see the meeting of congenial souls! I will disturb, disquiet, and bring up the greatest monsters of the human race! Tremble not, women! They cannot harm you now! Fear the living, not the dead!”

Come hither, Herod, the wicked. Thou that didst seek after that young child’s life, and destroyed the innocents! Let me look on thy face! No, go! Thou wert a heathen! Go, lie with the innocents thou hast massacred. Thou art too good for this company! “Come, Nero; thou awful Roman emperor, come up! No, thou wast drunk with power! schooled in Roman depravity. Thou hadst, besides, the example of thy fancied gods. Go, wait another day. I will seek a worse man.

“Come hither, St. Dominic! come, Torquemada; fathers of the Inquisition! merciless monsters, seek your equal here. No; pass by. You are no companion for such men as these. You were the servants of the atheistic popes, of cruel kings. Go to, and get you gone. Another time I may have work for you—now, lie there, and persevere to rot. You are not yet quite wicked and corrupt enough for this comparison. Go, get you gone, lest the sun goes back at sight of ye!

“Come up, thou heap of wickedness, George Jeffries! thy hands deep purple with the blood of thy fellow-men. Ah! I know thee, awful and accursed shade! Two hundred years after thy death men hate thee still, not without cause. Look me upon thee! I know thy history. Pause, and be still, while I tell to these men. * * * Come, shade of judicial butcher. Two hundred years, thy name has been pillowed in face of the world, and thy memory gibbeted before mankind. Let us see how thou wilt compare with those who kidnap men in Boston. Go, seek companionship with them. Go, claim thy kindred if such they be. Go, tell them that the memory of the wicked shall rot; that there is a God; an eternity; ay, and a judgment, too, where the slave may appeal against him that made him a slave, to Him that made him a man.

“What! Dost thou shudder? Thou turn back! These not thy kindred! Why dost thou turn pale, as when the crowd clutched at thy life in London street? Forgive me, that I should send thee on such an errand, or bid thee seek companionship with such—with Boston hunters of the slave! Thou wert not base enough! It was a great bribe that tempted thee! Again, I say, pardon me for sending thee to keep company with such men! Thou only struckest at men accused of crime; not at men accused only of their birth! Thou wouldst not send a man into bondage for two pounds! I will not rank thee with men who, in Boston, for ten dollars, would enslave a negro now! Rest still, Herod! Be quiet, Nero! Sleep, St. Dominic, and sleep, O Torquemada, in your fiery jail! Sleep, Jeffries, underneath ‘the altar of the church’ which seeks, with Christian charity to hide your hated bones!”

William H. Seward’s Speech on the Higher Law.

In the U. S. Senate, March 11, 1850.

“But it is insisted that the admission of California shall be attended by a COMPROMISE of questions which have arisen out of SLAVERY! I AM OPPOSED TO ANY SUCH COMPROMISE IN ANY AND ALL THE FORMS IN WHICH IT HAS BEEN PROPOSED. Because, while admitting the purity and the patriotism of all from whom it is my misfortune to differ, I think all legislative compromises radically wrong, and essentially vicious. They involve the surrender of the exercise of judgment and the conscience on distinct and separate questions, at distinct and separate times, with the indispensable advantages it affords for ascertaining the truth. They involve a relinquishment of the right to reconsider in future the decision of the present, on questions prematurely anticipated. And they are a usurpation as to future questions of the providence of future legislators.

“Sir, it seems to me as if slavery had laid its paralyzing hand upon myself, and the blood were coursing less freely than its wont through my veins, when I endeavor to suppose that such a compromise has been effected, and my utterance forever is arrested upon all the great questions, social, moral, and political, arising out of a subject so important, and yet so incomprehensible. What am I to receive in this compromise? Freedom in California. It is well; it is a noble acquisition; it is worth a sacrifice. But what am I to give as an equivalent? A recognition of a claim to perpetuate slavery in the District of Columbia; forbearance towards more stringent laws concerning the arrest of persons suspected of being slaves found in the free States; forbearance from the PROVISO of freedom in the charter of new territories. None of the plans of compromise offered demand less than two, and most of them insist on all these conditions. The equivalent then is, some portion of liberty, some portion of human rights in one region for liberty in another.”

“It is true indeed that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquired by the valor and the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it. We hold no arbitrary power over anything, whether acquired by law or seized by usurpation. The constitution regulates our stewardship; the constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to welfare and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purpose. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards, and must so discharge our trust, as to secure in the highest attainable degree their happiness. This is a State, and we are deliberating for it, just as our fathers deliberated in establishing the institutions we enjoy. Whatever superiority there is in our condition and hopes over those of any other ‘kingdom’ or ‘estate,’ is due to the fortunate circumstance that our ancestors did not leave things to ‘take their chances’ but that they ‘added amplitude and greatness’ to our commonwealth ‘by introducing such ordinances, constitutions, and customs as were wise.’ We in our turn have succeeded to the same responsibilities, and we cannot approach the duty before us wisely or justly, except we raise ourselves to the great consideration of how we can most certainly ‘sow greatness to our posterity and successors.’

“And now the simple, bold, and awful question which presents itself to us is this: shall we, who are founding institutions, social and political, for countless millions; shall we, who know by experience the wise and just, and are free to choose them, and to reject the erroneous and unjust; shall we establish human bondage, or permit it by our sufferance to be established? Sir, our forefathers would not have hesitated an hour. They found slavery existing here, and they left it only because they could not remove it. There is not only no free State which would now establish it, but there is no slave State which, if it had had the free alternative, as we now have, would have founded slavery. Indeed, our revolutionary predecessors had precisely the same question before them in establishing an organic law, under which the States of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa have since come into the Union, and they solemnly repudiated and excluded slavery from those States forever.”

Charles Sumner on the Fallibility of Judicial Tribunals.

Let me here say that I hold judges, and especially the Supreme Court of the country, in much respect; but I am too familiar with the history of Judicial proceedings to regard them with any superstitious reverence. Judges are but men and in all ages have shown a full share of frailty. Alas! alas! the worst crimes of history have been perpetrated under their sanction. The blood of martyrs and of patriots, crying from the ground, summons them to judgment.

It was a judicial tribunal which condemned Socrates to drink the fatal hemlock, and which pushed the Saviour barefoot over the pavements of Jerusalem, bending beneath his cross. It was a judicial tribunal which, against the testimony and entreaties of her father, surrendered the fair Virginia as a slave; which arrested the teachings of the great apostle to the Gentiles, and sent him in bonds from Judea to Rome; which, in the name of the old religion, adjured the saints and fathers of the Christian Church to death, in all its most dreadful forms; and which afterwards in the name of the new religion, enforced the tortures of the Inquisition, amidst the shrieks and agonies of its victims, while it compelled Galileo to declare, in solemn denial of the great truth he had disclosed, that the earth did not move round the sun.

It was a judicial tribunal which, in France, during the long reign of her monarchs, lent itself to be the instrument of every tyranny, as during the brief reign of terror it did not hesitate to stand forth the unpitying accessory of the unpitying guillotine. Ay, sir, it was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry the eighth, from the unjust divorce of his queen to the beheading of Sir Thomas Moore; which lighted the fires of persecution, that glowed at Oxford and Smithfield, over the cinders of Latimer, Ridley, and John Rodgers; which, after elaborate argument, upheld the fatal tyranny of ship money against the patriotic resistance of Hampden; which, in defiance of justice and humanity, sent Sydney and Russell to the block; which persistently enforced the laws of conformity that our Puritan Fathers persistently refused to obey; and which afterwards, with Jeffries on the bench, crimsoned the pages of English history with massacre and murder, even with the blood of innocent women. Ay, sir, and it was a judicial tribunal in our country, surrounded by all the forms of law, which hung witches at Salem, which affirmed the constitutionality of the Stamp Act, while it admonished “jurors and the people” to obey; and which now, in our day, has lent its sanction to the unutterable atrocity of the Fugitive Slave Law.

Galusha A. Grow’s Speech on the Homestead Bill.

In the House of Representatives, March 30, 1852. “Man’s Right to the Soil.”

* * * * *

But even if the Government could derive any revenue from the actual sale of public lands, it is neither just nor sound policy to hold them for that purpose. Aware, however, that it is a poor place, under a one hour rule, to attempt to discuss any of the natural rights of men, for, surrounded by the authority of ages, it becomes necessary, without the time to do it, first to brush away the dust that has gathered upon their errors. Yet it is well sometimes to go back of the authority of books and treatises, composed by authors reared and educated under monarchical institutions, and whose opinions and habits of thought consequently were more or less shaped and moulded by such influences, and examine, by the light of reason and nature, the true foundation of government and the inherent rights of men.

The fundamental rights of man may be summed up in two words—Life and Happiness. The first is the gift of the Creator, and may be bestowed at his pleasure; but it is not consistent with his character for benevolence, that it should be bestowed for any other purpose than to be enjoyed, and that we call happiness. Therefore, whatever nature has provided for preserving the one, or promoting the other, belongs alike to the whole race. And as the means for sustaining life are derived almost entirely from the soil, every person has a right to so much of the earth’s surface as is necessary for his support. To whatever unoccupied portion of it, therefore, he shall apply his labor for that purpose, from that time forth it becomes appropriated to his own exclusive use; and whatever improvements he may make by his industry become his property, and subject to his disposal.

The only true foundation of any right to property is man’s labor. That is property, and that alone which the labor of man has made such. What right, then, can the Government have in the soil of a wild and uncultivated wilderness as a source of revenue, to which not a day nor hour’s labor has been applied, to make it more productive, and answer the end for which it was created, the support and happiness of the race?

It is said by the great expounder of the common law in his commentaries, that “there is no foundation in nature or natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land.” The use and occupancy alone gives to man, in the language of the commentaries, “an exclusive right to retain, in a permanent manner, that specific land which before belonged generally to everybody, but particularly to nobody.” * * *

It may be said, true, such would be man’s right to the soil in a state of nature; but when he entered into society, he gave up part of his natural rights, in order to enjoy the advantages of an organized community. This is a doctrine, I am aware, of the books and treatises on society and government; but it is a doctrine of despotism, and belongs not to enlightened statesmen in a liberal age. It is the excuse of the despot in encroaching upon the rights of the subject. He admits the encroachment, but claims that the citizen gave up part of his natural rights when he entered into society; and who is to judge what ones he relinquished but the ruling power? It was not necessary that any of man’s natural rights should be yielded to the state in the formation of society. He yielded no right, but the right to do wrong, and that he never had by nature. All that he yielded in entering into organized society, was a portion of his unrestrained liberty, which was, that he would submit his conduct, that before was subject to the control of no living being, to the tribunals to be established by the state, and with a tacit consent that society, or the Government, might regulate the mode and manner of the exercise of his rights. Why should he consent to be deprived of them? It is upon this ground that we justify resistance to tyrants. Whenever the ruling power so far encroaches upon the natural rights of men that an appeal to arms becomes preferable to submission, they appeal from human to divine laws, and plead the natural rights of man in their justification. That government, and that alone, is just, which enforces and defends all of man’s natural rights, and protects him against the wrongs of his fellow-men. But it may be said, although such might be the natural rights of men, yet the Government has a right to these lands, and may use them as a source of revenue, under the doctrine of eminent domain. * * *

What is there in the constitution of things giving to one individual the sole and exclusive right to any of the bounties provided by nature for the benefit and support of the whole race, because, perchance, he was the first to look upon a mere fragment of creation? By the same process of reasoning, he who should first discover the source or mouth of a river, would be entitled to a monopoly of the waters that flow in the channel, or he who should first look upon one of the rills or fountains of the earth might prevent fainting man from quenching there his thirst, unless his right was first secured by parchment.

Why has the claim to monopolize any of the gifts of God to man been confined, by legal codes, to the soil alone? Is there any other reason than that it is a right which, having its origin in feudal times—under a system that regarded man but as an appendage of the soil that he tilled, and whose life, liberty and happiness, were but means of increasing the pleasures, pampering the passions and appetites of his liege lord—and, having once found a place in the books, it has been retained by the reverence which man is wont to pay to the past, and to time-honored precedents? The human mind is so constituted that it is prone to regard as right what has come down to us approved by long usage, and hallowed by gray age. It is a claim that had its origin with the kindred idea that royal blood flows only in the veins of an exclusive few, whose souls are more ethereal, because born amid the glitter of courts, and cradled amid the pomp of lords and courtiers, and, therefore, they are to be installed as rulers and law-givers of the race. Most of the evils that afflict society have had their origin in violence and wrong enacted into law by the experience of the past, and retained by the prejudices of the present.

Is it not time to sweep from the statute book its still lingering relics of feudalism; and to blot out the principles engrafted upon it by the narrow-minded policy of other times, and adapt the legislation of the country to the spirit of the age, and to the true ideas of man’s rights and relations to his Government? If a man has a right on earth, he has a right to land enough to rear a habitation on. If he has a right to live, he has a right to the free use of whatever nature has provided for his sustenance—air to breathe, water to drink, and land enough to cultivate for his subsistence; for these are the necessary and indispensable means for the enjoyment of his inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And is it for a Government that claims to dispense equal and exact justice to all classes of men, and that has laid down correct principles in its great chart of human rights, to violate those principles and its solemn declarations in its legislative enactments?

The struggle between capital and labor is an unequal one at best. It is a struggle between the bones and sinews of men, and dollars and cents. And in that struggle, is it for the government to stretch forth its arm to aid the strong against the weak? Shall it continue, by its legislation, to elevate and enrich idleness on the wail and woe of industry?

If the rule be correct as applied to governments as well as individuals, that whatever a person permits another to do, having the right and means to prevent it, he does himself, then indeed is the government responsible for all the evils that may result from speculation and land monopoly in the public domain. For it is not denied that Congress has the power to make any regulations for the disposal of these lands, not injurious to the general welfare. Now, when a new tract is surveyed, and you open the land office and expose it to sale, the man with the most money is the largest purchaser. The most desirable and available locations are seized upon by the capitalists of the country, who seek that kind of investment. The settler who chances not to have a pre-emption right, or to be there at the time of sale, when he comes to seek a home for himself and his family, must pay the speculator three or four hundred per cent. on his investment, or encounter the trials and hardships of a still more remote border life. And thus, under the operation of laws that are called equal and just, you take from the settler three or four dollars per acre, and put it in the pocket of the speculator—thus, by the operation of law, abstracting so much of his hard earnings for the benefit of capital; for not an hour’s labor has been applied to the land since it was sold by the government, nor is it more valuable to the settler. Has not the laborer a right to complain of legislation that compels him to endure greater toils and hardships, or contribute a portion of his earnings for the benefit of the capitalist? But not upon the capitalist or the speculator is it proper that the blame should fall. Man must seek a livelihood and do business under the laws of the country; and whatever rights he may acquire under the laws, though they may be wrong, yet the well-being of society requires that they be respected and faithfully observed. If a person engage in a business legalized and regulated by the law, and uses no fraud or deception in its pursuit, and evils result to the community, let them apply the remedy to the proper source—that is to the law-making power. The laws and the law-makers are responsible for whatever evils necessarily grow out of their enactments.

While the public lands are exposed to indiscriminate sale, as they have been since the organization of the government, it opens the door to the wildest system of land monopoly. It requires no lengthy dissertation to portray its evils. In the Old World its history is written in sighs and tears. Under its influence, you behold in England, the proudest and most splendid aristocracy, side by side with the most abject and destitute people; vast manors hemmed in by hedges as a sporting-ground for her nobility, while men are dying beside the enclosure for the want of land to till. Thirty thousand proprietors hold the title deeds to the soil of Great Britain, while in Ireland alone there are two and a half millions of tenants who own no part of the land they cultivate, nor can they ever acquire a title to a foot of it, yet they pay annually from their hard earnings twenty millions of dollars to absentee landlords for the privilege of dying on their soil. Under its blighting influence you behold industry in rags and patience in despair. Such are some of the fruits of land monopoly in the Old World; and, shall we plant its seeds in the virgin soil of the New? * * *

If you would raise fallen man from his degradation, elevate the servile from their grovelling pursuits to the rights and dignity of men, you must first place within their reach the means for satisfying their pressing physical wants, so that religion can exert its influence on the soul, and soothe the weary pilgrim in his pathway to the tomb. It is in vain you talk of the goodness and benevolence of an Omniscient Ruler to him, whose life from the cradle to the grave is one continued scene of pain, misery and want. Talk not of free agency to him whose only freedom is to choose his own method to die. In such cases, there might, perhaps, be some feeble conceptions of religion and its duties—of the infinite, everlasting, and pure; but unless there be a more than common intellect, they would be like the dim shadows that float in the twilight. * * *

Riches, it is true, are not necessary to man’s real enjoyment; but the means to prevent starvation are. Nor is a splendid palace necessary to his real happiness; but a shelter against the storm and winter’s blast is.

If you would lead the erring back from the paths of vice and crime to virtue and honor, give him a home—give him a hearth-stone, and he will surround it with household gods. If you would make men wiser and better, relieve the almshouse, close the doors of the penitentiary, and break in pieces the gallows, purify the influences of the domestic fireside. For that is the school in which human character is formed, and there its destiny is shaped. There the soul receives its first impress, and man his first lesson, and they go with him for weal or woe through life. For purifying the sentiments, elevating the thoughts, and developing the noblest impulses of man’s nature, the influences of a moral fireside and agricultural life are the noblest and the best. * * *

It was said by Lord Chatham, in his appeal to the House of Commons, in 1775, to withdraw the British troops from Boston, that “trade, indeed, increases the glory and wealth of a country; but its true strength and stamina are to be looked for in the cultivators of the land. In the simplicity of their lives is found the simpleness of virtue, the integrity and courage of freedom. These true, genuine sons of the soil are invincible.”

The history of American prowess has recorded these words as prophetic: man, in defence of his hearth-stone and fireside, is invincible against a world of mercenaries. In battling for his home and all that is dear to him on earth, he is never conquered save with his life. In such a struggle every pass becomes a Thermopylæ, every plain a Marathon. With an independent yeomanry scattered over our vast domain, the “young eagle” may bid defiance to the world in arms. Even though a foe should devastate our seaboard, lay in ashes its cities, they have made not one single advance towards conquering the country; for from the interior comes its hardy yeomanry, with their hearts of oak and nerves of steel, to expel the invader. Their hearts are the citadel of a nation’s power—their arms the bulwarks of liberty.

* * * * *

Every consideration of policy, then, both as to revenue for the general government, and increased taxation for the new States, as well as a means for removing the causes of pauperism and crime in the old, demands that the public lands be granted in limited quantities to the actual settler. Every consideration of justice and humanity calls upon us to restore man to his natural rights in the soil. * * *

In a new country the first and most important labor, as it is the most difficult to be performed, is to subdue the forest, and to convert the lair of the wild beast into a home for civilized man. This is the labor of the pioneer settler. His achievements, if not equally brilliant with those of the plumed warrior, are equally, if not more, lasting; his life, if not at times exposed to so great a hazard, is still one of equal danger and death. It is a life of toil and adventure, spent upon one continued battle-field, unlike that, however, on which martial hosts contend, for there the struggle is short and expected, and the victim strikes not alone, while the highest meed of ambition crowns the victor. Not so with the hardy pioneer. He is oft called upon to meet death in a struggle with fearful odds, while no herald will tell to the world of the unequal combat. Startled at the midnight hour by the war-whoop, he wakes from his dreams to behold his cottage in flames; the sharer of his joys and sorrows, with perhaps a tender infant, hurled, with rude hands, to the distant council-fire. Still he presses on into the wilderness, snatching new areas from the wild beast, and bequeathing them a legacy to civilized man. And all he asks of his country and his Government is, to protect him against the cupidity of soulless capital and the iron grasp of the speculator. Upon his wild battle-field these are the only foes that his own stern heart and right arm cannot vanquish.

Lincoln and Douglas.

The Last Joint Debate, at Alton, October 15, 1858.

SENATOR DOUGLAS’S SPEECH.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: It is now nearly four months since the canvass between Mr. Lincoln and myself commenced. On the 16th of June the Republican Convention assembled at Springfield and nominated Mr. Lincoln as their candidate for the United States Senate, and he, on that occasion, delivered a speech in which he laid down what he understood to be the Republican creed and the platform on which he proposed to stand during the contest. The principal points in that speech of Mr. Lincoln’s were: First, that this Government could not endure permanently divided into free and slave States, as our fathers made it; that they must all become free or all become slave; all become one thing or all become the other, otherwise this Union could not continue to exist. I give you his opinions almost in the identical language he used. His second proposition was a crusade against the Supreme Court of the United States because of the Dred Scot decision; urging as an especial reason for his opposition to that decision that it deprived the negroes of the rights and benefits of that clause in the Constitution of the United States which guaranties to the citizens of each State all the rights, privileges, and immunities of the citizens of the several States. On the 10th of July I returned home, and delivered a speech to the people of Chicago, in which I announced it to be my purpose to appeal to the people of Illinois to sustain the course I had pursued in Congress. In that speech I joined issue with Mr. Lincoln on the points which he had presented. Thus there was an issue clear and distinct made up between us on these two propositions laid down in the speech of Mr. Lincoln at Springfield, and controverted by me in my reply to him at Chicago. On the next day, the 11th of July, Mr. Lincoln replied to me at Chicago, explaining at some length, and reaffirming the positions which he had taken in his Springfield speech. In that Chicago speech he even went further than he had before, and uttered sentiments in regard to the negro being on an equality with the white man. He adopted in support of this position the argument which Lovejoy and Codding, and other Abolition lecturers had made familiar in the northern and central portions of the State, to wit: that the Declaration of Independence having declared all men free and equal, by Divine law, also that negro equality was an inalienable right, of which they could not be deprived. He insisted, in that speech, that the Declaration of Independence included the negro in the clause, asserting that all men were created equal, and went so far as to say that if one man was allowed to take the position, that it did not include the negro, others might take the position that it did not include other men. He said that all these distinctions between this man and that man, this race and the other race, must be discarded, and we must all stand by the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men were created equal.

The issue thus being made up between Mr. Lincoln and myself on three points, we went before the people of the State. During the following seven weeks, between the Chicago speeches and our first meeting at Ottawa, he and I addressed large assemblages of the people in many of the central counties. In my speeches I confined myself closely to those three positions which he had taken, controverting his proposition that this Union could not exist as our fathers made it, divided into free and Slave States, controverting his proposition of a crusade against the Supreme Court because of the Dred Scott decision, and controverting his proposition that the Declaration of Independence included and meant the negroes as well as the white men when it declared all men to be created equal. I supposed at that time that these propositions constituted a distinct issue between us, and that the opposite positions we had taken upon them we would be willing to be held to in every part of the State. I never intended to waver one hair’s breadth from that issue either in the north or the south, or wherever I should address the people of Illinois. I hold that when the time arrives that I cannot proclaim my political creed in the same terms not only in the northern but the southern part of Illinois, not only in the Northern but the Southern States, and wherever the American flag waves over American soil, that then there must be something wrong in that creed. So long as we live under a common Constitution, so long as we live in a confederacy of sovereign and equal States, joined together as one for certain purposes, that any political creed is radically wrong which cannot be proclaimed in every State, and every section of that Union, alike. I took up Mr. Lincoln’s three propositions in my several speeches, analyzed them, and pointed out what I believed to be the radical errors contained in them. First, in regard to his doctrine that this Government was in violation of the law of God, which says that a house divided against itself cannot stand, I repudiated it as a slander upon the immortal framers of our Constitution. I then said, I have often repeated, and now again assert, that in my opinion our Government can endure forever, divided into free and slave States as our fathers made it,—each State having the right to prohibit, abolish or sustain slavery, just as it pleases. This Government was made upon the great basis of the sovereignty of the States, the right of each State to regulate its own domestic institutions to suit itself, and that right was conferred with the understanding and expectation that inasmuch as each locality had separate interests, each locality must have different and distinct local and domestic institutions, corresponding to its wants and interests. Our fathers knew when they made the Government, that the laws and institutions which were well adapted to the green mountains of Vermont, were unsuited to the rice plantations of South Carolina. They knew then, as well as we know now, that the laws and institutions which would be well adapted to the beautiful prairies of Illinois would not be suited to the mining regions of California. They knew that in a Republic as broad as this, having such a variety of soil, climate and interest, there must necessarily be a corresponding variety of local laws—the policy and institutions of each State adapted to its condition and wants. For this reason this Union was established on the right of each State to do as it pleased on the question of slavery, and every other question; and the various States were not allowed to complain of, much less interfere with the policy, of their neighbors.

Suppose the doctrine advocated by Mr. Lincoln and the Abolitionists of this day had prevailed when the Constitution was made, what would have been the result? Imagine for a moment that Mr. Lincoln had been a member of the Convention that framed the Constitution of the United States, and that when its members were about to sign that wonderful document, he had arisen in that Convention as he did at Springfield this summer, and addressing himself to the President, had said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand; this Government, divided into free and slave States, cannot endure, they must all be free or all be slave, they must all be one thing or all be the other, otherwise, it is a violation of the law of God, and cannot continue to exist;”—suppose Mr. Lincoln had convinced that body of sages that that doctrine was sound, what would have been the result? Remember that the Union was then composed of thirteen States, twelve of which were slaveholding and one free. Do you think that the one free State would have outvoted the twelve slaveholding States, and thus have secured the abolition of slavery? On the other hand, would not the twelve slaveholding States have outvoted the one free State, and thus have fastened slavery, by a Constitutional provision, on every foot of the American Republic forever? You see that if this Abolition doctrine of Mr. Lincoln had prevailed when the Government was made, it would have established slavery as a permanent institution, in all the States, whether they wanted it or not, and the question for us to determine in Illinois now as one of the free States is, whether or not we are willing, having become the majority section, to enforce a doctrine on the minority, which we would have resisted with our hearts’ blood had it been attempted on us when we were in a minority. How has the South lost her power as the majority section in this Union, and how have the free States gained it, except under the operation of that principle which declares the right of the people of each State and each Territory to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way. It was under that principle that slavery was abolished in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; it was under that principle that one-half of the slaveholding States became free; it was under that principle that the number of free States increased until from being one out of twelve States, we have grown to be the majority of States of the whole Union, with the power to control the House of Representatives and Senate, and the power, consequently, to elect a President by Northern votes without the aid of a Southern State. Having obtained this power under the operation of that great principle, are you now prepared to abandon the principle and declare that merely because we have the power you will wage a war against the Southern States and their institutions until you force them to abolish slavery everywhere.

After having pressed these arguments home on Mr. Lincoln for seven weeks, publishing a number of my speeches, we met at Ottawa in joint discussion, and he then began to crawfish a little, and let himself down. I there propounded certain questions to him. Amongst others, I asked him whether he would vote for the admission of any more slave States in the event the people wanted them. He would not answer. I then told him that if he did not answer the question there I would renew it at Freeport, and would then trot him down into Egypt and again put it to him. Well, at Freeport, knowing that the next joint discussion took place in Egypt, and being in dread of it, he did answer my question in regard to no more slave States in a mode which he hoped would be satisfactory to me, and accomplish the object he had in view. I will show you what his answer was. After saying that he was not pledged to the Republican doctrine of “no more slave States,” he declared:

“I state to you freely, frankly, that I should be exceedingly sorry to ever be put in the position of having to pass upon that question. I should be exceedingly glad to know that there never would be another slave State admitted into this Union.”

Here permit me to remark, that I do not think the people will ever force him into a position against his will. He went on to say:

“But I must add in regard to this, that if slavery shall be kept out of the Territory during the territorial existence of any one given Territory, and then the people should, having a fair chance and a clear field when they come to adopt a Constitution, if they should do the extraordinary thing of adopting a slave Constitution, uninfluenced by the actual presence of the institution among them, I see no alternative, if we own the country, but we must admit it into the Union.”

That answer Mr. Lincoln supposed would satisfy the old line Whigs, composed of Kentuckians and Virginians down in the southern part of the State. Now what does it amount to? I desired to know whether he would vote to allow Kansas to come into the Union with slavery or not, as her people desired. He would not answer; but in a roundabout way said that if slavery should be kept out of a Territory during the whole of its territorial existence, and then the people, when they adopted a State Constitution, asked admission as a slave State, he supposed he would have to let the State come in. The case I put to him was an entirely different one. I desired to know whether he would vote to admit a State if Congress had not prohibited slavery in it during its territorial existence, as Congress never pretended to do under Clay’s Compromise measures of 1850. He would not answer, and I have not yet been able to get an answer from him. I have asked him whether he would vote to admit Nebraska if her people asked to come in as a State with a Constitution recognizing slavery, and he refused to answer. I have put the question to him with reference to New Mexico, and he has not uttered a word in answer. I have enumerated the Territories, one after another, putting the same question to him with reference to each, and he has not said, and will not say, whether, if elected to Congress, he will vote to admit any Territory now in existence with such a Constitution as her people may adopt. He invents a case which does not exist, and cannot exist under this Government, and answers it; but he will not answer the question I put to him in connection with any of the Territories now in existence. The contract we entered into with Texas when she entered the Union obliges us to allow four States to be formed out of the old State, and admitted with or without slavery as the respective inhabitants of each may determine. I have asked Mr. Lincoln three times in our joint discussions whether he would vote to redeem that pledge, and he has never yet answered. He is as silent as the grave on the subject. He would rather answer as to a state of the case which will never arise than commit himself by telling what he would do in a case which would come up for his action soon after his election to Congress. Why can he not say whether he is willing to allow the people of each State to have slavery or not as they please, and to come into the Union when they have the requisite population as a slave or a free State as they decide? I have no trouble in answering the questions. I have said every where, and now repeat it to you, that if the people of Kansas want a slave State they have a right, under the Constitution of the United States, to form such a State, and I will let them come into the Union with slavery or without, as they determine. If the people of any other Territory desire slavery, let them have it. If they do not want it, let them prohibit it. It is their business, not mine. It is none of our business in Illinois whether Kansas is a free State or a slave State. It is none of your business in Missouri whether Kansas shall adopt slavery or reject it. It is the business of her people and none of yours. The people of Kansas have as much right to decide that question for themselves as you have in Missouri to decide it for yourselves, or we in Illinois to decide it for ourselves.

And here I may repeat what I have said in every speech I have made in Illinois, that I fought the Lecompton Constitution to its death, not because of the slavery clause in it, but because it was not the act and deed of the people of Kansas. I said then in Congress, and I say now, that if the people of Kansas want a slave State, they have a right to have it. If they wanted the Lecompton Constitution, they had a right to have it. I was opposed to that Constitution because I did not believe that it was the act and deed of the people, but on the contrary, the act of a small, pitiful minority acting in the name of the majority. When at last it was determined to send that Constitution back to the people, and accordingly, in August last, the question of admission under it was submitted to a popular vote, the citizens rejected it by nearly ten to one, thus showing conclusively, that I was right when I said that the Lecompton Constitution was not the act and the deed of the people of Kansas, and did not embody their will.

I hold that there is no power on earth, under our system of Government, which has the right to force a Constitution upon an unwilling people. Suppose that there had been a majority of ten to one in favor of slavery in Kansas, and suppose there had been an Abolition President, and an Abolition Administration, and by some means the Abolitionists succeeded in forcing an Abolition Constitution on those slaveholding people, would the people of the South have submitted to that act for one instant? Well, if you of the South would not have submitted to it a day, how can you, as fair, honorable and honest men, insist on putting a slave Constitution on a people who desire a free State? Your safety and ours depend upon both of us acting in good faith, and living up to that great principle which asserts the right of every people to form and regulate their domestic institutions to suit themselves, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.

Most of the men who denounced my course on the Lecompton question, objected to it not because I was not right, but because they thought it expedient at that time, for the sake of keeping the party together, to do wrong. I never knew the Democratic party to violate any one of its principles out of policy or expediency, that it did not pay the debt with sorrow. There is no safety or success for our party unless we always do right, and trust the consequences to God and the people. I chose not to depart from principle for the sake of expediency in the Lecompton question, and I never intend to do it on that or any other question.

But I am told that I would have been all right if I had only voted for the English bill after Lecompton was killed. You know a general pardon was granted to all political offenders on the Lecompton question, provided they would only vote for the English bill. I did not accept the benefits of that pardon, for the reason that I had been right in the course I had pursued, and hence did not require any forgiveness. Let us see how the result has been worked out. English brought in his bill referring the Lecompton Constitution back to the people, with the provision that if it was rejected Kansas should be kept out of the Union until she had the full ratio of population required for a member of Congress, thus in effect declaring that if the people of Kansas would only consent to come into the Union under the Lecompton Constitution, and have a slave State when they did not want it, they should be admitted with a population of 35,000, but that if they were so obstinate as to insist upon having just such a Constitution as they thought best, and to desire admission as a free State, then they should be kept out until they had 93,420 inhabitants. I then said, and I now repeat to you, that whenever Kansas has people enough for a slave State she has people enough for a free State. I was and am willing to adopt the rule that no State shall ever come into the Union until she has the full ratio of population for a member of Congress, provided that rule is made uniform. I made that proposition in the Senate last winter, but a majority of the Senators would not agree to it; and I then said to them if you will not adopt the general rule I will not consent to make an exception of Kansas.

I hold that it is a violation of the fundamental principles of this Government to throw the weight of federal power into the scale, either in favor of the free or the slave States. Equality among all the States of this Union is a fundamental principle in our political system. We have no more right to throw the weight of the Federal Government into the scale in favor of the slaveholding than the free States, and last of all should our friends in the South consent for a moment that Congress should withhold its powers either way when they know that there is a majority against them in both Houses of Congress.

Fellow-citizens, how have the supporters of the English bill stood up to their pledges not to admit Kansas until she obtained a population of 93,420 in the event she rejected the Lecompton Constitution? How? The newspapers inform us that English himself, whilst conducting his canvass for re-election, and in order to secure it, pledged himself to his constituents that if returned he would disregard his own bill and vote to admit Kansas into the Union with such population as she might have when she made application. We are informed that every Democratic candidate for Congress in all the States where elections have recently been held, was pledged against the English bill, with perhaps one or two exceptions. Now, if I had only done as these anti-Lecompton men who voted for the English bill in Congress, pledging themselves to refuse to admit Kansas if she refused to become a slave State until she had a population of 93,420, and then return to their people, forfeited their pledge, and made a new pledge to admit Kansas at any time she applied, without regard to population, I would have had no trouble. You saw the whole power and patronage of the Federal Government wielded in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania to re-elect anti-Lecompton men to Congress who voted against Lecompton, then voted for the English bill, and then denounced the English bill, and pledged themselves to their people to disregard it. My sin consists in not having given a pledge, and then in not having afterward forfeited it. For that reason, in this State, every postmaster, every route agent, every collector of the ports, and every federal office-holder, forfeits his head the moment he expresses a preference for the Democratic candidates against Lincoln and his Abolition associates. A Democratic Administration which we helped to bring into power, deems it consistent with its fidelity to principle and its regard to duty, to wield its power in this State in behalf of the Republican Abolition candidates in every county and every Congressional District against the Democratic party. All I have to say in reference to the matter is, that if that Administration have not regard enough for principle, if they are not sufficiently attached to the creed of the Democratic party to bury forever their personal hostilities in order to succeed in carrying out our glorious principles, I have. I have no personal difficulty with Mr. Buchanan or his cabinet. He chose to make certain recommendations to Congress, as he had a right to do, on the Lecompton question. I could not vote in favor of them. I had as much right to judge for myself how I should vote as he had how he should recommend. He undertook to say to me, if you do not vote as I tell you, I will take off the heads of your friends. I replied to him, You did not elect me, I represent Illinois and I am accountable to Illinois, as my constituency, and to God, but not to the President or to any other power on earth.

And now this warfare is made on me because I would not surrender my convictions of duty, because I would not abandon my constituency, and receive the orders of the executive authorities how I should vote in the Senate of the United States. I hold that an attempt to control the Senate on the part of the Executive is subversive of the principles of our Constitution. The Executive department is independent of the Senate, and the Senate is independent of the President. In matters of legislation the President has a veto on the action of the Senate, and in appointments and treaties the Senate has a veto on the President. He has no more right to tell me how I shall vote on his appointments than I have to tell him whether he shall veto or approve a bill that the Senate has passed. Whenever you recognize the right of the Executive to say to a Senator, “Do this, or I will take off the heads of your friends,” you convert this Government from a republic into a despotism. Whenever you recognize the right of a President to say to a member of Congress, “Vote as I tell you, or I will bring a power to bear against you at home which will crush you,” you destroy the independence of the representative, and convert him into a tool of Executive power. I resisted this invasion of the constitutional rights of a Senator, and I intend to resist it as long as I have a voice to speak, or a vote to give. Yet, Mr. Buchanan cannot provoke me to abandon one iota of Democratic principles out of revenge or hostility to his course. I stand by the platform of the Democratic party, and by its organization, and support its nominees. If there are any who choose to bolt, the fact only shows that they are not as good Democrats as I am.

My friends, there never was a time when it was as important for the Democratic party, for all national men, to rally and stand together as it is to-day. We find all sectional men giving up past differences and continuing the one question of slavery, and when we find sectional men thus uniting, we should unite to resist them and their treasonable designs. Such was the case in 1850, when Clay left the quiet and peace of his home, and again entered upon public life to quell agitation and restore peace to a distracted Union. Then we Democrats, with Cass at our head, welcomed Henry Clay, whom the whole nation regarded as having been preserved by God for the times. He became our leader in that great fight, and we rallied around him the same as the Whigs rallied around old Hickory in 1832, to put down nullification. Thus you see that whilst Whigs and Democrats fought fearlessly in old times about banks, the tariff, distribution, the specie circular, and the sub-treasury, all united as a band of brothers when the peace, harmony, or integrity of the Union was imperilled. It was so in 1850, when Abolitionism had even so far divided this country, North and South, as to endanger the peace of the Union; Whigs and Democrats united in establishing the Compromise measures of that year, and restoring tranquillity and good feeling. These measures passed on the joint action of the two parties. They rested on the great principle that the people of each State and each Territory should be left perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions to suit themselves. You Whigs, and we Democrats justified them in that principle. In 1854, when it became necessary to organize the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, I brought forward the bill on the same principle. In the Kansas-Nebraska bill you find it declared to be the true intent and meaning of the act not to legislate slavery into any State or Territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way. I stand on that same platform in 1858 that I did in 1850, 1854, and 1856. The Washington Union, pretending to be the organ of the Administration, in the number of the 5th of this month, devotes three columns and a half to establish these propositions: First, that Douglas, in his Freeport speech, held the same doctrine that he did in his Nebraska bill in 1854; second, that in 1854 Douglas justified the Nebraska bill upon the ground that it was based upon the same principle as Clay’s Compromise measures of 1850. The Union thus proved that Douglas was the same in 1858 that he was in 1856, 1854, and 1850, and consequently argued that he was never a Democrat. Is it not funny that I was never a Democrat? There is no pretense that I have changed a hair’s breadth. The Union proves by my speeches that I explained the Compromise measures of 1850 just as I do now, and that I explained the Kansas and Nebraska bill in 1854 just as I did in my Freeport speech, and yet says that I am not a Democrat, and cannot be trusted, because I have not changed during the whole of that time. It has occurred to me that in 1854 the author of the Kansas and Nebraska bill was considered a pretty good Democrat. It has occurred to me that in 1856, when I was exerting every nerve and every energy for James Buchanan, standing on the same platform then that I do now, that I was a pretty good Democrat. They now tell me that I am not a Democrat, because I assert that the people of a Territory, as well as those of a State, have the right to decide for themselves whether slavery can or cannot exist in such Territory. Let me read what James Buchanan said on that point when he accepted the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 1856. In his letter of acceptance, he used the following language:

“The recent legislation of Congress respecting domestic slavery, derived as it has been from the original and pure fountain of legitimate political power, the will of the majority, promises ere long to allay the dangerous excitement. This legislation is founded upon principles as ancient as free government itself, and in accordance with them has simply declared that the people of a Territory, like those of a State, shall decide for themselves whether slavery shall or shall not exist within their limits.”

Dr. Hope will there find my answer to the question he propounded to me before I commenced speaking. Of course no man will consider it an answer, who is outside of the Democratic organization, bolts Democratic nominations, and indirectly aids to put Abolitionists into power over Democrats. But whether Dr. Hope considers it an answer or not, every fair-minded man will see that James Buchanan has answered the question, and has asserted that the people of a Territory like those of a State, shall decide for themselves whether slavery shall or shall not exist within their limits. I answer specifically if you want a further answer, and say that while under the decision of the Supreme Court, as recorded in the opinion of Chief Justice Taney, slaves are property like all other property, and can be carried into any Territory of the United States the same as any other description of property, yet when you get them there they are subject to the local law of the Territory just like all other property. You will find in a recent speech delivered by that able and eloquent statesman, Hon. Jefferson Davis, at Bangor, Maine, that he took the same view of this subject that I did in my Freeport speech. He there said:

“If the inhabitants of any Territory should refuse to enact such laws and police regulations as would give security to their property or to his, it would be rendered more or less valueless in proportion to the difficulties of holding it without such protection. In the case of property in the labor of man, or what is usually called slave property, the insecurity would be so great that the owner could not ordinarily retain it. Therefore, though the right would remain, the remedy being withheld, it would follow that the owner would be practically debarred, by the circumstances of the case, from taking slave property into a Territory where the sense of the inhabitants was opposed to its introduction. So much for the oft repeated arm in arm fallacy of forcing slavery upon any community.”

You will also find that the distinguished Speaker of the present House of Representatives, Hon. Jas. L. Orr, construed the Kansas and Nebraska bill in this same way in 1856, and also that great intellect of the South, Alex. H. Stephens, put the same construction upon it in Congress that I did in my Freeport speech. The whole South are rallying to the support of the doctrine that if the people of a Territory want slavery they have a right to have it, and if they do not want it that no power on earth can force it upon them. I hold that there is no principle on earth more sacred to all the friends of freedom than that which says that no institution, no law, no constitution, should be forced on an unwilling people contrary to their wishes; and I assert that the Kansas and Nebraska bill contains that principle. It is the great principle contained in that bill. It is the principle on which James Buchanan was made President. Without that principle he never would have been made President of the United States. I will never violate or abandon that doctrine if I have to stand alone. I have resisted the blandishments and threats of power on the one side, and seduction on the other, and have stood immovably for that principle, fighting for it when assailed by Northern mobs, or threatened by Southern hostility. I have defended it against the North and South, and I will defend it against whoever assails it, and I will follow it wherever its logical conclusions lead me. I say to you that there is but one hope, one safety for this country, and that is to stand immovably by that principle which declares the right of each State and each Territory to decide these questions for themselves. This Government was founded on that principle, and must be administered in the same sense in which it was founded.

But the Abolition party really think that under the Declaration of Independence the negro is equal to the white man, and that negro equality is an inalienable right conferred by the Almighty, and hence that all human laws in violation of it are null and void. With such men it is no use for me to argue. I hold that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negroes, nor savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race. They were speaking of white men. They alluded to men of European birth and European descent—to white men, and to none others, when they declared that doctrine. I hold that this Government was established on the white basis. It was established by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men, and none others. But it does not follow, by any means, that merely because the negro is not a citizen, and merely because he is not our equal, that, therefore, he should be a slave. On the contrary, it does follow that we ought to extend to the negro race, and to all other dependent races all the rights, all the privileges, and all the immunities which they can exercise consistently with the safety of society. Humanity requires that we should give them all these privileges; Christianity commands that we should extend those privileges to them. The question then arises what are these privileges, and what is the nature and extent of them. My answer is that that is a question which each State must answer for itself. We in Illinois have decided it for ourselves. We tried slavery, kept it up for twelve years, and finding that it was not profitable, we abolished it for that reason, and became a free State. We adopted in its stead the policy that a negro in this State shall not be a slave and shall not be a citizen. We have a right to adopt that policy. For my part I think it is a wise and sound policy for us. You in Missouri must judge for yourselves whether it is a wise policy for you. If you choose to follow our example, very good; if you reject it, still well, it is your business, not ours. So with Kentucky. Let Kentucky adopt a policy to suit herself. If we do not like it we will keep away from it, and if she does not like ours let her stay at home, mind her own business and let us alone. If the people of all the States will act on that great principle, and each State mind its own business, attend to its own affairs, take care of its own negroes and not meddle with its neighbors, then there will be peace between the North and the South, the East and the West, throughout the whole Union. Why can we not thus have peace? Why should we thus allow a sectional party to agitate this country, to array the North against the South, and convert us into enemies instead of friends, merely that a few ambitious men may ride into power on a sectional hobby? How long is it since these ambitious Northern men wished for a sectional organization? Did any one of them dream of a sectional party as long as the North was the weaker section and the South the stronger? Then all were opposed to sectional parties; but the moment the North obtained the majority in the House and Senate by the admission of California, and could elect a President without the aid of Southern votes, that moment ambitious Northern men formed a scheme to excite the North against the South, and make the people be governed in their votes by geographical lines, thinking that the North, being the stronger section, would out-vote the South, and consequently they, the leaders, would ride into office on a sectional hobby. I am told that my hour is out. It was very short.

Mr. Lincoln’s Reply.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:—I have been somewhat, in my own mind, complimented by a large portion of Judge Douglas’s speech—I mean that portion which he devotes to the controversy between himself and the present Administration. This is the seventh time Judge Douglas and myself have met in these joint discussions, and he has been gradually improving in regard to his war with the administration. At Quincy, day before yesterday, he was a little more severe upon the Administration than I had heard him upon any occasion, and I took pains to compliment him for it. I then told him to “Give it to them with all the power he had;” and as some of them were present, I told them I would be very much obliged if they would give it to him in about the same way. I take it he has now vastly improved upon the attack he made then upon the Administration. I flatter myself he has really taken my advice on this subject. All I can say now is to recommend to him and to them what I then commended—to prosecute the war against one another in the most vigorous manner. I say to them again—“Go it, husband!—Go it, bear!”

There is one other thing I will mention before I leave this branch of the discussion—although I do not consider it much of my business, any way. I refer to that part of the Judge’s remarks where he undertakes to involve Mr. Buchanan in an inconsistency. He reads something from Mr. Buchanan, from which he undertakes to involve him in an inconsistency; and he gets something of a cheer for having done so. I would only remind the Judge that while he is very valiantly fighting for the Nebraska bill and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, it has been but a little while since he was the valiant advocate of the Missouri Compromise. I want to know if Buchanan has not as much right to be inconsistent as Douglas has? Has Douglas the exclusive right, in this country, of being on all sides of all questions? Is nobody allowed that high privilege but himself? Is he to have an entire monopoly on that subject?

So far as Judge Douglas addressed his speech to me, or so far as it was about me, it is my business to pay some attention to it. I have heard the Judge state two or three times what he has stated to-day—that in a speech which I made at Springfield, Illinois, I had in a very especial manner complained that the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case had decided that a negro could never be a citizen of the United States. I have omitted by some accident heretofore to analyze this statement, and it is required of me to notice it now. In point of fact it is untrue. I never have complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held that a negro could not be a citizen, and the Judge is always wrong when he says I ever did so complain of it. I have the speech here, and I will thank him or any of his friends to show where I said that a negro should be a citizen, and complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it declared he could not be one. I have done no such thing, and Judge Douglas so persistently insisting that I have done so, has strongly impressed me with the belief of a predetermination on his part to misrepresent me. He could not get his foundation for insisting that I was in favor of this negro equality any where else as well as he could by assuming that untrue proposition. Let me tell this audience what is true in regard to that matter; and the means by which they may correct me if I do not tell them truly is by a recurrence to the speech itself. I spoke of the Dred Scott decision in my Springfield speech, and I was then endeavoring to prove that the Dred Scott decision was a portion of a system or scheme to make slavery national in this country. I pointed out what things had been decided by the court. I mentioned as a fact that they had decided that a negro could not be a citizen—that they had done so, as I supposed, to deprive the negro, under all circumstances, of the remotest possibility of ever becoming a citizen and claiming the rights of a citizen of the United States under a certain clause of the Constitution. I stated that, without making any complaint of it at all. I then went on and stated the other points decided in the case, viz: that the bringing of a negro into the State of Illinois and holding him in slavery for two years here was a matter in regard to which they would not decide whether it would make him free or not; that they decided the further point that taking him into a United States Territory where slavery was prohibited by act of Congress, did not make him free, because that act of Congress, as they held, was unconstitutional. I mentioned these three things as making up the points decided in that case. I mentioned them in a lump taken in connection with the introduction of the Nebraska bill, and the amendment of Chase, offered at the time, declaratory of the right of the people of the Territories to exclude slavery, which was voted down by the friends of the bill. I mentioned all these things together, as evidence tending to prove a combination and conspiracy to make the institution of slavery national. In that connection and in that way I mentioned the decision on the point that a negro could not be a citizen, and in no other connection.

Out of this, Judge Douglas builds up his beautiful fabrication—of my purpose to introduce a perfect, social, and political equality between the white and black races. His assertion that I made an “especial objection” (that is his exact language) to the decision on this account, is untrue in point of fact.

Now, while I am upon this subject, and as Henry Clay has been alluded to, I desire to place myself, in connection with Mr. Clay, as nearly right before this people as may be. I am quite aware what the Judge’s object is here by all these allusions. He knows that we are before an audience, having strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on. He desires to place me in an extremely Abolition attitude. He read upon a former occasion, and alludes without reading to-day, to a portion of a speech which I delivered in Chicago. In his quotations from that speech, as he has made them upon former occasions, the extracts were taken in such a way as, I suppose, brings them within the definition of what is called garbling—taking portions of a speech which, when taken by themselves, do not present the entire sense of the speaker as expressed at the time. I propose, therefore, out of that same speech, to show how one portion of it which he skipped over (taking an extract before and an extract after) will give a different idea, and the true idea I intended to convey. It will take me some little time to read it, but I believe I will occupy the time that way.

You have heard him frequently allude to my controversy with him in regard to the Declaration of Independence. I confess that I have had a struggle with Judge Douglas on that matter, and I will try briefly to place myself right in regard to it on this occasion. I said—and it is between the extracts Judge Douglas has taken from this speech and put in his published speeches:

“It may be argued that there are certain conditions that make necessities and impose them upon us, and to the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man he must submit to it. I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this Government. We had slaves among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more; and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let the charter remain as our standard.”

Now I have upon all occasions declared as strongly as Judge Douglas against the disposition to interfere with the existing institution of slavery. You hear me read it from the same speech from which he takes garbled extracts for the purpose of proving upon me a disposition to interfere with the institution of slavery, and establish a perfect social and political equality between negroes and white people.

Allow me while upon this subject briefly to present one other extract from a speech of mine, more than a year ago, at Springfield, in discussing this very same question, soon after Judge Douglas took his ground that negroes were not included in the Declaration of Independence:

“I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

“They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, every where.”

There again are the sentiments I have expressed in regard to the Declaration of Independence upon a former occasion—sentiments which have been put in print and read wherever any body cared to know what so humble an individual as myself chose to say in regard to it.

At Galesburg the other day, I said in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term “all men.” I reassert it to-day. I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding sentiment that the term “all men” in the Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendancy and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that shameful though rather forcible declaration of Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the Declaration of Independence was in that respect “a self-evident lie,” rather than a self-evident truth. But I say, with a perfect knowledge of all this hawking at the Declaration without directly attacking it, that three years ago there never had lived a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it and then asserting it did not include the negro. I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend, Stephen A. Douglas. And now it has become the catch-word of the entire party. I would like to call upon his friends every where to consider how they have come in so short a time to view this matter in a way so entirely different from their former belief? to ask whether they are not being borne along by an irresistible current—whither they know not?

In answer to my proposition at Galesburg last week, I see that some man in Chicago has got up a letter addressed to the Chicago Times, to show, as he professes, that somebody had said so before; and he signs himself “An Old Line Whig,” if I remember correctly. In the first place I would say he was not an old line Whig. I am somewhat acquainted with old line Whigs. I was with the old line Whigs from the origin to the end of that party; I became pretty well acquainted with them, and I know they always had some sense, whatever else you could ascribe to them, I know there never was one who had not more sense than to try to show by the evidence he produces that some man had, prior to the time I named, said that negroes were not included in the term “all men” in the Declaration of Independence. What is the evidence he produces? I will bring forward his evidence and let you see what he offers by way of showing that somebody more than three years ago had said negroes were not included in the Declaration. He brings forward part of a speech from Henry Clay—the part of the speech of Henry Clay which I used to bring forward to prove precisely the contrary. I guess we are surrounded to some extent to-day by the old friends of Mr. Clay, and they will be glad to hear any thing from that authority. While he was in Indiana a man presented a petition to liberate his negroes, and he (Mr. Clay) made a speech in answer to it, which I suppose he carefully wrote out himself and caused to be published. I have before me an extract from that speech which constitutes the evidence this pretended “Old Line Whig” at Chicago brought forward to show that Mr. Clay didn’t suppose the negro was included in the Declaration of Independence. Hear what Mr. Clay said:

“And what is the foundation of this appeal to me in Indiana, to liberate the slaves under my care in Kentucky? It is a general declaration in the act announcing to the world the independence of the thirteen American colonies, that all men are created equal. Now, as an abstract principle, there is no doubt of the truth of that declaration; and it is desirable, in the original construction of society, and in organized societies, to keep it in view was a great fundamental principle. But, then, I apprehend that in no society that ever did exist, or ever shall be formed, was or can the equality asserted among the members of the human race, be practically enforced and carried out. There are portions, large portions, women, minors, insane, culprits, transient sojourners, that will always probably remain subject to the government of another portion of the community.

“That declaration, whatever may be the extent of its import, was made by the delegations of the thirteen States. In most of them slavery existed, and had long existed, and was established by law. It was introduced and forced upon the colonies by the paramount law of England. Do you believe, that in making that declaration the States that concurred in it intended that it should be tortured into a virtual emancipation of all the slaves within their respective limits? Would Virginia and other Southern States have ever united in a declaration which was to be interpreted into an abolition of slavery among them? Did any one of the thirteen colonies entertain such a design or expectation? To impute such a secret and unavowed purpose, would be to charge a political fraud upon the noblest band of patriots that ever assembled in council—a fraud upon the Confederacy of the Revolution—a fraud upon the union of those States whose Constitution not only recognized the lawfulness of slavery, but permitted the importation of slaves from Africa until the year 1808.”

This is the entire quotation brought forward to prove that somebody previous to three years ago had said the negro was not included in the term “all men” in the Declaration. How does it do so? In what way has it a tendency to prove that? Mr. Clay says it is true as an abstract principle that all men are created equal, but that we cannot practically apply it in all cases. He illustrates this by bringing forward the cases of females, minors, and insane persons, with whom it cannot be enforced; but he says it is true as an abstract principle in the organization of society as well as in organized society, and it should be kept in view as a fundamental principle. Let me read a few words more before I add some comments of my own. Mr. Clay says a little further on:

“I desire no concealment of my opinions in regard to the institution of slavery. I look upon it as a great evil, and deeply lament that we have derived it from the parental Government, and from our ancestors. But here they are, and the question is, how can they be best dealt with? If a state of nature existed, and we were about to lay the foundations of society, no man would be more strongly opposed than I should be, to incorporating the institution of slavery among its elements.”

Now, here in this same book—in this same speech—in this same extract brought forward to prove that Mr. Clay held that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence—no such statement on his part, but the declaration that it is a great fundamental truth, which should be constantly kept in view in the organization of society and in societies already organized. But if I say a word about it—if I attempt, as Mr. Clay said all good men ought to do, to keep it in view—if, in this “organized society,” I ask to have the public eye turned upon it—if I ask in relation to the organization of new Territories, that the public eye should be turned upon it—forthwith I am vilified as you hear me to-day. What have I done, that I have not the license of Henry Clay’s illustrious example here in doing? Have I done aught that I have not his authority for, while maintaining that in organizing new Territories and societies, this fundamental principle should be regarded, and in organized society holding it up to the public view and recognizing what he recognized as the great principle of free government?

And when this new principle—this new proposition that no human being ever thought of three years ago—is brought forward, I combat it as having an evil tendency, if not an evil design. I combat it as having a tendency to dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man. I combat it as being one of the thousand things constantly done in these days to prepare the public mind to make property, and nothing but property, of the negro in all the States of this Union.

But there is a point that I wish, before leaving this part of the discussion, to ask attention to. I have read and I repeat the words of Henry Clay:

“I desire no concealment of my opinions in regard to the institution of slavery. I look upon it as a great evil, and deeply lament that we have derived it from the parental Government, and from our ancestors. I wish every slave in the United States was in the country of his ancestors. But here they are; the question is how they can best be dealt with? If a state of nature existed, and we were about to lay the foundations of society, no man would be more strongly opposed than I should be, to incorporate the institution of slavery among its elements.”

The principle upon which I have insisted in this canvass, is in relation to laying the foundations of new societies. I have ever sought to apply these principles to the old States for the purpose of abolishing slavery in those States. It is nothing but a miserable perversion of what I have said, to assume that I have declared Missouri, or any other slave State, shall emancipate her slaves. I have proposed no such thing. But when Mr. Clay says that in laying the foundations of societies in our Territories where it does not exist, he would be opposed to the introduction of slavery as an element, I insist that we have his warrant—his license for insisting upon the exclusion of that element which he declared in such strong and emphatic language was most hateful to him.

Judge Douglas has again referred to a Springfield speech in which I said “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” The Judge has so often made the entire quotation from that speech that I can make it from memory. I used this language:

“We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to the slavery agitation. Under the operation of this policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States—old as well as new, North as well as South.”

That extract and the sentiments expressed in it, have been extremely offensive to Judge Douglas. He has warred upon them as Satan wars upon the Bible. His perversions upon it are endless. Here now are my views upon it in brief.

I said we were now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to the slavery agitation. Is it not so? When that Nebraska bill was brought forward four years ago last January, was it not for the “avowed object” of putting an end to the slavery agitation? We were to have no more agitation in Congress, it was all to be banished to the Territories. By the way, I will remark here that, as Judge Douglas is very fond of complimenting Mr. Crittenden in these days, Mr. Crittenden has said there was a falsehood in that whole business, for there was no slavery agitation at that time to allay. We were for a little while quiet on the troublesome thing, and that very allaying plaster of Judge Douglas’s stirred it up again. But was it not understood or intimated with the “confident promise” of putting an end to the slavery agitation? Surely it was. In every speech you heard Judge Douglas make, until he got into this “imbroglio,” as they call it, with the Administration about the Lecompton Constitution, every speech on that Nebraska bill was full of his felicitations that we were just at the end of the slavery agitation. The last tip of the last joint of the old serpent’s tail was just drawing out of view. But has it proved so? I have asserted that under that policy that agitation “has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.” When was there ever a greater agitation in Congress than last winter? When was it as great in the country as to-day?

There was a collateral object in the introduction of that Nebraska policy which was to clothe the people of the Territories with the superior degree of self-government, beyond what they had ever had before. The first object and the main one of conferring upon the people a higher degree of “self-government,” is a question of fact to be determined by you in answer to a single question. Have you ever heard or known of a people any where on earth who had as little to do, as, in the first instance of its use, the people of Kansas had with this same right of “self-government?” In its main policy and in its collateral object, it has been nothing but a living, creeping lie from the time of its introduction till to-day.

I have intimated that I thought the agitation would not cease until a crisis should have been reached and passed. I have stated in what way I thought it would be reached and passed, I have said that it might go one way or the other. We might, by arresting the further spread of it, and placing it where the fathers originally placed it, put it where the public mind should rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. Thus the agitation may cease. It may be pushed forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. I have said, and I repeat, my wish is that the further spread of it may be arrested, and that it may be placed where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction. I have expressed that as my wish. I entertain the opinion upon evidence sufficient to my mind, that the fathers of this Government placed that institution where the public mind did rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. Let me ask why they made provision that the source of slavery—the African slave-trade—should be cut off at the end of twenty years? Why did they make provision that in all the new territory we owned at that time, slavery should be forever inhibited? Why stop its spread in one direction and cut off its source in another, if they did not look to its being placed in the course of ultimate extinction?

Again; the institution of slavery is only mentioned in the Constitution of the United States two or three times, and in neither of these cases does the word “slavery” or “negro race” occur; but covert language is used each time, and for a purpose full of significance. What is the language in regard to the prohibition of the African slave-trade? It runs in about this way: “The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight.”

The next allusion in the Constitution to the question of slavery and the black race, is on the subject of the basis of representation, and there the language used is, “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed—three-fifths of all other persons.”

It says “persons,” not slaves, not negroes; but this “three-fifths” can be applied to no other class among us than the negroes.

Lastly, in the provision for the reclamation of fugitive slaves, it is said: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” There again there is no mention of the word “negro” or of slavery. In all three of these places, being the only allusion to slavery in the instrument covert language is used. Language is used not suggesting that slavery existed or that the black race were among us. And I understand the cotemporaneous history of those times to be that covert language was used with a purpose, and that purpose was that in our Constitution, which it was hoped and is still hoped will endure forever—when it should be read by intelligent and patriotic men, after the institution of slavery had passed from among us—there should be nothing on the face of the great charter of liberty suggesting that such a thing as negro slavery had ever existed among us. This is part of the evidence that the fathers of the Government expected and intended the institution of slavery to come to an end. They expected and intended that it should be in the course of ultimate extinction. And when I say that I desire to see the further spread of it arrested, I only say I desire to see that done which the fathers have first done. When I say I desire to see it placed where the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, I only say I desire to see it placed where they placed it. It is not true that our fathers, as Judge Douglas assumes, made this Government part slave and part free. Understand the sense in which he puts it. He assumes that slavery is a rightful thing within itself—was introduced by the framers of the constitution. The exact truth is, that they found the institution existing among us, and they left it as they found it. But in making the Government they left this institution with many clear marks of disapprobation upon it. They found slavery among them, and they left it among them because of the difficulty—the absolute impossibility of its immediate removal. And when Judge Douglas asks me why we cannot let it remain part slave and part free, as the fathers of the Government made it, he asks a question based upon an assumption which is itself a falsehood; and I turn upon him and ask him the question, when the policy that the fathers of the Government had adopted in relation to this element among us was the best policy in the world—the only wise policy—the only policy that we can ever safely continue upon—that will ever give us peace, unless this dangerous element masters us all and becomes a national institution—I turn upon him and ask him why he could not leave it alone. I turn and ask him why he was driven to the necessity of introducing a new policy in regard to it. He has himself said he introduced a new policy. He said so in his speech on the 22d of March of the present year, 1858. I ask him why he could not let it remain where our fathers placed it. I ask, too, of Judge Douglas and his friends why we shall not again place this institution upon the basis on which the fathers left it. I ask you, when he infers that I am in favor of setting the free and slave States at war, when the institution was placed in that attitude by those who made the Constitution, did they make any war? If we had no war out of it, when thus placed, wherein is the ground of belief that we shall have war out of it, if we return to that policy? Have we had any peace upon this matter springing from any other basis? I maintain that we have not. I have proposed nothing more than a return to the policy of the fathers.

I confess, when I propose a certain measure of policy, it is not enough for me that I do not intend any thing evil in the result, but it is incumbent on me to show that it has not a tendency to that result. I have met Judge Douglas in that point of view. I have not only made the declaration that I do not mean to produce a conflict between the States, but I have tried to show by fair reasoning, and I think I have shown to the minds of fair men, that I propose nothing but what has a most peaceful tendency. The quotation that I happened to make in that Springfield speech, that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and which has proved so offensive to the Judge, was part and parcel of the same thing. He tries to show that variety in the domestic institutions of the different States is necessary and indispensable. I do not dispute it. I have no controversy with Judge Douglas about that. I shall very readily agree with him that it would be foolish for us to insist upon having a cranberry law here, in Illinois, where we have no cranberries, because they have a cranberry law in Indiana, where they have cranberries. I should insist that it would be exceedingly wrong in us to deny to Virginia the right to enact oyster laws, where they have oysters, because we want no such laws here. I understand, I hope, quite as well as Judge Douglas or any body else, that the variety in the soil and climate and face of the country, and consequent variety in the industrial pursuits and productions of a country, require systems of law conforming to this variety in the natural features of the country. I understand quite as well as Judge Douglas, that if we here raise a barrel of flour more than we want, and the Louisianians raise a barrel of sugar more than they want, it is of mutual advantage to exchange. That produces commerce, brings us together, and makes us better friends. We like one another the more for it. And I understand as well as Judge Douglas, or any body else, that these mutual accommodations are the cements which bind together the different parts of this Union—that instead of being a thing to “divide the house”—figuratively expressing the Union—they tend to sustain it; they are the props of the house tending always to hold it up.

But when I have admitted all this, I ask if there is any parallel between these things and this institution of slavery? I do not see that there is any parallel at all between them. Consider it. When have we had any difficulty or quarrel amongst ourselves about the cranberry laws of Indiana, or the oyster laws of Virginia, or the pine lumber laws of Maine, or the fact that Louisiana produces sugar, and Illinois flour? When have we had any quarrels over these things? When have we had perfect peace in regard to this thing which I say is an element of discord in this Union? We have sometimes had peace, but when was it? It was when the institution of slavery remained quiet where it was. We have had difficulty and turmoil whenever it has made a struggle to spread itself where it was not. I ask, then, if experience does not speak in thunder-tones, telling us that the policy which has given peace to the country heretofore, being returned to, gives the greatest promise of peace again. You may say, and Judge Douglas has intimated the same thing, that all this difficulty in regard to the institution of slavery is the mere agitation of office-seekers and ambitious northern politicians. He thinks we want to get “his place,” I suppose. I agree that there are office-seekers amongst us. The Bible says somewhere that we are desperately selfish. I think we would have discovered that fact without the Bible. I do not claim that I am any less so than the average of men, but I do claim that I am not more selfish than Judge Douglas.

But is it true that all the difficulty and agitation we have in regard to this institution of slavery springs from office-seeking—from the mere ambition of politicians? Is that the truth? How many times have we had danger from this question? Go back to the day of the Missouri Compromise. Go back to the Nullification question, at the bottom of which lay this same slavery question. Go back to the time of the Annexation of Texas. Go back to the troubles that led to the Compromise of 1850. You will find that every time, with the single exception of the Nullification question, they sprang from an endeavor to spread this institution. There never was a party in the history of this country, and there probably never will be, of sufficient strength to disturb the general peace of the country. Parties themselves may be divided and quarrel on minor questions, yet it extends not beyond the parties themselves. But does not this question make a disturbance outside of political circles? Does it not enter into the churches and rend them asunder? What divided the great Methodist Church into two parts, North and South? What has raised this constant disturbance in every Presbyterian General Assembly that meets? What disturbed the Unitarian Church in this very city two years ago? What has jarred and shaken the great American Tract Society recently, not yet splitting it, but sure to divide it in the end? Is it not this same mighty, deep-seated power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting and stirring them up in every avenue of society—in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life? Is this the work of politicians? Is that irresistible power which for fifty years has shaken the Government and agitated the people to be stilled and subdued by pretending that it is an exceedingly simple thing, and we ought not to talk about it? If you will get everybody else to stop talking about it, I assure you I will quit before they have half done so. But where is the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that disturbing element in our society which has disturbed us for more than half a century, which has been the only serious danger that has threatened our institutions—I say, where is the philosophy or the statesmanship based on the assumption that we are to quit talking about it, and that the public mind is all at once to cease being agitated by it? Yet this is the policy here in the north that Douglas is advocating—that we are to care nothing about it! I ask you if it is not a false philosophy? Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that every body does care the most about?—a thing which all experience has shown we care a very great deal about?

The Judge alludes very often in the course of his remarks to the exclusive right which the States have to decide the whole thing for themselves. I agree with him very readily that the different States have that right. He is but fighting a man of straw when he assumes that I am contending against the right of the States to do as they please about it. Our controversy with him is in regard to the new Territories. We agree that when States come in as States they have the right and the power to do as they please. We have no power as citizens of the free States or in our federal capacity as members of the Federal Union through the General Government, to disturb slavery in the States where it exists. We profess constantly that we have no more inclination than belief in the power of the Government to disturb it; yet we are driven constantly to defend ourselves from the assumption that we are warring upon the rights of the States. What I insist upon is, that the new Territories shall be kept free from it while in the Territorial condition. Judge Douglas assumes that we have no interest in them—that we have no right whatever to interfere. I think we have some interest. I think that as white men we have. Do we not wish for an outlet for our surplus population, if I may so express myself? Do we not feel an interest in getting at that outlet with such institutions as we would like to have prevail there? If you go to the Territory opposed to slavery and another man comes upon the same ground with his slave, upon the assumption that the things are equal, it turns out that he has the equal right all his way and you have no part of it your way. If he goes in and makes it a slave Territory, and by consequence a slave State, is it not time that those who desire to have it a free State were on equal ground? Let me suggest it in a different way. How many Democrats are there about here [“A thousand”] who left slave States and came into the free State of Illinois to get rid of the institution of slavery? [Another voice—“A thousand and one.”] I reckon there are a thousand and one. I will ask you, if the policy you are now advocating had prevailed when this country was in a Territorial condition, where would you have gone to get rid of it? Where would you have found your free State or Territory to go to? And when hereafter, for any cause, the people in this place shall desire to find new homes, if they wish to be rid of the institution, where will they find the place to go to?

Now irrespective of the moral aspect of this question as to whether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a negro, I am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white men may find a home—may find some spot where they can better their condition—where they can settle upon new soil and better their condition in life. I am in favor of this not merely (I must say it here as I have elsewhere) for our own people who are born amongst us, but as an outlet for free white people every where, the world over—in which Hans and Baptiste and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their conditions in life.

I have stated upon former occasions, and I may as well state again, what I understand to be the real issue in this controversy between Judge Douglas and myself. On the point of my wanting to make war between the free and the slave States, there has been no issue between us. So, too, when he assumes that I am in favor of introducing a perfect social and political equality between the white and black races. These are false issues, upon which Judge Douglas has tried to force the controversy. There is no foundation in truth for the charge that I maintain either of these propositions. The real issue in this controversy—the one pressing upon every mind—is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong. The sentiment that contemplates the institution of slavery in this country as a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican party. It is the sentiment around which all their actions—all their arguments circle—from which all their propositions radiate. They look upon it as being a moral, social and political wrong; and while they contemplate it as such, they nevertheless have due regard for its actual existence among us, and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way and to all the constitutional obligations thrown about it. Yet having a due regard for these, they desire a policy in regard to it that looks to its not creating any more danger. They insist that it should as far as may be, be treated as a wrong, and one of the methods of treating it as a wrong is to make provision that it shall grow no larger. They also desire a policy that looks to a peaceful end of slavery at some time, as being wrong. These are the views they entertain in regard to it as I understand them; and all their sentiments—all their arguments and propositions are brought within this range. I have said, and I repeat it here, that if there be a man amongst us who does not think that the institution of slavery is wrong, in any one of the aspects of which I have spoken, he is misplaced and ought not to be with us. And if there be a man amongst us who is so impatient of it as a wrong as to disregard its actual presence among us and the difficulty of getting rid of it suddenly in a satisfactory way, and to disregard the constitutional obligations thrown about it, that man is misplaced if he is on our platform. We disclaim sympathy with him in practical action. He is not placed properly with us.

On this subject of treating it as a wrong, and limiting its spread, let me say a word. Has any thing ever threatened the existence of this Union save and except this very institution of slavery? What is it that we hold most dear amongst us? Our own liberty and prosperity. What has ever threatened our liberty and prosperity save and except this institution of slavery? If this is true, how do you propose to improve the condition of things by enlarging slavery—by spreading it out and making it bigger? You may have a wen or cancer upon your person and not be able to cut it out lest you bleed to death; but surely it is no way to cure it, to engraft it and spread it over your whole body. That is no proper way of treating what you regard a wrong. You see this peaceful way of dealing with it as a wrong—restricting the spread of it, and not allowing it to go into new countries where it has not already existed. That is the peaceful way, the old-fashioned way, the way in which the fathers themselves set us the example.

On the other hand, I have said there is a sentiment which treats it as not being wrong. That is the Democratic sentiment of this day. I do not mean to say that every man who stands within that range positively asserts that it is right. That class will include all who positively assert that it is right, and all who like Judge Douglas treat it as indifferent and do not say it is either right or wrong. These two classes of men fall within the general class of those who do not look upon it as a wrong. And if there be among you any body who supposes that he, as a Democrat, can consider himself “as much opposed to slavery as anybody,” I would like to reason with him. You never treat it as a wrong. What other thing that you consider as a wrong, do you deal with as you deal with that? Perhaps you say it is wrong, but your leader never does, and you quarrel with any body who says it is wrong. Although you pretend to say so yourself you can find no fit place to deal with it as a wrong. You must not say any thing about it in the free States, because it is not here. You must not say any thing about it in the slave States, because it is there. You must not say anything about it in the pulpit, because that is religion and has nothing to do with it. You must not say any thing about it in politics, because that will disturb the security of “my place.” There is no place to talk about it as being a wrong, although you say yourself it is a wrong. But finally you will screw yourself up to the belief that if the people of the slave States should adopt a system of gradual emancipation on the slavery question, you would be in favor of it. You would be in favor of it. You say that is getting it in the right place, and you would be glad to see it succeed. But you are deceiving yourself. You all know that Frank Blair and Gratz Brown, down there in St. Louis, undertook to introduce that system in Missouri. They fought as valiantly as they could for the system of gradual emancipation which you pretend you would be glad to see succeed. Now I will bring you to the test. After a hard fight they were beaten, and when the news came over here you threw up your hats and hurrahed for Democracy. More than that, take all the argument made in favor of the system you have proposed, and it carefully excludes the idea that there is any thing wrong in the institution of slavery. The arguments to sustain that policy carefully excluded it. Even here to-day you heard Judge Douglas quarrel with me because I uttered a wish that it might some time come to an end. Although Henry Clay could say he wished every slave in the United States was in the country of his ancestors, I am denounced by those pretending to respect Henry Clay for uttering a wish that it might some time, in some peaceful way, come to an end. The Democratic policy in regard to that institution will not tolerate the merest breath, the slightest hint, of the least degree of wrong about it. Try it by some of Judge Douglas’s arguments. He says he “don’t care whether it is voted up or voted down” in the Territories. I do not care myself in dealing with that expression, whether it is intended to be expressive of his individual sentiments on the subject, or only of the national policy he desires to have established. It is alike valuable for my purpose. Any man can say that he does not see any thing wrong in slavery, but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it; because no man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. He may say he don’t care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing. He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong. He says that upon the score of equality, slaves should be allowed to go in a new Territory, like other property. This is strictly logical if there is no difference between it and other property. If it and other property are equal, his argument is entirely logical. But if you insist that one is wrong and the other right, there is no use to institute a comparison between right and wrong. You may turn over every thing in the Democratic policy from beginning to end, whether in the shape it takes on the statute books, in the shape it takes in the Dred Scott decision, in the shape it takes in conversation, or the shape it takes in short maxim-like arguments—it everywhere carefully excludes the idea that there is any thing wrong in it.

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. I was glad to express my gratitude at Quincy, and I re-express it here to Judge Douglas—that he looks to no end of the institution of slavery. That will help the people to see where the struggle really is. It will hereafter place with us all men who really do wish the wrong may have an end. And whenever we can get rid of the fog which obscures the real question—when we can get Judge Douglas and his friends to avow a policy looking to its perpetuation—we can get out from among that class of men and bring them to the side of those who treat it as a wrong. Then there will soon be an end of it, and that end will be its “ultimate extinction.” Whenever the issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter thrown out so that men can fairly see the real difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled, and it will be done peaceably too. There will be no war, no violence. It will be placed again where the wisest and best men of the world placed it. Brooks of South Carolina once declared that when this Constitution was framed, its framers did not look to the institution existing until this day. When he said this, I think he stated a fact that is fully borne out by the history of the times. But he also said they were better and wiser men than the men of these days; yet the men of these days had experience which they had not, and by the invention of the cotton-gin it became a necessity in this country that slavery should be perpetual. I now say that, willingly or unwillingly, purposely or without purpose, Judge Douglas has been the most prominent instrument in changing the position of the institution of slavery which the fathers of the Government expected to come to an end ere this—and putting it upon Brooks’s cotton-gin basis—placing it where he openly confesses he has no desire there shall ever be an end of it.

I understand I have ten minutes yet. I will employ it in saying something about this argument Judge Douglas uses, while he sustains the Dred Scott decision, that the people of the Territories can still somehow exclude slavery. The first thing I ask attention to is the fact that Judge Douglas constantly said, before the decision, that whether they could or not, was a question for the Supreme Court. But after the court has made the decision he virtually says it is not a question for the Supreme Court, but for the people. And how is it he tells us they can exclude it? He says it needs “police regulations,” and that admits of “unfriendly legislation.” Although it is a right established by the Constitution of the United States to take a slave into a Territory of the United States and hold him as property, yet unless the Territorial Legislature will give friendly legislation, and, more especially, if they adopt unfriendly legislation, they can practically exclude him. Now, without meeting this proposition as a matter of fact, I pass to consider the real Constitutional obligation. Let me take the gentleman who looks me in the face before me, and let us suppose that he is a member of the Territorial Legislature. The first thing he will do will be to swear that he will support the Constitution of the United States. His neighbor by his side in the Territory has slaves and needs Territorial legislation to enable him to enjoy that Constitutional right. Can he withhold the legislation which his neighbor needs for the enjoyment of a right which is fixed in his favor in the Constitution of the United States which he has sworn to support? Can he withhold it without violating his oath? And more especially, can he pass unfriendly legislation to violate his oath? Why, this is a monstrous sort of talk about the Constitution of the United States! There has never been as outlandish or lawless a doctrine from the mouth of any respectable man on earth. I do not believe it is a Constitutional right to hold slaves in a Territory of the United States. I believe the decision was improperly made and I go for reversing it. Judge Douglas is furious against those who go for reversing a decision. But he is for legislating it out of all force while the law itself stands. I repeat that there has never been so monstrous a doctrine uttered from the mouth of a respectable man.

I suppose most of us (I know it of myself) believe that the people of the Southern States are entitled to a Congressional Fugitive Slave law—that is a right fixed in the Constitution. But it cannot be made available to them without Congressional legislation. In the Judge’s language, it is a “barren right” which needs legislation before it can become efficient and valuable to the persons to whom it is guarantied. And as the right is Constitutional I agree that the legislation shall be granted to it—and that not that we like the institution of slavery. We profess to have no taste for running and catching niggers—at least I profess no taste for that job at all. Why then do I yield support to a Fugitive Slave law? Because I do not understand that the Constitution, which guaranties that right, can be supported without it. And if I believed that the right to hold a slave in a Territory was equally fixed in the Constitution with the right to reclaim fugitives, I should be bound to give it the legislation necessary to support it. I say that no man can deny his obligation to give the necessary legislation to support slavery in a Territory, who believes it is a Constitutional right to have it there. No man can, who does not give the Abolitionists an argument to deny the obligation enjoined by the Constitution to enact a Fugitive Slave law. Try it now. It is the strongest Abolition argument ever made. I say if that Dred Scott decision is correct, then the right to hold slaves in a Territory is equally a Constitutional right with the right of a slaveholder to have his runaway returned. No one can show the distinction between them. The one is express, so that we cannot deny it. The other is construed to be in the Constitution, so that he who believes the decision to be correct believes in the right. And the man who argues that by unfriendly legislation, in spite of that Constitutional right, slavery may be driven from the Territories, cannot avoid furnishing an argument by which Abolitionists may deny the obligation to return fugitives, and claim the power to pass laws unfriendly to the right of the slaveholder to reclaim his fugitive. I do not know how such an argument may strike a popular assembly like this, but I defy any body to go before a body of men whose minds are educated to estimating evidence and reasoning, and show that there is an iota of difference between the Constitutional right to reclaim a fugitive, and the Constitutional right to hold a slave, in a Territory, provided this Dred Scott decision is correct. I defy any man to make an argument that will justify unfriendly legislation to deprive a slaveholder of his right to hold his slave in a Territory, that will not equally, in all its length, breadth and thickness, furnish an argument for nullifying the Fugitive Slave law. Why, there is not such an Abolitionist in the nation as Douglas, after all.

MR. DOUGLAS’S REPLY.

Mr. Lincoln has concluded his remarks by saying that there is not such an Abolitionist as I am in all America. If he could make the Abolitionists of Illinois believe that, he would not have much show for the Senate. Let him make the Abolitionists believe the truth of that statement and his political back is broken.

His first criticism upon me is the expression of his hope that the war of the Administration will be prosecuted against me and the Democratic party of this State with vigor. He wants that war prosecuted with vigor; I have no doubt of it. His hopes of success, and the hopes of his party depend solely upon it. They have no chance of destroying the Democracy of this State except by the aid of federal patronage. He has all the federal office-holders here as his allies, running separate tickets against the Democracy to divide the party, although the leaders all intend to vote directly the Abolition ticket, and only leave the greenhorns to vote this separate ticket who refuse to go into the Abolition camp. There is something really refreshing in the thought that Mr. Lincoln is in favor of prosecuting one war vigorously. It is the first war I ever knew him to be in favor of prosecuting. It is the first war I ever knew him to believe to be just or Constitutional. When the Mexican war was being waged, and the American army was surrounded by the enemy in Mexico, he thought that war was unconstitutional, unnecessary, and unjust. He thought it was not commenced on the right spot.

When I made an incidental allusion of that kind in the joint discussion over at Charleston some weeks ago, Lincoln, in replying, said that I, Douglas, had charged him with voting against supplies for the Mexican war, and then he reared up, full length, and swore that he never voted against the supplies—that it was a slander—and caught hold of Ficklin, who sat on the stand, and said, “Here, Ficklin, tell the people that it is a lie.” Well, Ficklin, who had served in Congress with him, stood up and told them all that he recollected about it. It was that when George Ashmun, of Massachusetts, brought forward a resolution declaring the war unconstitutional, unnecessary, and unjust, that Lincoln had voted for it. “Yes,” said Lincoln, “I did.” Thus he confessed that he voted that the war was wrong, that our country was in the wrong, and consequently that the Mexicans were in the right; but charged that I had slandered him by saying that he voted against the supplies. I never charged him with voting against the supplies in my life, because I knew that he was not in Congress when they were voted. The war was commenced on the 13th day of May, 1846, and on that day we appropriated in Congress ten millions of dollars and fifty thousand men to prosecute it. During the same session we voted more men and more money, and at the next session we voted more men and more money, so that by the time Mr. Lincoln entered Congress we had enough men and enough money to carry on the war, and had no occasion to vote for any more. When he got into the House, being opposed to the war, and not being able to stop the supplies, because they had all gone forward, all he could do was to follow the lead of Corwin, and prove that the war was not begun on the right spot, and that it was unconstitutional, unnecessary, and wrong. Remember, too, that this he did after the war had been begun. It is one thing to be opposed to the declaration of a war, another and very different thing to take sides with the enemy against your own country after the war has been commenced. Our army was in Mexico at the time, many battles had been fought; our citizens, who were defending the honor of their country’s flag, were surrounded by the daggers, the guns and the poison of the enemy. Then it was that Corwin made his speech in which he declared that the American soldiers ought to be welcomed by the Mexicans with bloody hands and hospitable graves; then it was that Ashmun and Lincoln voted in the House of Representatives that the war was unconstitutional and unjust; and Ashmun’s resolution, Corwin’s speech, and Lincoln’s vote, were sent to Mexico and read at the head of the Mexican army, to prove to them that there was a Mexican party in the Congress of the United States who were doing all in their power to aid them. That a man who takes sides with the common enemy against his own country in time of war should rejoice in a war being made on me now, is very natural. And in my opinion, no other kind of a man would rejoice in it.

Mr. Lincoln has told you a great deal to-day about his being an old line Clay Whig. Bear in mind that there are a great many old Clay Whigs down in this region. It is more agreeable, therefore, for him to talk about the old Clay Whig party than it is for him to talk Abolitionism. We did not hear much about the old Clay Whig party up in the Abolition districts. How much of an old line Henry Clay Whig was he? Have you read General Singleton’s speech at Jacksonville? You know that Gen. Singleton was, for twenty-five years, the confidential friend of Henry Clay in Illinois, and he testified that in 1847, when the Constitutional Convention of this State was in session, the Whig members were invited to a Whig caucus at the house of Mr. Lincoln’s brother-in-law, where Mr. Lincoln proposed to throw Henry Clay overboard and take up Gen. Taylor in his place, giving, as his reason, that if the Whigs did not take up Gen. Taylor the Democrats would. Singleton testifies that Lincoln, in that speech, urged, as another reason for throwing Henry Clay overboard, that the Whigs had fought long enough for principle and ought to begin to fight for success. Singleton also testifies that Lincoln’s speech did have the effect of cutting Clay’s throat, and that he (Singleton) and others withdrew from the caucus in indignation. He further states that when they got to Philadelphia to attend the National Convention of the Whig party, that Lincoln was there, the bitter and deadly enemy of Clay, and that he tried to keep him (Singleton) out of the Convention because he insisted on voting for Clay, and Lincoln was determined to have Taylor. Singleton says that Lincoln rejoiced with very great joy when he found the mangled remains of the murdered Whig statesman lying cold before him. Now, Mr. Lincoln tells you that he is an old line Clay Whig! Gen. Singleton testifies to the facts I have narrated, in a public speech which has been printed and circulated broadcast over the State for weeks, yet not a lisp have we heard from Mr. Lincoln on the subject, except that he is an old Clay Whig.

What part of Henry Clay’s policy did Lincoln ever advocate? He was in Congress in 1848–9, when the Wilmot proviso warfare disturbed the peace and harmony of the country, until it shook the foundation of the Republic from its centre to its circumference. It was that agitation that brought Clay forth from his retirement at Ashland again to occupy his seat in the Senate of the United States, to see if he could not, by his great wisdom and experience, and the renown of his name, do something to restore peace and quiet to a disturbed country. Who got up that sectional strife that Clay had to be called upon to quell? I have heard Lincoln boast that he voted forty-two times for the Wilmot proviso, and that he would have voted as many times more if he could. Lincoln is the man, in connection with Seward, Chase, Giddings, and other Abolitionists, who got up that strife that I helped Clay to put down. Henry Clay came back to the Senate in 1849, and saw that he must do something to restore peace to the country. The Union Whigs and the Union Democrats welcomed him the moment he arrived, as the man for the occasion. We believed that he, of all men on earth, had been preserved by Divine Providence to guide us out of our difficulties, and we Democrats rallied under Clay then, as you Whigs in nullification time rallied under the banner of old Jackson, forgetting party when the country was in danger, in order that we might have a country first, and parties afterward.

And this reminds me that Mr. Lincoln told you that the slavery question was the only thing that ever disturbed the peace and harmony of the Union. Did not nullification once raise its head and disturb the peace of this Union in 1832? Was that the slavery question, Mr. Lincoln? Did not disunion raise its monster head during the last war with Great Britain? Was that the slavery question, Mr. Lincoln? The peace of this country has been disturbed three times, once during the war with Great Britain, once on the tariff question, and once on the slavery question. His argument, therefore, that slavery is the only question that has ever created dissension in the Union falls to the ground. It is true that agitators are enabled now to use this slavery question for the purpose of sectional strife. He admits that in regard to all things else, the principle that I advocate, making each State and Territory free to decide for itself, ought to prevail. He instances the cranberry laws, and the oyster laws, and he might have gone through the whole list with the same effect. I say that all these laws are local and domestic, and that local and domestic concerns should be left to each State and each Territory to manage for itself. If agitators would acquiesce in that principle, there never would be any danger to the peace and harmony of the Union.

Mr. Lincoln tries to avoid the main issue by attacking the truth of my proposition, that our fathers made this Government divided into free and slave States, recognizing the right of each to decide all its local questions for itself. Did they not thus make it? It is true that they did not establish slavery in any of the States, or abolish it in any of them; but finding thirteen States, twelve of which were slave and one free, they agreed to form a government uniting them together, as they stood divided into free and slave States, and to guaranty forever to each State the right to do as it pleased on the slavery question. Having thus made the government, and conferred this right upon each State forever, I assert that this Government can exist as they made it, divided into free and slave States, if any one State chooses to retain slavery. He says that he looks forward to a time when slavery shall be abolished everywhere. I look forward to a time when each State shall be allowed to do as it pleases. If it chooses to keep slavery forever, it is not my business, but its own; if it chooses to abolish slavery, it is its own business—not mine. I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom. I would not endanger the perpetuity of this Union, I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed. Hence, I say, let us maintain this Government on the principles that our fathers made it, recognizing the right of each State to keep slavery as long as its people determine, or to abolish it when they please. But Mr. Lincoln says that when our fathers made this Government they did not look forward to the state of things now existing; and therefore he thinks the doctrine was wrong; and he quotes Brooks, of South Carolina, to prove that our fathers then thought that probably slavery would be abolished by each State acting for itself before this time. Suppose they did; suppose they did not foresee what has occurred,—does that change the principles of our Government? They did not probably foresee the telegraph that transmits intelligence by lightning, nor did they foresee the railroads that now form the bonds of union between the different States, or the thousand mechanical inventions that have elevated mankind. But do these things change the principles of the Government? Our fathers, I say, made this Government on the principle of the right of each State to do as it pleases in its own domestic affairs, subject to the Constitution, and allowed the people of each to apply to every new change of circumstances such remedy as they may see fit to improve their condition. This right they have for all time to come.

Mr. Lincoln went on to tell you that he did not at all desire to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists, nor does his party. I expected him to say that down here. Let me ask him then how he expects to put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction every where, if he does not intend to interfere with it in the States where it exists? He says that he will prohibit it in all the Territories, and the inference is, then, that unless they make free States out of them he will keep them out of the Union; for, mark you, he did not say whether or not he would vote to admit Kansas with slavery or not, as her people might apply (he forgot that as usual, etc.); he did not say whether or not he was in favor of bringing the Territories now in existence into the Union on the principle of Clay’s Compromise measures on the slavery question. I told you that he would not. His idea is that he will prohibit slavery in all the Territories and thus force them all to become free States, surrounding the slave States with a cordon of free States and hemming them in, keeping the slaves confined to their present limits whilst they go on multiplying until the soil on which they live will no longer feed them, and he will thus be able to put slavery in a course of ultimate extinction by starvation. He will extinguish slavery in the Southern States as the French general did the Algerines when he smoked them out. He is going to extinguish slavery by surrounding the slave States, hemming in the slaves, and starving them out of existence, as you smoke a fox out of his hole. He intends to do that in the name of humanity and Christianity, in order that we may get rid of the terrible crime and sin entailed upon our fathers of holding slaves. Mr. Lincoln makes out that line of policy, and appeals to the moral sense of justice and to the Christian feeling of the community to sustain him. He says that any man who holds to the contrary doctrine is in the position of the king who claimed to govern by divine right. Let us examine for a moment and see what principle it was that overthrew the Divine right of George the Third to govern us. Did not these colonies rebel because the British parliament had no right to pass laws concerning our property and domestic and private institutions without our consent? We demanded that the British Government should not pass such laws unless they gave us representation in the body passing them,—and this the British government insisting on doing,—we went to war, on the principle that the Home Government should not control and govern distant colonies without giving them representation. Now, Mr. Lincoln proposes to govern the Territories without giving them a representation, and calls on Congress to pass laws controlling their property and domestic concerns without their consent and against their will. Thus, he asserts for his party the identical principle asserted by George III. and the Tories of the Revolution.

I ask you to look into these things, and then tell me whether the Democracy or the Abolitionists are right. I hold that the people of a Territory, like those of a State (I use the language of Mr. Buchanan in his letter of acceptance), have the right to decide for themselves whether slavery shall or shall not exist within their limits. The point upon which Chief Justice Taney expresses his opinion is simply this, that slaves being property, stand on an equal footing with other property, and consequently that the owner has the same right to carry that property into a Territory that he has any other, subject to the same conditions. Suppose that one of your merchants was to take fifty or one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of liquors to Kansas. He has a right to go there under that decision, but when he gets there he finds the Maine liquor law in force, and what can he do with his property after he gets it there? He cannot sell it, he cannot use it, it is subject to the local law, and that law is against him, and the best thing he can do with it is to bring it back into Missouri or Illinois and sell it. If you take negroes to Kansas, as Col. Jeff. Davis said in his Bangor speech, from which I have quoted to-day, you must take them there subject to the local law. If the people want the institution of slavery they will protect and encourage it; but if they do not want it they will withhold that protection, and the absence of local legislation protecting slavery excludes it as completely as a positive prohibition. You slaveholders of Missouri might as well understand what you know practically, that you cannot carry slavery where the people do not want it. All you have a right to ask is that the people shall do as they please; if they want slavery let them have it; if they do not want it, allow them to refuse to encourage it.

My friends, if, as I have said before, we will only live up to this great fundamental principle, there will be peace between the North and the South. Mr. Lincoln admits that under the Constitution on all domestic questions, except slavery, we ought not to interfere with the people of each State. What right have we to interfere with slavery any more than we have to interfere with any other question? He says that this slavery question is now the bone of contention. Why? Simply because agitators have combined in all the free States to make war upon it. Suppose the agitators in the States should combine in one-half of the Union to make war upon the railroad system of the other half? They would thus be driven to the same sectional strife. Suppose one section makes war upon any other peculiar institution of the opposite section and the same strife is produced. The only remedy and safety is that we shall stand by the Constitution as our fathers made it, obey the laws as they are passed, while they stand the proper test and sustain the decisions of the Supreme Court and the constituted authorities.

Speech of Hon. Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi,

On retiring from the United States Senate. Delivered in the Senate Chamber January 21, 1861.

I rise, Mr. President, for the purpose of announcing to the Senate that I have satisfactory evidence that the State of Mississippi, by a solemn ordinance of her people in convention assembled, has declared her separation from the United States. Under these circumstances, of course my functions are terminated here. It has seemed to me proper, however, that I should appear in the Senate to announce that fact to my associates, and I will say but very little more. The occasion does not invite me to go into argument; and my physical condition would not permit me to do so if it were otherwise, and yet it seems to become me to say something on the part of the State I here represent, on an occasion so solemn as this. It is known to Senators who have served with me here, that I have for many years advocated as an essential attribute of State sovereignty, the right of a State to secede from the Union. Therefore, if I had not believed there was justifiable cause; if I had thought that Mississippi was acting without sufficient provocation, or without an existing necessity, I should still, under my theory of the government, because of my allegiance to the State of which I am a citizen, have been bound by her action. I, however, may be permitted to say that I do think she has justifiable cause and I approve of her act. I conferred with her people before that act was taken, counseled them then that if the state of things which they apprehended should exist when the convention met, they should take the action which they have now adopted.

I hope none who hear me will confound this expression of mine with the advocacy of the right of a State to remain in the Union and to disregard its constitutional obligations by the nullification of the law. Such is not my theory. Nullification and secession so often confounded are indeed antagonistic principles. Nullification is a remedy which it is sought to apply within the Union and against the agents of the States. It is only to be justified when the agent has violated his constitutional obligation, and a State, assuming to judge for itself denies the right of the agent thus to act and appeals to the other States of the Union for a decision; but when the States themselves and when the people of the States have so acted as to convince us that they will not regard our constitutional rights, then, and then for the first time, arises the doctrine of secession in its practical application.

A great man who now reposes with his fathers and who has been often arraigned for a want of fealty to the Union advocated the doctrine of Nullification because it preserved the Union. It was because of his deep-seated attachment to the Union, his determination to find some remedy for existing ills short of the severance of the ties which bound South Carolina to the other States, that Mr. Calhoun advocated the doctrine of nullification, which he proclaimed to be peaceful, to be within the limits of State power, not to disturb the Union, but only to be a means of bringing the agent before the tribunal of the States for their judgment.

Secession belongs to a different class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again when a better comprehension of the theory of our government and the inalienable rights of the people of the States will prevent any one from denying that each State is a sovereign, and thus may reclaim the grants which it has made to any agent whomsoever.

I therefore say I concur in the action of the people of Mississippi, believing it to be necessary and proper, and should have been bound by their action if my belief had been otherwise; and this brings me at the important point which I wish, on this last occasion, to present to the Senate. It is by this confounding of nullification and secession that the name of a great man whose ashes now mingle with his mother earth, has been invoked to justify coercion against a seceding state. The phrase “to execute the laws” was an expression which General Jackson applied to the case of a State refusing to obey the laws while yet a member of the Union. That is not the case which is now presented. The laws are to be executed over the United States, and upon the people of the United States. They have no relation with any foreign country. It is a perversion of terms, at least it is a great misapprehension of the case, which cites that expression for application to a State which has withdrawn from the Union. You may make war on a foreign State. If it be the purpose of gentlemen they may make war against a State which has withdrawn from the Union; but there are no laws of the United States to be executed within the limits of a Seceded State. A State finding herself in the condition in which Mississippi has judged she is; in which her safety requires that she should provide for the maintenance of her rights out of the Union, surrenders all the benefits, (and they are known to be many) deprives herself of the advantages, (they are known to be great) severs all the ties of affection (and they are close and enduring) which have bound her to the Union; and thus divesting herself of every benefit, taking upon herself every burden, she claims to be exempt from any power to execute the laws of the United States within her limits.

I well remember an occasion when Massachusetts was arraigned before the Bar of the Senate, and when then the doctrine of coercion was rife, and to be applied against her because of the rescue of a fugitive slave in Boston. My opinion then was the same as it is now. Not in the spirit of egotism, but to show that I am not influenced in my opinion because the case is my own, I refer to that time and that occasion as containing the opinion which I then entertained and on which my present conduct is based. I then said, if Massachusetts, following her through a stated line of conduct, chooses to take the last step which separates her from the Union, it is her right to go, and I will neither vote one dollar nor one man to coerce her back; but will say to her, “God speed,” in memory of the kind associations which once existed between her and the other States. It has been a conviction of pressing necessity, it has been a belief that we are to be deprived in the Union, of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us, which has brought Mississippi into her present decision. She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack on her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races. That Declaration of Independence is to be construed by the circumstances and purposes for which it was made. The communities were declaring their independence; the people of those communities were asserting that no man was born—to use the language of Mr. Jefferson—booted and spurred to ride over the rest of mankind; that men were created equal—meaning the men of the political community; that there was no divine right to rule; that no man inherited the right to govern; that there were no classes by which power and place descended to families, but that all stations were equally within the grasp of each member of the body politic. These were the great principles they announced; these were the purposes for which they made their declaration; these were the ends to which their enunciation was directed. They have no reference to the slave; else, how happened it that among the items of arraignment made against George III. was that he endeavored to do just what the North has been endeavoring of late to do—to stir up insurrection among our slaves? Had the Declaration announced that the negroes were free and equal how was it the Prince was to be arraigned for stirring up insurrection among them? And how was this to be enumerated among the high crimes which caused the colonies to sever their connection with the mother country? When our constitution was formed, the same idea was rendered more palpable, for there we find provision made for that very class of persons as property; they were not put upon the footing of equality with white men—not even upon that of paupers and convicts, but so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste only to be represented in a numerical proportion of three-fifths.

Then, Senators, we recur to the compact which binds us together; we recur to the principles upon which our government was founded; and when you deny them, and when you deny to us, the right to withdraw from a government which thus prevented, threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence, and take the hazard. This is done not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of the country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our sacred duty to transmit unshorn to our children.

I find in myself, perhaps, a type of the general feeling of my constituents towards yours. I am sure I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North. I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, “I wish you well,” and such, I am sure, is the feeling of the people whom I represent towards those whom you represent. I therefore feel that I but express their desire when I say I hope, and they hope for peaceful relations with you, though we must part. They may be mutually beneficial to us in the future as they have been in the past, if you so will it. The reverse may bring disaster on every portion of the country; and if you will have it thus, we will invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered them from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages of the bear, and thus, putting our trust in God, and to our firm hearts and strong arms we will vindicate the right as best we may.

In the course of my service here, associated at different times with a great variety of Senators, I see now around me some with whom I have served long; there have been points of collision, but whatever of offense there has been to me I leave here; I carry with me no hostile remembrance. Whatever offense I have given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, Senators, in this hour of our parting, to offer you an apology for any harm which, in the heat of discussion, I have inflicted. I go hence unencumbered of any injury received, and having discharged the duty of making the only reparation in my power for any injury offered.

Mr. President and Senators, having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains for me to bid you a final adieu.

Speech of the Hon. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts

In the canvass against Horace Greeley at Richmond, Ind., August 3, 1872.

AN ABSTRACT.

Gentlemen, standing here to-day, in this presence, among these liberty-loving, patriotic men and women of Wayne county, I want to call your attention for a few moments to what we have struggled for in the past.

Nearly forty years ago, when the slave power dominated the country—when the dark shadow of human slavery fell upon us all here in the North—there arose a body of conscientious men and women who proclaimed the doctrine that emancipation was the duty of the master and the right of the slave; they proclaimed it to be a duty to let the oppressed go free. Rewards were offered—they were denounced, mobbed—violence pervaded the land. Yet these faithful ones maintained with fidelity, against all odds, the sublime creed of human liberty. The struggle, commencing forty years ago against the assumptions and dominations of the slave power, went on from one step to another—the slave power went right on to the conquest of the country—promises were broken, without regard to constitutions or laws of the human race. The work went on till the people, in their majesty, in 1860, went to the ballot-box and made Abraham Lincoln President of the United States. [Cheers.] Then came a great trial; that trial was whether we should do battle for the principles of eternal right, and maintain the cause of liberty, or surrender; whether we would be true to our principles or false. We stood firm—stood by the sacred cause—and then the slave power plunged the country into a godless rebellion.

Then came another trial, testing the manhood, the courage, the sublime fidelity of the lovers of liberty in the country. We met that test as we had met every other test—trusting in God, trusting in the people—willing to stand or fall by our principles. Through four years of blood we maintained those principles; we broke down the rebellion, restored a broken Union, and vindicated the authority and power of the nation. In that struggle Indiana played a glorious part in the field, and her voice in the councils of the nation had great and deserved influence. [Cheers.]

Now, gentlemen, measured by the high standard of fidelity to country, of patriotism, the great political party to which we belong to-day was as true to the country in war as it had been in peace—true to the country every time, and on all occasions.

Not only true to the country, but the Republican party was true to liberty. It struck the fetters from the bondman, and elevated four and a half millions of men from chattel-hood to manhood; gave them civil rights, gave them political rights, and gave them part and parcel of the power of the country. [Applause.]

Now, gentlemen, here to-day, I point to this record—this great record—and say to you, that, measured by the standard of patriotism—one of the greatest and grandest standards by which to measure public men, political organizations or nations—measured by that standard which the whole world recognizes, the Republican party of the United States stands before the world with none, to accuse it of want of fidelity to country. [Cheers.] Measured by the standard of liberty, equal, universal, impartial liberty—liberty to all races, all colors and all nationalities—the Republican party stands to-day before the country pre-eminently the party of universal liberty. [Loud cheers.] Measured by the standard of humanity—that humanity that stoops down and lifts up the poor and lowly, the oppressed and the castaways, the poor, struggling sons and daughters of toil and misfortune—measured by that standard, the Republican party stands before this country to-day without a peer in our history, or in the history of any other people. [Renewed and general applause.] We have gone further, embraced more, lifted up lowlier men, carried them to a higher elevation, labored amid obloquy and reproach to lift up the despised and lowly nations of the earth than any political organization that the sun ever shone upon.

And then, gentlemen, tested by the support of all the great ideas that tend to lift up humanity, to pull none down, to lift all up, to carry the country upward and forward, ever toward God, the Republican party of the country has been, and now is, to-day, in advance of any political organization the world knows.

Gentlemen, I am not here to maintain that this great party, with its three and a half millions of voters, tested and tried as it has been during twelve years—I am not here to say that it has made no mistakes. We have committed errors; we could not always see what the right was; we failed sometimes; but, gentlemen, take our record—take it as it stands—it is a bright and glorious record, that any man, or set of men, may be proud of. We have stood, and we stand to-day, on the side of man, and on the side of the ideas God has given us in His Holy Word. [Applause.] There has not been a day since by the labors, the prayers and the sacrifices of the old anti-slavery men and women of the country, from 1830 to 1855—during twenty-five years—I say to you, gentlemen, here, to-day, that this party, the product of these prayers, and these sacrifices, and these efforts—with all its faults—has been true to patriotism, true to liberty, true to justice, true to humanity, true to Christian civilization. [Cheers.]

I say to you here to-day, that all along during this time, the Democratic party carried the banners of slavery. Whenever the slave power desired anything they got it. They wielded the entire power of the nation, until, in their arrogance, when we elected Abraham Lincoln, they plunged the country into the fire and blood of the greatest civil war recorded in history. After the war all the measures inaugurated for emancipation—to make the country free—to lift an emancipated race up—to give them instruction and make them citizens—to give them civil rights and make them voters—to put them on an equality with the rest of the people—to every one of that series of thirty or forty measures the Democratic party gave their President unqualified and united opposition. Well, now, we have been accustomed to say that they were mistaken, misinformed, that they were honest—that they believed what they did; but, gentlemen, if they have believed what they have said, that they have acted according to their convictions from 1832 to 1872—a period of forty years—can they be honest, to-day, in indorsing the Cincinnati platform—in supporting Horace Greeley? [“No, no!”]

Why, we have read of sudden and miraculous conversions. We read of St. Paul’s conversion, of the light that shone around him, but I ask you, in the history of the human family have you ever known three millions of men—three millions of great sinners for forty years—[laughter]—three millions of men, all convicted, all converted, and all changed in the twinkling of an eye. [Renewed laughter.] Why, gentlemen, if it is so, for one I will lift up my eyes and my heart to God, that those sinners, that this great political party that has been for forty years, every time and all the time, on every question and on all questions pertaining to the human race and the rights of the colored race, on the wrong side—on the side of injustice, oppression and inhumanity—on the side that has been against man, and against God’s holy word; I say, gentlemen, that I will lift up my heart in gratitude to God that these men have suddenly repented.

Why, I have been accustomed to think that the greatest victory the Republican party would ever be called upon to win—and I knew it would win it, because the Republican party, as Napoleon said of his armies, are accustomed to sleep on the field of victory. The Republican party—that always won—always ought to win, because it is on the right side; and when it is defeated, it only falls back to gather strength to advance again. [Applause.] I did suppose that the greatest task it would ever have, greater than putting down the rebellion, greater than emancipating four millions of men, greater than lifting them up to civil rights—greater than all its grand deeds—would be the conviction and conversion of the Democratic party of the United States. [Laughter and cheers.] Just as we are going into a Presidential election—when it was certain that if the Republican party said and affirmed, said by its members, said altogether, that its ideas, its principles, its policy, its measures, were stronger than were the political organization of the Democrats. I say, just as we are going into the contest, when it was certain that we would break down and crush out its ideas, and take its flags and disband it, and out of the wreck we would gather hundreds of thousands of changed and converted men, the best part of the body—just at that time some of our men are so anxious to embrace somebody that has always been wrong that they start out at once in a wild hunt to clasp hands with our enemies and to save the Democratic party from absolute annihilation. [Laughter.] To do what they want us is to disband. Well, gentlemen, I suppose there are some here to-day that belonged to the grand old Army of the Potomac. If when Lee had retreated on Richmond, and Phil. Sheridan sent back to Grant that if he pushed things he would capture the army—if, instead of sending back to Sheridan, as Grant did, “Push things,” he had said to him, “Let us disband the Army of the Potomac; don’t hurt the feelings of these retreating men; let us clasp hands with them,” what would have been the result? I suppose there are some of you here to-day that followed Sherman—that were with him in his terrible march from Chattanooga to Atlanta—with him in that great march from Atlanta to the sea—what would you have thought of him if, when you came in sight of the Atlantic ocean, you had had orders to disband before the banners of the rebellion had disappeared from the Southern heavens?

I tell you, to-day, this movement of a portion of our forces is this and nothing more. I would as soon have disbanded that Army of the Potomac after Sheridan’s ride through the valley of the Shenandoah, or when Sherman had reached the sea, as to disband the Republican party to-day. The time has not come. [Loud and continued applause.]

I am not making a mere partisan appeal to you. I believe in this Republican party, and, if I know myself, rather than see it defeated to-day—rather than see the government pass out of its hands—I would sacrifice anything on earth in my possession, even life itself. [Loud applause] I have seen brave and good men—patriotic, liberty-loving, God-fearing men—I have seen them die for the cause of the country—for the ideas we profess, and I tell you to-day, with all the faults of the Republican party—and it has had faults and has made some mistakes—I say to you that I believe upon my conscience its defeat would be a disaster to the country, and would be a stain upon our record. It would bring upon us—we might say what we pleased, our enemies would claim it, and the world would record it—that this great, patriotic, liberty-loving Republican party of the United States, after all its great labors and great history, had been weighed in the balances and found wanting, and condemned by the American people.

Well, gentlemen, I choose, if it is to fall, to fall with it. I became an anti-slavery man in 1835. In 1836 I tied myself, pledged myself, to do all I could to overthrow the slave power of my country. During all these years I have never given a vote, uttered a word, or written a line that I did not suppose tended to this result. I invoke you old anti-slavery men here to-day—and I know I am speaking to men who have been engaged in the cause—I implore you men who have been true in the past, no matter what the men or their natures are, to stand with the grand organization of the Republican party—be true to its cause and fight its battles—if we are defeated, let us accept the defeat as best we may; if we are victorious, let us make our future more glorious than the past. If we fail, let us have the proud consciousness that we have been faithful to our principles, true to our convictions; that we go down with our flag flying—that we go down trusting in God that our country may become, what we have striven to make it, the foremost nation on the globe. [Immense applause.]

Speech of Senator Oliver P. Morton, of Indiana,

On the National Idea, at Providence, R. I.

The distinguished orator was introduced by Senator Anthony, and made an extended speech, from which we take the more pertinent paragraphs:

From this proposition two corollaries have been adduced from time to time, and I must say with great force of logic. The first is that this Union is composed of sovereign and independent States who have simply entered into a compact for particular purposes, and the government is merely their agent; that any State has the right to withdraw from the Union at pleasure, or whenever in its judgment the terms of the compact have been violated, or the interests of the State require its withdrawal. The second is that each State has the right to nullify any law of Congress which, in the judgment of the State, is in violation of the compact by which the government was formed. This doctrine has been the evil genius of the country from the foundation of our government. It may be said to be the devil in our political system. It has been our danger from the first. It is the rock in the straits, and we fear that the end is not yet. Now what can we oppose to this doctrine? We oppose what we call “the national idea.” We assume that this government was formed by the governments of the United States in their aggregate and in their primary capacity. We assume that, instead of there being thirty-seven nations, there is but one; instead of there being thirty-seven sovereignties, there is but one sovereignty. We assume that the States are not sovereign, but that they are integral and subordinate parts of one great country. I may be asked the question here, “Are there no State rights? Would you override the States? Would you obliterate State lines?” I answer, “No.” I answer that this doctrine is the only doctrine that can preserve the peace of this nation and preserve the rights of the States. I answer that there is a vast body of State rights guaranteed and secured by the Constitution of the United States, by the same Constitution that created and upholds the government of the United States; that these State rights have the same guarantee that the rights of the National Government have, equally entitled to the protection of the Supreme Court, springing out of the same instrument, and that one set of rights are just as sacred as the other. Some confound the idea of State sovereignty and State rights as being one and the same thing. Others seem to suppose that State rights are only consistent with State sovereignty, and cannot exist except upon the theory of State sovereignty; while I assume that State rights are consistent with National sovereignty, and are safest under the protection of the nation. The Constitution gives one class of rights to the government of the United States. They are specified, and they carry with them all the rights that are indispensable and necessary to their full execution and enjoyment. The rest are to be held and enjoyed by the States, or reserved to the people. The States have their rights by the agreement of the nation. That seems to be the important truth that is so often overlooked, that the rights of the States, sacred and unapproachable, are sacred by the agreement of the nation, as much so as are the powers that are conferred upon the government of the United States, that the States derive their powers from the same source, viz: The Constitution of the United States. That Constitution says that the government shall have one class of powers, and that other powers shall be gained by the States, to be enjoyed by them or reserved to the people. In the consideration of this question, we must reflect that the nation had assembled in convention in 1787, and there formed a government, there declared what rights should be given to the National Government, and what rights should be reserved to the States, and that, in either case, the grant and guarantee is an act of national sovereignty by the people in convention assembled. When we shall embrace this idea fully, all the danger of centralization will pass away, though we discard the idea of State sovereignty.

I do not differ so much with many gentlemen in regard to what the rights of the States are. I differ with them in regard to the titles by which they hold them. I say that so far as State rights are concerned, and the rights of the government, that we are not to go back beyond the period of 1787, when the Constitution was formed. The rights of the elder States, and of Rhode Island as she has them now, are to be dated from the formation of the Constitution. Then they came into convention. They had the right to make any sort of government they pleased, and they did. And in that government they guarantied and secured to the States the great body of rights in regard to local and domestic government, but it was the agreement of the nation at that time. So far as the new States are concerned, they are to come in on an equality. They are to have the same rights with the old; and this theory would be impossible of execution except upon the idea that the rights of the States and of the National Government are to be determined from the action that was taken at that time. The difficulty had been in regard to this theory of State sovereignty, and the assumed right of secession and of nullification was the result. They assumed that these States existed as nations separate and distinct before that time, and that they only loaned a portion of their rights for a particular purpose. This is the base of that theory; while we assume that the people were acting together at that time in their aggregate capacity, raising a system of government, giving the United States certain powers, and providing that the States should hold and enjoy the rest, excepting those that were reserved to the people. The preservation of local self-government is essential to the liberties of this nation. Nobody endorses that sentiment more strongly than I do. Nobody will stand by the rights of the States more firmly than I will. I hold that their rights are consistent with national sovereignty, and that national sovereignty is consistent with the rights of the States, and I deny that these rights are the result of inherent original State sovereignty. In other words, we differ in regard to the title. What the States should have, and what the government should have, was settled by the act of the nation in convention in 1787, changed to some extent by the adoption of amendments since that time. It is not enough for a party to deny the right of secession. It is not enough for a party to deny the right of nullification. They must go further. They must deny the doctrine of State sovereignty; for as long as that doctrine is admitted, these other things will spring up spontaneously from it, and whenever the occasion allows it. If we were to admit that the States were sovereign, then we would be bound to say that Webster did not answer Hayne, and that Webster and Hayne never answered Calhoun. If once it is admitted that the States are sovereign, it is hard to resist the corollaries to which I have referred, that they have the right to secede, and that they have the right to nullify.

The doctrine of nationality planted deep in the hearts of the American people is our only sheet-anchor of safety for the future. Our country is greatly extended, from the tropical to the arctic regions, with every variety of climate, soil, and productions, with different commercial and manufacturing interests. The States on the Pacific slopes are separated from those on this side of the Rocky Mountains by fifteen hundred miles of mountain and desert. They have a different commerce from what you have, almost an independent commerce. Their commerce will be with China, Japan, Australia, the western countries of South America, and the islands of the Southern Pacific. It is now but in its infancy, but it bids fair to develop into colossal proportions, and may change the commercial aspect of the world. We know not what feelings of independence may arise in those States in time to come. It is difficult to deny the effect that may be produced by the separation of vast States with a different commerce acting in conjunction with forced theories of the origin and laws of our government. In saying this I will cast no imputation upon the loyalty of those States. They are now as loyal as any, and were during the war. But we can imagine that what has been may be again. And we can understand what may be the danger of this doctrine, if it should still maintain its hold in the minds of the American people, when conflicting interests arise, and conflicting notions arise as to what may be the interests of the people; as in 1812 a war was brought about which was regarded as being fatal to the interests of the New England States, they took their position upon it. We have had a law which was regarded in South Carolina as being fatal to her interests, and she took her position upon it. This doctrine was again seized by slavery in 1861, and the rebellion was brought on. And what may happen in the far future upon the eastern and western coasts, upon the northern and southern extremities of our nation, we cannot tell.

The idea that we are a nation, that we are one people, undivided and indivisible, should be a plank in the platform of every party. It should be printed on the banner of every party. It should be taught in every school, academy, and college. It should be the political North Star by which every political manager should steer his bark. It should be the central idea of American politics, and every child, so to speak, should be vaccinated with this idea, so that he may be protected against this political distemper that has brought such calamity upon our country. Were the mind of the nation, so to speak, fully saturated with this sentiment of nationality, that we are but one people, undivided and indivisible, there would be no danger though our boundaries came to embrace the entire continent. It is therefore of the utmost importance that it should be taught and inculcated upon all occasions. What the sun is in the heavens, diffusing light, and life, and warmth, and by its subtle influence holding the planets in their orbits and preserving the harmony of the universe—such is the sentiment of nationality in a nation, diffusing light and protection in every part, holding the faces of Americans always toward their home, protecting the States in the exercise of their just powers, and preserving the harmony and prosperity of all.

We must have a nation. It is a necessity of our political existence, and we find the countries of the Old World now aspiring for nationality. Italy, after a long absence, has returned. Rome has again become the centre and the capital of a great nation. The bleeding fragments of the beautiful land have been bound up together, and Italy again resumes her place among the nations. And we find the great Germanic family has been sighing for a nationality. That race, whose overmastering civilization is acknowledged by all the world, has hitherto been divided into petty Principalities and States, such as Virginia and South Carolina aspire to be, but now are coming together and asserting their unity, their national existence, and are now able to dominate all the nations of Europe. We should then cherish this idea, that while the States have their rights sacred and unapproachable, which we should guard with untiring vigilance, never permitting an encroachment, and remembering that such encroachment is as much a violation of the Constitution of the United States as to encroach upon the rights of the general Government, still bearing in mind that the States are but subordinate parts of one great nation, and that the nation is over, all even as God is over the universe. Without entering into any of the consequences that flow from this doctrine, allow me for to-night to refer to that great national attribute, that great national duty—the duty and the power to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. If the Government of the United States has not the power to protect the citizens of the United States in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property in cases where the States fail, or refuse, or are unable to grant protection, then that Government should be amended, or should give place to a better. Great Britain sent forth a costly and powerful expedition to Abyssinia to rescue four British subjects who had been captured and imprisoned by the government of that country. She has recently threatened Greece with war, if she did not use all her power to bring to justice two brigands who had lately murdered two British subjects. These things are greatly to the honor of Great Britain. And our Government threatened Austria with war if she did not release Martin Kosta, who had declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States, and was therefore protected by the Government of the United States. More recently we have made war upon Corea, a province in Asia, and slaughtered her people, and battered down her forts, because Americans shipwrecked upon her coast were murdered and the government had refused to give satisfaction for it. And if a mob in London should murder half a dozen American citizens, we would call upon that government to use all its power to bring the murderers to punishment, and if Great Britain did not do so, it would be regarded as a cause of war. And yet some people entertain the idea that our Government has the power to protect its citizens everywhere except upon its own soil. The idea that I would advocate, the doctrine that I would urge as being the only true and national one, flowing inevitably from national sovereignty, is that our Government has the right to protect her citizens in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property wherever the flag floats, whether at home or abroad.

Speech of Hon. J. Proctor Knott, of Kentucky,

Delivered in the House of Representatives on the St. Croix and Superior Land Grant, January 21, 1871.

The house having under consideration the joint resolution (S. R. No. 11) extending the time to construct a railroad from St. Croix river or lake to the west end of Lake Superior and to Bayfield—

Mr. Knott said: Mr. Speaker—If I could be actuated by any conceivable inducement to betray the sacred trust in me by those to whose generous confidence I am indebted for the honor of a seat on this floor; if I could be influenced by any possible consideration to become instrumental in giving away, in violation of their known wishes any portion of their interest in the public domain for the mere promotion of any railroad enterprise whatever, I should certainly feel a strong inclination to give this measure my most earnest and hearty support; for I am assured that its success would materially enhance the pecuniary prosperity of some of the most valued friends I have on earth; friends for whose accommodation I would be willing to make almost any sacrifice not involving my personal honor or my fidelity as the trustee of an express trust. And that act of itself would be sufficient to countervail almost any objection I might entertain to the passage of this bill not inspired by any imperative and inexorable sense of public duty.

But, independent of the seductive influences of private friendship, to which I admit I am, perhaps, as susceptible as any of the gentlemen I see around me, the intrinsic merits of the measure itself are of such an extraordinary character as to commend it most strongly to the favorable consideration of every member of this house, myself not excepted, notwithstanding my constituents, in whose behalf alone I am acting here, would not be benefited by its passage one particle more than they would be by a project to cultivate an orange grove on the bleakest summit of Greenland’s icy mountains.

Now, sir, as to those great trunk lines of railways, spanning the continent from ocean to ocean, I confess my mind has never been fully made up. It is true they may afford some trifling advantages to local traffic, and they may even in time become the channels of a more extended commerce. Yet I have never been thoroughly satisfied either of the necessity or expediency of projects promising such meagre results to the great body of our people. But with regard to the transcendent merits of the gigantic enterprise contemplated in this bill, I have never entertained the shadow of a doubt.

Years ago, when I first heard that there was somewhere in the vast terra incognita, somewhere in the bleak regions of the great northwest, a stream of water known to the nomadic inhabitants of the neighborhood as the river St. Croix, I became satisfied that the construction of a railroad from that raging torrent to some point in the civilized world was essential to the happiness and prosperity of the American people if not absolutely indispensable to the perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent. I felt instinctively that the boundless resources of that prolific region of sand and pine shrubbery would never be fully developed without a railroad constructed and equipped at the expense of the government, and perhaps not then. I had an abiding presentiment that, some day or other, the people of this whole country, irrespective of party affiliations, regardless of sectional prejudices, and “without distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” would rise in their majesty and demand an outlet for the enormous agricultural productions of those vast and fertile pine barrens, drained in the rainy season by the surging waters of the turbid St. Croix.

These impressions, derived simply and solely from the “eternal fitness of things,” were not only strengthened by the interesting and eloquent debate on this bill, to which I listened with so much pleasure the other day, but intensified, if possible, as I read over this morning, the lively colloquy which took place on that occasion, as I find it reported in last Friday’s Globe. I will ask the indulgence of the house while I read a few short passages, which are sufficient, in my judgment, to place the merits of the great enterprise, contemplated in the measure now under discussion, beyond all possible controversy.

The honorable gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Wilson), who, I believe, is managing this bill, in speaking of the character of the country through which this railroad is to pass, says this:

“We want to have the timber brought to us as cheaply as possible. Now, if you tie up the lands, in this way, so that no title can be obtained to them—for no settler will go on these lands, for he cannot make a living—you deprive us of the benefit of that timber.”

Now, sir, I would not have it by any means inferred from this that the gentleman from Minnesota would insinuate that the people out in this section desire this timber merely for the purpose of fencing up their farms so that their stock may not wander off and die of starvation among the bleak hills of St. Croix. I read it for no such purpose, sir, and make no comment on it myself. In corroboration of this statement of the gentleman from Minnesota, I find this testimony given by the honorable gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Washburn). Speaking of these same lands, he says:

“Under the bill, as amended by my friend from Minnesota, nine-tenths of the land is open to actual settlers at $2.50 per acre; the remaining one tenth is pine-timbered land, that is not fit for settlement, and never will be settled upon; but the timber will be cut off. I admit that it is the most valuable portion of the grant, for most of the grant is not valuable. It is quite valueless; and if you put in this amendment of the gentleman from Indiana you may as well just kill the bill, for no man and no company will take the grant and build the road.”

I simply pause here to ask some gentleman better versed in the science of mathematics than I am, to tell me if the timbered lands are in fact the most valuable portion of that section of country, and they would be entirely valueless without the timber that is in them, what the remainder of the land is worth which has no timber on it at all?

But, further on, I find a most entertaining and instructive interchange of views between the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Rogers), the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Washburn), and the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Peters), upon the subject of pine lands generally, which I will tax the patience of the house to read:

“Mr. Rogers—Will the gentleman allow me to ask him a question?

“Mr. Washburn, of Wisconsin—Certainly.

“Mr. Rogers—Are these pine lands entirely worthless except for timber?

“Mr. Washburn, of Wisconsin—They are generally worthless for any other purpose. I am personally familiar with that subject. These lands are not valuable for purposes of settlement.

“Mr. Farnsworth—They will be after the timber is taken off.

“Mr. Washburn, of Wisconsin—No, sir.

“Mr. Rogers—I want to know the character of these pine lands.

“Mr. Washburn, of Wisconsin—They are generally sandy, barren lands. My friend from the Green Bay district (Mr. Sawyer) is himself perfectly familiar with this question, and he will bear me out in what I say, that these timber lands are not adapted to settlement.

“Mr. Rogers—The pine lands to which I am accustomed are generally very good. What I want to know is, what is the difference between our pine lands and your pine lands?

“Mr. Washburn, of Wisconsin—The pine timber of Wisconsin generally grows upon barren, sandy land. The gentleman from Maine (Mr. Peters) who is familiar with pine lands, will, I have no doubt, say that pine timber grows generally upon the most barren lands.”

“Mr. Peters—As a general thing pine lands are not worth much for cultivation.”

And further on I find this pregnant question the joint production of the two gentlemen from Wisconsin.

“Mr. Paine—Does my friend from Indiana suppose that in any event settlers will occupy and cultivate these pine lands?

“Mr. Washburn, of Wisconsin—Particularly without a railroad.”

Yes, sir, “particularly without a railroad.” It will be asked after awhile, I am afraid, if settlers will go anywhere unless the government builds a railroad for them to go on.

I desire to call attention to only one more statement, which I think sufficient to settle the question. It is one made by the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Paine), who says:

“These lands will be abandoned for the present. It may be that at some remote period there will spring up in that region a new kind of agriculture, which will cause a demand for these particular lands; and they may then come into use and be valuable for agricultural purposes. But I know, and I cannot help thinking that my friend from Indiana understands that, for the present, and for many years to come, these pine lands can have no possible value other than that arising from the pine timber which stands on them.”

Now, sir, who, after listening to this emphatic and unequivocal testimony of these intelligent, competent and able-bodied witnesses, who that is not as incredulous as St. Thomas himself, will doubt for a moment that the Goshen of America is to be found in the sandy valleys and upon the pine-clad hills of the St. Croix? Who will have the hardihood to rise in his seat on this floor and assert that, excepting the pine bushes, the entire region would not produce vegetation enough in ten years to fatten a grasshopper? Where is the patriot who is willing that his country shall incur the peril of remaining another day without the amplest railroad connection with such an inexhaustible mine of agricultural wealth? Who will answer for the consequences of abandoning a great and warlike people, in the possession of a country like that, to brood over the indifference and neglect of their government? How long would it be before they would take to studying the Declaration of Independence and hatching out the damnable heresy of secession? How long before the grim demon of civil discord would rear again his horrid head in our midst, “gnash loud his iron fangs and shake his crest of bristling bayonets?”

Then, sir, think of the long and painful process of reconstruction that must follow with its concomitant amendments to the constitution, the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth articles. The sixteenth, it is of course understood, is to be appropriated to those blushing damsels who are, day after day, beseeching us to let them vote, hold office, drink cocktails, ride a-straddle, and do everything else the men do. But above all, sir, let me implore you to reflect for a single moment on the deplorable condition of our country in case of a foreign war, with all our ports blockaded, all our cities in a state or siege, the gaunt specter of famine brooding like a hungry vulture over our starving land; our commissary stores all exhausted, and our famishing armies withering away in the field, a helpless prey to the insatiate demon of hunger; our navy rotting in the docks for want of provisions for our gallant seamen, and we without any railroad communication whatever with the prolific pine thickets of the St. Croix.

Ah, sir, I could very well understand why my amiable friends from Pennsylvania (Mr. Myers, Mr. Kelley and Mr. O’Neill) should be so earnest in their support of this bill the other day; and if their honorable colleague, my friend, Mr. Randall, will pardon the remark, I will say I consider his criticism of their action on that occasion as not only unjust, but ungenerous. I knew they were looking forward with a far-reaching ken of enlightened statesmanship to the pitiable condition in which Philadelphia will be left unless speedily supplied with railroad connection in some way or other with this garden spot of the universe. And beside, sir, this discussion has relieved my mind of a mystery that has weighed upon it like an incubus for years. I could never understand before why there was so much excitement during the last Congress over the acquisition of Alta Vela. I could never understand why it was that some of our ablest statesmen and most disinterested patriots should entertain such dark forebodings of the untold calamities that were to befall our beloved country unless we should take immediate possession of that desirable island. But I see now that they were laboring under the mistaken impression that the government would need the guano to manure the public lands on the St. Croix.

Now, sir, I repeat, I have been satisfied for years that if there was any portion of the inhabited globe absolutely in a suffering condition for want of a railroad it was these teeming pine barrens of the St. Croix. At what particular point on that noble stream such a road should be commenced I knew was immaterial, and it seems so to have been considered by the draughtsman of this bill. It might be up at the spring or down at the foot-log, or the water-gate, or the fish-dam, or anywhere along the bank, no matter where. But in what direction should it run, or where it should terminate, were always to my mind questions of the most painful perplexity. I could conceive of no place on “God’s green earth” in such straitened circumstances for railroad facilities as to be likely to desire or willing to accept such a connection. I knew that neither Bayfield nor Superior city would have it, for they both indignantly spurned the munificence of the government when coupled with such ignominious conditions, and let this very same land grant die on their hands years and years ago rather than submit to the degradation of a direct communication by railroad with the piny woods of the St. Croix; and I knew that what the enterprising inhabitants of those giant young cities would refuse to take would have few charms for others, whatever their necessities or cupidity might be.

Hence as I have said, sir, I was utterly at a loss to determine where the terminus of this great and indispensable road should be, until I accidentally overheard some gentleman the other day mention the name of “Duluth.”

Duluth! The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm, like the gentle murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses; or the soft, sweet accents of an angel’s whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence.

“Duluth!” ’Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years, as the hart panteth for the water-brooks. But where was Duluth? Never in all my limited reading, had my vision been gladdened by seeing the celestial word in print. And I felt a profound humiliation in my ignorance that its dulcet syllables had never before ravished my delighted ear. I was certain the draughtsman in this bill had never heard of it or it would have been designated as one of the termini of this road. I asked my friends about it, but they knew nothing of it. I rushed to the library, and examined all the maps I could find. I discovered in one of them a delicate hairlike line, diverging from the Mississippi near a place marked Prescott, which, I supposed, was intended to represent the river St. Croix, but, could nowhere find Duluth. Nevertheless, I was confident it existed somewhere, and that its discovery would constitute the crowning glory of the present century, if not of all modern times. I knew it was bound to exist in the very nature of things; that the symmetry and perfection of our planetary system would be incomplete without it. That the elements of maternal nature would since have resolved themselves back into original chaos if there had been such a hiatus in creation as would have resulted from leaving out Duluth! In fact, sir, I was overwhelmed with the conviction that Duluth not only existed somewhere, but that wherever it was, it was a great and glorious place. I was convinced that the greatest calamity that ever befell the benighted nations of the ancient world was in their having passed away without a knowledge of the actual existence of Duluth; that their fabled Atlantis, never seen save by the hallowed vision of the inspired poesy, was, in fact, but another name for Duluth; that the golden orchard of the Hesperides, was but a poetical synonym for the beer-gardens in the vicinity of Duluth. I was certain that Herodotus had died a miserable death, because in all his travels and with all his geographical research he had never heard of Duluth. I knew that if the immortal spirit of Homer could look down from another heaven than that created by his own celestial genius upon the long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand, if he could be permitted to behold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired strains, he would weep tears of bitter anguish that, instead of lavishing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Illion, it had not been his more blessed lot to crystalize in deathless song the rising glories of Duluth. Yes, sir, had it not been for this map, kindly furnished me by the legislature of Minnesota, I might have gone down to my obscure and humble grave in an agony of despair, because I could nowhere find Duluth. Had such been my melancholy fate, I have no doubt that with the last feeble pulsation of my breaking heart, with the last faint exhalation of my fleeting breath, I should have whispered, “Where is Duluth?”

But, thanks to the beneficence of that band of ministering angels who have their bright abodes in the far-off capital of Minnesota, just as the agony of my anxiety was about to culminate in the frenzy of despair, this blessed map was placed in my hands; and as I unfolded it a resplendent scene of ineffable glory opened before me, such as I imagined burst upon the enraptured vision of the wandering peri through the opening gates of Paradise. There, there, for the first time, my enchanted eye rested upon the ravishing word, “Duluth!” This map, sir, is intended, as it appears from its title, to illustrate the position of Duluth in the United States; but if gentlemen will examine it, I think they will concur with me in the opinion, that it is far too modest in its pretensions. It not only illustrates the position of Duluth in the United States, but exhibits its relations with all created things. It even goes further than this. It hits the shadowy vale of futurity, and affords us a view of the golden prospects of Duluth far along the dim vista of ages yet to come.

If gentlemen will examine it, they will find Duluth not only in the center of the map, but represented in the center of a series of concentric circles one hundred miles apart, and some of them as much as four thousand miles in diameter, embracing alike, in their tremendous sweep the fragrant savannas of the sunlit South and the eternal solitudes of snow that mantle the ice-bound North. How these circles were produced is perhaps one of those primordial mysteries that the most skilled paleologist will never be able to explain. But the fact is, sir, Duluth is pre-eminently a central point, for I am told by gentlemen who have been so reckless of their own personal safety as to venture away into those awful regions where Duluth is supposed to be, that it is so exactly in the center of the visible universe that the sky comes down at precisely the same distance all around it.

I find, by reference to this map, that Duluth is situated somewhere near the western end of Lake Superior, but as there is no dot or other mark indicating its exact location, I am unable to say whether it is actually confined to any particular spot, or whether “it is just lying around there loose.” I really cannot tell whether it is one of those ethereal creations of intellectual frostwork, more intangible than the rose-tinted clouds of a summer sunset; one of those airy exhalations of the speculator’s brain which, I am told, are very flitting in the form of towns and cities along those lines of railroad, built with government subsidies, luring the unwary settler as the mirage of the desert lures the famishing traveler on, and ever on, until it fades away in the darkening horizon; or whether it is a real, bona fide, substantial city, all “staked off,” with the lots marked with their owners’ names, like that proud commercial metropolis recently discovered on the desirable shores of San Domingo. But, however that may be, I am satisfied Duluth is there, or thereabouts, for I see it stated here on the map that it is exactly thirty-nine hundred and ninety miles from Liverpool, though I have no doubt, for the sake of convenience, it will be moved back ten miles, so as to make the distance an even four thousand.

Then, sir, there is the climate of Duluth, unquestionably the most salubrious and delightful to be found anywhere on the Lord’s earth. Now, I have always been under the impression, as I presume other gentlemen have, that in the region around Lake Superior it was cold enough for at least nine months in the year to freeze the smoke-stack off a locomotive. But I see it represented on this map that Duluth is situated exactly half way between the latitudes of Paris and Venice, so that gentlemen who have inhaled the exhilarating air of the one, or basked in the golden sunlight of the other, may see at a glance that Duluth must be the place of untold delight, a terrestrial paradise, fanned by the balmy zephyrs of an eternal spring, clothed in the gorgeous sheen of ever blooming flowers, and vocal with the silvery melody of nature’s choicest songsters. In fact sir, since I have seen this map, I have no doubt that Byron was vainly endeavoring to convey some faint conception of the delicious charms of Duluth when his poetic soul gushed forth, in the rippling strains of that beautiful rhapsody—

“Know ye the land of the cedar and the vine, Whence the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine; Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume, Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gul in her bloom; Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit, And the voice of the nightingale never is mute; Where the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky, In color though varied, in beauty may vie?”

As to the commercial resources of Duluth, sir, they are simply illimitable and inexhaustible, as is shown by this map. I see it stated here that there is a vast scope of territory, embracing an area of over two millions of square miles, rich in every element of material wealth and commercial prosperity, all tributary to Duluth. Look at it, sir, (pointing to the map.) Here are inexhaustible mines of gold, immeasurable veins of silver, impenetrable depths of boundless forest, vast coal measures, wide extended plains of richest pasturage—all, all embraced in this vast territory—which must, in the very nature of things, empty the untold treasures of its commerce into the lap of Duluth. Look at it, sir, (pointing to the map); do not you see from these broad, brown lines drawn around this immense territory, that the enterprising inhabitants of Duluth intend some day to inclose it all in one vast corral, so that its commerce will be bound to go there whether it would or not? And here, sir, (still pointing to the map), I find within a convenient distance the Piegan Indians, which, of all the many accessories to the glory of Duluth, I consider by far the most inestimable. For, sir, I have been told that when the small-pox breaks out among the women and children of the famous tribe, as it sometimes does, they afford the finest subjects in the world for the strategical experiments of any enterprising military hero who desires to improve himself in the noble art of war, especially for any valiant lieutenant-general whose

“Trenchant blade, Toledo trusty, For want of fighting has grown rusty, And eats into itself for lack, Of somebody to hew and hack.”

Sir, the great conflict now raging in the Old World has presented a phenomenon in military science unprecedented in the annals of mankind, a phenomenon that has reversed all the traditions of the past as it has disappointed all the expectations of the present. A great and warlike people, renowned alike for their skill and valor, have been swept away before the triumphant advance of an inferior foe, like autumn stubble before a hurricane of fire. For aught I know the next flash of electric fire that simmers along the ocean cable may tell us that Paris, with every fibre quivering with the agony of impotent despair, writhes beneath the conquering heel of her loathed invader. Ere another moon shall wax and wane, the brightest star in the galaxy of nations may fall from the zenith of her glory never to rise again. Ere the modest violets of early spring shall ope their beauteous eyes, the genius of civilization may chant the wailing requiem of the proudest nationality the world has ever seen, as she scatters her withered and tear-moistened lilies o’er the bloody tomb of butchered France. But, sir, I wish to ask if you honestly and candidly believe that the Dutch would have overrun the French in that kind of style if General Sheridan had not gone over there, and told King William and Von Moltke how he had managed to whip the Piegan Indians.

And here, sir, recurring to this map, I find in the immediate vicinity of the Piegans “vast herds of buffalo” and “immense fields of rich wheat lands.” [Here the hammer fell.]

The Speaker—Is there any objection to the gentleman from Kentucky continuing his remarks? The chair hears none. The gentleman will proceed.

Mr. Knott—I was remarking, sir, upon these vast “wheat fields” represented on this map in the immediate neighborhood of the buffaloes and Piegans, and was about to say that the idea of there being these immense wheat fields in the very heart of a wilderness, hundreds and hundreds of miles beyond the utmost verge of civilization, may appear to some gentlemen as rather incongruous, as rather too great a strain on the “blankets” of veracity. But to my mind there is no difficulty in the matter whatever. The phenomenon is very easily accounted for. It is evident, sir, that the Piegans sowed that wheat there and ploughed it in with buffalo bulls. Now, sir, this fortunate combination of buffaloes and Piegans, considering their relative positions to each other and to Duluth, as they are arranged on this map, satisfies me that Duluth is destined to be the best market of the world. Here, you will observe, (pointing to the map), are the buffaloes, directly between the Piegans and Duluth; and here, right on the road to Duluth, are the Creeks. Now, sir, when the buffaloes are sufficiently fat from grazing on those immense wheat fields, you see it will be the easiest thing in the world for the Piegans to drive them on down, stay all night with their friends, the Creeks, and go into Duluth in the morning. I think I see them, now, sir, a vast herd of buffaloes, with their heads down, their eyes glaring, their nostrils dilated, their tongues out, and their tails curled over their backs, tearing along toward Duluth, with about a thousand Piegans on their grass-bellied ponies, yelling at their heels! On they come! And as they sweep past the Creeks, they join in the chase, and away they all go, yelling, bellowing, ripping and tearing along, amid clouds of dust, until the last buffalo is safely penned in the stock-yards at Duluth.

Sir, I might stand here for hours and hours, and expatiate with rapture upon the gorgeous prospects of Duluth, as depicted upon this map. But human life is too short, and the time of this house far too valuable to allow me to linger longer upon this delightful theme. I think every gentleman upon this floor is as well satisfied as I am that Duluth is destined to become the commercial metropolis of the universe and that this road should be built at once. I am fully persuaded that no patriotic representative of the American people, who has a proper appreciation of the associated glories of Duluth and the St. Croix, will hesitate a moment that every able-bodied female in the land, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, who is in favor of “woman’s rights,” should be drafted and set to work upon this great work without delay. Nevertheless, sir, it grieves my very soul to be compelled to say that I cannot vote for the grant of lands provided for in this bill.

Ah, sir, you can have no conception of the poignancy of my anguish that I am deprived of that blessed privilege! There are two insuperable obstacles in the way. In the first place my constituents, for whom I am acting here, have no more interest in this road than they have in the great question of culinary taste now, perhaps, agitating the public mind of Dominica, as to whether the illustrious commissioners, who recently left this capital for that free and enlightened republic, would be better fricasseed, boiled, or roasted, and, in the second place, these lands, which I am asked to give away, alas, are not mine to bestow! My relation to them is simply that of trustee to an express trust. And shall I ever betray that trust? Never, sir! Rather perish Duluth! Perish the paragon of cities! Rather let the freezing cyclones of the bleak northwest bury it forever beneath the eddying sands of the raging St. Croix.

Henry Carey’s Speech on the Rates of Interest.

In the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, 1873.

In the Constitutional Convention, in Committee of the Whole on the article reported from the Committee on Agriculture, Mining, Manufactures, and Commerce, the first section being as follows:—“In the absence of special contracts the legal rate of interest and discount shall be seven per centum per annum, but special contracts for higher or lower rates shall be lawful. All national and other banks of issue shall be restricted to the rate of seven per centum per annum.” Mr. H. C. Carey made an address in favor of striking out the section. The following is an abstract of his remarks:—

Precisely a century and a half since, in 1723, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania reduced the legal charge for the use of money from eight to six per cent. per annum. This was a great step in the direction of civilization, proving, as it did, that the labor of the present was obtaining increased power over accumulations of the past, the laborer approaching toward equality with the capitalist. At that point it has since remained, with, however, some change in the penalties which had been then prescribed for violations of the law.

Throughout the recent war the financial policy of the National Government so greatly favored the money-borrower and the laborer as to have afforded reason for believing that the actual rate of interest was about to fall permanently below the legal one, with the effect of speedily causing usury laws to fall into entire disuse. Since its close, however, under a mistaken idea that such was the real road to resumption, all the Treasury operation of favoring the money-lender; the result exhibiting itself in the facts that combinations are being everywhere formed for raising the price of money; that the long loans of the past are being daily more and more superseded by the call loans of the present; that manufacturer and merchant are more and more fleeced by Shylocks who would gladly take “the pound of flesh nearest the heart” from all over whom they are enabled to obtain control.

Anxious for the perpetuation of this unhappy state of things, these latter now invite their victims to give their aid towards leveling the barriers by which they themselves are even yet to a considerable extent protected, assuring them that further grant of power will be followed by greater moderation in its exercise. Misled thereby, money borrowers, traders, and manufacturers are seen uniting, year after year with their common enemy in the effort at obtaining a repeal of the laws in regard to money, under which the State has so greatly prospered. Happily our working men, farmers, mechanics, and laborers fail to see that advantage is likely to accrue to them from a change whose obvious tendency is that of increasing the power of the few who have money to lend over the many who need to borrow; and hence it is that their Representatives at Harrisburg have so steadily closed their ears against the siren song by which it is sought to lead their constituents to give their aid to the work of their own destruction.

Under these circumstances is it that we are now asked to give place in the organic law to a provision by means of which this deplorable system is to be made permanent, the Legislature being thereby prohibited, be the necessity what it may, from placing any restraint upon the few who now control the supply of the most important of all the machinery of commerce, as against the many whose existence, and that of their wives and children, is dependent upon the obtaining the use thereof on such terms as shall not from year to year cause them to become more and more mere tools in the hands of the already rich. This being the first time in the world’s history that any such idea has been suggested, it may be well, before determining on its adoption, to study what has been elsewhere done in this direction, and what has been the result.

Mr. Carey then proceeded to quote at great length from recent and able writers the results that had followed in England from the adoption of the proposition now before the convention. These may be summed up as the charging of enormous rates of interest, the London joint stock banks making dividends among their stockholders to the extent of twenty, thirty, and almost forty per cent., the whole of which has ultimately to be taken from the wages of labor employed in manufactures, or in agriculture. At no time, said Mr. Carey, in Britain’s history, have pauperism and usury traveled so closely hand in hand together; the rich growing rich to an extent that, till now, would have been regarded as fabulous, and the wretchedness of the poor having grown in like proportion.

After discussing the effects of the repeal of the usury laws in some of the American States, Mr. Carey continued:—

“We may be told, however, that at times money is abundant, and that even so late as last summer it was difficult to obtain legal interest. Such certainly was the case with those who desired to put it out on call; but at that very moment those who needed to obtain the use of money for long periods were being taxed, even on securities of unexceptionable character, at double, or more than double, the legal rates. The whole tendency of the existing system is in the direction of annihilating the disposition for making those permanent loans of money by means of which the people of other countries are enabled to carry into effect operations tending to secure to themselves control of the world’s commerce. Under that system there is, and there can be, none of that stability in the price of money required for carrying out such operations.

Leaving out of view the recent great combination for the maintenance and perpetuation of slavery, there has been none so powerful, none so dangerous as that which now exists among those who, having obtained a complete control of the money power, are laboring to obtain legal recognition of the right of capital to perfect freedom as regards all the measures to which it may be pleased to resort for the purpose of obtaining more perfect control over labor. Already several of the States have to some extent yielded to the pressure that has been brought to bear upon them. Chief among these is Massachusetts, the usury laws having there been totally repealed, and with the effect, says a distinguished citizen of that State, that “all the savings institutions of the city at once raised the rate from six to seven per cent.; those out of the city to seven and a half and eight per cent. and there was no rate too high for the greedy. The consequence,” as he continues, “has been disastrous to industrial pursuits. Of farming towns in my county, more than one quarter have diminished in population.” Rates per day have now to a great extent, as I am assured, superseded the old rates per month or year; two cents per day, or $7.30 per annum, having become the charge for securities of the highest order. What, under such circumstances, must be the rate for paper of those who, sound and solvent as they may be, cannot furnish such security, may readily be imagined. Let the monopoly system be maintained and the rate, even at its headquarters, New England, will attain a far higher point than any that has yet been reached; this, too, in despite of the fact that her people had so promptly secured to themselves a third of the whole circulation allowed to the 40,000,000 of the population of the Union scattered throughout almost a continent. How greatly they value the power that has been thus obtained is proved by the fact that to every effort at inducing them to surrender, for advantage of the West or South, any portion thereof, has met with resistance so determined that nothing has been yet accomplished.

Abandonment of our present policy is strongly urged upon us for the reason that mortgages bear in New York a higher rate of interest. A Pennsylvanian in any of the northern counties has, as we are told, but to cross the line to obtain the best security at seven per cent. Why, however, is it that his neighbors find themselves compelled to go abroad when desirous of obtaining money on such security? The answer to this question is found in the fact that the taxation of mortgages is there so great as to absorb from half to two-thirds of the interest promised to be paid.

Again, we are told that Ohio legalizes “special contracts” up to eight per cent. and, that if we would prevent the efflux of capital we must follow in the same direction. Is there, however, in the exhibit now made by that State, anything to warrant us in so doing? Like Pennsylvania, she has abundant coal and ore. She has two large cities, the one fronting on the Ohio, and the other on the lakes, giving her more natural facilities for maintaining commerce than are possessed by Pennsylvania; and yet, while the addition to her population in the last decade was but 306,000, that of Pennsylvania was 615,000. In that time she added 900 to her railroad mileage, Pennsylvania meantime adding 2,500. While her capital engaged in manufactures rose from 57 to 141 millions, that of Pennsylvania grew from 109 to 406, the mere increase of the one being more than fifty per cent. in excess of the total of the other. May we find in these figures any evidence that capital has been attracted to Ohio by a higher rate of interest, or repelled from our State by a lower one? Assuredly not!

What in this direction is proposed to be done among ourselves is shown in the section now presented for our consideration. By it the legal rate in the absence of “special contracts” is to be raised to seven per cent., such “contracts,” however ruinous in their character, and whatsoever the nature of the security, are to be legalized; the only exception to these sweeping changes being that national banks, issuing circulating notes are to be limited to seven per cent. Shylock asked only “the due and forfeit of his bond.” Let this section be adopted, let him then present himself in any of our courts, can its judge do other than decide that “the law allows it and the court awards it,” monstrous as may have been the usury, and discreditable as may have been the arts by means of which the unfortunate debtor may have been entrapped? Assuredly not. Shylock, happily, was outwitted, the bond having made no provision for taking even “one jot of blood.” Here, the unfortunate debtor, forced by his flinty-hearted creditor into a “special contract” utterly ruinous, may, in view of the destruction of all hope for the future of his wife and children, shed almost tears of blood, but they will be of no avail; yet do we claim to live under a system whose foundation-stone exhibits itself in the great precept from which we learn that duty requires of us to do to others as we would that others should do unto ourselves.

By the English law the little landowner, the mechanic who owns the house in which he lives, is protected against his wealthy mortgagee. Here, on the contrary, the farmer, suffering under the effects of blight or drought, and thus deprived of power to meet with punctuality the demands of his mortgagee, is to have no protection whatsoever. So, too, with the poor mechanic suffering temporarily by reason of accidental incapacity for work, and, with the sheriff full in view before him, compelled to enter into a “special contract” doubling if not trebling, the previous rate of interest. Infamous as may be its extortion the court may not deny the aid required for its enforcement.

The amount now loaned on mortgage security in this State at six per cent. is certainly not less than $400,000,000, and probably extends to $500,000,000, a large portion of which is liable to be called for at any moment. Let this section be adopted and we shall almost at once witness a combined movement among mortgagees for raising the rate of interest. Notices demanding payment will fly thick as hail throughout the State, every holder of such security knowing well that the greater the alarm that can be produced and the more utter the impossibility of obtaining other moneys the larger may be made the future rate of interest. The unfortunate mortgagor must then accept the terms, hard as they may be, dictated to him, be they 8, 10, 12, or 20 per cent. Such, as I am assured has been the course of things in Connecticut, where distress the most severe has been produced by a recent abandonment by the State of the policy under which it has in the past so greatly prospered. At this moment her savings’ banks are engaged in compelling mortgagers to accept eight per cent. as the present rate. How long it will be before they will carry it up to ten or twelve, or what will be the effect, remains to be seen. Already among ourselves the effects of the sad blunders of our great financiers exhibit themselves in the very unpleasant fact that sheriffs’ sales are six times more numerous than they were in the period from 1861 to 1867, when the country was so severely suffering under the waste of property, labor, and life, which had but then occurred. Let this section be adopted, giving perfect freedom to the Shylocks of the day, and the next half dozen years will witness the transfer, under the sheriff’s hammer, of the larger portion of the real property of both the city and the State. Of all the devices yet invented for the subjugation of labor by capital, there is none that can claim to be entitled to take precedence of that which has been now proposed for our consideration.

Rightly styled the Keystone of the Union, one duty yet remains to her to be performed, to wit: that of bringing about equality in the distribution of power over that machinery for whose use men pay interest, which is known as money. New England, being rich and having her people concentrated within very narrow limits, has been allowed to absorb a portion of that power fully equal to her needs, while this State, richer still, has been so “cabined, cribbed, confined,” that her mine and furnace operators find it difficult to obtain that circulating medium by whose aid alone can they distribute among their workmen their shares of the things produced.—New York, already rich, has been allowed to absorb a fourth of the permitted circulation, to the almost entire exclusion of the States south of Pennsylvania and west of the Mississippi; and hence it is that her people are enabled to levy upon those of all these latter such enormous taxes. To the work of correcting this enormous evil Pennsylvania should now address herself. Instead of following in the wake of New Jersey and Connecticut, thereby giving to the monopoly an increase of strength, let her place herself side by side with the suffering States of the West, the South, and the Southwest, demanding that what has been made free to New York and New England shall be made equally free to her and them. Let her do this, and the remedy will be secured, with such increase in the general power for developing the wonderful resources of the Union as will speedily make of it an iron and cloth exporting State, with such power for retaining and controlling the precious metals as will place it on a surer footing in that respect than any of the powers of the Eastern world. The more rapid the societary circulation, and the greater the facility of making exchanges from hand to hand, and from place to place, the greater is the tendency toward reduction in the rate of interest, toward equality in the condition of laborer and employer, and toward growth and power to command the services of all the metals, gold and silver included.

It will be said, however, that adoption of such measures as have been indicated would tend to produce a general rise of prices; or, in the words of our self-styled economists, would cause “inflation.” The vulgar error here involved was examined some thirty years since by an eminent British economist, and with a thoroughness never before exhibited in reference to any other economic question whatsoever, the result exhibiting itself in the following brief words of a highly distinguished American one, published some twelve or fifteen years since, to wit:

“Among the innumerable influences which go to determine the general rate of prices, the quantity of money, or currency, is one of the least effective.”

Since then we have had a great war, in the course of which there have been numerous and extensive changes in the price of commodities, every one of which is clearly traceable to causes widely different from those to which they so generally are attributed. Be that, however, as it may, the question now before us is one of right and justice, and not of mere expediency. North and east of Pennsylvania eight millions of people have been allowed a greater share of the most important of all powers, the money one, than has been allotted to the thirty-two millions south and west of New York, and have thus been granted a power of taxation that should be no longer tolerated. The basis of our whole system is to be found in equality before the law, each and every man, each and every State, being entitled to exercise the same powers that are permitted to our people, or other States. If the Union is to be maintained, it can be so on no terms other than those of recognition of the existence of the equality that has here been indicated. To the work of compelling that recognition Pennsylvania should give herself, inscribing on her shield the brief words fiat justitia, ruat cœlum—let justice be done though the heavens fall!

Speech of Gen. Simon Cameron.

On the benefits derived by Pennsylvania from the Policy of Internal Improvements.

Any one will see, who will take the trouble to read the debates on the location of the National Capital, that the decision of that question seems to have been made solely with reference to a connection of the East with the then great wilderness of the West. All the sagacious men then in public life looked to the time when the West, with its wonderful productive soil brought under subjection by industry, would exercise a controlling influence on the destiny of the country. Columbia, in the State of Pennsylvania, was at one time within one vote of becoming the site of the Capital; and Germantown, near, and now a part of, Philadelphia, was actually decided on as the proper location by a majority of one. The first of these was favored because it was believed to be a favorable point from which to begin a slack water route to the west. Germantown near the Schuylkill, was chosen for the same reason. All looked forward to a system of canals which would accomplish this desirable object, and experience has fully demonstrated their wisdom in that great design. About 1790, General Washington and the great financier Robert Morris, traveled on horseback from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna river, with a view of deciding whether a canal could be built over that route.

Shortly after this, some gentlemen near Philadelphia actually began building a canal to the west, did some work on its eastern end, built one or two locks on the dividing ridge near Lebanon, and for want of sufficient funds and knowledge of the subject the work was stopped. The money expended on the enterprise was lost.

But the progressive men of the country, keeping their minds on the subject, continued to agitate the popular mind on it until 1820, when the Legislature of Pennsylvania chartered the Union Canal Company, and appropriated one million dollars to aid its construction. In a few years the canal was completed between the Schuylkill and Susquehanna. Although very small, this improvement did a great deal of good. And the most remarkable thing about it was its unpopularity with the masses. Not only the members of General Assembly who passed the bill, but Governor Heister, who signed the act of incorporation, were driven from office at the first opportunity legally presented for testing public opinion, and the party to which they belonged went into a minority. I remember well what a mighty sum a million dollars seemed to be; and the political revolution caused by this appropriation showed me that the idea of its vastness was not confined by any means to myself.

Our system of canals was completed, and the benefits derived from them were incalculable. When they were commenced our State was poor. Industry languished. The interchange of her products was difficult. Population was sparse. Intelligence was not generally diffused. Manufactures struggled weakly along. Work was not plentiful. Wages were low. When they were finished the busy hum of industry was heard on every hand. Our population had grown until we numbered millions. Our iron ore beds were yielding their precious hoards for human use. Coal mines, unknown or useless until means were provided for transporting their wealth to market, now sent millions of tons in every direction. Progress in every walk of advanced civilization was realized, and we were on the high road to permanent prosperity. But in the meantime a new and better means of communication had been discovered, and the building of railroads quickly reduced the value of canals, and the works we had completed at so much cost, and with such infinite labor, were suddenly superseded. We lost nearly all the money they had cost us, but this investment was wisely made. The return to our State was many times greater than the outlay.

Like all great projects intended for the public good, that of Internal Improvement progressed. In 1823, the New York canal—which had been pushed through against the prejudiced opposition of the people, by the genius of De Witt Clinton—was opened. Its success caused a revolution in the public mind all over the country. The effect was so marked in the State, that in 1825 a convention was called to consider the subject. Every county in the State was represented, I believe. That body pronounced in favor of a grand system of public works, which should not only connect the East and West, but also the waters of the Susquehanna with the great lakes, the West and the Northwest. Appropriations were recommended to the amount of three millions of dollars, and in 1826, I think the work began. This sum seemed to be enormous, and the estimates of the engineers reached a total of six millions of dollars. Meeting an ardent friend of the system one day, he declared that a sum of that magnitude could never be expended on these works. I ventured to reply, with great deference to his age and experience, that I thought it would be insufficient, and before they were completed I would not be surprised if ten millions would be found necessary. Looking at me steadily for a few moments, he closed the conversation by exclaiming, “Young man, you are a d——d fool!” I was thus left in full possession of his opinion of me. But after we had spent $41,698,594.74 in the construction of these works, I found my estimate of his judgment was singularly in harmony with my opinion of his politeness. His candor I never doubted.

In the convention of 1825, there were two gentlemen who voted for railways instead of canals. One was professor Vethake of Dickinson College, Carlisle; and the other was Jacob Alter, a man of very little education, but of strong understanding. The professor was looked upon as a dreamer, and was supposed to have led his colleague astray in his vagaries. But they both lived to see railroads extended over the whole world. As a part of our system of public works, we built a railroad from the Delaware to the Susquehanna, from Philadelphia to Columbia, and one from the eastern base of the Allegheny mountains to their western base. They were originally intended to be used with horse power. In the meantime the railroad system had been commenced, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, under the charge of a man of extraordinary ability, John Edgar Thompson, was rapidly pushed to completion. Another great railway, the Philadelphia and Reading, was built to carry anthracite coal from the Schuylkill mines to the market. A railroad was built each side of the Lehigh river, that another part of our coal territory might find a market in New York. Another was built from the north branch of the Susquehanna, connecting with the New York roads, and leading to the northern coal field. And yet another was built along the Susquehanna, through the southern coal basin, to the city of Baltimore. The total cost of these roads, independent of the Pennsylvania railroad, was $95,250,410.10, as shown by official reports. Their earnings last year are officially given at $24,753,065.32. Each of these was forced to contend with difficulty and prejudice. All were unpopular, and all were looked upon with suspicion until they actually forced their usefulness on the public mind. Those who made the fight for canals were forced to go over the whole ground again for railroads, and their double victory is greater than the success generally vouchsafed to the pioneers in any cause. These roads, with the Pennsylvania railroad and the lesser lines of improvements running through the coal region cost over $207,000,000.

The Reading Railroad will serve to illustrate the struggle of these great schemes. Its stock, now worth over par, once sold for twenty cents on the dollar; and at one time it was forced to sell its bonds at forty cents on the dollar to pay operating expenses. The vindication of the sagacity of the pioneers in these great enterprises is complete. All these lines are now profitable, and it has been demonstrated everywhere in the United States, that every new railroad creates the business from which its stockholders receive their dividends. It seems, therefore, scarcely possible to fix a limit to our profitable railroad expansion. They open new fields of enterprise, and this enterprise in turn, makes the traffic which fills the coffers of the companies.

I cannot now look back to the struggle to impress the people with the advantages of railways, without a feeling of weariness at the seeming hopeless struggle, and one of merriment at the general unbelief in our new-fangled project. Once at Elizabethtown in this State a public meeting had been called for the purpose of securing subscriptions to the stock of the Harrisburg and Lancaster Railroad. This road was intended to complete the railway between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, one hundred and five miles. A large concourse had gathered. Ovid F. Johnson, Attorney-General of our State, and a brilliant orator, made an excellent speech; but the effect was not in proportion to the effort. I determined to make an appeal, and I gave such arguments as I could. In closing I predicted that those now listening to me would see the day when a man could breakfast in Harrisburg, go to Philadelphia, transact a fair day’s business there, and returning, eat his supper at home. Great applause followed this, and some additional subscriptions. Abram Harnly, a friend of the road, and one of the most intelligent of his class, worked his way to me, and taking me aside whispered, “That was a good idea about going to Philadelphia and back to Harrisburg the same day;” and then, bursting with laughter, he added,—“But you and I know better than that!” We lived to see the road built; and now people can come and go over the distance twice a day, which Abram seemed to consider impossible for a single daily trip.

The peculiar condition of the States then known as “the West” was the subject of anxiety to many. They had attracted a large population, but the people were exclusively devoted to agriculture. Lacking diversified industry, they were without accumulated wealth to enable them to build railways; nor were the States in condition to undertake such an onerous duty, although several of them made a feeble attempt to do so. At one time the bonds of Illinois, issued to build her canals, sold as low as thirty cents on the dollar. So with Indiana. Both States were supposed to be bankrupt. It became, therefore, an important problem as to how means of communication should be supplied to the people of the West. Congress, in 1846, gave a grant of land to aid in building a railroad in Illinois. Every alternate section was given to the Company, and each alternate section was reserved by the Government. The road was built; and the one-half of the land retained by the government sold for a great deal more than all was worth before the road was constructed. This idea was original, I think, with Mr. Whitney of Mass., who spent two winters in Washington, about 1845, endeavoring to induce Congress to adopt that plan for the construction of a Trans-Continental Railway.

He died before seeing his scheme succeed. Others have built a road across the continent on the Central route. Another on the Northern route is now progressing, and the wealth and enterprise of those having it in charge renders its completion certain. And it yet remains for us to give the people of the Southern route a road to the Pacific which shall develop the magnificent region through which it will pass, and give the country one route to the great ocean protected from the ordinary difficulty of climate with which railroads must contend over so large a part of our territory. But I am admonished by the value of your space to confine myself to the limits of my own State.

I have said that the outlay we have made in building our public works was of great benefit to us even when the canals had been rendered almost valueless through the competition of railroads. This is paradoxical, but it is true nevertheless. That expenditure gave our people a needed knowledge of our vast resources. It familiarized them with large expenditures when made for the public good. And it showed them how a great debt may be beneficially incurred, and yet not break down the enterprise of the people. We at one time owed $41,698,595.74. By a steady attention to our finances, it is now reduced to $31,000,000, with resources,—the proceeds of the sale of public works—on hand amounting to $10,000,000. And while we have been steadily reducing our State debt, we have built 5,384 miles of railway on the surface of the earth, and 500 miles underground in our mines, at a cost of not less than $350,000,000, for a mile of railroad in Pennsylvania means something. We sent 368,000 men to the Federal Army. And our credit stands high on every stock exchange. Gratifying as this progress is, it is only a fair beginning. There is a large part of our territory rich in timber and full of iron, coal, and all kinds of mineral wealth, so entirely undeveloped by railroads that we call it “the Wilderness.” To open it up is the business of to-day, and I sincerely hope to see it done soon.

Forty years ago George Shoemaker, a young tavern-keeper of more vigor and enterprise than his neighbors, came to the conclusion that anthracite coal could be used as fuel. He went to the expense of taking a wagon load of it to Philadelphia, a hundred miles away, and, after peddling it about the streets for some days, was forced to give it away, and lose his time, his labor and his coal. He afterwards saw a great railway built to carry the same article to the same point, and enriching thousands from the profits of the traffic. But his experience did not end there. He saw a thousand dollars paid eagerly for an acre of coal land, which at the time of his venture to Philadelphia, no one would have, and he could not give away.

I have thought that a retrospective survey of our wonderful development might point plainly to the duty of the future. For if the experience of what has gone before is not useful to cast light on what is yet to come, then it will be difficult indeed to discover wherein its value lies. It teaches me to devote time and labor for the advancement of all Public Improvements, and I trust it may have a like effect on all who have the time and patience to read what I have here written.

Speech of Hon. John A. Logan,

On Self-Government in Louisiana, January 13 and 14, 1875.

The Senate having under consideration the resolution submitted by Mr. SCHURZ on the 8th of January, directing the Committee of the Judiciary to inquire what legislation is necessary to secure to the people of the State of Louisiana their rights of Self-government under the Constitution Mr. LOGAN said:

Mr. PRESIDENT: I believe it is considered the duty of a good sailor to stand by his ship in the midst of a great storm. We have been told in this Chamber that a great storm of indignation is sweeping over this land, which will rend asunder and sink the old republican craft. We have listened to denunciations of the President, of the republicans in this Chamber, of the republican party as an organization, their acts heretofore and their purposes in reference to acts hereafter, of such a character as has seldom been listened to in this or in any other legislative hall. Every fact on the side of the republican party has been perverted, every falsehood on the part of the opposition has been exaggerated, arguments have been made here calculated to inflame and arouse a certain class of the people of this country against the authorities of the Government, based not upon truth but upon manufactured statements which were utterly false. The republican party has been characterized as despotic, as tyrannical, as oppressive. The course of the Administration and the party toward the southern people has been denounced as of the most tyrannical character by men who have received clemency at the hands of this same party.

Now, sir, what is the cause of all this vain declamation? What is the cause of all this studied denunciation? What is the reason for all these accusations made against a party or an administration? I may be mistaken, but, if I am not, this is the commencement of the campaign of 1876. It has been thought necessary on the part of the opposition Senators here to commence, if I may use a homely phrase, a raid upon the republican party and upon this Administration, and to base that upon false statements in reference to the conduct of affairs in the State of Louisiana.

I propose in this debate, and I hope I shall not be too tedious, though I may be somewhat so, to discuss the question that should be presented to the American people. I propose to discuss that question fairly, candidly, and truthfully. I propose to discuss it from a just, honest, and legal standpoint. Sir, what is that question? There was a resolution offered in this Chamber calling on the President to furnish certain information. A second resolution was introduced, (whether for the purpose of hanging on it an elaborate speech or not I am not aware,) asking the Committee on the Judiciary to report at once some legislation in reference to Louisiana. Without any facts presented officially arguments have been made, the country has been aroused, and some people have announced themselves in a manner calculated to produce a very sore feeling against the course and conduct of the party in power. I say this is done without the facts; without any basis whatever; without any knowledge officially communicated to them in reference to the conduct of any of the parties in the State of Louisiana. In discussing this question we ought to have a standpoint; we ought to have a beginning; some point from which we may all reason and see whether or not any great outrage has been perpetrated against the rights of the American people or any portion of them.

I then propose to start at this point, that there is a government in the State of Louisiana. Whether that government is a government of right or not is not the question. Is there a government in that State against which treason, insurrection, or rebellion, may be committed? Is there such a government in the State of Louisiana as should require the maintenance of peace and order among the citizens of that State? Is there such a government in the State of Louisiana as requires the exercise of Executive authority for the purpose of preserving peace and order within its borders? I ask any Senator on this floor to-day if he can stand up here as a lawyer, as a Senator, as an honest man, and deny the fact that a government does exist? Whether he calls it a government de jure or a government de facto, it is immaterial. It is such an organization as involves the liberties and the protection of the rights of the people of that State. It will not do for Senators to talk about the election of 1872. The election of 1872 has no more to do with this “military usurpation” that you speak of to-day than an election of a hundred years ago. It is not a question as to whether this man or that was elected. The question is, is there such a government there as can be overturned, and has there been an attempt to overturn it? If so, then what is required to preserve its status or preserve the peace and order of the people?

But the other day when I asked the question of a Senator on the other side, who was discussing this question, whether or not he indorsed the Penn rebellion, he answered me in a playful manner that excited the mirth of people who did not understand the question, by saying that I had decided that there was no election, and that therefore there was no government to overturn. Now I ask Senators, I ask men of common understanding if that is the way to treat a question of this kind; when asked whether insurrection against a government recognized is not an insurrection and whether he endorses it, he says there is no government to overturn. If there is no government to overturn, why do you make this noise and confusion about a Legislature there? If there is no State government, there is no State Legislature. But I will not answer in that manner. I will not avoid the issue; I will not evade the question. I answer there is a Legislature, as there is a State government, recognized by the President, recognized by the Legislature, recognized by the courts, recognized by one branch of Congress, and recognized by the majority of the citizens by their recognition of the laws of the State; and it will not do to undertake to avoid questions in this manner.

Let us see, then, starting from that standpoint, what the position of Louisiana is now, and what it has been. On the 14th day of September last a man by the name of Penn, as to whom we have official information this morning, with some seven or ten thousand white-leaguers made war against that government, overturned it, dispersed it, drove the governor from the executive chamber, and he had to take refuge under the jurisdiction of the Government of the United States, on the soil occupied by the United States custom-house, where the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States Government extends, for the purpose of protecting his own life.

This then was a revolution; this then was a rebellion; this then was treason against the State, for which these men should have been arrested, tried, and punished. Let gentlemen dodge the question as they may; it may be well for some men there who engaged in this treasonable act against the government that they had Mr. Kellogg for governor. It might not have been so well for them, perhaps, had there been some other man in his place. I tell the Senator from Maryland if any crowd of armed men should undertake to disperse the government of the State of Illinois, drive its governor from the executive chamber, enter into his private drawers, take his private letters, and publish them, and act as those men did, some of them would pay the penalty either in the penitentiary or by dancing at the end of a rope.

But when this rebellion was going on against that State, these gentlemen say it was a State affair; the Government of the United States has nothing to do with it! That is the old-fashioned secession doctrine again. The government of the United States has nothing to do with it! This national government is made up of States, and each State is a part of the Government, each is a part of its life, of its body. It takes them all to make up the whole; and treason against any part of it is treason against the whole of it, and it became the duty of the President to put it down, as he did do; and, in putting down that treason against the Kellogg government, the whole country almost responded favorably to his action.

But our friend from Maryland, not in his seat now, [Mr. HAMILTON] said that that was part of the cause of the elections going as they did. In other words, my friend from Maryland undertook in a roundabout way to endorse the Penn rebellion, and claim that people of the country did the same thing against the government of the State of Louisiana, and on this floor since this discussion has been going on, not one Senator on that side of the chamber has lisped one word against the rebellion against the government of the State of Louisiana, and all who have spoken of it have passed it by in silence so as to indicate clearly that they endorse it, and I believe they do.

Then, going further, the President issued his proclamation requiring those insurgents to lay down their arms and to resume their peaceful pursuits. This morning we have heard read at the clerk’s desk that these men have not yet complied fully with that proclamation. Their rebellious organization continued up to the time of the election and at the election. When the election took place, we are told by some of these Senators that the election was a peaceable, and a fair election, that a majority of democrats were elected. That is the question we propose to discuss as well as we are able to do it. They tell us that there was no intimidation resorted to by any one in the State of Louisiana. I dislike very much to follow out these statements that are not true and attempt to controvert them because it does seem to me that we ought to act fairly and candidly in this Chamber and discuss questions without trying to pervert the issue or the facts in connection with it.

Now, I state it as a fact, and I appeal to the Senator from Louisiana to say whether or not I state truly, that on the night before the election in Louisiana notices were posted all over that country on the doors of the colored republicans and the white republicans, too, of a character giving them to understand that if they voted their lives would be in danger; and here is one of the notices posted all over that country:

This “2 × 6” was to show the length and width of the grave they would have. Not only that, but the negroes that they could impose upon and get to vote the democratic ticket received, after they had voted, a card of safety; and here is that card issued to the colored people whom they had induced to vote the democratic ticket, so that they might present it if any white-leaguers should undertake to plunder or murder them:

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 28, 1874.

This is to certify that Charles Durassa, a barber by occupation, is a Member of the 1st Ward Colored Democratic Club, and that at the late election he voted for and worked in the interests of the Democratic Candidates.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER, President 1st Ward Col’d Democratic Club.

NICK HOPE, Secretary.

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ROOMS DEMOCRATIC PARISH COMMITTEE.

New Orleans, Nov. 28, 1874.

The undersigned, Special Committee, appointed on behalf of the Parish Committee, approve of the above Certificate.

ED. FLOOD, Chairman. PAUL WATERMAN. H. J. RIVET.

ATTEST: J. H. HARDY, Ass’t Sec. Parish Committee.

These were the certificates given to negroes who voted the democratic ticket, that they might present them to save their lives when attacked by the men commonly known as Ku-Klux or white-leaguers in that country; and we are told that there is no intimidation in the State of Louisiana!

Our friend from Georgia [Mr. GORDON] has been very profuse in his declamation as to the civility and good order and good bearing of the people of Louisiana and the other Southern States. But, sir, this intimidation continued up to the election. After the election, it was necessary for the governor of that State to proceed in some manner best calculated to preserve the peace and order of the country.

* * * * *

Now, Mr. President, I want to ask candid, honest, fair-minded men, after reading the report of General Sheridan showing the murder, not for gain, not for plunder, but for political opinions in the last few years of thirty-five hundred persons in the State of Louisiana, all of them republicans, not one of them a democrat—I want to ask if they can stand here before this country and defend the democratic party of Louisiana? I put this question to them for they have been here for days crying against the wrongs upon the democracy of Louisiana. I want any one of them to tell me if he is prepared to defend the democracy of Louisiana. What is your democracy of Louisiana? You are excited, your extreme wrath is aroused at General Sheridan because he called your White Leagues down there “banditti.” I ask you if the murder of thirty-five hundred men in a short time for political purposes by a band of men banded together for the purpose of murder does not make them banditti, what it does make them? Does it make them democrats? It certainly does not make them republicans. Does it make them honest men? It certainly does not. Does it make them law-abiding men? It certainly does not. Does it make them peaceable citizens? It certainly does not. But what does it make them? A band of men banded together and perpetrating murder in their own State? Webster says a bandit is “a lawless or desperate fellow; a robber; a brigand,” and “banditti” are men banded together for plunder and murder; and what are your White Leagues banded together for if the result proves that they are banded together for murder for political purposes?

O, what a crime it was in Sheridan to say that these men were banditti! He is a wretch. From the papers he ought to be hanged to a lamp-post; from the Senators he is not fit to breathe the free air of heaven or of this free Republic; but your murderers of thirty-five hundred people for political offenses are fit to breathe the air of this country and are defended on this floor to-day, and they are defended here by the democratic party, and you cannot avoid or escape the proposition. You have denounced republicans for trying to keep the peace in Louisiana; you have denounced the Administration for trying to suppress bloodshed in Louisiana; you have denounced all for the same purpose; but not one word has fallen from the lips of a solitary democratic Senator denouncing these wholesale murders in Louisiana. You have said, “I am sorry these things are done,” but you have defended the White Leagues; you have defended Penn; you have defended rebellion; and you stand here to-day the apologists of murder, of rebellion, and of treason in that State.

I want to ask the judgment of an honest country, I want to ask the judgment of the moral sentiments of the law-abiding people of this grand and glorious Republic to tell me whether men shall murder by the score, whether men shall trample the law under foot, whether men shall force judges to resign, whether men shall force prosecuting attorneys to resign, whether men shall take five officers of a State out and hang or shoot them if they attempt to exercise the functions of their office, whether men shall terrify the voters and office-holders of a State, whether men shall undertake in violation of law to organize a Legislature for revolutionary purposes, for the purpose of putting a governor in possession and taking possession of the State and then ask the democracy to stand by them—I appeal to the honest judgment of the people of this land and ask them to respond whether this was not an excusable case when this man used the Army to protect the life of that State and to preserve the peace of that people? Sir, the man who will not use all the means in his power to preserve the nationality, the integrity of this Government, the integrity of a State or the peace and happiness of a people, is not fit to govern, he is not fit to hold position in this or any other civilized age.

Does liberty mean wholesale slaughter? Does republican government mean tyranny and oppression of its citizens? Does an intelligent and enlightened age of civilization mean murder and pillage, bloodshed at the hands of Ku-Klux or White Leagues or anybody else, and if any one attempts to put it down, attempts to reorganize and produce order where chaos and confusion have reigned, they are to be denounced as tyrants, as oppressors, and as acting against republican institutions? I say then the happy days of this Republic are gone. When we fail to see that republicanism means nothing, that liberty means nothing but the unrestrained license of the mobs to do as they please, then republican government is a failure. Liberty of the citizen means the right to exercise such rights as are prescribed within the limits of the law so that he does not in the exercise of these rights infringe the rights of other citizens. But the definition is not well made by our friends on the opposite side of this Chamber. Their idea of liberty is license; it is not liberty, but it is license. License to do what? License to violate law, to trample constitutions under foot, to take life, to take property, to use the bludgeon and the gun or anything else for the purpose of giving themselves power. What statesman ever heard of that as a definition of liberty? What man in a civilized age has ever heard of liberty being the unrestrained license of the people to do as they please without any restraint of law or of authority? No man, no not one until we found the democratic party, would advocate this proposition and indorse and encourage this kind of license in a free country.

Mr. President, I have perhaps said more on this question of Louisiana than might have been well for me to say on account of my strength, but what I have said about it I have said because I honestly believed it. What I have said in reference to it comes from an honest conviction in my mind and in my heart of what has been done to suppress violence and wrong. But I have a few remarks in conclusion to submit now to my friends on the other side, in answer to what they have said not by way of argument but by way of accusation. You say to us—I had it repeated to me this morning in private conversation—“Withdraw your troops from Louisiana and you will have peace.” Ah, I heard it said on this floor once “Withdraw your troops from Louisiana and your State government will not last a minute.” I heard that said from the opposite side of the Chamber, and now you say “Withdraw your troops from Louisiana and you will have peace.”

Mr. President, I dislike to refer to things that are past and gone; I dislike to have my mind called back to things of the past; but I well remember the voice in this Chamber once that rang out and was heard throughout this land, “Withdraw your troops from Fort Sumter if you want peace.” I heard that said. Now it is “Withdraw your troops from Louisiana if you want peace.” Yes, I say, withdraw your troops from Louisiana if you want a revolution, and that is what is meant. But, sir, we are told, and doubtless it is believed by the Senators who tell us so, who denounce the republican party, that it is tyrannical, oppressive, and outrageous. They have argued themselves into the idea that they are patriots, pure and undefiled. They have argued themselves into the idea that the democratic party never did any wrong. They have been out of power so long that they have convinced themselves that if they only had control of this country for a short time, what a glorious country they would make it. They had control for nearly forty long years, and while they were the agents of this country—I appeal to history to bear me out—they made the Government a bankrupt, with rebellion and treason in the land, and were then sympathizing with it wherever it existed. That is the condition in which they left the country when they had it in their possession and within their control. But they say the republican party is a tyrant; that it is oppressive. As I have said, I wish to make a few suggestions to my friends in answer to this accusation—oppressive to whom? They say to the South, that the republican party has tyrannized over the South. Let me ask you how has it tyrannized over the South? Without speaking of our troubles and trials through which we passed, I will say this: at the end of a rebellion that scourged this land, that drenched it with blood, that devastated a portion of it, left us in debt and almost bankrupt, what did the republican party do? Instead of leaving these our friends and citizens to-day in a territorial condition where we might exercise jurisdiction over them for the next coming twenty years, where we might have deprived them of the rights of members on this floor, what did we do? We reorganized them into States, admitted them back into the Union, and through the clemency of the republican party we admitted representatives on this floor who had thundered against the gates of liberty for four bloody years. Is that the tyranny and oppression of which you complain at the hands of the republican party? Is that a part of our oppression against you southern people?

Let us go a little further. When the armed democracy, for that is what they were, laid down their arms in the Southern States, after disputing the right of freedom and liberty in this land for four years, how did the republican party show itself in its acts of tyranny and oppression toward you? You appealed to them for clemency. Did you get it? Not a man was punished for his treason. Not a man ever knocked at the doors of a republican Congress for a pardon who did not get it. Not a man ever petitioned the generosity of the republican party to be excused for his crimes who was not excused. Was that oppression upon the part of the republicans in this land? Is that a part of the oppression of which you accuse us?

Let us look a little further. We find to-day twenty-seven democratic Representatives in the other branch of Congress who took arms in their hands and tried to destroy this Government holding commissions there by the clemency of the republican party. We find in this Chamber by the clemency of the republican party three Senators who held such commissions. Is that tyranny; is that oppression; is that the outrage of this republican party on you southern people? Sir, when Jeff Davis, the head of the great rebellion, who roams the land free as air, North, South, East, and West, makes democratic speeches wherever invited, and the vice-president of the southern rebellion holds his seat in the other House of Congress, are we to be told that we are tyrants, and oppressing the southern people? These things may sound a little harsh, but it is time to tell the truth in this country. The time has come to talk facts. The time has come when cowards should hide, and honest men should come to the front and tell you plain, honest truths. You of the South talk to us about oppressing you. You drenched your land in blood, caused weeping throughout this vast domain, covered the land in weeds of mourning both North and South, widowed thousands and orphaned many, made the pension-roll as long as an army-list, made the debt that grinds the poor of this land—for all these things you have been pardoned, and yet you talk to us about oppression. So much for the oppression of the republican party of your patriotic souls and selves. Next comes the President of the United States. He is a tyrant, too. He is an oppressor still, in conjunction with the republican party. Oppressor of what? Who has he oppressed of your Southern people, and when, and where? When your Ku-Klux, banded together for murder and plunder in the Southern States, were convicted by their own confession, your own representatives pleaded to the President and said, “Give them pardon, and it will reconcile many of the southern people.” The President pardoned them; pardoned them of their murder, of their plunder, of their piracy on land; and for this I suppose he is a tyrant.

More than that, sir, this tyrant in the White House has done more for you southern people than you ought to have asked him to do. He has had confidence in you until you betrayed that confidence. He has not only pardoned the offences of the South, pardoned the criminals of the democratic party, but he has placed in high official position in this Union some of the leading men who fought in the rebellion. He has put in his Cabinet one of your men; he has made governors of Territories of some of your leading men who fought in the rebellion; he has sent on foreign missions abroad some of your men who warred against this country; he has placed others in the Departments; and has tried to reconcile you in every way on earth, by appealing to your people, by recognizing them and forgiving them for their offenses, and for these acts of generosity, for these acts of kindness, he is arraigned to-day as a Cæsar, as a tyrant, as an oppressor.

Such kindness in return as the President has received from these people will mark itself in the history of generosity. O, but say they, Grant wants to oppress the White Leagues in Louisiana; therefore he is an oppressor. Yes, Mr. President, Grant does desire that these men should quit their everyday chivalric sports of gunning upon negroes and republicans. He asks kindly that you stop it. He says to you, “That is all I want you to do;” and you say that you are desirous that they shall quit it. You have but to say it and they will quit it. It is because you have never said it that they have not quit it. It is in the power of the democratic party to-day but to speak in tones of majesty, of honor, and justice in favor of human life, and your Ku-Klux and murderers will stop. But you do not do it; and that is the reason they do not stop. In States where it has been done they have stopped. But it will not do to oppress those people; it will not do to make them submit and subject them to the law; it will not do to stop these gentlemen in their daily sports and in their lively recreations. They are White Leagues; they are banded together as gentlemen; they are of southern blood; they are of old southern stock; they are the chivalry of days gone by; they are knights of the bloody shield; and the shield must not be taken from them. Sirs, their shield will be taken from them; this country will be aroused to its danger; this country will be aroused to do justice to its citizens; and when it does, the perpetrators of crime may fear and tremble. Tyranny and oppression! A people who without one word of opposition allows men who have been the enemies of a government to come into these legislative Halls and make laws for that government to be told that they are oppressors is a monstrosity in declamation and assertion. Who ever heard of such a thing before? Who ever believed that such men could make such charges? Yet we are tyrants!

Mr. President, the reading of the title of that bill from the House only reminds me of more acts of tyranny and oppression of the republican party, and there is a continuation of the same great offenses constantly going on in this Chamber. But some may say “It is strange to see Logan defending the President of the United States.” It is not strange to me. I can disagree with the President when I think he is wrong; and I do not blame him for disagreeing with me; but when these attacks are made, coming from where they do, I am ready to stand from the rising sun in the morning to the setting sun in the evening to defend every act of his in connection with this matter before us.

I may have disagreed with President Grant in many things; but I was calling attention to the men who have been accusing him here, on this floor, on the stump, and in the other House; the kind of men who do it, the manner of its doing, the sharpness of the shafts that are sent at him, the poisonous barbs that they bear with them, and from these men who, at his hands, have received more clemency than any men ever received at the hands of any President or any man who governed a country. Why, sir, I will appeal to the soldiers of the rebel army to testify in behalf of what I say in defense of President Grant—the honorable men who fought against the country, if there was honor in doing it. What will be their testimony? It will be that he captured your armed democracy of the South, he treated them kindly, turned them loose, with their horses, with their wagons, with their provisions; treated them as men, and not as pirates. Grant built no prison-pens for the southern soldiers; Grant provided no starvation for southern men; Grant provided no “dead-lines” upon which to shoot southern soldiers if they crossed them; Grant provided no outrageous punishment against these people that now call him a tyrant. Generous to a fault in all his actions toward the men who were fighting his country and destroying the constitution, that man to-day is denounced as a very Cæsar!

Sherman has not been denounced, but the only reason is that he was not one of the actors in this transaction; but I want now to say to my friends on the other side, especially to my friend from Delaware, who repeated his bitter denunciation against Sheridan yesterday—and I say this in all kindness, because I am speaking what future history will bear me out in—when Sheridan and Grant and Sherman, and others like them, are forgotten in this country, you will have no country. When the democratic party is rotten for centuries in its grave, the life, the course, the conduct of these men will live as bright as the noonday sun in the heart of every patriot of a republic like the American Union. Sirs, you may talk about tyranny, you may talk about oppression, you may denounce these men; their glory may fade into the darkness of night; but that darkness will be a brilliant light compared with the darkness of the democratic party. Their pathway is illuminated by glory; yours by dark deeds against the Government. That is a difference which the country will bear witness to in future history when speaking of this country and the actors on its stage.

Now, Mr. President, I have a word to say about our duty. A great many people are asking, what shall we do? Plain and simple in my judgment is the proposition. I say to republicans, do not be scared. No man is ever hurt by doing an honest act and performing a patriotic duty. If we are to have a war of words outside or inside, let us have them in truth and soberness, but in earnest. What then is our duty? I did not believe that in 1872 there were official data upon which we could decide who was elected governor of Louisiana. But this is not the point of my argument. It is that the President has recognized Kellogg as governor of that State, and he has acted for two years. The Legislature of the State has recognized him; the supreme court of the State has recognized him; one branch of Congress has recognized him. The duty is plain, and that is for this, the other branch of Congress, to do it, and that settles the question. Then, when it does it, your duty is plain and simple, and as the President has told you, he will perform his without fear, favor, or affection. Recognize the government that revolution has been against and intended to overthrow, and leave the President to his duty, and he will do it. That is what to do.

Sir, we have been told that this old craft is rapidly going to pieces; that the angry waves of dissension in the land are lashing against her sides. We are told that she is sinking, sinking, sinking to the bottom of the political ocean. Is that true? Is it true that this gallant old party, that this gallant old ship that has sailed through troubled seas before is going to be stranded now upon the rock of fury that has been set up by a clamor in this Chamber and a few newspapers in the country? Is it true that the party that saved this country in all its great crises, in all its great trials, is sinking to-day on account of its fear and trembling before an inferior enemy? I hope not. I remember, sir, once I was told that the old republican ship was gone; but when I steadied myself on the shores bounding the political ocean of strife and commotion, I looked afar off and there I could see a vessel bounding the boisterous billows with white sails unfurled, marked on her sides “Freighted with the hopes of mankind,” while the great Mariner above, as her helmsman, steered her, navigated her to a haven of rest, of peace, and of safety. You have but to look again upon that broad ocean of political commotion to-day, and the time will soon come when the same old craft, provided with the same cargo, will be seen, flying the same flag, passing through these tempestuous waves, anchoring herself at the shores of honesty and justice, and there she will lie undisturbed by strife and tumult, again in peace and safety. [Manifestations of applause in the galleries.]

Speech of Hon. James G. Blaine, of Maine,

On the False Issue raised by the Democratic Party, Delivered in the Senate of the United States, Monday, April 14, 1879.

The Senate having under consideration the bill (H. R. No. 1,) making appropriations for the support of the Army for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1880, and for other purposes—

Mr. Blaine said:

Mr. PRESIDENT: The existing section of the Revised Statutes numbered 2002 reads thus:

No military or naval officer, or other person engaged in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, shall order, bring, keep or have under his authority or control, any troops or armed men at the place where any general or special election is held in any State, unless it be necessary to repel the armed enemies of the United States, or to keep the peace at the polls.

The object of the proposed section, which has just been read at the Clerk’s desk, is to get rid of the eight closing words, namely, “or to keep the peace at the polls,” and therefore the mode of legislation proposed in the Army bill now before the Senate is an unusual mode; it is an extraordinary mode. If you want to take off a single sentence at the end of a section in the Revised Statutes the ordinary way is to strike off those words, but the mode chosen in this bill is to repeat and re-enact the whole section leaving those few words out. While I do not wish to be needlessly suspicious on a small point I am quite persuaded that this did not happen by accident but that it came by design. If I may so speak it came of cunning, the intent being to create the impression that whereas the republicans in the administration of the General Government had been using troops right and left, hither and thither, in every direction, as soon as the democrats got power they enacted this section. I can imagine democratic candidates for Congress all over the country reading this section to gaping and listening audiences as one of the first offsprings of democratic reform, whereas every word of it, every syllable of it, from its first to its last, is the enactment of a republican Congress.

I repeat that this unusual form presents a dishonest issue, whether so intended or not. It presents the issue that as soon as the democrats got possession of the Federal Government they proceeded to enact the clause which is thus expressed. The law was passed by a republican Congress in 1865. There were forty-six Senators sitting in this Chamber at that time, of whom only ten or at most eleven were democrats. The House of Representatives was overwhelmingly republican. We were in the midst of a war. The republican administration had a million or possibly twelve hundred thousand bayonets at its command. Thus circumstanced and thus surrounded, with the amplest possible power to interfere with elections had they so designed, with soldiers in every hamlet and county of the United States, the republican party themselves placed that provision on the statute book, and Abraham Lincoln, their President, signed it.

I beg you to observe, Mr. President, that this is the first instance in the legislation of the United States in which any restrictive clause whatever was put upon the statute book in regard to the use of troops at the polls. The republican party did it with the Senate and the House in their control. Abraham Lincoln signed it when he was Commander-in-Chief of an army larger than ever Napoleon Bonaparte had at his command. So much by way of correcting an ingenious and studied attempt at misrepresentation.

The alleged object is to strike out the few words that authorize the use of troops to keep peace at the polls. This country has been alarmed, I rather think indeed amused, at the great effort made to create a widespread impression that the republican party relies for its popular strength upon the use of the bayonet. This democratic Congress has attempted to give a bad name to this country throughout the civilized world, and to give it on a false issue. They have raised an issue that has no foundation in fact—that is false in whole and detail, false in the charge, false in all the specifications. That impression sought to be created, as I say, not only throughout the North American continent but in Europe to-day, is that elections are attempted in this country to be controlled by the bayonet.

I denounce it here as a false issue. I am not at liberty to say that any gentleman making this issue knows it to be false; I hope he does not; but I am going to prove to him that it is false, and that there is not a solitary inch of solid earth on which to rest the foot of any man who makes that issue. I have in my hand an official transcript of the location and the number of all the troops of the United States east of Omaha. By “east of Omaha,” I mean all the United States east of the Mississippi river and that belt of States that border the Mississippi river on the west, including forty-one million at least out of the forty-five million of people that this country is supposed to contain to-day. In that magnificent area, I will not pretend to state its extent, but with forty-one million people, how many troops of the United States are there to-day? Would any Senator on the opposite side like to guess, or would he like to state how many men with muskets in their hands there are in the vast area I have named? There are two thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven! And not one more.

From the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the lakes, and down the great chain of lakes, and down the Saint Lawrence and down the valley of the Saint John and down the St. Croix striking the Atlantic Ocean and following it down to Key West, around the Gulf, up to the mouth of the Mississippi again, a frontier of eight thousand miles either bordering on the ocean or upon foreign territory is guarded by these troops. Within this domain forty-five fortifications are manned and eleven arsenals protected. There are sixty troops to every million of people. In the South I have the entire number in each State, and will give it.

And the entire South has eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers to intimidate, overrun, oppress and destroy the liberties of fifteen million people! In the Southern States there are twelve hundred and three counties. If you distribute the soldiers there is not quite one for each county; and when I give the counties I give them from the census of 1870. If you distribute them territorially there is one for every seven hundred square miles of territory, so that if you make a territorial distribution, I would remind the honorable Senator from Delaware, if I saw him in his seat, that the quota for his State would be three—“one ragged sergeant and two abreast,” as the old song has it. [Laughter.] That is the force ready to destroy the liberties of Delaware!

Mr. President, it was said, as the old maxim has it, that the soothsayers of Rome could not look each other in the face without smiling. There are not two democratic Senators on this floor who can go into the cloak-room and look each other in the face without smiling at this talk, or, more appropriately, I should say without blushing—the whole thing is such a prodigious and absolute farce, such a miserably manufactured false issue, such a pretense without the slightest foundation in the world, and talked about most and denounced the loudest in States that have not and have not had a single Federal soldier. In New England we have three hundred and eighty soldiers. Throughout the South it does not run quite seventy to the million people. In New England we have absolutely one hundred and twenty soldiers to the million. New England is far more overrun to-day by the Federal soldier, immensely more, than the whole South is. I never heard anybody complain about it in New England, or express any great fear of his liberties being endangered by the presence of a handful of troops.

As I have said, the tendency of this talk is to give us a bad name in Europe. Republican institutions are looked upon there with jealousy. Every misrepresentation, every slander is taken up and exaggerated and talked about to our discredit, and the democratic party of the country to-day stand indicted, and I here indict them, for public slander of their country, creating the impression in the civilized world that we are governed by a ruthless military despotism. I wonder how amazing it would be to any man in Europe, familiar as Europeans are with great armies, if he were told that over a territory larger than France and Spain and Portugal and Great Britain and Holland and Belgium and the German Empire all combined, there were but eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers! That is all this democratic howl, this mad cry, this false issue, this absurd talk is based on—the presence of eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers on eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles of territory, not double the number of the democratic police in the city of Baltimore, not a third of the police in the city of New York, not double the democratic police in the city of New Orleans. I repeat, the number indicts them; it stamps the whole cry as without any foundation; it derides the issue as a false and scandalous and partisan makeshift.

What then is the real motive underlying this movement? Senators on that side, democratic orators on the stump cannot make any sensible set of men at the crossroads believe that they are afraid of eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers distributed one to each county in the South. The minute you state that, everybody sees the utter, palpable and laughable absurdity of it, and therefore we must go further and find a motive for all this cry. We want to find out, to use a familiar and vulgar phrase, what is “the cat under the meal.” It is not the troops. That is evident. There are more troops by fifty per cent. scattered through the Northern States east of the Mississippi to-day than through the Southern States east of the Mississippi, and yet nobody in the North speaks of it; everybody would be laughed at for speaking of it; and therefore the issue, I take no risk in stating, I make bold to declare, that this issue on the troops, being a false one, being one without foundation, conceals the true issue, which is simply to get rid of the Federal presence at Federal elections, to get rid of the civil power of the United States in the election of Representatives to the Congress of the United States. That is the whole of it; and disguise it as you may there is nothing else in it or of it.

You simply want to get rid of the supervision by the Federal Government of the election of Representatives to Congress through civil means; and therefore this bill connects itself directly with another bill, and you cannot discuss this military bill without discussing a bill which we had before us last winter, known as the legislative, executive, and judicial appropriation bill. I am quite well aware, I profess to be as well aware as any one, that it is not permissible for me to discuss a bill that is pending before the other House. I am quite well aware that propriety and parliamentary rule forbid that I should speak of what is done in the House of Representatives; but I know very well that I am not forbidden to speak of that which is not done in the House of Representatives. I am quite free to speak of the things that are not done there, and therefore I am free to declare that neither this military bill nor the legislative, executive, and judicial appropriation bill ever emanated from any committee of the House of Representatives at all; they are not the work of any committee of the House of Representatives, and, although the present House of Representatives is almost evenly balanced in party division, no solitary suggestion has been allowed to come from the minority of that House in regard to the shaping of these bills. Where do they come from? We are not left to infer; we are not even left to the Yankee privilege of guessing, because we know. The Senator from Kentucky [MR. BECK] obligingly told us—I have his exact words here—“that the honorable Senator from Ohio [MR. THURMAN] was the chairman of a committee appointed by the democratic party to see how it was best to present all these questions before us.”

We are told, too, rather a novel thing, that if we do not take these laws, we are not to have the appropriations. I believe it has been announced in both branches of Congress, I suppose on the authority of the democratic caucus, that if we do not take these bills as they are planned, we shall not have any of the appropriations that go with them. The honorable Senator from West Virginia [Mr. HEREFORD] told it to us on Friday; the honorable Senator from Ohio [Mr. THURMAN] told it to us last session; the honorable Senator from Kentucky [Mr. BECK] told it to us at the same time, and I am not permitted to speak of the legions who told us so in the other House. They say all these appropriations are to be refused—not merely the Army appropriation, for they do not stop at that. Look for a moment at the legislative bill that came from the democratic caucus. Here is an appropriation in it for defraying the expenses of the Supreme Court and the circuit and district courts of the United States, including the District of Columbia, &c., $2,800,000: “Provided”—provided what?

That the following sections of the Revised Statutes relating to elections—going on to recite them—be repealed.

That is, you will pass an appropriation for the support of the judiciary of the United States only on condition of this repeal. We often speak of this government being divided between three great departments, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—co-ordinate, independent, equal. The legislative, under the control of a democratic caucus, now steps forward and says, “We offer to the Executive this bill, and if he does not sign it, we are going to starve the judiciary.” That is carrying the thing a little further than I have ever known. We do not merely propose to starve the Executive if he will not sign the bill, but we propose to starve the judiciary that has had nothing whatever to do with the question. That has been boldly avowed on this floor; that has been boldly avowed in the other House; that has been boldly avowed in democratic papers throughout the country.

And you propose not merely to starve the judiciary but you propose that you will not appropriate a solitary dollar to take care of this Capitol. The men who take care of this great amount of public property are provided for in that bill. You say they shall not have any pay if the President will not agree to change the election laws. There is the public printing that goes on for the enlightenment of the whole country and for printing the public documents of every one of the Departments. You say they shall not have a dollar for public printing unless the President agrees to repeal these laws.

There is the Congressional Library that has become the pride of the whole American people for its magnificent growth and extent. You say it shall not have one dollar to take care of it, much less add a new book, unless the President signs these bills. There is the Department of State that we think throughout the history of the Government has been a great pride to this country for the ability with which it has conducted our foreign affairs; it is also to be starved. You say we shall not have any intercourse with foreign nations, not a dollar shall be appropriated therefor unless the President signs these bills. There is the Light-House Board that provides for the beacons and the warnings on seventeen thousand miles of sea and gulf and lake coast.

You say those lights shall all go out and not a dollar shall be appropriated for the board if the President does not sign these bills. There are the mints of the United States at Philadelphia, New Orleans, Denver, San Francisco, coining silver and coining gold—not a dollar shall be appropriated for them if the President does not sign these bills. There is the Patent Office, the patents issued which embody the invention of the country—not a dollar for them. The Pension Bureau shall cease its operations unless these bills are signed and patriotic soldiers may starve. The Agricultural Bureau, the Post Office Department, every one of the great executive functions of the Government is threatened, taken by the throat, highwayman-style, collared on the highway, commanded to stand and deliver in the name of the democratic congressional caucus. That is what it is; simply that. No committee of this Congress in either branch has ever recommended that legislation—not one. Simply a democratic caucus has done it.

Of course this is new. We are learning something every day. I think you may search the records of the Federal Government in vain; it will take some one much more industrious in that search than I have ever been, and much more observant than I have ever been, to find any possible parallel or any possible suggestion in our past history of any such thing. Most of the Senators who sit in this Chamber can remember some vetoes by Presidents that shook this country to its centre with excitement. The veto of the national-bank bill by Jackson in 1832, remembered by the oldest in this Chamber; the veto of the national-bank bill in 1841 by Tyler, remembered by those not the oldest, shook this country with a political excitement which up to that time had scarcely a parallel; and it was believed, whether rightfully or wrongfully is no matter, it was believed by those who advocated those financial measures at the time, that they were of the very last importance to the well-being and prosperity of the people of the Union. That was believed by the great and shining lights of that day. It was believed by that man of imperial character and imperious will, the great Senator from Kentucky. It was believed by Mr. Webster, the greatest of New England Senators. When Jackson vetoed the one or Tyler vetoed the other, did you ever hear a suggestion that those bank charters should be put on appropriation bills or that there should not be a dollar to run the Government until they were signed? So far from it that, in 1841, when temper was at its height; when the whig party, in addition to losing their great measure, lost it under the sting and the irritation of what they believed was a desertion by the President whom they had chosen; and when Mr. Clay, goaded by all these considerations, rose to debate the question in the Senate, he repelled the suggestion of William C. Rives, of Virginia, who attempted to make upon him the point that he had indulged in some threat involving the independence of the Executive. Mr. Clay rose to his full height and thus responded:

“I said nothing whatever of any obligation on the part of the President to conform his judgment to the opinions of the Senate and the House of Representatives, although the Senator argued as if I had, and persevered in so arguing after repeated correction. I said no such thing. I know and I respect the perfect independence of each department, acting within its proper sphere, of the other departments.”

A leading democrat, an eloquent man, a man who has courage and frankness and many good qualities, has boasted publicly that the democracy are in power for the first time in eighteen years, and they do not intend to stop until they have wiped out every vestige of every war measure. Well, “forewarned is forearmed,” and you begin appropriately on a measure that has the signature of Abraham Lincoln. I think the picture is a striking one when you hear these words from a man who was then in arms against the Government of the United States, doing his best to destroy it, exerting every power given him in a bloody and terrible rebellion against the authority of the United States and when Abraham Lincoln was marching at the same time to his martyrdom in its defense! Strange times have fallen upon us that those of us who had the great honor to be associated in higher or lower degree with Mr. Lincoln in the administration of the Government should live to hear men in public life and on the floors of Congress, fresh from the battle-fields of the rebellion, threatening the people of the United States that the democratic party, in power for the first time in eighteen years, proposes not to stay its hand until every vestige of the war measures has been wiped out! the late vice-president of the confederacy boasted—perhaps I had better say stated—that for sixty out of the seventy-two years preceding the outbreak of the rebellion, from the foundation of the Government, the South, though in a minority, had by combining with what he termed the anti-centralists in the North ruled the country; and in 1866 the same gentleman indicated in a speech, I think before the Legislature of Georgia, that by a return to Congress the South might repeat the experiment with the same successful result. I read that speech at the time; but I little thought I should live to see so near a fulfillment of its prediction. I see here to-day two great measures emanating, as I have said, not from a committee of either House, but from a democratic caucus in which the South has an overwhelming majority, two-thirds in the House, and out of forty-two Senators on the other side of this Chamber professing the democratic faith thirty are from the South—twenty-three, a positive and pronounced majority, having themselves been participants in the war against the Union either in military or civil station. So that as a matter of fact, plainly deducible from counting your fingers, the legislation of this country to-day, shaped and fashioned in a democratic caucus where the confederates of the South hold the majority, is the realization of Mr. STEPHENS’ prophecy. And very appropriately the House under that control and the Senate under that control, embodying thus the entire legislative powers of the Government, deriving its political strength from the South, elected from the South, say to the President of the United States, at the head of the Executive Department of the Government, elected as he was from the North—elected by the whole people, but elected as a Northern man; elected on Republican principles, elected in opposition to the party that controls both branches of Congress to-day—they naturally say, “You shall not exercise your constitutional power to veto a bill.”

Some gentleman may rise and say, “Do you call it revolution to put an amendment on an appropriation bill?” Of course not. There have been a great many amendments put on appropriation bills, some mischievous and some harmless; but I call it the audacity of revolution for any Senator or Representative, or any caucus of Senators or Representatives, to get together and say, “We will have this legislation or we will stop the great departments of the Government.” That is revolutionary. I do not think it will amount to revolution; my opinion is it will not. I think that is a revolution that will not go around; I think that is a revolution which will not revolve; I think that is a revolution whose wheel will not turn; but it is a revolution if persisted in, and if not persisted in, it must be backed out from with ignominy. The democratic party in Congress have put themselves exactly in this position to-day, that if they go forward in the announced programme, they march to revolution. I think they will, in the end, go back in an ignominious retreat. That is my judgment.

The extent to which they control the legislation of the country is worth pointing out. In round numbers, the Southern people are about one-third of the population of the Union. I am not permitted to speak of the organization of the House of Representatives, but I can refer to that of the last House. In the last House of Representatives, of the forty-two standing committees the South had twenty-five. I am not blaming the honorable Speaker for it. He was hedged in by partisan forces, and could not avoid it. In this very Senate, out of thirty-four standing committees the South has twenty-two. I am not calling these things up just now in reproach; I am only showing what an admirable prophet the late vice-president of the Southern Confederacy was, and how entirely true all his words have been, and how he has lived to see them realized.

I do not profess to know, Mr. President, least of all Senators on this floor, certainly as little as any Senator on this floor, do I profess to know, what the President of the United States will do when these bills are presented to him, as I suppose in due course of time they will be. I certainly should never speak a solitary word of disrespect of the gentleman holding that exalted position, and I hope I should not speak a word unbefitting the dignity of the office of a Senator of the United States. But as there has been speculation here and there on both sides as to what he would do, it seems to me that the dead heroes of the Union would rise from their graves if he should consent to be intimidated and outraged in his proper constitutional powers by threats like these.

All the war measures of Abraham Lincoln are to be wiped out, say leading democrats! The Bourbons of France busied themselves, I believe, after the restoration, in removing every trace of Napoleon’s power and grandeur, even chiseling the “N” from public monuments raised to perpetuate his glory; but the dead man’s hand from Saint Helena reached out and destroyed them in their pride and in their folly. And I tell the Senators on the other side of this Chamber,—I tell the democratic party North and South—South in the lead and North following,—that, the slow, unmoving finger of scorn, from the tomb of the martyred President on the prairies of Illinois, will wither and destroy them. Though dead he speaketh. [Great applause in the galleries.]

The presiding officer, (Mr. ANTHONY in the chair.) The Sergeant-at-Arms will preserve order in the galleries and arrest persons manifesting approbation or disapprobation.

Mr. BLAINE. When you present these bills with these threats to the living President, who bore the commission of Abraham Lincoln and served with honor in the Army of the Union, which Lincoln restored and preserved, I can think only of one appropriate response from his lips or his pen. He should say to you with all the scorn befitting his station:

Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?

Speech of Roscoe Conkling.

On the Extra Session of 1879. What it Teaches and what it Means. In the Senate of the United States, April 24, 1879.

The Senate having under consideration the bill (H. R. No. 1) making appropriations for the support of the Army for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1880, and for other purposes—

Mr. CONKLING said:

Mr. PRESIDENT: During the last fiscal year the amount of national taxes paid into the Treasury was $234,831,461.77. Of this sum one hundred and thirty million and a fraction was collected under tariff laws as duties on imported merchandise, and one hundred and four million and a fraction as tax on American productions. Of this total of $235,000,000 in round numbers, twenty-seven States which adhered to the Union during the recent war paid $221,204,268.88. The residue came from eleven States. I will read their names: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. These eleven States paid $13,627,192.89. Of this sum more than six million and a half came from the tobacco of Virginia. Deducting the amount of the tobacco tax in Virginia, the eleven States enumerated paid $7,125,462.60 of the revenues and supplies of the Republic.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Will the Senator from New York allow me to ask him a question?

Mr. CONKLING. If the Senator thinks that two of us are needed to make a statement of figures I will.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Two no doubt can make it better.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Does the Senator from New York yield to the Senator from Georgia?

Mr. CONKLING. After the expressed opinion of the Senator from Georgia that the statement needs his aid, I cannot decline.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I will not interrupt the Senator if it is disagreeable to him, I assure him. I ask if in the computation he has made of the amount paid he does not ascribe to the States that adhered to the Union, to use his language, all——

Mr. CONKLING. Having heard the Senator so far, I must ask him to desist.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York declines to yield further.

Mr. CONKLING. I have stated certain figures as they appear in the published official accounts: the Senator seems about to challenge the process or system by which the accounts are made up. I cannot give way for this, and must beg him to allow me to proceed with observations which I fear to prolong lest they become too wearisome to the Senate.

The laws exacting these few millions from eleven States, and these hundreds of millions from twenty-seven States, originated, as the Constitution requires all bills for raising revenue to originate, in the House of Representatives. They are not recent laws. They have been approved and affirmed by succeeding Congresses. The last House of Representatives and its predecessor approved them, and both these Houses were ruled by a democratic Speaker, by democratic committees, and by a democratic majority. Both Senate and House are democratic now, and we hear of no purpose to repeal or suspend existing revenue laws. They are to remain in full force. They will continue to operate and to take tribute of the people. If the sum they exact this year and next year, shall be less than last year, it will be only or chiefly because recent legislation favoring southern and tobacco-growing regions has dismissed twelve or fourteen million of annual tax on tobacco.

This vast revenue is raised and to be raised for three uses. It is supplied in time of severe depression and distress, to pay debt inflicted by rebellion; to pay pensions to widows, orphans, and cripples made by rebellion; and to maintain the Government and enforce the laws preserved at inestimable cost of life and treasure.

It can be devoted to its uses in only one mode. Once in the Treasury, it must remain there useless until appropriated by act of Congress. The Constitution so ordains. To collect it, and then defeat or prevent its object or use, would be recreant and abominable oppression.

The Constitution leaves no discretion to Congress whether needful appropriations shall be made. Discretion to ascertain and determine amounts needful, is committed to Congress, but the appropriation of whatever is needful after the amount has been ascertained, is commanded positively and absolutely. When, for example, the Constitution declares that the President and the judges at stated periods shall receive compensation fixed by law, the duty to make the appropriations is plain and peremptory; to refuse to make them, is disobedience of the Constitution, and treasonable. So, when it is declared that Congress shall have power to provide money to pay debts, and for the common defense and the general welfare, the plain meaning is that Congress shall do these things, and a refusal to do them is revolutionary, and subversive of the Constitution. A refusal less flagrant would be impeachable in the case of every officer and department of the Government within the reach of impeachment. Were the President to refuse to do any act enjoined on him by the Constitution, he would be impeachable, and ought to be convicted and removed from office as a convict. Should the judges, one, or some, or all of them, refuse to perform any duty which the Constitution commits to the judicial branch, the refusal would be plainly impeachable.

Congress is not amenable to impeachment. Congressional majorities are triable at the bar of public opinion, and in no other human forum. Could Congress be dissolved instantly here as in England, could Senators and Representatives be driven instantly from their seats by popular disapproval, were they amenable presently somewhere, there would be more of bravery, if not less of guilt, in a disregard of sworn obligation. Legislators are bound chiefly by their honor and their oaths; and the very impunity and exemption they enjoy exalts and measures their obligations, and the crime and odium of violating them. Because of the fixed tenure by which the members of each House hold their places and their trusts, irreparable harm may come of their acts any omissions, before they can be visited with even political defeat, and before the wrong they do can be undone. A congressional majority is absolutely safe during its term, and those who suffered such impunity to exist in the frame of our Government, must have relied on the enormity and turpitude of the act to deter the representatives of the people and the representatives of States from betraying a trust so exalted and so sacred as their offices imply.

Mr. President, it does not escape my attention, as it must occur to those around me, that in ordinary times obvious aphorisms, I might say truisms like these would be needless, if not out of place in the Senate. They are pertinent now because of an occasion without example in American history. I know of no similar instance in British history. Could one be found, it would only mark the difference between an hereditary monarchy without a written constitution, and a free republic with a written charter plainly defining from the beginning the powers, the rights, and the duties of every department of the Government. The nearest approaches in English experience to the transactions which now menace this country, only gild with broad light the wisdom of those who established a system to exempt America forever from the struggles between kingcraft and liberty, between aristocratic pretensions and human rights, which in succeeding centuries had checkered and begrimed the annals of Great Britain. It was not to transplant, but to leave behind and shut out the usurpations and prerogatives of kings, nobles, and gentry, and the rude and violent resorts which, with varying and only partial success, had been matched against them, that wise and far-seeing men of many nationalities came to these shores and founded “a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Such boisterous conflicts as the Old World had witnessed between subjects and rulers—between privilege and right, were the warnings which our fathers heeded, the dangers which they shunned, the evils which they averted, the disasters which they made impossible so long as their posterity should cherish their inheritance.

Until now no madness of party, no audacity or desperation of sinister, sectional, or partisan design, has ever ventured on such an attempt as has recently come to pass in the two Houses of Congress. The proceeding I mean to characterize, if misunderstood anywhere, is misunderstood here. One listening to addresses delivered to the Senate during this debate, as it is called, must think that the majority is arraigned, certainly that the majority wishes to seem and is determined to seem arraigned, merely for insisting that provisions appropriating money to keep the Government alive, and provisions not in themselves improper relating to other matters, may be united in the same bill. With somewhat of monotonous and ostentatious iteration we have been asked whether incorporating general legislation in appropriation bills is revolution, or revolutionary? No one in my hearing has ever so contended.

Each House is empowered by the Constitution to make rules governing the modes of its own procedure. The rules permitting, I know of nothing except convenience, common sense, and the danger of log-rolling combinations, which forbids putting all the appropriations into one bill, and in the same bill, all the revenue laws, a provision admitting a State into the Union, another paying a pension to a widow, another changing the name of a steamboat. The votes and the executive approval which would make one of these provisions a law, would make them all a law. The proceeding would be outlandish, but it would not violate the Constitution.

A Senator might vote against such a huddle of incongruities, although separately he would approve each one of them. If, however, they passed both Houses in a bunch, and the Executive found no objection to any feature of the bill on its merits, and the only criticism should be that it would have been better legislative practice to divide it into separate enactments, it is not easy to see on what ground a veto could stand.

The assault which has been made on the executive branch of the Government and on the Constitution itself, would not be less flagrant if separate bills had been resorted to as the weapons of attack. Suppose in a separate bill, the majority had, in advance of the appropriations, repealed the national-bank act and the resumption act, and had declared that unless the Executive surrendered his convictions and yielded up his approval of the repealing act, no appropriations should be made; would the separation of the bills have palliated or condoned the revolutionary purpose? In the absence of an avowal that appropriations were to be finally withheld, or that appropriations were to be made to hinge upon the approval or veto of something else, a resort to separate bills might have cloaked and secreted for a time the real meaning of the transaction. In that respect it would have been wise and artful to resort to separate bills on this occasion; and I speak, I think, in the hearing of at least one democratic Senator who did not overlook in advance the suggestion now made. But when it was declared, or intended, that unless another species of legislation is agreed to, the money of the people, paid for that purpose, shall not be used to maintain their Government and to enforce the laws—when it is designed that the Government shall be thrown into confusion and shall stop unless private charity or public succor comes to its relief, the threat is revolutionary, and its execution is treasonable.

In the case before us, the design to make appropriations hinge and depend upon the destruction of certain laws is plain on the face of the bills before us,—the bill now pending, and another one on our tables. The same design was plain on the face of the bills sent us at the last session. The very fact that the sections uncovering the ballot-box to violence and fraud, are not, and never have been separately presented, but are thrust into appropriation bills, discloses and proves a belief, if not a knowledge, that in a separate bill the Executive would not approve them. Moreover both Houses have rung with the assertion that the Executive would not approve in a separate measure the overthrow of existing safeguards of the ballot-box, and that should he refuse to give his approval to appropriations and an overthrow of those safeguards linked together, no appropriations should be made.

The plot and the purpose then, is by duress to compel the Executive to give up his convictions, his duty, and his oath, as the price to be paid a political party for allowing the Government to live! Whether the bills be united or divided, is mere method and form. The substance in either form is the same, and the plot if persisted in will bury its aiders and abettors in opprobrium, and will leave a buoy on the sea of time warning political mariners to keep aloof from a treacherous channel in which a political party foundered and went down.

The size of the Army and its pay, have both been exactly fixed by law—by law enacted by a democratic House, and approved by a second democratic House. It has been decided and voted that the coast defenses and the Indian and frontier service, require a certain number of soldiers; and the appropriations needed for provision and pay have been ascertained to a farthing. Nothing remains to be done, but to give formal sanction and warrant for the use of the money from time to time. This was all true at the last session. But a democratic House, or more justly speaking the democratic majority in the House refused to give its sanction, refused to allow the people’s money, to reach the use for which the people paid it, unless certain long-standing laws were repealed. When the Senate voted against the repeal, we were bluntly told that unless that vote was reversed, unless the Senate and the Executive would accept the bills, repealing clauses and all, the session should die, no appropriations should be made, and the wheels of the Government should stop. The threat was executed; the session did die, and every branch of the Government was left without the power to execute its duties after the 30th of next June.

We were further told that when the extra session, thus to be brought about, should convene, the democrats would rule both Houses, that the majority would again insist on its terms, and that then unless the Executive submitted to become an accomplice in the design to fling down the barriers that block the way to the ballot-box against fraud and force, appropriations would again be refused, and again the session should die leaving the Government paralyzed. The extra session has convened; the democrats have indeed the power in both Houses, and thus far the war and the caucus have come up to the manifesto. So far the exploit has been easy. The time of trial is to come; the issue has been made, and of its ignominious failure, there can be no doubt if the Executive shall plant itself on constitutional right and duty, and stand firm. The actors in this scheme have managed themselves and their party into a predicament, and unless the President lets them out they will and they must back out. [Laughter, and manifestations of applause in the galleries.]

Should the Executive interpose the constitutional shield against the political enormities of the proposed bills, and then should the majority carry out the threat to desert their posts by adjournment without making the needed appropriations, I hope and trust they will be called back instantly and called back as often as need be until they relinquish a monstrous pretension and abandon a treasonable position.

The Army bill now pending, is not, in its political features, the bill tendered us at the last session a few days ago; it is not the same bill then insisted on as the ultimatum of the majority. The bill as it comes to us now, condemns its predecessor as crude and objectionable. It was found to need alteration. It did need alteration badly, and those who lately insisted on it as it was, insist on it now as it then was not. A grave proviso has been added to save the right of the President to aid a State gasping in the throes of rebellion or invasion and calling for help. As the provision stood when thrust upon us first and last at the recent session, it would have punished as a felon the President of the United States, the General of the Army, and others, for attempting to obey the Constitution of the United States and two ancient acts of Congress, one of them signed by George Washington. Shorn of this absurdity, the bill as it now stands, should it become a law, will be the first enactment of its kind that ever found its way into the statutes of the United States. A century, with all its activities and party strifes, with all its passionate discords, with all its expedients for party advantage, with all its wisdom and its folly, with all its patriotism and its treason, has never till now produced a congressional majority which deemed such a statute fit to be enacted.

Let me state the meaning of the amendments proposed under guise of enlarging liberty on election day—that day of days when order, peace, and security for all, as well as liberty, should reign. The amendments declare in plain legal effect that, no matter what the exigency may be, no matter what violence or carnage may run riot and trample down right and life, no matter what mob brutality may become master, if the day be election day, any officer or person, civil, military, or naval, from the President down, who attempts to interfere, to prevent or quell violence by the aid of national soldiers, or armed men not soldiers, shall be punished, and may be fined $5,000 and imprisoned for five years. This is the law we are required to set up. Yes, not only to leave murderous ruffianism untouched, but to invite it into action by assurances of safety in advance.

In the city of New York, all the thugs and shoulder-hitters and repeaters, all the carriers of slung-shot, dirks, and bludgeons, all the fraternity of the bucketshops, the rat-pits, the hells and the slums, all the graduates of the nurseries of modern so-called democracy, [laughter;] all those who employ and incite them, from King’s Bridge to the Battery, are to be told in advance that on the day when the million people around them choose their members of the National Legislature, no matter what God-daring or man-hurting enormities they may commit, no matter what they do, nothing that they can do will meet with the slightest resistance from any national soldier or armed man clothed with national authority.

Another bill, already on our tables, strikes down even police officers armed, or unarmed, of the United States.

In South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and in the other States where the colored citizens are counted to swell the representation in Congress, and then robbed of their ballots and dismissed from the political sun—in all such States, every rifle club, and white league, and murderous band, and every tissue ballot-box stuffer, night-rider, and law-breaker, is to be told that they may turn national elections into a bloody farce, that they may choke the whole proceeding with force and fraud, and blood, and that the nation shall not confront them with one armed man. State troops, whether under the name of rifle clubs or white leagues, or any other, armed with the muskets of the United States, may constitute the mob, may incite the mob, but the national arm is to be tied and palsied.

I repeat such an act of Congress has never yet existed. If there ever was a time when such an act could safely and fitly stand upon the statute book, that time is not now, and is not likely to arrive in the near future. Until rebellion raised its iron hand, all parties and all sections had been content to leave where the Constitution left it the power and duty of the President to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

The Constitution has in this regard three plain commands:

The President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Again, “The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States.”

“The actual service of the United States” some man may say means war merely, service in time of war. Let me read again, “Congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the militia.” For what? First of all, “to execute the laws of the Union.”

Yes, Congress shall have power “to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union.” Speaking to lawyers, I venture to emphasize the word “execute.” It is a term of art; it has a long-defined meaning. The act of 1795, re-enacted since, emphasized these constitutional provisions.

* * * * *

The election law came in to correct abuses which reached their climax in 1868 in the city of New York. In that year in the State of New York the republican candidate for governor was elected; the democratic candidate was counted in. Members of the Legislature were fraudulently seated. The election was a barbarous burlesque. Many thousand forged naturalization papers were issued; some of them were white and some were coffee-colored. The same witnesses purported to attest hundreds and thousands of naturalization affidavits, and the stupendous fraud of the whole thing was and is an open secret. Some of these naturalization papers were sent to other States. So plenty were they, that some of them were sent to Germany, and Germans who had never left their country claimed exemption from the German draft for soldiers in the Franco-Prussian war, because they were naturalized American citizens! [Laughter.]

Repeating, ballot-box stuffing, ruffianism, and false counting decided everything. Tweed made the election officers, and the election officers were corrupt. In 1868, thirty thousand votes were falsely added to the democratic majority in the cities of New York and Brooklyn alone. Taxes and elections were the mere spoil and booty of a corrupt junta in Tammany Hall. Assessments, exactions, and exemptions were made the bribes and the penalties of political submission. Usurpation and fraud inaugurated a carnival of corrupt disorder; and obscene birds without number swooped down to the harvest and gorged themselves on every side in plunder and spoliation. Wrongs and usurpations springing from the pollution and desecration of the ballot-box stalked high-headed in the public way. The courts and the machinery of justice were impotent in the presence of culprits too great to be punished.

The act of 1870 came in to throttle such abuses. It was not born without throes and pangs. It passed the Senate after a day and a night which rang with democratic maledictions and foul aspersions.

In the autumn of that year an election was held for the choice of Representatives in Congress. I see more than one friend near me who for himself and for others has reason even unto this day to remember that election and the apprehension which preceded it. It was the first time the law of 1870 had been put in force. Resistance was openly counseled. Democratic newspapers in New York advised that the officers of the law be pitched into the river. Disorder was afoot. Men, not wanting in bravery, and not republicans, dreaded the day. Bloodshed, arson, riot were feared. Ghastly spectacles were still fresh in memory. The draft riots had spread terror which had never died, and strong men shuddered when they remembered the bloody assizes of the democratic party. They had seen men and women, blind with party hate, dizzy and drunk with party madness, stab and burn and revel in murder and in mutilating the dead. They had seen an asylum for colored orphans made a funeral pile, and its smoke sent up from their Christian and imperial city to tell in heaven of the inhuman bigotry, the horrible barbarity of man. Remembering such sickening scenes, and dreading their repetition, they asked the President to protect them—to protect them with the beak and claw of national power. Instantly the unkenneled packs of party barked in vengeful chorus. Imprecations, maledictions, and threats were hurled at Grant; but with that splendid courage which never blanched in battle, which never quaked before clamor—with that matchless self-poise which did not desert him even when a continent beyond the sea rose and uncovered before him, [applause in the galleries,] he responded in the orders which it has pleased the honorable Senator from Delaware to read. The election thus protected was the fairest, the freest, the most secure, a generation has seen. When, two years afterward, New York came to crown Grant with her vote, his action in protecting her chief city on the Ides of November, 1870, was not forgotten. When next New York has occasion to record her judgment of the services of Grant, his action in 1870 touching peace in the city of New York will not be hidden away by those who espouse him wisely. [Applause in the galleries.]

Now, the election law is to be emasculated; no national soldier must confront rioters or mobs; no armed man by national authority, though not a soldier, must stay the tide of brutality or force; no deputy marshal must be within call; no supervisor must have power to arrest any man who in his sight commits the most flagrant breach of the peace. But the democrats tell us “we have not abolished the supervisors; we have left them.” Yes, the legislative bill leaves the supervisors, two stool-pigeons with their wings clipped, [laughter,] two licensed witnesses to stand about idle, and look—yes, “a cat may look at a king”—but they must not touch bullies or lawbreakers, not if they do murders right before their eyes.

If a civil officer should, under the pending amendment, attempt to quell a riot by calling on the bystanders, if they have arms, he is punishable for that. If a marshal, the marshal of the district in which the election occurs, the marshal nominated to the Senate and confirmed by the Senate—I do not mean a deputy marshal—should see an affray or a riot at the polls on election day and call upon the bystanders to quell it, if this bill becomes a law, and one of those bystanders has a revolver in his pocket, or another one takes a stick or a cudgel in his hand, the marshal may be fined $5,000 and punished by five years’ imprisonment.

Such are the devices to belittle national authority and national law, to turn the idea of the sovereignty of the nation into a laughing-stock and a by-word.

Under what pretexts is this uprooting and overturning to be? Any officer who transgresses the law, be he civil or military, may be punished in the courts of the State or in the courts of the nation under existing law. Is the election act unconstitutional? The courts for ten years have been open to that question. The law has been pounded with all the hammers of the lawyers, but it has stood the test; no court has pronounced it unconstitutional, although many men have been prosecuted and convicted under it. Judge Woodruff and Judge Blatchford have vindicated its constitutionality. But, as I said before, the constitutional argument has been abandoned. The supreme political court, practically now above Congresses or even constitutions, the democratic caucus, has decided that the law is constitutional. The record of the judgment is in the legislative bill.

We are told it costs money to enforce the law. Yes, it costs money to enforce all laws; it costs money to prosecute smugglers, counterfeiters, murderers, mail robbers and others. We have been informed that it has cost $200,000 to execute the election act. It cost more than $5,000,000,000 in money alone, to preserve our institutions and our laws, in one war, and the nation which bled and the nation which paid is not likely to give up its institutions and the birthright of its citizens for $200,000. [Applause in the galleries.]

The presiding officer, (Mr. COCKRELL, in the chair.) The Senator will suspend a moment. The chair will announce to the galleries that there shall be no more applause; if so, the galleries will be cleared immediately.

Mr. CONKLING. Mr. President, that interruption reminds me, the present occupant of the chair having been deeply interested in the bill, that the appropriations made and squandered for local and unlawful improvements in the last river and harbor bill alone, would pay for executing the election law as long as grass grows or water runs. The interest on the money wrongfully squandered in that one bill, would execute it twice over perpetually. The cost of this needless extra session, brought about as a partisan contrivance, would execute the election law for a great while. A better way to save the cost, than to repeal the law, is to obey it. Let White Leagues and rifle clubs disband; let your night-riders dismount; let your tissue ballot-box stuffers desist; let repeaters, false-counters, and ruffians no longer be employed to carry elections, and then the cost of executing the law will disappear from the public ledger.

Again we are told that forty-five million people are in danger from an army nominally of twenty-five thousand men scattered over a continent, most of them beyond the frontiers of civilized abode. Military power has become an affrighting specter. Soldiers at the polls are displeasing to a political party. What party? That party whose Administration ordered soldiers, who obeyed, to shoot down and kill unoffending citizens here in the streets of Washington on election day; that party which has arrested and dispersed Legislatures at the point of the bayonet; that party which has employed troops to carry elections to decide that a State should be slave and should not be free; that party which has corraled courts of justice with national bayonets, and hunted panting fugitive slaves, in peaceful communities, with artillery and dragoons; that party which would have to-day no majority in either House of Congress except for elections dominated and decided by violence and fraud; that party under whose sway, in several States, not only the right to vote, but the right to be, is now trampled under foot.

Such is the source of an insulting summons to the Executive to become particeps criminis in prostrating wholesome laws, and this is the condition on which the money of the people, paid by the people, shall be permitted to be used for the purposes for which the people paid it.

Has the present national Administration been officiously robust in checking the encroachments and turbulence of democrats, either by the use of troops or otherwise? I ask this question because the next election is to occur during the term of the present Administration.

What is the need of revolutionary measures now? What is all this uproar and commotion, this daring venture of partisan experiment, for? Why not make your issue against these laws, and carry your issue to the people? If you can elect a President and a Congress of your thinking, you will have it all your own way.

Why now should there be an attempt to block the wheels of government on the eve of an election at which this whole question is triable before the principals and masters of us all? The answer is inevitable. But one truthful explanation can be made of this daring enterprise. It is a political, a partisan manœuvre. It is a strike for party advantage. With a fair election and an honest count, the democratic party cannot carry the country. These laws, if executed, insure some approach to a fair election. Therefore they stand in the way, and therefore they are to be broken down.

I reflect upon no man’s motives, but I believe that the sentiment which finds expression in the transaction now proceeding in the two houses of Congress, has its origin in the idea I have stated. I believe that the managers and charioteers of the democratic party think that with a fair election and a fair count they cannot carry the State of New York. They know that with free course, such as existed in 1868, to the ballot-box and count, no matter what majority may be given in that State where the green grass grows, the great cities will overbalance and swamp it. They know that with the ability to give eighty, ninety, one hundred thousand majority in the county of New York and the county of Kings, half of it fraudulently added, it is idle for the three million people living above the Highlands of the Hudson to vote.

This is a struggle for power. It is a fight for empire. It is a contrivance to clutch the National Government. That we believe; that I believe.

The nation has tasted, and drunk to the dregs, the sway of the democratic party, organized and dominated by the same influences which dominate it again and still. You want to restore that dominion. We mean to resist you at every step and by every lawful means that opportunity places in our hands. We believe that it is good for the country, good for every man North and South who loves the country now, that the Government should remain in the hands of those who were never against it. We believe that it is not wise or safe to give over our nationality to the dominion of the forces which formerly and now again rule the democratic party. We do not mean to connive at further conquests, and we tell you that if you gain further political power, you must gain it by fair means, and not by foul. We believe that these laws are wholesome. We believe that they are necessary barriers against wrongs, necessary defenses for rights; and so believing, we will keep and defend them even to the uttermost of lawful honest effort.

The other day, it was Tuesday I think, it pleased the honorable Senator from Illinois [Mr. Davis] to deliver to the Senate an address, I had rather said an opinion, able and carefully prepared. That honorable Senator knows well the regard not only, but the sincere respect in which I hold him, and he will not misunderstand the freedom with which I shall refer to some of his utterances.

Whatever else his sayings fail to prove, they did I think, prove their author, after Mrs. Winslow, the most copious and inexhaustible fountain of soothing syrup. The honorable Senator seemed like one slumbering in a storm and dreaming of a calm. He said there was no uproar anywhere—one would infer you could hear a pin drop—from centre to circumference. Rights, he said, are secure. I have his language here. If I do not seem to give the substance aright I will stop and read it. Rights secure North and South; peace and tranquillity everywhere. The law obeyed and no need of special provisions or anxiety. It was in this strain that the Senator discoursed.

Are rights secure, when fresh-done barbarities show that local government in one portion of our land is no better than despotism tempered by assassination? Rights secure, when such things can be, as stand proved and recorded by committees of the Senate! Rights secure, when the old and the young fly in terror from their homes, and from the graves of their murdered dead! Rights secure, when thousands brave cold, hunger, death, seeking among strangers in a far country a humanity which will remember that—

“Before man made them citizens, Great nature made them men!”

Read the memorial signed by Judge Dillon, by the democratic mayor of Saint Louis, by Mr. Henderson, once a member of the Senate, and by other men known to the nation, detailing what has been done in recent weeks on the Southern Mississippi. Read the affidavits accompanying this memorial. Has any one a copy of the memorial here? I have seen the memorial. I have seen the signatures. I hope the honorable Senator from Illinois will read it, and read the affidavits which accompany it. When he does, he will read one of the most sickening recitals of modern times. He will look upon one of the bloodiest and blackest pictures in the book of recent years. Yet the Senator says, all is quiet. “There is not such faith, no not in Israel.” Verily “order reigns in Warsaw.”

Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

Mr. President, the republican party every where wants peace and prosperity—peace and prosperity in the South, as much and as sincerely as elsewhere. Disguising the truth, will not bring peace and prosperity. Soft phrases will not bring peace. “Fair words butter no parsnips.” We hear a great deal of loose, flabby talk about “fanning dying embers,” “rekindling smoldering fires,” and so on. Whenever the plain truth is spoken, these unctious monitions, with a Peter Parley benevolence, fall copiously upon us. This lullaby and hush has been in my belief a mistake from the beginning. It has misled the South and misled the North. In Andrew Johnson’s time a convention was worked up at Philadelphia, and men were brought from the North and South, for ecstasy and gush. A man from Massachusetts and a man from South Carolina locked arms and walked into the convention arm in arm, and sensation and credulity palpitated, and clapped their hands, and thought an universal solvent had been found. Serenades were held at which “Dixie” was played. Later on, anniversaries of battles fought in the war of Independence, were made occasions by men from the North and men from the South for emotional, dramatic, hugging ceremonies. General Sherman, I remember, attended one of them, and I remember also, that with the bluntness of a soldier, and the wisdom and hard sense of a statesman, he plainly cautioned all concerned not to be carried away, and not to be fooled. But many have been fooled, and being fooled, have helped to swell the democratic majorities which now display themselves before the public eye.

Of all such effusive demonstrations I have this to say: honest, serious convictions are not ecstatic or emotional. Grave affairs and lasting purposes do not express or vent themselves in honeyed phrase or sickly sentimentality, rhapsody, or profuse professions.

This is as true of political as of religious duties. The Divine Master tells us, “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”

Facts are stubborn things, but the better way to deal with them is to look them squarely in the face.

The republican party and the Northern people preach no crusade against the South. I will say nothing of the past beyond a single fact. When the war was over, no man who fought against his flag was punished even by imprisonment. No estate was confiscated. Every man was left free to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After the Southern States were restored to their relations in the Union, no man was ever disfranchised by national authority—not one. If this statement is denied, I invite any Senator to correct me. I repeat it. After the Southern State governments were rebuilded, and the States were restored to their relations in the Union, by national authority, not one man for one moment was ever denied the right to vote, or hindered in the right. From the time that Mississippi was restored, there never has been an hour when Jefferson Davis might not vote as freely as the honorable Senator in his State of Illinois. The North, burdened with taxes, draped in mourning, dotted over with new-made graves tenanted by her bravest and her best, sought to inflict no penalty upon those who had stricken her with the greatest, and, as she believed, the guiltiest rebellion that ever crimsoned the annals of the human race.

As an example of generosity and magnanimity, the conduct of the nation in victory was the grandest the world has ever seen. The same spirit prevails now. Yet our ears are larumed with the charge that the republicans of the North seek to revive and intensify the wounds and pangs and passions of the war, and that the southern democrats seek to bury them in oblivion of kind forgetfulness.

We can test the truth of these assertions right before our eyes. Let us test them. Twenty-seven States adhered to the Union in the dark hour. Those States send to Congress two hundred and sixty-nine Senators and Representatives. Of these two hundred and sixty-nine Senators and Representatives, fifty-four, and only fifty-four, were soldiers in the armies of the Union. The eleven States which were disloyal send ninety-three Senators and Representatives to Congress. Of these, eighty-five were soldiers in the armies of the rebellion, and at least three more held high civil station in the rebellion, making in all eighty-eight out of ninety-three.

Let me state the same fact, dividing the Houses. There are but four Senators here who fought in the Union Army. They all sit here now; and there are but four. Twenty Senators sit here who fought in the army of the rebellion, and three more Senators sit here who held high civil command in the confederacy.

In the House, there are fifty Union soldiers from twenty-seven States, and sixty-five confederate soldiers from eleven States.

Who, I ask you, Senators, tried by this record, is keeping up party divisions on the issues and hatreds of the war?

The South is solid. Throughout all its borders it has no seat here save two in which a republican sits. The Senator from Mississippi [MR. BRUCE] and the Senator from Louisiana [Mr. KELLOGG] are still spared; and whisper says that an enterprise is afoot to deprive one of these Senators of his seat. The South is emphatically solid. Can you wonder that the North soon becomes solid too? Do you not see that the doings witnessed now in Congress fill the North with alarm, and distrust of the patriotism and good faith of men from the South? Forty-two democrats have seats on this floor; forty-three if you add the honorable Senator from Illinois, [MR. DAVIS.] He does not belong to the democratic party, although I must say, after reading his speech the other day, that a democrat who asks anything more of him is an insatiate monster. [Laughter.] If we count the Senator from Illinois, there are forty-three democrats in this Chamber. Twenty-three is a clear majority of all, and twenty-three happens to be exactly the number of Senators from the South who were leaders in the late rebellion.

Do you anticipate my object in stating these numbers? For fear you do not, let me explain. Forty-two Senators rule the Senate; twenty-three Senators rule the caucus. A majority rules the Senate; a caucus rules the majority; and the twenty-three southern Senators rule the caucus. The same thing, in the same way, governed by the same elements, is true in the House.

This present assault upon the purity and fairness of elections, upon the Constitution, upon the executive department, and upon the rights of the people; not the rights of a king, not on such rights as we heard the distinguished presiding officer, who I am glad now to discover in his seat, dilate upon of a morning some weeks ago; not the divine right of kings, but the inborn rights of the people—the present assault upon them, could never have been inaugurated without the action of the twenty-three southern Senators here, and the southern Representatives there, [pointing to the House.]

The people of the North know this and see it. They see the lead and control of the democratic party again where it was before the war, in the hands of the South. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” The honorable Senator from Alabama [Mr. MORGAN], educated no doubt by experience in political appearances, and spectacular effects, said the other day that he preferred the democrats from the North should go first in this debate. I admired his sagacity. It was the skill of an experienced tactician to deploy the northern levies as the sappers and miners; it was very becoming certainly. It was not from cruelty, or to make them food for powder, that he set them in the forefront of the battle; he thought it would appear better for the northern auxiliaries to go first and tunnel the citadel. Good, excellent, as far as it went; but it did not go very far in misleading anybody; putting the tail foremost and the head in the sand, only displayed the species and habits of the bird. [Laughter.]

We heard the other day that “the logic of events” had filled the southern seats here with men banded together by a common history and a common purpose. The Senator who made that sage observation perhaps builded better than he knew. The same logic of events, let me tell democratic Senators, and the communities behind them, is destined to bring from the North more united delegations.

I read in a newspaper that it was proposed the other day in another place, to restore to the Army of the United States men who, educated at the nation’s cost and presented with the nation’s sword, drew the sword against the nation’s life. In the pending bill is a provision for the retirement of officers now in the Army, with advanced rank and exaggerated pay. This may be harmless, it may be kind. One swallow proves not spring, but along with other things, suspicion will see in it an attempt to coax officers now in the Army to dismount, to empty their saddles, in order that others may get on.

So hue and cry is raised because courts, on motion, for cause shown in open court, have a right to purge juries in certain cases. No man in all the South, under thirty-five years of age, can be affected by this provision, because every such man was too young when the armies of the rebellion were recruited to be subject to the provision complained of. As to the rest, the discretion is a wholesome one. But, even if it were not, let me say in all kindness to southern Senators, it was not wise to make it a part of this proceeding, and raise this uproar in regard to it.

Even the purpose, in part already executed, to remove the old and faithful officers of the Senate, even Union soldiers, that their places may be snatched by others—to overturn an order of the Senate which has existed for a quarter of a century, in order to grasp all the petty places here, seems to me unwise. It is not wise, if you want to disarm suspicion that you mean aggrandizing, gormandizing, unreasonable things.

Viewing all these doings in the light of party advantage—advantage to the party to which I belong, I could not deplore them; far from it; but wishing the repose of the country, and the real, lasting, ultimate welfare of the South, and wishing it from the bottom of my heart, I believe they are flagrantly unwise, hurtfully injudicious.

What the South needs is to heal, build, mend, plant, sow. In short, to go to work. Invite labor; cherish it; do not drive it out. Quit proscription, both for opinion’s sake, and for color’s sake. Reform it altogether. I know there are difficulties in the way. I know there is natural repugnance in the way; but drop passion, drop sentiment which signifies naught, and let the material prosperity and civilization of your land advance. Do not give so much energy, so much restless, sleepless activity, to an attempt so soon to get possession once more, and dominate and rule the country. There is room enough at the national board, and it is not needed, it is not decorous, plainly speaking, that the South should be the MacGregor at the table, and that the head of the table should be wherever he sits. For a good many reasons, it is not worth while to insist upon it.

Mr. President, one of Rome’s famous legends stands in these words: “Let what each man thinks of the Republic be written on his brow.” I have spoken in the spirit of this injunction. Meaning offence to no man, and holding ill-will to no man, because he comes from the South, or because he differs with me in political opinion, I have spoken frankly, but with malice toward none.

This session, and the bill pending, are acts in a partisan and political enterprise. This debate, begun after a caucus had defined and clenched the position of every man in the majority, has not been waged to convince anybody here. It has resounded to fire the democratic heart, to sound a blast to the cohorts of party, to beat the long-roll, and set the squadrons in the field. That is its object, as plainly to be seen as the ultimate object of the attempted overthrow of laws.

Political speeches having been thus ordained, I have discussed political themes, and with ill-will to no portion of the country but good will toward every portion of it, I have with candor spoken somewhat of my thoughts of the duties and dangers of the hour. [Applause on the floor and in the galleries.]

Lincoln’s Speech at Gettysburg.

“Four-score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new Nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now, we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that Nation, or any Nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those, who here gave their lives that that Nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a large sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we SAY here, but it can never forget what they DID here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that Government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.”

Speech of Hon. John M. Broomall, of Pennsylvania,

On the Civil Rights Bill. House of Representatives, March 8, 1866.

Mr. Speaker, it is alleged that this species of legislation will widen the breach existing between the two sections of the country, will offend our southern brethren. Do not gentlemen know that those who are most earnestly asking this legislation are our southern brethren themselves.

They are imploring us to protect them against the conquered enemies of the country, who notwithstanding their surrender, have managed, through their skill or our weakness, to seize nearly all the conquered territory.

This is not the first instance in the world’s history in which all that had been gained by hard fighting was lost by bad diplomacy.

But they, whose feelings are entitled to so much consideration in the estimation of those who urge this argument, are not our southern brethren, but the southern brethren of our political opponents; the conquered rebels, pardoned and unpardoned; traitors priding themselves upon their treason.

These people are fastidious. The ordinary terms of the English language must be perverted to suit their tastes. Though they surrendered in open and public war, they are not to be treated as prisoners. Though beaten in the last ditch of the last fortification, they are not to be called a conquered people. The decision of the forum of their own choosing is to be explained away into meaningless formality for their benefit. Though guilty of treason, murder, arson, and all the crimes in the calendar, they are “our southern brethren.” The entire decalogue must be suspended lest it should offend these polished candidates for the contempt and execration of posterity.

Out of deference to the feelings of these sensitive gentlemen, an executive construction must be given to the word “loyalty,” so that it shall embrace men who only are not hanged because they have been pardoned, and who only did not destroy the Government because they could not. Out of deference to the feelings of these sensitive gentlemen, too, a distinguished public functionary, once the champion of the rights of man, a leader in the cause of human progress, a statesman whose keen foreknowledge could point out the “irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom,” cannot now see that treason and loyalty are uncompromising antagonisms.

It is charged against us that the wheels of Government are stopped by our refusal to admit the representatives of these southern communities. When we complain that Europe is underselling us in our markets, and demand protection for the American laborer, we are told to “admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we complain that excessive importations are impoverishing the country, and rapidly bringing on financial ruin, we are told to “admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we complain that an inflated currency is making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, keeping the prices of even the necessaries of life beyond the reach of widows and orphans who are living upon fixed incomes, the stereotyped answer comes, “Admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we demand a tax upon cotton to defray the enormous outlay made in dethroning that usurping “king of the world,” still the answer comes, and the executive parrots everywhere repeat it, “Admit the southern Senators and Representatives.”

The mind of the man who can see in that prescription a remedy for all political and social diseases must be curiously constituted. Would these Senators and Representatives vote a tax upon cotton? Would they protect American industry by increasing duties? Would they prevent excessive importations? To believe this requires as unquestioning a faith as to believe in the sudden conversion of whole communities from treason to loyalty.

We are blocking the wheels of Government! Why, the Government has managed to get along for four years, not only without the aid of the Southern Senators and Representatives, but against their efforts to destroy it; and in the mean time has crushed a rebellion that would have destroyed any other Government under heaven. Surely the nation can do without the services of these men, at least during the time required to examine their claims and to protect by appropriate legislation our Southern brethren. None but a Democrat would think of consulting the wolf about what safeguard should be thrown around the flock.

Those who advocate the admission of the Senators and Representatives from the States lately reclaimed from the rebellion, as a means of protecting the loyal men in those States and as a substitute for the system of legislation of which this bill is part, well know that the majority in both Houses of Congress ardently desire the full recognition of those States, and only ask that the rights and interests of the truly loyal men in those States shall be first satisfactorily secured.

Much useless controversy has been had about the legal status of those States. There is no difference between the two parties of the country on that point. The actual point of difference is this: the Democrats affiliate with their old political friends in the South, the late rebels, the friends and followers of Breckinridge, Lee, and Davis. The Union majority, on the other hand, naturally affiliate with the loyal men in the South, the men who have always supported the Government against Breckinridge, Lee, and Davis. Each party wants the South reconstructed in the hands of its own “southern brethren.”

In short, the northern party corresponding with the loyal men of the South ask that the legitimate results of Grant’s victory shall be carried out, while the northern party corresponding with the rebels of the South ask that things should be considered as if Lee had been the conqueror, or at least as if there had been a drawn battle, without victory on either side.

This brings the rights of those in whose behalf the opponents of the bill under consideration are acting directly in question, and in order to limit down the field of controversy as far as possible, let us inquire how far all parties agree upon the legal status of the communities lately in rebellion. Now, the meanest of all controversies is that which comes from dialectics. Where the disputants attach different meanings to the same word their time is worse than thrown away. I have always looked upon the question whether the States are in or out of the Union as only worthy of the schoolmen of the middle ages, who could write volumes upon a mere verbal quibble. The disputants would agree if they were compelled to use the word “State” in the same sense. I will endeavor to avoid this trifling.

All parties agree that at the close of the rebellion the people of North Carolina, for example, had been “deprived of all civil government.” The President, in his proclamation of May 29, 1865, tells the people of North Carolina this in so many words, and he tells the people of the other rebel States the same thing in his several proclamations to them. This includes the Conservatives and Democrats, who, however they may disagree, at last agree in this, that the President shall do their thinking.

The Republicans subscribe to this doctrine, though they differ in their modes of expressing it. Some say that those States have ceased to possess any of the rights and powers of government as States of the Union. Others say, with the late lamented President, that “those States are out of practical relations with the Government.”

Others hold that the State organizations are out of the Union. And still others that the rebels are conquered, and therefore that their organizations are at the will of the conqueror.

The President has hit upon a mode of expression which embraces concisely all these ideas. He says that the people of those States were, by the progress of the rebellion and by its termination, “deprived of all civil government.”

One step further. All parties agree that the people of these States, being thus disorganized for all State purposes, are still at the election of the government, citizens of the United States, and as such, as far as they have not been disqualified by treason, ought to be allowed to form their own State governments, subject to the requirements of the Constitution of the United States.

Still one step further. All parties agree that this cannot be done by mere unauthorized congregations of the people, but that the time, place and manner must be prescribed by some department of the Government, according to the argument of Mr. Webster and the spirit of the decision of the Supreme Court in Luther vs. Borden, 7 Howard, page 1.

Yet another step in the series of propositions. All parties agree that as Congress was not in session at the close of the rebellion, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, was bound to take possession of the conquered country and establish such government as was necessary.

Thus far all is harmonious; but now the divergence begins. At the commencement of the present session of Congress three-fourths of both Houses held that when the people of the States are “deprived of all civil government,” and when, therefore, it becomes necessary to prescribe the time, place, and manner in and by which they shall organize themselves again into States while the President may take temporary measures, yet only the law-making power of the Government is competent to the full accomplishment of the task. In other words, that only Congress can enable citizens of the United States to create States. I have said that at the commencement of the session three-fourths of both houses held this opinion. The proportion is smaller now, and by a judicious use of executive patronage it may become still smaller; but the truth of the proposition will not be affected if every Representative and Senator should be manipulated into denying it.

On the other hand, the remaining fourth, composed of the supple Democracy and its accessions, maintain that this State-creating power is vested in the President alone, and that he has already exercised it.

The holy horror with which our opponents affect to contemplate the doctrine of destruction of States is that much political hypocrisy. Every man who asks the recognition of the existing local governments in the South thereby commits himself to that doctrine. The only possible claim that can be set up in favor of the existing governments is based upon the theory that the old ones have been destroyed. The present organizations sprang up at the bidding of the President after the conquest among a people who, he said, had been “deprived of all civil government.”

If the President’s “experiment” had resulted in organizing the southern communities in loyal hands, the majority in Congress would have found no difficulty in indorsing it and giving it the necessary efficiency by legislative enactment.

In this case, too, the President never would have denied the power of Congress in the premises. He never would have set up the theory that the citizens of the United States, through their representatives, are not to be consulted when those who have once broken faith with them ask to have the compact renewed.

Our opponents have no love for the President. They called him a usurper and a tyrant in Tennessee. They ridiculed him as a negro “Moses.” They tried to kill him, and failing that, they accused him of being privy to the murder of his predecessor. But when his “experiment” at reconstruction was found to result in favor of their friends, the rebels, then they hung themselves about his neck like so many mill-stones, and tried to damn him to eternal infamy by indorsing his policy. Will they succeed? Will he shake them off, or go down with them?

But let us suffer these discordant elements to settle their own terms of combinations as best they may. The final result cannot be doubtful.

If ten righteous men were needed to save Sodom, even Andrew Johnson will find it impossible to save the Democratic party.

Our path of duty is plain before us. Let us pass this bill and such others as may be necessary to secure protection to the loyal men of the South. If our political opponents thwart our purposes in this, let us go to the country upon that issue.

I am by no means an advocate of extensive punishment, either in the way of hanging or confiscation, though some of both might be salutary. I do not ask that full retribution be enforced against those who have so grievously sinned. I am willing to make forgiveness the rule and punishment the exception; yet I have my ultimatum. I might excuse the pardon of the traitors Lee and Davis, even after the hanging of Wirz, who but obeyed their orders, orders which he would have been shot for disobeying. I might excuse the sparing of the master after killing the dog whose bite but carried with it the venom engendered in the master’s soul. I might look calmly upon a constituency ground down by taxation, and tell the complainants that they have neither remedy nor hope of vengeance upon the authors of their wrongs. I might agree to turn unpityingly from the mother whose son fell in the Wilderness, and the widow whose husband was starved at Andersonville, and tell them that in the nature of things retributive justice is denied them, and that the murderers of their kindred may yet sit in the councils of their country; yet even I have my ultimatum. I might consent that the glorious deeds of the last five years should be blotted from the country’s history; that the trophies won on a hundred battle-fields, the sublime visible evidence of the heroic devotion of America’s citizen soldiery, should be burned on the altar of reconciliation. I might consent that the cemetery at Gettysburg should be razed to the ground; that its soil should be submitted to the plow, and that the lamentation of the bereaved should give place to the lowing of cattle. But there is a point beyond which I shall neither be forced nor persuaded. I will never consent that the government shall desert its allies in the South and surrender their rights and interests to the enemy, and in this I will make no distinction of caste or color either among friends or foes.

The people of the South were not all traitors. Among them were knees that never bowed to the Baal of secession, lips that never kissed his image. Among the fastness of the mountains, in the rural districts, far from the contagion of political centres, the fires of patriotism still burned, sometimes in the higher walks of life, oftener in obscure hamlets, and still oftener under skins as black as the hearts of those who claimed to own them.

These people devoted all they had to their country. The homes of some have been confiscated, and they are now fugitives from the scenes that gladdened their childhood. Some were cast into dungeons for refusing to fire upon their country’s flag, and still others bear the marks of stripes inflicted for giving bread and water to the weary soldier of the Republic, and aiding the fugitive to escape the penalty of the disloyalty to treason. If the God of nations listened to the prayers that ascended from so many altars during those eventful years, it was to the prayers of these people.

Sir, we talked of patriotism in our happy northern homes, and claimed credit for the part we acted; but if the history of these people shall ever be written, it will make us blush that we ever professed to love our country.

The government now stands guard over the lives and fortunes of these people. They are imploring us not to yield them up without condition to those into whose hands recent events have committed the destinies of the unfortunate South. A nation which could thus withdraw its protection from such allies, at such a time, without their full and free consent, could neither hope for the approval of mankind nor the blessing of heaven.

Speech, of Hon. Charles A. Eldridge, of Wisconsin.

Against the Civil Rights Bill, in the House of Representatives, March 2, 1866.

Mr. Speaker: I thought yesterday that I would discuss this measure at some length; but I find myself this morning very unwell; and I shall therefore make only a few remarks, suggesting some objections to the bill.

I look upon the bill before us, Mr. Speaker, as one of the series of measures rising out of a feeling of distrust and hatred on the part of certain individuals, not only in this House, but throughout the country, toward these persons who formerly held slaves. I had hoped that long before this time the people of this country would have come to the conclusion that the subject of slavery and the questions connected with it had already sufficiently agitated this country. I had hoped that now, when the war is over, when peace has been restored, when in every State of the Union the institution of slavery has been freely given up, its abolition acquiesced in, and the Constitution of the United States amended in accordance with that idea, this subject would cease to haunt us as it is made to do in the various measures which are constantly being here introduced.

This bill is, it appears to me, one of the most insidious and dangerous of the various measures which have been directed against the interest of the people of this country. It is another of the measures designed to take away the essential rights of the State. I know that when I speak of States and State rights, I enter upon unpopular subjects. But, sir, whatever other gentlemen may think, I hold that the rights of the States are the rights of the Union, that the rights of the States and the liberty of the States are essential to the liberty of the individual citizen. * * *

Now, it may be said that there is no reason for this distinction; but I claim that there is. And there is no man that can look upon this crime, horrid as it is, diabolical as it is when committed by the white man, and not say that such a crime committed by a negro upon a white woman deserves, in the sense and judgment of the American people, a different punishment from that inflicted upon the white man. And yet the very purpose of this section, as I contend, is to abolish or prevent the execution of laws making a distinction in regard to the punishment.

But, further, it is said the negro race is weak and feeble; that they are mere children—“wards of the Government.” In many instances it might be just and proper to inflict a less punishment upon them for certain crimes than upon men of intelligence and education, whose motives may have been worse. It might be better for the community to control them by milder and gentler means. If the judge sitting upon the bench of the State court shall, in carrying out the law of the State, inflict a higher penalty upon the white man than that which attaches to the freedman, not that I suppose it is ever contemplated to enforce that, yet it would be equally applicable, and the penalty would be incurred by the judge in the same manner precisely.

But I proceed to the section I was about to remark upon when the gentleman interrupted me. The marshals who may be employed to execute warrants and precepts under this bill, as I have already remarked, are offered a bribe for the execution of them. It creates marshals in great numbers, and authorizes commissioners to appoint almost anybody for that purpose, and it stimulates them by the offer of a reward not given in the case of the arrest of persons guilty of any other crime.

It goes further. It authorizes the President, when he is apprehensive that some crime of that sort may be committed, on mere suspicion, mere information or statement that it is likely to be committed, to take any judge from the bench or any marshal from his office to the place where the crime is apprehended, for the purpose of more efficiently and speedily carrying out the provisions of the bill.

The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Thayer) tells us that it is very remarkable that it should be claimed that this bill is intended to create and continue a sort of military despotism over the people where this law is to be executed. It seems to me nothing is plainer. Where do we find any laws heretofore passed having no relation to the negro in which such a provision as this tenth section is to be found? Generally the marshal seeks by himself to execute this warrant, and failing, he calls out his POSSE COMITATUS. But this bill authorizes the use in the first instance of the Army and Navy by the President for the purpose of executing such writs.

The gentlemen who advocate this bill are great sticklers for equality, and insist that there shall be no distinction made on account of race or color.

Why, sir, every provision of this bill carries upon its face the distinction, and is calculated to perpetuate it forever as long as the act shall be in force. Where did this measure originate but in the recognition of the difference between races and colors? Does any one pretend that this bill is intended to protect white men—to save them from any wrongs which may be inflicted upon them by the negroes? Not at all. It is introduced and pressed in the pretended interest of the black man, and recognizes and virtually declares distinction between race and color.

* * * * *

I deprecate all these measures because of the implication they carry upon their face, that the people who have heretofore owned slaves intend to do them harm. I do not believe it. So far as my knowledge goes, and so far as my information extends, I believe that the people who have held the freedmen as slaves will treat them with more kindness, with more leniency, than those of the North who make such loud professions of love and affection for them, and are so anxious to pass these bills. They know their nature; they know their wants; they know their habits; they have been brought up together; none of the prejudices and unkind feelings which many in the north would have toward them.

I do not credit all these stories about the general feeling of hostility in the South toward the negro. So far as I have heard opinions expressed upon the subject, and I have conversed with many persons from that section of the country, they do not blame the negro for anything that has happened. As a general thing, he was faithful to them and their interests, until the army reached the place and took him from them. He has supported their wives and children in the absence of the husbands and fathers in the armies of the South. He has done for them what no one else could have done. They recognize his general good feeling toward them, and are inclined to reciprocate that feeling toward him.

I believe that is the general feeling of the southern people to-day. The cases of ill-treatment are exceptional cases. They are like the cases which have occurred in the northern States where the unfortunate have been thrown upon our charity.

Take, for instance, the stories of the cruel treatment of the insane in the State of Massachusetts. They may have been barbarously confined in the loathsome dens as stated in particular instances; but is that any evidence of the general ill-will of the people of the State of Massachusetts toward the insane? Is that any reason why the Federal arm should be extended to Massachusetts to control and protect the insane there?

It has also been said that certain paupers in certain States have been badly used, paupers, too, who were whites. Is that any reason why we should extend the arm of the Federal Government to those States to protect the poor who are thrown upon the charity of the people there?

Sir, we must yield to the altered state of things in this country. We must trust the people; it is our duty to do so; we cannot do otherwise. And the sooner we place ourselves in a position where we can win the confidence of our late enemies, where our counsels will be heeded, where our advice may be regarded, the sooner will the people of the whole country be fully reconciled to each other and their changed relationship; the sooner will all the inhabitants of our country be in the possession of all the rights and immunities essential to their prosperity and happiness.

Hon. A. K. McClure on What of the Republic?

Annual Address delivered before the Literary Societies of Dickinson College, June 26th, 1873.

GENTLEMEN OF THE LITERARY SOCIETIES:—What of the Republic? The trials and triumphs of our free institutions are hackneyed themes. They are the star attractions of every political conflict. They furnish a perpetual well-spring of every grade of rhetoric for the hustings, and partisan organs proclaim with the regularity of the seasons, the annual perils of free government.

But a different occasion, with widely different opportunities and duties, has brought us together. The dissembling of the partisan would be unwelcome, but here truth may be manfully spoken of that which so profoundly concerns us all. I am called to address young men who are to rank among the scholars, the teachers, the statesmen, the scientists of their age. They will be of the class that must furnish a large proportion of the executives, legislators, ministers, and instructors of the generation now rapidly crowding us to the long halt that soon must come. Doubtless, here and there, some who have been less favored with opportunities, will surpass them in the race for distinction; but in our free government where education is proffered to all, and the largest freedom of conviction and action invites the humblest to honorable preferment, the learned must bear a conspicuous part in directing the destiny of the nation. Every one who moulds a thought or inspires a fresh resolve even in the remotest regions of the Continent, shapes, in some measure, the sovereign power of the Republic.

The time and the occasion are alike propitious for a dispassionate review of our political system, and of the political duties which none can reject and be blameless. Second only to the claims of religion are the claims of country. Especially should the Christian, whether teacher or hearer, discharge political duties with fidelity. I do not mean that the harangue of the partisan should desecrate holy places, or that men should join in the brawls of pot-house politicians; but I do mean that a faithful discharge of our duty to free government is not only consistent with the most exemplary and religious life, but is a Christian as well as a civil obligation. The government that maintains liberty of conscience as one of its fundamental principles, and under which Christianity is recognized as the common law, has just claims upon the Christian citizen for the vigilant exercise of all political rights.

If it be true, as is so often confessed around us, that we have suffered a marked decline in political morality and in our political administration, let it not be assumed that the defect is in our system of government, or that the blame lies wholly with those who are faithless or incompetent. Here no citizen is voiceless, and none can claim exemption from just responsibility for evils in the body politic. Ours is, in fact as well as in theory, a government of the people; and its administration is neither better nor worse than the people themselves. It was devised by wise and patriotic men, who gave to it the highest measure of fidelity; and so perfectly and harmoniously is its framework fashioned, that the sovereign power can always exercise a salutary control over its own servants. An accidental mistake of popular judgment, or the perfidy of an executive, or the enactment of profligate or violent laws, are all held in such wholesome check by co-ordinate powers, as to enable the supreme authority of the nation to restrain or correct almost every conceivable evil.

Until the people as a whole are given over to debauchery the safety of our free institutions cannot be seriously endangered. True, such a result might be possible without the demoralization of a majority of the people, if good citizens surrender their rights, and their duties, and their government to those who desire to rule in profligacy and oppression.

If reputable citizens refrain from active participation in our political conflicts, they voluntarily surrender the safety of their persons and property, and the good order and well-being of society, to those who are least fitted for the exercise of authority. When such results are visible in any of the various branches of our political system, turn to the true source and place the responsibility where it justly belongs. Do not blame the thief and the adventurer, for they are but plying their vocations, and they rob public rather than private treasure, because men guard the one and do not guard the other. Good men employ every proper precaution to protect their property from the lawless. When an injury is done to them individually they are swift to invoke the avenging arm of justice. They are faithful guardians of their own homes and treasures against the untitled spoiler, while they are criminally indifferent to the public wrongs done by those who, in the enactment and execution of the laws, directly affect their happiness and prosperity. Do not answer that politics have become disreputable. Such a declaration is a confession of guilt. He who utters it becomes his own accuser. If it be true that our politics, either generally or in any particular municipality or State, have become disreputable, who must answer for it? Who have made our politics disreputable? Surely not the disreputable citizens, for they are a small minority in every community and in every party. If they have obtained control of political organizations, and thereby secured their election to responsible trusts, it must have been with the active or passive approval of the good citizens who hold the actual power in their own hands. There is not a disgraceful official shaming the people of this country to-day, who does not owe his place to the silent assent or positive support of those who justly claim to be respectable citizens, and who habitually plead their own wrongs to escape plain and imperative duties. If dishonest or incompetent appointments have been made, in obedience to the demands of mere partisans, a just expression of the honest sentiments of better citizens, made with the manliness that would point to retribution for such wrongs, would promptly give us a sound practical civil service, and profligacy and dishonesty would end.

Our Presidents and Governors are not wholly or even mainly responsible for the low standard of our officials. If good men concede primary political control to those who wield it for selfish ends, by refraining from an active discharge of their political duties, and make the appointing powers dependent for both counsel and support upon the worst political elements, who is to blame when public sentiment is outraged by the selection of unworthy men to important public trusts? The fruits are but the natural, logical results of good citizens refusing to accept their political duties. There is not a blot on our body politic to-day that the better elements of the people could not remove whenever they resolved to do so,—and they will so resolve in good time, as they have always done in the past. There is not a defect or deformity in our political administration that they cannot, and will not correct, by the peaceful expression of their sober convictions, in the legitimate way pointed out by our free institutions.

You who are destined to be more or less conspicuous among the teachers of men, should study well this reserved power so immediately connected with the preservation of our government. The virtue and intelligence of the people is the sure bulwark of safety for the Republic. It has been the source of safety in all times past, in peace and in war, and it is to-day, and will ever continue to be, the omnipotent power that forbids us to doubt the complete success of free government. It may, at times, be long suffering and slow to resent wrongs which grow gradually in strength and diffuse their poison throughout the land. It may invoke just censure for its forbearance in seasons of partisan strife. It may long seem lost as a ruling element of our political system, and may appear to be faithless to its high and sacred duties. It may be unfelt in its gentler influences, which should ever be active in maintaining the purity and dignity of society and government. But if for a season the better efforts of a free people are not evident to quicken and support public virtue, it must not be assumed that the source of good influences has been destroyed, or that public virtue cannot be restored to its just supremacy. When healthful influences do not come like the dew drops which glitter in the morning as they revive the harvest of the earth, they will most surely come in their terrible majesty, as the tempest comes to purify the atmosphere about us. The miasmas which arise from material corruption, poison the air we breathe and disease all physical life within their reach. The poison of political corruption is no less subtle and destructive in its influences upon communities and nations. But when either becomes general or apparently beyond the power of ordinary means of correction, the angry sweep of the hurricane must perform the work of regeneration. In our government the mild, but effectual restraints of good men should be ceaseless in their beneficent offices, but when they fail to be felt in our public affairs, and evil control has widened and strengthened itself in departments of power, the storm and the thunderbolt have to be invoked for the public safety, and our convulsive but lawful revolutions attest the omnipotence of the reserved virtue of a faithful and intelligent people.

I am not before you to garner the scars and disjointed columns of free government. The Republic that has been reared by a century of patriotic labor and sacrifice, more than covers its wounds with the noblest achievements ever recorded in man’s struggle for the rights of man. It is not perfect in its administration or in the exercise of its vast and responsible powers; but when was it so? when shall it be so? No human work is perfect. No government in all the past has been without its misshaped ends; and few, indeed, have survived three generations without revolution. We must have been more than mortals, if our history does not present much that we would be glad to efface. We should be unlike all great peoples of the earth, if we did not mark the ebb and flow of public virtue, and the consequent struggles between the good and evil elements of a society in which freedom is at times debased to license. We have had seasons of war and of peace. We have had tidal waves of passion, with their sweeping demoralization. We have enlisted the national pride in the perilous line of conquest, and vindicated it by the beneficent fruits of our civilization. We have had the tempest of aggression, and the profound calm that was the conservator of peace throughout the world. We have revolutionized the policy of the government through the bitter conflicts of opposing opinions, and it has been strengthened by its trials. We have had the fruits of national struggles transferred to the vanquished, without a shade of violence; and the extreme power of impeachment has been invoked in the midst of intensest political strife, and its judgment patriotically obeyed. We have had fraternal war with its terrible bereavements and destruction. We have completed the circle of national perils, and the virtue and intelligence of the people have ever been the safety of the Republic.

At no previous period of our history have opportunity and duty so happily united to direct the people of this country to the triumphs and to the imperfections of our government. We have reached a healthy calm in our political struggles. The nation has a trusted ruler, just chosen by an overwhelming vote. The disappointments of conviction or of ambition have passed away, and all yield cordial obedience and respect to the lawful authority of the country. The long-lingering passions of civil war have, for the last time, embittered our political strife, and must now be consigned to forgetfulness. The nation is assured of peace. The embers of discord may convulse a State until justice shall be enthroned over mad partisanship, but peace and justice are the inexorable purposes of the people, and they will be obeyed. Sectional hatred, long fanned by political necessities, is henceforth effaced from our politics, and the unity of a sincere brotherhood will be the cherished faith of every citizen. We first conquered rebellion, and now have conquered the bitterness and estrangement of its discomfiture.

The Vice-President of the insurgent Confederacy is a Representative in our Congress. One who was first in the field and last in the Senate in support of rebellion has just died while representing the government in a diplomatic position of the highest honor. Another who served the Confederacy in the field and in the forum, has been one of the constitutional advisers of the national administration. One of the most brilliant of Confederate warriors now serves in the United States Senate, and has presided over that body. The first Lieutenant of Lee was long since honored with responsible and lucrative official trust, and many of lesser note, lately our enemies, are discharging important public duties. The war and its issues are settled forever. Those who were arrayed against each other in deadly conflict are now friends. The appeal from the ballot to the sword has been made, and its arbitrament has been irrevocably ratified by the supreme power of the nation. Each has won from the other the respect that is ever awarded to brave men, and the affection that was clouded by the passion that made both rush to achieve an easy triumph, has returned chastened and strengthened by our common sacrifices. Our battle-fields will be memorable as the theatres of the conflicts of the noblest people the world had to offer to the god of carnage, and the monuments to our dead, North and South, will be pointed to by succeeding generations as the proud records of the heroism of the American people.

The overshadowing issues touching the war and its logical results are now no longer in controversy, and in vain will the unworthy invoke patriotism to give them unmerited distinction. No supreme danger can now confront the citizen who desires to correct errors or abuses of our political system. He who despairs of free institutions because evils have been tolerated, would have despaired of every administration the country has ever had, and of every government the world has ever known. If corruption pervades our institutions to an alarming extent, let it not be forgotten that it is the natural order of history repeating itself. It is but the experience of every nation, and our own experience returning to us, to call into vigorous action the regenerating power of a patriotic people. We have a supreme tribunal that is most jealous of its high prerogatives, and that will wield its authority mercilessly when the opportune season arrives. We have just emerged from the most impassioned and convulsive strife of modern history. It called out the highest type of patriotism, and life and treasure were freely given with the holiest devotion to the cause of self-government. With it came those of mean ambition, and of venal purposes, and they could gain power while the unselfish were devoted to the country’s cause. They could not be dethroned because there were grave issues which dare not be sacrificed. Such evils must be borne at times in all governments, rather than destroy the temple to punish the enemies of public virtue. To whatever extent these evils exist, they are not the legitimate creation of our free institutions. They are not the creation of maladministration, nor of any party. They are the monstrous barnacles spawned by unnatural war, which clogged the gallant ship of State in her extremity, and had to be borne into port with her. And now that the battle is ended, and the issues settled, do not distrust the reserved power of our free institutions. It will heal the scars of war and efface the stains of corruption, and present the great Republic to the world surpassing in grandeur, might and excellence, the sublimest conceptions ever cherished of human government.

As you come to assume the responsibilities which must be accepted by the educated citizen, you will be profoundly impressed with the multiplied dangers which threaten the government. They will appear not only to be innumerable and likely to defy correction, but they will seem to be of modern creation. It is common to hear intelligent political leaders declaim against the moral and intellectual degeneracy of the times, and especially against the decline in public morality and statesmanship. They would make it appear that the people and the government in past times were models of purity and excellence, while we are unworthy sons of noble sires. Our rulers are pronounced imbecile, or wholly devoted to selfish ends.

Our law-makers are declared to be reeking with corruption or blinded by ambition, and greed and faithlessness are held up to the world as the chief characteristics of our officials. From this painful picture we turn to the history of those who ruled in the earlier and what we call the better days of the Republic, and the contrast sinks us deep in the slough of despair. I am not prepared to say that much of the complaint against the political degeneracy of the times, and the standard of our officials, is not just; but in the face of all that can be charged against the present, I regard it as the very best age this nation has ever known. The despairing accusations made against our public servants are not the peculiar creation of the times in which we live, and the allegation of wide spread demoralization in the body politic, was no more novel in any of the generations of the past than it is now. We say nothing of our rulers that was not said of those whose memory we so sacredly worship. License is one of the chief penalties, indeed the sole defect of liberty, and it has ever asserted its prerogatives with tireless industry. It was as irreverent with Washington as it is with Grant. It racked Jefferson and Jackson, and it pained and scarred Lincoln and Chase, and their compatriots. It criticised the campaigns and the heroes of the revolutionary times, as we criticise the living heroes of our day. It belittled the statesmen of every epoch in our national progress, just as we belittle those who are now the guardians of our free institutions. Perhaps we have more provocation than they had; but if so, they were less charitable, for the tide of ungenerous criticism and distrust has known no cessation. I believe we have had seasons when our political system was more free from blemish than it is now, and that we have had periods when both government and people maintained a higher standard of excellence than we can boast of; but it is equally true that we have, in the past, sounded a depth in the decline of our political administration that the present age can never reach.

You must soon appear in the active struggles for the perpetuity of free government, and some of the sealed chapters of the past are most worthy of your careful study. I would not efface one good inspiration that you have gathered from the lives and deeds of our fathers, whose courage and patriotism have survived their infirmities. Whatever we have from them that is purifying or elevating, is but the truth of history; and when unborn generations shall have succeeded us, no age in all the long century of freedom in the New World, will furnish to them higher standards of heroism and statesmanship than the defamed and unappreciated times in which we live. And when the future statesmen shall turn to history for the most unselfish and enlightened devotion to the Republic, they will pause over the records we have written, and esteem them the brightest in all the annals of man’s best efforts for his race. We can judge of the true standard of our government and people only by a faithful comparison with the true standard of the men and events which have passed away. You find widespread distrust of the success of our political system. It is the favorite theme of every disappointed ambition, and the vanquished of every important struggle are tempted, in the bitterness of defeat, to despair of the government. Would you know whence comes this chronic or spasmodic political despair? If so, you must turn back over the graves of ages, for it is as old as free government. Glance at the better days of which we all have read, and to which modern campaign eloquence is so much indebted. Do not stop with the approved histories of the fathers of the Republic. They tell only of the transcendent wisdom and matchless perfections of those who gave us liberty and ordained government of the people. Go to the inner temple of truth. Seek that which was then hidden from the nation, but which in these days of newspapers and free schools, and steam and lightning, is an open record so that he who runs may read. Gather up the few public journals of a century ago, and the rare personal letters and sacred diaries of the good and wise men whose examples are so earnestly longed for in the degenerate present, and your despair will be softened and your indignation at current events will be tempered, as you learn that our history is steadily repeating itself, and that with all our many faults, we grow better as we progress.

Do you point to the unfaltering courage and countless sacrifices of those who gave us freedom, so deeply crimsoned with their blood? I join you in naming them with reverence, but I must point to their sons, for whom we have not yet ceased to mourn, who equalled them in every manly and patriotic attribute. When wealth and luxury were about us to tempt our people to indifference and ease, the world has no records of heroism which dim the lustre of the achievements we have witnessed in the preservation of the liberty our fathers bequeathed to us. Have corruption and perfidy stained the triumphs of which we boast? So did corruption and perfidy stain the revolutionary “times that tried men’s souls.” Do we question the laurels with which our successful captains have been crowned by a grateful country? So did our forefathers question the just distinction of him who was first in war and first in peace, and he had not a lieutenant who escaped distrust, nor a council of war that was free from unworthy jealousies and strife. Do politicians and even statesmen teach the early destruction of our free institutions? It is the old, old story; “the babbling echo mocks itself.” It distracted the cabinets of Washington and the elder Adams. It was the tireless assailant of Jefferson and Madison. It made the Jackson administration tempestuous. It gave us foreign war under Polk. It was a teeming fountain of discord under Taylor, Pierce and Buchanan. It gave us deadly fraternal conflict under Lincoln. Its dying throes convulsed the nation under Johnson. The promise of peace, soberly accepted from Grant, was the crown of an unbroken column of triumphs over the distrust of every age, that was attacking free government. Do we complain of violent and profligate legislation? Hamilton, the favorite statesman of Washington, was the author of laws, enacted in time of peace, which could not have been enforced in our day even under the necessities and passions of war. And when the judgment of the nation repealed them, he sought to overthrow the popular verdict, because he believed that the government was overthrown. Almost before order began after the political chaos of the revolution, the intensest struggles were made, and the most violent enactments urged, for mere partisan control. Jefferson, the chief apostle of government of the people, did not always cherish supreme faith in his own work. He trembled at the tendencies to monarchy, and feared because of “the dupery of which our countrymen have shown themselves susceptible.” He rescued the infant Republic from the centralization that was the lingering dregs of despotism, and unconsciously sowed the seeds which ripened into States’ rights and nullification under Jackson, and into rebellion under Lincoln. But for the desperate conflict of opposing convictions as to the corner-stone of the new structure, Jefferson would have been more wise and conservative. He was faithful to popular government in the broadest acceptation of the theory. He summed it up in his memorable utterance to his neighbors when he returned from France. He said:—“The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err, but its errors are honest solitary and short-lived.” Politically speaking, with the patriots and statesmen of the “better days” of the Republic, their confidence in, or distrust of, the government, depended much upon whether Hamilton or Jefferson ruled. Dream of them as we may, they were but men, with the same ambition, the same love of power, the same infirmities, which we regard as the peculiar besetting sins of our times. If you would refresh your store of distrust of all political greatness, study Jefferson through Burr and Hamilton, or Washington and Hamilton through Jefferson, or Jackson through Clay and the second Adams, or Clay and Adams through Jackson and Randolph, and you will think better of the enlightened and liberal age in which you live.

No error is so common among free people as the tendency to depreciate the present and all its agencies and achievements.

We all turn with boundless pride to the Senate of Clay, Webster and Calhoun. In the period of their great conflicts, it was the ablest legislative tribunal the world has ever furnished. Rome and Greece in the zenith of their greatness, never gathered such a galaxy of statesmen. But not until they had passed away did the nation learn to judge them justly. Like the towering oaks when the tempest sweeps over the forest, the storm of faction was fiercest among their crowns, and their struggles of mere ambition, and their infirmities, which have been kindly forgotten, often made the thoughtless or the unfaithful despair of our free institutions. Not one of them escaped detraction or popular reprobation. Not one was exempt from the grave accusation of shaping the destruction of our nationality, and yet not one meditated deliberate wrong to the country on which all reflected so much honor. Calhoun despaired of the Union, because of the irrepressible antagonism of sectional interests, but he cherished the sincerest faith in free institutions. But when the dispassionate historian of the future is brought to the task of recording the most memorable triumphs of our political system, he will pass over the great Senate of the last generation, and picture in their just proportions the grander achievements of the heroes and statesmen who have been created in our own time. If we could draw aside the veil that conceals the future from us, and see how our children will judge the trials and triumphs of the last decade, we would be shamed at our distrust of ourselves and of the instruments we have employed to discharge the noblest duties. Our agents came up from among us. We knew them before they were great, and remembered well their common inheritance of human defects.—They are not greater than were men who had lived before them, but the nation has had none in all the past who could have written their names higher on the scroll of fame. We knew Lincoln as the uncouth Western campaigner and advocate; as a man of jest, untutored in the graces, and unschooled in statesmanship. We know him in the heat and strife of the political contests which made him our President, and our passions and prejudices survived his achievements. If his friends, we were brought face to face with his imperfections, and perhaps complained that he was unequal to impossibilities. If his enemies, we antagonized his policy and magnified his errors. We saw him wrestle with the greed of the place-man, with the ambitious warrior and with the disappointed statesman. We received his great act of Emancipation as a part of the mere political policy of his rule, and judged it by the light of prejudiced partisan convictions.

But how will those of the future judge him? When the hatreds which attached to his public acts have passed into forgetfulness; when his infirmities shall have been buried in oblivion, and when all his master monuments shall stand out in bold relief, made stainless by the generous offices of time, his name will be linked with devotion wherever liberty has a worshipper. And it will be measurably so of those who were his faithful co-laborers. It will be forgotten that they were at times weak, discordant, irresolute men when they had to confront problems the solution of which had no precedents in the world’s history. It will not be conspicuous in the future records of those great events, that the most learned and experienced member of his cabinet would have accepted peace by any supportable compromise, and that one of the most trusted of his constitutional advisers would have assented to peaceable dismemberment to escape internecine war. Few will ever know that our eminent Minister of War was one of those who was least hopeful of the preservation of the unity of the States, when armed secession made its first trial of strength with the administration. It will not be recorded how the surrender of Sumter was gravely discussed to postpone the presence of actual hostilities, and how the midsummer madness of rebellion made weakness and discord give way to might and harmony, by the first gun that sent its unprovoked messenger of death against the flag and defenders of the Union. It will not be remembered that faction ran riot in the highest places, and that the struggle for the throne embittered cabinet councils and estranged eminent statesmen, even when the artillery of the enemy thundered within sound of the Capital.

It will not be declared how great captains toyed with armies and decimated them upon the deadly altar of ambition, and how blighted hopes of preferment made jangled strife and fruitless campaigns. Nor will the insidious treason that wounded the cause of free government in the home of its friends, blot the future pages of our history in the just proportions in which the living felt and knew it. It will be told that in the hour of greatest peril, the administration was criticised, and the constitution and laws expounded, with supreme ability and boldness, while the meaner struggles of the cowardly and faithless will be effaced with the passions of the times that created them. And it is best that these defects of greatness should slumber with mortality. Not only the heroes and rulers, but the philanthropists as well, of all nations and ages, have had no exemption from the frailties which are colossal when in actual view. That we have been no better than we have seen ourselves, does not prove that we are a degenerate people. On the contrary, it teaches how much of good and great achievement may be hoped for with all the imperfections we see about us. In our unexampled struggle, when faction, and corruption, and faithlessness had done their worst, a regenerated nationality, saved to perfected justice, liberty and law, was the rich fruits of the patriotic efforts of the people and their trusted but fallible leaders. There is the ineffaceable record we have written for history, and it will be pointed to as the sublimest tribute the world has given to the theory of self-government. The many grievous errors and bitter jealousies of the conflict which weakened and endangered the cause; the venality that grew in hideous strength, while higher and holier cares gave it safety; the incompetency that grasped place on the tidal waves of devotion to country, and the widespread political evils which still linger as sorrowful legacies among us, will in the fulness of time be healed and forgotten, and only the grand consummation will be memorable. This generous judgment of the virtue and intelligence of the people, that corrects the varying efforts and successes of political prostitution; that pardons the defects of those who are faithful in purpose, and without which the greatest deeds would go down to posterity scarred and deformed, is the glass through which all must read of the noblest triumphs of men.

Our Republic stands alone in the whole records of civil government. In its theory, in its complete organization, and in its administration, it is wholly exceptional. We talk thoughtlessly of the overthrow of the old Republics, and the weak or disappointed turn to history for the evidence of our destruction. It is true that Republics which have been mighty among the powers of the earth have crumbled into hopeless decay, and that the shifting sands of time have left desolate places where once were omnipotence and grandeur. Rome made her almost boundless conquests under the banner of the Republic, and a sister Republic was her rival in greatness and splendor. They are traced obscurely on the pages of history as governments of the people. Rome became mistress of the world. Her triumphal arches of costliest art recorded her many victories. Her temples of surpassing elegance, her colossal and exquisite statues of her chieftains, her imposing columns dedicated to her invincible soldiery, and her apparently rapid progress toward a beneficent civilization, give the story of the devotion and heroism of her citizens. But Rome never was a free representative government. What is called her Republic was but a series of surging plebeian and patrician revolutions, of Tribunes, Consuls and Dictators, with seasons of marvelous prowess under the desperate lead of as marvelous ambition. The tranquillity, the safety, and the inspiration of a government of liberty and law, are not to be found in all the thousand years of Roman greatness. The lust of empire was the ruling passion in the ancient Republics. Hannibal reflected the supreme sentiment of Carthage when he bowed at the altar and swore eternal hostility to Rome; and Cato, the Censor, as faithfully spoke for Rome when he declared to an approving Senate—“Carthago delenda!” Such was the mission of what history hands down to us as the great free governments of the ancients. Despotism was the forerunner of corruption, and the proudest eras they knew were but hastening them to inevitable destruction.

The imperial purple soon followed in Rome, as a debauched people were prepared to accept in form what they had long accepted with the mockery of freedom. Rulers and subjects, noble and ignoble, church and state, made common cause to precipitate her decay. At last the columns of the barbarian clouded her valleys. The rude hosts of Attila, the “Scourge of God,” swarmed upon her, and their battle-axes smote the demoralized warriors of the tottering empire. The Goth and the Vandal jostled each other from the degraded sceptre they had conquered, and Rome was left widowed in her ruins. And Carthage!—she too had reared a great government by spoliation, and called it a Republic. It was the creation of ambition and conquest. Her great chieftain swept over the Pyrenees and the Alps with his victorious legions, and even made the gates of the Eternal City tremble before the impetuous advance of the Carthaginians. But Carthage never was free until the cormorant and the bittern possessed it, and the God of nations had “stretched out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.” Conqueror and conquered are blotted from the list of the nations of the earth. We read of the Grecian Republic; but it was a libel upon free government. Her so-called free institutions consisted of a loose, discordant confederation of independent States, where despotism ruled in the name of liberty. Sparta has made romance pale before the achievements of her sons, but her triumphs were not of peace, nor were they for free government. Athens abolished royalty more than a thousand years before the Christian era, and made Athenian history most thrilling and instructive, but her citizens were strangers to freedom. The most sanguinary wars with sister States, domestic convulsions almost without cessation, and the grinding oppression of caste, were the chief offerings of the government to its subjects. Solon restored her laws to some measure of justice, only to be cast aside for the usurper. Greece yet has a name among the nations of the world, but her sceptre for which the mightiest once warred to enslave her people under the banner of the Republic, has long since been unfelt in shaping the destiny of mankind. Thus did Rome and Carthage and Greece fade from the zenith of distinction and power, before constitutional government of the people had been born among men. To-day there is not an established sister Republic that equals our single Commonwealth in population. Spain, France and Mexico have in turn worshiped Emperors, Kings, Dictators and popular Presidents. Yesterday they were reckoned Republics. What they have been made to-day, or what they will be made to-morrow, is uncertain and unimportant. They are not now, and never have been, Republics save in name, and never can be free governments until their people are transformed into law-creating and law-abiding communities. With them monarchy is a refuge from the license they miscall liberty, and despotism is peace. Switzerland is called a Republic. She points to her acknowledged independence four hundred years ago, but not until the middle of the present century did the Republic of the Alps find tranquillity in a constitutional government that inaugurated the liberty of law. Away on a rugged mountain-top in Italy, is the only Republic that has maintained popular government among the States of Europe. For more than fourteen hundred years a handful of isolated people, the followers of a Dalmatian hermit priest, have given the world an example of unsullied freedom. Through all the mutations, and revolutions, and relinings of the maps of Europe, the little territory of San Marino has been sacredly respected. Her less than ten thousand people have prospered without interruption; and civil commotions and foreign disputes or conflicts have been unknown among them. She has had no wealth to tempt the spoiler; no commerce or teeming valleys to invite conquest; no wars to breed dictators; no surplus revenues to corrupt her officials; and in patient and frugal industry her citizens have enjoyed the national felicity of having no history. They have had no trials and no triumphs, and have made civilization better only by the banner of peace they have worshipped through all the convulsions and bloody strife of many centuries.

The world has but one Republic that has illustrated constitutional freedom in all its beneficence, power and grandeur, and that is our own priceless inheritance. As a government, our Republic has alone been capable of, and faithful to, representative free institutions, with equal rights, equal justice, and equal laws for every condition of our fellows. All the nations of the past furnish no history that can logically repeat itself in our advancement or decline. Created through the severest trials and sacrifices; maintained through foreign and civil war with unexampled devotion; faithful to law as the offspring and safety of liberty; progressive in all that ennobles our peaceful industry, and cherishing enlightened and liberal Christian civilization as the trust and pride of our citizens, for our government of the people, none but itself can be its parallel.

In what are called free governments of antiquity, we search in vain for constitutional freedom, or that liberty that subordinates passion and license to law. The refuge from the constant perils of an unrestrained Democracy was always found in despotism, and when absolutism became intolerable, the tide of passion would surge back to Democracy. The people, in mass councils, would rule Consuls, Presidents and Generals, but it was fruitful only of chaos and revolution. The victorious chieftain and the illustrious philosopher would be honored with thanksgivings to the gods for their achievements, and their banishment or death would next be demanded by the same supreme tribunal. Grand temples and columns and triumphal arches would be erected to commemorate the victories of the dominant power, and the returning waves of revolution would decree the actors and their monuments to destruction. Ambitious demagogues prostituted such mockeries of government to the basest purposes. The Olympic games of Greece became the mere instruments of unscrupulous leaders to lure the people, in the name of freedom, to oppression and degradation, and the wealth of Rome was lavishly employed to corrupt the source of popular power, and spread demoralization throughout the Republic. The debauched citizens and soldiers were inflamed by cunning and corrupt devices, against the purest and most eminent of the sincere defenders of liberty; and the vengeance of the infuriated mob, usurping the supreme power of the State, would doom to exile or to death, honest Romans who struggled for Roman freedom. Cato, the younger, Tribune of the people, and faithful to his country, took his own life to escape the reprobation of a polluted sovereignty. Cicero was Consul of the people, made so by his triumph over Cæsar. But the same people who worshipped him and to whose honor and prosperity he was devoted, banished him in disgrace, confiscated his wealth and devastated his home. Again he was recalled through a triumphal ovation, and again proscribed by the triumvirs and murdered by the soldiers of Antony. The Grecian Republic banished “Aristides the just,” and Demosthenes, the first orator of the world, who withstood the temptations of Macedonian wealth, was fined, exiled and his death decreed. He saved his country the shame of his murder by suicide. Miltiades won the plaudits of Greece for his victories, only to die in prison of wounds received in fighting her battles. Themistocles, orator, statesman and chieftain, was banished and died in exile. Pericles, once master of Athens, and who gave the world the highest attainments in Grecian arts, was deposed from military and civil authority by the people he had honored. Socrates, immortal teacher of Grecian philosophy, soldier and senator, and one of the most shining examples of public virtue, was ostracised and condemned and drank the fatal hemlock. The Republic of Carthage gave the ancients their greatest general, and as chief magistrate, he was as wise in statesmanship as he was skillful in war; but in a strange land Hannibal closed his eyes to his country’s woes by taking his own life. Nor need we confine our research to Pagan antiquity alone, for such stains upon what is called popular government. During the present century France has enthroned and banished the Bourbons, and worshiped and execrated the Bonapartes; and Spain and Mexico, and scores of States of lesser note, have welcomed and spurned the same rulers, and created and overthrew the same dynasties.

For the matchless progress of enlightened rule during the last century, the world is indebted to England and America. Parent and child, though separated by violence and estranged in their sympathies even to the latest days, have been coworkers in the great cause of perfecting and strengthening liberal government. Each has been too prone to hope and labor for the decline or subordination of the other, but they both have thereby “builded wiser than they knew.” Their ceaseless rivalry for the approving judgment of civilization and for the development of the noblest attributes of a generous and enduring authority, have made them vastly better and wiser than either would have been without the other. We have inherited her supreme sanctity for law, and thus bounded our liberties by conservative restraints upon popular passions, until the sober judgment of the people can correct them. She has, however unwillingly, yielded to the inspiration of our enlarged freedom and advanced with hesitating steps toward the amelioration of her less favored classes. She maintains the form and splendor of royalty, but no monarch, no ministry, no House of Lords, can now defy the Commoners of the English people. The breath of disapproval coming from the popular branch of the government, dissolves a cabinet or compels an appeal to the country. A justly beloved Queen, unvexed by the cares of State, is the symbol of the majesty of English law, and there monarchy practically ends. We have reared a nobler structure, more delicate in its framework, more exquisite in its harmony, and more imposing in its progress. Its beneficence would be its weakness with any other people than our own. Solon summed up the history of many peoples, when, in answer to the question whether he had given the Athenians the best of laws, he said: “The best they were capable of receiving!” Even England with her marked distinctions of rank, and widely divided and unsympathetic classes, could not entrust her administration to popular control, without inviting convulsive discord and probable disintegration. Here we confide the enactment and execution of our laws to the immediate representatives of the people; but executives, and judicial tribunals, and conservative legislative branches, are firmly established, to receive the occasional surges of popular error, as the rock-ribbed shore makes harmless the waves of the tempest. We have no antagonism of rank or caste; no patent of nobility save that of merit, and the Republic has no distinction that may not be won by the humblest of her citizens. Our illustrious patriots, statesmen, and chieftains are cherished as household gods. They have not in turn been applauded and condemned, unless they have betrayed public trust. They are the creation of our people under our exceptional system, that educates all and advances those who are most eminent and faithful; and they are, from generation to generation, the enduring monuments of the Republic. We need no triumphal arches, or towering columns, or magnificent temples to record our achievements. Every patriotic memory bears in perpetual freshness the inscriptions of our noblest deeds, and every devoted heart quickens its pulsations at the contemplation of the power and safety of government of the people. In every trial, in peace and in war, we have created our warriors, our pacificators and our great teachers of the country’s sublime duties and necessities. It is not always our most polished scholars, or our ripest statesmen who have the true inspiration of the loyal leader. Ten years ago one of the most illustrious scholars and orators of our age, was called to dedicate the memorable battle-field of Gettysburg, as the resting place of our martyred dead. In studied grandeur he told the story of the heroism of the soldiers of the Republic, and in chaste and eloquent passages he plead the cause of the imperiled and bleeding Union. The renowned orator has passed away, and his oration is forgotten. There was present on that occasion, the chosen ruler and leader of the people. He was untutored in eloquence, and a stranger to the art of playing upon the hopes or grief of the nation. He was the sincere, the unfaltering guardian of the unity of the States, and his utterance, brief and unstudied, inspired and strengthened every patriotic impulse, and made a great people renew their great work with the holiest devotion. As he turned from the dead to the living, he gave the text of liberty for all time, when he declared: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Neither birth, nor circumstance, nor power, can command the devotion of our people. Our revolutions in enlightened sentiment, have been the creation of all the varied agencies of our free government, and the judgments of the nation have passed into history as marvels of justice. We have wreathed our military and civil heroes with the greenest laurels. In the strife of ambition, some have felt keenly what they deemed the ingratitude of the Republic; but in their disappointment, they could not understand that the highest homage of a free people is not measured by place or titled honors. Clay was none the less beloved, and Webster none the less revered, because their chief ambition was not realized. Scott was not less the “Great Captain of the Age,” because he was smitten in his efforts to attain the highest civil distinction. But a few months ago two men of humblest opportunities and opposite characteristics, were before us as rival candidates for our first office. One had been a great teacher, who through patient years of honest and earnest effort, had made his impress upon the civilization of every clime. He was the defender of the oppressed, and the unswerving advocate of equal rights for all mankind. Gradually his labors ripened, but the fruits were to be gathered through the flame of battle, and he was unskilled in the sword. Another had to come with his brave reapers into the valley of death. He was unknown to fame, and the nation trusted others who wore its stars. But he transformed despair into hope, and defeat into victory. He rose through tribulation and malice, by his invincible courage and matchless command, until the fruition of his rival’s teachings had been realized in their own, and their country’s grandest achievement. In the race for civil trust, partisan detraction swept mercilessly over both, and two men who had written the proudest records of their age, in their respective spheres of public duty, were assailed as incompetent and unworthy. Both taught peace. One dared more for hastened reconciliation, forgiveness and brotherhood. The other triumphed, and vindicated his rival and himself by calling the insurgent to share the honors of the Republic. Soon after the strife was ended, they met at the gates of the “City of the Silent,” and the victor, as chief of the nation, paid the nation’s sincere homage to its untitled, but most beloved and lamented citizen. Had the victor been the vanquished, the lustre of his crown would have been undimmed in the judgment of our people or of history. Our rulers are but our agents, chosen in obedience to the convictions which govern the policy of the selection, and mere political success is no enduring constituent of greatness. The public servant, and the private citizen, will alike be honored or condemned, as they are faithful or unfaithful to their responsible duties.

When we search for the agencies of the great epochs in our national progress, we look not to the accidents of place. Unlike all other governments, ours is guided supremely by intelligent and educated public convictions, and those who are clothed with authority, are but the exponents of the popular will. Herein is the source of safety and advancement of our free institutions. On every hand, in the ranks of people, are the tireless teachers of our destiny. Away in the forefront of every struggle, are to be found the masters who brave passion and prejudice and interest, in the perfection of our nationality.

Our free press reaching into almost every hamlet of the land; our colleges now reared in every section; our schools with open doors to all; our churches teaching every faith, with the protection of the law; our citizens endowed with the sacred right of freedom of speech and action; our railroads spanning the continent, climbing our mountains, and stretching into our valleys; our telegraphs making every community the centre of the world’s daily records—these are the agencies which are omnipotent in the expression of our national purposes and duties. Thus directed and maintained, our free government has braved foreign and domestic war, and been purified and strengthened in the crucible of conflict. It has grown from a few feeble States east of the Ohio wilderness, to a vast continent of commonwealths, and forty millions of population. It has made freedom as universal as its authority within its vast possessions. The laws of inequality and caste are blotted from its statutes. It reaches the golden slopes of the Pacific with its beneficence, and makes beauty and plenty in the valleys of the mountains on the sunset side of the Father of Waters. From the cool lakes of the north, to the sunny gulfs of the South, and from the eastern seas to the waters that wash the lands of the Pagan, a homogeneous people obey one constitution, and are devoted to one country. Nor have its agencies and influences been limited to our own boundaries. The whole accessible world has felt its power, and paid tribute to its excellence. Europe has been convulsed from centre to circumference by the resistless throbbings of oppressed peoples for the liberty they cannot know and could not maintain. The proud Briton has imitated his wayward but resolute child, and now rules his own throne. France has sung the Marseillaise, her anthem of freedom, and waded through blood in ill-directed struggles for her disenthralment. The scattered tribes of the Fatherland now worship at the altar of German unity, with a liberalized Empire. The sad song of the serf is no longer heard from the children of the Czar. Italy, dismembered and tempest tossed through centuries, again ordains her laws in the Eternal City, under a monarch of her choice. The throne of Ferdinand and Isabella has now no kingly ruler, and the inspiration of freedom has unsettled the title of despotism to the Spanish sceptre. The trained lightning flashes the lessons of our civilization to the home of the Pyramids; the land of the Heathen has our teachers in its desolate places, and the God of Day sets not upon the boundless triumphs of our government of the people.

Robert G. Ingersoll, of Illinois,

In the National Republican Convention at Cincinnati, June, 1876, in nominating James G. Blaine for the Presidency.

“Massachusetts may be satisfied with the loyalty of Benjamin H. Bristow; so am I; but if any man nominated by this convention cannot carry the State of Massachusetts, I am not satisfied with the loyalty of that State. If the nominee of this convention cannot carry the grand old Commonwealth of Massachusetts by seventy-five thousand majority, I would advise them to sell out Faneuil Hall as a Democratic headquarters. I would advise them to take from Bunker Hill that old monument of glory.

“The Republicans of the United States demand as their leader in the great contest of 1876 a man of intelligence, a man of integrity, a man of well-known and approved political opinions. They demand a reformer after as well as before the election. They demand a politician in the highest, broadest and best sense—a man of superb moral courage. They demand a man acquainted with public affairs, with the wants of the people; with not only the requirements of the hour, but with the demands of the future. They demand a man broad enough to comprehend the relations of this government to the other nations of the earth. They demand a man well versed in the powers, duties, and prerogatives of each and every department of this Government. They demand a man who will sacredly preserve the financial honor of the United States; one who knows enough to know that the national debt must be paid through the prosperity of this people; one who knows enough to know that all the financial theories in the world cannot redeem a single dollar; one who knows enough to know that all the money must be made, not by law, but by labor; one who knows enough to know that the people of the United States have the industry to make the money and the honor to pay it over just as fast as they make it.

“The Republicans of the United States demand a man who knows that prosperity and resumption, when they come must come together; that when they come, they will come hand in hand through the golden harvest fields; hand in hand by the whirling spindles and the turning wheels; hand in hand past the open furnace doors; hand in hand by the flaming forges; hand in hand by the chimneys filled with eager fire—greeted and grasped by the countless sons of toil.

“This money has to be dug out of the earth. You cannot make it by passing resolutions in a political convention.

“The Republicans of the United States want a man who knows that this Government should protect every citizen, at home and abroad; who knows that any government that will not defend its defenders, and protect its protectors, is a disgrace to the map of the world. They demand a man who believes in the eternal separation and divorcement of Church and School. They demand a man whose political reputation is spotless as a star; but they do not demand that their candidate shall have a certificate of moral character signed by a Confederate Congress. The man who has, in full, heaped and rounded measure, all these splendid qualifications, is the present grand and gallant leader of the Republican party—James G. Blaine.

“Our country, crowned with the vast and marvelous achievements of its first century, asks for a man worthy of the past and prophetic of her future; asks for a man who has the audacity of genius; asks for a man who is the grandest combination of heart, conscience and brain beneath her flag. Such a man is James G. Blaine.

“For the Republican host, led by this intrepid man, there can be no defeat.

“This is a grand year—a year filled with the recollections of the Revolution; filled with proud and tender memories of the past; with the sacred legends of liberty; a year in which the sons of freedom will drink from the fountains of enthusiasm; a year in which the people call for a man who has preserved in Congress what our soldiers won upon the field; a year in which they call for the man who has torn from the throat of treason the tongue of slander; for the man who has snatched the mask of Democracy from the hideous face of rebellion; for the man who, like an intellectual athlete, has stood in the arena of debate and challenged all comers, and who is still a total stranger to defeat.

“Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress, and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his country and the maligners of his honor.

“For the Republican party to desert this gallant leader now, is as though an army should desert their general upon the field of battle.

“James G. Blaine is now and has been for years the bearer of the sacred standard of the Republican party. I call it sacred, because no human being can stand beneath its folds without becoming and without remaining free.

“Gentlemen of the convention, in the name of the great Republic, the only Republic that ever existed upon this earth; in the name of all her defenders and of all her supporters; in the name of all her soldiers living; in the name of all her soldiers dead upon the field of battle, and in the name of those who perished in the skeleton clutch of famine at Andersonville and Libby, whose sufferings he so vividly remembers, Illinois—Illinois nominates for the next President of this country, that prince of parliamentarians—that leader of leaders—James G. Blaine.”

Roscoe Conkling, of New York,

In the National Republican Convention at Chicago, June, 1880, nominating Ulysses S. Grant for the Presidency.

“And when asked what State he hails from, Our sole reply shall be, He hails from Appomattox And the famous Apple tree.”

Obeying instructions I should never dare to disregard, I rise in behalf of the State of New York to propose a nomination with which the country and the Republican party can grandly win. The election before us will be the Austerlitz of American politics. It will decide whether for years to come the country will be ‘Republican or Cossack.’ The need of the hour is a candidate who can carry doubtful States, North and South; and believing that he more surely than any other can carry New York against any opponent, and carry not only the North, but several States of the South, New York is for Ulysses S. Grant. He alone of living Republicans has carried New York as a Presidential candidate. Once he carried it even according to a Democratic count, and twice he carried it by the people’s vote, and he is stronger now. The Republican party with its standard in his hand, is stronger now than in 1868 or 1872. Never defeated in war or in peace, his name is the most illustrious borne by any living man; his services attest his greatness, and the country knows them by heart. His fame was born not alone of things written and said, but of the arduous greatness of things done, and dangers and emergencies will search in vain in the future, as they have searched in vain in the past, for any other on whom the nation leans with such confidence and trust. Standing on the highest eminence of human distinction, and having filled all lands with his renown, modest, firm, simple and self-poised, he has seen not only the titled but the poor and the lowly in the utmost ends of the world rise and uncover before him. He has studied the needs and defects of many systems of government, and he comes back a better American than ever, with a wealth of knowledge and experience added to the hard common sense which so conspicuously distinguished him in all the fierce light that beat upon him throughout the most eventful, trying and perilous sixteen years of the nation’s history.

“Never having had ‘a policy to enforce against the will of the people,’ he never betrayed a cause or a friend, and the people will never betray or desert him. Vilified and reviled, truthlessly aspersed by numberless presses, not in other lands, but in his own, the assaults upon him have strengthened and seasoned his hold upon the public heart. The ammunition of calumny has all been exploded; the powder has all been burned once, its force is spent, and General Grant’s name will glitter as a bright and imperishable star in the diadem of the Republic when those who have tried to tarnish it will have mouldered in forgotten graves and their memories and epitaphs have vanished utterly.

“Never elated by success, never depressed by adversity, he has ever in peace, as in war, shown the very genius of common sense. The terms he prescribed for Lee’s surrender foreshadowed the wisest principles and prophecies of true reconstruction.

“Victor in the greatest of modern wars, he quickly signalized his aversion to war and his love of peace by an arbitration of international disputes which stands as the wisest and most majestic example of its kind in the world’s diplomacy. When inflation, at the height of its popularity and frenzy, had swept both houses of Congress, it was the veto of Grant which, single and alone, overthrew expansion and cleared the way for specie resumption. To him, immeasurably more than to any other man, is due the fact that every paper dollar is as good as gold. With him as our leader we shall have no defensive campaign, no apologies or explanations to make. The shafts and arrows have all been aimed at him and lie broken and harmless at his feet. Life, liberty and property will find safeguard in him. When he said of the black man in Florida, ‘Wherever I am they may come also,’ he meant that, had he the power to help it, the poor dwellers in the cabins of the South should not be driven in terror from the homes of their childhood and the graves of their murdered dead. When he refused to receive Denis Kearney he meant that lawlessness and communism, although it should dictate laws to a whole city, would everywhere meet a foe in him, and, popular or unpopular, he will hew to the line of right, let the chips fly where they may.

“His integrity, his common sense, his courage and his unequaled experience are the qualities offered to his country. The only argument against accepting them would amaze Solomon. He thought there could be nothing new under the sun. Having tried Grant twice and found him faithful, we are told we must not, even after an interval of years, trust him again. What stultification does not such a fallacy involve! The American people exclude Jefferson Davis from public trust. Why? Because he was the arch traitor and would be a destroyer. And now the same people are asked to ostracize Grant and not trust him. Why? Because he was the arch preserver of his country; because, not only in war, but afterward, twice as a civic magistrate, he gave his highest, noblest efforts to the Republic. Is such absurdity an electioneering jugglery or hypocrisy’s masquerade?

“There is no field of human activity, responsibility or reason in which rational beings object to Grant because he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting, and because he has had unequaled experience, making him exceptionally competent and fit. From the man who shoes your horse to the lawyer who pleads your case, the officers who manage your railway, the doctor into whose hands you give your life, or the minister who seeks to save your souls, what now do you reject because you have tried him and by his works have known him? What makes the Presidential office an exception to all things else in the common sense to be applied to selecting its incumbent? Who dares to put fetters on the free choice and judgment which is the birthright of the American people? Can it be said that Grant has used official power to perpetuate his plan? He has no place. No official power has been used for him. Without patronage or power, without telegraph wires running from his house to the convention, without electioneering contrivances, without effort on his part, his name is on his country’s lips, and he is struck at by the whole Democratic party because his nomination will be the death-blow to Democratic success. He is struck at by others who find offense and disqualification in the very service he has rendered and in the very experience he has gained. Show me a better man. Name one and I am answered. But do not point, as a disqualification, to the very facts which make this man fit beyond all others. Let not experience disqualify or excellence impeach him. There is no third term in the case, and the pretense will die with the political dog-days which engendered it. Nobody is really worried about a third term except those hopelessly longing for a first term and the dupes they have made. Without bureaus, committees, officials or emissaries to manufacture sentiment in his favor, without intrigue or effort on his part, Grant is the candidate whose supporters have never threatened to bolt. As they say, he is a Republican who never wavers. He and his friends stood by the creed and the candidates of the Republican party, holding the right of a majority as the very essence of their faith, and meaning to uphold that faith against the common enemy and the charlatans and guerrillas who from time to time deploy between the lines and forage on one side or the other.

“The Democratic party is a standing protest against progress. Its purposes are spoils. Its hope and very existence is a solid South. Its success is a menace to prosperity and order.

“This convention is master of a supreme opportunity, can name the next President of the United States and make sure of his election and his peaceful inauguration. It can break the power which dominates and mildews the South. It can speed the nation in a career of grandeur eclipsing all past achievements. We have only to listen above the din and look beyond the dust of an hour to behold the Republican party advancing to victory, with its greatest marshal at its head.”

James A. Garfield, of Ohio,

In the National Republican Convention at Chicago, June, 1880, nominating John Sherman for the Presidency.

“I have witnessed the extraordinary scenes of this convention with deep solicitude. No emotion touches my heart more quickly than a sentiment in honor of a great and noble character. But as I sat on these seats and witnessed these demonstrations, it seemed to me you were a human ocean in a tempest. I have seen the sea lashed into a fury and tossed into a spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man. But I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured. When the storm has passed and the hour of calm settles on the ocean, when sunlight bathes its smooth surface, then the astronomer and surveyor takes the level from which he measures all terrestrial heights and depths. Gentlemen of the convention, your present temper may not mark the healthful pulse of our people. When our enthusiasm has passed, when the emotions of this hour have subsided, we shall find the calm level of public opinion below the storm from which the thoughts of a mighty people are to be measured, and by which their final action will be determined. Not here, in this brilliant circle where fifteen thousand men and women are assembled, is the destiny of the Republic to be decreed; not here, where I see the enthusiastic faces of seven hundred and fifty-six delegates waiting to cast their votes into the urn and determine the choice of their party; but by four million Republican firesides, where the thoughtful fathers, with wives and children about them, with the calm thoughts inspired by love of home and love of country, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, and the knowledge of the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in days gone by—there God prepares the verdict that shall determine the wisdom of our work to-night. Not in Chicago in the heat of June, but in the sober quiet that comes between now and the melancholy days of November, in the silence of deliberate judgment will this great question be settled. Let us aid them to-night.

“But now, gentlemen of the convention, what do we want? Bear with me a moment. Hear me for this cause, and for a moment be silent, that you may hear. Twenty-five years ago this Republic was wearing a triple chain of bondage. Long familiarity with traffic in the bodies and souls of men had paralyzed the conscience of a majority of our people. The baleful doctrine of State Sovereignty had shocked and weakened the noblest and most beneficent powers of the National Government, and the grasping power of slavery was seizing the virgin territory of the West and dragging them into the den of eternal bondage. At that crisis the Republican party was born. It drew its first inspiration from that fire of liberty which God has lighted in every man’s heart, and which all the powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish. The Republican party came to deliver and save the Republic. It entered the arena when the beleaguered and assailed territories were struggling for freedom, and drew around them the sacred circle of liberty which the demon of slavery has never dared to cross. It made them free forever. Strengthened by its victory on the frontier, the young party, under the leadership of that great man who, on this spot, twenty years ago, was made its leader, entered the national capital and assumed the high duties of the Government. The light which shone from its banner dispelled the darkness in which slavery had enshrouded the capital, and melted the shackles of every slave, and consumed, in the fire of liberty, every slave-pen within the shadow of the Capitol. Our national industries, by an impoverishing policy, were themselves prostrated, and the streams of revenue flowed in such feeble currents that the Treasury itself was well nigh empty. The money of the people was the wretched notes of two thousand uncontrolled and irresponsible State banking corporations, which was filling the country with a circulation that poisoned rather than sustained the life of business. The Republican party changed all this. It abolished the babel of confusion, and gave the country a currency as national as its flag, based upon the sacred faith of the people. It threw its protecting arm around our great industries, and they stood erect as with new life. It filled with the spirit of true nationality all the great functions of the Government. It confronted a rebellion of unexampled magnitude, with slavery behind it, and, under God, fought the final battle of liberty until victory was won. Then, after the storms of battle, were heard the sweet, calm words of peace uttered by the conquering nation, and saying to the conquered foe that lay prostrate at its feet: ‘This is our only revenge, that you join us in lifting to the serene firmament of the Constitution, to shine like stars for ever and ever, the immortal principles of truth and justice, that all men, white or black, shall be free and stand equal before the law.’

“Then came the question of reconstruction, the public debt, and the public faith. In the settlement of the questions the Republican party has completed its twenty-five years of glorious existence, and it has sent us here to prepare it for another lustrum of duty and of victory. How shall we do this great work? We cannot do it, my friends, by assailing our Republican brethren. God forbid that I should say one word to cast a shadow upon any name on the roll of our heroes. This coming fight is our Thermopylæ. We are standing upon a narrow isthmus. If our Spartan hosts are united, we can withstand all the Persians that the Xerxes of Democracy can bring against us. Let us hold our ground this one year, for the stars in their courses fight for us in the future. The census taken this year will bring reinforcements and continued power. But in order to win this victory now, we want the vote of every Republican, of every Grant Republican and every anti-Grant Republican in America, of every Blaine man and every anti-Blaine man. The vote of every follower of every candidate is needed to make our success certain; therefore I say, gentlemen and brethren, we are here to take calm counsel together, and inquire what we shall do. We want a man whose life and opinions embody all the achievements of which I have spoken. We want a man who, standing on a mountain height, sees all the achievements of our past history, and carries in his heart the memory of all its glorious deeds, and who, looking forward, prepares to meet the labor and the dangers to come. We want one who will act in no spirit of unkindness toward those we lately met in battle. The Republican party offers to our brethren of the South the olive branch of peace, and wishes them to return to brotherhood, on this supreme condition, that it shall be admitted forever and forevermore, that, in the war for the Union, we were right and they were wrong. On that supreme condition we meet them as brethren, and on no other. We ask them to share with us the blessings and honors of this great Republic.

“Now, gentlemen, not to weary you, I am about to present a name for your consideration—the name of a man who was the comrade and associate and friend of nearly all those noble dead whose faces look down upon us from these walls to-night; a man who began his career of public service twenty-five years ago, whose first duty was courageously done in the days of peril on the plains of Kansas, when the first red drops of that bloody shower began to fall which finally swelled into the deluge of war. He bravely stood by young Kansas then, and, returning to his duty in the National Legislature, through all subsequent time, his pathway has been marked by labors performed in every department of legislation. You ask for his monuments. I point you to twenty-five years of national statutes. Not one great beneficent statute has been placed in our statute books without his intelligent and powerful aid. He aided these men to formulate the laws that raised our great armies and carried us through the war. His hand was seen in the workmanship of those statutes that restored and brought back the unity and married calm of the States. His hand was in all that great legislation that created the war currency, and in a still greater work that redeemed the promises of the Government, and made the currency equal to gold. And when at last called from the halls of legislation into a high executive office he displayed that experience, intelligence, firmness and poise of character which has carried us through a stormy period of three years. With one-half the public press crying ‘crucify him,’ and a hostile Congress seeking to prevent success, in all this he remained unmoved until victory crowned him. The great fiscal affairs of the nation, and the great business interests of the country, he has guarded and preserved, while executing the law of resumption and effecting its object without a jar and against the false prophecies of one-half of the press and all the Democracy of this continent. He has shown himself able to meet with calmness the great emergencies of the Government for twenty-five years. He has trodden the perilous heights of public duty, and against all the shafts of malice has borne his breast unharmed. He has stood in the blaze of ‘that fierce light that beats against the throne,’ but its fiercest ray has found no flaw in his armor, no stain on his shield. I do not present him as a better Republican or as a better man than thousands of others we honor, but I present him for your deliberate consideration. I nominate John Sherman, of Ohio.”

Daniel Dougherty, of Pennsylvania,

In the Democratic National Convention at Cincinnati, June 1880, nominating Winfield Scott Hancock for the Presidency.

“I propose to present to the thoughtful consideration of the convention the name of one who, on the field of battle, was styled ‘The Superb,’ yet won the still nobler renown as a military governor whose first act when in command of Louisiana and Texas was to salute the Constitution by proclaiming that the military rule shall ever be subservient to the civil power. The plighted word of a soldier was proved by the acts of a statesman. I nominate one whose name will suppress all factions, will be alike acceptable to the North and to the South—a name that will thrill the Republic, a name, if nominated, of a man that will crush the last embers of sectional strife, and whose name will be hailed as the dawning of the day of perpetual brotherhood. With him we can fling away our shields and wage an aggressive war. We can appeal to the supreme tribunal of the American people against the corruption of the Republican party and their untold violations of constitutional liberty. With him as our chieftain the bloody banner of the Republicans will fall from their palsied grasp. Oh, my countrymen, in this supreme moment the destinies of the Republic are at stake, and the liberties of the people are imperiled. The people hang breathless on your deliberation. Take heed! Make no mis-step! I nominate one who can carry every Southern State, and who can carry Pennsylvania, Indiana, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York—the soldier-statesman, with a record as stainless as his sword—Winfield Scott Hancock, of Pennsylvania. If elected, he will take his seat.”

George Gray, of Delaware,

In the Democratic National Convention at Cincinnati, June, 1880, nominating Thomas F. Bayard for the Presidency.

“I am instructed by the Delaware delegation to make in their behalf a nomination for the Presidency of the United States. Small in territory and population, Delaware is proud of her history and of her position in the sisterhood of States. Always devoted to the principles of that great party which maintains the equality and rights of the States, as well as of the individual citizen, she is here to-day in grand council to do all that in her lies for the advancement of our common cause. Who will best lead the Democratic hosts in the impending struggle for the restoration of honest government and the constitutional rights of the States and of their people, is the important question that we must decide. Delaware is not blinded by her affections when she presents to this convention, as a candidate for this great trust, the name of her gallant son, Thomas Francis Bayard. He is no carpet knight rashly put forth to flash a maiden sword in this great contest. He is a veteran covered with the scars of many hard-fought battles, when the principles of constitutional liberty have been at stake in an arena where the giants of radicalism were his foes, and his bruised arms, not ‘hung up,’ but still burnished brightly, are monuments of his prowess. Thomas F. Bayard is a statesman who will need no introduction to the American people. His name and his record are known wherever our flag floats—aye, wherever the English tongue is spoken. His is no sectional fame. With sympathies as broad as the continent, a private character as spotless as the snow from heaven, a judgment as clear as the sunlight, an intellect keen and bright as a flashing sabre, a courage that none dare question, honest in thought and deed, the people all know him by heart, and, as I said before, they need not be told who and what he is. But you, gentlemen of the convention, who must keep in view the success so important to be achieved in November, pray consider the elements of his strength. Who more than he will as a candidate appeal to the best traditions of our party and our country? In whom more than he will the business interests of the country, now re-awakening to new life and hope, confide for that economy and repose which shall send capital and labor forth like twin brothers hand in hand to the great work of building up the country’s prosperity and advancing its civilization? Who better than he will represent the heart and intellect of our great party, or give expression to its noblest inspirations? Who will draw so largely upon the honest and reflecting independent voters as he, whose very name is a synonym for honest and fearless opposition to corruption every where and in every form, and who has dared to follow in what he thought the path of duty with a chivalrous devotion that never counted personal gains or losses? Who has contributed more than Thomas Francis Bayard to the commanding strength that the Democratic party possesses to-day? Blot out him and his influence, and who would not feel and mourn his loss? Pardon Delaware if she says too much; she speaks in no disparagement of the distinguished Democrats whose names sparkle like stars in the political firmament. She honors them all. But she knows her son, and her heart will speak. Nominate him and success is assured. His very name will be a platform. It will fire every Democratic heart with a new zeal and put a sword in the hand of every honest man with which to drive from place and power the reckless men who have for four years held both against the expressed will of the American people. Don’t tell us that you admire and love him, but that he is unavailable. Tell the country that the sneer of our Republican enemies is a lie, and that such a man as Thomas F. Bayard is not too good a man to receive the nomination of the Democratic party. Take the whole people into your confidence, and tell them that an honest and patriotic party is to be led by as honest and pure a man as God ever made; that a brave party is to be led by a brave man whose courage will never falter, be the danger or emergency what it may. Tell them that our party has the courage of its convictions, and that statesmanship, ability and honesty are to be realized once more in the government of these United States, and the nomination of Thomas F. Bayard will fall like a benediction on the land, and will be the presage of a victory that will sweep like a whirlwind from the lakes to the Gulf and from ocean to ocean.”

Frye Nominating Blaine.

In the Chicago Convention, 1880.

“I once saw a storm at sea in the nighttime; an old ship battling for its life with the fury of the tempest; darkness everywhere; the winds raging and howling; the huge waves beating on the sides of the ship, and making her shiver from stem to stern. The lightning was flashing, the thunders rolling; there was danger everywhere. I saw at the helm, a bold, courageous, immovable, commanding man. In the tempest, calm; in the commotion, quiet; in the danger, hopeful. I saw him take that old ship and bring her into her harbor, into still waters, into safety. That man was a hero. [Applause.] I saw the good old ship of State, the State of Maine, within the last year, fighting her way through the same waves, against the dangers. She was freighted with all that is precious in the principles of our republic; with the rights of the American citizenship, with all that is guaranteed to the American citizen by our Constitution. The eyes of the whole nation were on her, and intense anxiety filled every American heart lest the grand old ship, the “State of Maine,” might go down beneath the waves forever, carrying her precious freight with her. But there was a man at the helm, calm, deliberate, commanding, sagacious; he made even the foolish man wise; courageous, he inspired the timid with courage; hopeful, he gave heart to the dismayed, and he brought that good old ship safely into harbor, into safety; and she floats to-day greater, purer, stronger for her baptism of danger. That man too, was heroic, and his name was James G. Blaine. [Loud cheers.]

“Maine sent us to this magnificent Convention with a memory of her own salvation from impending peril fresh upon her. To you representatives of 50,000,000 of the American people, who have met here to counsel how the Republic can be saved, she says, “Representatives of the people, take the man, the true man, the staunch man, for your leader, who has just saved me, and he will bring you to safety and certain victory.””

Senator Hill’s Denunciation of Senator Mahone.

In Extra Session of the Senate, March 14, 1881.

Very well; the records of the country must settle that with the Senator. The Senator will say who was elected as a republican from any of the States to which I allude. I say what the whole world knows, that there are thirty-eight men on this floor elected as democrats, declaring themselves to be democrats, who supported Hancock, and who have supported the democratic ticket in every election that has occurred, and who were elected, moreover, by democratic Legislatures, elected by Legislatures which were largely democratic; and the Senator from New York will not deny it. One other Senator who was elected, not as a democrat, but as an independent, has announced his purpose to vote with us on this question. That makes thirty-nine, unless some man of the thirty-eight who was elected by a democratic Legislature proves false to his trust. Now, the Senator from New York does not say that somebody has been bought. No; I have not said that. He does not say somebody has been taken and carried away. No; I have not said that. But the Senator has said, and here is his language, and I hope he will not find it necessary to correct it:

It may be said, very likely I shall be found to say despite some criticism that I may make upon so saying in advance, that notwithstanding the words “during the present session,” day after to-morrow or the day after that, if the majority then present in the Chamber changes, that majority may overthrow all this proceeding, obliterate it, and set up an organization of the Senate in conformity with and not in contradiction of the edict of the election.

The presidential election he was referring to—

If an apology is needed for the objection which I feel to that, it will be found I think in the circumstance that a majority, a constitutional majority of the Senate, is against that resolution, is against the formation of committees democratic in inspiration and persuasion, to which are to go for this session all executive matters.

The Senator has announced to-day that the majority on this side of the Chamber was only temporary. He has announced over and over that it was to be a temporary majority. I meet him on the fact. I say there are thirty-eight members sitting in this Hall to-day who were elected by democratic Legislatures, and as democrats, and one distinguished Senator who was not elected as a democrat, but by democratic votes, the distinguished Senator from Illinois, [Mr. DAVIS,] has announced his purpose to vote with these thirty-eight democrats. Where, then, have I misrepresented? If that be true, and if those who were elected as democrats are not faithless to the constituency that elected them, you will not have the majority when the Senate is full.

Again, so far from charging the Senator from New York with being a personal party to this arrangement, I acquitted him boldly and fearlessly, for I undertake to say what I stated before, and I repeat it, to his credit, he is no party to an arrangement by which any man chosen by a democratic Legislature and as a democrat is not going to vote for the party that sent him here. Sir, I know too well what frowns would gather with lightning fierceness upon the brow of the Senator from New York if I were to intimate or any other man were to intimate that he, elected as a republican, because he happened to have a controlling vote was going to vote with the democrats on the organization. What would be insulting to him he cannot, he will not respect in another.

Now, sir, I say the Senator has been unjust in the conclusion which he has drawn, because it necessarily makes somebody who was chosen as a democrat ally himself with the republicans, not on great questions of policy, but on a question of organization, on a question of mere political organization. I assume that that has not been done. No man can charge that I have come forward and assumed that his fidelity was in question. I have assumed that the Senator from New York was wrong in his statement. Why? Because if any gentleman who was chosen to this body as a democrat has concluded not to vote with the democrats on the organization, he has not given us notice, and I take it for granted that when a gentleman changes his opinions, as every Senator has a right to change his opinions, his first duty is to give notice of that change to those with whom he has been associated. He has not given that notice; no democrat of the thirty-eight has given that notice to this side of the House. I therefore assume that no such change has occurred.

But there is another obligation. While I concede the right of any gentleman to change his opinions and change his party affiliations, yet I say that when he has arrived at the conclusion that duty requires him to make that change he must give notice to the constituency that sent him here. I have heard of no such notice. If the people of any of these democratic States, who through democratic Legislatures have sent thirty-eight democrats to this body and one more by democratic votes, have received notice of a change of party opinion or a change of party affiliations by any of those they sent here, I have not heard of it; the evidence of it has not been produced.

Sir, I concede the right of every man to change his opinions; I concede the right of every man to change his party affiliations; I concede the right of any man who was elected to the high place of a seat in this Senate as a democrat to change and become a republican; but I deny in the presence of this Senate, I deny in the hearing of this people, that any man has a right to accept a commission from one party and execute the trust confided to him in the interest of another party. Demoralized as this country has become, though every wind bears to us charges of fraud and bargain and corruption; though the highest positions in the land, we fear, have been degraded by being occupied by persons who procured them otherwise than by the popular will, yet I deny that the people of either party in this country have yet given any man a right to be faithless to a trust. They have given no man a right to accept a commission as a democrat and hold that commission and act with the republicans. Manhood, bravery, courage, fidelity, morality, respect for the opinions of mankind requires that whenever a man has arrived at the conclusion that he cannot carry out the trust which was confided to him, he should return the commission and tell his constituents, “I have changed my mind and therefore return you the commission you gave me.” Sir, I do not believe that a single one of the thirty-eight gentlemen who were elected as democrats and whose names are before me here, will hold in his pocket a commission conferred by democrats, conferred on him as a democrat, and without giving notice to his constituency, without giving notice to his associates, will execute that commission in the interest of the adversary party and go and communicate his conclusion, first of all, and only, to the members of the adversary party.

Sir, who is it that has changed? Whom of these thirty-eight does the Senator rely upon to vote with the republicans? That one has not notified us; he has not notified his constituency. Therefore I say it is not true, and I cannot sit here quietly and allow a gentleman on the other side of the Chamber, however distinguished, to get up here and assume and asseverate over and over that somebody elected as a democrat is faithless to his trust, and not repel it. No, gentlemen, you are deceived; you will be disappointed. I vindicate the character of American citizenship, I vindicate the honor of human nature when I say you will be disappointed, and no man elected as a democrat is going to help you organize the committees of this Senate. I do not say so because I know. No, I have no personal information, but I will stand here and affirm that no man who has been deemed by any constituency in this country to be worthy of a place in this body will be guilty of that treachery. And how is the Senator’s majority to come? How many are there? He has not told us. The papers said this morning that there were two or three, and they named my good friend from Tennessee, [Mr. HARRIS.] When I saw that I knew the whole thing was absurd. The idea that anybody in this world would ever believe that my friend from Tennessee could possibly be guilty of such a thing, and my colleague [Mr. BROWN] also was named—gentlemen who were born and reared in the school of fidelity to their party. How many? Have you one? If you have but one that was elected as a democrat and who has concluded to go with the republicans, then you have only half, you have 38 to 38, and I suppose you count upon the vote of the Vice-President. Has that been arranged? Sir, I will not blame you if you vote for voting according to the sentiment that elected you, for voting according to the professions of your principles which you avowed when you were elected. I deny myself the right of the Vice-President to take part in the constitution and organization of this Senate; but I shall not make the question. If you have got one, the vote will be 38 to 38. Who is the one? Who is ambitious to do what no man in the history of this country has ever done, to be the first man to stand up in this high presence, after this country has reached fifty million people, and proclaim from this proud eminence that he disgraces the commission he holds. [Applause in the galleries.]

The VICE-PRESIDENT rapped to order.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Who is it? Who can he be? Do you receive him with affection? Do you receive him with respect? Is such a man worthy of your association? Such a man is not worthy to be a democrat. Is he worthy to be a republican? If my friend from Illinois, my friend from Kansas, or my friend from New York, were to come to me holding a republican commission in his pocket, sent here by a republican Legislature, and whisper to me “I will vote with the democrats on organization,” I would tell him that if he so came he would be expelled with ignominy from the ranks of the party.

And why do you beg us to wait? If all who were elected as democrats are to remain democrats, what good will waiting do you? You will still be in a minority of two, the same minority you are in this morning.

Mr. President, I affirm that no man elected and sent here by a democratic Legislature as a democrat, whatever may have been local issues, whatever may have been the divisions of factions, and above all no man who professed to be a democrat when he was elected and who procured his election by professing to be a democrat, in the name of democracy and republicanism as well, in the name of American nature, I charge that no such man will prove false to his trust; and therefore why wait? Why delay the business of the country? Why should the nominations lie on the table unacted on? Why should we spend days and days here with the parties on the other side filibustering for time to get delay, to get a few days? Why should we do that when upon the assumption that the Senate is not to blush at an exhibition of treachery the result will be the same one week, two weeks, six months, two years from now that it is now?

Sir, I know that there is a great deal in this question. The American people have had much to humiliate them; all peoples have much to humiliate them. I know that the patronage of this Government has become very great. I know that the distinguished gentleman who presides at the other end of the Avenue holds in his hand millions and hundreds of millions of patronage. To our shame be it said it has been whispered a hundred times all through the country by the presses of both parties until it has become absolutely familiar to American ears that the patronage of the Federal Government has been used to buy votes and control elections to keep one party in power. It is a question that confronts every honest statesman whether something shall not be done to lessen that patronage. I respond to the sentiment of the President in his inaugural when I say there ought to be a rule in even the civil service by which this patronage shall be placed where it cannot be used for such purposes. If it is not done, I do not know what humiliations are in store for us all.

But, Mr. President, here are facts that no man can escape. Gentlemen of the republican party of this Senate, you cannot organize the Senate unless you can get the vote of some man who was elected as a democrat. You cannot escape that. Have you gotten it? If so, how? If you have, nobody knows it but yourselves. How? There is no effect without a cause; there is no change without a purpose; there is no bargain without a consideration. What is the cause? If there has been a change, why a change? How does it happen that you know the change and we do not? What induced the change? I deny that there has been a change. I maintain that all the distinguished gentlemen who make up the thirty-eight democrats on this side of the Chamber are firm, firm to the principles that sent them here, firm to the professions that sent them here, and firm to the constituencies that sent them here. They were elected as democrats. Now on the question of organization, which is nothing in the world but a pure political question and a party question at that, they will act with the democratic party, and you, gentlemen, will be deceived if you calculate otherwise. Therefore, there is no necessity for you to enter into all this filibustering and producing this delay for the purpose of getting the organization.

Mr. President, as I said before, the Senate should be a place where there should be no masquerading; men should deal frankly with each other. If I were to charge any gentleman on the republican side of the Chamber who was elected as a republican, who professed to be a republican when he was elected, with having made arrangements with the democrats to vote with them, I should insult him and he would resent it as an insult, and gentlemen excuse me for repelling the charge which if made against you, you would repel as an insult. I repel as an insult the charge made against any democrat that he would be false to his colors and is intending to vote with you on the organization.

Mr. HARRIS. Mr. President, I rise only to say that I regret that the honorable Senator from Georgia should have deemed it proper to dignify the miserable newspaper twaddle in respect to my political position——

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I will say to my friend I did not intend——

Mr. HARRIS. I am quite sure the Senator did not intend anything unkind to me; yet, by mentioning the matter here, he gives a dignity to it that it never could have had otherwise, and one that it is not worthy of, especially in view of the fact, as I very well know, that there is not a democrat or a republican in America, who knows me, who has ever doubted, or doubts to-day, what my political position is. It is unworthy of further notice, and I will notice it no more.

Mr. MAHONE. Mr. President, I do not propose to detain you and the Senate more than a few minutes. The distinguished Senator from Georgia has manifestly engaged in an effort to disclose my position on this floor.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I do not know what your position is. How could I disclose it?

Mr. MAHONE. Sir, the Senator might be a little more direct as he might well have been in the course of his remarks in asking my position; and that I will give him.

Now, Mr. President, the Senator has assumed not only to be the custodian here of the democratic party of this nation, but he has dared to assert his right to speak for a constituency that I have the privilege, the proud and honorable privilege on this floor, of representing [applause in the galleries] without his assent, without the assent of such democracy as that he speaks for. [Applause in the galleries.] I owe them, sir, I owe you [addressing Mr. HILL] and those for whom you undertake to speak nothing in this Chamber. [Applause in the galleries.] I came here, sir, as a Virginian to represent my people, not to represent that democracy for which you stand. [Applause in the galleries.] I come with as proud a claim to represent that people as you to represent the people of Georgia, won on fields where I have vied with Georgians whom I commanded and others in the cause of my people and of their section in the late unhappy contest; but thank God for the peace and the good of the country that contest is over, and as one of those who engaged in it, and who has neither here nor elsewhere any apology to make for the part taken, I am here by my humble efforts to bring peace to this whole country, peace and good will between the sections, not here as a partisan, not here to represent that Bourbonism which has done so much injury to my section of the country. [Applause in the galleries.]

Now, sir, the gentleman undertakes to say what constitutes a democrat. A democrat! I hold, sir, that to-day I am a better democrat than he, infinitely better—he who stands nominally committed to a full vote, a free ballot, and an honest count. I should like to know how he stands for these things where tissue ballots are fashionable. [Laughter, and applause in the galleries.]

Now, sir, I serve notice on you that I intend to be here the custodian of my own democracy. I do not intend to be run by your caucus. I am in every sense a free man here. I trust I am able to protect my own rights and to defend those of the people whom I represent, and certainly to take care of my own. I do not intend that any Senator on this floor shall undertake to criticise my conduct by innuendoes, a method not becoming this body or a straightforward legitimate line of pursuit in argument.

I wish the Senator from Georgia to understand just here that we may get along in the future harmoniously, that the way to deal with me is to deal directly. We want no bills of discovery. Now, sir, you will find out how I am going to vote in a little while. [Applause.]

Mr. DAVIS, of West Virginia. Mr. President, during this temporary suspension——

Mr. MAHONE. I have not yielded the floor. I am waiting for a little order.

Mr. DAVIS, of West Virginia. I wish to call the attention of the Chair to the disorder in the Senate both when my friend from Georgia was speaking and now. I believe it has been some time since we have had as much disorder as we have had to-day in the galleries. I hope the Chair will enforce order.

Mr. TELLER. I should like to say that much of the disorder originated in the first place from the cheering on the democratic side of the Chamber.

The VICE-PRESIDENT. The Chair announces that order must be maintained in the galleries; otherwise the Sergeant-at-Arms will be directed to clear the galleries.

Mr. MAHONE. I promised not to detain the Senate, and I regret that so early after my appearance here I should find it necessary to intrude any remarks whatsoever upon the attention of this body. I would prefer to be a little modest; I would prefer to listen and to learn; but I cannot feel content after what has passed in this presence, when the gentleman by all manner of methods, all manner of insinuations, direct and indirect, has sought to do that which would have been better done and more bravely pursued if he had gone directly to the question itself. He has sought to discover where the democrat was who should here choose to exercise his right to cast his vote as he pleased, who should here exercise the liberty of manhood to differ with his caucus. Why, sir, the gentleman seems to have forgotten that I refused positively to attend his little lovefeast; not only that, I refused to take part in a caucus which represents a party that has not only waged war upon me but upon those whom I represent on this floor. They have not only intruded within the boundaries of my own State, without provocation, to teach honesty and true democracy, but they would now pursue my people further by intruding their unsolicited advice and admonition to their representative in this Chamber. Yes, sir, you have been notified, duly notified that I would take no part or lot in any political machinery.

Further than that, you have been notified that I was supremely indifferent to what you did; that I had no wish to prefer, and was indifferent to your performances; that I should stand on this floor representing in part the people of the State of Virginia, for whom I have the right to speak (and not the Senator from Georgia) even of their democracy. The gentleman may not be advised that the Legislature which elected me did not require that I should state either that I was a democrat or anything else. I suppose he could not get here from Georgia unless he was to say that he was a democrat, anyhow. [Laughter.] I come here without being required to state to my people what I am. They were willing to trust me, sir, and I was elected by the people, and not by a legislature, for it was an issue in the canvass. There was no man elected by the party with which I am identified that did not go to the Legislature instructed by the sovereigns to vote for me for the position I occupy on this floor. It required no oath of allegiance blindly given to stand by your democracy, such as is, [laughter,] that makes a platform and practices another thing. That is the democracy they have in some of the Southern States.

Now, I hope the gentleman will be relieved. He has been chassezing all around this Chamber to see if he could not find a partner somewhere; he has been looking around in every direction; occasionally he would refer to some other Senator to know exactly where the Senator was who stood here as a democrat that had the manhood and the boldness to assert his opinions in this Chamber free from the dictation of a mere caucus. Now, I want the gentleman to know henceforth and forever here is a man, sir, that dares stand up [applause] and speak for himself without regard to caucus in all matters. [Applause, long continued, in the galleries and on the floor.] Mr. President, pardon me; I have done.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Mr. President—

The VICE-PRESIDENT. The Senate will be in order. Gentlemen on the floor not members of the Senate will take seats.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Mr. President, I hope nobody imagines that I rise to make any particular reply to the remarkable exhibition we have just seen. I rise to say a few things in justification of myself. I certainly did not say one word to justify the gentleman in the statement that I made an assault upon him, unless he was the one man who had been elected as a democrat and was not going to vote with his party. I never saw that gentleman before the other day. I have not the slightest unkind feeling for him. I never alluded to him by name; I never alluded to his State; and I cannot understand how the gentleman says that I alluded to him except upon the rule laid down by the distinguished Senator from New York, that a guilty conscience needs no accuser. [Applause and hisses in the galleries.] I did not mention the Senator. It had been stated here by the Senator from New York over and over that the other side would have a majority when that side was full. I showed it was impossible that they should have a majority unless they could get one democratic vote, with the vote of the Vice-President. I did not know who it was; I asked who it was; I begged to know who it was; and to my utter astonishment the gentleman from Virginia comes out and says he is the man.

The Senator from Virginia makes a very strange announcement. He charged me not only with attacking him, but with attacking the people of Virginia? Did I say a word of the people of Virginia? I said that the people of no portion of this country would tolerate treachery. Was that attacking the people of Virginia? I said that thirty-eight men had been elected to this body as democrats. Does the Senator deny that? Does he say he was elected here not as a democrat? He says he was not required to declare that he was a democrat, and in the next breath he says he is a truer, better democrat than I am. Then I commend him to you. Take good care of him, my friends. Nurse him well. How do you like to have a worse democrat than I am?

Mr. CONKLING and others. A better democrat.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Oh, a better! Then my friend from New York is a better democrat than I am. You have all turned democrats; and we have in the United States Senate such an exhibition as that of a gentleman showing his democracy by going over to the Republicans!

Sir, I will not defend Virginia. She needs no defense. Virginia has given this country and the world and humanity some of the brightest names of history. She holds in her bosom to-day the ashes of some of the noblest and greatest men that ever illustrated the glories of any country. I say to the Senator from Virginia that neither Jefferson, nor Madison, nor Henry, nor Washington, nor Leigh, nor Tucker, nor any of the long list of great men that Virginia has produced ever accepted a commission to represent one party and came here and represented another. [Applause on the floor and in the galleries.]

Mr. COCKRELL. I trust that those at least who are enjoying the privilege of the floor of the Senate Chamber will be prohibited from cheering.

The VICE-PRESIDENT. The Chair will state that the violation of the rules does not appear to be in the galleries, but by persons who have been admitted to the privilege of the floor. The Chair regrets to clear the floor, but if the manifestation is continued he will be obliged to do so. It is a violation of the rules of the Senate.

Mr. MAHONE rose.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Does the Senator from Virginia wish to interrupt me?

Mr. MAHONE. I do wish to interrupt you.

The VICE-PRESIDENT. Does the Senator from Georgia yield?

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Certainly.

Mr. MAHONE. I understand you to say that I accepted a commission from one party and came here to represent another. Do I understand you correctly?

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I understood that you were elected as a democrat.

Mr. MAHONE. Never mind; answer the question.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Yes, I say you accepted a commission, having been elected as a democrat. That is my information.

Mr. MAHONE. I ask you the question: Did you say that I had accepted a commission from one party and came here to represent another? That is the question.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Oh, I said that will be the case if you vote with the republicans. You have not done it yet, and I say you will not do it.

Mr. MAHONE. If not out of order in this place, I say to the gentleman that if he undertakes to make that statement it is unwarranted and untrue.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I should like to ask the gentleman a question: Was he not acting with the democratic party, and was he not elected as a democrat to this body? Answer that question.

Mr. MAHONE. Quickly, sir. I was elected as a readjuster. Do you know what they are? [Laughter and applause.]

The VICE-PRESIDENT rapped with his gavel.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I understand there are in Virginia what are called readjuster democrats and debt-paying democrats, or something of that kind, but as I understand they are all democrats. We have nothing to do with that issue. We are not to settle the debt of Virginia in the Senate Chamber; but I ask the Senator again, was he not elected to this body as a member of the national democratic party?

Mr. MAHONE. I will answer you, sir. No. You have got the answer now.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Then I conceive that the gentleman spoke truly when he said that I do not know what he is. What is he? Everybody has understood that he voted with the democrats. Did he not support Hancock for the Presidency? Did not the Senator support Hancock for the Presidency, I ask him? [A pause] Dumb! Did he not act with the democratic party in the national election, and was not the Senator from Virginia himself a democrat? That is the question. Why attempt to evade? Gentlemen, I commend him to you. Is there a man on that side of the Chamber who doubts that the Senator was sent to this body as a democrat? Is there a man in this whole body who doubts it? Is there a man in Virginia who doubts it? The gentleman will not deny it. Up to this very hour it was not known on this side of the Chamber or in the country how he would vote in this case, or whether he was still a democrat or not. I maintain that he is. The Senator from New York seemed to have information that somebody who was elected as a democrat was not, and I went to work to find out who it was. It seems I have uncovered him. For months the papers of the country have been discussing and debating how the Senator would vote. Nobody could know, nobody could tell, nobody could guess. I have been a truer friend to the Senator than he has been to himself. I have maintained always that when it came to the test the Senator would be true to his commission; that the Senator would be true to the democratic professions he made when he was elected. He will not rise in this presence and say he could have been elected to the Senate as a republican. He will not rise in the Senate and say he could have been elected to the Senate if he had given notice that on the organization of this body he would vote with the republicans. He will not say it.

The gentleman makes some remarks about the caucus. I have no objection to a gentleman remaining out of a caucus. That is not the question. I have no objection to a gentleman being independent. That is not the question. I have no objection to a gentleman being a readjuster in local politics. That is not the question. I have no objection to a man dodging from one side to another on such a question. With that I have nothing to do. That is a matter of taste with him; but I do object to any man coming into this high council, sent here by one sentiment, commissioned by one party, professing to be a democrat, and after he gets here acting with the other party. If the gentleman wants to be what he so proudly said, a man, when he changes opinions, as he had a right to do, when he changes party affiliations as he had a right to do, he should have gone to the people of Virginia and said, “You believed me to be a democrat when you gave me this commission; while I differed with many of you on the local question of the debt, I was with you cordially in national politics; I belonged to the national democratic party; but I feel that it is my duty now to co-operate with the republican party, and I return you the commission which you gave to me.” If the gentleman had done that and then gone before the people of Virginia and asked them to renew his commission upon his change of opinion, he would have been entitled to the eulogy of manhood he pronounced upon himself here in such theatrical style. I like manhood.

I say once more, it is very far from me to desire to do the Senator injury. I have nothing but the kindest feelings for him. He is very much mistaken if he supposes I had any personal enmity against him. I have not the slightest. As I said before, I never spoke to the gentleman in my life until I met him a few days ago; but I have done what the newspapers could not do, both sides having been engaged in the effort for months; I have done what both parties could not do, what the whole country could not do—I have brought out the Senator from Virginia.

But now, in the kindest spirit, knowing the country from which the honorable Senator comes, identified as I am with its fame and its character, loving as I do every line in its history, revering as I do its long list of great names, I perform the friendly office unasked of making a last appeal to the honorable Senator, whatever other fates befall him, to be true to the trust which the proud people of Virginia gave him, and whoever else may be disappointed, whoever else may be deceived, whoever else may be offended at the organization of the Senate, I appeal to the gentleman to be true to the people, to the sentiment, to the party which he knows commissioned him to a seat in this body.

Mr. LOGAN. Mr. President, I have but a word to say. I have listened to a very extraordinary speech. The Senate of the United States is a body where each Senator has a right to have a free voice. I have never known before a Senator, especially a new Senator, to be arraigned in the manner in which the Senator from Virginia has been, and his conduct criticised before he had performed any official act, save one, so far as voting is concerned. He needs no defense at my hands; he is able to take care of himself; but I tell the Senator from Georgia when he says to this country that no man has a right to come here unless he fulfills that office which was dictated to him by a party, he says that which does not belong to American independence. Sir, it takes more nerve, more manhood, to strike the party shackles from your limbs and give free thought its scope than any other act that man can perform. The Senator from Georgia himself, in times gone by, has changed his opinions. If the records of this country are true (and he knows whether they are or not) he, when elected to a convention as a Union man, voted for secession. [Applause in the galleries.]

The VICE-PRESIDENT rapped with his gavel.

Mr. HOAR. If my friend will pardon me a moment, I desire to call the attention of the Chair to the fact that there has been more disorder in this Chamber during this brief session of the Senate than in all the aggregate of many years before. I take occasion when a gentleman with whose opinions I perfectly agree myself in speaking to say that I shall move the Chair to clear any portion of the gallery from which expressions of applause or dissent shall come if they occur again.

Mr. LOGAN. What I have said in reference to this record I do not say by way of casting at the Senator, but merely to call attention to the fact that men are not always criticised so severely for changing their opinions. The Senator from Georgia spoke well of my colleague. Well he may. He is an honorable man and a man deserving well of all the people of this country. He was elected not as a democrat but by democratic votes. He votes with you. He never was a democrat in his life; he is not to-day. You applaud him and why? Because he votes with you. You want his vote; that is all. You criticise another man who was elected by republican votes and democratic votes, readjusters as they are called, and say that he has no right to his opinions in this Chamber. The criticism is not well. Do you say that a man shall not change his political opinions?

The Senator from Georgia in days gone by, in my boyhood days, I heard of, not as a democrat. To-day he sits here as a democrat. No one wishes to criticise him because he has changed his political opinions. He had a right to do so. I was a democrat once, too, and I had a right to change my opinions and I did change them. The man who will not change his opinions when he is honestly convinced that he was in error is a man who is not entitled to the respect of men. I say this to the Senator from Georgia. The Senator says to us, “take him,” referring to the Senator from Virginia. Yes, sir, we will take him if he will come with us, and we will take every other honest man who will come. We will take every honest man in the South who wants to come and join the republican party, and give him the right hand of fellowship, be he black or white. Will you do as much?

Mr. HILL of Georgia. We have got them already.

Mr. LOGAN. Yes, and if a man happens to differ with you the tyranny of political opinion in your section of country is such that you undertake to lash him upon the world and try to expose him to the gaze of the public as a man unfaithful to his trust. We have no such tyranny of opinion in the country where I live; and it will be better for your section when such notions are driven to the shades and retired from the action of your people.

I do not know that the gentleman from Virginia intends to vote as a republican. I have never heard him say so. I know only what he has said here to-day; but I respect him for stating to the Senate and the country that he is tired of the Bourbon democracy; and if more men were tired of it the country would be better off. The people are getting tired of it even down in your country, every where. The sooner we have a division down there the better it will be for both sides, for the people of the whole country.

I did not rise to make any defense of the Senator from Virginia, for he is able, as I said, to defend himself, but merely to say to the Senator from Georgia that the criticism made upon that Senator without any just cause is something I never witnessed before in this Chamber or in any other deliberative body, and in my judgment it was not justified in any way whatever.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I desire to say once more, what everybody in the audience knows is true, that I did not arraign the Senator from Virginia. In the first speech I never alluded to Virginia or to the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. LOGAN. Every one in the Chamber knew to whom the Senator alluded.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I alluded to somebody who was elected as a democrat, and who was going to vote as a republican.

Mr. TELLER. He was not elected as a democrat.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Then I did not allude to the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. TELLER. The Senator said that thirty-eight members of the Senate were elected as democrats.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Certainly they were.

Mr. TELLER. That is a mistake.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Certainly they were, and the record shows it.

Mr. CONKLING. May I ask the Senator a question?

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Let me go on and then you can follow me. I again say it is strange that the Senator from Virginia should say I arraigned him, and his valiant defender, the Senator from Illinois, comes to defend him from an arraignment that was never made.

Mr. LOGAN. Did not the Senator from Georgia ask the Senator from Virginia in his seat if he was not elected as a Democrat? Did not the Senator charge that a man was acting treacherously to his constituents? Did the Senator not make the most severe arraignment of him that he could possibly make?

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. If the Senator will allow me, I did that only after the Senator from Virginia had arraigned himself. The Senator from Virginia insisted that I alluded to him when I had not called his name, and I had not alluded to his State and when I had arraigned nobody.

Mr. LOGAN. Will the Senator allow me to ask him this question: Did he not have in his mind distinctly the Senator from Virginia when he made his insinuations?

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I will answer the gentleman’s question fairly. I did believe that the gentlemen on the other side who were counting upon a democratic vote were counting upon the Senator from Virginia, but I equally believed that they would be disappointed. I did not believe that the Senator from Virginia was guilty, and I in perfect sincerity and good faith, so far from arraigning him, intended to defend him from the foul suspicion, and my honest repulsion of the insinuation, which was necessary in consequence of what they expected, was regarded by the Senator himself as an arraignment. There is an anecdote told in the life of the great minister, Whitefield. When he was speaking one day in the country to an audience, he described the enormity of sin and the characteristics of sin; he did it with wonderful power. When he came out he was assailed by a gentleman for having made a personal assault on him. “Why,” said Whitefield, “I never heard of you before; I did not intend any assault upon you.” He replied, “Well, sir, you told me everything I have been doing all my life.” I frankly confess I am not a man to dodge. The papers have justified me in believing, Senators have justified me in believing, that you are calculating to get the democratic vote of the Senator from Virginia, whom the whole country has treated as having been elected as a democrat. I believed you would be disappointed; I believed that because you would be disappointed it was wholly unnecessary to delay this organization. I did not believe the Senator would vote with you, and in vindication of that Senator I will not believe it yet. He has not said so. He has made the mistake, because of what the papers say, of assuming that I alluded to him; but I vindicate him yet. He said if I asserted that he was elected as a democrat and would be false to his commission, I said what was not warranted and what was untrue. I am glad he said so. I did not say he would; but I say you expected it, I say your papers expected it, and I say it has been calculated on. I vindicate the Senator from Virginia, and I hope he will vindicate himself by not doing what you expect him to do. The Senator from Illinois charges me again with criticising a man for changing his opinion. I distinctly said that every man in this country has a right to change his opinion. The distinguished Senator from Illinois has changed his opinion. He says the country is tired of Bourbon democracy. He ought to know, for he used to be one of the worst Bourbon democrats this country ever saw.

Mr. LOGAN. That was when you belonged to the other side.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. The first time I ever heard of that Senator was when I was battling in the South for the good old whig principles and he was an outrageous Bourbon democrat. That amounts to nothing. You had a right to change, if you have changed; I do not say you have.

Mr. LOGAN. I will only say, if the Senator will allow me, that when I saw the light I changed for the right. The Senator saw the darkness and changed for the wrong.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Ah, that is not argument.

Mr. LOGAN. It is true, however, just the same.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I hope the Senator will see more light and change again.

Mr. LOGAN. I do not think I shall.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. He needs a great deal of light.

Mr. LOGAN. No doubt of that. I do not expect to get it, however, from that side.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I object to this style of interruption; it is unworthy of the Senate. I am not here to indulge in such remarks. The Senator has a right to change; I have arraigned nobody for changing his opinion. If the Senator from Virginia has changed his opinions he has a right to change them; I have not said he has not. I do not deny his right. I admit that a man has a right also to change his party affiliations if he is convinced he has been wrong; but a man has no right to hold a commission which was given him while he was a democrat and because he was a democrat and given to him as a democrat, and change his opinions and act with the adversary party. It is his duty to return that commission to the people who gave it and ask them to renew it upon his change of opinion. That is all I ask.

Mr. LOGAN. Will the Senator allow me to ask him what right has he as a Senator to undertake to dictate to the Senator from Virginia as to what shall be required in his State?

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. That is incorrect again. I have not undertaken to dictate to the Senator from Virginia. The Senator from Virginia can do just as he pleases; but when the Senator from Virginia acts as a public man I have a right to my opinion of his public acts, and I have a right to speak of all public acts and their character. I will not deny his right; I am not dictating to him—far from it. There is not in my heart now an unkind feeling for the Senator from Virginia. I would if I could rescue him from the infamy into which others are trying to precipitate him. That is what I want to do. I am not assailing him; I am not arraigning him; I am not dictating to him. I know the proud nature of the Senator from New York. I know if that Senator was elected to this body as a republican, although he might have been a readjuster at the time, and if he should come to this body and the democrats should begin to intimate in this Hall and the democratic papers should intimate over the country that he was going to vote with the democrats on the organization, he would feel insulted just as my friend from Tennessee (Mr. Harris) justly felt by the allusions to him in the newspapers. So with any other man on that side. If the Senator from Virginia was elected as a democrat I am right; but if as a republican I have nothing more to say.

Mr. LOGAN. Will the Senator allow me right there? Is it not true that the democracy of the Virginia Legislature that elected the Senator now in his seat from Virginia did nominate Mr. Withers as their candidate and supported him, and was not this senator elected by the opponents of the democrats of that Legislature? Is not that true? I ask the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. MAHONE. Substantially so.

Mr. LOGAN. Then if that be true, why say that he came here as the representative of the democracy of Virginia?

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. My understanding is that the democracy of Virginia is very much like the democracy of other States, as Tennessee. We are divided down there in several States on local questions that have nothing to do with national politics. In Virginia the democracy was divided between what are called readjuster democrats and debt-paying democrats, but all democrats.

What was called the republican party it was said, although I must vindicate many of the republicans in the State from the charge, coalesced with what are called the readjuster democrats. The late Senator from Virginia was nominated by what are called the debt-paying democrats, and the present Senator from Virginia, as I understand it, was run against him as a readjuster democrat.

Mr. LOGAN. And the republicans all supported him.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Certainly, because they always support a candidate who is running against the regular nominee. I suppose the republicans always go for men who are not in favor of paying debts! I had thought that republicans professed to affiliate with those who would pay debts. But I have nothing to do with that question; it does not come in here. What I say and what will not be denied, and I am ashamed that there is an attempt to deny it, is, and it is the worst feature of this whole thing, that anybody should get up here and attempt to deny that the Senator from Virginia was elected to the Senate as a democrat; should attempt to evade the fact that he was a Hancock democrat last year; that he has acted with the national democracy all the time; and that whatever might have been the local differences in Virginia, he has been a national democrat every hour, held out to the country as such. I say I am ashamed that anybody should attempt to make a question of that fact. He was not only a democrat, a national democrat, and voted for Hancock, but I remember the historical fact that he had what he called his own ticket in the field for Hancock and voted for it. He is just as much a democrat, sent here as a readjuster democrat, as the other candidate, the debt-paying democrat, would have been if he had been elected.

Mr. LOGAN. The difference is, if the Senator will allow me, if the other had been elected, he would have been in full accord with the democracy here. This gentleman does not happen to be, and therefore the criticism of the Senator from Georgia.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I do not wish to do the republicans of Virginia injustice; I do not wish to do any body injustice. There are some republicans of Virginia for whom I confess, if reports be true, I have a profound respect. When a portion of the democrats, under the cry of readjusterism, sought to get the support of the republicans of Virginia, there were manly republicans who refused to go into a coalition that would compromise the character of the State on the question of its debt. I am told there are republicans now in Virginia who say that if republicanism here means the Senator from Virginia, and you accept him as a republican, you must give them up as republicans. I do not know how true it is. But this is unworthy of the Senate.

I repeat, the worst feature of this whole transaction is that anybody should get up here and attempt to make an impression that there was a doubt as to the democracy of the Senator from Virginia heretofore. That is an evasion unworthy of the issue, unworthy of the place, unworthy of the occasion, unworthy of Virginia, unworthy of the Senator, unworthy of his defenders. Admit the fact that he was a democrat, and then claim that he exercised the inalienable right of changing his opinions and his party affiliations, but do not claim that he had a right to do it in the manner you say he has done it.

Once more let me say, the Senator from Virginia ought to know that by all the memories of the past there is not a man in this body whose whole soul goes out more in earnest to protect his honor than my own. I would rather lose the organization of the Senate by the democratic party and never again have a democratic committee in this body than have Virginia soiled with dishonor. I do not say that the Senator is going to do it, but I see the precipice yawning before him. I see whither potential influences are leading him. I know the danger just ahead. I would rescue him if I could. He may say it is enmity; he may say it is an unfriendly spirit; he will live to know the force of the words I am uttering. Men in this country have a right to be democrats; men in this country have a right to be republicans; men in this country have a right to divide on national issues and local issues; but no man has a right to be false to a trust, I repeat it, and whether the Senator from Virginia shall be guilty or not is not for me to judge and I will not judge. I say if he votes as you want him to vote God save him or he is gone. If he comes here to illustrate his democracy by going over to that side of the House and voting with that side of the House, he will be beyond my rescue. No, gentlemen, I honor you. I like a proud republican as well as I do a proud democrat. I am conscious of the fact that some of the best personal friends I have in this body sit on that side of the Chamber, men whose high character I would trust anywhere and everywhere. Gentlemen, you know your hearts respond to every word I am uttering when I say you despise treachery, and you honor me to-day for making an effort to rescue a gentleman, not from treachery, but from the charge of it. If the Senator shall vote as you desire him to vote, he cannot escape the charge.

Mr. MAHONE. Mr. President, I want to interrupt the Senator from Georgia.

The VICE-PRESIDENT. Does the Senator from Georgia yield?

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Certainly.

Mr. MAHONE. I cannot allow you to make any such insinuation.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I make no insinuation.

Mr. MAHONE. You did emphatically, and it was unmanly. Now it must stop. Let us understand that.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I repeat, I do not know how the Senator is going to vote. I believe he is not going to vote as you expect. I believe he is not going to be guilty of being false to his commission. I will not charge that he will; I will not insinuate that he will. I have not insinuated it. The gentleman must be his own keeper; the gentleman must solve his own questions; but I repeat, I repeat as a friend, I repeat as a friend whose friendship will be appreciated some day, that the Senator is in danger of bringing upon himself a charge which he will never have the power to explain.

Mr. MAHONE. I cannot allow you or any other man to make that charge without a proper answer.

Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Oh, well.

Senator Mahone’s Reply to Senator Hill

in Extra Senate Session, March 28th, 1881.

Mr. MAHONE. Mr. President, my profound respect for the wisdom and experience of my seniors in this Chamber compels me to renew expression of the reluctance with which I so soon intrude upon its deliberations. Senators and the country will concede that to this seeming forwardness I have been provoked.

If I do not challenge generous consideration from those who would appear to have found pleasure in their unjustifiable assaults, I do not doubt that I shall command the respect of the brave and independent here, as I know I shall command that of my own people. I shall not complain of the intolerance and indirection which have characterized the allusions of some Senators to myself. Doubtless they comport entirely with their own sense of manly deportment and senatorial dignity, however little they do with mine. Virginia is accustomed to meet occasions where the independent spirit of the Anglo-Saxon is required to assert itself; Virginia has ever met, with fortitude and dignity, every duty that destiny has imposed, always, however, with much contempt for small party tactics where principles were involved to which her faith and her honor were committed.

With absolute confidence in my loyalty to her and my devotion to every interest of her people, I shall not relax my purpose to repel every impeachment of the constituency which sent me here with clearly defined duties which they and I comprehend. I was elected to the Senate of the United States to do their will, not to a caucus to do its petty bidding. Virginia earned her title of the Old Dominion by the proud and independent action of her own people, by the loyalty of her sons to the instincts of independence, without help at the hands of those who would now interfere with her affairs.

However feebly I may assert that spirit against the gratuitous and hypocritical concern for her of strangers to her trials, her sacrifices, and her will, I feel that the spirit of my people inspires me when I scornfully repel for them and for myself ungracious attempts to instruct a Virginia Senator as to his duty to them and to himself. Senators should learn to deal with their constituencies, while I answer to mine.

To him who would insinuate that my action in respect to the organization of the committees of this body and the proposed election of its officers has been governed or controlled by impure considerations—and I am loth to believe that any honorable Senator has so intended—in the language of another, I say:

If thou saidst I am not peer To any lord in Scotland here, Lowland or highland, far or near, Lord Angus, thou hast lied!

And now, Mr. President, permit me to say that Senators can no more realize my regret than they can measure my amazement that my colleague should have felt it incumbent upon him to join the assaulting column in this Chamber. He first introduces the consideration of my political consistency, and he next introduces me, with the eighty-odd thousand of his fellow-citizens who sent me here, to this honorable body as a repudiator of public obligations. The sense of justice of fellow Senators renders it unnecessary for me to apologize for noticing my colleague’s criticisms on the one hand and his perversions on the other. However much he and his friends may endeavor, by the chop-logic of the attorney, to demonstrate what I ought to be, I know by my convictions and by my sense of duty what I am. In this particular I have largely the advantage of my colleague; for if I take him by his record, diminutive as it is, he neither knows what he was, what he is, or what duty he came here to perform. A very brief recital of Virginia political history, covering but a decade, will give a clear view of the Virginia situation as it is represented on this floor. My colleague gave the first page, and then, like the lazy, truant school-boy, skipped many pages, or, like the shifty lawyer, read only so much of the authority as suited his case. I am duly grateful to him for the small meed of praise he would deal out to me for the humble part I bore in the great liberal movement of 1869, which was undertaken to return our State to her normal condition in the Union.

I am the more grateful because the organs of the faction he represents here have recently published columns to prove that I was breathed into political existence subsequently to that momentous period. Not being sworn, my colleague thought it was sufficient for him to tell the truth without the usual obligation to tell the whole truth. It is now my privilege, as well as duty, to supply all deficiencies. The views I entertained then I still adhere to, and though, as far as my information goes, we had no material assistance from him in that severe and trying ordeal of 1869, I do know that after his election to this body he confessed himself in entire accord with all that had been done by Virginia as a condition precedent to her restoration, and with the zeal of a new convert expressed the hope that other States of the Union without the same propelling cause should do likewise. In a letter addressed to the then governor of Virginia (Walker) he wrote as follows:

JOHNSTON TO GOVERNOR WALKER IN 1869.

Believing fully not only that we in Virginia could not prosper, but that our continued exclusion from the Union interfered with the business of the whole country, I have been anxious for an early compliance with the reconstruction laws, and that the State should itself inaugurate some movement similar to that which resulted in your election for the purpose, and not wait, like Micawber, “for something to turn up.”

* * * * *

The fifteenth amendment, which I trust will soon be adopted by States enough to make it a part of the Constitution of the United States, will end a question which has agitated the country for half a century. I entirely approve of the principles of that amendment, and as we have invested the freedman with the right to vote, let us give him a fair opportunity to vote understandingly. He has civil rights, and it is our interest he should know their value.

* * * * *

That we are apparently so near to the consummation of reconstruction we are greatly indebted to President Grant’s kind offices. The State was in a dilemma; it wanted a constitution; but the one made for it has at least two very objectionable features. We felt that we were suffering in all our material interests by staying out of the Union, and yet to go in under the constitution with all its provisions would have been worse.

The Gordian knot was happily cut by the President’s first message to Congress and the prompt response of that body. Up to this time the conduct of the administration has been liberal, and if the same policy is pursued hereafter it ought to have the hearty support of this State. If we cast dead issues behind us and look only to that line of conduct which shall restore quiet and confidence, and encourage enterprise and industry, we shall even see the country richer and more prosperous than it has ever been.

This movement in 1869 accomplished the restoration of our State under the expurgated constitution and gave us representation here in the persons of my colleague and ex-Senator Lewis. We were relieved of military government, became rehabilitated in our sovereignty, with entire control of our local autonomy. Thus, for a period, Virginia seemed to be enjoying the full freedom of her long-deferred hope for peace.

In the curious panoramic exhibition of my colleague I next appear as a candidate for governor in 1877. To be a candidate in Virginia is a privilege which every qualified voter may constitutionally exercise, and in that year there were three prominent candidates other than those named by the Senator. Two of them had been major-generals and one a brigadier-general. What an omission! Shades of departed glory defend us! when a United States Senator of the Bourbon persuasion can omit imposing titles in detailing events with which they were intimately associated. ’Tis true I was not nominated, lacking forty votes of a certain majority of a convention composed of over fourteen hundred delegates against a combination of five candidates, one of whom my colleague preferred, that preference perhaps being based upon motives as unselfish as are usual in veteran politicians and office-holders.

Mr. President, I can scarcely hope, in the presence of this body, where my colleague has served for many years, and where the altitude of his statesmanship frowns contemptuously down upon all who would aspire to reach its summit, to attain the awful diffidence with which I should undertake to correct any of his statements. He is one of the conscript fathers of the Senate, old in all its ways and usages; and long absence from his constituency and perpetual service to the national democratic party in helping to organize its numerous defeats make him forgetful of recent events in Virginia. Hence the necessity of my attempting to inform him as to certain matters of recent history at home.

“The next event,” says my colleague, “was that the readjusters separated themselves from the democratic party;” and after treating this at some length he says, “This brings us down to what is called Mozart Hall convention,” in which, he adds, “I spoke of the conservative party as though I belonged to it.”

Mr. President, I confess my inability to understand all this curious mixture of the odds and ends of my colleague’s scrap-book. He parades his facts in curiously-contrived array. He empties his ill-assorted jewels of information and “chunks of wisdom,” and seems to rely upon Senators to give them that consecutive arrangement as to fact and date which they have, possibly, in his own great mind. But, sir, the fact is there was no remarkable incident in Virginia politics between the election of 1877 and 1879, the month of February of the latter year being, the date of the assembling of the Mozart Hall convention. Certainly until February, 1879, there was no change in the status of parties in Virginia within that period. There was no organization of readjusters until February, 1879, and there was no declared democratic party until 1880.

This brings me, Mr. President, to a period when I propose to do more than follow my colleague in his half-way candid and nearly always inaccurate statement. It is at this juncture, he says, that Mr. Riddleberger and I are so much identified that he cannot separate us. It is at this point the organization of the readjusters begins; and it is at this point he appears to seek to make an impression wholly unwarranted by any act of the readjusters in Virginia. It is at this point, too, Mr. President, that I am constrained by a sense of duty to my people, my State, and myself to treat the question of our State debt as it presents itself in Virginia. In doing this, I wish it distinctly understood that I hold this to be a matter belonging exclusively to the State of Virginia, and I should repel any Federal interference with this as I would with any other question of mere State concern. I shall presume upon the indulgence of Senators because they have heard but one side, and that more than once, and I know they will be willing to hear a defense of Virginia against unjust attacks from those who ought to be her defenders.

Sir, there is not a fact upon which to base any one of the statements or arguments of my colleague. Instead of the Mozart Hall convention being held to effect a repeal of an irrepealable contract, it was a body of people assembled on a call of members of the General Assembly opposed to what is known in Virginia as the “brokers’ bill.” They assembled before that bill had passed either House of the General Assembly, and, coming fresh from the people, expressed their unqualified disapproval of that measure. It was apparent the measure was to pass, and organized opposition began. But, Mr. President, this is neither the beginning nor the end of this question. It was in 1871 that the first funding bill was enacted, and this we know in Virginia as the first contract.

I will not go into the details of this measure, as I shall ask the clerk to read a review of all the Virginia funding acts before concluding my remarks. It is my purpose now only to notice the speeches of Senators, notably that of my colleague, in this Chamber. It will be news to Senators to hear to-day that the readjusters never repealed either of the funding contracts. That enacted and only partially executed in 1866–’67 was in effect repealed by the Assembly which passed it, and the work of repeal was consummated by the Legislature that enacted the more obnoxious measure of 1871. This in turn was repealed by the Assembly of 1872, the propounder of the repeal measure being the present lieutenant-governor of the State, subsequently in full fellowship with the alleged debt-payers. Indeed this measure was so obnoxious that Governor Walker, who was conceded to be its author, subsequently urged that the Federal Government should assume the debts of the Southern States.

Mr. President, I might pause to inquire if that is a part of the doctrine of my colleague and the Senators who co-operate with him, when they stand here to represent the party for which Governor Walker then spoke, the pretended debt-payers of Virginia? It was this repeal bill which the Virginia court of appeals held to be unconstitutional, and here the matter rested until the State had accumulated interest arrears to over five million dollars, beside diverting one and a half million dollars which was dedicated by the constitution to the public free schools.

In 1877 what is known as the Barbour bill was proposed and passed, not a few of the latter-day self-styled debt-payers being among its most zealous supporters. Although this did not repeal in terms the original funding bill, it was nevertheless vetoed by the governor.

Such was our condition at the succeeding election—schools reduced 50 per cent., length of sessions abridged, asylums sustained by money borrowed from the banks—after exhausting every possible expedient even to a reduction of judicial salaries, that a Legislature was returned pledged to a resettlement of this debt.

That settlement came in the form of the brokers’ bill, for which my colleague stands at home and here the champion, aided and abetted by distinguished gentlemen on this floor. I commend the virtuous democracy of this Chamber to read that bill, and then tell this Senate whether there ever was a more undemocratic measure than the bill propounded in Virginia by the party whose cause they espouse.

That settlement came in the form of the broker’s bill, as I have said, and this was the last repeal of the original contract. Yet my colleague would say the readjusters of to-day disregard the court decisions. Surely he has not forgotten that he was upon the hustings in Virginia advocating each of the successive measures repealing the “irrepealable” contract, while in every instance the readjusters proper opposed the new measure.

But here again I am called upon to answer the charge of personal inconsistency. My colleague cannot ascertain that I opposed the funding scheme of 1871—a measure which, I assert without the fear of contradiction, not only repudiated but forcibly repudiated what my colleague understands to be one-third of the debt of Virginia. I suggest to my fellow-Senators on the opposite side to take care of that contamination of which they have warned the country in respect to the readjusters of Virginia.

My colleague adverted to the Richmond Whig, and proclaimed it as my mouthpiece. Mr. President, nobody speaks for me; I speak for myself. Why not have ascertained from the same source how I stood on the funding bill of 1871? Senators will not find that I ever supported the measure of 1871.

Passing over what appears in my colleague’s speech as extracts from newspapers, to whose misstatements he has contributed a full share, I come now to notice his animadversions on the Riddleberger bill. If his criticisms were based on fact and a proper understanding of that measure, they would be unanswerable. He says that “the ‘Riddleberger bill’ has been substantially pronounced unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States.” I ask him in what particular? Is it in this—that it does not recognize the interest that accrued during the war? If so, will my learned colleague inform me upon what principle of right he last summer sustained a measure which repudiated one-half of the interest that has accrued since the complete restoration of our State? Does he not know that that measure of forcible readjustment absolutely repudiated one-half of the accrued and unfunded interest, while the Riddleberger bill provides for paying it dollar for dollar? The difference is simply this: that since 1871 we have denied the right of the creditor to exact war interest and proposed to pay him all else in full. Our adversaries would and did fund that war interest and proposed to repudiate one-half of that which we are in honor and in law bound to pay.

Is it unconstitutional in that it pays but 3 per cent.? The only measure ever passed by the Virginia Assembly to pay as much as 4 per cent. and the only one under which one-third of our creditors have received a penny of interest, was introduced and patronized by Mr. Riddleberger. The first time that our Legislature ever voiced 3 per cent. was when they passed the brokers’ job, the pet scheme of my colleague, so ably re-enforced in his advocacy of it on this floor by distinguished gentlemen on the other side, the Legislature then themselves admitting and declaring in the preamble of their bill that this is all the State can pay for ten years “without destroying its industries;” and last winter every legislator of their party voted to run the 3 per cent. for the whole time.

Is it unconstitutional in that it does not exempt the bonds from taxation forever, as the brokers’ bill attempted to do, a feature peculiar to that measure for paying the debt of Virginia which my colleague advocates here? If so, I would respectfully refer my colleague to his State constitution, which says that all property shall be taxed equally and uniformly; that no one species of property shall be taxed higher than another, and that only such property as is used for religious, educational, and charitable purposes may be exempt from taxation. My learned colleague, who so unkindly characterized the patron of that bill as a county court lawyer, cites only Hartman vs. Greenhow as the case which holds this bill unconstitutional. That case decided no principle that this bill infringes. The Riddleberger bill imposes no tax upon bonds held either in or out of the State. It simply does not exempt any. By what authority, I would ask my colleague, can such a tax be made and collected? He must answer to the party which he undertakes to represent here for doing an unconstitutional act: to tax bonds of the State of Virginia held by a non-resident. The Riddleberger bill does not tax them. Whenever the General Assembly, carrying out the Riddleberger bill, shall endeavor to tax bonds held out of the State, it will be time for the Senator to renew the test in the Supreme Court of the United States and cite the precedent of Hartman vs. Greenhow.

Is it the much-discussed fourteenth section which is unconstitutional? If so I would remind my legal colleague that it is a verbatim copy of a statute passed by the State of Tennessee, adjudicated by the Supreme Court of the United States, and not only held by that high tribunal to be constitutional but proper legislation for the protection and maintenance of government. Is it unconstitutional in what is called its force feature? If so it has precedent in the bill of ’71, which forbade the payment of any interest to a creditor who did not accept a reduction of one-third. It has precedent in the brokers’ bill, which provided tax certificates to compete at a reduced price with the receivable coupon, and both of these measures found a hustings advocate in my colleague.

But he would imply that our debt was ascertained at a certain sum in pursuance of the State Constitution, which he says was $29,667,304.76.

Mr. President, if there is any man in the party which my colleague represents who agrees with another member of that party in Virginia as to what the debt of that State is, we have yet to find the concurrence; it is with one leader this figure, with another leader another figure; by one report of their officers one sum, and then by another report of other officers a different sum. Grant that sum to be the true one; but let the Senator state that our constitution recognized no specific sum. It says there shall first be a settlement with West Virginia, which has not yet been had, and commands payment of what Virginia shall owe. That is the language, that is the instruction of the constitution of Virginia; that, after a settlement with West Virginia, covering one-third of old Virginia’s territory, shall have been arrived at by an adjustment of their relative proportions of the public debt, Virginia will provide for her share. Now I would like the Senators from West Virginia in this cry against readjusters as repudiators to tell the country what answer they have made to their obligation for one-third of the debt contracted by the old Commonwealth of Virginia. Will they tell the country where they have ever made a proposition to pay one stiver of their share of the public debt of that State to maintain the honor and the dignity of their own Commonwealth? Let them answer.

It was the party of my colleague, that repudiated the settlement of 1871 by the passage of the brokers’ bill in 1879, and in turn attempted to repudiate the latter by unanimously indorsing what is known as the “Ross Hamilton bill.” I suppose it would not suit my colleague to tell this audience who Ross Hamilton is. Yet, I beg Senators to take notice that the party of my colleague, after a winter spent in the vain effort to find a leader capable of devising means to overthrow the popular will, discovered such, as they supposed, in the person of Ross Hamilton, a colored republican member of the Legislature from the county of Mecklenburg, and blindly followed him to defeat. Hamilton’s bill, which was thus unanimously supported by my colleague’s party, not only in effect repealed their pet scheme, the brokers’ bill, but all other acts in respect to the public debt of Virginia.

I come now to perform a duty—the most unpleasant in one sense and the most agreeable in another. It is to repel the charge flippantly, I hope inconsiderately, made on this floor that we are repudiators and our proposed measure dishonorable. To the first I reply that my colleague’s party in eight years of administration of our State affairs paid 2 per cent. installments of interest on ten millions of our public debt just six times, or 12 per cent. in all; 6 times 8 would be 48 per cent. Instead of that they paid 12 per cent., and that is debt-paying!

Let this suffice. But when Senators apply the word dishonorable, they do not know either whom or what they characterize. Two things they have endeavored to demonstrate, and one is that I received a majority of the white conservative vote of both branches of the Virginia General Assembly. Proudly do I proclaim the truth of this. Every one of those who voted for me to come to this Chamber gave an unqualified vote for the Riddleberger bill. Are they dishonorable men? Scornfully do I repel the charge that any one of them is capable of dishonorable action.

Were it true, what a sad commentary it would be upon those honorable gentlemen whom it is said I am not representing here. Mr. President, my colleague comes from what we call in Virginia the great Southwest, a noble and prosperous section of Virginia. Fifteen white Conservative counties compose his congressional district, and though the ablest of the orators of my colleague’s party canvassed it thoroughly against me and the views set forth in this measure, but two delegates and no senator of the gentleman’s party came to the Legislature. To a man they supported the Riddleberger bill. Every senator and every delegate from my colleague’s own congressional district, save and except two delegates, supported me for the Senate and the Riddleberger bill as a measure for debt-paying. He would do well to spend a little more time with his constituents!

Whatever our differences on this question, it seems to me those people should have had a defender in him against such foul and slanderous accusations as have been made—that they are dishonorable men. O Shame! where is thy blush? Dishonorable in Virginia to beg the privilege of paying every dollar she borrowed—that is, her rightful share, instead of not only paying that but also the share of West Virginia—dishonorable to pay every dollar she borrowed, only abating the war interest! Dishonorable, too, in the opinion of the gentlemen who represent States on this floor and municipalities which have by arbitrary legislation reduced their indebtedness from $243,000,000 down to $84,000,000! Dishonorable in Virginia not only to assume her full share of her public obligations, as measured by her territory in this division of it, but offering to tax her people to an extent threatening the destruction of her industrial interests! Is that dishonorable in that people? If so, what have you to say of this tier of Southern States whose public indebtedness, whose plighted faith, whose sacred obligations—as sacred as are those of my State of Virginia—have been reduced from $243,000,000 by one or another method of repudiation, upon one or another excuse, down to $84,000,000, with a reduced interest rate upon the curtailed principal, and only proposing to pay interest in some cases at 2 per cent. and in others 3 and in others 4 on the reduced principal? Is it dishonorable in Virginia to assume $20,000,000 of the debt of the old State and then to tax her industries within the verge of endurance to pay on that sum the highest rate of interest? Let Senators who assail unjustly the conduct of Virginia in this respect put their own houses in order. I want, Mr. President, the Secretary to read from the International Review the measures of readjustment in the Southern States that Senators may know how fashionable readjustment had been in that section of this great country on which northern democrats rely in a presidential election.

The Chief Clerk read as follows:

Fluctuation of the Debts of twelve Southern States since the year 1842. ───────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬───────────── States. │ 1842. │ 1852. │ 1860. │ 1870. ───────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼───────────── West Virginia │ │ │ │ Virginia │ $6,994,307│ $13,573,355│ $31,779,062│ $47,390,839 North Carolina │ None.│ 977,000│ 9,699,000│ 29,900,045 South Carolina │ 5,691,234│ 3,144,931│ 4,046,540│ 7,665,909 Georgia │ 1,309,750│ 2,801,972│ 2,670,750│ 6,544,500 Florida │ 4,000,000│ 2,800│ 4,120,000│ 1,288,697 Alabama │ 15,400,060│ 8,500,000│ 6,700,000│ 8,478,018 Mississippi │ 7,000,000│ 7,271,707│ None.│ 1,796,230 Louisiana │ 23,985,000│ 11,492,566│ 4,561,109│ 25,021,734 Texas │ │ 5,725,671│ None.│ 508,641 Arkansas │ 2,676,000│ 1,506,562│ 3,092,624│ 3,459,557 Tennessee │ 3,198,166│ 3,776,856│ 20,896,606│ 38,539,802 Kentucky │ 3,085,500│ 5,726,307│ 5,479,244│ 3,892,480 ───────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼───────────── Totals │ 73,340,017│ 64,499,727│ 93,046,934│ 174,486,452 ───────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────

──────────────┬─────────────────────┬───────────┬────────────────────── States. │ Date after the war │ │ Amount of debt │ when debt reached │ 1880. │repudiated bet. period │ highest. │ │ wh. highest & June, │ │ │ 1880 ──────────────┼─────────────────────┼───────────┼────────────────────── West Virginia │ │ No debt.│ Virginia │ $47,390,839│$29,345,226│ $18,045,613 North Carolina│ 29,900,045│ 3,629,511│ 26,270,534 South Carolina│ 24,782,906│ 7,175,454│ 17,607,452 Georgia │ 20,197,500│ 10,334,000│ 9,863,500 Florida │ 5,512,268│ 1,391,357│ 4,120,911 Alabama │ 31,952,000│ 11,613,670│ 20,338,830 Mississippi │ 3,226,847│ 379,485│ 2,847,362 Louisiana │ 40,416,734│ 12,635,810│ 27,780,924 Texas │ 5,782,887│ 5,782,887│ Arkansas │ 18,287,273│ 5,813,627│ 12,473,646 Tennessee │ 41,863,406│ 25,685,822│ 16,177,584 Kentucky │ 3,892,480│ 180,394│ 3,712,086 ──────────────┼─────────────────────┼───────────┼────────────────────── Totals │ 273,205,185│113,967,243│ 159,237,942 ──────────────┴─────────────────────┴───────────┴──────────────────────

Mr. MAHONE. There is no mere readjustment there; I will not say it is repudiation. “Repudiation” is honorable, perhaps; “readjustment” dishonorable.

Oh, Virginia! It was for this you bared your bosom to soldier’s tread and horse’s hoof. It was for this you laid waste your fields. It was for this you displayed your noble virtues of fortitude and courage, your heroic suffering and sacrifice. It was for this you suffered the dismemberment of your territory and sent your sons to the field to return to the ruins where were once their homes. It was for this you so reluctantly abandoned your allegiance to a common country to be the last to make war and the last to surrender. O Ingratitude, thou basest and meanest of crimes!

And now, Mr. President, at the time of my election who constituted my opponents? Already, as you have been advised, another representing distinctly the Bourbon democracy of Virginia and the so-called democracy of this Chamber, another representing distinctly the republican party of Virginia—these were the candidates before the Legislature which elected me to this body. I received not only a majority of the so-called democratic readjusters but of the so-called republican readjusters. And now what were the efforts, known there if not here to gentlemen, to defeat me? Were not combinations sought to be made? It is known of all men there at the capital of my State, if not here, that every influence from whatsoever quarter it could be adduced, whether democratic or republican, was brought together at Richmond for the purpose by combination of defeating my election, of defeating the sovereign will of the people of that Commonwealth as expressed on the 4th of November, 1879.

There was a democracy which sought to secure the election of an orthodox, simon-pure, unadulterated republican, but of that kind called Bourbons in Virginia—a democracy which was not only willing but ready and anxious to send here in the place I have the honor to hold a republican whom they would otherwise profess to despise. What for? For the consideration well known there, that they might elect certain county judges and control the State offices, and by that means prevent the disclosures which have subsequently followed since the readjusters have gotten possession of the capitol. That democracy which like Cæsar’s wife would stand “above suspicion,” were ready to trade a seat in the United States Senate so that a few county judges might be preserved, that the offices in the capitol at Richmond might be retained in their control; I say in order, perhaps, that the disclosures which have followed the advent of the party I represent might have been longer concealed; moreover that control of the ballot-box in the State might continue where it had been; so certainly I believe; and all this by those who professed to represent the party which had declared in national convention for a full vote, a free ballot, and an honest count.

Such were the considerations, such I say were the inducements which prompted that democracy to its efforts to send to this Chamber a republican beyond question since these many long and weary years. If that is the democracy that the gentlemen on that side love, I proclaim my inability to co-operate with them.

I supported neither of the candidates for Congress in my district, and emphatically declared that purpose on more than one public occasion, because one was a candidate of that party, the Bourbon reactionists, and the other a Bourbon republican with accommodating views on the debt question.

To obey the behests of the democratic caucus of this body, whose leadership on this floor, whose representative national authority—the one here and the other elsewhere—have championed the cause of the Bourbon-funder party in Virginia, would be an obsequious surrender of our State policy and self-condemnation of our independent action.

The desire of our people for cordial relations with all sections of a common country and the people of all the States of the Union, their devotion to popular education, their efforts for the free enjoyment of a priceless suffrage and an honest count of ballots, their determination to make Virginia, in the public belief, a desirable home for all men, wherever their birthplace, whatever their opinions, and to open her fields and her mines to enterprise and capital, and to stay the retrograde movement of years, so as to bring her back from the fifteenth in grade to her original position among the first in the sisterhood of States, forbid that my action here should be controlled or influenced by a caucus whose party has waged war upon my constituency and where party success is held paramount to what I conceive to be the interests of Virginia and the welfare of the whole country.

The readjusters of Virginia have no feeling of hostility, no words of unkindness for the colored man. His freedom has come, and whether by purpose or by accident, thank God, that among other issues which so long distracted our country and restrained its growth, was concluded, and I trust forever, by the results of the sanguinary struggle between the sections.

I have faith, and it is my earnest hope, that the march of an enlightened civilization and the progress of human freedom will proceed until God’s great family shall everywhere enjoy the products of their own labor and the blessings of civil, political, and religious liberty.

The colored man was loyal to Virginia in all the days of conflict and devastation which came of the heroic struggle in the war of sections that made her fields historic. By no act of his was either the clash of arms provoked or freedom secured. He did not solve his duty by consideration of self-interest.

Speech of Hon. Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont,

(Author of the Tariff Bill of 1861), delivered in the Senate of the United Stales, December 8, 1881, on the Bill to Appoint a Tariff Commission.

The Senate, being as in Committee of the Whole, and having under consideration the bill (S. No. 22) to provide for the appointment of a commission to investigate the question of the tariff and internal revenue laws—

Mr. MORRILL said: I have brought this subject to the early attention of the Senate because, if early legislative action on the tariff is to be had, obviously the measure proposed by Senator Eaton and passed at the last session of the Senate is a wise and indispensable preliminary, which cannot be started too soon. The essential information needed concerns important interests, vast in number and overspreading every nook and corner of our country; and when made available by the ingathering and collocation of all the related facts, will secure the earliest attention of Congress, as well as the trust and confidence of the country, and save the appropriate committees of both Houses weeks and months of irksome labor—possibly save them also from some blunders and from final defeat.

An enlargement of the free list, essential reductions and readjustments of rates, are to be fully considered, and some errors of conflicting codifications corrected.

If a general revision of the Bible seems to have been called for, it is hardly to be wondered at that some revision of our revenue laws should be invited. But changes in the framework of a law that has had more of stability than any other of its kind in our history, and from which an unexampled growth of varied industries has risen up, should be made with much circumspection, after deliberate consideration, by just and friendly hands, and not by ill-informed and reckless revolutionists. When our recent great army was disbanded, war taxes were also largely dismissed, and we have now, and certainly shall have hereafter, no unlimited margin for slashing experiments.

THE TARIFF OF 1861.

The tariff act of 1861, which, by a nickname given by baffled opponents as an echo to a name so humble as my own, it was perhaps hoped to render odious, was yet approved by a democratic President and gave to Mr. Buchanan a much needed opportunity to perform at last one official act approved by the people.

If I refer to this measure, it will not be egotistically nor to shirk responsibility, but only in defense of those who aided its passage—such as the never-to-be-forgotten Henry Winter Davis, Thad. Stevens, and, William A. Howard, and, let me add, the names of Fessenden and Crittenden—and, without the parliamentary skill of one (Mr. SHERMAN) now a member of this body, its success would not have been made certain.

And yet this so-called “Morrill tariff,” hooted at as a “Chinese wall” that was to shut out both commerce and revenue, notwithstanding amendments subsequently piled and patched upon it at every fresh demand during the war, but retaining its vertebræ and all of its specific characteristics, has been as a financial measure an unprecedented success in spite of its supposed patronymical incumbrance. Transforming ad valorem duties into specific, then averaging but 25 per cent. upon the invoice values, imposing much higher rates upon luxuries than upon necessaries, and introducing compound duties upon woolens, justly compensatory for the duties on wool, it has secured all the revenue anticipated, or $198,159,676 in 1881 against $53,187,511 in 1860, and our total trade, exports and imports, in 1860, of $687,192,176, appears to have expanded in 1880 to $1,613,770,633, with a grand excess of exports in our favor of $167,683,912, and an excess in 1881 of $259,726,254, while it was $20,040,062 against us in 1860. A great reduction of the public debt has followed, and the interest charged has fallen from $143,781,591 in 1867 to about $60,500,000 at the present time.

If such a result is not a practical demonstration of healthy intrinsic merits, when both revenue and commerce increase in a much greater ratio than population, what is it? Our imports in the past two years have been further brilliantly embellished by $167,060,041 of gold and silver coin and bullion, while retaining in addition all of our own immense domestic productions; and it was this only which enabled us to resume and to maintain specie payments. Let the contrast of 1860 be also borne in mind, when the excess of our exports of gold and silver was $57,996,004.

As a protective measure this tariff, with all its increasing amendments, has proven more satisfactory to the people and to various industries of the country than any other on record. The jury of the country has so recorded its verdict. Agriculture has made immense strides forward. The recent exports of food products, though never larger, is not equal by twenty-fold to home consumption, and prices are every where more remunerative, agricultural products being higher and manufactures lower. Of wheat, corn, and oats there was produced 1,184,540,849 bushels in 1860, but in 1880 the crop had swelled to 2,622,200,039 bushels, or had much more than doubled. Since 1860 lands in many of the Western States have risen from 100 to 175 per cent. The production of rice, during the same time, rose from 11,000,000 pounds to 117,000,000. The fires of the tall chimneys have every where been lighted up; and while we made only 987,559 tons of pig iron in 1860, in 1880 we made 4,295,414 tons; and of railroad iron the increase was from 235,107 tons to 1,461,837 tons. In twenty years the production of salt rose from 12,717,200 bushels to 29,800,298 bushels. No previous crop of cotton equalled the 4,861,000 bales of 1860; but the crop of 1880 was larger, and that of 1881 is reported at 6,606,000 bales. The yield of cotton from 1865 to 1881 shows an increase over the fifteen years from 1845 to 1861 of 14,029,000 bales, or almost an average gain of a million bales a year.

The giant water-wheels have revolved more briskly, showing the manufacture of 1,797,000 bales of cotton in 1880 against only 979,000 bales in 1860, and this brought up the price of raw cotton to higher figures than in 1860. Thirteen States and one Territory produced cotton, but its manufacture spreads over thirty States and one Territory. The census of cotton manufacture shows:

────────────────────┬────────────┬──────────── │ 1860. │ 1880. ────────────────────┼────────────┼──────────── Capital invested │ $98,585,269│$207,781,868 Number of operatives│ 122,028│ 175,187 Wages paid │ $23,940,108│ $41,921,106 Value of productions│ 115,681,774│ 192,773,960 ────────────────────┴────────────┴────────────

It will be found that a larger amount of capital has been invested in cotton mills than in woolen, and that the increase of productions has been large and healthy, a very handsome proportion of which is to be credited to Southern States. Goods of many descriptions have also been cheapened in price. Standard prints or calicoes which sold in 1860 for nine and one-half cents per yard now sell for six and one-half cents.

The census returns of woolen manufactures show the following astonishing results:

───────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────────── │Census of 1880.│Census of 1860. ───────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────────── Males employed │ 74,367│ 24,841 Females employed │ 65,261│ 16,519 Capital invested │ $155,454,105│ $30,862,654 Wages paid │ 47,115,614│ 9,808,254 Value raw material consumed │ 162,609,436│ 36,586,887 Value of annual product │ 265,684,796│ 61,895,217 Importations of woolens │ 33,613,897│ 37,876,945 Annual product’n of wool lbs│ 264,500,000│ 60,511,343 ───────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────

It thus appears, that while the number of hands employed is three times and a half larger than in 1860, the wages paid is about five times larger and the capital is five times greater. The annual productions have been more than quadrupled, and the aggregate importations have fallen off four millions. With these results in our front, protection on wool and woolens will be likely to withstand the hand-grenades of all free-trade besiegers.

In New England and some other States sheep husbandry has fallen off, and in some places it has been replaced by the dairy business; but in other States the wool-clip has largely increased, especially has the weight of the fleece increased. The number of sheep has increased about 80 per cent. and the weight of wool over 400 per cent. The discovery that the fine long merino wools, known as the American merino, are in fact the best of combing wools and now used in many styles of dress goods has added greatly to their demand and value. Many kinds of woolen goods can be had at a less price than twenty years ago. Cashmeres that then brought forty-six cents per yard brought only thirty-eight and one-fourth cents in 1880, and muslin de laines dropped from twenty cents to fifteen, showing that the tariff did not make them dearer, but that American competition caused a reduction of prices.

The length of our railroads has been trebled, rising from 31,185 miles in 1860 to 94,000 miles in 1881, and possibly to one-half of all in the world. For commercial purposes the wide area of our country has been compressed within narrow limits, and transportation in time and expense, from New York to Kansas, or from Chicago to Baltimore, is now less formidable than it was from Albany or Pittsburgh to Philadelphia prior to the era of railroads. The most distant States reach the same markets, and are no longer neighbors-in-law, but sister States. The cost of eastern or western bound freight is less than one-third of former rates. Workingmen, including every ship-load of emigrants, have found acceptable employment. Our aggregate wealth in 1860 was $19,089,156,289, but is estimated to have advanced in 1880 to over forty billions. Further examination will show that the United States are steadily increasing in wealth, and increasing, too, much more rapidly than free-trade England, notwithstanding all her early advantages of practical experience and her supremacy in accumulated capital. The increase of wealth in France is twice as rapid as in England, but in the United States it is more rapid than even in France.

These are monumental facts, and they can no more be blinked out of sight than the Alleghanies or the Rocky Mountains. They belong to our country, and sufficiently illustrate its progress and vindicate the tariff of 1861. If the facts cannot be denied, the argument remains irrefutable. If royal “cowboys” who attempted to whistle down American independence one hundred years ago ingloriously failed, so it may be hoped will fail royal trumpeters of free-trade who seem to take sides against the United States in all commercial contests for industrial independence.

Among the branches of manufactures absolutely waked into life by the tariff of 1861, and which then had no place above zero, may be named crockery and china ware. The number of white-ware factories is now fifty-three, with forty decorating establishments; and the products, amounting to several millions, are sold at prices 25 to 50 per cent. below the prevailing prices of twenty years ago. Clay and kaolin equal to the best in China have been found east, west, and south in such abundance as to promise a large extension of American enterprise, not only in the ordinary but in the highest branches of ceramic art. Steel may also here claim its birth. No more of all sorts than 11,838 tons were made in 1860, but 1,397,015 tons were made in 1880. Those who objected to a duty on steel have found they were biting something more than a file. Silks in 1860, hardly unwound from the cocoon, were creeping along with only a small showing of sewing-silk and a few trimmings, but now this industry rises to national importance, furnishing apt employment to many thousand women as well as to men; and the annual products, sharply competing with even the Bonnét silks of Lyons, amount to the round sum of $34,500,000. Notwithstanding the exceptionally heavy duties, I am assured that silk goods in general are sold for 25 per cent. less than they were twenty years ago.

Plate-glass is another notable manufacture, requiring great scientific and mechanical skill and large capital, whose origin bears date since the tariff of 1861. It is made in Missouri and in Indiana, and to a small extent in Kentucky and Massachusetts; but in Indiana it is made of the purest and best quality by an establishment which, after surmounting many perils, has now few equals in the magnitude or perfection of its productions, whether on this or the other side of the Atlantic, and richly merits not only the favor but the patronage of the Government itself. Copper is another industry upon which a specific duty was imposed in 1861, which has had a rapid growth, and now makes a large contribution to our mineral wealth. The amount produced in 1860 was less than one-fifth of the present production, and valued at $2,288,182; while in 1880 the production rose to the value of $8,849,961. The capital invested increased from $8,525,500 to $31,675,096. In 1860 the United States Mint paid from twenty-three and one-half to twenty-five cents per pound for copper; but has obtained it the present year under a protective tariff as low as seventeen cents. Like our mines of inexhaustible coal and iron, copper is found in many States, some of it superior to any in the world, and for special uses is constantly sought after by foreign governments.

Many American productions sustain the character they have won by being the best in the world. Our carpenters and joiners could not be hired to handle any other than American tools; and there are no foreign agricultural implements, from a spade to a reaper, that an American farmer would accept as a gift. There is no saddlery hardware nor house-furnishing, equal in quality and style to American. Watches and jewelry and the electric gold and silver plated ware of American workmanship as to quality have the foremost place in the marts of the world. The superiority of our staple cotton goods is indisputable, as is proven by the tribute of frequent counterfeits displayed abroad. The city of Philadelphia alone makes many better carpets and more in quantity than the whole of Great Britain. These are noble achievements, which should neither be obscured nor lost by the sinister handling and industrious vituperation of free-trade monographists.

The vast array of important and useful inventions recorded in our Patent Office, and in use the world over, shows that it is hardly arrogance for us to accept the compliment of Mr. Cobden and claim that the natural mechanical genius of average Americans will soon appear as much superior to that of Englishmen as was that of Englishmen one hundred years ago to that of the Dutch.

THE TARIFF SHIELDED US IN 1873.

If we had been under the banner of free trade in 1873, when the widespread financial storm struck our sails, what would have been our fate? Is it not apparent that our people would have been stranded on a lee shore, and that the general over-production and excess of unsold merchandise everywhere abroad would have come without hindrance, with the swiftness of the winds, to find a market here at any price? As it was the gloom and suffering here were very great, but American workingmen found some shelter in their home markets, and their recovery from the shock was much earlier assured than that of those who in addition to their own calamities had also to bear the pressure of the hard times of other nations.

In six years, ending June 30, 1881, our exports of merchandise exceeded imports by over $1,175,000,000—a large sum in itself, largely increasing our stock of gold, filling the pockets of the people with more than two hundred and fifty millions not found in the Treasury or banks, making the return to specie payments easy, and arresting the painful drain of interest so long paid abroad. It is also a very conclusive refutation of the wild free-trade chimeras that exports are dependent upon imports, and that comparatively high duties are invariably less productive of revenue than low duties. The pertinent question arises, Shall we not in the main hold fast to the blessings we have? As Americans we must reject free trade. To use some words of Burke upon another subject: “If it be a panacea we do not want it. We know the consequences of unnecessary physic. If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it.”

FREE-TRADE PROSPERITY ON THE WANE.

It gives me no pleasure to notice retrograde steps in the prosperity of Great Britain; and, if some evidence of this sort is brought out, like that of the five thousand houses now marked “To let” in Sheffield and ten thousand in Birmingham, it will have no other purpose than to show that free trade has failed to secure the promised supremacy to English manufactures. The avowal of Mr. Gladstone that the additional penny to the income tax produces less revenue than formerly indicates a positive decrease of wealth; and the steady diminution of British exports since 1873, amounting in 1880 to one hundred and sixty million dollars, with a diminution in the total of exports and imports of two hundred and fifty million dollars, is more conclusive proof as well of British decadence as of the advancement of other nations.

COMMERCIAL PROTECTION.

The sum of our annual support bestowed upon the Navy, like that upon the Army, may be too close-fisted and disproportionate to our extended ocean boundaries, and to the value of American commerce afloat; yet whatever has been granted has been designed almost exclusively for the protection of our foreign commerce, and amounts in the aggregate to untold millions. Manufacturers do not complain that this is a needless and excessive favor to importers; and why, then, should importers object to some protection to a much larger amount of capital, and to far greater numbers embarked certainly in an equally laudable enterprise at home?

THE FREE-TRADE PROPAGANDISTS OF ENGLAND.

For the last thirty-five years England has been making extraordinary efforts, political, industrial, legislative, diplomatic, social, and literary, all combined, to persuade mankind to follow her example of reversing that policy of protection, supreme in her Augustan age, or from Queen Anne down throughout the Georgian era, and the policy maintained by Chatham, by the younger Pitt, and by Canning with an energy that created and sustained the most varied and extensive workshops of the world. Already mistress of the ocean and abounding in wealth, the sea-girt Island aspired to a world-wide monopoly of trade. Penetrated with this later free-trade ambition, and not infrequently accused of trying to make all England tributary to Manchester, and all the rest of the world tributary to England, the eloquent Mr. Bright, who grandly rejected any idea of a new nation in America, resorts even to the infelicitous language of passion when he denounces his opponents, as he does, by declaring that any looking toward protective legislation anywhere in the world is proof either of “congenital depravity or defect of judgment.” Let us be thankful it is no worse, for what would have happened if the wrathful Englishman had said “total depravity?”

The repeal of the corn laws was not for the benefit of foreign nations, but solely for the benefit of Englishmen.

FIRST. It was their belief that their skill and great capital gave them that superiority which would secure them against all competition except that arising from cheaper food.

SECOND. The cheaper-fed workmen of Germany, France, and America presented the only competition not to be resisted, and it had to be at once squarely met. Protection was abandoned, and abandoned possibly forever, but abandoned because the laboring British population had become too great and too hungry, with over a million and a half of paupers, when measured by the supply of home-grown food. Some of the little Benjamins must go to Egypt for corn. Starving men do little work, but occasionally do too much. The sole conditions to the continuance of the dense population and the grand scale of British manufactures in competition with modern nations appeared to be parsimony and privation, or lower-priced bread and lowest-priced labor. With these partially secured there came a season of temporary relief, but, unfortunately, with no increase of wages. It was barely success at the cost of an alliance with the discontent of underpaid workmen, with strikes and organized expatriation. Free trade, it is found, grinds labor to the bone, and forces it to fly, with muscles and machinery, to more inviting fields.

British agriculture, long depressed and chronically exposed to bad harvests, is now threatened with ruin by foreign competition, and British manufactures also seem almost as destitute of sunshine as their agriculture, though still owning a reluctant allegiance to the laws of the universe and to the exact science of the garrulous Bonamy Price. Lord Derby, in a late speech to the Lancashire farmers, recommended that some of the farmers should emigrate—five millions, I believe, he proposed—and those who might remain, said he, will then be able to farm on better terms.

True enough; but what a cold, sunless, and desperate remedy is that! If not Roman decimation, at least a sentence of banishment, crushing out the sweetest affections planted in human hearts, their love for their birthplaces, the homes of their fathers! But if these ill-fated men have barely supported life by the pittances daily earned, by what means, at whose cost, can they be transported to better and more welcome homes? The advice of Lord Derby is like that of the children of Marie Antoinette when the populace of Paris were clamoring for bread. Said the children: “Why don’t they buy cake?” Equally “child-like and bland” is Lord Derby. It would seem, when over 40 per cent. of their yearly imports must be of food, that the British Islands are too small for the foundations of the empire. The grand pyramid stands upon its apex reversed.

English statesmen have not forgotten the reservation of Sir Robert Peel, the author of the free-trade bill in 1846: “I reserve to myself,” said he, “distinctly and unequivocally the right of adapting my conduct to the exigencies of the moment and to the wants of the country;” and that is all protectionists ever claim to do.

Already Sir Stafford Northcote, the leader of the Tory opposition in the House of Commons, is on the fence, and only ventures to favor “universal free trade.” That is surely a horse of another color, not Wellington’s “Copenhagen,” but more like Sancho Panza’s “Dapple.”

The recent reaction or change in many organs of British opinion shows that this right of adaptation to the exigencies of the moment is neither surrendered nor obsolete. Let me cite an extract from an influential paper, called the Observer:

There is no obligation upon us to incur industrial martyrdom for the sake of propagating free-trade principles, even supposing their truth to be as self-evident as we fondly imagined. Moreover, to speak the honest truth, we are beginning to doubt how far the creed to which we pinned our faith is so self-evident as we originally conceived. If we can persuade other nations to follow our example, then free trade is unquestionably the best thing for England. It does not follow, however, that it is the best thing for us, if we are to be left the sole adherents of free trade in the midst of a community of nations devoted to protection.

The Observer does not say, as will be seen, that it is best for other nations, but only, if they will follow her example, “unquestionably the best thing for England;” and that will not be disputed.

Other nations, however, seem to prefer to profit by the earlier English example, displayed for seventy years after Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared, and free trade, like the favorite English plum-pudding, is now called for by nobody but themselves, and is getting so cold as to be unpalatable even at home. Yet it is proposed by the amateur statesmen of our urban free-trade clubs, guiltless of any drop of perspiration in the paths of industry, to arrest American development by copying this foreign example, and thus bring our home labor and all of its rewards down to the European and Asiatic level. Nevertheless, I have faith that we shall abide in the track of the principles and politics which elevate and give character to American citizens, surrounding them with the daily presence and beauty of the useful arts, which so largely add to the power and dignity of any people in the great family of nations. To limit the industrial forces of an active, inventive, and ingenious people to agriculture alone, excluding manufactures and the mechanic arts, would be little better than in time of war to restrict an army to infantry alone, to the exclusion of cavalry and artillery. Great battles are not often so won.

A diversity of pursuits makes a great nation possible in peace, and greater in war. General competence, habits of self-reliance, and higher culture are thus more surely obtained. The improvement in one occupation is contagious, and spreads to all others. Philosophy, politics, and liberty all go up higher, and the happiness and dignity of mankind are promoted.

It is an axiom of British free-trade economy that for any branch of manufactures to rest on safe foundations it is indispensable that both the raw material and the skilled labor required should be indigenous. This seems to be a rule intended to fence out of the field all nations where either the raw material or the skilled labor called for is not native and abundant; but, if applied where the raw material is not indigenous, the British Islands would be stripped of a great share of their industry. Nor can any nation claim a class of men as born with a monopoly of skilled endowments; these, at any rate, are not “congenital,” and trades must be taught by long apprenticeships; but raw materials are usually planted by nature, and climate and soil fix and determine inflexible boundaries. Cotton is not indigenous in the British Islands, though their accomplished cotton manufactures have made it the leading article of commerce, leading their national policy. Hemp and silk, also, are the products of other lands. Having no timber or lumber good enough for ships, it is all brought, like their royal timber, from any place in the world but home. The steel used at Sheffield for cutlery is made from iron imported from Sweden and Norway; and no fine or merino wool consumed is of home growth. Not a little of the best machinery now alive in England had its birth on this side of the Atlantic, and must be credited to American genius.

The title of the British Islands to all the raw material, and to exclusive and hereditary mechanical skill among men, is widely contested, and the world will not fold its arms unresistingly to any such pretentious domination. The power of steam, though marvelously developed by English cleverness, is an auxiliary force belonging of right to the whole human race, as much as gravity or electricity, wherever its service may be called for, and its abode can no more be exclusively monopolized than that of the Promethean fire stolen from Heaven.

The first steam-engine is supposed to have been employed at Manchester in 1790, where there are now, it is stated, in daily use within a circuit of ten miles more than fifty thousand boilers, yielding a total force equal to the power of one million horses, and the combined steam-power of Great Britain is represented to be equal to the manual labor of twice the number of males living on the globe. We greatly admire the prodigious enterprise of Great Britain, and it would be strange if, with our immensely greater coal-fields, it should let Americans sleep.

THE THEORY.

Free trade, as a theory, unembarrassed by contact with practical affairs, and divorced from any idea of supplying other equal and legitimate sources of revenue for the support of governments, appears wonderfully simple and seductive. Tearing down custom-houses, as a knock-down argument, is held to be scientific, but it is not conclusive. Some schoolmen, innocent of earning even a coat or a pair of shoes by the sweat of the brow, and sage without experience, adopt the theory because it is an article of faith—saving without works—with a ready-made catechism in imported text-books, and requires no comprehensive investigation of the multiform and ever-varying facts and exigencies in national affairs; but when the theory comes to be practically applied alike to all times, places and conditions of men, it obviously becomes political quackery, as untenable and preposterous as it would be to insist upon clothing all mankind in garments of the same material, in summer or winter, and of equal cut and dimensions, whether for big men or little, on the Danube or on the Mississippi. But however free trade comes to America, it comes as a strait-jacket, and whether new or second-hand, it is equally a misfit and unacceptable.

The affairs of communities are subject to endless differences from age to age and year to year, and governments that do not recognize these differences are either stupid or tyrannical, and deserve to be superseded or overthrown. In 1816 the sound policy of England, as Lord Brougham declared, was to stifle “in the cradle those infant manufactures in the United States which the war had forced into existence.” In 1824 the policy, according to Huskisson, was “an extension of the principle of reducing duties just so far as was consistent with complete protection of British industry.” In 1846 duties upon most foreign manufactures had almost ceased to yield any revenue, and Sir Robert Peel was forced to listen to the cry for cheap bread, though he was teased almost to the fighting point by the fertile, bitter, and matchless sarcasms of Disraeli, who also said: “The time will come when the working classes of England will come to you on bended knees and pray you to undo your present legislation.”

At this moment important changes of public opinion seem to be going on abroad, and the ponderous octavos of Malthus, Ricardo, McCulloch, and Mill may have some repose. What may have been found expedient yesterday may be fraught with mischief to-day, and he that has no distrust of an inflexible free-trade hobby will turn out to be, unwittingly perhaps, as has been well said, “a friend of every other country but his own,” and find at last that he has rejected the solid school of experience only to get astride of an imported catch-word, vainly imagining he is bottomed on a scientific and universal principle. Daniel Webster declared, “I give up what is called the science of political economy. There is no such science. There are no rules on these subjects so fixed and invariable that their aggregate constitutes a science.”

PRACTICE VERSUS THEORY.

But English free trade does not mean free trade in such articles as the poor require and must have, like tea and coffee, nor in tobacco, wines and spirituous liquors. These articles they reserve for merciless exactions, all specific, yielding a hundred millions of revenue, and at three times the rate we levy on spirits and more than five times the rate we levy on tobacco! This is the sly part of the entertainment to which we are invited by free-traders.

In 1880 Great Britain, upon tobacco and cigars, mainly from the United States, valued at $6,586,520, collected $43,955,670 duties, or nearly two-thirds as much as we collect from our entire importations of merchandise from Great Britain.

After all, is it not rather conspicuous hypocrisy for England to disclaim all protection, so long as she imposes twenty-nine cents per pound more upon manufactured tobacco than upon unmanufactured, and double the rate upon manufactured cocoa of that upon the raw? American locomotives are supposed to have great merit, and the foreign demand for them is not unknown, but the use of any save English locomotives upon English railroads is prohibited. Is there any higher protection than prohibition? And have not her sugar refiners lived upon the difference of the rates imposed upon raw and refined sugars? On this side of the Atlantic such legislation would be called protection.

WHAT THEY MEAN.

One of the cardinal principles of British free-traders is, “Buy where you can buy cheapest, and sell where you can sell dearest,” and that is precisely what they mean. They expect to buy of us cheapest and sell to us dearest. It is the only logical outcome of the whole policy. We are to be the victims of sharpers, whether we sell or buy. One-half of this resounding phrase, “buy where you can buy cheapest,” often appears to touch the pocket nerve of those who, having nothing to sell, derive their income from capital, or from a fixed salary, and they forget that their capital or their salary might have been much smaller had it not been for the greater prosperity and compensation which protection has given to labor and to all business enterprises. Some part of this class are accustomed to make periodical journeys through foreign lands, and as they often bring home more or less of esthetic rarities, they feel aggrieved that such expensive luxuries, which, if cheap and common, would have had no attractions for them, often happen to be among the very tidbits upon which it is the fitting policy of a republican form of government to levy revenue. The tax falls upon those able to pay. No country on the globe sends out so many foreign travelers with a spendable surplus, as the United States, or that scatter their money more generously, not to say extravagantly. English reciprocity in pleasure travel, however, like their often proposed commercial reciprocity, is comparatively jug-handled. They come singly; we go in droves and caravans.

AMERICA VINDICATED BY THOSE WHO COME TO STAY.

But if foreign countries send comparatively an unequal number of visitors tending to reimburse the abounding expenditures of Americans abroad, they do send us a far more numerous if not valuable company who come to stay, bringing both fortunes and affections, and adding, as they have added within the past two years, over a million and a quarter of brave hearts and willing hands to the productive forces of the country. Their tracks are all one way. None go back and none come here as drones, for such stay away to absorb honey already stored; but the “tenth legions,” so to say, of all the conscripted armies of Europe, in health and fit for any service, are rushing to our shore on the “waves of the Atlantic, three thousand miles long,” as volunteers for life. Were we to drop protection this western exodus would cease and the emigrants now here would be relegated to the same scale of wages from which they so anxiously attempted to escape.

These facts are pregnant arguments annually reproduced, upholding the American policy of protection, and show that those who expect to earn their living—tempted, it is true, by the highest rewards, and tempted by free schools for their children—know where to find the largest opportunities for the comforts of life, for happiness and intellectual progress; and know also that America is not and never intends to be a transatlantic Ireland nor an agricultural back lot of Europe.

COMMERCIAL RULES NOT A SCIENCE.

We have some worthy literary professors of free trade and some hacks who know their master’s crib “of quick conception and easy delivery,” as John Randolph would have described them, who, having determined that the sun shall hereafter rise in the west, assume for their doctrines, like their English masters, the basis of absolute science, which they insist shall be everywhere accepted, regardless of all conditions, wants, or circumstances, as the latest revelation of economic truth; but free trade fails, shamefully fails, to stand the admitted tests of an exact science, as its results must ever be both an inconsistent quantity and incapable of prediction. It yields to the condition of nations and of the seasons, to war, to time, and constantly yields to facts. The blackboard compels universal assent to mathematics, and the laboratory offers the same service to chemistry; but any test or analysis of free trade yields nothing but polemical vagaries, and it may appropriately be consigned to the witches’ cauldron with—

Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog.

· · · · ·

Mingle, mingle, mingle, You that mingle may.

Queerly enough some of the parties referred to, denounce the tariff men as but “half-educated,” while, perhaps, properly demanding themselves exclusive copyright protection for all of their own literary productions, whether ephemeral or abiding. It is right, they seem to think, to protect brains—and of these they claim the monopoly—but monstrous to protect muscles; right to protect the pen, but not the hoe nor the hammer.

Free trade would almost seem to be an aristocratic disease from which workingmen are exempt, and those that catch it are as proud of it as they would be of the gout—another aristocratic distinction.

It might be more modest for these “nebulous professors” of political economy to agree among themselves how to define and locate the leading idea of their “dismal science” whether in the value in exchange or value in use, in profits of capital or wages, whether in the desire for wealth or aversion to labor, or in the creation, accumulation, distribution and consumption of wealth, and whether rent is the recompense for the work of nature or the consequence of a monopoly of property, before they ask a doubting world to accept the flickering and much disputed theory of free trade as an infallible truth about which they have themselves never ceased to wrangle. The weight of nations against it is as forty to one. It may be safe to say that when sea-serpents, mermaids, and centaurs find a place in natural history, free trade will obtain recognition as a science; but till then it must go uncrowned, wearing no august title, and be content with the thick-and-thin championship of the “Cobden Club.”

THE BRITISH POLICY EVERYWHERE REJECTED.

All of the principal British colonies from the rising to the setting of the sun—India alone possibly excepted—are in open and successful revolt against the application of the free-trade tyranny of their mother country, and European States not only refuse to copy the loudly-heralded example, but they are retreating from it as though it were charged with dynamite. Even the London Times, the great “thunderer” of public opinion in Great Britain, does not refrain from giving a stunning blow to free trade when it indicates that it has proved a blunder, and reminds the world that it predicted it would so prove at the start. The ceremony of free trade, with only one party responding solitary and alone, turns out as dull and disconsolate as that of a wedding without a bride. The honeymoon of buying cheap and selling dear appears indefinitely postponed.

There does not seem to be any party coming to rescue England from her isolated predicament. Bismarck, while aiming to take care of the interests of his own country, as do all ministers, on this question perhaps represents the attitude of the greater part of the far-sighted statesmen of Europe, and he, in one of his recent parliamentary speeches, declared:

Without being a passionate protectionist, I am as a financier, however, a passionate imposer of duties, from the conviction that the taxes, the duties levied at the frontier, are almost exclusively borne by the foreigner, especially for manufactured articles, and that they have always an advantageous, retrospective, protectionist action.

Practically the nations of continental Europe acquiesce in this opinion, and are a unit in their flat refusal of British free trade. They prefer the example of America. Before self-confident men pronounce the whole world of tariff men, at home and abroad, “half-educated or half-witted,” they would do well to see to it that the stupidity is not nearer home, or that they have not themselves cut adrift from the logic of their own brains, only to be wofully imposed upon by free-trade quackery, which treats man as a mere fact, no more important than any other fact, and ranks labor only as a commodity to be bought and sold in the cheapest or dearest markets.

So long as statesmen are expected to study the prosperity and advancement of the people for whose government and guidance they are made responsible, so long free-trade theories must be postponed to that Utopian era when the health, strength and skill, capital and labor of the whole human race shall be reduced or elevated to an entire equality, and when each individual shall dwell in an equal climate, upon an equal soil, freely pasture his herds and flocks where he pleases, and love his neighbor better than himself.

OUR FARMERS.

The test of profitable farming is the state of the account at the end of the year. Under free trade the evidence multiplies that the English farmer comes to the end of the year with no surplus, often in debt, bare and discontented. Their laborers rarely know the luxury of meat, not over sixteen ounces per week, and never expect to own a rood of the soil.

But under the protective policy the American farmer holds and cultivates his own land, has a surplus at the end of the year for permanent investments or improvements, and educates and brings up his sons and daughters with the advantages and comforts of good society. There are more American houses with carpets than in any other country of the world. I believe it will not be disputed that the down-trodden tillers of the soil in Great Britain are not well fed; that they are coarsely underclad, and that for lack of common-school culture they would hardly be regarded as fit associates here for Americans who drive their teams afield, or for the young men who start in life as laborers upon farms. The claim that free trade is the true policy of the American farmer would seem to be, therefore, a very courageous falsehood.

It is an unfortunate tendency of the age that nearly one-half of the population of the globe is concentrated in cities, often badly governed, and sharply exposed to extravagance, pauperism, immorality, and all the crimes and vices which overtake mankind reared in hot-beds. I would neither undervalue the men of brilliant parts, nor blot out the material splendor of cities, but regret to see the rural districts depopulated for their unhealthy aggrandizement. Free trade builds up a few of these custom-house cities, where gain from foreign trade is the chief object sought, where mechanics, greater in numbers than any other class, often hang their heads, though Crœsus rolls in Pactolian wealth, and Shylock wins his pound of flesh; but protection assembles artisans and skilled workmen in tidy villages and towns, details many squadrons of industry to other and distant localities, puts idle and playful waterfalls at work, opens, builds up, and illumines, as with an electric light, the whole interior of the country; and the farmer of Texas or of New England, of Iowa or of Wisconsin, is benefited by such reinforcements of consumers, whether they are by his side or across the river, at Atlanta or South Bend, at Paterson or at Providence. The farmers own and occupy more than nineteen-twentieths of our whole territory, and their interest is in harmony with the even-handed growth and prosperity of the whole country.

There is not a State whose interests would not be jeopardized by free trade, and I should like to dwell upon the salient facts as to Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, Alabama, Illinois, and many other States, but I shall only refer to one. The State of Texas, surpassing empires in its vast domains, doubling its population within a decade, and expending over twenty million dollars within a year in the construction of additional railroads, with a promised expenditure within the next fifteen months of over twenty-seven millions more, has sent to market as raw material the past year 12,262,052 pounds of hides, 20,671,639 pounds of wool, and 1,260,247 bales of cotton. Her mineral resources, though known to be immense, are as yet untouched. Her bullocks, in countless herds on their way to market, annually crowd and crop the prairies from Denver to Chicago. But now possessed of a liberal system of railroads, how long will the dashing spirit of the Lone Star State—where precious memories still survive of Austin, of Houston, of Rusk, and of Schleicher—be content to send off unmanufactured her immense bulk of precious raw materials, which should be doubled in value at home, and by the same process largely multiply her population? With half as many in number now as had the original thirteen, and soon to pass our largest States, wanting indefinite quantities of future manufactures at home, Texas should also prepare to supply the opening trade with Mexico, in all of its magnitude and variety, and far more worthy of ambition than in the golden days of Montezuma.

No State can run and maintain railroads unless the way-stations, active and growing settlements and towns, are numerous enough to offer a large, constant, and increasing support. The through business of long lines of railroads is of great importance to the termini, and gives the roads some prestige, but the prosperity and dividends mainly accrue from the local business of thrifty towns on the line of the roads. It is these, especially manufacturing towns, which make freight both ways, to and from, that free trade must ever fail to do, and while through freights, owing to inevitable competition, pay little or no profit, the local freights sustain the roads, and are and must be the basis of their chief future value. Without this efficient local support, cheap and rapid long transportation would be wholly impracticable.

The Southern States, in the production of cotton, have possibly already reached the maximum quantity that can be cultivated with greatest profit, unless the demand of the world expands. A short crop now often brings producers a larger sum than a full crop. The amount of the surplus sent abroad determines the price of the whole crop. Production appears likely soon to outrun the demand. Texas alone has latent power to overstock the world. Is it not time, therefore, to curtail the crop, or to stop any large increase of it, while sure to obtain as much or more for it, and to turn unfruitful capital and labor into other and more profitable channels of industry? The untrodden fields, where capital and labor wait to be organized for the development of Southern manufactures and mining, offer unrivaled temptations to leaders among men in search of legitimate wealth.

The same facts are almost equally applicable to general agriculture, but more particularly to the great grain-growing regions of the West. A great harvest frequently tends to render the labor of the whole year almost profitless, whenever foreign countries are blessed with comparatively an equal abundance. The export of corn last year in October was 8,535,067 bushels, valued at $4,604,840, but the export of only 4,974,661 bushels this year brings $3,605,813. An equal difference appears in the increased value of exports of flour. A much larger share of crops must be consumed nearer home, if any sure and regular market is to be permanently secured. The foreign demand, fitful and uncertain as it is, rarely exceeds one-twentieth of even the present home requirements, and the losses from long transportation, incident to products of great bulk, can never be successfully avoided except by an adequate home demand.

Farmers do not look for a market for grain among farmers, but solely among non-producing consumers, and these it is greatly to their interest to multiply rather than to diminish by forcing them to join in producing or doubling crops for which there may be an insufficient demand. Every ship-load of wheat sent abroad tends to bring down foreign prices; and such far-off markets should be sought only when the surplus at home is excessive or when foreign prices are extraordinarily remunerative.

The wheat regions of the West, superb as they undoubtedly are, it is to be feared, have too little staying character to be prodigally squandered, and their natural fertility noticeably vanishes in the rear unless retained by costly fertilizers almost as rapidly as new fields open in front. Some of the Middle States as well as the New England, though seeking fertilizers far and near, already look to the West for much of their corn and bread; and there is written all over Eastern fields, as Western visitors may read, the old epitaph, “As we are now so you may be.” It will take time for this threatened decadence, but not long in the life of nations. The wheat crop runs away from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, and sinks in other localities as it looms up in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Dakota. Six years of cropping in California, it is said, reduces the yield per acre nearly one-half.

There was in 1880 devoted to wheat culture over thirty-five million acres, or nearly double the acreage of 1875. In twenty-five years a hundred million people will more than overtake any present or prospective surplus, and we may yet need all of our present magnificent wheat fields to give bread to our own people. Certainly we need not be in haste to slaughter and utterly exhaust the native fertility of our fields on the cheap terms now presented.

England, with all her faults, is great, but unfortunately has not room to support her greatness, and must have cheap food and be able to offer better wages or part with great numbers of her people. I most sincerely hope her statesmen—and she is never without those of eminence—will prove equal to their great trust and to any crisis; but we cannot surrender the welfare of our Republic to any foreign empire. Free trade may or may not be England’s necessity. Certainly it is not our necessity; and it has not reached, and never will reach, the altitude of a science. An impost on corn there, it is clear, would now produce an exodus of her laboring population that would soon leave the banner of Victoria waving over a second-rate power.

Among the nations of the world the high position of the United States was never more universally and cordially admitted. Our rights are everywhere promptly conceded, and we ask nothing more. It is an age of industry, and we can only succeed by doing our best. Our citizens under a protective tariff are exceptionally prosperous and happy, and not strangers to noble deeds nor to private virtues. A popular government based on universal suffrage will be best and most certainly perpetuated by the elevation of laboring men through the more liberal rewards of diversified employments, which give scope to all grades of genius and intelligence and tend to secure to posterity the blessings of universal education and the better hope of personal independence.

Speech of Hon. J. D. Cameron, of Penna.

On the Reduction of Revenue as Affecting the Tariff. Delivered in the United States Senate January 16, 1882.

Mr. CAMERON, of Pennsylvania. I move to take up the resolution submitted by me in relation to internal-revenue taxes.

The motion was agreed to; and the Senate proceeded to consider the following resolution submitted by Mr. CAMERON, of Pennsylvania, December 6, 1881:

Resolved, That in the opinion of the Senate it is expedient to reduce the revenue of the Government by abolishing all existing internal revenue taxes except those imposed upon high wines and distilled spirits.

Mr. CAMERON, of Pennsylvania. Mr. President, the surplus revenue of this Government applicable to the payment of the public debt for the year ending June 30, 1881, was $100,069,404.98.

The inference from these figures must be that if such surplus receipts are applied to the reduction of the debt it will be paid within ten or twelve years. The question then is: Should the people continue to be taxed as heavily as they now are to pay it off within so short a period? Is it wise or prudent?

No one will deny the wisdom of the legislators who inaugurated the system of reducing the debt, or the patriotism of the people who have endured a heavy load of taxation to pay the interest and reduce the principal of such indebtedness. Both have been causes of wonder to the world, and have shown the strength, honesty, and prudence attainable under a republican form of government in matters where it was thought to be weak. It is acknowledged that the course thus pursued by Congress, and supported by the people, has had several good results. The exercise of the power of the Government and the cheerful submission to the enacting nature of the laws by the people has had an undoubted tendency to elevate and strengthen the moral tone of the nation, giving the people more confidence in each other, and compelling the approval of the world. It has reduced the principal sum of our national indebtedness until it is entirely within the ready control of the financial ability of the people either to pay off or to pay the interest thereon. It has established the credit of the country, and brought it up from a position where the 6 per cent. gold bonds of the United States before the war would not command par to a present premium of 17 per cent, on a 4 per cent. bond, and to the ready exchange of called 6 per cent. bonds into new ones bearing 3½ per cent. interest. It has demonstrated the ability of the country not only to carry on a most expensive internal war, but to pay off its cost in a time unknown to any other people; and further, that the ability of the country to furnish men and material of war and to meet increased financial demands is cumulative. The burden carried by this country from 1861 to the present day has been much greater than it would be if laid upon this nation and people from 1881 to 1900.

The burden, therefore, of the present debt would fall but lightly on the country if the payment thereof should be for a time delayed, or the rate at which it has been paid be decreased. It thus becomes a question of prudence with the Government whether they will continue the burden upon the people, or relieve them of part of it.

The burdens of general taxation borne by the people are very onerous. They have not only the General Government to sustain, on which devolves the expenses of legislation, of the Federal judiciary, of the representatives of our country in all the principal governments and cities of the world, of the management of such of our internal affairs and conveniences as belong to Congress, the keeping up of our Army and Navy, the erection of public buildings, the improvement of the rivers and harbors, and many other items that require large annual expenditures. With the increase of population and the filling up of our unoccupied lands almost all these annual outlays and expenses will tend to increase in place of decreasing, and all such expenditures must be in some way met by the people of the country. They have also to sustain their State governments with the expenses and outlays incident to them, their legislatures, judiciaries, penitentiaries, places of reform, hospitals, and all means of aiding the afflicted, to sustain the common schools, to pay the cost of such improvements of rivers, of canals, of railways, or of roads as the States may undertake. They have also the heavy cost to meet of city governments, of county, town and borough governments; they must pay the inferior Legislatures, erect buildings, provide water, police, jails, poor-houses, and build roads and take care of them.

On the liberality of the people the country depends for the building of charitable institutions, universities, colleges, private schools of high grade, and every variety of relief to the poor and the afflicted. In addition to these burdens almost all the States, most of the large cities, and many of the counties and towns in the States still labor under the burdens of indebtedness incurred during the war to sustain the General Government, which indebtedness, incurred on the then value of paper currency, has now to be paid in gold. They have not had the means at command to pay off much of such indebtedness like the General Government, nor to refund it at a lower rate of interest. The superior credit of the General Government has been made partially at the expense of the local governments. I have stated these facts that Senators might keep in mind that the question should not be considered as merely one of our ability to reduce our indebtedness by paying off annually one hundred millions of dollars and by continuing our present laws for raising revenues, as if it were but a small matter for the people to do, but it should be considered in connection with the total burden of taxation imposed by the revenue laws of the General Government, as well as by those of the State and the subordinate governments within their bounds.

There is, therefore, a strong argument to be found in these facts of the other burdens of taxation borne by the people in favor of reducing the amount of revenue applicable to the payment of the public debt when it can be done without injury to the credit of the Government and without risking in the least the ability of the Government either to pay such indebtedness as it matures or to interfere with the ability of the Government to fully provide for the wants of the country as they may be developed. A complete statement of the percentage of taxation borne by each male citizen of the United States over twenty-one years of age in the various ways stated would astound the Senate and the country. There is probably no country in the world where the taxation direct and indirect is so heavy, and only a people situated and circumstanced as the American people are could prosper under such a burden. If no other reason could be advanced in favor of a reduction of the amount of moneys derived from our internal-revenue laws than this one of reducing the burdens of the people, it would be amply sufficient, in my judgment, to warrant the proposed reduction. Yet I will say frankly that I have another object in wishing to have the internal revenue reduced, and I hope before long that every vestige of that system will cease to exist. That object is to prevent any material change being made in the tariff upon imports as it now exists, for upon its existence depends the prosperity, the happiness, the improvement, the education of the laboring people of the country, although I do not object to a careful revision of it by a competent commission.

I want to say a word here about the arrears of pension act. This act never should be repealed, and in my judgment it never will or can be. It has lately been held up to contempt by that class of people who twenty years ago were engaged in exhorting these same pensioners to go to the front, and who now object to rewarding them; but their opinion is not shared by the people at large; in fact, no more essentially just law was ever placed upon the statute book. Its effect is simply and solely to prevent the Government from pleading the statute of limitation against its former defenders. It did not increase the rate of pensions in any way whatever, but merely said that a man entitled to a pension for physical injury received in Government service should not be debarred from receiving it because he was late in making his application. To the payment of these pensions every sentiment of honesty and gratitude should hold us firmly committed.

My friend the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. BECK] is very honest, is generally very astute, and has great capacity as a leader. My personal friendship makes me desire his success, and as an individual I want him to be the recipient of all the honors his party can bestow upon him, but I am very sure that he is now opposing a measure that is intended to promote the welfare of and is in accord with the wishes of the people of the country. He is leading his party astray, he is holding it back, he is tying it to the carcass of free trade.

Politically I am glad that he is; on his own account I regret it. He is opposing the principle of protection, and, in my judgment, no man can do that and retain the support of the people. No party can to-day proclaim the doctrine of “a tariff for revenue only” and survive. Opposition to an earnest prosecution of the war for the suppression of the rebellion failed to destroy the Democratic party because of the recruits it received from the South, but opposition to the doctrine of protection to American productions, hostility to the elevation of American labor, no party in this enlightened day can advocate and live. I am astonished that the Democratic party does not learn by experience. The “tariff-for-a-revenue-only” plank in the Cincinnati platform lost it Indiana, lost it New York, and in 1884 it will lose it one-half of the Southern States.

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The morning hour has expired. Is it the pleasure of the Senate that unanimous consent be given to the Senator from Pennsylvania to proceed with his remarks?

Mr. BECK. I move that unanimous consent be granted.

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Chair hears no objection, and the morning hour will be continued until the Senator from Pennsylvania closes his remarks.

Mr. CAMERON, of Pennsylvania. The great question of protection to American labor will be the question which will obliterate old dissensions and unite the States in one common brotherhood. The Democratic party has made its last great fight. It will struggle hard, and in its death throes will, with the aid of a few unsuccessful and disappointed Republicans, possibly have temporary local successes, but death has marked it for its victim, die it will, and on its tomb will be inscribed, “Died because of opposition to the education, the elevation, the advancement of the people.”

The historic policy of this country has been to raise its revenues mainly from duties on imports and from the sale of the public lands. There are many reasons in favor of this policy. It is more just and equal in its burdens on the States and on the people; it is less inquisitorial, less expensive, less liable to corruption; it is free from many vexed questions which our experience of twenty years in collecting internal revenue has developed. The internal revenue brings the General Government in contact with the people in almost every thing they eat, wear, or use. The collection of revenue by duties on imports is so indirect as to remove much of the harshness felt when the citizen comes in direct contact with the iron grip of the law compelling him to affix a stamp to what he makes or uses. No one will question the fact that the collection of internal duties unfavorably affected the general morals of the nation.

The internal revenue laws were adopted by the Government as a war measure, as an extraordinary and unusual means of raising money for an emergency, and it is proper and in accordance with public opinion that with the end of the emergency such policy should cease. I cannot but think that every Senator will agree with me that the end of the emergency has been reached. The emergency embraced not only the time of the expenditures, but their continuation until the debt incurred during the emergency was so reduced as to be readily managed, if not exclusively by the ordinary revenues of the Government, yet with a greatly reduced system of internal revenues and for a limited time. But in determining wherein such reduction shall be made, two great interests of the country are to be considered:

First, the system of duties on foreign goods, wares, &c.

Second, our national banking system.

It has been proposed to meet this question of reduction by lowering the rates of duty, and thus to continue in this country indefinitely the use of direct and indirect taxation, supposing that such reduction would require the prolonged continuation of internal taxation.

The first effect of this would be to increase the revenues, as lower duties would lead for awhile to increased importations; but ultimately these increased importations would destroy our manufactures and impoverish the people to the point of inability to buy largely abroad, and when that point would be reached, we should have no other source of revenue than internal taxes upon an impoverished people. At first we should have more revenue than we need, but in the end much less.

This statement of the effect of lower duties may at first seem anomalous and questionable, but that such would be the result is proven by the effect on the revenues of the country of the reduction in duties in the tariff of 1846 below that of 1842. This will be evident from the Treasury statistics of the years 1844, 1845, 1846, 1847, &c., which will show for the latter years a large increase of revenues. A reduction of duties which would affect the ability of our manufacturers to compete with foreign makers would cause a large importation of goods, with two objects: first, to find a market, the effect of which would be to keep the mills of England and other countries fully employed; and, second, a repetition of the custom of English manufacturers to put goods on our markets at low and losing prices for the purpose of crippling and breaking down our operators. And the increase of out national revenues would continue until our fires were stopped, our mills and mines closed, our laborers starved, and our capital and skill, the work of many years, lost. This time would be marked, by a renewal of our vassalage to England. Then the tables would be turned, our revenues would fall off with our inability to purchase, our taxation would continue and become very onerous, and in place of a strong, reliant, and self-supporting people, exercising a healthful influence over the nations of the world, we would be owned and be the servants of Europe, tilling the ground for the benefit of its people; our laborers would be brought down to a level with the pauper labor of Europe.

Our form of government will not permit the employment of ignorant pauper labor. It is a government of the people, and to have it continue to grow and prosper the people must be paid such wages as will enable them to be educated sufficiently to realize and appreciate the benefits of its free institutions; and knowing these benefits, they will maintain them. If, on the other hand, it is desirable that the revenues from duties should be decreased, and thereby retain both kinds of taxation, the direct and the indirect, the best possible way to do this would be to largely increase the duties on imported goods, which would for a time decrease the imports, thereby decreasing the amount of duties received. This tendency would last until, through this policy, the wealth and purchasing power of the country would so largely increase that the revenues would again increase, both by reason of decreased cost in foreign countries and because of the purchase by us of articles of special beauty, skill, and luxury. It may be said (and however paradoxical it may appear, the assertion is proven by the history of the tariff) that while the immediate tendency with free-trade duties is to increase imports and revenues, the ultimate result of such low duties is to decrease the imports and revenues, due to the decreasing ability of the country to purchase. The immediate tendency of protective tariffs is to decrease imports and revenues, but the final result is to increase the imports and duties, arising from the greater ability of the country to purchase. But my intention is not to discuss at this time the question of a tariff, but to show the effect of a change in the duties on imports upon the revenues of the country.

I clearly recognize that while the public mind is decidedly in favor of encouraging home manufacturers by levying what are called protective duties, yet the people are opposed to placing those duties so high that they become prohibitory and making thereby an exclusive market for our manufacturers at home. It seems very clear to my mind, in view of these statements as to the result of decreasing or increasing the duties on our imports, that no reduction of revenue is practicable by changes in our tariff.

The second great interest of the people, which will very shortly be directly affected by the large and increasing surplus revenues of the country, is the system of national banks, and this through the decrease of the public indebtedness by the application of the annual surplus to its payment. The large annual reduction of the public debt will very shortly begin to affect the confidence of the public in the continuation of the system. It will increase public anxieties and excite their fears as to a substitution of any other system for this that has proven so acceptable and so valuable to the country. If the national banking system is to be worked out of existence, it will inevitably cause serious financial trouble.

Financial difficulties among a people like those of this country, however ill-based or slight, are always attended by disastrous consequences, because in times of prosperity the energies and hopefulness of the people are stretched to the utmost limits, and the shock of financial trouble has the effect of an almost total paralysis on the business of the country. It is certainly the part of statesmanship to avoid such a calamity whenever it is possible.

I unhesitatingly declare and believe that the value of our system of national banks is so great in the benefits the country derives therefrom and the dangers and losses its continuance will avoid that it were better to continue in existence an indebtedness equal to the wants of the banks which the country may from time to time require until some equally conservative plan may be offered that will enable us to dispense with the system.

It is also important in this connection for Senators to bear in mind that the increasing business of the country will annually require increased banking facilities, and consequently increased bonds as the basis on which they can be organized; and it should not be overlooked that a possible determination by Congress to pay off by retiring or by funding the greenbacks will create a great hiatus in the circulating medium of the country, which can only be replaced by additional national-bank notes based upon an equivalent amount of public indebtedness.

In view of the statements I have made, I cannot but conclude that the wisest and most prudent course for Congress is to leave the question of changes in the tariff laws to be adjusted as they may from time to time require, and to make whatever reduction of the income of the Government that may be found desirable by reducing the changes in the internal-revenue laws.

The national revenue laws as they now are may be greatly and profitably changed. They are very burdensome to a heavily-taxed people, and such burdens should be relieved wherever it is possible. This can now be done with safety by providing that so much of the public debt may be paid off from time to time as may not be required to sustain the system of national banks.

I move that the resolution be referred to the Committee on Finance.

The motion was agreed to.

Extracts from Speech of Hon. Thomas H. Benton,

On Proposed Amendments of the Constitution in relation to the election of President and Vice-President, Delivered in the U. S. Senate Chamber, A. D. 1824.

He said:—The evil of a want of uniformity in the choice of Presidential electors, is not limited to its disfiguring effect upon the face of our government, but goes to endanger the rights of the people, by permitting sudden alterations on the eve of an election, and to annihilate the rights of the small States, by enabling the large ones to combine, and to throw all their votes into the scale of a particular candidate. These obvious evils make it certain that any uniform rule would be preferable to the present state of things. But, in fixing on one, it is the duty of statesmen to select that which is calculated to give to every portion of the Union its due share in the choice of a chief magistrate, and to every individual citizen a fair opportunity of voting according to his will. This would be effected by adopting the District System. It would divide every State into districts equal to the whole number of votes to be given, and the people of each district would be governed by its own majority, and not by a majority existing in some remote part of the State. This would be agreeable to the rights of individuals: for in entering into society, and submitting to be bound by the decision of the majority, each individual retained the right of voting for himself wherever it was practicable, and of being governed by a majority of the vicinage, and not by majorities brought from remote sections to overwhelm him with their accumulated numbers. It would be agreeable to the interests of all parts of the States; for each State may have different interests in different parts; one part may be agricultural, another manufacturing, another commercial; and it would be unjust that the strongest should govern, or that two should combine and sacrifice the third. The district system would be agreeable to the intention of our present constitution, which, in giving to each elector a separate vote, instead of giving to each State a consolidated vote, composed of all its electoral suffrages, clearly intended that each mass of persons entitled to one elector, should have the right of giving one vote, according to their own sense of their own interest.

The general ticket system now existing in ten States, was the offspring of policy, and not of any disposition to give fair play to the will of the people. It was adopted by the leading men of those States, to enable them to consolidate the vote of the State. It would be easy to prove this by referring to facts of historical notoriety. It contributes to give power and consequence to the leaders who manage the elections, but it is a departure from the intention of the constitution; violates the rights of the minorities, and is attended with many other evils.

The intention of the constitution is violated because it was the intention of that instrument to give to each mass of persons, entitled to one elector, the power of giving an electoral vote to any candidate they preferred. The rights of minorities are violated, because a majority of one will carry the vote of the whole State. The principle is the same, whether the elector is chosen by general ticket, or by legislative ballot; a majority of one, in either case, carries the vote of the whole State. In New York, thirty-six electors are chosen; nineteen is a majority, and the candidate receiving this majority is fairly entitled to receive nineteen votes; but he counts in reality thirty-six: because the minority of seventeen are added to the majority. These seventeen votes belong to seventeen masses of people, of 40,000 souls each, in all 680,000 people, whose votes are seized upon, taken away, and presented to whom the majority pleases. Extend the calculation to the seventeen States now choosing electors by general ticket or legislative ballot, and it will show that three millions of souls, a population equal to that which carried us through the Revolution, may have their votes taken from them in the same way. To lose their votes is the fate of all minorities, and it is theirs only to submit; but this is not a case of votes lost, but of votes taken away, added to those of the majority, and given to a person to whom the minority was opposed.

He said, this objection (to the direct vote of the people) had a weight in the year 1787, to which it is not entitled in the year 1824. Our government was then young, schools and colleges were scarce, political science was then confined to few, and the means of diffusing intelligence were both inadequate and uncertain. The experiment of a popular government was just beginning; the people had been just released from subjection to an hereditary king, and were not yet practiced in the art of choosing a temporary chief for themselves. But thirty-six years have reversed this picture; thirty-six years, which have produced so many wonderful changes in America, have accomplished the work of many centuries upon the intelligence of its inhabitants. Within that period, schools, colleges, and universities have multiplied to an amazing extent. The means of diffusing intelligence have been wonderfully augmented by the establishment of six hundred newspapers, and upwards of five thousand post-offices. The whole course of an American’s life, civil, social, and religious, has become one continued scene of intellectual and of moral improvement. Once in every week, more than eleven thousand men, eminent for learning and for piety, perform the double duty of amending the hearts, and enlightening the understandings, of more than eleven thousand congregations of people. Under the benign influence of a free government, both our public institutions and private pursuits, our juries, elections, courts of justice, the liberal professions, and the mechanical arts, have each become a school of political science and of mental improvement. The federal legislature, in the annual message of the President, in reports of heads of departments, and committees of Congress, and speeches of members, pours forth a flood of intelligence which carries its waves to the remotest confines of the republic. In the different States, twenty-four State executives and State legislatures, are annually repeating the same process within a more limited sphere. The habit of universal travelling, and the practice of universal interchange of thought, are continually circulating the intelligence of the country, and augmenting its mass. The face of our country itself, its vast extent, its grand and varied features, contribute to expand the human intellect and magnify its power. Less than half a century of the enjoyment of liberty has given practical evidence of the great moral truth, that under a free government, the power of the intellect is the only power which rules the affairs of men; and virtue and intelligence the only durable passports to honor and preferment. The conviction of this great truth has created an universal taste for learning and for reading, and has convinced every parent that the endowments of the mind and the virtues of the heart, are the only imperishable, the only inestimable riches which he can leave to his posterity.

This objection (the danger of tumults and violence at the elections) is taken from the history of the ancient republics; and the tumultuary elections of Rome and Greece. But the justness of the example is denied. There is nothing in the laws of physiology which admits a parallel between the sanguinary Roman, the volatile Greek, and the phlegmatic American. There is nothing in the state of the respective countries, or in the manner of voting, which makes one an example for the other. The Romans voted in a mass, at a single voting place, even when the qualified voters amounted to millions of persons.

They came to the polls armed, and divided into classes, and voted, not by heads, but by centuries.

In the Grecian republics all the voters were brought together in a great city, and decided the contest in one great struggle.

In such assemblages, both the inducement to violence, and the means of committing it, were prepared by the government itself. In the United States all this is different. The voters are assembled in small bodies, at innumerable voting places, distributed over a vast extent of country. They come to the polls without arms, without odious instructions, without any temptation to violence, and with every inducement to harmony.

If heated during the day of election, they cool off upon returning to their homes, and resuming their ordinary occupations.

But let us admit the truth of the objection. Let us admit that the American people would be as tumultuary at this presidential election as were the citizens of the ancient republics at the election of their chief magistrates. What then? Are we thence to infer the inferiority of the officers thus elected, and the consequent degradation of the countries over which they presided? I answer no. So far from it, that I assert the superiority of these officers over all others ever obtained for the same countries, either by hereditary succession, or the most select mode of election. I affirm those periods of history to be the most glorious in arms, the most renowned in arts, the most celebrated in letters, the most useful in practice, and the most happy in the condition of the people, in which the whole body of the citizens voted direct for the chief officer of their country. Take the history of that commonwealth which yet shines as the leading star in the firmament of nations. Of the twenty-five centuries that the Roman state has existed, to what period do we look for the generals and statesmen, the poets and orators, the philosophers and historians, the sculptors, painters and architects, whose immortal works have fixed upon their country the admiring eyes of all succeeding ages? Is it to the reign of the seven first kings?—to the reigns of the emperors, proclaimed by the prætorian bands?—to the reigns of the Sovereign Pontiffs, chosen by a select body of electors in a conclave of most holy cardinals? No.—We look to none of these, but to that short interval of four centuries and a half which lies between the expulsion of the Tarquins, and the re-establishment of monarchy in the person of Octavius Cæsar. It is to this short period, during which the consuls, tribunes, and prætors, were annually elected by a direct vote of the people, to which we look ourselves, and to which we direct the infant minds of our children, for all the works and monuments of Roman greatness; for roads, bridges, and aqueducts, constructed; for victories gained, nations vanquished, commerce extended, treasure imported, libraries founded, learning encouraged, the arts flourishing, the city embellished, and the kings of the earth humbly suing to be admitted into the friendship, and taken under the protection of the Roman people. It was of this magnificent period that Cicero spoke, when he proclaimed the people of Rome to be the masters of kings, and the conquerors and commanders of all the nations of the earth. And, what is wonderful, during this whole period, in a succession of four hundred and fifty annual elections, the people never once prepared a citizen to the consulship who did not carry the prosperity and glory of the Republic to a point beyond that at which he had found it.

It is the same with the Grecian Republics. Thirty centuries have elapsed since they were founded; yet it is to an ephemeral period of one hundred and fifty years only the period of popular elections which intervened between the dispersing of a cloud of petty tyrants, and the coming of a great one in the person of Philip, King of Macedon, that we are to look for that galaxy of names which shed so much lustre upon their country, and in which we are to find the first cause of that intense sympathy which now burns in our bosoms at the name of Greece.

These short and brilliant periods exhibit the great triumph of popular elections; often tumultuary, often stained with blood, but always ending gloriously for the country.

Then the right of suffrage was enjoyed; the sovereignty of the people was no fiction. Then a sublime spectacle was seen, when the Roman citizen advanced to the polls and proclaimed: “I vote for Cato to be consul;” the Athenian, “I vote for Aristides to be Archon;” the Hebran, “I vote for Pelopidas to be Bœotrach;” the Lacedemonian, “I vote for Leonidas to be first of the Ephori,” and why not an American citizen the same? Why may he not go up to the poll and proclaim, “I vote for Thomas Jefferson to be President of the United States?” Why is he compelled to put his vote in the hands of another, and to incur all the hazards of an irresponsible agency, when he himself could immediately give his own vote for his own chosen candidate, without the slightest assistance from agents or managers?

But I have other objections to these intermediate electors. They are the peculiar and favorite institution of aristocratic republics, and elective monarchies. I refer the Senate to the late republics of Venice and Genoa; of France, and her litter; to the Kingdom of Poland; the empire of Germany, and the Pontificate of Rome. On the contrary, a direct vote by the people is the peculiar and favorite institution of democratic republics; as we have just seen in the governments of Rome, Athens, Thebes, and Sparta; to which may be added the principal cities of the Amphyctionic and Achaian leagues, and the renowned republic of Carthage when the rival of Rome.

I have now answered the objections which were brought forward in the year ’78. I ask for no judgment upon their validity of that day, but I affirm them to be without force or reason in the year 1824.

TIME and EXPERIENCE have so decided. Yes, time and experience, the only infallible tests of good or bad institutions, have now shown that the continuance of the electoral system will be both useless and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and that the only effectual mode of preserving our government from the corruptions which have undermined the liberties of so many nations, is, to confide the election of our chief magistrates to those who are farthest removed from the influence of his patronage; that is to say, to the whole body of American citizens.

The electors are not independent; they have no superior intelligence; they are not left to their own judgment in the choice of a President; they are not above the control of the people; on the contrary, every elector is pledged, before he is chosen, to give his vote according to the will of those who choose him.

He is nothing but an agent, tied down to the execution of a precise trust. Every reason which induced the convention to institute electors has failed. They are no longer of any use, and may be dangerous to the liberties of the people. They are not useful, because they have no power over their own vote, and because the people can vote for a President as easily as they can vote for an elector. They are dangerous to the liberties of the people, because, in the first place, they introduce extraneous considerations into the election of President; and in the second place, they may sell the vote which is intrusted to their keeping. They introduce extraneous considerations, by bringing their own character and their own exertions into the presidential canvass. Every one sees this. Candidates for electors are now selected, not for the reasons mentioned in the Federalist, but for their devotion to a particular party, for their manners, and their talent at electioneering. The elector may betray the liberties of the people, by selling his vote. The operation is easy, because he votes by ballot; detection is impossible, because he does not sign his vote; the restraint is nothing but his own conscience, for there is no legal punishment for this breach of trust. If a swindler defrauds you out of a few dollars of property or money, he is whipped and pilloried, and rendered infamous in the eye of the law; but, if an elector should defraud 40,000 people of their vote, there is no remedy but to abuse him in newspapers, where the best men in the country may be abused, as Benedict Arnold or Judas Iscariot.

Every reason for instituting electors has failed, and every consideration of prudence requires them to be discontinued. They are nothing but agents, in a case which requires no agent; and no prudent man would, or ought, to employ an agent to take care of his money, his property, or his liberty, when he is equally capable to take care of them himself.

But, if the plan of the constitution had not failed—if we were now deriving from electors all the advantages expected from their institution—I, for one, would still be in favor of getting rid of them.

I should esteem the incorruptibility of the people, their disinterested desire to get the best man for President, to be more than a counterpoise to all the advantages which might be derived from the superior intelligence of a more enlightened, but smaller, and therefore, more corruptible body. I should be opposed to the intervention of electors, because the double process of electing a man to elect a man, would paralyze the spirit of the people, and destroy the life of the election itself. Doubtless this machinery was introduced into our constitution for the purpose of softening the action of the democratic element; but it also softens the interest of the people in the result of the election itself. It places them at too great a distance from their first servant. It interposes a body of men between the people and the object of their choice, and gives a false direction to the gratitude of the President elected. He feels himself indebted to the electors who collected the votes of the people, and not to the people, who gave their votes to the electors.

It enables a few men to govern many, and, in time, it will transfer the whole power of the election into the hands of a few, leaving to the people the humble occupation of confirming what has been done by superior authority.

IN MEMORIAM.

Hon. James G. Blaine’s Oration on President Garfield.

THE GRAND MORAL OF HIS CAREER.

An Elaborate, Polished and Scholarly Tribute by an Accomplished Orator, in the Hall of the House of Representatives, on Monday, Feb. 27, 1882.

At ten o’clock the doors of the House of Representatives were opened to holders of tickets for the memorial services, and in less than half an hour the galleries were filled, a large majority of the spectators being ladies, mostly in black. There were no signs of mourning in the hall, even the full-length portrait of the late President, James Abram Garfield, painted by E. F. Andrews, of Washington, being undraped. The three front rows of desks had been replaced by chairs to accommodate the invited guests, and the Marine Band was stationed in the lobby, back of the Speaker’s desk.

Among the distinguished guests first to arrive were George Bancroft, W. W. Corcoran, Cyrus Field and Admiral Worden, who took seats directly in front of the clerk’s desk. Among the guests who occupied seats upon the floor were General Schenck, Governor Hoyt, of Pennsylvania; Foster, of Ohio; Porter, of Indiana; Hamilton, of Maryland, and Bigelow, of Connecticut, and Adjutant-General Harmine, of Connecticut.

At 11.30 Generals Sherman, Sheridan, Hancock, Howard and Meigs, and Admirals Ammen and Rodgers entered at the north door of the chamber and were assigned seats to the left of the Speaker’s desk, and a few moments later the members of the Diplomatic Corps, in full regalia, were ushered in, headed by the Hawaiian Minister, as dean of the Corps. The Supreme Court of the District, headed by Marshal Henry, arrived next. Mrs. Blaine occupied a front seat in the gallery reserved for friends of the President. At twelve o’clock the House was called to order by Speaker Keifer, and prayer was offered by the Chaplain. The Speaker then announced that the House was assembled and ready to perform its part in the memorial services, and the resolutions to that effect were read by Clerk McPherson. At 12.10 the Senate was announced, and that body, headed by its officers, entered and took their assigned seats. The Chief Justice and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, in their robes of office, came next, and were followed by President Arthur and his Cabinet. The President took the front seat on the right of the Presiding Officer’s chair, next to that occupied by Cyrus W. Field.

Senator Sherman and Representative McKinley (Ohio) occupied seats at the desk on the right and left of the orator of the day. Mr. West, the British Minister, was the only member of the Diplomatic Corps who did not wear the court uniform.

A delegation of gentlemen from the Society of the Army of the Cumberland acted as ushers at the main entrance to the Rotunda and in the various corridors leading to the galleries.

At 12.30 the orator of the day was announced, and after a short prayer by the Chaplain of the House, F. D. Power, president Davis said: “This day is dedicated by Congress for memorial services of the late President of the United States, James A. Garfield. I present to you the Hon. James G. Blaine, who has been fitly chosen as the orator for this historical occasion.”

Mr. Blaine then rose, and standing at the clerk’s desk, immediately in front of the two presiding officers, proceeded, with impressiveness of manner and clearness of tone, to deliver his eulogy from manuscript, as follows:

Mr. Blaine’s Oration.

Mr. President: For the second time in this generation the great departments of the Government of the United States are assembled in the Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a murdered President. Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in which the passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical termination of his great life added but another to the lengthened succession of horrors which had marked so many lintels with the blood of the first born. Garfield was slain in a day of peace, when brother had been reconciled to brother, and when anger and hate had been banished from the land. “Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited where such example was last to have been looked for, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate. Let him draw, rather, a decorous smooth-faced, bloodless demon; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character.”

GARFIELD’S ANCESTORS.

From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth till the uprising against Charles First, about twenty thousand emigrants came from old England to New England. As they came in pursuit of intellectual freedom and ecclesiastical independence rather than for worldly honor and profit, the emigration naturally ceased when the contest for religious liberty began in earnest at home. The man who struck his most effective blow for freedom of conscience by sailing for the colonies in 1620 would have been accounted a deserter to leave after 1640. The opportunity had then come on the soil of England for that great contest which established the authority of Parliament, gave religious freedom to the people, sent Charles to the block, and committed to the hands of Oliver Cromwell the Supreme Executive authority of England. The English emigration was never renewed, and from these twenty thousand men with a small emigration from Scotland and from France are descended the vast numbers who have New England blood in their veins.

In 1685 the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. scattered to other countries four hundred thousand Protestants, who were among the most intelligent and enterprising of French subjects—merchants of capital, skilled manufacturers, and handicraftsmen superior at the time to all others in Europe. A considerable number of these Huguenot French came to America; a few landed in New England and became honorably prominent in its history. Their names have in large part become anglicised, or have disappeared, but their blood is traceable in many of the most reputable families, and their fame is perpetuated in honorable memorials and useful institutions.

From these two sources, the English-Puritan and the French-Huguenot, came the late President—his father, Abram Garfield, being descended from the one, and his mother, Eliza Ballou, from the other.

It was good stock on both sides—none better, none braver, none truer. There was in it an inheritance of courage, of manliness, of imperishable love of liberty, of undying adherence to principle. Garfield was proud of his blood; and, with as much satisfaction as if he were a British nobleman reading his stately ancestral record in Burke’s Peerage, he spoke of himself as ninth in descent from those who would not endure the oppression of the Stuarts, and seventh in descent from the brave French Protestants who refused to submit to tyranny even from the Grand Monarque.

General Garfield delighted to dwell on these traits, and during his only visit to England, he busied himself in discovering every trace of his forefathers in parish registries and on ancient army rolls. Sitting with a friend in the gallery of the House of Commons one night after a long day’s labor in this field of research, he said with evident elation that in every war in which for three centuries patriots of English blood had struck sturdy blows for constitutional government and human liberty, his family had been represented. They were at Marston Moor, at Naseby and at Preston; they were at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga, and at Monmouth, and in his own person had battled for the same great cause in the war which preserved the Union of the States.

Losing his father before he was two years old, the early life of Garfield was one of privation, but its poverty has been made indelicately and unjustly prominent. Thousands of readers have imagined him as the ragged, starving child, whose reality too often greets the eye in the squalid sections of our large cities. General Garfield’s infancy and youth had none of their destitution, none of their pitiful features appealing to the tender heart and to the open hand of charity. He was a poor boy in the same sense in which Henry Clay was a poor boy; in which Andrew Jackson was a poor boy; in which Daniel Webster was a poor boy; in the sense in which a large majority of the eminent men of America in all generations have been poor boys. Before a great multitude of men, in a public speech, Mr. Webster bore this testimony:

HIS EARLY DAYS.

“It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin raised amid the snow drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that when the smoke rose first from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills there was no similar evidence of a white man’s habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections and the touching narratives and incidents which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode.”

With the requisite change of scene the same words would aptly portray the early days of Garfield. The poverty of the frontier, where all are engaged in a common struggle and where a common sympathy and hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty, different in kind, different in influence and effect from that conscious and humiliating indigence which is every day forced to contrast itself with neighboring wealth on which it feels a sense of grinding dependence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed no poverty. It is but the beginning of wealth, and has the boundless possibilities of the future always opening before it. No man ever grew up in the agricultural regions of the West, where a house-raising, or even a corn-husking, is a matter of common interest and helpfulness, with any other feeling than that of broad-minded, generous independence. This honorable independence marked the youth of Garfield as it marks the youth of millions of the best blood and brain now training for the future citizenship and future government of the republic. Garfield was born heir to land, to the title of freeholder which has been the patent and passport of self-respect with the Anglo-Saxon race ever since Hengist and Horsa landed on the shores of England. His adventure on the canal—an alternative between that and the deck of a Lake Erie schooner—was a farmer boy’s device for earning money, just as the New England lad begins a possibly great career by sailing before the mast on a coasting vessel or on a merchantman bound to the farther India or to the China Seas.

No manly man feels anything of shame in looking back to early struggles with adverse circumstances, and no man feels a worthier pride than when he has conquered the obstacles to his progress. But no one of noble mould desires to be looked upon as having occupied a menial position, as having been repressed by a feeling of inferiority, or as having suffered the evils of poverty until relief was found at the hand of charity. General Garfield’s youth presented no hardships which family love and family energy did not overcome, subjected him to no privations which he did not cheerfully accept, and left no memories save those which were recalled with delight, and transmitted with profit and with pride.

Garfield’s early opportunities for securing an education were extremely limited, and yet were sufficient to develop in him an intense desire to learn. He could read at three years of age, and each winter he had the advantage of the district school. He read all the books to be found within the circle of his acquaintance; some of them he got by heart. While yet in childhood he was a constant student of the Bible, and became familiar with its literature. The dignity and earnestness of his speech in his maturer life gave evidence of this early training. At eighteen years of age he was able to teach school, and thenceforward his ambition was to obtain a college education. To this end he bent all his efforts, working in the harvest field, at the carpenter’s bench, and, in the winter season, teaching the common schools of the neighborhood. While thus laboriously occupied he found time to prosecute his studies and was so successful that at twenty-two years of age he was able to enter the junior class at Williams College, then under the presidency of the venerable and honored Mark Hopkins, who, in the fullness of his powers, survives the eminent pupil to whom he was of inestimable service.

The history of Garfield’s life to this period presents no novel features. He had undoubtedly shown perseverance, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, and ambition—qualities which, be it said for the honor of our country, are everywhere to be found among the young men of America. But from his graduation at Williams onward, to the hour of his tragical death, Garfield’s career was eminent and exceptional. Slowly working through his educational period, receiving his diploma when twenty-four years of age, he seemed at one bound to spring into conspicuous and brilliant success. Within six years he was successively president of a college, State Senator of Ohio, Major General of the Army of the United States and Representative-elect to the National Congress. A combination of honors so varied, so elevated, within a period so brief and to a man so young, is without precedent or parallel in the history of the country.

IN THE ARMY.

Garfield’s army life was begun with no other military knowledge than such as he had hastily gained from books in the few months preceding his march to the field. Stepping from civil life to the head of a regiment, the first order he received when ready to cross the Ohio was to assume command of a brigade, and to operate as an independent force in Eastern Kentucky. His immediate duty was to check the advance of Humphrey Marshall, who was marching down the Big Sandy with the intention of occupying in connection with other Confederate forces the entire territory of Kentucky, and of precipitating the State into secession. This was at the close of the year 1861. Seldom, if ever, has a young college professor been thrown into a more embarrassing and discouraging position. He knew just enough of military science, as he expressed it himself, to measure the extent of his ignorance, and with a handful of men he was marching, in rough winter weather, into a strange country, among a hostile population to confront a largely superior force under the command of a distinguished graduate of West Point, who had seen active and important service in two preceding wars.

The result of the campaign is matter of history. The skill, the endurance, the extraordinary energy shown by Garfield, the courage imparted to his men, raw and untried as himself, the measures he adopted to increase his force and to create in the enemy’s mind exaggerated estimates of his numbers, bore perfect fruit in the routing of Marshall, the capture of his camp, the dispersion of his force, and the emancipation of an important territory from the control of the rebellion. Coming at the close of a long series of disasters to the Union arms, Garfield’s victory had an unusual and extraneous importance, and in the popular judgment elevated the young commander to the rank of a military hero. With less than two thousand men in his entire command, with a mobilized force of only eleven hundred, without cannon, he had met an army of five thousand and defeated them—driving Marshall’s forces successively from two strongholds of their own selection, fortified with abundant artillery. Major-General Buell, commanding the Department of the Ohio, an experienced and able soldier of the regular army, published an order of thanks and congratulation on the brilliant result of the Big Sandy campaign which would have turned the head of a less cool and sensible man than Garfield. Buell declared that his services had called into action the highest qualities of a soldier, and President Lincoln supplemented these words of praise by the more substantial reward of a brigadier-general’s commission, to bear date from the day of his decisive victory over Marshall.

The subsequent military career of Garfield fully sustained its brilliant beginning. With his new commission he was assigned to the command of a brigade in the Army of the Ohio, and took part in the second and decisive day’s fight in the great battle of Shiloh. The remainder of the year 1862 was not especially eventful to Garfield, as it was not to the armies with which he was serving. His practical sense was called into exercise in completing the task, assigned him by General Buell, of reconstructing bridges and re-establishing lines of railway communication for the army. His occupation in this useful but not brilliant field was varied by service on courts-martial of importance, in which department of duty he won a valuable reputation, attracting the notice and securing the approval of the able and eminent Judge-Advocate-General of the Army. That of itself was a warrant to honorable fame; for among the great men who in those trying days gave themselves, with entire devotion, to the service of their country, one who brought to that service the ripest learning, the most fervid eloquence, the most varied attainments, who labored with modesty and shunned applause, who in the day of triumph sat reserved and silent and grateful—as Francis Deak in the hour of Hungary’s deliverance—was Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, who in his honorable retirement enjoys the respect and veneration of all who love the Union of the States.

Early in 1863 Garfield was assigned to the highly important and responsible post of chief of staff to General Rosecrans, then at the head of the Army of the Cumberland. Perhaps in a great military campaign no subordinate officer requires sounder judgment and quicker knowledge of men than the chief of staff to the commanding general. An indiscreet man in such a position can sow more discord, breed more jealousy and disseminate more strife than any other officer in the entire organization. When General Garfield assumed his new duties he found various troubles already well developed and seriously affecting the value and efficiency of the Army of Cumberland. The energy, the impartiality and the tact with which he sought to allay these dissensions, and to discharge the duties of his new and trying position, will always remain one of the most striking proofs of his great versatility. His military duties closed on the memorable field of Chickamauga, a field which however disastrous to the Union arms gave to him the occasion of winning imperishable laurels. The very rare distinction was accorded him of great promotion for his bravery on a field that was lost. President Lincoln appointed him a Major-General in the Army of the United States for gallant and meritorious conduct in the battle of Chickamauga.

The Army of the Cumberland was reorganized under the command of General Thomas, who promptly offered Garfield one of its divisions. He was extremely desirous to accept the position, but was embarrassed by the fact that he had, a year before, been elected to Congress, and the time when he must take his seat was drawing near. He preferred to remain in the military service, and had within his own breast the largest confidence of success in the wider field which his new rank opened to him. Balancing the arguments on the one side and the other, anxious to determine what was for the best, desirous above all things to do his patriotic duty, he was decisively influenced by the advice of President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton, both of whom assured him that he could at that time, be of especial value in the House of Representatives. He resigned his commission of Major-General on the 5th day of December, 1863, and took his seat in the House of Representatives on the 7th. He had served two years and four months in the army, and had just completed his thirty-second year.

IN CONGRESS.

The Thirty-eighth Congress is pre-eminently entitled in history to the designation of the War Congress. It was elected while the war was flagrant, and every member was chosen upon the issues involved in the continuance of the struggle. The Thirty-seventh Congress had, indeed, legislated to a large extent on war measures but it was chosen before any one believed that secession of the States would be actually attempted. The magnitude of the work which fell upon its successor was unprecedented, both in respect to the vast sums of money raised for the support of the Army and Navy, and of the new and extraordinary powers of legislation which it was forced to exercise. Only twenty-four States were represented, and one hundred and eighty-two members were upon its roll. Among these were many distinguished party leaders on both sides, veterans in the public service, with established reputations for ability, and with that skill which comes only from parliamentary experience. Into this assemblage of men Garfield entered without special preparation, and it might almost be said unexpectedly. The question of taking command of a division of troops under General Thomas, or taking his seat in Congress was kept open till the last moment so late, indeed, that the resignation of his military commission and his appearance in the House were almost contemporaneous. He wore the uniform of a Major-General of the United States Army on Saturday, and on Monday in civilian’s dress, he answered to the roll call as a Representative in Congress from the State of Ohio.

He was especially fortunate in the constituency which elected him. Descended almost entirely from New England stock, the men of the Ashtabula district were intensely radical on all questions relating to human rights. Well educated, thrifty, thoroughly intelligent in affairs, acutely discerning of character, not quick to bestow confidence, and slow to withdraw it, they were at once the most helpful and most exacting of supporters. Their tenacious trust in men in whom they have once confided is illustrated by the unparalleled fact that Elisha Whittlesey, Joshua R. Giddings, and James A. Garfield represented the district for fifty-four years.

There is no test of a man’s ability in any department of public life more severe than service in the House of Representatives; there is no place where so little deference is paid to reputation previously acquired or to eminence won outside; no place where so little consideration is shown for the feelings or failures of beginners. What a man gains in the House he gains by sheer force of his own character, and if he loses and falls back he must expect no mercy and will receive no sympathy. It is a field in which the survival of the strongest is the recognized rule and where no pretense can deceive and no glamour can mislead. The real man is discovered, his worth is impartially weighed, his rank is irreversibly decreed.

With possibly a single exception Garfield was the youngest member in the House when he entered, and was but seven years from his college graduation. But he had not been in his seat sixty days before his ability was recognized and his place conceded. He stepped to the front with the confidence of one who belonged there. The House was crowded with strong men of both parties; nineteen of them have since been transferred to the Senate, and many of them have served with distinction in the gubernatorial chairs of their respective States, and on foreign missions of great consequence; but among them all none grew so rapidly none so firmly as Garfield. As is said by Trevelyan of his parliamentary hero, Garfield succeeded “because all the world in concert could not have kept him in the background, and because when once in the front he played his part with a prompt intrepidity and a commanding ease that were but the outward symptoms of the immense reserves of energy, on which it was in his power to draw.” Indeed the apparently reserved force which Garfield possessed was one of his great characteristics. He never did so well but that it seemed he could easily have done better. He never expended so much strength but that he seemed to be holding additional power at call. This is one of the happiest and rarest distinctions of an effective debater, and often counts for as much in persuading an assembly as the eloquent and elaborate argument.

The great measure of Garfield’s fame was filled by his service in the House of Representatives. His military life, illustrated by honorable performance, and rich in promise, was, as he himself felt, prematurely terminated, and necessarily incomplete. Speculation as to what he might have done in a field, where the great prizes are so few, cannot be profitable. It is sufficient to say that as a soldier he did his duty bravely; he did it intelligently; he won an enviable fame, and he retired from the service without blot or breath against him. As a lawyer, though admirably equipped for the profession, he can scarcely be said to have entered on its practice. The few efforts he made at the bar were distinguished by the same high order of talent which he exhibited on every field where he was put to the test, and if a man may be accepted as a competent judge of his own capacities and adaptations, the law was the profession to which Garfield should have devoted himself. But fate ordained otherwise, and his reputation in history will rest largely upon his service in the House of Representatives. That service was exceptionally long. He was nine times consecutively chosen to the House, an honor enjoyed by not more than six other Representatives of the more than five thousand who have been elected from the organization of the government to this hour.

ORATOR AND DEBATER.

As a parliamentary orator, as a debater on an issue squarely joined, where the position had been chosen and the ground laid out, Garfield must be assigned a very high rank. More, perhaps, than any man with whom he was associated in public life, he gave careful and systematic study to public questions, and he came to every discussion in which he took part with elaborate and complete preparation. He was a steady and indefatigable worker. Those that imagine that talent or genius can supply the place or achieve the results of labor will find no encouragement in Garfield’s life. In preliminary work he was apt, rapid and skillful. He possessed in a high degree the power of readily absorbing ideas and facts, and, like Dr. Johnson, had the art of getting from a book all that was of value in it by a reading apparently so quick and cursory that it seemed like a mere glance at the table of contents. He was a pre-eminently fair and candid man in debate, took no petty advantage, stooped to no unworthy methods, avoided personal allusions, rarely appealed to prejudice, did not seek to inflame passion. He had a quicker eye for the strong point of his adversary than for his weak point, and on his own side he so marshaled his weighty arguments as to make his hearers forget any possible lack in the complete strength of his position. He had a habit of stating his opponent’s side with such amplitude of fairness and such liberality of concession that his followers often complained that he was giving his cases away. But never in his prolonged participation in the proceedings of the House did he give his case away, or fail in the judgment of competent and impartial listeners to gain the mastery.

These characteristics, which marked Garfield as a great debater, did not, however, make him a great parliamentary leader. A parliamentary leader, as that term is understood wherever free representative government exists, is necessarily and very strictly the organ of his party. An ardent American defined the instinctive warmth of patriotism when he offered the toast, “Our country always right, but right or wrong, our country.” The parliamentary leader who has a body of followers that will do and dare and die for the cause, is one who believes his party always right, but right or wrong, is for his party. No more important or exacting duty devolves upon him than the selection of the field and the time for contest. He must know not merely how to strike, but where to strike and when to strike. He often skillfully avoids the strength of his opponent’s position and scatters confusion in his ranks by attacking an exposed point when really the righteousness of the cause and the strength of logical intrenchment are against him. He conquers often both against the right and the heavy battalions; as when young Chas. Fox, in the days of his Toryism, carried the House of Commons against justice, against its immemorial rights, against his own convictions, if, indeed, at that period Fox had convictions, and, in the interest of a corrupt administration, in obedience to a tyrannical sovereign, drove Wilkes from the seat to which the electors of Middlesex had chosen him and installed Luttrell in defiance, not merely of law, but of public decency. For an achievement of that kind Garfield was disqualified—disqualified by the texture of his mind, by the honesty of his heart, by his conscience, and by every instinct and aspiration of his nature.

The three most distinguished parliamentary leaders hitherto developed in this country are Mr. Clay, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Thaddeus Stevens. Each was a man of consummate ability, of great earnestness, of intense personality, differing widely each from the others, and yet with a signal trait in common—the power to command. In the give and take of daily discussion, in the art of controlling and consolidating reluctant and refractory followers; in the skill to overcome all forms of opposition, and to meet with competency and courage the varying phases of unlooked-for assault or unsuspected defection, it would be difficult to rank with these a fourth name in all our Congressional history. But of these Mr. Clay was the greatest. It would, perhaps, be impossible to find in the parliamentary annals of the world a parallel to Mr. Clay, in 1841, when at sixty-four years of age he took the control of the Whig party from the President who had received their suffrages, against the power of Webster in the Cabinet, against the eloquence of Choate in the Senate, against the Herculean efforts of Caleb Cushing and Henry A. Wise in the House. In unshared leadership, in the pride and plenitude of power he hurled against John Tyler with deepest scorn the mass of that conquering column which had swept over the land in 1840, and drove his administration to seek shelter behind the lines of his political foes. Mr. Douglas achieved a victory scarcely less wonderful when, in 1854, against the secret desires of a strong administration, against the wise counsel of the older chiefs, against the conservative instincts and even the moral sense of the country, he forced a reluctant Congress into a repeal of the Missouri compromise. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, in his contests from 1865 to 1868, actually advanced his parliamentary leadership until Congress tied the hands of the President and governed the country by its own will, leaving only perfunctory duties to be discharged by the Executive. With two hundred millions of patronage in his hands at the opening of the contest, aided by the active force of Steward in the Cabinet and the moral power of Chase on the Bench, Andrew Johnson could not command the support of one-third in either House against the Parliamentary uprising of which Thaddeus Stevens was the animating spirit and the unquestioned leader.

From these three great men Garfield differed radically, differed in the quality of his mind, in temperament, in the form and phase of ambition. He could not do what they did, but he could do what they could not, and in the breadth of his Congressional work he left that which will longer exert a potential influence among men, and which, measured by the severe test of posthumous criticism, will secure a more enduring and more enviable fame.

GARFIELD’S INDUSTRY.

Those unfamiliar with Garfield’s industry and ignorant of the details of his work may, in some degree, measure them by the annals of Congress. No one of the generation of public men to which he belonged has contributed so much that will be valuable for future reference. His speeches are numerous, many of them brilliant, all of them well studied, carefully phrased and exhaustive of the subject under consideration. Collected from the scattered pages of ninety royal octavo volumes of Congressional Record they would present an invaluable compendium of the political history of the most important era through which the national government has ever passed. When the history of this period shall be impartially written, when war legislation, measures of reconstruction, protection of human rights, amendments to the constitution, maintenance of public credit, steps toward specie resumption, true theories of revenue may be reviewed, unsurrounded by prejudice and disconnected from partisanism, the speeches of Garfield will be estimated at their true value, and will be found to comprise a vast magazine of fact and argument, of clear analysis and sound conclusion. Indeed, if no other authority were accessible, his speeches in the House of Representatives from December 1863, to June, 1880, would give a well connected history and complete defence of the important legislation of the seventeen eventful years that constitute his Parliamentary life. Far beyond that, his speeches would be found to forecast many great measures, yet to be completed—measures which he knew were beyond the public opinion of the hour, but which he confidently believed would secure popular approval within the period of his own lifetime, and by the aid of his own efforts.

Differing, as Garfield does, from the brilliant parliamentary leaders, it is not easy to find his counterpart anywhere in the record of American public life. He perhaps more nearly resembles Mr. Seward in his supreme faith in the all-conquering power of a principle. He had the love of learning, and the patient industry of investigation, to which John Quincy Adams owes his prominence and his Presidency. He had some of those ponderous elements of mind which distinguished Mr. Webster, and which indeed, in all our public life, have left the great Massachusetts Senator without an intellectual peer.

In English parliamentary history, as in our own, the leaders in the House of Commons present points of essential difference from Garfield. But some of his methods recall the best features in the strong, independent course of Sir Robert Peel, and striking resemblances are discernible in that most promising of modern conservatives, who died too early for his country and his fame, the Lord George Bentinck. He had all of Burke’s love for the sublime and the beautiful, with, possibly, something of his superabundance, and in his faith and his magnanimity, in his power of statement, in his subtle analysis, in his faultless logic, in his love of literature, in his wealth and world of illustration, one is reminded of that great English statesman of to-day, who, confronted with obstacles that would daunt any but the dauntless, reviled by those whom he would relieve as bitterly as by those whose supposed rights he is forced to invade, still labors with serene courage for the amelioration of Ireland, and for the honor of the English name.

NOMINATION TO THE PRESIDENCY.

Garfield’s nomination to the Presidency, while not predicted or anticipated, was not a surprise to the country. His prominence in Congress, his solid qualities, his wide reputation, strengthened by his then recent election as Senator from Ohio, kept him in the public eye as a man occupying the very highest rank among those entitled to be called statesmen. It was not mere chance that brought him this high honor. “We must,” says Mr. Emerson, “reckon success a constitutional trait. If Eric is in robust health, and has slept well and is at the top of his condition, and thirty years old at his departure from Greenland, he will steer west and his ships will reach New Foundland. But take Eric out and put in a stronger and bolder man and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles farther and reach Labrador and New England. There is no chance in results.”

As a candidate, Garfield steadily grew in popular favor. He was met with a storm of detraction at the very hour of his nomination, and it continued with increasing volume and momentum until the close of his victorious campaign:

No might nor greatness in mortality Can censure ’scape; back-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?

Under it all he was calm, and strong, and confident; never lost his self-possession, did no unwise act, spoke no hasty or ill-considered word. Indeed nothing in his whole life is more remarkable or more creditable than his bearing through those five full months of vituperation—a prolonged agony of trial to a sensitive man, a constant and cruel draft upon the powers of moral endurance. The great mass of these unjust imputations passed unnoticed, and, with the general debris of the campaign, fell into oblivion. But in a few instances the iron entered his soul and he died with the injury unforgotten if not unforgiven.

One aspect of Garfield’s candidacy was unprecedented. Never before in the history of partisan contests in this country had a successful Presidential candidate spoken freely on passing events and current issues. To attempt anything of the kind seemed novel, rash, and even desperate. The older class of voters recalled the unfortunate Alabama letter, in which Mr. Clay was supposed to have signed his political death-warrant. They remembered also the hot-tempered effusion by which General Scott lost a large share of his popularity before his nomination, and the unfortunate speeches which rapidly consumed the remainder. The younger voters had seen Mr. Greeley in a series of vigorous and original addresses, preparing the pathway for his own defeat. Unmindful of these warnings, unheeding the advice of friends, Garfield spoke to large crowds as he journeyed to and from New York in August, to a great multitude in that city, to delegations and deputations of every kind that called at Mentor during the summer and autumn. With innumerable critics, watchful and eager to catch a phrase that might be turned into odium or ridicule, or a sentence that might be distorted to his own or his party’s injury, Garfield did not trip or halt in any one of his seventy speeches. This seems all the more remarkable when it is remembered that he did not write what he said, and yet spoke with such logical consecutiveness of thought and such admirable precision of phrase as to defy the accident of misreport and the malignity of misrepresentation.

AS PRESIDENT.

In the beginning of his Presidential life Garfield’s experience did not yield him pleasure or satisfaction. The duties that engross so large a portion of the President’s time were distasteful to him, and were unfavorably contrasted with his legislative work. “I have been dealing all these years with ideas,” he impatiently exclaimed one day, “and here I am dealing only with persons. I have been heretofore treating of the fundamental principles of government, and here I am considering all day whether A or B shall be appointed to this or that office.” He was earnestly seeking some practical way of correcting the evils arising from the distribution of overgrown and unwieldy patronage—evils always appreciated and often discussed by him, but whose magnitude had been more deeply impressed upon his mind since his accession to the Presidency. Had he lived, a comprehensive improvement in the mode of appointment and in the tenure of office would have been proposed by him, and with the aid of Congress no doubt perfected.

But, while many of the Executive duties were not grateful to him, he was assiduous and conscientious in their discharge. From the very outset he exhibited administrative talent of a high order. He grasped the helm of office with the hand of a master. In this respect, indeed, he constantly surprised many who were most intimately associated with him in the government, and especially those who had feared that he might be lacking in the executive faculty. His disposition of business was orderly and rapid. His power of analysis, and his skill in classification, enabled him to despatch a vast mass of detail with singular promptness and ease. His Cabinet meetings were admirably conducted. His clear presentation of official subjects, his well-considered suggestion of topics on which discussion was invited, his quick decision when all had been heard, combined to show a thoroughness of mental training as rare as his natural ability and his facile adaptation to a new and enlarged field of labor.

With perfect comprehension of all the inheritances of the war, with a cool calculation of the obstacles in his way, impelled always by a generous enthusiasm, Garfield conceived that much might be done by his administration towards restoring harmony between the different sections of the Union. He was anxious to go South and speak to the people. As early as April he had ineffectually endeavored to arrange for a trip to Nashville, whither he had been cordially invited, and he was again disappointed a few weeks later to find that he could not go to South Carolina to attend the centennial celebration of the victory of the Cowpens. But for the autumn he definitely counted on being present at three memorable assemblies in the South, the celebration at Yorktown, the opening of the Cotton Exposition at Atlanta, and the meeting of the Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga. He was already turning over in his mind his address for each occasion, and the three taken together, he said to a friend, gave him the exact scope and verge which he needed. At Yorktown he would have before him the associations of a hundred years that bound the South and the North in the sacred memory of a common danger and a common victory. At Atlanta he would present the material interests and the industrial development which appealed to the thrift and independence of every household, and which should unite the two sections by the instinct of self-interest and self-defence. At Chattanooga he would revive memories of the war only to show that after all its disaster and all its suffering, the country was stronger and greater, the Union rendered indissoluble, and the future, through the agony and blood of one generation, made brighter and better for all.

Garfield’s ambition for the success of his administration was high. With strong caution and conservatism in his nature, he was in no danger of attempting rash experiments or of resorting to the empiricism of statesmanship. But he believed that renewed and closer attention should be given to questions affecting the material interests and commercial prospects of fifty millions of people. He believed that our continental relations, extensive and undeveloped as they are, involved responsibility, and could be cultivated into profitable friendship or be abandoned to harmful indifference or lasting enmity. He believed with equal confidence that an essential forerunner to a new era of national progress must be a feeling of contentment in every section of the Union, and a generous belief that the benefits and burdens of government would be common to all. Himself a conspicuous illustration of what ability and ambition may do under republican institutions, he loved his country with a passion of patriotic devotion, and every waking thought was given to her advancement. He was an American in all his aspirations, and he looked to the destiny and influence of the United States with the philosophic composure of Jefferson and the demonstrative confidence of John Adams.

THE POLITICAL CONTROVERSY.

The political events which disturbed the President’s serenity for many weeks before that fatal day in July form an important chapter in his career, and, in his own judgment, involved questions of principle and of right which are vitally essential to the constitutional administration of the Federal Government. It would be out of place here and now to speak the language of controversy, but the events referred to, however they may continue to be source of contention with others, have become, so far as Garfield is concerned, as much a matter of history as his heroism at Chickamauga or his illustrious service in the House. Detail is not needful, and personal antagonism shall not be rekindled by any word uttered to-day. The motives of those opposing him are not to be here adversely interpreted nor their course harshly characterized. But of the dead President this is to be said, and said because his own speech is forever silenced and he can be no more heard except through the fidelity and the love of surviving friends. From the beginning to the end of the controversy he so much deplored, the President was never for one moment actuated by any motive of gain to himself or of loss to others. Least of all men did he harbor revenge, rarely did he even show resentment, and malice was not in his nature. He was congenially employed only in the exchange of good offices and the doing of kindly deeds.

There was not an hour, from the beginning of the trouble till the fatal shot entered his body, when the President would not gladly, for the sake of restoring harmony, have retraced any step he had taken if such retracing had merely involved consequences personal to himself. The pride of consistency, or any supposed sense of humiliation that might result from surrendering his position, had not a feather’s weight with him. No man was ever less subject to such influences from within or from without. But after the most anxious deliberation and the coolest survey of all the circumstances, he solemnly believed that the true prerogatives of the Executive were involved in the issue which had been raised, and that he would be unfaithful to his supreme obligation if he failed to maintain, in all their vigor, the constitutional rights and dignities of his great office. He believed this in all the convictions of conscience when in sound and vigorous health, and he believed it in his suffering and prostration in the last conscious thought which his wearied mind bestowed on the transitory struggles of life.

More than this need not be said. Less than this could not be said. Justice to the dead, the highest obligation that devolves upon the living, demands the declaration that in all the bearings of the subject, actual or possible, the President was content in his mind, justified in his conscience, immovable in his conclusions.

GARFIELD’S RELIGION.

The religious element in Garfield’s character was deep and earnest. In his early youth he espoused the faith of the Disciples, a sect of that great Baptist Communion which in different ecclesiastical establishments is so numerous and so influential throughout all parts of the United States. But the broadening tendency of his mind and his active spirit of inquiry were early apparent and carried him beyond the dogmas of sect and the restraints of association. In selecting a college in which to continue his education he rejected Bethany, though presided over by Alexander Campbell, the greatest preacher of his church. His reasons were characteristic: first, that Bethany leaned too heavily toward slavery; and, second, that being himself a Disciple and the son of Disciple parents, he had little acquaintance with people of other beliefs, and he thought it would make him more liberal, quoting his own words, both in his religious and general views, to go into a new circle and be under new influences.

The liberal tendency which he had anticipated as the result of wider culture was fully realized. He was emancipated from mere sectarian belief, and with eager interest pushed his investigations in the direction of modern progressive thought. He followed with quickening step in the paths of exploration and speculation so fearlessly trodden by Darwin, by Huxley, by Tyndall, and by other living scientists of the radical and advanced type. His own church, binding its disciples by no formulated creed, but accepting the Old and New Testaments as the word of God, with unbiased liberality of private interpretation, favored, if it did not stimulate, the spirit of investigation. Its members profess with sincerity, and profess only, to be of one mind and one faith with those who immediately followed the Master, and who were first called Christians at Antioch.

But however high Garfield reasoned of “fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,” he was never separated from the Church of the Disciples in his affections and in his associations. For him it held the ark of the covenant. To him it was the gate of Heaven. The world of religious belief is full of solecisms and contradictions. A philosophic observer declares that men by the thousand will die in defence of a creed whose doctrines they do not comprehend and whose tenets they habitually violate. It is equally true that men by the thousand will cling to church organizations with instinctive and undenying fidelity when their belief in maturer years is radically different from that which inspired them as neophytes.

But after this range of speculation, and this latitude of doubt, Garfield came back always with freshness and delight to the simpler instincts of religious faith, which, earliest implanted, longest survive. Not many weeks before his assassination, walking on the banks of the Potomac with a friend, and conversing on these topics of personal religion, concerning which noble natures have an unconquerable reserve, he said that he found the Lord’s Prayer and the simple petitions learned in infancy infinitely restful to him, not merely in their stated repetition, but in their casual and frequent recall as he went about the daily duties of life. Certain texts of scripture had a very strong hold on his memory and his heart. He heard, while in Edinburgh some years ago, an eminent Scotch preacher who prefaced his sermon with reading the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, which book had been the subject of careful study with Garfield during his religious life. He was greatly impressed by the elocution of the preacher and declared that it had imparted a new and deeper meaning to the majestic utterances of Saint Paul. He referred often in after years to that memorable service, and dwelt with exaltation of feeling upon the radiant promise and the assured hope with which the great apostle of the Gentiles was “persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor principalities, nor powers nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The crowning characteristic of General Garfield’s religious opinions, as, indeed, of all his opinions, was his liberality. In all things he had charity. Tolerance was of his nature. He respected in others the qualities which he possessed himself—sincerity of conviction and frankness of expression. With him the inquiry was not so much what a man believes, but does he believe it? The lines of his friendship and his confidence encircled men of every creed, and men of no creed, and to the end of his life, on his ever lengthening list of friends, were to be found the names of a pious Catholic priest and of an honest-minded and generous-hearted free-thinker.

THE ASSASSIN’S BULLET.

On the morning of Saturday, July 2d, the President was a contented and happy man—not in an ordinary degree, but joyfully, almost boyishly happy. On his way to the railroad station to which he drove slowly, in conscious enjoyment of the beautiful morning, with an unwonted sense of leisure, and a keen anticipation of pleasure, his talk was all in the grateful and gratulatory vein. He felt that after four months of trial his administration was strong in its grasp of affairs, strong in popular favor and destined to grow stronger; that grave difficulties confronting him at his inauguration had been safely passed; that troubles lay behind him and not before him; that he was soon to meet the wife whom he loved, now recovering from an illness which had but lately disquieted and at times almost unnerved him; that he was going to his Alma Mater to renew the most cherished associations of his young manhood, and to exchange greetings with those whose deepening interest had followed every step of his upward progress from the day he entered upon his college course until he had attained the loftiest elevation in the gift of his countrymen.

Surely, if happiness can ever come from the honors or triumphs of this world, on that quiet July morning James A. Garfield may well have been a happy man. No foreboding of evil haunted him; no slightest premonition of danger clouded his sky. His terrible fate was upon him in an instant. One moment he stood erect, strong, confident, in the years stretching peacefully out before him. The next he lay wounded, bleeding, helpless, doomed to weary weeks of torture, to silence and the grave.

Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world’s interest, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death—and he did not quail. Not alone for one short moment in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony, that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage, he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell—what brilliant, broken plans, what baffled, high ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm, manhood’s friendship, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation, a great host of sustaining friends, a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full, rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys not yet emerged from childhood’s day of frolic; the fair, young daughter; the sturdy sons just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding a father’s love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoicing power to meet all demand. Before him, desolation and great darkness! And his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled with instant, profound, and universal sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became the centre of a nation’s love, enshrined in the prayers of a world. But all the love and all the sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He trod the wine-press alone. With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin’s bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the Divine decree.

As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from his prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean’s changing wonders; on its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.

AFTER THE ORATION.

The eulogy was concluded at 1.50, having taken just an hour and a half in its delivery. As Mr. Blaine gave utterance to the last solemn words the spectators broke into a storm of applause, which was not hushed for some moments. The address was listened to with an intense interest and in solemn silence, unbroken by any sound except by a sigh of relief (such as arises from a large audience when a strong tension is removed from their minds) when the orator passed from his allusion to differences existing in the Republican party last spring. Benediction was then offered by the Rev. Dr. Bullock, Chaplain of the Senate. The Marine Band played the “Garfield Dead March” as the invited guests filed out of the Chamber in the same order in which they had entered it. The Senate was the last to leave, and then the House was called to order by the Speaker.

Mr. McKinley, of Ohio, offered the following resolution:

Resolved, The Senate concurring, that the thanks of Congress are hereby presented to the Hon. James G. Blaine for the appropriate memorial address delivered by him on the life and services of James A. Garfield, late President of the United States, in the Representative Hall, before both houses of Congress and their invited guests, on the 27th of February, 1882, and that he be requested to furnish a copy for publication.

Resolved, That the Chairman of the Joint Committee appointed to make the necessary arrangements to carry into effect the resolution of Congress in relation to the memorial exercises in honor of James A. Garfield be requested to communicate to Mr. Blaine the foregoing resolution, receive his answer thereto and present the same to both Houses of Congress. The resolution was adopted unanimously.

Mr. McKinley then offered the following:

Resolved, That as a further mark of respect to the memory of the deceased President of the United States the House do now adjourn.

The resolution was unanimously adopted, and in accordance therewith the Speaker at 1.55 declared the House adjourned until to-morrow.

CIVIL SERVICE.

Improvement of the Subordinate Civil Service.

Speech of Hon. George H. Pendleton, of Ohio, in the Senate of the United States, Tuesday, December 12, 1882.

On the bill (S. 133) to regulate and improve the civil service of the United States.

MR. PENDLETON said:

MR. PRESIDENT: When I assented yesterday that this bill should be informally laid aside without losing its place, I had no set speech to deliver, nor had I the intention of preparing a speech for to-day. I did not intend to hold up the bill here as an obstruction to any business before the Senate, or as an aid in passing any measure that might receive my approbation, as my good Friend, the Senator from Kansas [Mr. PLUMB], so politely intimated. The bill providing for a bankrupt law was very speedily, and to me unexpectedly, disposed of yesterday, and this bill was called up several hours earlier than I supposed it would be, and I thought the convenience of the Senate as well as of myself would be subserved if I had an opportunity to condense what I had to say on the subject.

The necessity of a change in the civil administration of this government has been so fully discussed in the periodicals and pamphlets and newspapers, and before the people, that I feel indisposed to make any further argument. This subject, in all its ramifications, was submitted to the people of the United States at the fall elections, and they have spoken in no low or uncertain tone.

I do not doubt that the local questions exerted great influence in many States upon the result; but it is my conviction, founded on the observation of an active participation in the canvass in Ohio, that dissatisfaction with the methods of administration adopted by the Republican party in the past few years was the most important single factor in reaching the conclusion that was attained. I do not say that the civil service of the Government is wholly bad. I can not honestly do so. I do not say that the men who are employed in it are all corrupt or inefficient or unworthy. That would do a very great injustice to a great number of faithful, honest, and intelligent public servants. But I do say that the civil service is inefficient; that it is expensive; that it is extravagant; that it is in many cases and in some senses corrupt; that it has welded the whole body of its employès into a great political machine; that it has converted them into an army of officers and men, veterans in political warfare, disciplined and trained, whose salaries, whose time, whose exertions at least twice within a very short period in the history of our country have robbed the people of the fair results of Presidential elections.

I repeat, Mr. President, that the civil service is inefficient, expensive, and extravagant and that it is in many instances corrupt. Is it necessary for me to prove facts which are so patent that even the blind must see and the deaf must hear?

At the last session of Congress, in open Senate, it was stated and proven that in the Treasury Department at Washington there were 3,400 employès, and that of this number the employment of less than 1,600 was authorized by law and appropriations made for their payment, and that more than 1,700 were put on or off the rolls of the Department at the will and pleasure of the Secretary of the Treasury, and paid not out of appropriations made for that purpose but out of various funds and balances of appropriation lapsed in the Treasury in one shape or another, which are not by law appropriated to the payment of these employès. I was amazed. I had never before heard that such a state of affairs existed. I did not believe that it was possible until my honorable colleague rose in his place and admitted the general truth of the statement and defended the system as being necessary for the proper administration of the Treasury Department.

Mr. President, we see in this statement whence comes that immense body of public officials, inspectors, detectives, deputies, examiners, from the Treasury Department who have for years past been sent over the States for the purpose of managing Presidential conventions and securing Presidential elections at the public expense.

I hold in my hand a statement made before the committee which reported this bill, showing that in one of the divisions of the Treasury Department at Washington where more than nine hundred persons were employed, men and women, five hundred and more of them were entirely useless, and were discharged without in any degree affecting the efficiency of the bureau. I read from the testimony taken before the committee. Every gentleman can find it if he has not it already on his table. The statement to which I refer I read from page 121 of report of committee No. 576:

The extravagance of the present system was well shown in the examination of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing by a committee of which I was chairman. Of a force of nine hundred and fifty-eight persons five hundred and thirty-nine, with annual salaries amounting to $390,000, were found to be superfluous and were discharged. The committee reported that for years the force in some branches had been twice and even three times as great as the work required. In one division—

I beg Senators to listen to this—

In one division a sort of platform had been built underneath the iron roof, about seven feet above the floor, to accommodate the surplus counters. It appeared that the room was of ample size without this contrivance for all persons really needed. In another division were found twenty messengers doing work which it was found could be done by one. The committee reported that the system of patronage was chiefly responsible for the extravagance and irregularities which had marked the administration of the bureau, and declared that it had cost the people millions of dollars in that branch of the service alone. Under this system the office had been made to subserve the purpose of an almshouse or asylum.

In consequence of this report the annual appropriation for the Printing Bureau was reduced from $800,000 to $200,000, and out of the first year’s savings was built the fine building now occupied by that bureau.

And again, on page 126, this same gentleman says:

My observation teaches me there is more pressure and importunity for these places—

That is, the $900 clerkship—

and that more time is consumed by heads of Departments, and those having the appointing power, in listening to applications for that grade than for all the other places in the Departments combined; and that when it is discretionary with a Department to appoint a man or a woman the choice is usually exercised in favor of the woman. I know a recent case in the Treasury Department where a vacancy occurred which the head of the bureau deemed it important to fill with a man. It was a position where a man’s services were almost indispensable; but the importunity was so great that he was compelled to accept a woman, although her services were not required. In consequence of this importunity for places for women a practice has grown up in the Treasury Department of allowing the salaries of the higher grades of clerkships to lapse when vacancies occur, and of dividing up the amount among clerks, usually women, at lower salaries. In the place of a male clerk at $1,800 a year, for instance, three women may be employed at $600. Often the services of a man are required in its higher grade, while the women are not needed at all; but as the man can not be employed without discharging the women he can not be had. The persons employed in this way are said to be “on the lapse.” Out of this grew the practice known in Departmental language as “anticipating the lapse.”

In the endeavor to satisfy the pressure for place more people are appointed on this roll than the salaries then lapsing will warrant, in the hope that enough more will lapse before the end of the fiscal year to provide funds for their payment. But the funds almost always run short before the end of the year, and then either the “lapse” appointees must be dropped or clerks discharged from the regular roll to make place for them. In some instances, in former administrations, the employès on the regular roll were compelled, under terror of dismissal, to ask for leaves of absence, without pay, for a sufficient time to make up the deficiency caused by the appointment of unnecessary employès “on the lapse”. Another bad feature is that these “lapse” employès being appointed without regard to the necessities of the work, for short periods and usually without regard to their qualifications, are of little service, while their employment prevents the filling of vacancies on the regular roll and demoralizes the service.

In one case thirty-five persons were put on the “lapse fund” of the Treasurer’s office for eight days at the end of the fiscal year, to sop up some money which was in danger of being saved and returned to the Treasury.

MR. MAXEY. Do I understand the Senator to say that that testimony was taken by the Senate Committee on Civil Service and Retrenchment?

MR. PENDLETON. Yes sir. This testimony was taken in the month of March, I think, of the present year.

Says this gentleman further—

I have no doubt that under a rigid application of this proposed system the work of the Treasury Department could be performed with two-thirds the number of clerks now employed, and that is a moderate estimate of the saving.

Mr. President, a Senator who is now present in the Chamber and who will recognize the statement when I make it, though I shall not indicate his name, told me that the Secretary of one of the Departments of the Government said to him, perhaps to the Committee on Appropriations, at the last session, that there were seventeen clerks in his Department for whom he could find no employment; that he did need one competent clerk of a higher grade, and if the appropriation were made for that one clerk, at the proper amount according to the gradations of the service and the appropriation for the seventeen were left out, he could, without impairing the efficiency of his Department, leave those seventeen clerks off the roll; but if the appropriation should be made the personal, social, and political pressure was so great that he would be obliged to employ and pay them, though he could find no employment for them.

Need I prove, Mr. President, that which is known to all men, that a systematic pressure has been brought upon the clerks in the Departments of the Government this year to extort from them a portion of their salary under a system which the President himself scouts as being voluntary, and that they are led to believe and fairly led to believe that they have bought and paid for the offices which they hold and that the good faith of those who take from them a portion of the salary is pledged to their retention in their positions?

I have said before upon the floor of the Senate that this whole system demoralizes everybody who is engaged in it. It demoralizes the clerks who are appointed. That is inevitable. It demoralizes those who make the appointment. That also is inevitable. And it demoralizes Senators and Representatives who by the exercise of their power as Senators and Representatives exert pressure upon the appointing power.

I repeat that this system, permeating the whole civil service of the country, demoralizes everybody connected with it, the clerks, the appointing power, and those who by their official position and their relations to the executive administration of the Government have the influence necessary to put these clerks in office.

Mr. President, how can you expect purity, economy, efficiency to be found anywhere in the service of the Government if the report made by this committee to the Senate has even the semblance of truth? If the civil service of the country is to be filled up with superfluous persons, if salaries are to be increased in order that assessments may be paid, if members of Congress having friends or partisan supporters are to be able to make places for them in public employment, how can you expect Senators and Representatives to be economical and careful in the administration of the public money?

I am sure there is no Senator here who will forget a scene which we had upon the last night session of the last session, when the Senator from Iowa [Mr. Allison], the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, the official leader of the Senate, rising in his place with the last appropriation bill in his hand, and the report of the committee of conference, made a statement to the Senate of the result of the appropriations. He stated that the appropriations that were made during that session amounted to $292,000,000—I throw off the fractions—and he felicitated the Senate and himself as the organ and mouthpiece of his party, that this was an excess of only $77,000,000 over and above the expenditures of the year before. Instantly the Senator from Connecticut [Mr. Platt] rose in his place and reminded the Senator that there would be a deficiency in the Pension Bureau alone of $20,000,000 or $25,000,000. The honorable Senator from Georgia, who now occupies the chair [Mr. Brown], inquired of the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations whether there would be any deficiencies in the expenses of the current year, or whether the statement was supposed to cover probable deficiencies in addition to the appropriations, and the honorable Senator from Kentucky [Mr. BECK], certainly as familiar with all these subjects as any member of this body, rose in his place and said that notwithstanding the utmost scrutiny of the Committee on Appropriations, undoubtedly at the end of the fiscal year the ordinary deficiencies would be found.

Two hundred and ninety-two millions of dollars of regular appropriations; $20,000,000 of deficiency in one bureau alone, the usual deficiencies occurring during the course of the year of $20,000,000 more! As if this were not enough, my honorable colleague arose in his place and took up the tale and called attention to the fact that the permanent appropriations amounted annually to one hundred and thirty-seven or more millions of dollars. According to his statement made in that speech, which I am sure nobody will forget, the expenditures of the Government during this present fiscal year would amount to $402,000,000 or $403,000,000—nearly $9 a head for every man, woman, and child in the United States—more money than was appropriated for all the expenses of the Government during the first forty years of its existence, I will venture to say, though I do not speak by the book.

Harbor and river appropriation bills of $18,000,000! Thirty-two new buildings commenced in the States, almost every one of which has had buildings before! Two million five hundred thousand dollars appropriated for the commencement of those buildings, for laying the foundation! Before they are finished $25,000,000 more will be needed to complete them! While these enormous appropriations were being made there came up from the country a demand for a revision of the tariff, which was confessedly greatly needed; for a revision of the internal-revenue laws, which was equally necessary; for a reduction of taxation pressing so heavily upon all the interests of the country. Our honorable friends upon the other side of the Chamber chose to answer that demand by a bill repealing the taxes upon perfumery and cosmetics and bank checks, and met with a sneer of derision and ridicule every effort that was made on this side of the Chamber for a reduction of taxation.

Mr. President, it was these methods of administration, it was these acts of the Republican party, which made it possible for the Democratic party, and other men who prized their country higher than they did their party, to elect in Ohio a Democratic ticket by eighteen or twenty thousand majority, and elect sixteen out of the twenty-one members of Congress assigned to that State. I say elected sixteen, perfectly conscious of the fact that thirteen of them only have received their certificates at present. If three of them, against whom the aggregate majority is only sixty votes, do not receive certificates under the action of the returning board or under the powers of our judiciary which have been invoked, they will be seated, as they ought to be, at the beginning of the next session of Congress in the other house.

Under the impulse of this election in Ohio, upon these facts and influences which I have stated as being of great importance there, it became possible for the Democratic party and its allies, whom I have described, to elect a Democratic governor in New York, in Massachusetts, in Kansas, in Michigan, and various other States in which there has been none but a Republican governor for many years past. The same influences enable us, having accessions to our ranks from Iowa and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, to have at the beginning of the next session of Congress an aggregate of perhaps sixty or more Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

MR. HALE. Will the Senator from Ohio let me ask him a question right here? As he is confining himself very closely to the civil service of the Government, I should like to ask him one question here relating to that. He has appealed directly to the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, who was not present at the time, although he has just come in. The Senator from Ohio has alluded to the remarkable speech made by the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations upon the expenditures of the Government at the last session, and the wonderful scene that was exhibited there at that time. In that speech on the expenditures of the Government, by the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, was the admission that the aggregate expenditures were seventy-odd millions of dollars more than the year before—remarkable when in that speech of the Senator from Iowa, the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, he showed that every dollar was accounted for by deficiencies on the part of the previous Democratic Congress and by the increase of pensions and some other matters.

MR. PENDLETON. I remember the speech of the Senator from Iowa very well; I have quoted it repeatedly from the RECORD, in which I found it. I did him no injustice; I know he will not believe I would intentionally do him injustice at any time. I stated then, I stated a moment ago, I have stated it on the stump, I repeat it now, that the Senator from Iowa in that speech said that the appropriations for the current year were $292,000,000, and that they were $77,000,000 in excess of those made for the last year: and I might have added if I chose to make it a partisan affair, that the last Congress was under Democratic control.

MR. HALE. And did he not account for every dollar of that $77,000,000 increase? But I think I will leave it to him, as he is present now.

MR. PENDLETON. Undoubtedly he accounted for it, for he gave all the items that went to make up the $77,000,000.

I am confining myself more closely, Mr. President, to the discussion of the reform of the civil service of the Government than the Senator seems to apprehend. I was showing to him the causes of this very remarkable revolution in public sentiment which we have seen as exhibited by the last election. I attributed that result in great measure to the defects in our civil-service system and to the demoralization which, arising there and in its practices, has reached the other departments of the Government.

Mr. President, I was about to say when the Senator from Maine interrupted me that I begged gentlemen on this side of the Chamber and I beg the Democratic party throughout the country not to mistake this result of last fall as a purely Democratic triumph. It was achieved by the Democratic party with the assistance of men of all parties upon whom their love of country sat heavier than their love of party. It was a protest made by an awakened people who were indignant at the wrongs which had been practiced upon them. It was a tentative stretching out of that same people to find instrumentalities by which those wrongs could be righted.

The people demanded economy and the Republican party gave them extravagance. The people demanded a reduction of taxation and the Republican party gave them an increase of expenditure. The people demanded purity of administration and the Republican party revelled in profligacy; and when the Republican party came to put themselves on trial before that same people the people gave them a day of calamity.

I beg that my colleagues on this side of the Chamber may remember, I desire that our party associates throughout the country shall remember, that the people will continue to us their confidence and increase it, that they will continue to us power and increase it, just in the proportion that we honestly and fairly and promptly answer to the demands which the people have made, and which were thus responded to by the Republican party. They asked revenue reform and they received none. They asked civil-service reform and they obtained none. They asked that the civil service of this Government should not either as to its men or its expenditures be made the basis upon which political contests were to be carried on, and they received for answer that that was an old fashion and a good method of political warfare.

I beg gentlemen upon this side of the Chamber to remember that if they desire to escape the fate which now seems to be impending over their adversaries they must avoid the example which those adversaries have set them.

Mr. President the bill which I have the honor to advocate to-day, and which is reported by a committee of the Senate, is the commencement, in my humble judgment, of an attempt to answer one of the demands which the people have authoritatively made. I speak advisedly. It is the commencement of an attempt to organize a system which shall respond to one of the demands which the people have made.

I suppose the most enthusiastic supporter of this bill will not pretend that it is perfect. I suppose he will not pretend that upon the adoption of this bill a system will immediately spring into life which will perfect and purify the civil service of the Government. But it is the commencement of an attempt to lay the foundations of a system which, if it shall answer in any reasonable degree the expectation of those who by experience and faithful study have framed it, it will in the end correct the abuses to which I have alluded, and which have been delineated by no enemy of the Republican party or of the Administration in the report which I have read to the Senate.

The bill has for its foundation the simple and single idea that the offices of the Government are trusts for the people; that the performance of the duties of those offices is to be in the interests of the people; that there is no excuse for the being of one office or the paying of one salary except that it is in the highest practicable degree necessary for the welfare of the people; that every superfluous office-holder should be cut off; that every incompetent office-holder should be dismissed; that the employment of two where one will suffice is robbery; that salaries so large that they can submit to the extortion, the forced payment of 2 or 10 per cent. are excessive and ought to be diminished. I am not speaking of purely voluntary contributions.

If it be true that offices are trusts for the people, then it is also true that the offices should be filled by those who can perform and discharge the duties in the best possible way. Fidelity, capacity, honesty, were the tests established by Mr. Jefferson when he assumed the reins of government in 1801. He said then, and said truly, that these elements in the public offices of the Government were necessary to an honest civil service, and that an honest civil service was essential to the purity and efficiency of administration, necessary to the preservation of republican institutions.

Mr. Jefferson was right. The experience of eighty years has shown it. The man best fitted should be the man placed in office, especially if the appointment is made by the servants of the people. It is as true as truth can be that fidelity, capacity, honesty, are essential elements of fitness, and that the man who is most capable and most faithful and most honest is the man who is the most fit, and he should be appointed to office.

These are truths that in their statement will be denied by none, and yet the best means of ascertaining that fitness has been a vexed question with every Administration of this Government and with every man who has been charged with the responsibility of its execution. We know what is the result. Pass examinations have been tried; professions have been tried; honest endeavors have been tried; a disposition to live faithfully up to these requirements has been tried; and yet we know and the experience of to-day shows it, that they have all made a most lamentable failure. We do now know that so great has been the increase of the powers of this Government and the number of officers under it that no President, no Cabinet, no heads of bureaus, can by possibility know the fitness of all applicants for the subordinate offices of the Government. The result has been, and under the existing system it must always be, that the President and his Cabinet and those who are charged with the responsibility have remitted the question of fitness to their own partisan friends, and those partisan friends have in their turn decided the question of fitness in favor of their partisan friends. The Administration has need of the support of members of Congress in carrying on its work. It therefore remits to members of Congress of its own party the questions of appointment to office in the various districts. These gentlemen, in the course of their political life, naturally (I do not find fault with them for it) find themselves under strain and pressure to secure a nomination or a re-nomination or election, and they use the places to reward those whose friends and families and connections and aids and deputies will serve their purpose.

I put it to gentlemen, particularly to my friends on this side of the Chamber, because you have not the opportunity to exercise this patronage as much as our friends on the other side, whether or not the element of fitness enters largely into the questions of appointment in your respective districts and States. It can not be. The necessities of the case prevent it. The pressure upon men who want to be elected prevents it. The demands that are made by partisan friends and those who have been influential and potent in securing personal triumph to gentlemen who may happen to be in such relation to the appointing power that they have the influence to secure appointment prevent it. The result is as I have stated, that instead of making fitness, capacity, honesty, fidelity the only or the essential qualifications for office, personal fidelity and partisan activity alone control.

When I came to the Senate I had occasion more than ever before to make some investigation upon the subject, and found to my surprise the extent to which the demoralization of the service had gone. I saw the civil service debauched and demoralized. I saw offices distributed to incompetent and unworthy men as a reward for the lowest of dirty partisan work. I saw many men employed to do the work of one man. I saw the money of the people shamefully wasted to keep up electioneering funds by political assessments on salaries. I saw the whole body of the public officers paid by the people organized into a compact, disciplined corps of electioneerers obeying a master as if they were eating the bread of his dependence and rendering him personal service. I saw these evils were fostered, encouraged, stimulated very largely by Senators and Representatives. They had their friends who lent them a helping hand; and regardless of the fitness of these friends, of the necessity of their employment, they insisted on the appointment and had the power, which on consideration, was found sufficient to secure it.

I believed then, and I believe now, that the existing system which, for want of a better name, I call the “spoils system,” must be killed or it will kill the Republic. I believe that it is impossible to maintain free institutions in the country upon any basis of that sort. I am no prophet of evil, I am not a pessimist in any sense of the word, but I do believe that if the present system goes on until 50,000,000 people shall have grown into 100,000,000, and 140,000 officers shall have grown into 300,000, with their compensation in proportion, and all shall depend upon the accession of one party or the other to the Presidency and to the executive functions, the Presidency of the country, if it shall last in name so long, will be put up for sale to the highest bidder even as in Rome the imperial crown was put to those who could raise the largest fund.

I beg gentlemen to believe that whatever I may have said as to the relations of parties I do not approach the question of the reform of the civil service in any mere partisan spirit. It was because I thought I saw this danger, because I believed that it was imminent, because I believed then as I do now that it is destructive of republicanism and will end in the downfall of republican government, that I felt it my duty to devote whatever ability I had to the consideration of this subject. It was that which induced me a year or two ago to introduce a bill which after the best reflection, the best study, the best assistance that I could get I did introduce in the Senate, and which in some degree modified, has come back from the Committee on Civil Service Reform, and is now pending before this body.

The purpose of this bill is merely to secure the application of the Jeffersonian tests, fidelity, honesty, capacity. The methods are those which are known and familiar to us all in the various avocations of life—competition, comparison. Perhaps the bill is imperfect. If so, I am sure I express the wish of every member of the committee that it may be improved. There is no pride of opinion, there is no determination, if suggestions of value are made not promptly to adopt them. There is no disposition to do aught except to perfect, and in the best possible way, this bill, the sole object of which is to improve this great department of our Government.

Mr. President, it is because I believe the “spoils system” to be a great crime, because I believe it to be fraught with danger, because I believe that the highest duty of patriotism is to prevent the crime and to avoid the danger, that I advocate this or a better bill if it can be found for the improvement of the civil service.

I shall say in passing that I find it no objection to this bill at all that while I believe it is of great value to the country in all its aspects, I do not believe it will bring disaster to the Democratic party. There has been great misapprehension as to the methods and the scope of the bill. I desire the attention of the Senators while I briefly state them. I see I have spoken a good deal longer than I intended. The bill simply applies to the Executive Departments of the Government here in Washington and to those offices throughout the country, post-offices and custom-houses, which employ more than fifty persons. I am told, and I am sure that I am not far out of the way, if I am not exactly accurate, that the number of such offices does not exceed thirty or perhaps thirty-five, and that the number of persons who are employed in them, together with those in the Departments here, will not exceed 10,000.

I said that this was a tentative effort; that it was intended to be an experiment, and it is because it is tentative, because it is intended to be an experiment, that the committee thought it advisable in its initial stages to limit it, as they have limited it, in the bill. The bill does not apply to elective officers, of course, nor to officers appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, nor to the military, nor to the naval, nor to the judicial establishment. It applies simply now to those officials who are employed in the Departments here and in the large offices of the Government elsewhere, first, because as an experiment it was thought that it gave scope enough to test its value and labor enough to employ all those who are engaged in putting it in operation until its merits shall be fairly tried and it shall commend itself either to the approval or condemnation of the American people.

There was another reason. The heads of offices and bureaus, where the number of employès is small, can themselves personally judge of the fitness of persons who are applicants for appointment, knowing as they do more or less in their narrow communities their antecedents, their habits, and their modes of life.

The bill does not touch the question of tenure of office or of removal from office. I see it stated by those who do not know that it provides for a seven years’ tenure of office. There is nothing like it in the bill. I see it stated that it provides against removals from office. There is nothing like it in the bill. Whether or not it would be advisable to fix the tenure of office, whether or not it would be advisable to limit removals are questions about which men will differ; but the bill as it is and as we invoke the judgment of the Senate upon it contains no provisions either as to tenure of office or removals from office. It leaves those questions exactly where the law now finds them. It concerns itself only with admission to the public service; it concerns itself only with discovering in certain proper ways or in certain ways—gentlemen may differ as to whether they are proper or not—the fitness of the persons who shall be appointed. It takes cognizance of the fact that it is impossible for the head of a Department or a large office personally to know all the applicants, and therefore it provides a method by which, when a vacancy occurs by death, by resignation, by the unlimited power of removal, a suitable person may be designated to fill the vacancy. It says in effect that when a vacancy occurs in the civil service everybody who desires entrance shall have the right to apply. Everybody, humble, poor, without patronage, without influence, whatever may be his condition in life, shall have the right to go before the parties charged with an examination of his fitness and there be subjected to the test of open, regulated, fair, impartial examination.

MR. MAXEY. If it is agreeable I should like to interrupt the Senator to ask a question upon that point. In the plan suggested for examination as to fitness is it to be a competitive examination by the bill? I ask the Senator if the committee has fallen upon any plan as to the line of inquiry that should be instituted in that examination, and if so will he indicate it? That I think is an important consideration.

MR. PENDLETON. I am glad that the Senator has asked that question, for it gives me an opportunity of saying to him and to the Senate that if they will examine the report made by the committee, they will find that this system is not entirely new, but that to a very large extent in certain offices in New York, in Philadelphia, and in Boston it has been put into practical operation under the heads of the offices there, and that they have devised, with the assistance of the commission originally appointed by General Grant, but largely upon their own motion, a system which I suppose would, to some extent, be followed under this bill.

MR. MAXEY. What I desire to know is whether the committee, after examining the various lines of questions asked in the competitive examinations, have themselves fallen upon any plan which they could recommend to the Senate as a proper plan for examination?

MR. PENDLETON. No; the committee have not carried their investigations to that point for the simple reason that it would be impracticable for a committee of the Senate charged with the examination of the general subject to look into the proper examinations as to every Department of the Government and every department in that Department. For instance, for a letter-carrier one series of examinations might be very proper, for an assayer another system of examination, for an accountant still other examinations, for a weigher and gauger still another. The examinations must be adapted to the particular offices which it is sought to fill, and that can only be by the leisurely and competent investigation of gentlemen who are charged as an official duty with the determination of what the needs of all the Departments and offices require.

MR. MAXEY. That may be quite a reasonable view of the case; but some of the questions which I have seen submitted I am of the opinion have nothing whatever to do with the examination for a mere clerkship, but would have something to do perhaps with an examination in a college or something of that sort.

MR. PENDLETON. The examinations are to be regulated in relation to the particular offices to be filled. I am not the advocate of any special system of questions which has been devised. I am not the apologist for any error which may have been committed. I am not prepared to say that I have seen any of these series of questions which might not admit of improvement.

MR. MAXEY. I will state to the Senator that the suggestion he has himself made is about the best that I have heard. A great many of the questions which have been submitted I think are nonsensical to be put to an applicant for a minor clerkship.

MR. PENDLETON. I shall offer some amendments in behalf of the committee and in behalf of myself before we reach a vote. The details of the bill are these: The preamble expresses fully the philosophy of the bill. Read it carefully. It sets forth what common justice demands for the citizen and for the Government. It sets forth what the economy, efficiency, and integrity of the public service demand.

WHEREAS COMMON JUSTICE REQUIRES THAT, SO FAR AS PRACTICABLE, ALL CITIZENS DULY QUALIFIED SHALL BE ALLOWED EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES, ON GROUNDS OF PERSONAL FITNESS, FOR SECURING APPOINTMENTS, EMPLOYMENT, AND PROMOTION IN THE SUBORDINATE CIVIL SERVICE OF THE UNITED STATES; AND

WHEREAS JUSTICE TO THE PUBLIC LIKEWISE REQUIRES THAT THE GOVERNMENT SHALL HAVE THE LARGEST CHOICE AMONG THOSE LIKELY TO ANSWER THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE PUBLIC SERVICE: AND

WHEREAS JUSTICE, AS WELL AS ECONOMY, EFFICIENCY, AND INTEGRITY IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE WILL BE PROMOTED BY SUBSTITUTING OPEN AND UNIFORM COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS FOR THE EXAMINATIONS HERETOFORE HELD IN PURSUANCE OF THE STATUTES OF 1853 AND 1855.