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stitution. I shall vote against its adoption, and I shall advise all the people of my district to set their faces-aye-and their shoulders against it. But if we are to have it-let us not have it with its death-warrant in its very face; with the sardonic grin of death upon its countenance.

44. NOT STRENGTH ENOUGH IN THE BOW. -Webster.

Mr. President,-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 it preceded, 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 o 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. But the gentleman disclaims 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 stili, 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 have 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 intentions 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. hey will not be found fixed and quivering in the object at which they were aimed.

45. NATIONAL SELF-RESPECT.- -Beman.

Far be it from me to cherish, in any shape, a spirit of national prejudice, or to excite in others a disgusting national vanity. But when I reflect upon the part which this country is probably to act in the renovation of the world, I rejoice that I am a citizen of this great republic. This western continent has, at different periods, been the subject of every species of transatlantic abuse. In former days, some of the naturalists of Europe told us, that every thing here was constructed upon a small scale. The frowns of nature were represented as investing the whole hemisphere we inhabit. It has been asserted, that the eternal storms, which are said to beat upon the brows of our mountains, and to roll the tide of desolation at their bases the hurricanes which sweep our vales, and the volcanic fires which issue from a thousand flaming craters—the thunderbolts which perpetually descend from heaven, and the earthquakes, whose trepidations are felt to the very centre of our globe, have superinduced a degeneracy through all the produc tions of nature. Men have been frightened into intellectual dwarfs, and the beasts of the forest have not attained more than half their ordinary growth!-While some of the lines and

But

touches of this picture have been blotted out by the reversing hand of time, others have been added, which have, in some respects, carried the conceit still farther. In later days, and in some instances even down to the present period, it has been published and republished from the enlightened presses of the old world, that so strong is the tendency to deterioration on this continent, that the descendants of European ancestors are far inferior to the original stock from which they sprang. inferior in what? In national spirit and patriotic achievement? Let the revolutionary conflict-the opening scenes at Boston, and the catastrophe at Yorktown-furnish the reply. Let Bennington and Saratoga support their respective claims. Inferior in enterprise? Let the sail that whitens every ocean, and the commercial spirit that braves every element, and visits every bustling mart, refute the unfounded aspersion. Inferior in deeds of zeal and valor for the church? Let our missionaries in the bosom of our own forest, in the distant regions of the east, and on the islands of the great Pacific, answer the question. Inferior in science, and letters, and the arts? It is true our nation is young; but we may challenge the world to furnish a national maturity which, in these respects, will compare with

ours.

The character and institutions of this country have already produced a deep impression upon the world we inhabit. What but our example has stricken the chains of despotism from the provinces of South America-giving, by a single impulse, freedom to half a hemisphere? A Washington here, has created a Bolivar there. The flag of independence which has long waved from the summit of our Alleghany, has now been answered by a corresponding signal from the heights of the Andes. And the same spirit, too, that came across the Atlantic wave with the pilgrims, and made the rock of Plymouth the corner-stone of freedom and of this republic, is traveling back to the east. It has already carried its influence into the cabinets of princes; and it is, at this moment, sung by the Grecian bard, and emulated by the Grecian hero.

46. THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON.-Everett.

It was one of those great days, one of those elemental occasions in the world's affairs, when the people rise and act for themselves. Some organization and preparation had been made; but, from the nature of the case, with scarce any effect

on the events of that day. It may be doubted, whether there was an efficient order given the whole day to any boay of men as large as a regiment. It was the people, in their first capacity, as citizens and as freemen, starting from their beds at midnight, from their firesides and their fields, to take their own cause into their own hands. Such a spectacle is the height of the moral sublime; when the want of every thing is fully made up by the spirit of the cause; and the soul within stands in place of discipline, organization, resources. In the prodigious efforts of a veteran army, beneath the dazzling splen dor of their array, there is something revolting to the reflecting mind. The ranks are filled with the desperate, the mercenary the depraved; and iron slavery, by the name of subordination merges the free will of one hundred thousand men in the un qualified despotism of one; the humanity, mercy, and remorse which scarce ever desert the individual bosom, are sounds without a meaning to that fearful, ravenous, irrational monster of prey, a mercenary army. It is hard to say who are most to be commiserated, the wretched people on whom it is let loose, or the still more wretched people whose substance has been sucked out to nourish it into strength and fury. But in the efforts of the people, of the people struggling for their rights, moving, not in organized, disciplined masses, but ir their spontaneous action, man for man, and heart for heart,— though I like not war nor any of its works,-there is something glorious. They can then move forward without orders, act together without combination, and brave the flaming lines of battle, without intrenchments to cover, or walls to shield them. No dissolute camp has worn off from the feelings of the youthful soldier the freshness of that home, where his mother and his sisters sit waiting, with tearful eyes and aching hearts, to hear good news from the wars; no long service in the ranks of the conqueror has turned the veteran's heart into marble; their valor springs not from recklessness, from habit, from indifference to the preservation of a life, knit by no pledges to the life of others; but in the strength and spirit of the cause alone, they act, they contend, they bleed. In this they conquer. The people always conquer. They always must conquer. Arinies may be defeated; kings may be overthrown, and new dynasties imposed by foreign arms on an ignorant and slavish race, that care not in what language the covenant of their subjection runs, nor in whose name the deed of their barter and sale is made out. But the people never invade; and when they rise against the invader, are never subdued. If they are driven from the plains, they fly to the mountains. Steep rocks

and everlasting hills are their castles; the tangled, pathless thicket their palisado; and nature,-God,-is their ally. Now he overwhelms the host of their enemies beneath his drifting mountains of sand; now he buries them beneath an atmo sphere of falling snows; he lets loose his tempests on their flects; he puts a folly into their councils, a madness into the hearts of their leaders; and he never gave, and never wil give, a full and final triumph over a virtuous, gallant people resolved to be free.

47. ENNOBLING RECOLLECTIONS OF THE REVOLUTION.—

Hayne.

It has been usual, on occasions like the present, to give a history of the wrongs endured by our fathers. But, my friends, we have prouder, and more ennobling recollections, connected with our revolution. They are to be found in the spirit displayed by our fathers, when all their petitions had been slighted, their remonstrances despised, and their appeals to the generous sympathies of their brethren utterly disregarded. Yes, my friends, theirs was that pure and lofty spirit of devoted patriotism, which never quailed beneath oppression, which braved all dangers, trampled upon difficulties, and in "the times which tried men's souls," taught them to be faithful to their principles, and to their country-true; and which induced them in the very spirit of that Brutus (whose mantle has fallen, in our own day, upon the shoulders of one so worthy to wear it) to swear on the altar of liberty-to give themselves up wholly to their country. There is one characteristic, however, of the American revolution, which, constituting as it does, its living principleits proud distinction, and its crowning glory-cannot be passed over in silence. It is this-that our revolution had its origin, not so much in the weight of actual oppression, as in the great principle-the sacred duty, of resistance to the exercise of unauthorized power. Other nations have been driven to rebelhion by the iron hand of despotism, the insupportable weight of oppression, which leaving men nothing worth living for, hast taken away the fear of death itself, and caused them to rush upon the spears of their enemies, or to break their chains upon the heads of their oppressors. But it was a tax of three-pence a pound upon tea, imposed without right, which was considered by our ancestors, as a burden too grievous to be borne. And why? Because they were men "who felt oppression's lightest

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