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rians, sent to visit the wrath of God on a degenerate empire; it is not the inroad of disciplined banditti, marshalled by the intrigues of ministers and kings. It is the human family, led out to possess its broad patrimony. The states and nations which are springing up in the valley of the Missouri, are bound to us by the dearest ties of a common language, a common government, and a common descent.

Who can forget that this extension of our territorial limits is the extension of the empire of all we hold dear; of our laws, of our character, of the memory of our ancestors, of the great achievements in our history? Whithersoever the sons of these states shall wander, to southern or western climes, they will send back their hearts to the rocky shores, the battle-fields, and the intrepid councils of the Atlantic coast. These are placed beyond the reach of vicissitude. They have become already matter of history, of poetry, of eloquence :

"The love, where death has set his seal,

Nor age can chill, nor rival steal,

Nor falsehood disavow."

EDWARD EVERETT.

97.

THE EXPERIMENT OF SELF-GOVERNMENT.

WE are summoned to new energy and zeal by the high nature of the experiment we are appointed in Providence to make, and the grandeur of the theatre on which it is to be performed. When the Old World afforded no longer any hope, it pleased heaven to open this last refuge of humanity. The attempt has begun, and is going on, far from foreign corruption, on the broadest scale, and under the most benignant prospects; and it certainly rests with us to solve the great problem in human society, to settle, and that forever, that momentous questionwhether mankind can be trusted with a purely popular system? One might almost think, without extravagance, that the departed wise and good of all places and times are looking down from their happy seats to witness what shall now be done by us; that they who lavished their treasures and their blood of old, who labored and suffered, who spake and wrote, who fought and perished, in the one great cause of freedom and truth, are now hanging, from their orbs on high, over the last solemn experiment of humanity. As I have wandered over the spots once the scene of their labors, and mused among the prostrate col

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umns of their senate-houses and forums, I have seemed almost to hear a voice from the tombs of departed ages-from the sepulchres of the nations which died before the sight. They exhort us, they adjure us to be faithful to our trust. They implore us, by the long trials of struggling humanity; by the blessed memory of the departed; by the dear faith which has been plighted, by pure hands, to the holy cause of truth and man; by the awful secrets of the prison-houses where the sons of freedom have been immured; by the noble heads which have been brought to the block; by the wrecks of time, by the eloquent ruins of nations, they conjure us not to quench the light which is rising on the world. Greece cries to us, by the convulsed lips of her poisoned, dying Demosthenes; and Rome pleads with us in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully.

EDWARD EVERETT.

98. REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLES.

THE present age may be justly described as the age of revolutions. From the commencement of our revolution up to the present day, we have witnessed, in Europe and America, an uninterrupted series of important changes. The thrones of the Old World have been shaken to their foundations. Every arrival from abroad brings us intelligence of some new event of the highest moment; some people rising in revolt against their sovereign; some new constitution proclaimed in one country; some reform, equivalent to a new constitution, projected in another; France in the midst of a dangerous revolutionary crisis; Belgium, Poland, and Italy the scenes of actual hostilities; England on the eve of commotion: the whole European commonwealth apparently plunging again into the gulf of general war.

What is the object of all those desperate struggles? The object of them is to obtain an extension of individual liberty. Established institutions have lost their influence and authority. Men have become weary of submitting to names and forms which they once reverenced. It has been ascertained-to use the language of Napoleon-that a throne is only four boards covered with velvet that a written constitution is but a sheet of parchment. There is, in short, an effort making throughout the world to reduce the action of government within the narrowest possible limits, and to give the widest possible extent to individual liberty.

Our own country, though happily exempt, and God grant that it may long continue so, from the troubles of Europe, is not exempt from the influence of the causes that produce them. We too are inspired and agitated, and governed by the all-pervading, all-inspiring, all-agitating, all-governing spirit of the age. What do I say? We were the first to feel and act upon its influence. Our revolution was the first of the long series that has since shaken every corner of Europe and America. Our fathers led the van in the long array of heroes, martyrs, and confessors, who had fought and fallen under the banner of liberty. The institutions they bequeathed to us, and under which we are living in peace and happiness, were founded on the principles which lie at the bottom of the present agitation in Europe. We have realized what our contemporaries are laboring to attain. Our tranquillity is the fruit of an entire acquiescence in the spirit of the age. We have reduced the action of government within narrower limits, and given a wider scope to individual liberty, than any community that ever flourished before.

EDWARD EVERETT.

99. WAR WITH FRANCE.

THE first thing that strikes me, sir, in casting my eyes to the future, is the utter impossibility that war, should there unfortunately be one, can have an honorable termination. The capacity of France to inflict injury upon us is ten times greater than ours to inflict injuries on her; while the cost of the war, in proportion to her means, would be in nearly the same proportion less than ours to our means. She has relatively a small commerce to be destroyed, while we have the largest in the world, in proportion to our capital and population. She may threaten and harass our coast, while her own is safe from assault. I do not hesitate to pronounce, sir, that a war with France will be among the greatest calamities-greater than a war with England herself. The power of the latter to annoy us may be greater than that of the former; but so is ours, in turn, greater to annoy England than France. Nothing can be more destructive to our commerce and navigation, than for England to be neutral, while we are belligerent, in a contest with such a country as France. The whole of our commercial marine, with our entire shipping, would pass almost instantly into the hands of England. With the exception of our public armed vessels, there would be

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scarcely a flag of ours afloat on the ocean. We grew rich by being neutral while England was belligerent. It was that which so suddenly built up the mighty fabric of our prosperity and greatness. Reverse the position: let England be neutral while we are belligerent, and the sources of our wealth and prosperity would be speedily exhausted.

In a just and necessary war, all these consequences ought to be fearlessly met. Though a friend to peace, when a proper occasion occurs I would be among the last to dread the consequences of war. I think the wealth and blood of a country are well poured out in maintaining a just, honorable, and necessary war; but, in such a war as that with which the country is now threatened- —a mere war of etiquette-a war turning on a question so trivial as whether an explanation shall or shall not be given-no, whether it has or has not been given, (for that is the real point on which the controversy turns,)-to put in jeopardy the lives and property of our citizens, and the liberty and institutions of our country, is worse than folly-is madness. I say the liberty and institutions of the country. I hold them to be in imminent danger. Such has been the grasp of executive power, that we have not been able to resist its usurpations, even in a period of peace; and how much less shall we be able, with the vast increase of power and patronage which a war must confer on that department? In a sound condition of the country, with our institutions in their full vigor, and every department confined to its proper sphere, we would have nothing to fear from a war with France, or any other power; but our system is deeply diseased, and we may fear the worst in being involved in a war at such a juncture.

JOHN C. CALHOUN,

100. THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION.

SIR, I may well appeal to those who find in the constitution or out of the constitution this power to control the territories, whether it is a power that ought to be exercised under existing circumstances.

Here is one-half of a great country which believes, with a unanimity perhaps without a parallel in grave national questions, that the constitution has delegated to congress no such power whatever. And there is a large portion of the other half which entertains similar views; while of those who see in the consti

tution sufficient grounds for legislative action, there are many who admit-indeed, probably, there are few who deny that the question is not free from serious doubts.

Besides the want of constitutional power, there are at least fourteen states of this Union which see in this measure a direct attack upon their rights, and a disregard of their feelings and interests, as injurious in itself as it is offensive to their pride of character, and incompatible with the existence of those bonds of amity which are stronger than constitutional ties to hold us together. No man can shut his eyes to the excitement which prevails there, and which is borne to us by the press in countless articles coming from legislative proceedings, from popular assemblies, and from all the sources whence public opinion is derived, and be insensible to the evil day that is upon us. I believe this Union will survive all the dangers with which it may be menaced, however trying the circumstances in which it. may be placed. I believe it is not destined to perish till long after it shall have fulfilled the great mission confided to it, of example and encouragement to the nations of the earth who are struggling with the despotism of centuries, and groping their way in a darkness once impenetrable, but where the light of knowledge and freedom is beginning to disperse the gloom. But to maintain this proud position, this integrity of political existence, on which so much for us and for the world depends, we must carefully avoid those sectional questions so much and so forcibly deprecated by the father of his country, and cultivating a spirit of mutual regard, adding to the considerations of interest which hold us together the higher motives of affection and of affinity of views and of sympathies. Sad will be the day when the first drop of blood is shed in the preservation of this Union. That day need never come, and never will come, if the same spirit of compromise and of concession by each to the feelings of all, which animated our fathers, continues to animate us and our children. But if powers offensive to one portion of the country, and of doubtful obligation, to say the least of it, are to be exercised by another, and under circumstances of peculiar excitement, this confederation may be rent in twain, leaving another example of that judicial blindness with which God, in his providence, sometimes visits the sins of nations.

LEWIS CASS.

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