to start back from this yawning and fathomless abyss of disunion, whose depths no human eye can reach, and from which the groans of buried empires send back fearful warning? God grant that we may not blindly, madly, rashly, plunge in, to explore for ourselves the dark recesses of its dreary caverns! GEORGE EVANS.* 55. THE UNION. That BUT a few days since, I visited the hall where the immortal Washington, after carving out the liberty which we, in common with twenty-five millions of our fellow-beings, this day enjoy, with a victorious, yet unpaid army, who adored him, under his command, surrendered his commission and his sword voluntarily to the representatives of a few exhausted colonies. sublime occasion yet imparts its sacred influences to the place, and there is eloquence in its silent walls. But where, said I, are the brave and patriotic spirits who here fostered the germ of this mighty empire? Alas! they have gone to their rewards, and the clods of the valley lie heavily on their hearts; while we, their ungrateful children, with every element of good before us, forgetting the mighty sacrifices they made for their descendants, trifle with the rich blessings we inherited, and are ready, with sacrilegious hands, to despoil the temple of liberty which they reared by years of toil and trial, and cemented in blood and tears. Oh! could we not have deferred this inhuman struggle until the departure from amongst us of the revolutionary soldier, with his bowed and tottering frame, and his once bright eye dimmed? Ask him the cost of liberty, and he will “shoulder his crutch and tell how fields were won," and tell you of its priceless value. And yet we are shamelessly struggling in his sight, like mercenary children, for the patrimony, around the death-bed of a common parent, by whose industry and exertion it was accumulated, before the heart of him who gave them existence had ceased to pulsate. Amid all these conflicts, it has been my policy to give peace and stability to the Union, to silence agitation, to restore fraternal relations to an estranged brotherhood, and to lend my feeble aid in enabling our common country to march onward to the glorious fruition which awaits U. S. Senator from Maine. her. I have opposed, and will hereafter oppose, the monster disunion, in any and every form, and howsoever disguised, or in whatsoever condition-whether in the germ, or the stately upas, with its wide-spread branches; whether it comes from the North or the South, or the East or the West; and whether it consists in denying the South her just rights, or in her demanding that to which she is not entitled. The union of these states, in the true spirit of the constitution, is a sentiment of my life. It was the dream of my early years; it has been the pride and joy of manhood; and, if it shall please Heaven to spare me to age, I pray that its abiding beauty may beguile my vacant and solitary hours. I do not expect a sudden disruption of the political bonds which unite the states of this confederacy; but I greatly fear a growing spirit of jealousy and discontent and sectional hate, which must, if permitted to extend itself, finally destroy the beauty and harmony of the fabric, if it does not raze it to its foundation. It cannot be maintained by force, and majorities in a confederacy should be admonished to use their power justly. Let no one suppose that those who have been joined together will remain so, despite the commission of mutual wrongs, because they have once enjoyed each other's confidence and affection, and propriety requires them to remain united. A chafed spirit, whether of a community or an individual, may be goaded beyond endurance, and the history of the world has proved that the season of desperation which succeeds is awfully reckless of consequences. But woe be to him by whom the offence of disunion comes! He will be held accursed when the bloody mandates of Herod and Nero shall be forgiven; and be regarded as a greater monster in this world than he who, to signalize his brutal ferocity, reared a monument of thousands of human skulls; and, in the next, "The common damned will shun his society, DANIEL S. DICKINSON.* 56. A DEFENCE OF DANIEL WEBSTER. SIR, in regard to the denunciation of the sentiment of my honorable friend from Massachusetts, I have something to say, * U. S. Senator from New York, The opinion expressed in this denunciation is, that it would be a natural and easy step for the senator from Massachusetts to take, to join the enemies of his country in war: in other words, to turn traitor, and merit by his treason the most ignominious of all deaths, with an immortality of infamy beyond the grave! And for what? The senator from Massachusetts had expressed a preference for the constitution to the capitol of his country. He had dared to declare that he prized the magna charta of American liberty,—the sacred bond of our union, the tie which binds together twelve millions of freemen,-above the stones and mortar which compose the crumbling mass within whose walls we are assembled. "The very head and front of his offending hath this extent: no more." No man here has questioned, in the most violent moments of party excitement-not amidst the fiercest of all political strife-his purity of purpose in debate. Grant to him, what all others who have any title to the character of gentlemen demand for themselves, that he believed what he said; grant that, in his judgment, as well as that of many here, the very existence of our liberties is involved in the surrender of the principle he contended for; grant that the concentration of legislative and executive power in the hands of a single man is the death-blow to the constitution, and that the senator was right in considering the proposed appropriation as establishing the very principle which gave that fatal blow;and who is he that, thus believing, would support that proposition, because the guns of the enemy were battering at the walls of the capitol? Where is the coward-where is the traitor, who would not rather see the capitol than the constitution of his country in ruins? or who would lend himself to the establishment of a despotism among us, with a view to save this building for the despot to revel in? Sir, in the days when Themistocles led the Athenians to victory at Salamis, he advised them to surrender their capitol for the preservation of the constitution of their country. That gallant people rose under the impulse of patriotism as one man, and with a stern resolution to yield life itself rather than abandon their liberties, and surrender the proud privilege of legislating for themselves to the delegate of a Persian despot, who offered them "all their own dominions, together with an accession of territory ample as their wishes, upon the single condition that they should receive law and suffer him to preside in Greece." At that eventful period of their history, Crysilus alone proposed the surrender of their constitution to save the capitol; and they stoned him to death. The public indignation was not yet JOHN M. CLAYTON.-THOMAS CORWIN. 77 satisfied; for the Athenian matrons then rose and inflicted the same punishment on his wife. Leaving their capitol, and their noble city, rich as it was with the productions of every art, and glittering all over with the proudest trophies and the most splendid temples in the world; deserting, in the cause of free government, the very land that gave them birth, they embarked on board their ships, and fought that battle, the name of which has made the bosoms of freemen to thrill with sympathy in all the ages that have followed it, and shall cause the patriot's heart to beat higher with emotion through countless ages to come. I repeat, sir, what no man who knows the senator from Massachusetts has ever doubted, that he was sincere in declaring that he viewed the proposition under debate as involving the surrender of the most valuable trust reposed in us by the constitution to a single man; and as one which, while it delegates the legislative power to the executive, establishes a precedent to prostrate the constitution forever. I do not feel, however, that his conduct needs vindication from me or any other; for, although the transient spirit of party may have sought to obscure his exalted character in the eyes of those who are easily led by misrepresentation into error, honorable fame has already encircled his temples with a wreath of unfading verdure, and impartial history shall hereafter emphatically designate him, amidst all the compatriots of his day, as the able, the eloquent, the fearless champion and defender of his country's constitution. JOHN M. CLAYTON.* 57. THE WAR WITH MEXICO. SIR, I scarcely understand the meaning of all this myself. If we are to vindicate our rights by battles, in bloody fields of war, let us do it. If that is not the plan, why then let us call back our armies into our own territory, and propose a treaty with Mexico, based upon the proposition that money is better for her and land is better for us. Thus we can treat Mexico like an equal, and do honor to ourselves. But what is it you ask? You have taken from Mexico one-fourth of her territory, and you now propose to run a line comprehending about another * U. S. Senator from Delaware. third, and for what? I ask, Mr. President, for what? What has Mexico got from you for parting with two-thirds of her domain? She has given you ample redress for every injury of which you have complained. She has submitted to the award of your commissioners, and, up to the time of the rupture with Texas, faithfully paid it. And for all that she has lost (not through, or by you, but which loss has been your gain), what requital do we, her strong, rich, robust neighbor, make? Do we send our missionaries there, "to point the way to heaven ?" Or do we send the schoolmasters to pour daylight into her dark places, to aid her infant strength to conquer freedom, and reap the fruit of the independence herself alone had won? No, no; none of this do we. But we send regiments, storm towns, and our colonels prate of liberty in the midst of the solitudes their ravages have made. They proclaim the empty forms of social compact to a people bleeding and maimed with wounds received in defending their hearth-stones against the invasion of these very men who shoot them down, and then exhort them to be free. Your chaplain of the navy throws aside the New Testament and seizes a bill of rights. He takes military possession of some town in California, and instead of teaching the plan of the atonement and the way of salvation to the poor, ignorant Celt, he presents Colt's pistol to his ear, and calls on him to take "trial by jury and habeas corpus," or nine bullets in his head. Oh! Mr. President, are you not the lights of the earth, if not its salt? What is the territory, Mr. President, which you propose to wrest from Mexico? It is consecrated to the heart of the Mexican by many a well-fought battle with his old Castilian master. His Bunker Hills, and Saratogas, and Yorktowns are there! The Mexican can say, "There I bled for liberty! and shall I surrender that consecrated home of my affections to the Anglo-Saxon invaders? What do they want with it? They have Texas already. They have possessed themselves of the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. What else do they want? To what shall I point my children as memorials of that independence which I bequeath to them, when those battle-fields shall have passed from my possession?" Sir, had one come and demanded Bunker Hill of the people of Massachusetts-had England's lion ever showed himself there, is there a man over thirteen and under ninety who would not have been ready to meet him,-is there a river on this continent that would not have run red with blood,-is there a field but would have been piled high with the unburied bones of |