Part Four - Practise - section(1)

- Close Of The Oration On The Crown . . Demosthenes
- Oratory Henry Ward Beecher
- On The American War…Lord Chatham
- Impeachment Of Warren Hastings…Edmund Burke
- The Force Bill…John C. Calhoun
- Defense Of John Stockdale…Lord Erskine
- Address To The Young Men Of Italy…Joseph Mazzini
- South Carolina And Massachusetts…Daniel Webster
- The Death Penalty…Victor Hugo
- Our Relations To England....Edward Everett
- Reply To Hayne…Daniel Webster
- Speech Of Serjeant Buzfuz....Charles Dickens
- Catiline's Defiance…Rev. George Croly
- Catiline Denounced…Cicero
- The Eloquence Of Adams…Daniel Webster
- The Power Of Habit…John B. Gough
- Invective Against Corry…Henry Grattan
- Toussaint L'ouverture…Wendell Phillips
- The Secret Of Lincoln's Power…Henry Watterson
- The Death Of Abraham Lincoln…Henry Ward Beecher
- Inaugural Address…Theodore Roosevelt
- A Vision Of War And A Vision Of The Future…Ingersoll
- Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death!…Patrick Henry
- Second Inaugural Address…Abraham Lincoln
- Farewell Address…George Washington

CLOSE OF THE ORATION ON THE CROWN

BY DEMOSTHENES

The people gave their voice, and the danger that hung upon our borders went by like a cloud. Then was the time for the upright citizen to show the world if he could suggest anything better: now, his cavils come too late. The statesman and the adventurer are alike in nothing, but there is nothing in which they differ more than this. The statesman declares his mind before the event, and submits himself to be tested by those who have believed him, by fortune, by his own use of opportunities, by every one and everything. The adventurer is silent when he ought to have spoken, and then, if there is a disagreeable result, he fixes an eye of malice upon that. As I have said, then was the opportunity of the man who cared for Athens and for the assertion of justice.

But I am prepared to go further: If any one has had a new light as to something which it would have been expedient to do then, I protest that this ought not to be concealed from me. But if there neither is nor was any such thing; if no one to this very hour is in a position to name it; then what was your adviser to do? Was he not to choose the best of the visible and feasible alternatives ? And this is what I did, Æschines, when the herald asked, "Who wishes to speak?" His question was not, Who wishes to rake up old accusations? or, Who wishes to give pledges of the future? In those days you sat dumb in the assemblies. I came forward and spoke.

Come now it is better late than never: point out what argument should have been discovered what opportunity that might have served has not been used by me in the interests of Athens what alliance, what policy was available which I might better have commended to our citizens?however, he bears so hardly upon the results, I am ready to make a statement which may sound startling. I say that, if the event had been manifest to the whole world beforehand, if all men had been fully aware of it, if you, Æschines, who never opened your lips, had been ever so loud or so shrill in prophecy or in protest, not even then ought Athens to have forsaken this course, if Athens had any regard for her glory, or for her past, or for the ages to come. Now, of course, she seems to have failed; but failure is for all men when Heaven so decrees. In the other case, she, who claims the first place in Greece, would have renounced it, and would have incurred the reproach of having betrayed all Greece to Philip. If she had indeed betrayed without a blow those things for which our ancestors endured every imaginable danger, who would not have spurned, Æschines, at you? Not at Athens the gods forbid nor at me. In the name of Zeus, how could we have looked visitors in the face if, things having come to their present pass, Philip having been elected leader and lord of all the struggle against it had been sustained by others without our help, and this, tho never once in her past history our city had preferred inglorious safety to the perilous vindication of honor? What Greek, what barbarian does not know that the Thebans, and their predecessors in power, the Lacedaemonians, and the Persian king, would have been glad and thankful to let Athens take anything that she liked, besides keeping what she had got, if she would only have done what she was told, and allowed some other power to lead Greece?

Such a bargain, however, was for the Athenians of those days neither conditional, nor congenial, nor supportable. In the whole course of her annals, no one could ever persuade Athens to side with dishonest strength, to accept a secure slavery, or to desist, at any moment in her career, and from doing battle and braving danger for preeminence, for honor, and for renown.

You, Athenians, find these principles so worthy of veneration, so accordant with your own character, that you praise none of your ancestors so highly as those who put them into action. You are right. Who must not admire the spirit of men who were content to quit their country, and to exchange their city for their triremes in the cause of resistance to dictation; who put Themistocles, the author of his course, at their head, while as for Kyrsilos, the man who gave his voice for accepting the enemy's terms, they stoned him to death, yes, and his wife was stoned by the women of Athens? The Athenians of those days were not in search of an orator or a general who should help them to an agreeable servitude. No, they would not hear of life itself if they were not to live free. Each one of them held that he had been born the son, not only of his father and his mother, but of his country also. And wherein is the difference ? It is here. He that recognizes no debt of piety save to his parents awaits his death in the course of destiny and of nature. But he that deems himself the son of his country also will be ready to die sooner than see her enslaved. In his estimate those insults, those dishonors which must be suffered in his city when she has lost her freedom will be accounted more terrible than death.

If I presumed to say that it was I who thus inspired you with a spirit worthy of your ancestors, there is not a man present who might not properly rebuke me. What I do maintain is that these principles of conduct were your own; that this spirit existed in the city before my intervention, but that, in the successive chapters of events, I had my share of merit as your servant. Æschines, on the contrary, denounces our policy as a whole, invokes your resentment against me as the author of the city's terrors and dangers, and, in his anxiety to wrest from me the distinction of the hour, robs you of glories which will be celebrated as long as time endures. For, if you condemn Ktesiphon on the ground that my public course was misdirected, then you will be adjudged guilty of error: you will no longer appear as sufferers by the perversity of fortune.

But never, Athenians, never can it be said that you erred when you took upon you that peril for the freedom and safety of all. No, by our fathers who met the danger at Marathon; no, by our fathers who stood in the ranks at Plataea; no, by our fathers who did battle on the waters of Salamis and Artemision; no, by all the brave who sleep in tombs at which their country paid those last honors which she had awarded, Æschines, to all of them alike, not alone to the successful or the victorious! And her award was just. The part of brave men had been done by all. The fortune experienced by the individual among them had been allotted by a power above man.

Here is the proof. Not when my extradition was demanded, not when they sought to arraign me before the Amphictyonic Council, not for all their menaces or their offers, not when they set these villains like wild beasts upon me, have I ever been untrue to the loyalty I bear you. From the outset, I chose the path of a straightforward and righteous statesmanship, to cherish the dignities, the prerogatives, the glories of my country: to exalt them: to stand by their cause. I do not go about the market-place radiant with joy at my country's disasters, holding out my hand and telling my good news to any one who, I think, is likely to report it in Macedon; I do not hear of my country's successes with a shudder and a groan and a head bent to earth, like the bad men who pull Athens to pieces, as if, in so doing, they were not tearing their own reputations to shreds, who turn their faces to foreign lands, and, when an alien has triumphed by the ruin of the Greeks, give their praises to that exploit, and vow that vigilance must be used to render that triumph eternal.

Never, powers of Heaven, may any brow of the immortals be bent in approval of that prayer. Bather, if it may be, breathe even into these men a better mind and heart; but if so it is that to these can come no healing, then grant that these, and these alone, may perish utterly and early on land and on the deep: and to us, the remnant, send the swiftest deliverance from the terrors gathered above our heads; send us the salvation that stands fast perpetually.

ORATORY

BY HENRY WARD BEECHER

Oratory has this test and mark of divine providence, that God, when he makes things perfect, signifies that he is done, by throwing over them the robe of beauty; for beauty is the divine thought of excellence. All growing things, in their earlier stages, are rude. All of them are in vigorous strength, it may be; but not until the blossom comes, and the fruit hangs pendant, has the vine evinced for what it was made. God is a God of beauty; and beauty is everywhere the final process. When things have come to that, they have touched their limit.

A living force that brings to itself all the resources of imagination, all the inspirations of feeling, all that is influential in body, in voice, in eye, in gesture, in posture, in the whole animated man, is in strict analogy with the divine thought and the divine arrangement; and there is no misconstruction more utterly untrue and fatal than this: that oratory is an artificial thing, which deals with baubles and trifles, for the sake of making bubbles of pleasure for transient effect on mercurial audiences. So far from that, it is the consecration of the whole man to the noblest purposes to which one can address himself the education and inspiration of his fellow men by all that there is in learning, by all that there is in thought, by all that there is in feeling, by all that there is in all of them, sent home through the channels of taste and of beauty. And so regarded, oratory should take its place among the highest departments of education.

But oratory is disregarded largely; and one of the fruits of this disregard is, that men fill all the places of power with force misdirected; with energy not half so fruitful as it might be; with sincerity that knows not how to spread its wings and fly. If you were to trace and to analyze the methods which prevail in all the departments of society, you would find in no other such contempt of culture, and in no other such punishment of this contempt.

How much squandering there is of the voice! How little is there of the advantage that may come from conversational tones! How seldom does a man dare to acquit himself with pathos and fervor! And the men are themselves mechanical and methodical in the bad way, who are most afraid of the artificial training that is given in the schools, and who so often show by the fruit of their labor that the want of oratory is the want of education.

How remarkable is sweetness of voice in the mother, in the father, in the household! The music of no chorded instruments brought together is, for sweetness, like the music of familiar affection when spoken by brother and sister, or by father and mother.

Conversation itself belongs to oratory. How many men there are who are weighty in argument, who have abundant resources, and who are almost boundless in their power at other times and in other places, but who, when in company among their kind, are exceedingly unapt in their methods. Having none of the secret instruments by which the elements of nature may be touched, having no skill and no power in this direction, they stand as machines before living, sensitive men. A man may be as a master before an instrument; only the instrument is dead; and he has the living hand; and out of that dead instrument what wondrous harmony springs forth at his touch! And if you can electrify an audience by the power of a living man on dead things, how much more should that audience be electrified when the chords are living and the man is alive, and he knows how to touch them with divine inspiration!

I advocate, therefore, in its full extent, and for every reason of humanity, of patriotism, and of religion, a more thorough culture of oratory.

First, in the orator, is the man. Let no man who is a sneak try to be an orator. A man who is to be an orator must have something to say. He must have something that in his very soul he feels to be worth saying. He must have in his nature that kindly sympathy which connects him with his fellow men, and which so makes him a part of the audience which he moves that his smile is their smile, that his tear is their tear, and that the throb of his heart becomes the throb of the hearts of the whole assembly.' A man that is humane, a lover of his kind, full of all earnest and sweet sympathy for their welfare, has in him the original element, the substance, of oratory, which is truth; but in this world truth needs nursing and helping; it needs every advantage; for the underflow of life is animal, and the channels of human society have been taken possession of by lower influences beforehand. The devil squatted on human territory before the angel came to dispossess him. Pride and intolerance, arrogance and its cruelty, selfishness and its greed, all the lower appetites and passions, swarm, and hold in thrall the under-man that each one of us yet carries the man of flesh, on which the spirit-man seeks to ride and by which too often he is thrown and trampled under foot. The truth, in its attempt to wean the better from the worse, needs every auxiliary and every adjuvant.

The first work, therefore, is to teach a man's body to serve his soul; and in this work, the education of the bodily presence is the very first step. What power there is in posture and in gesture! By it, how many discriminations are made; how many smooth things are rolled off; how many complex things men are made to comprehend!

Among other things, the voice perhaps the most important of all, and the least cultured should not be forgotten. The human voice is like an orchestra. It ranges high up, and can shriek betimes like the scream of an eagle or it is low as a lion's tone; and at every intermediate point is some peculiar quality. It has in it the mother's whisper and the father's command. It has in it warning and alarm. It has in it sweetness. It is full of mirth and full of gaiety. It glitters, tho it is not seen with all its sparkling fancies. It ranges high, intermediate, or low, in obedience to the will, unconsciously to him who uses it; and men listen through the long hour, wondering that it is so short, and quite unaware that they have been bewitched out of their weariness by the charm of a voice, not artificial, not prearranged in the man's thought, but by assiduous training made to be his highest nature. Such a voice answers to the soul, and is its beating.

“ But," it is said, '' does not the voice come by nature ?'' Yes; but is there anything that comes by nature which stays as it comes, if it is worthily handled ? We receive one talent that we may make it five; and we receive five talents that we make them ten. There is no one thing in man that he has in perfection till he has it by culture. We know that in respect to everything but the voice. Is not the ear trained to acute hearing 1 Is not the eye trained in science ? Do men not school the eye, and make it quick-seeing by patient use ? Is a man, because he has learned a trade, and was not born to it, thought to be less a man? Because we have made discoveries of science, and adapted them to manufacture; because we have developed knowledge by-training, are we thought to be unmanly ? Shall we, because we have unfolded our powers by the use of ourselves for that noblest of purposes, the inspiration and elevation of mankind, be less esteemed? Is the school of human training to be disdained, when by it we are rendered more useful to our fellow men ?

If you go from our land to other lands; if you go to the land which has been irradiated by parliamentary eloquence; if you go to the people of Great Britain; if you go to the great men in ancient times who lived in the intellect; if you go to the illustrious names that every one recalls Demosthenes and Cicero they represent a life of work.

Not until Michael Angelo had been the servant and the slave of matter, did he learn to control matter; and not until he had drilled and drilled and drilled himself were his touches free and easy as the breath of summer, and full of color as the summer itself. Not until Raphael had subdued himself by color, was he the crowning artist of beauty. You shall not find one great sculptor, nor one great architect, nor one great painter, nor one eminent man in any department of art, nor one great scholar, nor one great statesman, nor one divine of universal gifts, whose greatness, if you inquire, you will not find to be the fruit of study, and of the evolution that comes from study.

Great is the advance of civilization; mighty are the engines of force, but man is greater than that which he produces. Vast is that machine which stands in the dark, unconsciously lifting, lifting the only humane slave the iron slave the Corliss engine; but he that made the engine is greater than the engine itself. Wonderful is the skill by which that most exquisite mechanism of modern life, the watch, is constructed; but greater is the man that made the watch than the watch that is made. Great is the Press, great are the hundred instrumentalities and institutions and customs of society; but above them all is man. The living force is greater than any of its creations greater than society, greater than the laws-. "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," saith the Lord. Man is greater than his own institutions. And this living force is worthy of all culture of all culture in the power of beauty; of all culture in the direction of persuasion ; of all culture in the art of reasoning.

To make men patriots, to make men Christians, to make men the sons of God, let all the doors of heaven be opened, and let God drop down charmed gifts winged imagination, all-perceiving reason, and all-judging reason. Whatever there is that can make men wiser and better let it descend upon the head of him who has consecrated himself to the work of mankind, and who has made himself an orator for man's sake and for God's sake.

ON THE AMERICAN WAR

BY LORD CHATHAM

I cannot, my lords, I will not, join in congratulation on misfortune and disgrace. This, my lords, is a perilous and tremendous moment. It is not a time for adulation; the smoothness of flattery cannot save us in this rugged and awful crisis. It is now necessary to instruct the throne in the language of truth. We must, if possible, dispel the delusion and darkness which envelop it; and display, in its full danger and genuine colors, the ruin which is brought to our doors. Can ministers still presume to expect support in their infatuation? Can parliament be so dead to its dignity and duty, as to give its support to measures thus obtruded and forced upon it. Measures, my lords, which have reduced this late flourishing empire to scorn and contempt! "But yesterday, and Britain might have stood against the world: now, none so poor as to do her reverence !'' The people, whom we at first despised as rebels, but whom we now acknowledge as enemies, are abetted against us, supplied with every military store, have their interests consulted, and their ambassadors entertained, by our inveterate enemy; and ministers do not and dare not interpose with dignity or effect. The desperate state of our army abroad is in part known. No man more highly esteems and honors the British troops than I do; I know their virtues and their valor; I know they can achieve anything but impossibilities; and I know that the conquest of British America is an impossibility. You cannot, my lords, you cannot conquer America. What is your present situation there? "We do not know the worst; but we do know that, in three campaigns, we have done nothing, and suffered much. You may swell every expense, accumulate every assistance, and extend your traffic to the shambles of every German despot; your attempts will be forever vain and impotent doubly so, indeed, from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your adversaries, to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty. If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms never, never, never!

But, my lords, who is the man, that, in addition to the disgraces and mischiefs of the war, has dared to authorize and associate, to our arms, the tomahawk and scalping-knife of the savage ? to call, into civilized alliance, the wild and inhuman inhabitant of the woods? to delegate, to the merciless Indian, the defense of disputed rights, and to wage the horrors of his barbarous war against our brethren ? My lords, these enormities cry aloud for redress and punishment. But, my lords, this barbarous measure has been defended, not only on the principles of policy and necessity, but also those of morality; "for it is perfectly allowable," says Lord Suffolk, <4to use all the means that God and nature have put into our hands.'' I am astonished, I am shocked, to hear such principles confessed; to hear them avowed in this House, or in this country. My lords, I did not intend to encroach upon so much of your attention, but I can not repress my indignation I feel myself impelled to speak. My lords, we are called upon, as members of this House, as men, as Christians, to protest against such horrible barbarity! "That God and nature have put into our hands!" What ideas of God and nature that noble lord may entertain, I know not; but I know that such detestable principles are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What! to attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife! to the cannibal savage, torturing, murdering, devouring, drinking the blood of his mangled victims! Such notions shock every precept of morality, every feeling of humanity, every sentiment of honor. These abominable principles, and this more abominable avowal of them, demand the most decisive indignation!

IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS

BY EDMUND BURKE

In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villainy upon Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.

My lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national justice ? Do we want a cause, my lords ? You have the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and of wasted kingdoms.

Do you want a criminal, my lords? When was there so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any one? No, my lords, you must not look to punish any other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.

My lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my lords, that the sun, in his beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the material bonds and barriers of nature, united by the bond of a social and moral community all the Commons of England resenting, as their own, the indignities and cruelties, that are offered to all the people of India.

Do we want a tribunal? My lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us with a tribunal like this. My lords, here we see virtually, in the mind's eye, that sacred majesty of the Crown, under whose authority you sit and whose power you exercise.

We have here all the branches of the royal family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the sovereign and the subject offering a pledge, in that situation, for the support of the rights of the Crown and the liberties of the people, both of which extremities they touch.

My lords, we have a great hereditary peerage here; those who have their own honor, the honor of their ancestors, and of their posterity, to guard, and who will justify, as they always have justified, that provision in the Constitution by which justice is made an hereditary office.

My lords, we have here a new nobility, who have risen, and exalted themselves by various merits, by great civil and military services, which have extended the fame of this country from the rising to the setting sun.

My lords, you have here, also, the lights of our religion; you have the bishops of England. My lords, you have that true image of the primitive Church in its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified from the superstitions and the vices which a long succession of ages will bring upon the best institutions.

My lords, these are the securities which we have in all the constituent parts of the body of this House. We know them, we reckon, we rest upon them, and commit safely the interests of India and of humanity into your hands. Therefore, it is with confidence, that, ordered by the Commons, I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed.

I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted, whose property he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name, and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life.

My lords, the Commons will share in every fate with your lordships; there is nothing sincere which can happen to you, in which we shall not be involved; and, if it should so happen, that we shall be subjected to some of those frightful changes which we have seen; if it should happen that your lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, amidst the magistrates, who supported their thrones, may you in those moments feel that consolation which I am persuaded they felt in the critical moments of their dreadful agony!

My lords, there is a consolation, and a great consolation it is, which often happens to oppressed virtue and fallen dignity; it often happens that the very oppressors and persecutors themselves are forced to bear testimony in its favor. The Parliament of Paris had an origin very, very similar to that of the great court before which I stand; the Parliament of Paris continued to have a great resemblance to it in its Constitution, even to its fall; the Parliament of Paris, my lords, WAS; it is gone! It has passed away; it has vanished like a dream! It fell pierced by the sword of the Comte de Mirabeau. And yet that man, at the time of his inflicting the death-wound of that Parliament, produced at once the shortest and the grandest funeral oration that ever was or could be made upon the departure of a great court of magistracy. When he pronounced the death sentence upon that Parliament, and inflicted the mortal wound, he declared that his motives for doing it were merely political, and that their hands were as pure as those of justice itself, which they administered a great and glorious exit, my lords, of a great and glorious body!

My lords, if you must fall, may you so fall! But, if you stand, and stand I trust you will, together with the fortunes of this ancient monarchy together with the ancient laws and liberties of this great and illustrious kingdom, may you stand as unimpeached in honor as in power; may you stand, not as a substitute for virtue, but as an ornament of virtue, as a security for virtue; may you stand long, and long stand the terror of tyrants; may you stand the refuge of afflicted nations; may you stand a sacred temple, for the perpetual residence of an inviolable justice!

THE FORCE BILL

BY JOHN CALDWELL CALHOUN

It is said that the bill ought to pass, because the law must be enforced. The law must be enforced! The imperial edict must be executed! It is under such sophistry, couched in general terms, without looking to the limitations which must ever exist in the practical exercise of power, that the most cruel and despotic acts ever have been covered. It was such sophistry as this that cast Daniel into the lion'sden, and the three Innocents into the fiery furnace. Under the same sophistry the bloody edicts of Nero and Caligula were executed. The law must be enforced. Yes, the act imposing the "tea-tax must be executed." This was the very argument which impelled Lord North and his administration to that mad career which forever separated us from the British crown. Under a similar sophistry, that'' religion must be protected," how many massacres have been perpetrated? and how many martyrs have been tied to the staked What! acting on this vague abstraction, are you prepared to enforce a law without considering whether it be just or unjust, constitutional or unconstitutional ? Will you collect money when it is acknowledged that it is not wanted? He who earns the money, who digs it from the earth with the sweat of his brow, has a just title to it against the universe. No one has a right to touch it without his consent except his government, and this only to the extent of its legitimate wants; to take more is robbery, and you propose by this bill to enforce robbery by murder. Yes: to this result you must come, by this miserable sophistry, this vague abstraction of enforcing the law, without a regard to the fact whether the law be just or unjust, constitutional or unconstitutional.

In the same spirit we are told that the Union must be preserved, without regard to the means. And how is it proposed to preserve the Union ? By force! Does any man in his senses believe that this beautiful structure this harmonious aggregate of States, produced by the joint consent of all can be preserved by force? Its very introduction will be certain destruction to this Federal Union. No, no. You cannot keep the States united in their constitutional and federal bonds by force. Force may, indeed, hold the parts together, but such union would be the bond between master and slave a union of exaction on one side and of unqualified obedience on the other. That obedience which, we are told by the Senator from Pennsylvania, is the Union! Yes, exaction on the side of the master; for this very bill is intended to collect what can be no longer called taxes the voluntary contribution of a free people but tribute tribute to be collected under the mouths of the cannon! Your custom-house is already transferred to a garrison, and that garrison with its batteries turned, not against the enemy of your country, but on subjects (I will not say citizens), on whom you propose to levy contributions. Has reason fled from our borders? Have we ceased to reflect? It is madness to suppose that the Union can be preserved by force. I tell you plainly that the bill, should it pass, can not be enforced. It will prove only a blot upon your statute-book, a reproach to the year, and a disgrace to the American Senate. I repeat, it will not be executed; it will rouse the dormant spirit of the people, and open their eyes to the approach of despotism. The country has sunk into avarice and political corruption, from which nothing can arouse it but some measure, on the part of the Government, of folly and madness, such as that now under consideration.

DEFENSE OF JOHN STOCKDALE

BY LORD ERSKINE

Gentlemen, I hope I have now performed my duty to my client I sincerely hope that I have; for, certainly, if ever there was a man pulled the other way by his interests and affections, if ever there was a man who should have trembled at the situation in which I have been placed on this occasion, it is myself, who not only love, honor, and respect, but whose future hopes and preferments are linked, from free choice, with those who, from the mistakes of the author, are treated with great severity and injustice. These are strong retardments; but I have been urged on to activity by considerations which can never be inconsistent with honorable attachments, either in the political or social world the love of justice and of liberty, and a zeal for the Constitution of my country, which is the inheritance of our posterity, of the public, and of the world. These are the motives which have animated me in defense of this person, who is an entire stranger to me; whose shop I never go to; and the author of whose publication or Mr. Hastings, who is the object of it I never spoke to in my life.

One word more, gentlemen, and I have done. Every human tribunal ought to take care to administer justice as we look hereafter to have justice administered to ourselves. Upon the principle on which the attorney-general prays sentence upon my client God have mercy upon us. Instead of standing before Him in judgment with the hopes and consolations of Christians, we must call upon the mountains to cover us; for which of us can present, for omniscient examination, a pure, unspotted, and faultless course? But I humbly expect that the benevolent Author of our being will judge us as I have been pointing out for your example. Holding up the great volume of our lives in His hands, and regarding the general scope of them if He discovers benevolence, charity, and good will to man beating in the heart, where He alone can look; if He finds that our conduct, tho often forced out of the path by infirmities, has been in general well directed; His all-searching eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives; much less will His judgment select them for punishment without the general context of our existence, by which faults may be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offenses to have been grafted by human imperfection upon the best and kindest of our affections. No, gentlemen, believe me, this is not the course of divine justice, or there is no truth in the Gospels of Heaven. If the general tenor of a man's conduct be such as I have represented it, he may walk through the shadow of death, with all his faults about him, with as much cheerfulness as in the common paths of life; because he knows that, instead of a stern accuser to expose before the Author of his nature those frail passages which, like the scored matter in the book before you, checker the volume of the brightest and best spent life, His mercy will obscure them from the eye of His purity, and our repentance blot them out forever.

All this would, I admit, be perfectly foreign and irrelevant if you were sitting here in a case of property between man and man, where a strict rule of law must operate, or there would be an end of civil life and society. It would be equally foreign, and still more irrelevant, if applied to those shameful attacks upon private reputation which are the bane and disgrace of the Press; by which whole families have been rendered unhappy during life by aspersions cruel, scandalous, and unjust. Let such libelers remember that no one of my principles of defense can, at any time, or upon any occasion, ever apply to shield them from punishment; because such conduct is not only an infringement of the rights of men, as they are defined by strict law, but is absolutely incompatible with honor, honesty, or mistaken good intentions. On such men let the attorney-general bring forth all the artillery of his office, and thanks and blessings of the whole public will follow him. But this is a totally different case. Whatever private calumny may mark this work, it has not been made the subject of complaint, and we have therefore nothing to do with that, nor any right to consider it. We are trying whether the public could have been considered as offended and endangered if Mr. Hastings himself, in whose place the author and publisher have a right to place themselves, had, under all the circumstances which have been considered, composed and published the volume under examination. That question can not, in common sense, be anything resembling a question of law, but is a pure question of fact, to be decided on the principles which I have humbly recommended. I therefore ask of the Court that the book itself may now be delivered to you. Bead it with attention, and as you shall find it, pronounce your verdict.

ADDRESS TO THE YOUNG MEN OF ITALY

BY JOSEPH MAZZINI

When I was commissioned by you, young men, to proffer in this temple a few words consecrated to the memory of the brothers Bandiera, and their fellow martyrs at Cosenza, I thought that some one of those who heard me might, perhaps, exclaim, with noble indignation, "Why thus lament over the dead? The martyrs of liberty are only worthily honored by winning the battle they have begun. Cosenza, the land where they fell, is enslaved; Venice, the city of their birth, is begirt with strangers. Let us emancipate them; and, until that moment, let no words pass our lips, save those of war." But another thought arose, and suggested to me, Why have we not conquered? Why is it that, while our countrymen are fighting for independence in the north of Italy, liberty is perishing in the south? Why is it that a war which should have sprung to the Alps with the bound of a lion has dragged itself along for four months with the slow, uncertain motion of the scorpion surrounded by the circle of fire? How has the rapid and powerful intuition of a People newly arisen to life been converted into the weary, helpless effort of the sick man, turning from side to side ?

Ah! had we all arisen in the sanctity of the idea for which our martyrs died; had the holy standard of their faith preceded our youth to battle; had we made of our every thought an action, and of our every action a thought; had we learned from them that liberty and independence are one; we should not now have war, but victory! Cosenza would not be compelled to venerate the memory of her martyrs in secret, nor Venice be restrained from honoring them with a monument; and we, here gathered together, might gladly invoke those sacred names, without uncertainty as to our future destiny, or a cloud of sadness on our brows; and might say to those precursor souls, "Rejoice, for your spirit is incarnate in your brethren, and they are worthy of you." Could Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, and their fellow martyrs, now arise from the grave and speak to you, they would, believe me, address you, tho with a power very different from that given to me, in counsel not unlike that which now I utter.

Love! Love is the flight of the soul toward God: toward the great, the sublime, and the beautiful, which are the shadow of God upon earth. Love your family; the partner of your life; those around you, ready to share your joys and sorrows; the dead, who were dear to you, and to whom you were dear. Love your country. It is your name, your glory, your sign among the Peoples. Give to it your thought, your counsel, your blood. You are twenty-four millions of men, endowed with active, splendid faculties; with a tradition of glory, the envy of the Nations of Europe. An immense future is before you your eyes are raised to the loveliest Heaven, and around you smiles the loveliest land in Europe; you are encircled by the Alps and the sea, boundaries marked out by the finger of God for a people of giants. And you must be such, or nothing. Let not a man of that twenty-four millions remain excluded from the fraternal bond which shall join you together; let not a look be raised to that Heaven which is not that of a free man. Love humanity. You can only ascertain your own mission from the aim placed by God before humanity at large. Beyond the Alps, beyond the sea, are other Peoples, now fighting, or preparing to fight, the holy fight of independence, of nationality, of liberty; other Peoples striving by different routes to reach the same goal. Unite with them they will unite with you.

And love, young men, love and reverence the Ideal; it is the country of the spirit, the city of the soul, in which all are brethren who believe in the inviolability of thought, and in the dignity of our immortal natures. From that high sphere spring the principles which alone can redeem the Peoples. Love enthusiasm the pure dreams of the virgin soul, and the lofty visions of early youth; for they are the perfume of Paradise, which the soul preserves in issuing from the hands of its Creator. Respect, above all things, your conscience; have upon your lips the truth that

God has placed in your hearts; and, while working together in harmony in all that tends to the emancipation of our soil, even with those who differ from you, yet ever bear erect your own banner, and boldly promulgate your faith.

Such words, young men, would the martyrs of Cosenza have spoken, had they been living among you. And here, where, perhaps, invoked by our love, their holy spirits hover near us, I call upon you to gather them up in your hearts, and to make of them a treasure amid the storms that yet threaten you, but which, with the name of our martyrs on your lips, and their faith in your hearts, you will overcome

God be with you, and bless Italy!

SOUTH CAROLINA AND MASSACHUSETTS

BY DANIEL WEBSTER

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 name. I claim them for countrymen, one and all. The Laurenses, the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, the Sumters, the Marions, Americans, all, whose fame is no more to be hemmed in by State lines, than their talents and 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 remembrances 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 party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it; if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraints, shall succeed in separating 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 of vigor it may retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall, at last, if fall it must, amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, on the very spot of its origin! (Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown db Co., Boston.)

THE DEATH PENALTY

BY VICTOR HUGO

Gentlemen of the Jury, if there is a culprit here, it is not my son, it is myself, it is I! I, who for these twenty-five years have opposed capital punishment, have contended for the inviolability of human life, have committed this crime for which my son is now arraigned. Here I denounce myself, Mr. Advocate General! I have committed it under all aggravated circumstances; deliberately, repeatedly, tenaciously. Yes, this old and absurd lex talionis this law of blood for blood I have combated all my life all my life, Gentlemen of the Jury! And, while I have breath, I will continue to combat it, by all my efforts as a writer, by all my words and all my votes as a legislator! I declare it before the crucifix; before that victim of the penalty of death, who sees and hears us; before that gibbet, to which, two thousand years ago, for the eternal instruction of the generations, the human law nailed the Divine!

In all that my son has written on the subject of capital punishment and for writing and publishing which he is now on trial, in all that he has written, he has merely proclaimed the sentiments with which, from his infancy, I have inspired him. Gentlemen Jurors, the right to criticize a law, and to criticize it severely especially a penal law is placed beside the duty of amelioration, like the torch beside the work under the artisan's hand. The right of the journalist is as sacred, as necessary, as imprescriptible, as the right of the legislator.

What are the circumstances? A man, a convict, a sentenced wretch, is dragged, on a certain morning, to one of our public squares. There lie finds the scaffold! He shudders, he struggles, he refuses to die. He is young yet only twenty-nine. Ah! I know what you will say, '' He is a murderer!" But hear me. Two officers seize him. His hands, his feet, are tied. He throws off the two officers. A frightful struggle ensues. His feet, bound as they are, become entangled in the ladder. He uses the scaffold against the scaffold! The struggle is prolonged. Horror seizes on the crowd. The officers, sweat and shame on their brows, pale, panting, terrified, despairing, despairing with I know not what horrible despair, shrinking under that public reprobation which ought to have visited the penalty, and spared the passive instrument, the executioner, the officers strive savagely. The victim clings to the scaffold, and shrieks for pardon. His clothes are torn, his shoulders bloody, still he resists. At length, after three-quarters of an hour of this monstrous effort, of this spectacle without a name, of this agony, agony for all, be it understood, agony for the assembled spectators as well as for the condemned man, after this age of anguish, Gentlemen of the Jury, they take back the poor wretch to his prison.

The People breathe again. The People, naturally merciful, hope that the man will be spared. But no, the guillotine, tho vanquished, remains standing. There it frowns all day, in the midst of a sickened population. And at night, the officers, reinforced, drag forth the wretch again, so bound that he is but an inert weight, they drag him forth, haggard, bloody, weeping, pleading, howling for life, calling upon God, calling upon his father and mother, for like a very child had this man become in the prospect of death, they drag him forth to execution. He is hoisted on the scaffold, and his head falls! And then through. every conscience runs a shudder. Never had legal murder appeared with an aspect so indecent, so abominable. All feel jointly implicated in the deed. It is at this very moment that from a young man's breast escapes a cry, wrung :from his very heart, a cry of pity and of anguish, a cry of horror, a cry of humanity. And this cry you would punish! And in the face of the appalling facts which I have narrated, you would say to the guillotine, "Thou art right!" and to Pity, saintly Pity, "Thou art wrong!" Gentlemen of the Jury, it cannot be! Gentlemen, I have finished.

OUR RELATIONS TO ENGLAND

BY EDWARD EVERETT

Who does not feel, what reflecting American does not acknowledge, the incalculable advantages derived by this land out of the deep fountains of civil, intellectual, and moral truth, from which we have drawn in England ? What American does not feel proud that his fathers were the countrymen of Bacon, of Newton, and of Locke ? Who does not know that, while every pulse of civil liberty in the heart of the British Empire beats warm and full in the bosom of our ancestors, the sobriety, the firmness, and the dignity, with which the cause of free principles struggled into existence here, constantly found encouragement and countenance from the friends of liberty there? Who does not remember that, when the Pilgrims went over the sea, the prayers of the faithful British confessors, in all the quarters of their dispersion, went over with them, while their aching eyes were strained till the star of hope should go up in the western skies ? And who will ever forget that, in that eventful struggle which severed these youthful republics from the British crown, there was not heard throughout our continent in arms, a voice which spoke louder for the rights of America than that of Burke, or of Chatham, within the walls of the British Parliament, and at the foot of the British throne?

I am not I need not say I am not the panegyrist of England. I am not dazzled by her riches, nor awed by her power. The scepter, the miter, and the coronet, stars, garters, and blue ribbons, seem to me poor things for great men to contend for. Nor is my admiration awakened by her armies, mustered for the battles of Europe; her navies, overshadowing the ocean; nor her empire, grasping the farthest East. It is these, and the price of guilt and blood by which they are too often maintained, which are the cause why no friend of liberty can salute her with undivided affections. But it is the cradle and the refuge of free principles, tho often persecuted; the school of religious liberty, the more precious for the struggles through which it has passed; the tombs of those who have reflected honor on all who speak the English tongue; it is the birthplace of our fathers, the home of the Pilgrims; it is these which I love and venerate in England. I should feel ashamed of an enthusiasm for Italy and Greece, did I not also feel it for a land like this. In an American, it would seem to me degenerate and ungrateful to hang with passion upon the traces of Homer and Virgil, and follow, without emotion, the nearer and plainer footsteps of Shakespeare and Milton. I should think him cold in his love for his native land who felt no melting in his heart for that other native country which holds the ashes of his forefathers.

REPLY TO HAYNE

BY DANIEL WEBSTER

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 rose, 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 answer 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 modestice, 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 for 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 what 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 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 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. (Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Co., Boston.)

SPEECH OF SERJEANT BUZFUZ IN THE CASE OF BARDELL AGAINST PICKWICK

BY CHARLES DICKENS

You heard from my learned friend, Gentlemen of the Jury, that this is an action for a breach of promise of marriage, in which the damages are laid at fifteen hundred pounds. The plaintiff, Gentlemen, is a widow; yes, Gentlemen, a widow. The late Mr. Bardell, some time before his death, became the father, Gentlemen, of a little boy. With this little boy, the only pledge of her departed exciseman, Mrs. Bardell shrunk from the world, and courted the retirement and tranquillity of Goswell Street; and here she placed in her front parlor-window a written placard, bearing this inscription: "Apartments furnished for a single gentleman. Inquire within." Mrs. Bardell's opinions of the opposite sex, Gentlemen, were derived from a long contemplation of the inestimable qualities of her lost husband. She had no fear, she had no distrust, all was confidence and reliance. "Mr. Bardell," said the widow, "was a man of honor, Mr. Bardell was a man of his word, Mr. Bardell was no deceiver, Mr. Bardell was once a single gentleman himself; to single gentlemen I look for protection, for assistance, for comfort, and for consolation; in a single gentleman I shall perpetually see something to remind me of what Mr. Bardell was, when he first won my young and untried affections; to a single gentleman, then, shall my lodgings be let.'' Actuated by this beautiful and touching impulse (among the best impulses of our imperfect nature, Gentlemen), the lonely and desolate widow dried her tears, furnished her first floor, caught her innocent boy to her maternal bosom, and put the bill up in her parlor-window. Did it remain there long? No! The serpent was on the watch, the train was laid, the mine was preparing, the sapper and the miner were at work! Before the bill had been in the parlor-window three days, three days, Gentlemen, a being, erect upon two legs, and bearing all the outward semblance of a man, and not of a monster, knocked at the door of Mrs. Bardell's house! He inquired within; he took the lodgings and on the very next day he entered into possession of them. This man was Pickwick, Pickwick, the defendant!

Of this man I will say little. The subject presents but few attractions; and I, Gentlemen, am not the man, nor are you, Gentlemen, the men, to delight in the contemplation of revolting heartlessness, and of systematic villainy. I say systematic villainy, Gentlemen; and when I say systematic villainy, let me tell the defendant, Pickwick, if he be in Court, as I am informed he is, that it would have been more decent in him, more becoming, if he had stopped away. Let me tell him, further, that a counsel, in his discharge of his duty, is neither to be intimidated nor bullied, nor put down; and that any attempt to do either the one or the other will recoil on the head of the attempter, be he plaintiff or be he defendant, be his name Pickwick, or Noakes, or Stoakes, or Stiles, or Brown, or Thompson.

I shall show you, Gentlemen, that for two years Pickwick continued to reside constantly, and without interruption or intermission, at Mrs. Bardell's house. I shall show you that Mrs. Bardell, during the whole of that time, waited on him, attended to his comforts, cooked his meals, looked out his linen for the washerwoman when it went abroad, darned, aired, and prepared it for wear when it came home, and, in short, enjoyed his fullest trust and confidence. I shall show you that on many occasions he gave half-pence, and on some occasions, even sixpence to her little boy. I shall prove to you, that on one occasion, when he returned from the country, he distinctly and in terms offered her marriage: previously, however, taking special care that there should be no witnesses to their solemn contract; and that I am in a situation to prove to you, on the testimony of three of his own friends, most unwilling witnesses, Gentlemen, most unwilling witnesses, that on that morning he was discovered by them holding the plaintiff in his arms, and soothing her agitation by his caresses and endearments.

And now, Gentlemen, but one word more. Two letters have passed between these parties, letters that must be viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye, letters that were evidently intended, at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands they might fall. Let me read the first: "Garraway's, twelve o'clock. Dear Mrs. B. Chops and Tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.'* Gentlemen, what does this mean? Chops and Tomato sauce! Yours, Pickwick! Chops! Gracious Heavens! And Tomato sauce! Gentlemen, is the happiness of a sensitive and confiding female to be trifled away by such shallow artifices as these? The next has no date whatever, which is in itself suspicious: "Dear Mrs. B., I shall not be at home to-morrow. Slow coach.'' And then follows this very remarkable expression, "Don't trouble yourself about the warming-pan." The warming-pan! Why, Gentlemen, who does trouble himself about a warming-pan? Why is Mrs. Bardell so earnestly entreated not to agitate herself about this warming-pan, unless (as is no doubt the case) it is a mere cover for hidden fire a mere substitute for some endearing word or promise, agreeably to a preconcerted system of correspondence, artfully contrived by Pickwick with a view to his contemplated desertion ? And what does this allusion to the slow coach mean 2 For aught I know, it may be a reference to Pickwick himself, who has most unquestionably been a criminally slow coach during the whole of this transaction, but whose speed will now be very unexpectedly accelerated, and whose wheels, Gentlemen, as he will find to his cost, will very soon be greased by you!
But enough of this, Gentlemen. It is difficult to smile with an aching heart. My client's hopes and prospects are ruined, and it is no figure of speech to say that her occupation is gone indeed. The bill is down but there is no tenant! Eligible single gentlemen pass and repass but there is no invitation for them to inquire within, or without! All is gloom and silence in the house; even the voice of the child is hushed; his infant sports are disregarded, when his mother weeps. But Pickwick, Gentlemen, the ruthless destroyer of this domestic oasis in the desert of Goswell Street, Pickwick, who comes before you to-day with his heartless tomato-sauce and warming-pans, Pickwick still rears his head with unblushing effrontery, and gazes without a sigfi on the ruin he has made! Damages, Gentlemen, heavy damages, is the only punishment with which you can visit him, the only recompense you can award to my client I And for those damages she now appeals to an enlightened, a high-minded, a right-feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathizing, a contemplative Jury of her civilized countrymen!

CATILINE'S DEFIANCE

BY REV. GEORGE CROLY

CONSCRIPT FATHERS!

I do not rise to waste the night in words; Let that Plebeian talk; 't is not my trade; But here I stand for right, let him show proofs,-For Roman right; tho none, it seems, dare stand To take their share with me. Ay, cluster there! Cling to your master, judges, Romans, slaves! His charge is false; I dare him to his proofs. You have my answer. Let my actions speak!

But this I will avow, that I have scorned, And still do scorn, to hide my sense of wrong!

Who brands me on the forehead, breaks my sword, Or lays the bloody scourge upon my back, "Wrongs me not half so much as he who shuts The gates of honor on me, burning out The Roman from his birthright; and, for what?

[Looking round him.

To fling your offices to every slave!
Vipers, that creep where man disdains to climb,
And, having wound their loathsome track to the top,
Of this huge, moldering monument of Rome,
Hang hissing at the nobler man below!
Come, consecrated Lictors, from your thrones;
[To the Senate.
Fling down your scepters; take the rod and ax, And
make the murder as you make the law!
Banished from Rome! What's banished, but set free From
daily contact of the things I loathe?
"Tried and convicted traitor!" Who says this?
Who'll prove it, at his peril, on my head?
Banished! I thank you for 't. It breaks my chain!
I held some slack allegiance till this hour;
But now my sword's my own. Smile on, my lords!
I scorn to count what feelings, withered hopes,
Strong provocations, bitter, burning wrongs,
I have within my heart's hot cells shut up,
To leave you in your lazy dignities.
But here I stand and scoff you! here, I fling
Hatred and full defiance in your face!
Your Consul's merciful. For this, all thanks.
He dares not touch a hair of Catiline!

go; but, I return. This trial!
Here I devote your Senate! I've had wrongs
To stir a fever in the blood of age,
Or make the infant's sinews strong as steel.
This day's the birth of sorrow! This hour's work
Will breed proscriptions! Look to your hearths, my lords!
For there, henceforth, shall sit, for household gods, Shapes hot from Tartarus! all shames and crimes
Wan Treachery, with his thirsty dagger drawn; Suspicion, poisoning his brother's cup;
Naked Rebellion, with the torch and axe,
Making his wild sport of your blazing Thrones;
Till Anarchy comes down on you like the Night,
And Massacre seals Rome's eternal grave.
 I go; but not to leap the gulf alone.
I go; but, when I come, 't will be the burst
Of ocean in the earthquake, rolling back
In swift and mountainous ruin. Fare you well:
You build my funeral-pile; but your best blood
Shall quench its flame! Back, slaves!
[To the Lictors.] I will return.

CATILINE DENOUNCED

BY CICERO

How far, O Catiline, wilt thou abuse our patience ? How long shalt thou baffle justice in thy mad career ? To what extreme wilt thou carry thy audacity? Art thou nothing daunted by the nightly watch, posted to secure the Pala-tium? Nothing, by the city guards ? Nothing, by the rally of all good citizens? Nothing, by the assembling of the Senate in this fortified place? Nothing, by the averted looks of all here present ? Seest thou not that all thy plots are exposed? that thy wretched conspiracy is laid bare to every man's knowledge, here in the Senate? that we are well aware of thy proceedings of last night; of the night before; the place of meeting, the company convoked, the measures concerted? Alas, the times! Alas, the public morals! The Senate understands all this. The Consul sees it. Yet the traitor lives! Lives ? Ay, truly, and confronts us here in council, takes part in our deliberations, and, with his measuring eye, marks out each man of us for slaughter! And we, all this while, strenuous that we are, think we have amply discharged our duty to the State, if we but shun this madman's sword and fury!

Long since, O Catiline, ought the Consul to have ordered thee to execution, and brought upon thy own head the ruin thou hast been meditating against others! There was that virtue once in Rome, that a wicked citizen was held more execrable than the deadliest foe. We have a law still, Catiline, for thee. Think not that we are powerless, because forbearing. We have a decree, tho it rests among our archives like a sword in its scabbard, a decree, by which thy life would be made to pay the forfeit of thy crimes. And, should I order thee to be instantly seized and put to death, I make just doubt whether all good men would not think it done rather too late than any man too cruelly. But for good reasons, I will defer the blow long since deserved. Then will I doom thee, when no man is found, so lost, so wicked, nay, so like thyself, but shall confess that it was justly dealt. While there is one man that dares defend thee, live! But thou shalt live so beset, so surrounded, so scrutinized, by the vigilant guards that I have placed around thee, that thou shalt not stir a foot against the Republic, without my knowledge. There shall be eyes to detect thy slightest movement, and ears to catch thy wariest whisper, of which thou shalt not dream. The darkness of night shall not cover thy treason the walls of privacy shall not stifle its voice. Baffled on all sides, thy most secret counsels clear as noonday, what canst thou now have in view? Proceed, plot, conspire, as thou wilt; there is nothing you can contrive, nothing you can propose, nothing you can attempt, which I shall not know, hear and promptly understand. Thou shalt soon be made aware that I am even more active in providing for the preservation of the State than thou in plotting its destruction!

THE ELOQUENCE OF ADAMS

BY DANIEL WEBSTER

When public bodies are to be addressed on momentous occasions, when great interests are at stake, and strong passions excited, nothing is valuable in speech, further than as it is connected with high intellectual and moral endowments. Clearness, force, and earnestness are the qualities which produce conviction.

True eloquence, indeed, does not consist in speech. It can not be brought from far. Labor and learning may toil for it, but they will toil in vain. Words and phrases may be marshaled in every way, but they can not compass it. It must exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion. Affected passion, intense expression, the pomp of declamation, all may aspire after it; they can not reach it. It comes, if it come at all, like the outbreaking of a fountain from the earth, or the bursting forth of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force.

The graces taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied contrivances of speech shock and disgust men, when their own lives, and the fate of their wives, their children, and their country, hang on the decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities. Then patriotism is eloquent; then self-devotion is eloquent. The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the firm resolve, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward to his object, this, this is eloquence; or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence ; it is action, noble, sublime, godlike action.

In July, 1776, the controversy had passed the stage of argument. An appeal had been made to force, and opposing armies were in the field. Congress, then, was to decide whether the tie which had so long bound us to the parent State was to be severed at once, and severed forever. All the Colonies had signified their resolution to abide by this decision, and the people looked for it with the most intense anxiety. And surely, fellow citizens, never, never were men called to a more important political deliberation. If we contemplate it from the point where they then stood, no question could be more full of interest: if we look at it now, and judge of its importance by its effects, it appears in still greater magnitude.

Let us, then, bring before us the assembly which was about to decide a question thus big with the fate of empire. Let us open their doors, and look in upon their deliberations. Let us survey the anxious and care-worn countenances, let us hear the firm-toned voices, of this band of patriots.

Hancock presides over the solemn sitting; and one of those not yet prepared to pronounce for absolute independence is on the floor, and is urging his reasons for dissenting from the Declaration:

''Let us pause! This step, once taken, can not be retraced. This resolution, once passed, will cut off all hope of reconciliation. If success attend the arms of England, we shall then be no longer colonies, with charters and with privileges: these will all be forfeited by this act; and we shall be in the condition of other conquered peoples, at the mercy of the conquerors. For ourselves, we may be ready to run the hazard; but are we ready to carry the country to that length? Is success so probable as to justify it? Where is the military, where the naval power, by which we are to resist the whole strength of the arm of England?

"While we stand on our old ground, and insist on redress of grievances, we know we are right, and are not answerable for consequences. Nothing then can be imputed to us. But if we now change our object, carry our pretensions further, and set up for absolute independence, we shall lose the sympathy of mankind. We shall no longer be defending what we possess, but struggling for something which we never did possess, and which we have solemnly and uniformly disclaimed all intention of pursuing, from the very outset of the troubles. Abandoning thus our old ground of resistance only to arbitrary acts of oppression, the nations will believe the whole to have been mere pretense, and they will look on us, not as injured, but as ambitious subjects.

"I shudder before this responsibility. It will be on us, if, relinquishing the ground on which we have stood so long, and stood so safely, we now proclaim independence, and carry on the war for that object, while these cities burn, these pleasant fields whiten and bleach with the bones of their owners, and these streams run blood. It will be upon us, it will be upon us, if, failing to maintain this unseasonable and ill-judged Declaration, a sterner despotism, maintained by military power, shall be established over our posterity, when we ourselves, given up by an exhausted, a harassed, a misled people, shall have expiated our rashness and atoned for our presumption on the scaffold.''

It was for Mr. Adams to reply to arguments like these. We know his opinions, and we know his character. He would commence with his accustomed directness and earnestness :

"Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true 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 life and his own honor? Are you not, 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 1 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 mean 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 defense 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.

"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 began, 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 forever.'' (Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Co., Boston.)

THE POWER OF HABIT

BY JOHN B. GOUGH

I remember once riding from Buffalo to the Niagara Falls. I said to a gentleman, "What river is that, sir?" "That/' he said, "is the Niagara River." "Well, it is a beautiful stream," said I, "bright, and fair, and glassy. How far off are the rapids?" "Only a mile or two," was the reply. "Is it possible that only one mile from us we shall find the water in the turbulence which it must show near to the Falls V' " You will find it so, sir.''

And so I found it; and the first sight of Niagara Falls I shall never forget. Now launch your bark on that Niagara River; it is bright, smooth, beautiful, and glassy. There is a ripple at the bow; the silver wake you leave behind adds to your enjoyment. Down the stream you glide, oars, sails, and helm in proper trim; and you set out on your pleasure excursion. Suddenly some one cries out from the bank, " Young men, ahoy!"

"What is it?"

"The rapids are below you."

'' Ha, ha! We have heard of the rapids; but we are not such fools as to get there. If we go too fast, then we shall up with the helm, and steer to the shore; we will set the mast in the socket, hoist the sail, and speed to the land. Then on, boys; don't be alarmed; there is no danger."

"Young men, ahoy, there!"

"What is it?"

"The rapids are below you!"

"Ha ha! We shall laugh and quaff; all things delight us. What care we for the future? No man ever saw it. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. We will enjoy life while we may; will catch pleasure as it flies. This is enjoyment; time enough to steer out of danger when we are sailing swiftly with the current."

"Young men, ahoy!"

"What is it?"

"Beware! Beware! The rapids are below you!"

Now you see the water foaming all around. See how fast you pass that point! Up with the helm! Now turn.

Pull hard! quick! quick! quick! pull for your lives; pull till the blood starts from your nostrils, and the veins stand like whipcords upon your brow. Set the mast in the socket! Hoist the sail! Ah! ah! it is too late! Shrieking, cursing, howling, blaspheming, over they go.

Thousands go over the rapids every year, through the power of habit, crying all the while, "When I find out that it is injuring me, I will give it up."

We see sometimes, on our city streets, placards posted, "Lost! Lost! Lost!" And I stop sometimes to think of the cherished treasure that is gone, the heartache at its loss, the longing for its return. On those same streets we hear sometimes, in the calm of the evening's deepening twilight, the ringing of the crier's bell, and his shrill voice, shouting, *' Child lost! Child lost!'' Yes! a child lost, away from the comfort and brightness of home, gone from the father's smile and the mother's fond embrace, strayed out into the night, alone, amid its dreary, coming blackness. But the lost treasure is merely material; and the child is still in the pathway of loving humanity, still within the enfolding arms of an all-loving God.

But the drunkards! Lost! lost! lost! fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, lost to friends, to families, to loved ones, to society; lost to the world, to the church; and lost, forever lost, from the circle of the redeemed that shall gather around God's throne over the rapids, and lost. ("Platform Echoes," copyrighted 1877 by A. D. Worthington & Co., Hartford, Conn.)

INVECTIVE AGAINST CORRY

BY HENRY GRATTAN

Has the gentleman done? has he completely done? He was unparliamentary from the beginning to the end of his speech. There was -scarce a word uttered that was not a violation of the privileges of the House. But I did not call him to order why? Because the limited talents of some men render it impossible for them to be severe without being unparliamentary. But before I sit down, I shall show him how to be severe and parliamentary at the same time.

On any other occasion, I should think myself justified in treating with silent contempt anything which might fall from that honorable member; but there are times when the insignificance of the accuser is lost in the magnitude of the accusation. I know the difficulty the honorable gentleman labored under when he attacked me, conscious that, on a comparative view of our characters, public and private, there is nothing he could say which would injure me. The public would not believe the charge. I despise the falsehood. If such a charge were made by an honest man, I would answer it in the manner I shall do before I sit down. But I shall first reply to it, when not made by an honest man.

The right honorable gentleman has called me "an unim-peached traitor/' I ask why not "traitor," unqualified by any epithet? I will tell him; it was because he dare not. It was the act of a coward who raises his arm to strike, but has not the courage to give the blow. I will not call him villain, because it would be unparliamentary, and he is a Privy Councilor. I will not call him fool, because he happens to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. But I say, he is one who has abused the privilege of Parliament and freedom of debate by uttering language, which, if spoken out of the House, I should answer only with a blow. I care not how high his situation, how low his character, how contemptible his speech; whether a Privy Councilor or a parasite, my answer would be a blow.

He has charged me with being connected with the rebels. The charge is utterly, totally, and meanly false. Does the honorable gentleman rely on the report of the House of Lords for the foundation of his assertion? If he does, I can prove to the committee that there was a physical impossibility of that report being true. But I scorn to answer any man for my conduct, whether he be a political coxcomb, or whether he brought himself into power by a false glare of courage or not.

I have returned, not as the right honorable member has said, to raise another storm, I have returned to discharge an honorable debt of gratitude to my country, that conferred a great reward for past services, which, I am proud to say, was not greater than my desert. I have returned to protect that constitution, of which I was the parent and the founder, from the assassination of such men as the honorable gentleman and his unworthy associates. They are corrupt, they are seditious, and they, at this very moment, are in a conspiracy against their country. I have returned to refute a libel, as false as it is malicious, given to the public under the appellation of a report of the committee of the Lords. Here I stand ready for impeachment or trial: I dare accusation. I defy the honorable gentleman; I defy the government; I defy their whole phalanx: let them come forth. I tell the ministers I will neither give them quarter nor take it. I am here to lay the shattered remains of my constitution on the floor of this House in defense of the liberties of my country.

TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE

BY WENDELL. PHILLIPS

If I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. "Were I to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts, you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Tous-saint L'Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle.

Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army out of what? Englishmen, the best blood in Europe. Out of the middle class of Englishmen, the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen, their equals. This man manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed and, as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt, and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now if Cromwell was a general, this man was a soldier.

Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro, rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons, anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams, before any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival States makes up for this inspired black of St. Domingo.

Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro's sword.

I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his dominions.

You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L 'Ouverture. (Reprinted by permission of the publishers and holders of copyright, Lee and Shepard, Boston.)

THE SECRET OF LINCOLN'S POWER

BY HENRY WATTERSON

What was Lincoln's mysterious power, and whence?

His was the genius of common sense; of common sense in action; of common sense in thought; of common sense enriched by experience and unhindered by fear. Inspired, he was truly, as Shakespeare was inspired; as Mozart was inspired; as Burns was inspired; each, like him, sprung directly from the people.

I look into the crystal globe, that, slowly turning, reveals the story of his life, and I see a little broken-hearted boy, weeping by the outstretched form of a dead mother, then bravely, nobly trudging a hundred miles to obtain her Christian burial. I see this motherless lad growing to manhood amid scenes that seem to lead to nothing but abasement: no teachers; no books; no chart, except his own untutored mind; no compass, except his own undisciplined will; no light, save light from Heaven; yet, like the caravel of Columbus, struggling on and on through the trough of the sea, always toward the destined land. I see the full-grown man, stalwart and brave, an athlete in activity of movement and strength of limb, yet vexed by weird dreams and visions of life, of love, of religion, sometimes verging on despair. I see the mind, grown as robust as the body, throw off these phantoms of the imagination and give itself to the practical uses of this work-a-day world; the rearing of children; the earning of bread; the cumulous duties of the husband, the father, and the citizen. I see the party leader, self-confident in conscious rectitude; original, because it was not his nature to follow; potent, because he was fearless, pursuing his convictions with earnest zeal, and urging them upon his fellows with the resources of an oratory which was hardly more impressive than it was many-sided. I see him, the preferred among his fellows, ascend to the eminence ordained for him, and him alone among the statesmen of the time, amid the derision of opponents and the distrust of supporters, yet unwed and unmoved, because thoroughly equipped to meet the emergency. The same being, from first to last: the little boy weeping over a dead mother; the great chief sobbing amid the cruel horrors of war, flinching not from duty, nor changing his lifelong ways of dealing with the stern realities which pressed upon him and hurried him forward. And, last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history, I see him lying dead there in the capitol of the nation, to which he had rendered "the last, full measure of his devotion," the flag of his country wrapped about him, and the world in mourning at his feet. Surely, he was one of God's elect; not in any sense a creature of circumstance, or accident, or chance.

The inspired are few. Whence their emanation, where and how they got their power, by what rule they lived, moved and had their being, we know not. There is no explanation to their lives. They rose from shadow and they went in mist. We see them, feel them, but we know them not. They came, God's word upon their lips; they did their office, God's mantle about them; and they vanished, God's holy light between the world and them, leaving behind a memory, half mortal and half myth. From first to last they were the creations of some special Providence.

Tried by this standard, where shall we find an illustration more impressive than Abraham Lincoln, whose career might be chanted by a Greek chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial theme of modern times?

Where did Shakespeare get his genius? Where did Mozart get his music? God, God, and God alone; and as surely as these were raised up by God, inspired by God, was Abraham Lincoln; and a thousand years hence, no story, no tragedy, no epic poem will be filled with greater wonder, or be followed by mankind with deeper feeling, than that which tells of his life and death.

THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

BY HENRY WARD BEECHER

Republican institutions have been vindicated in this experience as they never were before; and the whole history of the last four years, rounded up by this cruel stroke, seems, in the providence of God, to have been clothed, now, with an illustration, with a sympathy, with an aptness, and with a significance, such as we never could have expected nor imagined. God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event, to all nations of the earth: '' Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.''

Even he who now sleeps has, by this event, been clothed with new influence. Dead, he speaks to men who now willingly hear what before they refused to listen to. Now his simple and weighty words will be gathered like those of Washington, and your children, and your children's children, shall be taught to ponder the simplicity and deep wisdom of utterances which, in their time, passed, in party heat, as idle words. Men will receive a new impulse of patriotism for his sake, and will guard with zeal the whole country which he loved so well. I swear you, on the altar of his memory, to be more faithful to the country for which he has perished. They will, as they follow his hearse, swear a new hatred to that slavery against which he warred, and which, in vanquishing him, has made him a martyr and a conqueror. I swear you, by the memory of this martyr, to hate slavery with an unappeasable hatred. They will admire and imitate the firmness of this man, his inflexible conscience for the right; and yet his gentleness, as tender as a woman's, his moderation of spirit, which not all the heat of party could inflame, nor all the jars and disturbances of this country shake out of its place. I swear you to an emulation of his justice, his moderation, and his mercy.

You I can comfort; but how can I speak to that twilight million to whom his name was as the name of an angel of God? There will be wailing in places which no minister shall be able to reach. When, in hovel and in cot, in wood and in wilderness, in the field throughout the South, the dusky children, who looked upon him as that Moses whom God sent before them to lead them out of the land of bondage, learn that he has fallen, who shall comfort them? O thou Shepherd of Israel, that didst comfort thy people of old, to thy care we commit the helpless, the long-wronged, and grieved.

And now the martyr is moving in triumphal march, mightier than when alive. The nation rises up at every stage of his coming. Cities and states are his pallbearers, and the cannon beats the hours with solemn progression. Dead, dead, DEAD, he yet speaketh. Is Washington dead? Is Hampden dead? Is David dead? Is any man that ever was fit to live dead? Disenthralled of flesh, and risen in the unobstructed sphere where passion never comes, he begins his illimitable work. His life now is grafted upon the infinite, and will be fruitful as no earthly life can be. Pass on, thou that hast overcome!

Your sorrows, O people, are his peace! Your bells, and bands, and muffled drums sound triumph in his ear. Wail and weep here; God makes its echo joy and triumph there. Pass on!

Four years ago, O Illinois! we took from your midst an untried man, and from among the people. We return him to you a mighty conqueror. Not thine any more, but the nation's; not ours, but the world's. Give him peace, O ye prairies!

In the midst of this great continent his dust shall rest, a sacred treasure to myriads who shall pilgrim to that shrine to kindle anew their zeal and patriotism. Ye winds that move over the mighty places of the West, chant his requiem! Ye people, behold a martyr whose blood, as so many articulate words, pleads for fidelity, for law, for liberty! ("Patriotic Addresses/' copyright by Pilgrim Press, Boston.)

INAUGURAL ADDRESS

BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

MY FELLOW CITIZENS: No people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with gratitude to the Giver of Good, who has blessed us with the conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of well-being and of happiness. To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent. We are the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which, in old countries, are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization.

We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race, and yet our life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away. Under such conditions it would be our fault if we failed, and the success which we have had in the past, the success which we confidently believe the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of vain glory, but rather a deep and abiding realization ot all which life has offered us; a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours, and a fixed determination to show that under a free government a mighty people can thrive best, alike as regards the things of the body and the things of the soul.

Much has been given to us and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves, and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities. Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words but in our deeds that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights.

But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong. While ever careful to refrain from wronging others, we must be no less insistent that we are not wronged ourselves. We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right and not because we are afraid.

No weak nation that acts rightly and justly should ever have cause to fear us, and no ^strong power should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent aggression. Our relations with the other powers of the world are important; but still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population and in power as this nation has seen during the century and a quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied by a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation that rises to greatness.

Power invariably means both responsibility and danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils the very existence of which it was impossible that they should foresee. Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a democratic republic.

The conditions which have told of our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance and individual initiative, also have brought the care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind.

If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations; and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn. There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.

Yet, after all, tho the problems are new, tho the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and preserved this republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the free men who compose it.

But we have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our children's children.

To do so, we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the every-day affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood and endurance, and above all the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.

A VISION OF WAR AND A VISION OF THE FUTURE

BY ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the great struggle for national life. We hear the sounds of preparation the music of boisterous drums the silver voices of heroic bugles. We see thousands of assemblages, and hear the appeals of orators. We see the pale cheeks of women, and the flushed faces of men; and in those assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers. We lose sight of them no more. We are with them when they enlist in the great army of freedom. We see them part with those they love. Some are walking for the last time in quiet, woody places, with the maidens they adore. We hear the whisperings and the sweet vows of eternal love as they lingeringly part forever. Others are bending over cradles, kissing babes that are asleep. Some are receiving the blessings of old men. Some are parting with mothers who hold them and press them to their hearts again and again, and say nothing. Kisses and tears, tears and kisses; divine mingling of agony and love! And some are talking with wives, and endeavoring with brave words, spoken in the old tones, to drive from their hearts the awful fear. We see them part. We. see the wife standing in the door with the babe in her arms standing in the sunlight sobbing. At the turn of the road a hand waves she answers by holding high in her loving arms the child. He is gone, and forever.

We see them all as they march proudly away under the flaunting flags, keeping time to the grand, wild music of war marching down the streets of the great cities through the towns and across the prairies down to the fields of glory, to do and to die for the eternal right.

We go with them, one and all. We are by their side on all the gory fields in all the hospitals of pain on all the weary marches. We stand guard with them on the wild storm and under the quiet stars. We are with them in ravines running with blood in the furrows of old fields. We are with them between contending hosts, unable to move, wild with thirst, the life ebbing slowly away among the withered leaves. We see them pierced by balls and torn with shells, in the trenches, by forts, and in the whirlwind of the charge, where men become iron, with nerves of steel.

We are with them in the prisons of hatred and famine; but human speech can never tell what they endured.

We are at home when the news comes that they are dead. We see the maiden in the shadow of her first sorrow. We see the silvered head of the old man bowed with the last grief.

The past rises before us, and we see four millions of human beings governed by the lash! We see them bound hand and foot; we hear the strokes of cruel whips; we see the hounds tracking women through tangled swamps; we see babes sold from the breasts of mothers. Cruelty unspeakable! Outrage infinite!

Four million bodies in chains four million souls in fetters! All the sacred relations of wife, mother, father, and child trampled beneath the brutal feet of might. And all this was done under our own beautiful banner of the free.

The past rises before us. We hear the roar and shriek of the bursting shell. The broken fetters fall. These heroes died. We look. Instead of slaves we see men and women and children. The wand of progress touches the auction block, the slave pen, the whipping post, and we see homes and firesides and schoolhouses and books, and where all was want and crime and cruelty and fear, we see the faces of the free.

These heroes are dead. They died for liberty they died for us. They are at rest. They sleep in the land they made free, under the flag they rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the tearful willows, and the embracing vines. They sleep beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of storm, each in the windowless Palace of Rest. Earth may run red with other wars they are at peace. In the midst of battle, in the roar of conflict, they found the serenity of death. I have one sentiment for soldiers living and dead: Cheers for the living; tears for the dead.

A vision of the future rises:

I see our country filled with happy homes, with firesides of content, the foremost land of all the earth.

I see a world where thrones have crumbled and where kings are dust. The aristocracy of idleness has perished from the earth.

I see a world without a slave. Man at last is free. Nature's forces have by science been enslaved. Lightning and light, wind and wave, frost and flame, and all the secret, subtle powers of earth and air are the tireless toilers for the human race.

I see a world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music's myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth, a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which the gibbet's shadow does not fall; a world where labor reaps its full reward; where work and worth go hand in hand; where the poor girl trying to win bread with the needle the needle, that has been called '' the asp for the breast of the poor'' is not driven to the desperate choice of crime or death, of suicide or shame.

I see a world without the beggar's outstretched palm, the miser's heartless, stony stare, the piteous wail of want, the livid lips of lies, the cruel eyes of scorn.

I see a race without disease of flesh or brain shapely and fair, the married harmony of form and function and, as I look, life lengthens, joy deepens, love canopies the earth; and over all, in the great dome, shines the eternal star of human hope.

GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH

BY PATRICK HENRY

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 offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason toward my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward 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 she 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 anything 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 everything 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 has 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