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you will become of that system? How long will it last, after the payment of duties shall come to be considered as a badge of servitude?

IB. I

X.-ON INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.
House of Representatives, Jan., 1819.

On this subject of national power, what can be more important than a perfect unity in every part, in feelings and sentiments? And what can tend more powerfully to produce it, than overcoming the effects of distance? No country, enjoying freedom, ever occupied any thing like as great an extent of country as this republic. One hundred years ago, the most profound philosophers did not believe it to be even possible. They did not suppose it possible that a pure republic could exist on as great a scale, even, as the island of Great Britain. What then was considered as chimerical, we have now the felicity to enjoy; and, what is most remarkable, such is the happy mould of our govern ment, so well are the state and general powers blended, that much of our political happiness draws its origin from the extent of our republic. It has exempted us from most of the causes which distracted the small republics of antiquity.

Let it not, however, be forgotten, let it be forever kept in mind, that it exposes us to the greatest of all calamities, next to the loss of liberty, and even to that in its consequences, disunion. We are great, and rapidly, I was about to say fearfully, growing. This is our pride and our danger, our weakness and our strength. Little does he deserve to be intrusted with the liberties of this people, who does not raise his mind to these truths. We are under the most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion.

The strongest of all cem'ents is, undoubtedly, the wisdom, justice, and, above all, the moderation of this house; yet the great subject on which we are now deliberating, in this respect, deserves the most serious consideration. Whatever impedes the intercourse of the extremes with this, the center of the republic, weakens the Union. The more enlarged the sphere of commercial circulation, the more extended that of social intercourse—the more strongly we are bound together, the more inseparable are our destinies.

Those who understand the human heart best know how powerfully distance tends to break the sympathies of our nature. Nothing, not even dissimilarity of language, tends more to estrange man from man. Let us, then, bind the republic together

EFFECT OF OUR NAVAL VICTORIES.

167

with a perfect system of roads and canals! Let us conquer space! It is thus the most distant part of the republic will be brought within a few days' travel of the center; it is thus that a citizen of the West will read the news of Boston still moist from the press.

J. C. CALHOUN.

XI.-EFFECT OF OUR NAVAL VICTORIES.

THIS country is left alone to support the rights of neutrals. Perilous is the condition, and arduous the task. We are not intimidated. We stand opposed to British usurpation, and by our spirit and efforts have done all in our power to save the last vestiges of neutral rights. Yes, our embargoes, non-intercourse, non-importation, and, finally, war, are all manly exertions to preserve the rights of this and other nations from the deadly grasp of British maritime policy.

But, say our opponents, these efforts are lost, and our condition hopeless. If so, it only remains for us to assume the garb of our condition. We must submit, humbly submit, crave pardon, and hug our chains. It is not wise to provoke where we can not

resist.

But first let us be well assured of the hopelessness of our state before we sink into submission. On what do our opponents rest their despondent and slavish belief? On the recent events in Europe? I admit they are great, and well calculated to impose on the imagination. Our enemy never presented a more imposing exterior. His fortune is at the flood. But I am admonished by universal experience that such prosperity is the most precarious of human conditions. From the flood the tide dates its ebb. From the meridian the sun commences his decline. Depend upon it, there is more of sound philosophy than of fiction in the fickleness which poets attribute to fortune. Prosperity has its weakness, adversity its strength. In many respects, our enemy has lost by those very changes which seem so very much in his favor. He can no more claim to be struggling for existence; no more to be fighting the battles of the world in defence of the liberties of mankind. The magic cry of "French influence" is lost. In this very hall, we are not strangers to that sound. Here, even here, the cry of "French influence," that baseless fiction, that phantom of faction now banished, often resounded. I rejoice that the spell is broken by which it was attempted to bind the spirit of this youthful nation. The minority can no longer act under cover, but must come out and defend their opposition on its own intrinsic merits.

But

Our example can scarcely fail to produce its effects on other nations interested in the main'tenance of maritime rights. if, unfortunately, we should be left alone to maintain the contest, and if-which may Heaven forbid !-necessity should compel us to yield for the present, yet our generous efforts will not have been lost. A mode of thinking and a tone of sentiment have gone abroad which must stimulate to future and more successful struggles. What could not be done with eight millions of people will be done with twenty. The great cause will never be yielded; no, never, never! I hear the future audibly announced in the past, in the splendid victories over the Guerriére,* Java, and, Macedonian. We and all nations, by these victories, are taught a lesson never to be forgotten. Opinion is power. The charm of British naval invincibility is gone.

IB.

XII. OUR NATIONAL CITIZENSHIP.

SIR, proud as I am of the title of citizen of Virginia, grateful as I am for the unmerited favor which that honored mother has shown me, I yet feel, with the Father of the Country, that "the just pride of patriotism is exalted" by the more comprehensive title of citizen of the United States, that title which gives me a share in the common inheritance of glory which has descended to us from our Revolutionary sages, patriots, and heroes; that title which enables me to claim the names of the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, and the Sumpters, of South Carolina, of the Hancocks, the Adamses, and the Otises, of Massachusetts, and all the other proud names which have illustrated the annals of cach and all of these States, as " copatriot with my own."

In reviewing, Mr. President, the fundamental tenets of that new school of constitutional law, which has sprung up within the last four or five eventful years of our political history, I have endeavored to show that they have no foundation whatever in any just view of the constitution, that they are directly at war with the cotemporary understanding and expositions of its founders, and that they derive no countenance whatever from the principles of that genuine republican school, which reëstablished the constitution in its purity, after the temporary perversions to which it had been subjected.

These modern doctrines, I do firmly believe, are, in their tendency, utterly subversive of that happy system of government,

* Pronounced Gerryair.

WAR UNDER THE GUISE OF PEACE.

169

the preservation of which is not only the sole security for liberty with us, but the last hope of freedom throughout the world. If, in the depth of these convictions, I shall have fallen into a warmer tone of discussion than is my habit, it will be attributed, I trust, to its true cause, and not to any want of proper respect or kind feeling towards the members, one and all, of this body.

Sir, we live in times when it is a solemn duty which every man owes his country to speak his opinions, without disguise or equivocation, even at the risk of giving offense to some of those whom it would be his greatest pleasure, as well as highest ambition, to content in all things. I have been already admonished, sir, that a sword is, at this moment, suspended over my head, which may descend and sever the worthless thread of my political existence, for the act of public duty I am now performing. Sir, if it should be so, I shall have at least one consolation, the consciousness of having fallen in the defence of the constitution of my country, and of that liberty which is indissolubly connected with it.

WM. C. RIVES (1833).

XIII.-WAR UNDER THE GUISE OF PEACE.

SIR, I have been exceedingly struck, while listening to gentlemen, with the fact that while the ends and objects at which they aim are all so pacific, their speeches are strewn and sown thick, broad-cast, with so much of the food and nourishment of war. Their ends and objects are peace - a treaty of peace; but their means and their topics wear a certain incongruous grimness of aspect. The "bloom is on the rye;" but, as you go near, you see bayonet-points sparkling beneath, and are fired upon by a thousand men in ambush! The end they aim at is peace; the means of attaining it are an offensive and absurd threat.

but

I declare, sir, that while listening to senators whose sincerity and patriotism I can not doubt, and to this conflict of topics and objects with which they half-bewilder me, I was forcibly reminded of that consum'mate oration in the streets of Rome, by one who "came to bury Cæsar, not to praise him." He did not wish to stir up any body to mutiny and rage! O, no! He would not have a finger lifted against the murderers of his and the people's friend not he! He feared he wronged them. Yet who has not admired the exquisite address and the irresistible effect with which he returns again and again to "sweet Cæsar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths," and puts a tongue in each, familiar mantle, first worn on the evening of the day his great friend overcame the Nervii, now pierced by the cursed steel of

-to the

Cassius, of the envious Casca, of the well-beloved Brutus, - to his legacy of drachmas, arbors, and orchards, to the people of Rome, whose friend, whose benefactor, he shows to them, all marred by traitors,- till the mob break away from his words of more than fire, with:

"We will be revenged!- Revenge! About!
Seek - burn - fire-

--

- kill - slay !—let not a traitor live!"

Antony was insincere. Senators are wholly sincere. Yet the contrast between their pacific professions and that revelry of belligerent topics and sentiments which rings and flashes in their speeches here, half suggests a doubt to me, sometimes, whether they or I perfectly know what they mean or what they desire. They promise to show you a garden; and you look up to see nothing but a wall "with dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms!" They propose to teach you how peace is to be preserved; and they do it so exquisitely that you go away half inclined to issue letters of marque and reprisal to-morrow morning.

The proposition is peace; but the audience rises and goes off with a sort of bewildered and unpleasing sensation, that if there were a thousand men in all America as well disposed as the orator, peace might be preserved; but that, as the case stands, it is just about hopeless! I ascribe it altogether to their anxious and tender concern for peace, that senators have not a word to say about the good she does, but only about the danger she is in. They have the love of compassion, not the love of desire. Not a word about the countless blessings she scatters from her golden urn; but only "the pity of it, Iago! the pity of it!" to think how soon the dissonant clangor of a thousand brazen throats may chase that bloom from her cheek,

"And Death's pale flag be quick advanced there."

Sir, no one here can say one thing and mean another; yet much may be meant, and nothing directly said. "The dial spoke not, but pointed full upon the stroke of murder."

СНОАТЕ.

XIV. DESTINY OF THE UNITED STATES.

ONE of England's own writers has said: "The possible destiny of the United States of America, as a nation of one hundred millions of freemen, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august conception." Sir, it is an

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