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culty of the work we have on hand: but they show its necessity too. Our Indian government is, in its best state, a grievance. It is necessary that the correctives should be uncommonly vigorous; and the work of men, sanguine, warm, and even impassioned in the cause. But it is an arduous thing to plead against abuses of a power which originates from your own country, and affects those whom we are used to consider as strangers. From "Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill."

FRENCH LEGITIMACY.

CHARLES PHILLIPS.

You have forced upon France a family to whom misfortune could teach no mercy, or experience wisdom; vindictive in prosperity, servile in defeat, timid in the field, vacillating in the cabinet; suspicion amongst themselves, discontent amongst their followers; their memories tenacious but of the punishments they had provoked; their piety active but in subserviency to their priesthood; and their power passive but in the subjugation of their people! Such are the dynasties you have conferred on Europe. In the very act, that of enthroning three individuals of the same family, you have committed in politics a capital error. But Providence has countermined the ruin you were preparing; and whilst the impolicy prevents the chance, their impotency precludes the danger of a coalition. As to the rest of Europe, how has it been ameliorated? What solitary benefit have the "deliverers" conferred? They have partitioned the states of the feeble to feed the rapacity of the powerful; and after having alternately adored and deserted Napoleon, they have wreaked their vengeance on the noble, but unfortunate fidelity that spurned their example. Do you want proofs; look to Saxony, look to Genoa, look to Norway, but, above all, to Poland! that speaking monument of regal murder and legitimate robbery:

Oh bloodiest picture in the book of time-
Sarmatia fell-unwept-without a crime!

Here was an opportunity to recompense that brave, heroic, generous, martyred, and devoted people; here was an opportunity to convince Jacobinism that crowns and crimes were not, of course, co-existent, and that the highway rapacity of one generation might be atoned by the penitential retribution of another!

From "Speech at Liverpool."

LAFAYETTE IN AMERICA.

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THOMAS H. BENTON.

THE Duke of Orleans, a brave general in the republican armies, at the commencement of the Revolution, was handed to the throne by Lafayette, and became the citizen king, surrounded by republican institutions." And in this Lafayette was consistent and sincere. He was a republican himself, but deemed a constitutional monarchy the proper government for France, and labored for that form in the person of Louis XVI. as well as in that of Louis Philippe.

Loaded with honors, and with every feeling of his heart gratified in the noble reception he had met in the country of his adoption, Lafayette returned to the country of his birth the following summer, still as the guest of the United States, and under its flag. He was carried back in a national ship of war, the new frigate Brandywine-a delicate compliment (in the name and selection of the ship) from the new president, Mr. Adams, Lafayette having wet with his blood the sanguinary battlefield which takes its name from the little stream which gave it first to the field, and then to the frigate. Mr. Monroe, then a subaltern in the service of the United States, was wounded at the same time. How honorable to themselves and to the American people, that nearly fifty years afterwards, they should again appear together, and in exalted station; one as president, inviting the other to the great republic, and signing the acts which testified a nation's gratitude; the other as a patriot hero, tried in the revolutions of two countries, and resplendent in the glory of virtuous and consistent fame.

From "Benton's Thirty Years' View."

THE CEDED LANDS.

JOHN M. BERRIEN.

WHEN, in obedience to the will of the legislature of Georgia, her chief magistrate had communicated to the president his determination to survey the ceded territory, his right to do so was admitted. It was declared by the president that the act would be "wholly" on the responsibility of the government of Georgia, and that "the government of the United States would not be in any manner responsible for any consequences which might result from the measure." When his willingness to encounter this responsibility was announced, it was met by the declaration that the president would "not permit the survey to be made," and he was referred to a major-general of the army of the United States, and one thousand regulars.

The murder of McIntosh-the defamation of the chief magistrate of Georgia-the menace of military force to coerce her to submissionwere followed by the traduction of two of her cherished citizens, em

ployed as the agents of the general government in negotiating the treaty-gentlemen whose integrity will not shrink from a comparison with that of the proudest and loftiest of their accusers. Then the sympathies of the people of the Union were excited in behalf of "the children of the forest," who were represented as indignantly spurning the gold which was offered to entice them from the graves of their fathers, and resolutely determined never to abandon them. The incidents of the plot being thus prepared, the affair hastens to its consummation. A new treaty is negotiated here-a pure and spotless treaty. The rights of Georgia and of Alabama are sacrificed; the United States obtain a part of the lands, and pay double the amount stipulated by the old treaty; and those poor and noble, and unsophisticated sons of the forest, having succeeded in imposing on the simplicity of this government, next concert, under its eye, and with its knowledge, the means of defrauding their own constituents, the chiefs and warriors of the Creek nation,

From "Benton's Thirty Years' View."

THE PROTECTIVE SYSTEM.

GEORGE MCDUFFIE.

THE days of Roman liberty were numbered when the people consented to receive bread from the public granaries. From that moment it was not the patriot who had shown the greatest capacity and made the greatest sacrifices to serve the republic, but the demagogue who would promise to distribute most profusely the spoils of the plundered provinces, that was elevated to office by a degenerate and mercenary populace. Everything became venal, even in the country of Fabricius, until finally the empire itself was sold at public auction! And what, sir, is the nature and tendency of the system we are discussing? It bears an analogy, but too lamentably striking, to that which corrupted the republican purity of the Roman people. God forbid that it should consummate its triumph over the public liberty, by a similar catastrophe, though even that is an event by no means improbable, if we continue to legislate periodically in this way, and to connect the election of our chief magistrate with the question of dividing out the spoils of certain states-degraded into Roman provinces-among the influential capitalists of the other states of this Union! Sir, when I consider that, by a single act like the present, from five to ten millions of dollars may be transferred annually from one part of the community to another; when I consider the disguise of disinterested patriotism under which the basest and most profligate ambition may perpetrate such an act of injustice and political prostitution, I cannot hesitate, for a moment, to pronounce this very system of indirect bounties the most stupendous instrument of corruption ever placed in the hands of public functionaries. From Benton's Thirty Years' View."

THE CHARTER OF RUNNYMEDE.

LORD CHATHAM.

My lords, I have better hopes of the constitution, and a firmer confidence in the wisdom and constitutional authority of this house. It is to your ancestors, my lords, it is to the English barons, that we are indebted for the laws and constitution we possess. Their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere. Their understandings were as little polished as their manners, but they had hearts to distinguish right from wrong; they had heads to distinguish truth from falsehood; they understood the rights of humanity, and they had spirit to maintain them.

My lords, I think that history has not done justice to their conduct, when they obtained from their sovereign, that great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta: they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people. They did not say, these are the rights of the great barons, or these are the rights of the great prelates:-No, my lords; they said, in the simple Latin of the times, nullus liber homo, and provided as carefully for the meanest subject as for the greatest. These are uncouth words, and sound but poorly in the ears of scholars; neither are they addressed to the criticism of scholars, but to the hearts of free men. These three words, nullus liber homo, have a meaning which interests us all: they deserve to be remembered-they deserve to be inculcated in our minds-they are worth all the classics. Let us not, then, degenerate from the glorious example of our ancestors. Those iron barons (for so I may call them when compared with the silken barons of modern days) were the guardians of the people; yet their virtues, my lords, were never engaged in a question of such importance as the present. A breach has been made in the constitution-the battlements are dismantled-the citadel is open to the first invader-the walls totter the constitution is not tenable. What remains, then, but for us to stand foremost in the breach, to repair it, or perish in it?

From "Speech on the Address to the Throne," 1770.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

SIR JAMES MCINTOSH.

THE French revolution began with great and fatal errors. These errors produced atrocious crimes. A mild and feeble monarchy was succeeded by bloody anarchy, which very shortly gave birth to military despotism. France, in a few years, described the whole circle of human society.

All this was in the order of nature. When every principle of autho

rity and civil discipline, when every principle which enables some men to command and disposes others to obey, was extirpated from the mind by atrocious theories, and still more atrocious examples; when every old institution was trampled down with contumely, and every new institution covered in its cradle with blood; when the principle of property itself, the sheet-anchor of society, was annihilated; when in the persons of the new possessors, whom the poverty of language obliges us to call proprietors, it was contaminated in its source by robbery and murder, and it became separated from that education and those manners, from that general presumption of superior knowledge and more scrupulous probity which form its only liberal titles to respect; when the people were taught to despise everything old, and compelled to detest everything new; there remained only one principle strong enough to hold society together, a principle utterly incompatible, indeed, with liberty, and unfriendly to civilization itself, a tyrannical and barbarous principle; but, in that miserable condition of human affairs, a refuge from still more intolerable evils. I mean the principle of military power, which gains strength from that confusion and bloodshed in which all the other elements of society are dissolved, and which, in these terrible extremities, is the cement that preserves it from total destruction.

From "Speech on the Trial of Pellier."

AMERICAN PETITIONS.

LORD CHATHAM.

WHEN your lordships look at the papers transmitted us from America; when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must declare and avow, that in all my reading and observation-and it has been my favorite study-I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world—that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. I trust it is obvious to your lordships, that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retract; let us retract while we can, not when we must. I say we must necessarily undo these violent oppressive acts; they must be repealed-you will repeal them; I pledge myself for it, that you will in the end repeal them; I stake my reputation on it—I will consent to be taken for an idiot, if they are not finally repealed Avoid, then, this humiliating, disgraceful necessity. With a dignity

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