unreserved, and practical union of the people, intended by themselves to be perpetual? Did they not, as perfectly as any people ever did, constitute and declare themselves a single and undivided nation? Is there in all history an instance of such a union among a people who did not feel themselves to be, in every important particular, the same people? Why, even before the Union was a fact in history, the feeling in the North in reference to it was expressed by James Otis, one of the leading patriots of Massachusetts, in the Convention of 1765, in the hope that a union would be formed which should "knit and work together into the very blood and bones of the original system, every region, as fast as settled;" and from distant South Carolina, greathearted Christopher Gadsden answered back, "There ought to be no New-England man, no New-Yorker, known on the continent, but all of us Americans." And in the very hour of the Union's birth-throes, Patrick Henry flashed upon the Congress of 1774 these lightning words: "All America is thrown into one mass. Where are your landmarks,-your boundaries of colonies? They are all thrown down. The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New-Yorkers, and New-Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American." And when, after the Union was a recorded and mighty fact in history, the united people, through their Congress, organized the first form of government for the new-born nation, they solemnly wrote down in the articles of their confederation, "The Union shall be perpetual." CHARLES DANIEL DRAKE. (1861.)

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION.

SIR, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such, because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic

government, being incapable of any other. I doubt, too, whether any other convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better constitution. For when you assemble a number of men, to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our counsels are confounded, like those of the builders of Babel, and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet, hereafter, for the purpose of cutting one another's throats.

Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution, because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that this is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us, in returning to his constituents, were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects and great advantages resulting naturally in our favor, among foreign nations, as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength and efficacy of any government, in procuring and securing happiness to the people, depends on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of that government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors. I hope, therefore, that for our own sakes, as a part of the people, and for the sake of our posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution, wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts and endeavors to the means of having it well administered.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

A REPUBLIC THE STRONGEST GOVERNMENT.

(Extract from First Inaugural Address after the bitter Presidential canvass in 1800.)

THE contest being now decided by the voice of the nation, and announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.

Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind; let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little, if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking, through blood and slaughter, his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some, and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety: but, every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.

We have called, by different names, brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand, undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has, so far, kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, to be the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the stand

ard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Let history answer this question.

THOMAS JEFFERSON.

AMERICAN LIBERTY IS REASONABLE AND JUST.

To the Anglo-Saxon mind, liberty is not apt to be the enthusiast's mountain nymph, with cheeks wet with morning dew, and clear eyes that mirror the heavens; but rather is she an old dowager lady, fatly invested in commerce and manufactures, and peevishly fearful that enthusiasm will reduce her establishment, and panics cut off her dividends.

Our political institutions, again, are but the body, of which liberty is the soul; their preservation depends upon their being continually inspired by the light and heat of the sentiment and idea whence they sprung, and when we timorously suspend, according to the latest political fashion, the truest and dearest maxims of our freedom to the call of expediency or threat of passion; when we convert politics into a mere game of interest, unhallowed by a single great or unselfish principle, we may be sure that our worst passions are busy "forging our fetters;" that we are proposing all those intricate problems which red republicanism so swiftly solves, and giving manifest destiny pertinent hints, to shout new anthems of atheism over victorious rapine.

The liberty which our fathers planted, and for which they sturdily contended, and under which they grandly conquered, is a rational, and temperate, but brave and unyielding freedom; the august mother of institutions; the hardy nurse of enterprise; the sworn ally of justice and order; a liberty that lifts her awful and rebuking face equally upon the cowards who would sell, and the braggarts who would pervert, her precious gifts of rights and obligations.

This liberty we are solemnly bound, at all hazards, to protect; at any sacrifice to preserve; and by all just means to extend, against the unbridled excesses of that ugly and brazen hag,

originally scorned and detested by those who unwisely gave her infancy a home, but which now, in her enormous growth and favored deformity, reels with blood-shot eyes, and dishevelled tresses, and words of unshamed slavishness, into halls where Liberty should sit enthroned.

EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE.

AMERICAN RESPONSIBILITY MEASURED.

WHEN we reflect on what has been, and is, how is it possible not to feel a profound sense of the responsibleness of this republic to all future ages! What vast motives press upon us for lofty efforts! What brilliant prospects invite our enthusiasm! What solemn warnings at once demand our vigilance and moderate our confidence!

The Old World has already revealed to us, in its unsealed books, the beginning and end of all its own marvellous struggles in the cause of liberty. Greece, lovely Greece, "the land of scholars and the nurse of arms," where sister republics, in fair procession, chanted the praises of liberty and the gods, where and what is she? For two thousand years the oppressor has bound her to the earth. Her arts are no more.

The last sad relics of her temples are but the barracks of a ruthless soldiery; the fragments of her columns, and her palaces, are in the dust, yet beautiful in ruin. She fell not when the mighty were upon her. Her sons were united at Thermopyla and Marathon; and the tide of her triumph rolled back upon the Hellespont. She was conquered by her own factions. She fell by the hands of her own people. The man of Macedonia did not the work of destruction. It was already done, by her own corruptions, banishments, and dissensions.

Rome, republican Rome, whose eagles glanced in the rising and setting sun, where and what is she? The Eternal City yet remains, proud even in her desolation, noble in her decline, venerable in the majesty of religion, and calm as in the composure of death. The Malaria has but travelled in the paths worn by her destroyers. More than eighteen centuries have