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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 to 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 defence 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. The war, then, must go on. We must fight it through. And, if the war must go on, why put off longer the declaration of independence? That measure will strengthen us. If we fail, it can be no worse for us. But we

shall not fail. The cause will raise up armies ; the cause will create navies. The people, if we are true to them, will carry us, and will carry themselves, gloriously through this struggle. DANIEL WEBSTER.

30. THE SAME.-PART SECOND.

SIR, the declaration will inspire the people with increased courage. Instead of a long and bloody war for restoration of privileges, for redress of grievances, for chartered immunities, held under a British king, set before them the glorious object of entire independence, and it will breathe into them anew the breath of life. Read this declaration at the head of the army: every sword will be drawn from its scabbard, and the solemn vow uttered, to maintain it or to perish on the bed of honor. Publish it from the pulpit: religion will approve it, and the love of religious liberty will cling around it, resolved to stand with it, or fall with it. Send it to the public halls; proclaim it there let them hear it, who heard the first roar of the enemy's cannon let them see it, who saw their brothers and their sons fall on the field of Bunker Hill, and in the streets of Lexington and Concord,-and the very walls will cry out in its support.

Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs; but 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. If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the

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poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready, at the appointed hour of sacrifice-come when that hour may.

But, whatever may be our fate, 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 am, all that I have, and all that I hope for, in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it. Sink or swim, 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! DANIEL WEBSTER.

31.

ENCROACHMENTS ON THE CONSTITUTION.

WHETHER the consequences be prejudicial or not, if there pe an illegal exercise of power, it is to be resisted in the proper manner. Even if no harm or inconvenience result from transgressing the boundary, the intrusion is not to be suffered to pass unnoticed. Every encroachment, great or small, is important enough to awaken the attention of those who are intrusted with the preservation of a constitutional government. We are not to wait till great public mischiefs come, till the government is overthrown, or liberty itself put in extreme jeopardy. We should not be worthy sons of our fathers, were we so to regard great questions affecting the general freedom. Those fathers accomplished the revolution on a strict question of principle. The parliament of Great Britain asserted a right to tax the colonies in all cases whatsoever, and it was precisely on this question that they made the revolution turn. The amount of taxation was trifling, but the claim itself was inconsistent with liberty; and that was, in their eyes, enough. It was against the recital of an act of parliament, rather than against any suffering under its enactments that they took up arms. They

went to war against a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration. They poured out their treasures and their blood like water, in a contest, in opposition to an assertion, which those less sagacious and not so well schooled in the principles of civil liberty would have regarded as barren phraseology, or mere parade of words. They saw in the claim of the British parliament a seminal principle of mischief, the germ of unjust power; they detected it, dragged it forth from underneath its plausible disguises, struck at it, nor did it elude either their steady eye, or their well-directed blow, till they had extirpated and destroyed it, to the smallest fibre. On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts; whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

32. THE SENTINELS OF LIBERTY.

WHEN the members of this house shall lose the freedom of speech and debate; when they shall surrender the right of publicly and freely canvassing all important measures of the executive; when they shall not be allowed to maintain their own authority and their own privileges by vote, declaration, or resolution, they will then be no longer free representatives of a free people, but slaves themselves, and fit instruments to make slaves of others.

Sir, if the people have a right to discuss the official conduct of the executive, so have their representatives. We have been taught to regard a representative of the people as a sentinel on the watch-tower of liberty. Is he to be blind, though visible danger approaches? Is he to be deaf, though sounds of peril fill the air? Is he to be dumb, while a thousand duties impel him to raise the cry of alarm? Is he not, rather, to catch the lowest whisper which breathes intention or purpose of encroachment on the public liberties, and to give his voice breath and utterance at the first appearance of danger? not his eye to traverse the whole horizon, with the keen and

Is

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eager vision of an unhooded hawk, detecting, through all disguises, every enemy advancing, in any form, towards the citadel which he guards? Sir, this watchfulness for public liberty, this duty of foreseeing danger and proclaiming it, this promptitude and boldness in resisting attacks on the constitution from any quarter, this defence of established landmarks, this fearless resistance of whatever would transcend or remove them, all belong to the representative character, are interwoven with its very nature, and of which it cannot be deprived, without converting an active, intelligent, faithful agent of the people into an unresisting and passive instrument of power. A representative body which gives up these rights and duties, gives itself up. It is a representative body no longer. It has broken the tie between itself and its constituents, and henceforth is fit only to be regarded as an inert, self-sacrificed mass, from which all appropriate principle of vitality has departed forever.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

33. BUNKER-HILL MONUMENT.

THE Bunker-Hill monument is finished. Here it stands. Fortunate in the natural eminence on which it is placed,-higher, infinitely higher, in its objects and purpose, it rises over the land, and over the sea; and visible, at their homes, to three hundred thousand citizens of Massachusetts,-it stands, a memorial of the last, and a monitor to the present, and all succeeding generations. I have spoken of the loftiness of its purpose. If it had been without any other design than the creation of a work of art, the granite of which it is composed would have slept in its native bed. It has a purpose; and that purpose gives it character. That purpose enrobes it with dignity and moral grandeur. That well-known purpose it is which causes us to look up to it with a feeling of awe. It is itself the orator of this occasion. It is not from my lips, it is not from any human lips, that that strain of eloquence is this day to flow, most competent to move and excite the vast multitudes around. The potent speaker stands motionless before them. It is a plain shaft. It bears no inscriptions, fronting to the rising sun, from which the future antiquarian shall wipe the dust. Nor does the rising sun cause tones of music to issue from its summit. But at the rising of the sun, and at the setting of the sun, in the blaze of noon-day, and beneath the milder effulgence of lunar

light, it looks, it speaks, it acts, to the full comprehension of every American mind, and the awakening of glowing enthusiasm in every American heart. Its silent, but awful utterance; its deep pathos, as it brings to our contemplation the 17th of June, 1775, and the consequences which have resulted to us, to our country, and to the world; from the events of that day, and which we know must continue to rain influence on the destinies of mankind, to the end of time; the elevation with which it raises us high above the ordinary feelings of life; surpass all that the study of the closet, or even the inspiration of genius, can produce. To-day, it speaks to us. Its future auditories will be through successive generations of men, as they rise up before it, and gather round it. Its speech will be of patriotism and courage; of civil and religious liberty; of free government; of the moral improvement and elevation of mankind; and of the immortal memory of those who, with heroic devotion, have sacrificed their lives for their country.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

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34. THE CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON.

AMERICA has furnished to the world the character of Washington! And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind. Washington!" First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen !"-Washington is all our own! The enthusiastic veneration and regard in which the people of the United States hold him, prove them to be worthy of such a countryman; while his reputation abroad reflects the highest honor on his country and its institutions. I would cheerfully put the question to-day to the intelligence of Europe and the world, what character of the century, upon the whole, stands out in the relief of history, most pure, most respectable, most sublime; and I doubt not, that, by a suffrage approaching to unanimity, the answer would be, Washington!

This structure,* by its uprightness, its solidity, its durability, is no unfit emblem of his character. His public virtues and public principles were as firm as the earth on which it stands; his personal motives as pure as the serene heaven in which its summit is lost. But, indeed, though a fit, it is an inadequate emblem. Towering high above the column which our hands have builded, beheld, not by the inhabitants of a single city, or a single State, ascends the colossal grandeur of his character, * Bunker-Hill Monument.

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