is needless to say will be cast in favor of those who uphold the cause of human liberty. We must resist unceasingly the admission of slave states, and urge and demand the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. We have secured the right of petition, but the federal government continues to be swerved by the influences of slavery as before. This tendency can and must be counteracted; and when one independent Congress shall have been elected, the internal slave-trade will be subjected to inquiry. Amendments to the constitution may be initiated, and the obstacles in the way of emancipation will no longer appear insurmountable.

But, gentlemen, I fear I may appear to dogmatize when I intended only to invoke concession. If I seem to do so too earnestly, it is because I feel so deeply interested in the cause to which your efforts are devoted, and because I believe with Burke, that " Iwe ought to act in political affairs with all the moderation which does not absolutely enervate that vigor, and quench that fervency of spirit, without which the best wishes for the public good must evaporate in empty speculation.". Letter to Hon.

S. P. Chase and Others of Ohio, May, 1845.

COMMERCE.

Public Faith.

No reason for rejecting these claims remains, except that they have not been paid heretofore. But mere lapse of time pays no debts, and discharges no obligations. There has been no release, no waiver, no neglect, no delay, by the creditors. They have been here twenty-five times in fifty years; that is to say, they have appeared in their successive generations, before every Congress since their claims against the United States accrued. Against such claims and such creditors there is no prescription.

It is said, indeed, that the nation is unable to pay these claims I put a single question in reply: When will the nation be more affluent than now?

now.

The senator [Mr. HUNTER] says, again, that, if the debts are just, we should pay the whole, and not a moiety; and that if the claims are unjust, then the bill proposes a gratuity—that in the one case the appropriation is too small, and in the other too great. This is the plea of him who, I think it was in Ephesus, despoiled the statue of Jupiter of its golden robe, saying, “Gold was too warm in summer, and too cold in winter, for the shoulders of the god."

Sir, commerce is one of the great occupations of this nation. It is the fountain of its revenues, as it is the chief agent of its advancement in civilization and enlargement of empire. It is exclusively the care of the federal authorities. It is for the tection of commerce that they pass laws, make treaties, build

*For French Spoliations.

pro

But justice

fortifications, and maintain navies upon all the seas. and good faith are surer defences than treaties, fortifications, or naval armaments. Justice and good faith constitute true national honor, which feels a stain more keenly than a wound. The nation that lives in wealth and in the enjoyment of power, and yet under unpaid obligations, dwells in dishonor and in danger. The nation that would be truly great, or even merely safe, must practise an austere and self-denying morality.

The faith of canonized ancestors, whose fame now belongs to mankind, is pledged to the payment of these debts. "Let the merchants send hither well-authenticated evidences of their claims, and proper measures shall be taken for their relief." This was the promise of Washington. The evidence is here. Let us redeem the sacred and venerable engagement. Through his sagacity and virtue, we have inherited with it ample and abundant resources, and to them we ourselves have added the newlydiscovered wealth of southern plains, and the hidden treasures of the western coast. With the opening of the half century, we are entering upon new and profitable intercourse with the ancient oriental states and races, while we are grappling more closely to us the new states on our own continent. Let us signalize an epoch so important in commerce and politics, by justly discharging ourselves for ever from the yet remaining obligations of the first and most sacred of all our national engagements. While we are growing over all lands, let us be rigorously just to other nations, just to the several states, and just to every class and to every citizen; in short, just in all our administration, and just toward all mankind. So shall prosperity crown all our enterprises-nor shall any disturbance within nor danger from abroad come nigh unto us, nor alarm us for the safety of fireside, or fane, or capitol. Speech on French Spoliation Bill in U. S. Senate, January, 21, 1851.

American Enterprise.

COME, then, senators, and suppose that you stand with me in the galleries of St. Stephen's chapel, on a day so long gone by as the 22d of March, 1775. A mighty debate has been going on here in this august legislature of the British empire. Insur

rection against commercial restriction has broken out in the distant American colonies; a seditious assembly in Philadelphia has organized it; and a brave, patient, unimpassioned, and not untried soldier of Virginia, lies, with hastily-gathered and irregular levies, on the heights of Dorchester, waiting the coming out of the British army from Boston. The question whether Great Britain shall strike, or concede and conciliate, has just been debated and decided. Concession has been denied. A silence, brief but intense, is broken by the often fierce and violent, but now measured and solemn utterance of Burke: "My counsel has been rejected. You have determined to trample upon and extinguish a people who have, in the course of a single life, added to England as much as she had acquired by a progressive increase of improvement, brought on, by varieties of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements, in a series of seventeen hundred years. A vision has passed before my eyes; the spirit of prophecy is upon me. Listen, now, to a revelation of the consequences which shall follow your maddened decision. Henceforth, there shall be division, separation, and eternal conflict in alternating war and peace between you and the child you have oppressed, which has inherited all your indomitable love of liberty and all your insatiable passion for power. Though still in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood, America will, within the short period of sixteen months, cast off your dominion and defy your utmost persecution. Perfecting the institutions you have not yet suffered to ripen, she will establish a republic, the first confederate representative commonwealth, which shall in time become the admiration and envy of the world. France, the hereditary rival whom, only twenty years ago, with the aid of your own colonies, you despoiled of her North American possessions, though they had been strengthened by the genius of Richelieu, will take sweet revenge in aiding the emancipation of those very colonies, and thus dismembering your empire. You will strike her in vain with one hand, while you stretch forth the other to reduce your colonies with equal discomfiture. And you, even you, most infatuated yet most loyal prince, will within eight years sign a treaty of peace with the royal Bourbon, and of independence with republican America! With fraud, corruption, fire and sword, you will compensate

England with conquests in the East, and within half a century they will surround the world, and the British flag shall wave over provinces covering five millions of square miles, and containing one sixth of the people of the globe. Nor shall you lose your retaliation upon your ancient enemy; for she, in the meantime, imbibing and intoxicated by the spirit of revolution in her American affiliation, shall overthrow all authority, human and divine, and, exhausting herself by twenty-five years of carnage and desolation throughout continental Europe, shall at last succumb to your victorious arms, and relapse, after ineffectual struggles, into the embraces of an inglorious military despotism. Yet, notwithstanding all these unsurpassed conquests and triumphs, shall you enjoy no certain or complete dominion. For, on the other hand, wild beasts and savage men and uncouth manners shall all disappear on the American continent; and the three millions whom you now despise, gathering to themselves increase from every European nation and island, will, within seventy-five years, spread themselves over field and forest, prairie and mountain, until, in your way to your provinces in the Bahamas, they shall meet you on the shores of the gulf of Mexico, and on your return from the eastern Indies, they will salute from the eastern coast of the Pacific ocean. In the meantime, with genius developed by the influence of freedom, and with vigor called forth and disciplined in the subjugation of the forest, and trained and perfected in the mysteries of ship-building and navigation, by the hardy exercise of the whale fisheries under either pole, they will, in all European conflicts, with keen sagacity, assume the relation of neutrals, and thus grasp the prize of Atlantic commerce dropped into their hands by fierce belligerents. In the midst of your studies and experiments in hydraulics, steam, and electricity, they will seize the unpractised and even incomplete inventions, and cover their rivers with steamboats, and connect and bind together their widely-separated territories with canals, railroads, and telegraphs. When a long interval of peace shall have come, your merchants, combining a vast capital, will regain and hold for a time the carrying trade, by substituting capacious, buoyant, and fleet packet-ships. departing and arriving with exact punctuality; but the Americans, quickly borrowing the device, and improving on your

you