otherwise be thrown off-if liberty must perish, or the government be overthrown-I would not hesitate, at the hazard of life, to resort to revolution, and to tear down a corrupt government, that could neither be reformed nor borne by freemen. But I trust in God that things will never come to that pass. I trust never to see such fearful times; for fearful indeed they would be, if they should ever befall us. It is the last remedy, and not to be thought of till common sense and the voice of mankind would justify the resort.

J. C. CALHOUN.

CX.-POLITICAL CORRUPTION.

1. WE are apt to treat the idea of our own corruptibility as utterly visionary, and to ask, with a grave affectation of dignity-what! do you think a member of congress can be corrupted? Sir, I speak what I have long and deliberately considered, when I say, that since man was created, there never has been a political body on the face of the earth, that would not be corrupted under the same circumstances. Corruption steals upon us in a thousand insidious forms, when we are least aware of its approaches.

2. Of all the forms, in which it can present itself, the bribery of office is the most dangerous, because it assumes the guise of patriotism to accomplish its fatal sorcery. We are often asked, where is the evidence of corruption? Have you seen it? Sir, do you expect to see it? You might as well expect to see the embodied forms of pestilence and famine stalking before you, as to see the latent operations of this insidious power. We may walk amid it, and breathe its contagion, without being conscious of its presence.

3. All experience teaches us the irresistible power of temptation, when vice assumes the form of virtue. The great enemy of mankind could not have consummated his infernal scheme, for the seduction of our first parents, but for the disguise in which he presented himself. Had he appeared as the devil, in his proper form-had the spear

of Ithuriel disclosed the naked deformity of the fiend of hell, the inhabitants of paradise would have shrunk with horror from his presence.

4. But he came as the insinuating serpent, and presented a beautiful apple, the most delicious fruit in all the garden. He told his glowing story to the unsuspecting victim of his guile "It can be no crime to taste of this delightful fruit-it will disclose to you the knowledge of good and evil--it will raise you to an equality with the angels."

5. Such, sir, was the process; and, in this simple, but impressive narrative, we have the most beautiful and philosophical illustration of the frailty of man, and the power of temptation, that could possibly be exhibited. Mr. Chairman, I have been forcibly struck with the similarity between our present situation and that of Eve, after it was announced that Satan was on the borders of paradise. We, too, have been warned, that the enemy is on Our borders.

6. But God ford that the similitude should be carried any further. Eve, conscious of her innocence, sought temptation and defied it. The catastrophe is too fatally known to us all. She went "with the blessings of heaven on her head, and its purity in her heart," guarded by the ministry of angels-she returned covered with shame, under the heavy denunciation of heaven's everlasting curse.

7. Sir, it is innocence that temptation conquers. If our first parent, pure as she came from the hand of God, was overcome by the seductive power, let us not imitate her fatal rashness, seeking temptation when it is in our power to avoid it. Let us not vainly confide in our own infallibility. We are liable to be corrupted. To an ambitious man, an honorable office will appear as beautiful and fas cinating as the apple of paradise.

8. I admit, sir, that ambition is a passion, at once the most powerful and the most useful. Without it human affairs would become a mere stagnant pool. By means of his patronage, the President addresses himself in the most irresistible manner, to this the noblest and strongest of our passions. All that the imagination can desire - honor, Kidd.-23

power, wealth, ease, are held out as the temptation. Man was not made to resist such temptation. It is impossible to conceive, Satan himself could not devise, a system which would more infallibly introduce corruption and death into our political Eden. Sir, the angels fell from heaven with less temptation. M'DUFFIE.

CXI.-EXTENSION OF THE REPUBLIC.

1. In the grand and steady progress of the Republic, the career of duty and usefulness will be run by all its children, under a constantly increasing excitement. The voice, which, in the morning of life, shall awaken the patriotic sympathy of the land, will be echoed back by a community, incalculably swelled in all its proportions, before that voice shall be hushed in death.

2. The writer, by whom the noble features of our scenery shall be sketched with a glowing pencil, the traits of our romantic early history gathered up with filial zeal, and the peculiarities of our character seized with delicate perception, can not mount so entirely and rapidly to success, but that ten years will add new millions to the numbers of his readers. The American statesman, the orator, whose voice is already heard in its supremacy, from Florida to Maine, whose intellectual empire already extends beyond the limits. of Alexander's, has yet new states and new nations, starting nto being, the willing tributaries to his sway.

3. The wilderness, which one year is impassable, is traversed the next by the caravans of the industrious emigrants, who go to follow the setting sun with the language, the institutions, and the arts of civilized life. It is not the irruption of wild barbarians, sent to visit the wrath of God on a degenerate empire; it is not the inroad of disciplined banditti, marshaled by the intrigues of ministers and kings. It is the human family, let out to possess its broad patrimony. The states and nations, which are springing up in the valley of the distant west, are bound to us by the dearest ties of a common language, a common government, and a common descent.

4. Who, then, can forget that this extension of our territorial limits, is the extension of the empire of all we hold dear; of our laws, of our character, of the memory of our ancestors, of the great achievments in our history? Whithersoever the sons of the original states shall wander, to southern or western climes, they will send back their hearts to the rocky shores, the battle fields, and the intrepid coun cils of the Atlantic coast. These are placed beyond the reach of vicissitude. They have become already matter of history, of poetry, of eloquence.

E. EVERETT.

CXII. SPEECH OF JAMES OTIS.

1. ENGLAND may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes, as to fetter the step of freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land, than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland. Arbitrary principles. like those against which we now contend, have cost one king of England his life, another his crown, and they may yet cost a third his most flourishing colonies.

2. Some have sneeringly asked, "Are the Americans too poor to pay a few pounds on stamped paper?" No! America, thanks to God and herself, is rich. But the right to take ten pounds, implies the right to take a thousand; and what must be the wealth, that avarice, aided by power, can not exhaust! True, the specter is now small; but the shadow he casts before him is huge enough to darken all this fair land. Others, in sentimental style, talk of the immense debt of gratitude which we owe to England. And what is the amount of this debt? Why, truly it is the same that the young lion owes to the dam, which has brought it forth on the solitude of the mountain, cr left it amid the winds and storms of the desert.

3. We plunged into the wave, with the great charter of freedom in our teeth, because the fagot and torch were be hind us. We have waked the new world from its savage lethargy; forests have been prostrated in our path; towns

and cities have grown up suddenly as the flowers of the tropics, and the fires in our autumnal woods are scarcely more rapid than the increase of our wealth and population. And do we owe all this to the kind succor of the mother country? No! we owe it to the tyranny that drove us from her, to the pelting storms which invigorated our helpless infancy.

CXIII. THE AGE OF REASON.

1. GENTLEMEN, I have no objection to the most extended and free discussion upon doctrinal points of the Christian religion; and, though the law of England does not permit it, I do not dread the reasonings of deists against the existence of Christianity itself, because, as it was said by its divine author, if it be of God, it will stand. An intellectual book, however erroneous, addressed to the intellectual world upon so profound and complicated a subject, can never work the mischief it is calculated to repress. Such works will only incite the minds of men, enlightened by study, to a closer investigation of a subject well worthy of their deepest and continued contemplation. The powers of the mind are given for human improvement in the progress of human existence. The changes produced by such reciprocations of lights and intelligences are certain. in their progression, and make their way imperceptibly by the final and irresistible power of truth.

2. If Christianity be founded in falsehood, let us become deists in this manner, and I am contented. But this book has no such object and no such capacity; it presents no arguments to the wise and enlightened; on the contrary, it treats the faith and opinions of the wisest with the most shocking contempt, and stirs up men, without the advantages of learning or sober thinking, to a total disbelief of every thing hitherto held sacred; and consequently to a rejection of all the laws and ordinances of the State, which stand only upon the assumption of their truth.

3. Gentlemen, I can not conclude without expressing the