glory in her strength; I have seen her again and again struck down on a hundred chosen fields of battle. I have seen her friends fly from her. I have seen her foes gather around her. I have seen them bind her to the stake. I have seen them give her ashes to the winds, regathering them again that they might scatter them yet more widely. But when they turned to exult, I have seen her again meet them, face to face, clad in complete steel, and brandishing in her strong right hand a flaming sword, red with insufferable light. And therefore I take courage. The people gather around her once more. The genius of America will at last lead

her sons to freedom."

The reader will readily perceive that one elegance of this passage consists in its describing a long period of devotion to certain principles.

No better illustration of the weight of personal character in prompting eloquent outbursts can be found than in the reply of Lord Thurlow, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer under George the Third, to some aspersions cast upon his humble origin, by the Duke of Clarence, in the course of a debate in the House of Lords. Lord Thurlow advanced to the seat from which an English chancellor usually addressed the House and said: "My lords, I am amazed! Yes, my lords, I am amazed at his grace's speech. The noble duke cannot look before him, behind him, or on either side of him, without seeing some noble peer who owes his seat in this house to his successful exertions in the profession to which I belong. Does he not feel that it is as honorable to

owe it to these as to being the accident of an accident? To all these noble lords, the language of the noble duke is as applicable and as insulting as it is to myself. But I don't fear to meet it singly and alone. No one venerates the peerage more than I do, but, my lords, I must say that the peerage solicited me, and not I the peerage,―nay, more, I can say, and will say, that as a peer of Parliament as speaker of this right honorable House, as keeper of the great seal, as guardian of his majesty's conscience, as Lord High Chancellor of England, nay, even in that character alone, in which the noble duke would think it an affront to be considered, but which character none can deny me, as a man, I am at this time as much respected as the proudest peer I now look down upon."

Stephen A. Douglas in his contest with Abraham Lincoln laid particular claim to the merit of having adopted and maintained a uniform course on the subject of popular sovereignty. His opponents contended that he was guilty of an inconsistency in favoring the Missouri Compromise and then advocating the Kansas-Nebraska bill which repealed that measure. To this charge Mr. Douglas replied: "All we have to do, therefore, is to adhere firmly in the future, as we have done in the past, to the principles contained in the recommendation of the President in his annual message, that the example of the Minnesota case shall be carried out in all future cases of the admission of Territories into the Union

as States. Let that be done and the principle of popular sovereignty will be maintained in all of its vigor and all of its integrity. I rejoice to know that Illinois stands prominently and proudly forward among the States which first took their position firmly and immovably upon the principle of popular sovereignty, applied to the Territories as well as the States. We all recollect when, in 1850, the peace of the country was disturbed in consequence of the agitation of the slavery question, and the effort to force the Wilmot Proviso upon all the Territories, that it required all the talent and all the energy, all the wisdom, all the patriotism of a Clay and a Webster united with other great party leaders, to devise a system of measures by which peace and harmony could be restored to our distracted country. Those compromise measures eventually passed and were recorded on the statute book, not only as the settlement of the then existing difficulties, but as furnishing a rule of action which should prevent in all future time the recurrence of like evils, if they were firmly and fairly carried out. Those compromise measures rested, as I said in my speech in Chicago, on my return home that year, upon the principle that every people ought to have the right to form and regulate their own domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution. They were founded upon the principle that, while every State possessed that right under the Constitution, the same right ought to

be extended to and exercised by the people of the Territories. When the Illinois Legislature assembled, a few months after the adoption of these measures, the first thing the members did was to review their act on on this slavery agitation, and to correct the errors into which their predecessors had fallen. You remember that their first act was to repeal the Wilmot Proviso instructions to our United States Senators, which had been previously passed, and in lieu of them to record another resolution upon the journal with which you must all be familiar a resolution brought forward by Mr. Ninian Edwards, and adopted by the House of Representatives by a vote of sixty-one in the affirmative to four in the negative. That resolution I can quote to you in almost the exact language. It declared that the great principle of self-government was the birthright of freemen, was the gift of heaven, was achieved by the blood of our revolutionary fathers, and must be continued and carried out in the organization of all the Territories and the admission of all the new States. That became the Illinois platform by the united voices of the Democratic party and of the Whig party in 1851, all the Whigs and all the Democrats in the Legislature uniting in an affirmative vote upon it, and there being only four votes in the negative, of abolitionists, of course; that resolution stands upon the journal of your Legislature to this day and hour, unrepealed, as a standing, living, perpetual instruction

to the Senators of Illinois in all time to come, to carry out that principle of self-government and allow no limitation upon it in the organization of any Territories or the admission of any new States. In 1854, when it became my duty, as chairman of the Committee on Territories, to bring forward a bill for the organization of Kansas and Nebraska, I incorporated that principle in it, and Congress passed it, thus carrying the principle into practical effect. I will not recur to the scenes which took place all over the country in 1854, when the Nebraska bill passed. I could then travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my effigies in consequence of having stood up for it. I leave it for you to say how I met that storm, and whether I quailed under it; whether I did not 'face the music,' justify the principle, and pledge my life to carry it out."

Still another pertinent example is to be found in the Webster-Hayne debate. One of the first attacks made by Mr. Hayne on Mr. Webster arose from the former referring to a speech of the latter delivered in 1825, five years before the debate, in which Mr. Hayne believed he had found a glaring inconsistency in Mr. Webster's position in 1830 as compared with what he held in 1825.

Mr. Hayne began the attack by saying:—

"Now, sir, will it be believed by those who now hear me-and who listened to the gentleman's denunciation of my doctrines yesterday-that a book then lay open

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