TRIBUTE TO THE PEOPLE OF KANSAS.'

HERE let me pause for a brief moment, to pay a merited tribute of respect and gratitude to my constituency. Brave, devoted, uncompromising, heroic people! proudly do I bear your honored name in these halls. Sir, theirs is the glory of these eventful days; to them belongs the credit of having first interposed a barrier to check the progress of despotic rule on this continent. Kansas lost, we should now be hopelessly, irretrievably subjugated. No such Republican party as we have seen would have been organized, or, if organized, it would have been speedily extinguished. Abraham Lincoln would not now be President; but rather some such slaveholder as Jefferson Davis. We should not now see a mighty host marshalled beyond the Potomac, with the cheering ensign of the Republic full high advanced, and the power of a legit imate Government and twenty millions of free people behind it; but we should see, instead of this, our Government transformed into a slaveholding despotism, as tyrannical as that of Nero, by means so indirect and insidious as hardly to be seen until the fatal work was finished. The people of Kansas took it upon themselves to act as a breakwater, which has had the effect to stay the advancing tide of slavery, and shield the continent from its sway.

When I recur to my own intercourse with this gallant people, during the period of their terrible struggle in their attempts to subdue the wilderness-to make homes for themselves where no home save that of the Indian, the elk, or the buffalo had ever existed before; considering their scanty resources, and the severities of life in a new country to which they were exposed; and remembering their determined pur pose in behalf of the cause at stake-how men and women alike surrendered with alacrity every personal interest and comfort and aspiration, and, with a sublime self-sacrifice, consecrated themselves to the great service-the perils they encountered, the extreme suffering they individually endured, and yet the true martyr spirit, the patience, the constancy, the fortitude they displayed throughout; when I recall these things, and my own relations with them in those trying scenes-our mutual hopes and fears and efforts the days when we were together in the council and the camp-the nights when, on the broad unsheltered prairie, or around rude and poor but hospitable firesides, we were consulting, delib erating, arranging, resolving, and executing; and when I recall, as I never fail to do, the glorious memory of those

who passed through the shadows of death in this august work-some by sickness, others by privation, others again on the field of battle bravely fighting for liberty-I am moved with a feeling for which no expression would be appropriate but the silent eloquence of tears.

Sir, history has no brighter page in all her long annals than this. I say it without hesitancy, although I am the representative of Kansas on this floor.

It is recorded of the chivalric but ill-fated people of Poland, that they stood up a shelter and breastwork for Europe against the swelling tide of infidel invaders, who, in the seventeenth century, threatened to overwhelm the civilization of that continent. A similar record will be made by the pen of impartial history, to testify to the transcendent heroism of my noble friends and constituency. It shall be said of them that, though few in number, limited in means, surrounded by enemies, far away from friends and reinforcements, they yet stood up, like a wall of adamant, against a power which wielded the resources of a nation of thirty millions of people, balked it of its prey, and saved a continent to freedom and civilization. Such is the inscription which the eternal page will bear in letters of light, regarding the transactions to which I refer; and traditionary song and story shall celebrate to posterity the worth of their deeds which to-day may find no recognition."-Hon. Martin F. Conway, 1861.

NATURE OF THE UNION.

OUR fathers were, by every circumstance surrounding their homes, by their relations to each other, and by their own expressed assent, ONE PEOPLE; separated, it is true, into thirteen several municipal organizations, having in many respects diverse interests, but still not the less in mind, in heart, and in destiny, ONE.

You and I are descendants of that people; and I ask you if it is not true-if you do not in your hearts know it to be true that when, in the incipient stages of the revolution through which they were called to struggle, they magnanimously put aside all local differences and jealousies, and with one impulse combined their efforts, their fortunes, their lives, their all, against fearful odds, for the redress of their common grievances at the hands of the mother country, and for the independence which they resolved to achieve, they evoked an already existing feeling of unity, and did, in the very es

sence of the term, form a full, 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, great-hearted Christopher Gadsden answered baek "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."

C. D. Drake, 1861.

INSINCERITY OF SECESSIONISTS.

So far as the doctrine of State Sovereignty is used to sustain the right of secession, it is to my mind apparent that its supporters in the South do not themselves believe in it. If there is a reserved right of secession, paramount to the Constitution, it must have existed when the Union was formed; for it has not been acquired or granted since. If it did exist then, the Union was entered into with a tacit understanding that there was such a right. If entered into with such an understanding, then a State seceding would be guilty of no legal wrong towards the other States; it would do only what it had a right to do. So doing, it would have no reason to regard itself as an enemy of the remaining States, or the na

tional Government as an enemy to it; and would have just cause of complaint against either, for taking a hostile attitude to it for seceding. But what do we find in the seceded States? Instantly upon passing their ordinances of secession, and in some instances in advance of it, they, by their acts, proclaim themselves the enemies of the United States in every way which could signalize them as such. They proceed to organize a Confederate Government, to raise armies, to provide for their support, to create a navy, and to seize the armories, forts, navy-yards, docks, custom-houses, mints, money, and all other property of the United States within their reach; they overpower and capture the United States troops, wherever they find them in detached bodies too small for resistance, and hold them as prisoners of war; they fire upon a vessel under the national flag, and in the Government service; they beleaguer, and finally bombard, and reduce a national fort, held by a brave, half-starved garrison, one hundredth part as strong as the assailing host; and all for what reason? They were not assailed by the Government on account of their secession. No troops were marched against them, no navy closed their ports, no mails were stopped within their borders; they were, for months after their secession, as they asked to be, "let alone"-let alone to commit every form of aggression upon the nation, without retaliation or resistance: why did they take the attitude of enemies? If, in seceding, they exercised only a reserved right, they did a lawful act, and had no occasion to wage war upon the Government they had renounced; nor had the Government occasion, for the act of secession, to attack them. Why, then, did they wage the war? Without the least doubt, because they knew that their claim of a reserved right in a State to dissolve its connection with the Union at its will, was a flimsy and false pretence, which they themselves had not the slightest faith in; and because, veil it however they might from their people, under the guise of State sovereignty, the leaders knew that secession was REBELLION, and that, sooner or later, rebellion must be met by force. In their own consciousness, therefore, as exhibited in their acts, the pretext of a constitutional right of secession, is a fallacy and a falsehood. As such the onlooking world regards it, and the intelligence of mankind scouts and condemns it.-Charles D. Drake, 1861.

NATIONAL AND STATE ALLEGIANCE.

I.

EVERY individual of every nation, barbarian or civilized, is bound by allegiance to the supreme authority which presides over that nation, whether it be king, emperor, grand duke, sultan, tycoon, chief or constitutional republican gov ernment. Society without allegiance is anarchy; government without allegiance is a mockery; people without allegiance are a mob.

He, who looks below the surface has no difficulty in seeing that the doctrine of primary State allegiance, which was promulgated by South Carolina in 1832, and, though exploded by her own Court of Appeals in 1834, has since been diligently inculcated through the entire South, and was put forth by the Governor of this State in his recent treasonable proclamation of war against the United States, lies at the bottom, like a subterranean fire, burning out the popular heart, and, with earthquake throes, upheaving the founda tions of our national institutions. It is no more true that States exist, than that, but for this shallow heresy, they would not now have been arrayed against the national Government. It appeals to home attachments, to State pride, to self interest, to local jealousy, to sectional animosity, to every passional feeling hostile to a broad and patriotic nationality; and, like a mighty lens, it focalizes the whole upon a single petty point, burning to ashes the tie of paramount allegiance to the Government of the nation, loosing the warring elements, and bringing in chaos again. With him who takes this doctrine to his soul, true, generous, self-sacrificing love of country is as impossible as for one born blind to describe a rainbow; his State is his country, and his American citizenship is a bauble compared with his citizenship there. Point him to the flag of his country, and he sees only the one star which typifies his State; and every other is to that, rayless and cold. Talk to him of the nation, and he replies, "South Carolina." Speak of national prosperity and hap piness, and he responds" the Old Dominion!" Refer to the honor of the nation, and he shouts "Mississippi!" "Arkansas!" "Texas!" Lead his mind where you will, and like a cat he always returns to the particular spot he inhabits, and which he calls his State! Ever regarding that, he raises not his head to behold the glorious COUNTRY, which claims his first devotion as an American, his highest love as a freeman.