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THE PATRIOTIC SPEAKER.

THE PROSPECTS OF THE REPUBLIC. .

WE stand the latest, and, if we fail, probably the last, experiment of self-government by the people. We have begun it under circumstances of the most auspicious nature. We are in the vigor of youth. Our growth has never been checked by the oppressions of tyranny. Our constitutions have never been enfeebled by the vices or luxuries of the Old World. Such as we are, we have been from the beginning, simple, hardy, intelligent, accustomed to self-government, and to self-respect. The Atlantic rolls between us and any formidable foe. Within our own territory, stretching through many degrees of latitude and longitude, we have the choice of many products, and many means of independence. The Government is mild. The Press is free. Religion is free. Knowledge reaches, or may reach, every home. What fairer prospect of success could be presented? What means more adequate to accomplish the sublime end? What more is necessary than for the people to preserve what they have themselves created? Already has the age caught the spirit of our institutions. It has already ascended the Andes, and snuffed the breezes of both oceans. It has infused itself into the life-blood of Europe, and warmed the sunny plains of France and the lowlands of Holland. It has touched the philosophy of Germany and the North; and, moving onward to the South, has opened to Greece the lessons of their better days. Can it be that America, under such circumstances, can betray herself? Can it be that she is to be added to the catalogue of Republics, the inscription on whose ruins is: THEY WERE, BUT THEY ARE NOT? Forbid it, my countrymen! Forbid it, Heaven!-Judge Story.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT OF SELF-GOVERNMENT.

WE are summoned to new energy and zeal by the high nature of the experiment we are appointed in Providence to make, and the grandeur of the theatre on which it is to be performed. At a moment of deep and general agitation in the Old World, it pleased Heaven to open this last refuge of humanity. The attempt has begun, and is going on, far from foreign corruption, on the broadest scale, and under the most benignant prospects; and it certainly rests with us to solve the great problem in human society,-to settle, and that forever, the momentous question,-whether mankind can be trusted with a purely popular system of Government.

One might almost think, without extravagance, that the departed wise and good, of all places and times, are looking down from their happy seats to witness what shall now be done by us; that they who lavished their treasures, and their blood, of old,-who spake and wrote, who labored, fought and perished, in the one great cause of Freedom and Truth, -are now hanging, from their orbs on high, over the last solemn experiment of humanity. As I have wandered over the spots once the scene of their labors, and mused among the prostrate columns of their senate-houses and forums, I have seemed almost to hear a voice from the tombs of departed ages, from the sepulchres of the nations which died before the sight. They exhort us, they adjure us, to be faithful to our trust. They implore us, by the long trials of struggling humanity; by the blessed memory of the departed; by the dear faith which has been plighted by pure hands to the holy cause of truth and man; by the awful secrets of the prison-house, where the sons of freedom have been immured; by the noble heads which have been brought to the block; by the wrecks of time, by the eloquent ruins of nations, they conjure us not to quench the light which is rising on the world. Greece cries to us by the convulsed lips of her poisoned, dying Demosthenes; and Rome pleads with us in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully. Hon. Edward Everett.

THREATS OF SLAVEHOLDERS DEFIED.

LANGUAGE of this sort has no effect upon me. My purIt is interwoven with my existence. Its du

pose is fixed.

rability is limited with my life. It is a great and glorious cause-setting bounds to slavery the most cruel and debasing the world has ever witnessed. It is the cause of the freedom of man!

If

If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come! My hold on life is probably as frail as that of any man who now hears me; but, while that hold lasts, it shall be devoted to the freedom of man. blood is necessary to extinguish any fire which I have assisted to kindle, while I regret the necessity, I shall not hesitate to contribute my own. The violence which gentlemen have resorted to on this subject will not move my purpose, nor drive me from my ground. I have the fortune and honor to stand here as the representative of freemen who possess intelligence to know their rights, and who have the spirit to maintain them. Whatever might be my own private sentiments on this subject, standing here as the representative of others, no choice is left me. I know the will of my constituents, and, regardless of consequences, I will avow it. As their representative, I will proclaim their hatred to slavery in every shape. As their representative, here will I hold my stand, till this floor, with the national Constitution which supports it, shall sink beneath me. If I am doomed to fall, I shall, at least, have the painful consolation to fall as a fragment of the ruins of my country.—Tallmadge, 1819.

ISLAVERY EXTENSION TO BE RESISTED.

HAS it, indeed, come to this, that in the Congress of the United States, slavery has become a subject of so much delicacy, of so much danger, of so much feeling, that it cannot safely be discussed? Are members who venture to express their sentiments on this subject to be accused of talking to the galleries, with intent to excite a servile insurrection, and to be threatened with the fate of Arbuthnot and Ambrister? Are we to be told of the dissolution of the Union, of civil war, and of seas of blood? And yet, with such awful threatenings, do gentlemen, in the same breath, insist on the extension of this evil and scourge—an evil fraught with dire calamities to us as individuals, and to the nation; threatening in its progress to overthrow, along with the liberties of the country, all our notions of religion and morals. You behold Southern gentlemen contributing to teach the doc

trines of Christianity in every part of the globe. Turn over the page, and you behold them legislating to secure the ignorance and stupidity of their own slaves! While we hear of a liberality which civilizes the savages of all countries, and carries the Gospel alike to the Hottentot and the Hindoo, it has been reserved for the republican State of Georgia, not content with the care of overseers, to legislate to secure the oppression and ignorance of her slaves. The man who teaches a negro to read is liable to a criminal prosecution! The dark, benighted beings of all creation profit by our liberality-save those on our own plantations. Where is the missionary of hardihood enough to venture to teach the slaves of Georgia? Here is the stain, the stigma which fastens on the character of our country, and which, in the appropriate language of the gentleman from Georgia, not all the waters of the ocean, only seas of blood, can wash out!

If it is not safe now to discuss slavery on this floor, if it cannot now come before us as a proper subject for general legislation, what will be the result when it is spread through your widely extended domain? Its present threatening aspect, and the violence of its supporters, so far from inducing me to yield to its progress, prompt me to resist its march. Now is the time! The extension of the evil must be now prevented, or the opportunity will be lost forever!

Tallmadge, 1819.

FREE AND SLAVE TERRITORY CONTRASTED.

Look down the long vista of futurity. See your empire, in extent unequalled, in advantageous situation without a parallel, occupying all the valuable part of our continent. Behold this extended empire inhabited by the hardy sons of America, freemen knowing their rights, and inheriting the will to maintain them; owners of the soil on which they live, and interested in the institutions which they labor to uphold; with two oceans laving your shores and tributary to your purposes, bearing on their bosoms the commerce of your people-compared to yours, the governments of Europe dwindle into insignificance, and the world has no parallel. But reverse the scene. People this fair domain with the slaves of your planters. Spread slavery, that bane of man, that abomination of heaven, over your extended empire! You prepare its dissolution; you turn its accumulated strength into positive weakness; you cherish a cancer in

your breast; you put a viper in your bosom; you place a vulture on your heart-nay, you whet the dagger, and thrust it into the hands of a portion of your population, stimulated to use it by every impulse, human and divine. The envious contrast between your happiness and their misery, between your liberty and their slavery, must constantly prompt them to accomplish your destruction. Your enemies will learn the source and the cause of your weakness. As often as external dangers shall threaten, or internal commotions await you, you will then realize that, by your own procurement, you have placed amid your families, and in the bosom of your country, a population at once the greatest cause of individual danger and of national weakness. With this defect, your government must crumble to pieces, and your people become the scoff of the world.-Tallmadge, 1819.

THE TRUE BASIS OF DEMOCRACY.

THE true ground, on which to plead for the self-government of the people, is not the inherent virtue of man. Genuine democracy regards him as a sinner, and, it is on this very fact, that all men are alike guilty in the sight of heaven, that the claim of equality rests. Frederic William, of Prussia, once reproving a chaplain for some piece of servility to himself, in divine service, said to him, "I'd have you to know, sir, that in the sight of God, I am as great a rascal as yourself" Let selfish conservatism, that draws an inference to its own emolument from the exceeding imperfection of humanity, lay this to heart. If the people are turbulent and vicious, the king, on the basis of this doctrine, is only one of them, and they are all rabble in the sight of God together. Or, if the people's outer unadornment be offensive to the sense polite, let it be remembered that when they are unclothed of this plebeian mortality, then the king shall lay aside his purple too, and they shall all be sans culottes together. But this is not the truth, on which democracy founds its cheerful creed. Not on the ground that humanity is fallen, but that it is redeemed; and that provision is made in the economy of redemption for its perfect disenthralment, not only from the bondage of human authority, but from the tyranny of self. The freeman repudiates allegiance to any government but that which is delegated from himself, not because he holds that man should be uncontrolled, but because he has a king already, and one who allows no other

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