deceived. That "vast inland sea" is mare nostrum; it is our Atlantic Ocean. Once cut off from the powerful and controlling ties of a united Government; aliens and foreigners to each other; with police and espionage, and armed force at every depot upon the frontiers, nature, stronger than man, would reassume her rights and her supremacy. You made he railroad and the telegraph; but God Almighty made the Mississippi and her hundred tributaries.

Hon. Clement L. Vullandigham, 1859.

THREATS OF DISUNION DISREGARDED.

THE fancied temporary interests of the few who might desire to import slaves into the Territories, should not be suf fered to divert the national legislature from that line of policy demanded by justice, and the permanent interests of the nation, of the white race, and of the whole human family.

But you declare that the Union cannot be maintained unless men are permitted to coerce the emigration of negro slaves to the Territories! Well, sir, this threat produces no terror: as far as my knowledge extends, nobody in the Northwest is frightened by it, although it originates in a high quarter. We understand that it is your interest to stay in the Union, and that you have not the power to dissolve it; that a dissolution of the Union would bring on you, in tenfold strength, every evil of which you complain.

With this impotent threat "to dissolve the Union,” if a Republican should be elected President of the United States, you not only demand the disbanding of the Republican party, and, by a logical sequence, the repeal of all laws in the free States disparaging the institution and prohibiting its existence within their jurisdiction; but you attempt to coerce our consciences and judgment, and require us to approve slavery as morally right-a humane and Christian institution. In this you will never succeed.

Neither vehement threats of a dissolution of the Union, nor any other mode of coercion, will be likely to change our opinions of either the morality or expediency of slaveholding. The laws of the human mind cannot be changed; perception, memory, conscience and judgment will continue. Conscience may be stupefied for a time, but it will again rally and assert its right to control the conduct of men. The people of the whole North, almost without a solitary exception, believe that slavery is in itself wrong, and may be maintained tem

race.

porarily only, in consequence of the necessities that may surround the parties which sustain this relation to an inferior Whenever these necessities cease, they maintain that it will be the duty of each to dissolve the relation. Nobody in the North, however, maintains that this can ever be effected, except by the action of the people of the States where the relation exists. The Republicans maintain that Congress has no power whatever over this subject within their limits.

You admonish us, however, that if a gentleman who entertains the doctrines originally maintained by Washington, Jefferson, and the other illustrious men who lived during the earlier part of the Republic, from which, as was admitted on yesterday by the honorable Senator from Virginia, (Mr. Mason,) the Democracy has swerved, should be elected. President of the United States, in accordance with the Constitution and the laws, you will destroy the Government. When analyzed, could a proposition be more insulting to freemen? We must surrender our own reasoning faculties, and our consciences and judgment, and follow your behests! We must change, because you have changed! We must repudiate, because you have discarded, the opinions of the fathers! When we approach the polls, we must represent your opinions and not our own, by our votes! That is, we must cease to be freemen, and become your political slaves! If your political opponents will destroy their platform and dissolve their organization; if the free States will destroy their constitutions and repeal their laws on the subject of slavery; if a majority of the freemen of the country will stultify their own judgments, and trample under foot their consciences; give up freedom of speech and of the press, and cease to exercise the right of freemen at the polls, you will graciously permit the Union to be continued! Well, sir, this mode of preserving the Union would cost us too much. We have the hearts and heads and hands and will to preserve it in a cheaper manner, let the crisis come when it may. Hon. James Harlan, 1860.

THE YANKEE TWANG.

My colleague* amused himself with the comic power he possesses in imitating the nasal twang of the Yankees of the Western Reserve in Ohio. It sounded strange to you as it

* Mr. Cox.

did to him; and so it did to the army of Prince Rupert at Marston Moor, when the ancestors of these men rushed into battle against the mailed chivalry and curled darlings of the court of Charles I. What happened then? Something worthy to be noted, and not forgotten. Stout Cromwell and his unconquerable Ironsides, when the day was well nigh lost, charged with resistless fury upon the proud columns of that host of gentlemen, as they were boastfully denominated, and lo! Prince Rupert and his host were no longer there. They were scattered as the dried leaves of autumn are before the storm-blast of the coming winter. That same nasal twang rang out, on that day, their well known war-cry, "the sword of the Lord and Gideon." These Yankees are a peculiar people; they are an industrious, thriving, painstaking race of men. The frailties of these men grow out of their very virtues, those stern virtues which founded liberty in England, and baptized it in their own blood upon Bunker Hill, in America. They will do so again if there is a necessity for it. It is a hard matter to deal with men who do verily believe that God Almighty and his angels encamp round about them. What do they care for earthly things or earthly power? What do they care for kings, and lords, and presidents? They fully believe they are heirs of the King of kings. In the hour of battle they seem to themselves to stand, like the great Hebrew leader in the cleft of the rock; the glory of the most high God passes by them, and they catch a gleam of its brightness. If you come in conflict with the purposes of such men, they will regard duty as everything, life as nothing. So it appeared in our war of the Revolution. The gentleman from Mississippi said that the North got more revolutionary pensjons than the South. I do not know how that is. How did it happen? Gentlemen tell me they would not have pensions in the South. I am glad if it be so. But I am not now, never have been, and never will be willing to violate history and good taste so far as to draw invidious distinctions between this or that State or colony, who, by their combined valor, won the independence of all the States. While I must always venerate the men of New England of that day, I still turn with unabated admiration to those of the South, especially to Virginia-glorious "Old Dominion," illustrious alike for her heroes in war and her sages in peace; and if it depend on vote or effort of mine, the last land warrant of the last descendant of her revolutionary heroes shall be located on lands, if such can be found, rich as the delta of the Nile; in a climate if it be possible, healthful as was Eden ere yet

in had brought death into the home of the first family of man.-Hon. Thomas Corwin, 1860.

1

EFFECTS OF THE DOCTRINE OF NON-INTERVENTION IN THE TERRITORIES.

You cannot make laws for Utah because you have denied the power of Congress to make laws for the Territories. What is Utah? A blot on the fair pages of your history, which all the waters of Lethe can never wash out-a foul, incestuous den-a disgrace to a civilized and Christian country. That is what comes of this glorious new doctrine which you have propagated on all sides. That comes of your parting with the wise usages and the wise institutions of your fathers; and so it will ever be the moment you abandon those well-established, constitutional rules fixed by the founders of the Republic. You have abandoned the great highways of the past-the good macadamized roads made for you-every milestone of which was red with Revolutionary blood; you have strayed away from them and wandered after wills-o'-the-wisp into swamps and by-paths. All that the Republican party wish to do, is to stand up and call you back as a mother calls to her lost child, and put you on the safe old road again. They call upon you to come out from the wilderness; to quit the shedding of each other's blood in fratricidal war for the right to have this or that law; to let the Congress of the United States, who represent the fathers, the brothers, the sisters of the peaceful emigrants who have gone into the Territories, consider what is best for their children and friends. But abandon, as you have abandoned, the institutions of your fathers, and there will be neither peace nor progress in the Territories. There will be strife here, and civil war there, and wild confusion will reign supreme.

The wise prophet of Israel, after he came down from the mountain with the law in his hand, and found his brother Aaron worshipping a golden calf which he had made, was so angry that he threw down the tables of the law and broke them. He determined that that wicked people should never have an opportunity of worshipping any more golden calves; he made all the women bring in their trinkets and golden ornaments and melted them down into one mass. Let us, in the same spirit, bring in these memorable idols of ours; sacrifice them on the common altar of our country; shake hands, forget, and forgive.-Hon. Thomas Corwin, 1860.

DUTY OF THE FUTURE.

I HOPE the observations which I have made, forced from me without any of that preparation which is usual, may not be entirely worthless. Whether we consider this ever-recurring question of slavery as resting within our unrestricted discretion, or whether we regard it as fixed and limited by constitutional law-in either aspect, with good sense, guided by true patriotism, there is nothing to be feared. The way through the future is, in my judgment, open, clear, and plain. We cannot be so weak as to give way to childish fears, or sink into lethargy and despair. On the contrary, let us "gird up our loins" to the work before us; for upon us this duty is devolved. We cannot escape from it if we would. Let us, above all, preserve our Constitution inviolate, and the Union which it created, unbroken. By the lights they give us, with the aids of an enlightened religion, and an ever-improving Christian philosophy, let us march on ward and onward in the great highway of social progress. Let us always keep in the advancing car of that progress-our book of constitutions and our Bible. Like the Jews of old, let the ark of the covenant be advanced to the front in our march. With these to guide us, I feel the proud assurance that our free principles will take their way through all coming time; and before them I do believe that the cloven footed altars of oppression, all over the world, will fall down, as Dagon of old fell down, and was shivered to pieces in the presence of the ark of the living God. But if we halt in this great exodus of the nations; if we are broken into inconsiderable fragments, and ultimately dispersed, through our follies of this day, what imagination can compass the frightful enormity of our crime! What would the world say of this unpardonable sin? Rather than this, we should pray the kind Father of all, even his wicked children, to visit us with the last and worst of all the afflictions that fall on sin and sinful man. Better for us would it be that the fruitful earth should be smitten for a season with barrenness and become dry dust and refuse its annual fruits; better that the heavens for a time should become brass, and the ear of God deaf to our prayers; better that famine, with her cold and skinny fingers, should lay hold upon the throats of our wives and children; better that God should commission the angel of destruction to go forth over the whole land, scattering pestilence and death from his dusky wing, than that we should prove faithless to our trust, and by that means our light should be