the Vandal; but the star of her empire might have waved in triumph long after the ivy twined her broken columns.

The associations of an independent freehold are eminently calculated to ennoble and elevate the possessor. It is the life-spring of a manly national character, and of a generous patriotism; a patriotism that rushes to the defence of the country and the vindication of its honor, with the same zeal and alacrity that it guards the hearthstone and the fireside. Wherever Freedom has unfurled her banner, the men who have rallied around to sustain and uphold it have come from the workshop and the field, where, inured to heat and to cold, and to all the inclemencies of the season, they have acquired the hardihood necessary to endure the trials and privations of the camp. An independent yeomanry, scattered over our vast domain, is the best and surest guarantee for the perpetuity of our liberties; for their arms are the citadel of a nation's power, their hearts the bulwarks of liberty. Let the public domain, then, be set apart and consecrated as a patrimony to the sons of toil; close your land office forever against the speculator, and thereby prevent the capital of the country seeking that kind of investment-from absorbing the hard earnings of labor without rendering an equivalent. While the laborer is thus crushed by the system established by the Government, by which so large an amount is abstracted from his earnings for the benefit of the speculator, in addition to all the other disadvantages that ever beset the unequal struggle between the bones and sinews of men and dollars and cents, what wonder is it that misery and want so often sit at his fireside, and penury and sorrow surround his death bed?

While the pioneer spirit goes forth into the wilderness, snatching new areas from the wild beast and bequeathing them a legacy to civilized man, let not the Government dampen his ardor and palsy his arm by legislation that places him in the power of soulless capital and grasping speculation; for upon his wild battle field these are the only foes that his own stern heart and right arm cannot vanquish.

Hon. G. A. Grow, 1860.

JOHN BROWN'S "INVASION."

I TRUST the calmer judgment of the other side of the House will modify their views heretofore expressed, and limit and soften the sweeping judgment which impeached a whole

political party of conspiracy to promote servile insurrection.

I think they will be inclined to take a somewhat different view of the origin, the character, and the scope of John Brown's crime.

It was no invasion of Virginia at all; still less an invasion of Virginia by or from a free State. It was a conspiracy to free negroes; arrested in the attempt; defended with arms; stained with murder, and punished with death. It was a crime to be dealt with by judge and jury and sheriff.

The utmost vigilance of two governments has failed to trace a single connection with any body of men in any State. Two of Brown's confederates were arrested in Pennsylvania without warrant and carried without a guard to jail in Virginia. His arsenal contained two hundred Sharpe's rifles and something over a thousand pikes, his army consisted of about twenty men, and though rumor promised him succor, no one ever saw a body of men or a single man marching to join him or to rescue him. Not a slave joined him voluntarily; not one lifted his hand against his master; all were anxious to return to the bosom of their master's families.

Atrocious as was the crime, and great as is the cause I have to deplore some of the best blood shed, that crime has revealed a state of fact and of feeling, both among our own population and that of the free States, on which our eyes ought to rest with satisfaction, in view of the future.

It negatives the existence of any conspiracy against our peace in the free States of the confederacy. Neither the plan nor the execution revealed any higher intelligence or greater power behind the crazy enthusiasts who acted in the tragedy. To lay this blood at the door of a great political party of our fellow-citizens, who now control the governments of every free State but two, in spite of the indignant denial of all their Representatives here, and without a particle of proof in fact, is not reasonable. It is to call Dirk Hatteraick's defence, in his lair, an invasion of Scotland! It is to lay the bloody deeds of Balfour of Burleigh on the whole body of the Protestants in Scotland!

But the keenness with which gentlemen feel this crime against the peace of a slave State may well enable them to appreciate how the more aggravated events in Kansas inflamed the minds of men in the free States, and fired the fanaticism of Brown to the point of bloody revenge.

That men and women of like mind, in whom, on one subject, the ideas of right and wrong are sadly disordered, sympathized with the convicts; that some papers applauded his

deed, and some pulpits echoed his eulogy, are certainly symptoms of no sound state of morals in the actors; but they are of no political significance in the populous North. On this floor they have no representative. That bloody type of fanaticism is, of all things, most rare among the Abolitionists; and they are a body of enthusiasts who have never, to my knowledge, had ten Representatives in this hall. But, to sympathize with a criminal, to pity a convict, to consider the conviction an expiation, and the execution a martyrdom, is too common at this day to excite surprise in any case. Even with the ministers of religion, the ascent of the scaffold is Jacob's ladder-the gallows is the very gate of Heaven; and the old formula of pax et misericordia is changed for one in the spirit, if not in the words, of Edgeworth, "Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven!"

I dwell on these matters the more, because they have been made the occasion of exaggerated inferences and the proofs of unfounded fears, which a more thorough or cooler contemplation of the manifestations of thought and feeling in our free American society will dispel. I seek for signs of peace. I will explore every region for ground of returning confidence. I think there is no ground for the excitement which has prevailed. I think the longer gentlemen look at the facts, they will the more surely see that their feelings led them to extremes which they will not be inclined to repeat. Hon. Henry Winter Davis, 1860.

POLYGAMY IN UTAH.

THE existence of such an institution as prevails in Utah, under the protection of the laws of the United States, is an outrage upon the moral feelings of our whole population. It is, as I conceive, an insult to our own wives and our own daughters, and the wives and daughters of our constituents. It is a reflection upon the pure and elevated morality of the United States, that such an institution as this should go unwhipped of justice, and flourish and prosper, and laugh its defiance, under the groundless pretence of constitutional license. While it continues, "the slow, unmoving finger of scorn" will be pointed at us by the civilized world, and we will merit the reproach for winking at and sustaining excesses such as, if equalled, could not have been excelled, in Sodom and Gomorrah in the days of old.

I, for one, advocate the enactment of this law in the name

of the respectable and virtuous women of the United States. Their sex is degraded and disgraced by the practices which prevail in a worse than heathen territory. Every highminded and honorable woman, who values the purity of the female character, must feel that she is insulted when Utah can be designated as a region of wholesale frailty, or quoted as an evidence of female weakness; and that the infamous practices which prevail there, if not directly sanctioned, are at least scandalously tolerated by the Government of the United States. In no part of the world is woman, as a general rule, treated with such universal deference and respect as are extended to her in our own country. She richly deserves it all. And when I say this, I say it in no spirit of unmeaning compliment. Woman nurses us in infancy; she is our companion in maturer life; the gentle echo of her footsteps is heard in the chamber of sickness; the soft pressure of her kind hand is felt upon the brow of pain; she sheds tears over the dying couch of man and strews flowers upon his grave. She has a noble and generous heart, and her influence is generally exerted for good. And if there is anything under heaven for which we should feel grateful to our Creator, it is for giving us woman as the highest, last, and greatest blessing to man. It was designed that she should give her whole heart in exchange for the undivided affection of man, and become his partner in lawful marriage. Enthroned in the domestic circle, she becomes our refuge amidst the storms and conflicts of life, and sheds a halo of happiness around the joys of home. Among barbarians she is treated as an inferior; but with her sympathizing and angelic nature, her instinctive love of right, and her wondrous capacity for influence upon the mind of man, the precepts of Christianity have elevated her in the scale of being, until in every civilized land she has attained her true position; and in this free and happy country of ours especially, she wields an influence such as she never exerted before, but not more than is amply her due. Let not that influence be paralyzed by any stigma or reproach which we can remove; but rather let it be honored, respected and enlarged by every means in our power. Hon. Thomas H. R. Nelson, 1860.

LEGISLATIVE CENSURE REPELLED.

MR. CHAIRMAN, The Honorable the legislature of Maryland has decorated me with its censure.

It is my purpose to

acknowledge that compliment. It is long, sir, since the party which now controls the legislature of Maryland has been so fortunate as to have a majority in both its branches; and it has so conducted itself that it is probable it will be long ere again it succeeds in getting that control.

If one may judge from the course and conduct of that body, the gentlemen who compose it are perhaps more surprised at their present power than their opponents. They do not appear to be less bewildered or more to have changed their original nature than Christophero Sly, when waking up, after his debauch, in the nobleman's chamber, dazzled with the unaccustomed elegance which surrounded him, he began to question himself thus:

"Am I a lord? and have I such a lady?

Or do I dream? or have I dream'd till now?
I do not sleep; I see, I hear, I speak;

I smell sweet savors, and I feel soft things;
Upon my life, I am a lord, indeed;

And not a tinker, nor Christophero Sly.
Well, bring our lady hither to our sight;
And, once again, a pot o' the smallest ale!"

Sudden elevation has never changed the character of the person accidentally raised to a position he was never intended by nature to occupy; and those who imagine it ever can may free themselves from that delusion by looking at the legis lature of Maryland. That majority, which now presumes to represent the people of Maryland, are as much out of place. in her legislative halls as was Christophero in the lordly chamber; and they retain and reveal their natural instincts and ability as did Christophero his preference for the smallest ale over sack.

There is no department of legislation to which, in the brief period of their power, they have not applied their fingers; and it would be doing them injustice to say that there is any they have adorned.

Greatly deficient in that first quality which constitutes the legislator-sound practical common sense-they abound in that genius of ignorance which so amazed and delighted Montesquieu's Persian in the Parisian professors-a genius which enabled them to undertake to practice and teach, with the utmost confidence, arts and sciences of which they knew nothing.

I, sir, have no apologies to make for the vote which they see fit to condemn. I have no excuses to render. What I did, I did on my own judgment, and did not look across my