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and offered in the committee by Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, was adopted by it and reported to Congress, and, to its everlasting honor, passed by the unanimous vote of eight states, five of the eight being at that time slave-holding states. What a beneficent provision, and how farreaching in its results who is competent to tell? In the memorable words of Webster, "It impressed upon the very soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity to sustain any other than a freeman. It laid the interdict against servitude in original compact, not only deeper than any local law, but deeper than all local constitutions." No child has been or ever will be born, throughout all that vast domain, that will not have occasion to bless the memory of Nathan Dane, and honor the good and the thoughtful men that passed that beneficent ordinance, "to the last syllable of recorded time."

And now came the closing, the supreme, the superlative work of the Congress, without which all its other labors might well have proved vain and fruitless. It did not require unusual wisdom nor a protracted experi ence for sensible men to perceive that a compact between independent powers each asserting its own sovereignty and perpetually disposed to fly off in its centrifugal orbit, might indeed be a confederacy, but was not a Union such as should weld us together in harmonious relations and constitute us a homogeneous people, an autonomous, a self-sustaining nation.

It is not within the scope of my present purpose to give a history of the great Convention by which that constitution was formed, nor of the various provisions of that instrument, although I must be pardoned if in closing I say a few words concerning the character and functions of that government which it organized. The history of the Continental Congress substantially ends with the act by which in the resolution of February 21, 1787, it called a meeting of that Convention which was to assemble in the following May for the purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation, and in the words of the resolution "render the federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union.' This Constitution, the result of the labors of this Convention, was reported to the Congress on the 28th day of September, 1787, unanimously approved on the same day, and immediately transmitted to the states, and as we all know subsequently ratified by the nine states whose assent was required, returned to the Continental Congress thus ratified, which by a resolution duly adopted, appointed the first Wednesday in March, 1789, as the time for the new government to commence its organized existence.

And here we may appropriately terminate the history of those several assemblages which altogether constitute the Continental Congress. The

delegates met, indeed, from time to time, until the 2d day of March, 1789, when, only a single member appearing, it quietly terminated its existence. The last roll-call was made on the 10th day of October, 1788, when only twenty members answered to their names, and of those only two are especially notable, to wit: Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, whose subsequent history has given to each a record of service of immeasurable worth to the new government, and to them individually an immortal name. Had the Congress survived another month, it would have had an existence of fifteen years. There was no beat of drums, no waving of standards, no noisy proclamation of heralds, when it went out of life; but what a record has it left of patriotic, self-sacrificing service, and what a legacy of priceless worth in the Constitution which, through its agency, is bequeathed to us and to our posterity forevermore.

And now, let us ask, what is this Constitution our fathers have given us, and what the character, the functions, or, in other words, the real import and the actual value of the government under which we live. Is it a mere compact made by sovereign and independent powers, each one the judge of the extent of the power it has conferred, and the manner and mode of its exercise? A government terminable at the will and subject to the capricious control of each of the high contracting powers that assented to its form, and gave it leave to be? Are we an assemblage of consenting sovereigns to a compact to which at any moment we may put an end in the exercise of that sovereignty; an aggregate of assenting atoms, agreeing indeed to unite, but capable of resolving ourselves into our original elements, and assuming at our own pleasure our primitive form and substance?

These are pregnant questions, put by some with cautious hesitation, by others with bold assurance; and yet the answer to them all seems to me most easy and satisfactory. Our Constitution is not a compact, it was and is not the creation of independent sovereignties, each competent within the very terms and in the spirit of the Constitution to place upon it their own interpretation, and of their own volition without revolution or violence to withdraw themselves from its jurisdiction. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution was the offspring of state sovereignty. Both instruments on their very face confute this doctrine. The Declaration affirmed that, not by the authority of the states as corporate bodies politic, but" in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies," they declared themselves free and independent states; and the Constitution with equal explicitness declares that "We the people of these United States do ordain and establish this Constitution."

And it is equally clear, to state the proposition in its briefest and most comprehensive terms, that by the Constitution the people of these United States establish a nation supreme over all the lesser sovereignties that constituted the separate states, ordaining a Constitution that operated upon all the states in their corporate capacity not only, but directly upon every individual within the boundaries of the nation, and endowing that Government with legislative, judicial and executive functions, adequate to the enforcement of all its provisions against all resistance, whether that resistance should be by the exertion of individual force, or should arm itself with power attempted to be wielded by instrumentalities derived from any corporate source, be it municipal or state, or assuming to be sovereign under any name whatever. In these respects, if I may use the expression, as I do with the profoundest reverence, the general government is like Deity itself

"Sitting serene upon the floods their fury to restrain,

And as such Sovereign Lord supreme forevermore shall reign."

This is substantially the conclusion to which the great and unanswerable argument of Daniel Webster conducted the people of these United States when he met and overthrew the doughtiest of the champions of states' rights in the great debate of 1830. It is the doctrine which inspired the heart and aroused the unconquerable courage of that sturdy patriot, Andrew Jackson, who by the favor of a gracious Providence was in the Executive chair when nullification raised its head in 1832, and was by his iron will crushed out, as by his iron heel he would have stamped out its aiders and abettors, had they dared to put in actual practice what they proclaimed to be their abstract faith.

But although the snake was scotched, it was not killed, for it required. the final and supreme argument to meet the doctrine of secession on its last field, and in agony and blood subdue and overthrow it forever. War is said to be the "ultima ratio Regum;" and so it has often proved, and it is the final argument of republics as well, when the issue presented is that of continued existence or speedy death. Very dear, indeed, should this our freedom and our Union be to us, for with a great price we purchased that freedom, and with a vast sacrifice we preserved that Union. Would you estimate in part that price and sum up that sacrifice? Go, then, and visit the homes and stand by desolated hearthstones scattered through the land, and mark the vacant chairs once occupied by those who went forth to engage in that last great argument, and " whose feet departing ne'er returned." Walk through the national cemeteries and count, if

you can, the cenotaphs that lift their white heads above the graves of buried heroes, or visit the quiet rural burial-places and note the green. mounds, each distinguished by the modest stars and stripes that loving hands with each returning spring have planted there, and ask who sleep beneath, and constitute a portion of that countless host who

"On Fame's eternal camping-ground,

Their silent tents have spread

While honor guards with ceaseless round

The bivouac of the dead;"

and then tell us what is the meaning of Union and nationality, and what the extent and boundless comprehensiveness of the compensations that give to those sacrifices their priceless value, their inestimable worth.

Shall this government that our fathers gave us, and this Union we have done and suffered so much to maintain, survive and be perpetuated, or shall we follow in the track of many nations-the wrecks and débris of whose existence are strewn all along the shores of time? There are prophets of evil, as well as of good. They have existed in all ages, and do still-ravens, very black and very hoarse, as black and hoarse as were those that sat upon the castle of Macbeth, and croaked the fatal entrance of Duncan, under his battlements. And some of them delight to sit upon the battlements of our Constitution, and hoarsely croak of present evil and coming disaster. Believe no such birds of ill-omen, listen to no such Cassandra lamentations of impending woe. Have faith in your institutions, and have faith in the men that enjoy as well as administer them.

Much as I admire Macaulay, I do not accept his philosophy. I remember that his training, as well as that of most of the foreign thinkers that have undertaken to sit in judgment upon us and our institutions, has been under monarchical and aristocratic influences, and my answer to his prediction that our institutions will fail because we have given to the people too much freedom, and that they will ultimately turn and destroy us with the very instrument we have given them for their and our protection, is the answer that, in a memorable debate in the Forty-fifth Congress, was given by him whom the people have just called to be their chief magistrate for the coming four years. That answer is this: Neither Macaulay, nor any of the other thinkers to whom allusion has been made, have given proper weight to two potent influences that enter largely into our civilization, and give tone and character to our institutions. One of these is our educational forces, that reach through and will ultimately permeate all classes in our community; and the other is, that we have no privileged social or

class distinctions that hold men down in hopeless, abject subjection, but all have liberty by the light of our institutions, to rise to the highest position within the gift of the Republic. To use his own striking illustration, "our society does not resemble the crust of the earth, with its impassable barriers of rock. It resembles rather the waters of the mighty sea, deep, broad and boundless, and yet so free in all its parts, that the drop which mingles with the sand at its bottom is free to rise through all the mass of the superincumbent waters, until it flashes in the light on the crest of the highest wave." This is our answer. Is it not ample, and is it not enough?

For myself, standing upon the verge of three-fourths of a century of our national history, having partaken in a limited degree of the responsibilities attaching to its legislative, judicial and executive functions, and gazing back through that long vista upon its varied fortunes, I avow myself in all that respects our national glory, stability and perpetuity, an optimist in as large a sense as John Milton was in regard to England, when in that grand burst of eloquence in his plea for the liberty of unlicensed printing, he exclaimed, "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle, mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance, while the whole brood of timorous and flocking birds with those that love the twilight, flitter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of Sects and Schisms."

Such was the vision that broke upon the mental eye of one of the profoundest thinkers and noblest patriots of England. If the historian of the mother-land can not truthfully record its perfect fulfillment there, may it not be the hope and aspiration of the nation that broke away from her control, forgetting all our sad past and burying it forever in its grave of blood, and looking cheerfully to the future with its rainbow of promise, to more than surpass the dream of the poet in the peaceful glories that shall crown the coming history of free, united and happy America.

W. B. Bacon

UTICA, NEW YORK.