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VIRGINIAN ORATORY.

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Stephen Langton was, you know nothing, sure enough. [Laughter and cheers.] He was a Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. [Renewed cheers.] I come here not to praise the Catholics, but I come here to acknowledge historical truths, and to ask of Protestants, What has heretofore been the pride and boast of Protestants? Tolerance of opinions in religious faith. [Applause.] All we ask is tolerance. All we ask is that, if you hate the Catholics because they have proscribed heretics, you won't out-proscribe proscription. If you hate the Catholics because they have nunneries and monasteries, and Jesuitical secret orders, don't out-Jesuit the Jesuits by going into dark-lantern secret chambers to apply test oaths. If you hate the Catholics because you say they encourage the Machiavelian expediency of telling lies sometimes, don't swear yourselves not to tell the truth.

"If you place me with your sword in hand by that great pillar of Virginia sovereignty, I promise you to bear and forbear to the last extremity. I will suffer much, suffer long, suffer almost any thing but dishonor. But it is, in my estimation, with the union of the States as it is with the union of matrimony— you may suffer almost any thing except dishonor; but when honor is touched the union must be dissolved. [Loud and prolonged cheers.] I will not say that; I take back the words. I will not allow myself to contemplate a dissolution of the Union. [Renewed cheering.] No; we will still try to save it. But when the worst comes to worst, if compelled to draw the sword of Virginia, I will draw it; and, by the gods of the State and her holy altars, if I am compelled to draw it, I will flesh it or it shall pierce my body. [Enthusiastic cheering.] And I tell you more, we have got Abolitionists in this State. [Voice in the crowd, 'D-n the Know-Nothings,' and great laughter.] If I should have to move, some of the first, I fear, against whom I should have to act would be some within our own limits. But if forced to fight, I will not confine myself to the State of Virginia. My motto will be:

"Woe to the coward that ever he was born,

That did not draw the sword before he blew the horn.'

[Loud cheers.]"

Mr. Levin died, as I have stated, in March of 1860, in his fifty-second year, but Henry A. Wise is still living in his sixtyfifth. His has been a stormy experience. He graduated at Washington College, Pennsylvania, at the age of nineteen, was admitted to the bar at Winchester, Virginia, in 1828, and removed the same year to Nashville, Tennessee, where he practiced his profession for a short time. Returning to his native county of Accomac, Virginia, he was elected a Representative in Congress in 1833, and served until 1844. He was an extreme Whig up to the time John Tyler quarreled with that party, after which he gradually united with the Democrats, and in 1855 became their candidate for Governor of Virginia and was elected. He held that position until 1860. He was a Confederate brigadier-general, and did his utmost to excite the people of the South against the Government. The extract I take from his speech is a fair specimen of his oratory. Intense, impetuous, and rapid, he is a very formidable adversary on the hustings and at the bar. His opposition to General Jackson was exceedingly virulent and able. He figured prominently in the lamentable duel at Bladensburg, Maryland, on the 24th of February, 1838, between Jonathan Cilley, of Maine, a Democrat, and William J. Graves, of Kentucky, a Whig. Few events ever excited greater horror. It was the first of many tragedies growing out of the arrogant insolence of the slaveholders. They fought with rifles, at eighty yards, and when Cilley fell, in the thirty-sixth year of his age, a bright light was extinguished and a noble heart stilled. Wise was the undoubted dictator of the Tyler Administration. Standing between the two great parties. in the House, he delighted in his isolation and rioted in the eccentricities of his genius. Sent as Minister to Brazil in 1844, and remaining there until 1847, he made himself notorious by

POLITICS AND RELIGION.

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some of the maddest diplomatic explosions. He had been appointed Minister to France in 1843, and resigned his place to accept the post, but the Senate would not confirm him, and his constituency immediately returned him to Congress. He was Governor of Virginia when John Brown was executed, and made the worst use of that event in preparing the people for the coming rebellion. He lost one or two sons in that struggle, and is now, I believe, in the active practice of his profession.

The fatal error in the Native American and Know-Nothing excitements was that the first warred against all Catholics, and the second against all foreigners. We must wait to see how the present assault by Irish Catholics upon Irish Protestants will end. It is a new phase, and must work out new results, especially in view of late developments in Italy, France, Germany, and Spain, in all of which Republican members of the Church of Rome, like Hyacinthe in France, Garibaldi in Italy, Döllinger in Germany, and Castelar in Spain, have taken arms boldly against the extraordinary assumptions of the Pope and his College of Cardinals. Döllinger is already being called the Luther of his time, and Garibaldi is the soldier who fights for liberty in the name of the crucified Saviour.

Should this movement crystallize, it may revolutionize by liberalizing the Catholic Church. Let us not despise these signs of the times. They are numerous. The past history of the American sentiment is a profound philosophy-worthy of the statesman's careful study. The appointment of so many foreigners in New York by the Democratic party in the spring of 1844 was so odious that the Native Americans carried that great city in all its departments, electing James Harper (the venerable head of the publishing house of that name, now deceased) Mayor, and carrying the Board of Aldermen. The contagion then spread to Philadelphia, when Levin took up the cause, and, as I have shown, carried it to a great success. Defeated for a season, it is again revived by causes that have a deeper

G

root and extend over the whole area of civilization. How these will germinate and grow, whether into a creed or a faction, into a great mission or a new mischief, is one of the mysteries of

the age.

[July 30, 1871.]

XXX.

How to win friends and keep them is the secret of a successful public man. Andrew Jackson possessed it, without absolutely courting the people. His strict integrity, generous nature, high honor, military character and history, were the chief elements of his prestige. Henry Clay possessed and knew how to use it. His charms were unrivaled eloquence, supreme ambition, innate patriotism, commanding presence, and magnetism of men and women. John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan were cold and formal men, who inspired admiration by their talents, but never awakened real affection. Abraham Lincoln captured every body by seeming to be indifferent to the very qualities in which he was eminent. His simplicity and naturalness, so to speak, were resistless. But no character, certainly no candidate for our highest office, was a completer master of the gift of securing tenacious friends than Stephen A. Douglas. He had scarcely touched the floor of Congress before he became an object of interest. His extreme youth, his boyish appearance, his ready wit, his fine memory, his native rhetoric, above all, his suavity and heartiness, made him a favorite long before he was named for President. He delighted in pleasant company. Unused to what is called "etiquette," he soon adapted himself to its rules, and took rank in the dazzling society of the capital. Many a time have I watched him leading in the keen encounters of the

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bright intellects around the festive board. To see him threading the glittering crowd with a pleasant smile or a kind word for every body, one would have taken him for a trained courtier. But he was more at home in the close and exciting thicket of men. That was his element. To call each one by name, sometimes by his Christian name; to stand in the centre of a listening throng, while he told some Western story or defended some public measure; to exchange jokes with a political adversary; or, ascending the rostrum, to hold thousands spell-bound for hours, as he poured forth torrents of characteristic eloquence these were traits that raised up for him hosts who were ready to fight for him. Eminent men did not hesitate to take their stand under the Douglas flag. Riper scholars than himself, older if not better statesmen, frankly acknowledged his leadership and faithfully followed his fortunes.

But among them all none came into Congress more devotedly attached to Douglas than James A. McDougall, who died shortly after the close of his term as a Senator in Congress from California. Born at Bethlehem, New York, on the 19th of November, 1817, he removed to Pike County, Illinois, when he was just twenty years of age, and when Stephen A. Douglas was registrar of the Land Office in that State. There was four years' difference between the men, and they loved each other like brothers. McDougall was chosen Attorney-General of the State in 1842, and re-elected in 1844. In 1849 he originated and accompanied an exploring expedition to Rio del Norte, Gila, and Colorado; afterward emigrated to California, where he followed his profession until he was chosen AttorneyGeneral of that State in 1850. He was sent to Congress for one term, from 1853 to 1855, but declined a re-election, and remained out of public life until he was made a Senator in Congress in 1861, the term of which he served out. He entered the Senate as a War Democrat of the advanced school, and was for a while the representative of the ideas for which Brod

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