ment been so shamefully disgraced, and our constitution violated; wherefore have our laws been made to authorize a change; and wherefore are we now assembled here!

Why should I mention the impressment of our seamen: depredation on every branch of our commerce; including the direct export trade, and made under laws which professedly undertake to regulate our trade with other nations: negotiation resorted to, time after time, till it is become hopeless: the restrictive system persisted in to avoid war, and in the vain expectation of returning justice !

What member of this house can say, with certainty, that he has, on all occasions, construed the constitution correctly; and who among us would be satisfied to stake all his hopes and prospects on the issue of an investigation, which, disregarding all respect for the purity of the motive, should seek only to discover an inadvertent error, resulting from a defect of judgment in the attainment of objects identified with the best interests of the nation!

What mystic spell is that which so blinds us to the suffering of our brethren, which deafens to our ear the voice of bleeding humanity, when it is aggravated by the shriek of dying thousands: which makes the very magnitude of the slaughter throw a softening disguise over its cruelties and its horrors: which causes us to eye with indifference the field that is crowded with the most revolting abominations, and arrests that sigh, which each individual would singly have drawn from us, by the report of the many who have fallen and breathed their last in agony along with him?

From what source does the gentleman derive the principle that a right, inherent in the nature of man, which he inhales with his first breath, which grows with his growth and strengthens with his strength, which has the fiat of God for its sanction, and is incorporated in the code of all the nations of the earth, becomes extinct with regard to those who, from motives of policy or humanity, may forbear to exercise it for any number of years: that a common law is thereby entailed on the American people to the latest generations, by which they are required to bend beneath the tomahawk and scalping-knife of the savage, and submit to every cruelty and enormity without the privilege of retaliating on the enemy the wrongs and injuries we have suffered by his wanton transgressions of the rules of civilized warfare !

Who would be doomed to gaze upon

A sky without a cloud or sun

Why fly to folly, why to phrensy fly
For rescue from the blessings we possess {

Where, where for shelter shall the guilty fly,
When consternation turns the good man pale!
Why in this thorny wilderness so long,

Since there's no promised land's ambrosial bower!
Wherefore dost thou urge the name of hands,
To bid Eneas tell the tale twice o'er

How Troy was burnt, and he made miserable!
Wherefore rejoice: what conquest brings he home:
What tributaries follow him to Rome,

To grace in captive bonds his chariot-wheels!
What hero like the man who stands himself:
Who dares to meet his naked heart alone:
Who hears intrepid the full charge it brings;
Resolved to silence future murmurs there!

Who

Shall shake these solid mountains, this firm earth
And bid those clouds and waters take a shape
Distinct from that which we and all our sires
Have seen them wear on their eternal way
What need we any spur but our own cause
To prick us to redress; what other bond,
Than secret Romans that have spoke the word,
And will not palter; and what other oath,
Than honesty to honesty engaged

That this shall be, or we will fall for it!

Who proclaims to me

That there were crimes made venial by the occasion;
That passion was our nature; that the goods

Of Heaven waited on the goods of fortune:
Who showed me his humanity secured
By his nerves only: who deprived me of
All power to vindicate myself and race ·
In open day!

Why did Wolsey, near the steps of fate,

On weak foundations raise the enormous weight!
Why but to sink beneath misfortune's blow
With louder ruins to the gulfs below!

What gave great Villiers to the assassin's knife,
And fixed disease on Harley's closing life;

What murdered Wentworth; and what exiled Hyde,
By kings protected and to kings allied

3. INDIRECT INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES.

RULE XVI. The indirect interrogative, if of a close of compact construction, is delivered with the upper emphatic sweep to the emphatic word and the lower from it; if of a perfect or imperfect loose construction, each part is delivered in the same manner. (See Plate, Fig. 14: a. b. See also Ch. III. Mod. Slides.)

In a series of indirect, the last, and sometimes all but the first, are delivered like a declarative: ending with partial and perfect close. (See ibid. c.)

1. Examples of the first kind.

He went to Europe after you saw him on that occasion

He admitted the validity of the deed, when you produced it?

Ros. You say, if I bring in your Rosalind

You will bestow her on Orlando here ! [To the Duke.]
Duke S. That would I, had I kingdoms to give with her.
Ros. And you say you will have her, when I bring her [To
Orlando.]

[To Phebe.]

Orl. That would I, were I of all kingdoms, king.
Ros.
You say you'll marry me, if I be willing
Phe. That would I, should I die the hour after.
Ros. You say, that you'll have Phebe, if she will
Though to have her and death were both one thing.

Sil.

[To Silvius.]

Hard state of things, that one may believe one's fears; but can

not rely upon one's hopes !

And all these tell you the particulars

Of every several grief! how first it grew,

And then increased; what action caused that;
What passion that; and answer to each point
That you will put to them!

2. Examples of the second kind.

[And the younger said unto his father,] Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me! [And he divided unto them his living.*]

3. Examples of the third kind.

[So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord :] thou knowest that I love thee [He saith unto

To read the parts of these sentences, not included in brackets, as many do, with the per fect close, is to give them an air of impertinence, or impudence: an air entirely remote from the humble assurance and supplication which they are designed to express.

him, Feed my lambs. He saith unto him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord:] thou knowest that I love thee [He saith unto him, Feed my sheep. He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me; and he said unto him] Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee [Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.*]

[And she said, Truth, Lord :] yet the dogs eat of the crumbs

which fall from their master's table f

RULE XVII. As a whole, this sentence should oe delivered with the upward slide to the disjunctive or, and with the downward slide from it: as the parts may be either simple or compound, and if compound, close, compact or loose or semi-interrogative, their delivery, independently considered, must be modified accordingly. (See Plate, Fig. 5. See also Chap. III. Mod. Slides.)

To be, or not to be !

Examples.

Was it fancy or was it fact!

Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another!

Are the stars that gem the vault of the heavens above us, mere decorations of the night, or suns and centres of planetary systems!

Do you question me as an honest man should do for my simple, true judgment? or would you have me speak after my custom, as being a professed tyrant of the sex!

Is there nothing that whispers to that right honorable gentleman, that the crisis is too big, that the times are too gigantic, to be ruled by the little hackneyed and every-day means of ordinary corruption; or are we to believe, that he has within himself a conscious feeling, that disqualifies him from rebuking the ill-timed selfishness of his new allies!

Did those great Italian masters begin and proceed in their art without choice of method, and always draw with the same ease and freedom; or did they observe some method: beginning with simple and elementary parts, an eye, a nose, a finger, which they drew with great pains and care; often drawing the same thing in

*Bee Note on preceding page.

order to draw it correctly; and so proceeding with patience and industry, till, after considerable length of time, they arrived at the masterly manner you speak of!

Is it the cold and languid speaker, whose words fall in such sluggish and drowsy motion from his lips, that they can promote nothing but the slumbers of his auditory, and minister opiates to the body, rather than stimulants to the mind; is it the unlettered fanatic without method, without reason, with incoherent raving, and vociferous ignorance, calculated to ft his hearers, not for the kingdom of heaven, but for a hospital of lunatics; is it even the learned, ingenious and pious minister of Christ, who, by neglect or contempt of the oratorical art, has contracted a whining, monotonous sing-song of delivery to exercise the patience of his flock, at the expense of other Christian graces? or is it the genuine orator of heaven, with a heart sincere, upright and fervent: a mind stored with that universal knowledge, required as the foundation of the art: with a genius for the invention, a skill for the disposition, and a voice for the elocution of every argument to convince and every sentiment to persuade

Will you believe that the pure system of Christian faith which appeared eighteen hundred years ago, in one of the obscurest regions of the Roman empire, at the moment of the highest mental cultivation and of the lowest moral degeneracy; which superseded at once all the curious fabrics of pagan philosophy; which spread almost instantaneously through the civilized world in opposition to the prejudices, the pride, and the persecution of the times; which has already had the most beneficial influence on society, and been the source of almost all the melioration of the human character; and which is now the chief support of the harmony, the domestic happiness, the moral and the intellectual improvement of the best part of the world;-will you believe, I say, that this system originated in the unaided reflections of twelve Jewish fishermen on the sea of Galilee, with the son of a carpenter at their head? or will you admit a supposition which solves all the wonders of this case which accounts at once for the perfection of the system, and the miracle of its propagation: that Jesus was, what he professed to be, the prophet of God; and that his apostles were, as they declared, empowered to perform the miracles which subdued the incredulity of the world?

Was it a wailing bird of the gloom,

Which shrieks on the house of wo all night;
Or a shivering fiend that flew to a tomb

Are thy wild children like thyself arrayed,
Strong in immortal and unchecked delight