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my voice be heard, however transcendent my statesmanship! Rise up this instant and condemn me! But if, in your opinion and judgment, I am far better and of better descent than my adversary; if (to speak without offence) I am not inferior, I or mine, to any respectable citizen; then give no credit to him for his other statements-it is plain they were all equally fictions-but to me let the same good-will, which you have uniformly exhibited upon many former trials, be manifested now. With all your malice, Eschines, it was very simple to suppose that I should turn from the discussion of measures and policy to notice your scandal. I will do no such thing: I am not so crazed. Your lies and calumnies about my political life I will examine forthwith; for that loose ribaldry I shall have a word hereafter, if the jury desire to hear it.

MODERN TOLERATION.-T. F. MARSHALL.

MEN have been known to fight for their religion and their franchises. John Huss was an obscure professor in a German university. The Emperor Sigismund, when he burnt him at Constance, little dreamed that from the ashes of the friendless martyr there would rise the flames of a war in Bohemia which would shake the Austrian power, and desolate Germany through long years of suffering and of blood. If the persecuting temper of the sixteenth century is to be renewed here, if American Protestantism so far forgets its genius and its mission, as to aid in rekindling the religious wars of that terrible period in quest of vengeance for the gone centuries of wrong, religion will suffer most. True Christianity will veil her face and seek the shade, till better times. Men will be divided between a sullen and sordid fanaticism on the one side, and a scoffing infidelity on the other. Our national characteristics will be lost. American civilization will have changed its character. Our Federal Union will have sacrificed its distinctive traits, and we shall have exhibited a failure in the principles with which our government commenced its career, at which hell itself might exult in triumph.

EULOGY ON FRANKLIN.-FAUCHET.

FRANKLIN did not omit any of the means of being useful to men, or serviceable to society. He spoke to all conditions, to both sexes, to every age. This amiable moralist descended, in his writings, to the most artless details; to the most ingenuous familiarities; to the first ideas of a rural, a commercial, and a civil life; to the dialogues of old men and children; full at once of all the verdure and all the maturity of wisdom. In short, the prudent lessons arising from the exposition of those obscure, happy, easy virtues, which form so many links in the chain of a good man's life, derived immense weight from that reputation for genius which he had acquired, by being one of the first naturalists and greatest philosophers in the universe.

At one and the same time, he governed nature in the heavens and in the hearts of men. Amidst the tempests of the atmosphere, he directed the thunder; amidst the storms of society, he directed the passions. Think, gentlemen, with what attentive docility, with what religious respect, one must hear the voice of a simple man, who preached up human happiness, when it was recollected that it was the powerful voice of the same man who regulated the lightning.

He electrified the consciences, in order to extract the destructive fire of vice, exactly in the same manner as he electrified the heavens, in order peaceably to invite from them the terrible fire of the elements.

Venerable old man! august philosopher! legislator of the felicity of thy country, prophet of the fraternity of the human race, what ecstatic happiness embellished the end of thy career! From thy fortunate asylum, and in the midst of thy brothers who enjoyed in tranquillity the fruit of thy virtues, and the success of thy genius, thou hast sung songs of deliverance. The last looks which thou didst cast around thee, beheld America happy; France, on the other side of the ocean, free, and a sure indication of the approaching freedom and happiness of the world.

THE CONSTITUTION A BILL OF RIGHTS.-HAMILTON.

THE Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS. The several bills of rights in Great Britain, form its constitution, and conversely the constitution of each state is its bill of rights. In like manner the proposed constitution, if adopted, will be the bill of rights of the Union. Is it one object of a bill of rights to declare and specify the political privileges of the citizens in the structure and administration of the government? This is done in the most ample and precise manner in the plan of the convention; comprehending various precautions for the public security, which are not to be found in any of the state constitutions. Is another object of a bill of rights to define certain immunities and modes of proceeding, which are relative to personal and private concerns? This we have seen has also been attended to, in a variety of cases, in the same plan. Adverting therefore to the substantial meaning of a bill of rights, it is absurd to allege that it is not to be found in the work of the convention. It may be said that it does not go far enough, though it will not be easy to make this appear; but it can with no propriety be contended that there is no such thing. It certainly must be immaterial what mode is observed as to the order of declaring the rights of the citizens, if they are provided for in any part. of the instrument which establishes the government: whence it must be apparent that much of what has been said on this subject rests merely on verbal and nominal distinctions, entirely foreign to the substance of the thing.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.-MACKINTOSH.

THE French Revolution began with great and fatal errors. These errors produced atrocious crimes. A mild and feeble monarchy was succeeded by bloody anarchy, which very shortly gave birth to military despotism. France, in a few years, described the whole circle of human society.

All this was in the order of nature. When every principle of authority and civil discipline, when every principle which enables some men to command and disposes others to obey, was extirpated from the mind by atrocious theories, and still more atrocious examples; when every old institution was trampled down with contumely, and every new institution covered in its cradle with blood; when the principle of property itself, the sheet-anchor of society, was annihilated; when in the persons of the new possessors, whom the poverty of language obliges us to call proprietors, it was contaminated in its source by robbery and murder, and it became separated from that education and those manners, from that general presumption of superior knowledge and more scrupulous probity which form its only liberal titles to respect; when the people were taught to despise everything old, and compelled to detest everything new; there remained only one principle strong enough to hold society together, a principle utterly incompatible, indeed, with liberty, and unfriendly to civilization itself, a tyrannical and barbarous principle; but, in that miserable condition of human affairs, a refuge from still more intolerable evils. I mean the principle of military power, which gains strength from that confusion and bloodshed in which all the other elements of society are dissolved, and which, in these terrible extremities, is the cement that preserves it from total destruction.

THE REIGN OF TERROR.-LORD BROUGHAM.

THE Reign of Terror, under which no life was secure for a day; the wholesale butcheries, both of the prisoners in September, and by the daily executions that soon followed; the violence of the conscription, which filled every family with orphans and widows; the profligate despotism and national disasters under the Directory; the military tyranny of Napoleon; the sacrifice of millions to slake his thirst of conquest; the invasion of France by foreign troops--Pandours, Hussars, Cossacks, twice revelling

in the spoils of Paris; the humiliating occupation of the country for five years by the allied armies, and her ransom by the payment of millions;-these were the consequences, more or less remote, of the Reign of Terror, which so burnt into the memory of all Frenchmen the horrors of anarchy, as to make an aversion to change for a quarter of a century the prevailing characteristic of a people not the least fickle among the nations, and to render a continuance of any yoke bearable, compared with the perils of casting it off. All these evils were the price paid by the respectable classes of France, but especially of Paris, for their unworthy dread of resisting the clubs and the mob in 1792.

AMERICAN PETITIONS.-LORD CHATHAM.

WHEN your lordships look at the papers transmitted us from America; when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must declare and avow, that in all my reading and observation—and it has been my favorite study—I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world-that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. I trust it is obvious to your lordships, that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retract; let us retract while we can, not when we must. I say we must necessarily undo these violent oppressive acts; they must be repealed-you will repeal them; I pledge myself for it, that you will in the end repeal them; I stake my reputation on it-I will consent to be taken for an idiot, if they are not finally repealed. Avoid, then, this humiliating, disgraceful necessity. With a dignity becoming your exalted situation, make the first advances to

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