class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are sovereign. There was a time when none desired it. I hope the time may come again, when a better comprehension of the theory of our government, and the inalienable rights of the people of the States, will prevent any one from denying that each State is sovereign, and this may reclaim the grants which it has made to any agent whomsoever. I therefore say, I concur in the action of the people of Mississippi, believing it to be necessary and proper, and should have been bound by their action if my belief had been otherwise; and this brings me to the important point which I wish on this last occasion to present to the Senate. It is by this confounding of nullification and secession that the name of a great man, whose ashes now mingle with his mother earth, has been invoked to justify coercion against a seceded State. The phrase 'to execute the laws,' was an expression which General Jackson applied to the case of a State refusing to obey the laws while yet a member of the Union. That is not the case now presented. The laws are to be executed over the United States, and upon the people of the United States. They have no relation to any foreign country. It is a perversion of terms; at least it is a great misapprehension of the case, which cites that expression for application to a State which has withdrawn from the Union. You may

make war on a foreign State. If it be the purpose of gentlemen, they may make war against a State which has withdrawn from the Union; but there are no laws of the United States to be executed within the limits of a seceded State. seceded State. A State finding herself in the condition in which Mississippi has judged she is, in which her safety requires that she should provide for the maintenance of her rights out of the Union, surrenders all the benefits, (and they are known to be many), deprives herself of the advantages, (they are known to be great) severs all the ties of affection (and they are close and endearing,) which have bound her to the Union; and thus divesting herself of every benefit, taking upon herself every burden, she claims to be exempt from any power to execute the laws of the United States within her limits.

"I well remember an occasion when Massachusetts was arraigned before the bar of the Senate, and when then the doctrine of coercion was rife, and to be applied against her, because of the rescue of a fugitive slave in Boston. My opinion then was the same that it is now. Not in a spirit of egotism, but to show that I am not influenced in my opinion because the case is my own, I refer to that time and that occasion as containing the opinion which I then entertained, and on which my present conduct is based. I then said, if Massachusetts, following her through a stated line of conduct, chooses to take the last step

which separates her from the Union, it is her right to go, and I will neither vote one dollar, nor one man to bring her back; but will say to her, God speed, in memory of kind associa

tions which once existed between her and the other States. It has been a conviction of passing necessity, it has been a belief that we are to be deprived in the Union of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us, which has brought Mississippi into her present decision. She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men. are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the second Declaration of Independence has been evoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races. That Declaration of Independence is to be construed by the circumstances and purposes from which it was made. The communities were declaring their independence; the people of those communities were asserting that no man was born to use the language of Mr. Jefferson-booted and spurred to ride over the rest of mankind; that men were created equal-meaning the men of the political community; that there was no divine right to rule; that no man inherited the right to govern; that there were no classes by which power and place descended to families, and that all stations were equally within the grasp of each member of the body-politic. These were the great principles they announced; these were the purposes for

which they made their declaration; these were the ends to which enunciations was directed. They had no reference to the slaves; else, how happened it that among the items of arraignment made against George III. was that he endeavored to do just what the North has been endeavoring of late to do-to stir up insurrections among our slaves. Had the declaration announced that the negroes were free and equal, how was the Prince to be arraigned for stirring up insurrection among them? And how was this to be enumerated among the high crimes which caused the colonies to sever their connection with the mother country? When our constitution was formed, the same idea was rendered more palpable; for there we find provision made for that very class of persons as property; they were not upon the footing of equality with white men-not even upon that of paupers and convicts; but so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste, only to be represented in numerical proportion of three-fifths.

"Then, senators, we recur to the compact which binds us together; we recur to the principles upon which our government was founded; and when you deny them, and when you deny to us to withdraw from a government which thus perverted, threatens to be the distruction of our rights, we but tread the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence, and take the hazard. This is done

not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of the country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit; but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our sacred duty to transmit to our children.

"I find in myself, perhaps, a type of the general feeling of my constituents towards yours. I am sure I feel no hostilty to you, senators from the North. I am sure there is not any one of you, whatever sharp discussions there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well, and such I am sure is the feeling of the people whom I represent towards those you represent. I therefore feel that I but express their desires, when I say I hope, and they hope, for peaceful relation with you, though we must part. They may be beneficial to us in the future, as they have been in the past, if you so will. The reverse may bring disaster on every portion of the country; and if you will have it thus, we will invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered them from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages of the beast; and thus putting our trust in God, and in our own firm hearts and

strong arms, we will vindicate the right as best we may. In the course of my service here, associated at different times with a great variety of senators, I see now around me some with whom I have served long; there have been points of collision; but whatever of offence there has been given to me I leave here; I carry with me no hostile remembrance. Whatever offence I have given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, senators, in this hour of our parting, to offer you my apology for any pain, which in the heat of discussion, I have inflicted. I go hence unincumbered of the remembrance of any injury received, and having discharged the duty of making the only reparation in my power for the injury offered. Mr. President, and senators, having made the announcement, which the occasion seems to me to require, it only remains for me to bid you a final adieu."

Mr. Davis was no braggart, and in the speech quoted, expresses clearly and in able language, the Calhoun theory of the relation of the States to the general government, and I have no doubt he expressed his honest convictions.

THE lives of prominent business men pass, for the most part, unwritten. To write them would be to narrate the successive steps by which they developed from obscurity into fame, from inexperience into wisdom, and from poverty into fortune. This would be to give the history of their business, in its perplexities, contests and risks, exposing, often, the proportion which its resources bore to its undertakings, and wherein its reverses offset, in part, its strokes of better fortune. Two inherent difficulties lie in the way of a good biography of a business man. The habit of reticence and reserve concerning his own affairs, which becomes instinctive in a successful man of affairs, would render such sketches distasteful to their subject. The patient revelation by him to his biographer of the details essential to an accurate handling of the subject would be often a greater and less satisfactory labor than to write the biography himself. Even when such a revelation were made, it would still be useless, unless the biographer possessed a more apt appreciation of commercial matters than is usually obtained by literary men. And the writing his own biography would be

marred by the imperfections which afflict a man of the first class who attempts to work in any other sphere than that in which he is first.

Hence, the attempted sketches of a business man are apt to shrink into collections of those incidents, perhaps. humorous or trivial, which were the most fleeting or irrelevant in his true career. Sometimes they relate only to those amusements which were but the atter-glow of his prosperity. These properly interest all who know the broader outlines of his commanding life. For such these trivialities are lifted into dignity. This implies. that the sketch is adapted to private reading among the merchant's friends. And this, in turn, concedes that it is not his true life. For the public would be greatly interested in the true careers of all its successful

men.

Rufus T. Bush, of Brooklyn, socially, and of New York city as a business man, is best known in his commercial life as the founder of the Bush and Denslow Manufacturing Company, which is now affiliated with the Standard Oil Company, and as having rapidly accumulated the considerable estate in Brooklyn and

New York which, since his death, has been incorporated into The Bush Company, Limited.

While his surroundings at birth gave no indication that he would inherit a marked talent for affairs, yet the same fine thread of heredity which we find in tracing back the ancestry of Thomas A. Edison, Charles O'Conor, and so many other men of note who seem to have come up without antecedents, applies to our subject. It is not without significance that O'Conor, though born among the poor of New York, was lineally descended from Ireland's kings; or that though Edison seemed to spring up like a sunflower, without seed, from the prairie sod, yet his ancestor's name is signed to the continental money of the war of 1776. So the "Petroleum V. Nasby," whose humorous but sturdy logic cheered the heart of President Lincoln and of the millions who strove and suffered with him in our great contest, traced his ancestral lineage to the father of one of England's clearest thinkers, the apostle of common sense, John

Locke.

Upon his father's side, Mr. Bush was descended from the Dutch admiral, Ter Boss, in command of the naval forces charged with the defence of the city of New Amsterdam and the colony of New Netherlands (now New York) while they were in Dutch control. In the line of his maternal ancestry, he stood connected with the

Sutherlands of the county and earldom of that name, in Scotland.

Mr. Bush carefully shunned every pretence that merit could be inherited in any marked degree, as likely to originate in either vanity or snobbery. Still, it was of his characteristics the most notable that, in the vicissitudes of business and excitements of trade, and notwithstanding an unusual acuteness of nervous sensibility, neither his most intimate nor casual acquaintance ever knew him to swerve from the calm politeness characteristic of an inborn gentleman, or to narrate an incident, apply an epithet or make an allusion that could not be repeated in the most refined presence. Moreover, the innate dignity of his nature, while ever eager to unbend to genuine humor, had no use for any person who insisted on a course of conduct or anecdote not in harmony with gcod breeding, good morals and good taste.

Born a farmer's son, in Tompkins county, N. Y., on the 22nd of February, 1840, and removing with his parents to Michigan at the age of eleven years, he grew up with experience. and a character essentially western, so far as the epithet "western" has come to be identified with special nerve and activity. His birth, as appears above, occurred on the day. made sacred by that of the "Father of his country." It may be pardoned if we mention the additional coincidence that from the period when his