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rable and impracticable, is her Puritanism. In an age of discoveries, that discovery is the most remarkable. After Puritanism has been upon the continent two centuries and a half, building up free institutions; after union with it for three generations, its light following the light of the sun, and kindling the western horizon with new glory; after having suffered and toiled with it, and been inspired by it through the Revolution; after having enjoyed with it, or in spite of it, for seventy-four years, the freest and most beneficent Government the Divine Ruler ever permitted to man; the country learns, with surprise, it has all the while been under the saddest of delusions; that what it had fondly believed a

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spirit of health,” is, in truth, a "goblin damned;" that New England is a diseased limb of our body politic, that must be severed, or the whole body perish.

With scarcely less surprise, if at a time like this we have a right to be surprised at any thing, do we observe by whom these assaults upon New England are made. By those who claim to be the especial friends of the democratic institutions which Puritan hands planted and Puritan tears watered in the wilderness of the New World. By the especial friends of personal liberty, of which, under the Tudors and Stuarts, the Puritans were the depositaries; and of which, from that day to this, they have been the vigilant and zealous defenders. By the especial friends of the Union, which germinated on the New-England soil, and of which the humble confederation of the New-England Colonies was the forerunner and the prophecy. By the especial friends of the Constitution, which, in the hour of its past perils,

has found in New-England statesmen some of its firmest bulwarks, and, in the greatest of them all, its great defender. With Virginia, who, by her resolutions of 1798, inserted the wedge, which, from that day, she has driven deeper and nearer to the heart of the Union; with South Carolina, which, more than thirty years ago, set up the standard of revolt, and has been laboring for a generation, with persistent malignity and folly, to destroy the Government she had felt only in its blessings; with the Gulf States, who are seeking, by a rebellion remorseless and bloody, to plunge themselves and the country into the gulf of woe and perdition; with these, Union is possible and desirable, but not with the Puritans of New England!

Leave them to perish on their granite, ice-bound peaks! Theirs is a restless spirit, the very genius of discontent. They disturbed the repose of the Tudors; they reformed the Reformation; they took from one Stuart his head, and from another his throne; they secured Magna Carta; they gave to civil liberty the Petition of Right; they left merry England in the heyday of its material prosperity, where, could they have appreciated the tranquillity of despotism, they might have laughed and grown fat; they left the homes of childhood, the graves of fathers, and faced ocean, wilderness, want, the savage foe, merely to pray as the spirit taught them to pray. Simple men, they might have worshipped God in solemn temples, in cathedral aisles, the eye ravished with beauty, and the ear with music. They sought rather the rude log-house in the forest, or the temple not made with hands; preferring

to royal favor the favor of the King of kings. They planted their humble commonwealths upon a sterile soil and in an inhospitable climate. Their institutions were laid on the rough granite of English liberty. Instead of seeking to bask in royal sunshine, they stood out in the cold, and contrived to bar their doors, not only against intruders, but against the king. Loyal to the crown when the crown let them alone, they maintained, from the beginning, a substantial, sturdy independence. When separation came, it is among the most striking things in history to observe how slight changes in the framework of government were necessary. For ninety years, Mr. Speaker, their destinies have been blended with those of the other colonies. From many States sprung up one nation. To-day, New England finds upon her soil more than three millions of free, intelligent, happy people. A million of living men born upon that soil have their homes in the other States. One-third of the population of the United States is of New-England descent; its ancestral graves and memories with us.

The Puritans have borne with them toward the setting sun the institutions, the manners, the culture of New England; the meeting-house, the town-house, the common school, the college, the village library. They were not without the weaknesses and follies of their time, and follies their own; but in spite of these, and over and above these, they had the elements of character which fit men to be the founders of empire, -conditores imperiorum, — firmness, courage, prophetic sagacity, serene, unfaltering trust in God. And they were the founders

of an empire; a beneficent, a glorious, let us pray the infinite Lawgiver, an enduring empire.

But I forget, Mr. Speaker: wise men have discovered not only that the sun has spots, but that it is the spots that make up the sun; and that, after all, there is no light or life or healing in his beams; that the clothes are more than the man, the outward more than the inward, the accidental and temporary more than the vital and permanent. The history of three centuries is to be rewritten; the judgment of the civilized world to be reversed; the House of Stuart to be recanonized; the locks of the Cavalier to be recurled, and the Roundhead again set upon the stocks for the rabble to pelt. The task is formidable; but as wit has a keen edge, and error and calumny are swift of foot, it may be well to notice briefly some items of the great debt we owe to the Puritans and their descendants, and some of the grounds of attack.

The debt which personal liberty owes to the Puritans can scarcely be overstated. By liberty I mean no philosophical abstractions, no platitudes of French philosophy, but practical, personal freedom, intrenched in, and defined and upheld by, sovereign law; the sense and right of security which makes a man's house his castle, and his person sacred; a man's right to life, property, the use of his brain and of his lips, within the pale of the law, and unless deprived of them by due process of law; the right without which all the forms and machinery of free government are mockery, delusion, and fraud. It is to the Puritans of the time of Charles I. we owe the great Petition of Right, to whose lofty

yet eminently practical ideas of liberty our times have not climbed.

Let me ask the Clerk to read the passages I have marked. Observe, Mr. Speaker, how history repeats itself. "I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive.”

“Whereas also, by the statute called the Great Charter of the liberties of England, it is declared and enacted, that no freeman may be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his freehold or liberties or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land;

“And, in the eight and twentieth year of the reign of King Edward III., it was declared and enacted, by authority of Parliament, that no man, of what estate or condition that he be, should be put out of his land or tenement, nor taken nor imprisoned nor disinherited, nor put to death, without being brought to answer by due process of law;

"Nevertheless, against the tenor of the said statutes, and other the good laws and statutes of your realm to that end provided, divers of your subjects have of late been imprisoned without any cause showed; and when, for their deliverance, they were brought before justice by your majesty's writs of habeas corpus, there to undergo and receive as the court should order, and their keepers commanded to certify the causes of their detainer, no cause was certified but that they were detained by your majesty's special command, signified by the lords of your Privy Council, and yet were returned back to several prisons, without being charged with any thing to which they might make answer according to the law;

“And whereas also, by the said Great Charter, and other of the laws and statutes of this your realm, no man ought to be adjudged to death but by the laws established in this your realm, either by the customs of the same realm or by acts of Parliament; and whereas no offender, of what kind soever, is exempted from the proceedings to be used, and punishments to be inflicted, by the laws and statutes of this your realm; nevertheless, of late time, divers commissions, under your majesty's great seal, have issued forth, by which certain persons have been assigned and appointed commissioners, with power and

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