then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me-my money-was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it. But it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great confederacy shall be at peace and in harmony one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill-temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands and yield to them if in our deliberate view of our duty we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine if we can what will satisfy them.

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them if in the future we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, What will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone but we must somehow convince them that we do let them alone. This we know by ex

perience is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly-done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated: we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our freeState constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, "Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery." But we do let them alone-have never disturbed them; so that after all it is what we say which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing until we cease saying.

.

I am also aware they have not as yet in terms demanded the overthrow of our free-State constitutions. Yet those constitutions declare the wrong of slavery with more solemn emphasis than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced the overthrow

of these constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding as they do that slavery is morally right and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it as a legal right and a social blessing.

Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality-its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension-its enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition as being right; but thinking it wrong as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we while our votes will prevent it allow it to spread into the national Territories and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so indus

triously plied and belabored-contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of "don't care on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists, reversing the divine rule and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government or of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.

WINTHROP

ROB

OBERT CHARLES WINTHROP, a noted American orator, and a direct descendant of Governor John Winthrop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 12, 1809, and died there, November 16, 1894. After his graduation from Harvard University he studied law with Daniel Webster, and was admitted to the bar in 1831. He was for several years a member of the State legislature and a member of the lower house of Congress, 1841-50, being speaker of the House during the thirtieth Congress. When Webster became secretary of state in 1850, Winthrop was appointed to fill his unexpired term in the Senate. In 1851 he was Whig candidate for governor of Massachusetts, but was defeated and thereafter declined all political nominations, although he delivered political addresses occasionally. In Congress he proved himself to be an able parliamentary speaker, but he will be longest remembered by his historical addresses, which are as eloquent as they are scholarly, and display a finished, refined style. Among the best of his many orations are those on the laying of the corner-stone of the Washington monument in 1848, the Boston Centennial oration, 1876, and the oration at the Yorktown Centennial in 1881. His published writings comprise "Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions " (1853-67); "Memoir of Nathan Appleton (1861); Life and Letters of John Winthrop (1867); "Washington, Bowdoin, and Franklin" (1876); "Reminiscences of Foreign Travel (1894).

EULOGY OF EDWARD EVERETT

DELIVERED IN FANEUIL HALL, JANUARY 19, 1865

HARDLY know, fellow citizens and friends, I hardly know either how to speak or how to be silent here today. I dare not trust myself to any off-hand, impulsive utterance on such a theme. And yet I cannot but feel how poor and how inadequate to the occasion is the best preparation which I am capable of making. I am sincerely and deeply sensible how unfitted I am by emotions which I should in vain attempt to restrain for meeting the expectations and the demands of such an hour or for doing justice to an event which has hardly left a heart unmoved or an eye unmoistened in our whole community. Most gladly would I

(6637)