BLANCHE A UGUST BLANCHE, one of the most popular of modern Swedish authors, was born in Stockholm in 1811. His versatility from the first was remarkable. He began while hardly more than a boy by writing political articles for a radical journal in Stockholm. Afterwards he wrote novels, short stories, essays, poems, and plays, and was singularly successful in every literary work he attempted. It was as a dramatist, however, that he did his best work. He was a member of the Swedish Parliament, or Rigsdag, an ardent politician, and an accomplished orator. In his habits he was eminently social, a generous and jovial host, radical both in religion and politics, and always ready to lend a helping hand to those who needed it. His kindness, his humor, his bonhomie, and his democratic ways endeared him to the people, and his death, which occurred in 1868, was an occasion of general mourning. ADDRESS ON THE DETHRONEMENT OF GUSTAVUS S DELIVERED ON ITS FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELE- TATES, like individuals, have their crisis to pass through ment, and those which have fallen to the lot of Sweden have been many and severe. More than once has she seemed on the verge of ruin; her forehead has been stained with blood more times than can be reckoned; she is scarred from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot; yet she stands to-day upright and free. This shows that our land has had able physicians, and that her hurts, though sometimes seemingly mortal, have been in every instance thoroughly cured. There were hard times during the reign of the Danish kings under the union. Uniting the three northern crowns into one was a beautiful thought, conceived by a queen, a woman, but defeated by kings and It struck against the selfishness and cruelties of Danish men. governors, and Engelbrekt, Sture and Wasar had their hands full in delivering us from this evil. Yet the independence of Sweden was never in any real danger. The people maintained their fortitude, and not so much as a chip was broken from the old granite foundation. The outlook seemed dark at the close of the reign of Charles XII, but the country, though bleeding from innumerable wounds, was a lion which retreated cautiously with its eyes fixed upon the enemy, paw uplifted, ever feared and ever dangerous to approach. The lion on the three rivers cringes before the lion in the den. Sweden lost a great deal, but she held Finland, nevertheless, and occupied a considerable portion of German soil. Awful was the year 1809. That disastrous year, which, with darker clouds than ever before, descended upon our poor, suffering and desperate motherland. At war with nearly all the world, calamities and treachery on every side, and stubborn autocracy in our midst; Finland lost; all the resources of the country exhausted, its youth dragged to the battlefields, dying on the way; insurrection fast becoming a necessity; Russian soldiers tramping the soil of our fathers. The wild hordes of the deserts longed to water their horses at the shores of Malaren as they did by the Seine some years later. They reached the Seine, but not the Malaren, and by the help of God they shall never get there. The help from God on March 13, 1809, was the revolution itself, and the men who led that movement were chosen instruments in God's hands. The memory of the day shall ever be kept holy in the true Swedish heart. Is it, then, over the downfall of an unfortunate and almost senseless monarch that a noble race to-day rejoices? Nay, it is the overthrow of unlimited monarchy which always has been so burdensome, which gave Narva to us with one hand and Pultava with the other, unlimited monarchy, which our land shall never more tolerate, but will fight it as persistently as our fathers did, and strangle every semblance of it as Hercules strangled the lion with his strong arm. And so when we drink to the memory of the 13th of March, 1809, we drink also to the destruction of the despotic principle in the north, from the ruins of which the people's new freedom, like a liberated dove, flew out over land and sea without one drop of blood having stained its immaculate wings. Gentlemen! Hail that day! the darkest hour is before the dawn. To the memory of the 13th of March, 1809! [Special translation by Charles E. Hurd.] BENJAMIN JUDAH PHILIP BENJAMIN was born in St. Croix, West Indies, in 1811. Soon after his birth, his parents, who were English Jews, emigrated to the United States, and the boy grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. After spending three years at Yale College, he entered upon the study of the law, and in 1832 was admitted to the bar in New Orleans. He was twice sent from Louisiana to the United States Senate, first in 1853 as a Whig, and again in 1859 as a Conservative. After the death of John C. Calhoun he was the most powerful champion of the legal claims of slavery under the Constitution. He resigned his seat in the United States Senate on February 21, 1861, and accepted the appointment of Attorney-General in the provisional government of the Confederate States. He was next made Secretary of War, and, ultimately, Secretary of State, which last-named position he held until the Confederacy collapsed. After the fall of Richmond, he escaped to the Bahamas, whence he reached Liverpool. Admitted to practice at the English bar, he soon acquired a lucrative practice, and rose to eminence. He died in Paris, in 1884. The speech which we here reproduce was one of the weightiest defences of the doctrine of the right of property in slaves. ON THE PROPERTY DOCTRINE, OR THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY IN SLAVES SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, MARCH 11, 1858 R. PRESIDENT, the whole subject of slavery, so far as it is involved in the issue now before Με the country, is narrowed down at last to a controversy on the solitary point, whether it be competent for the Congress of the United States, directly or indirectly, to exclude slavery from the Territories of the Union. The Supreme Court of the United States have given a nega tive answer to this proposition, and it shall be my first effort to support that negation by argument, independently of the authority of the decision. It seems to me that the radical, fundamental error which underlies the argument in affirmation of this power, is the assumption that slavery is the creature of the statute law of the several States where it is established; that it has no existence outside of the limits of those States; that slaves are not property beyond those limits; and that property in slaves is neither recognized nor protected by the Constitution of the United States, nor by international law. 1 controvert all these propositions, and shall proceed at once to my argument. Mr. President, the thirteen Colonies, which on the 4th of July, 1776, asserted their independence, were British colonies, governed by British laws. Our ancestors in their emigration to this country brought with them the common law of England as their birthright. They adopted its prin ciples for their government so far as it was not incompatible with the peculiarities of their situation in a rude and unsettled country. Great Britain then having the sovereignty over the Colonies, possessed undoubted power to regulate their institutions, to control their commerce, and to give laws to their intercourse, both with the mother and the other nations of the earth. If I can show, as I hope to be able to establish to the satisfaction of the Senate, that the nation thus exercising sovereign power over these thir. teen Colonies did establish slavery in them, did maintain and protect the institution, did originate and carry on the slave trade, did support and foster that trade, that it for bade the Colonies permission either to emancipate or export their slaves, that it prohibited them from inaugurating any |