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certain restraints on our action even in time of war. We are a Christian people, and the war must be prosecuted in a manner recognized by Christian nations. We must not invade constitutional rights. The innocent must not suffer, nor women or children be the victims. Savages must not be let loose. But while I sanction no war on the rights of others, I will implore my countrymen not to lay down their arms until our own rights are recognized. The Constitution and its guarantees are our birthright, and I am ready to enforce that inalienable right to the last extent. We cannot recognize secession. Recognize it once, and you have not only dissolved government, but you have destroyed social order, and upturned the foundations of society. You have inaugurated anarchy in its worst form, and will shortly experience all the horrors of the French Revolution.

Then we have a solemn duty, to maintain the government. The greater our unanimity, the speedier the day of peace. We have prejudices to overcome from a fierce party contest waged a few short months since. Yet these must be allayed. Let us lay aside all criminations and recriminations as to the origin of these difficulties. When we shall have again a country, with the United States flag floating over it, and respected on every inch of American soil, it will then be time enough to ask who and what brought all this upon us. I have said more than I intended to say. It is a sad task to discuss questions so fearful as civil war; but sad as it is, bloody and disastrous as I expect the war will be, I express it as my conviction, before God, that it is the duty of every American citizen to rally round the flag of his country. S. A. Douglas.

CCLXXXIX.

ON THE ORDINANCE OF SECESSION IN THE GEORGIA

CONVENTION.

HIS step, once taken, can never be recalled; and all the

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baleful and withering consequences that follow will rest on the convention for all coming time. When we and our posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war, which this act of yours will inevitably invite and call forth; when your green fields of waving harvests shall be trodden down by

the murderous soldiery and the fiery car of war sweeping over our land; our temples of justice laid in ashes; all the horrors and desolation of war upon us, who but this convention will be held responsible for it? and who but him who shall have given his vote for this unwise and ill-timed measure shall be held to strict account for this suicidal act by the present generation, and probably cursed and execrated by posterity for all coming time, for the wide and desolating ruin that will inevitably follow this act you now propose to perpetrate?

Pause, I entreat you, and consider for a moment what reasons you can give that will ever satisfy yourselves in calmer moments, what reasons you can give to your fellow-sufferers in the calamity that it will bring upon us? What reason can you give the nations of the earth to justify it? They will be the calm and deliberate judges in the case, and to what cause, or one overt act can you point, on which to rest the plea of justification? What right has the North assailed? What interest of the South has been invaded? What justice has been denied? and what claim founded in justice and right has been withheld? Can either of you to-day name one governmental act of wrong deliberately and purposely done by the government at Washington of which the South has a right to complain? I challenge the answer! While, on the other hand, let me show the facts (and believe me, gentlemen, I am not here the advocate of the North, but am here the firm friend and lover of the South and her institutions, and for this reason I speak thus plainly and faithfully for yours, mine, and every other man's interest, the words of truth and soberness,) let me show the facts, I say, of which I wish you to judge, and I will only state facts which are clear and undeniable, and which now stand as records authentic in the history of our country.

When we of the South demanded the slave-trade, or the importation of Africans for the cultivation of our lands, did they not yield the right for twenty years? When we asked a threefifths representation in Congress for our slaves, was it not granted? When we asked and demanded the return of any fugitive from justice, or the recovery of those persons owing labor or allegiance, was it not incorporated in the Constitution? and again ratified and strengthened in the Fugitive Slavc Law of 1850?

Do you reply that in many instances they have violated this compact, and have not been faithful to their engagements? As individuals and local communities they may have done so; but not by the sanction of government; for that has always been true to Southern interests.

Leaving out of the view, for the present, the countless millions of dollars you must expend in a war with the North, there will be thousands and tens of thousands of your sons and brothers slain in battle, and offered up as sacrifices upon the altar of ambition.-and for what, we ask again? It is for the overthrow of the American government, established by our common ancestry, cemented and built up by their sweat and blood, and founded on the broad principles of Right, Justice, and Humanity? And, as such, I must declare here, as I have often done before, and which has been repeated by the greatest and wisest of statesmen and patriots in this and other lands, that it is the best and freest government, the most equal in its rights, the most just in its decisions -the most lenient in its measures, and the most inspiring in its principles to elevate the race of men, that the sun in heaven ever shone upon.

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Now, for you to attempt to overthrow such a government as this, under which we have lived for more than three quarters of a century, in which we have gained our wealth, our standing as a nation, our domestic safety while the elements of peril are around us, with peace and tranquility accompanied with unbounded prosperity and rights unassailed — is the height of mad

ness, folly and wickedness, to which I can neither lend my sanction nor my vote. A. H. Stephens.

CCXC.

"THE HIRELING LABORERS" OF THE NORTH.

THE HE Senator from South Carolina [Mr Hammond] exclaims: "The man who lives by daily labor, your whole hireling class of manual laborers, are essentially slaves; and they feel galled by their degradation." What a sentiment is this to hear uttered in the councils of this democratic republic! This language of scorn and contempt is addressed to senators who were not nursed

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by a slave; whose lot it was to toil with their own hands, eat bread, earned, not by the sweat of another's brow, but by their own.

Sir, should the Senator and his agitators and lecturers come to Massachusetts, on a mission to teach our "hireling class of manual laborers," our "slaves," the "tremendous secret of the ballot-box," and to help "combine and lead them," these stigmatized "hirelings" would reply to the Senator and his associates: "We are freemen; we are the peers of the gifted and the wealthy; we know the tremendous secret of the ballot-box;' and we mould and fashion these institutions that bless and adorn our free Commonwealth! These public schools are ours, for the education of our children; these libraries, with their accumulated treasures, are ours; these multitudinous and varied pursuits of life, where intelligence and skill find their reward, are ours. Labor is here honored and respected, and great examples incite us to action.

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"All around us, in the professions, in the marts of commerce, on the exchange where merchant princes and capitalists do congregate, in these manufactories and workshops where the products of every clime are fashioned into a thousand forms of utility and beauty, on these smiling farms fertilized by the sweat of free labor, in every position of private and of public life, are our associates, who were but yesterday what you call 'hireling laborers,' and, therefore, essentially slaves!' In every department of human effort are noble men who sprang from our ranks, — men whose good deeds will be felt, and will live in the grateful memories of men, when the stones reared by the hands of affection to their honored names shall crumble into dust. Our eyes glisten and our hearts throb over the bright, glowing, and radiant pages of our history that record the deeds of patriotism of the sons of New England who sprang from our ranks, and wore the badges of toil. While the names of Benjamin Franklin Roger Sherman, Nathaniel Greene, and Paul Revere, live on the brightest pages of our history, the mechanics of Massachusetts and New England will never want illustrious examples to incite us to noble aspirations and noble deeds.

"Go home, sir, and say to your privileged class, which you vauntingly say leads progress, civilization, and refinement, that

in the opinion of the hireling laborers' of Massachusetts, if you have no sympathy for your African bondmen, you should, at least, sympathize with the millions of your own race, whose labor you have dishonored and degraded by slavery! You should teach your millions of poor and ignorant white men, so long oppressed by your policy, the 'tremendous secret that the ballot-box is stronger than an army with banners!' You should combine' and lead them to the adoption of a policy which shall secure their own emancipation from a degrading thraldom!"

H. Wilson.

CCXCI.

THE DEATH OF SLAVERY THE LIFE OF THE NATION.

WE

E of America have been accustomed to contemplate, with something of gratified and patriotic pride, the wondrous progress of our country, and the strength and stability of our Government. Gazing with beaming eye and throbbing heart upon the grandeur and beauty of this splendid edifice of constitutional government in America, we came to believe that it was as imperishable as the memory of its illustrious builders. We dreamed for our native land a glorious destiny a magnificent career among the nations during the coming ages. But our firm, confident faith is now shaken — our bright hopes are now dimmed our lofty pride is now humbled our gorgeous visions of the future glories of the Republic are now obscured by the storm of battle. Our country, the land of so much of affection, of pride and of hope, now presents to the startled and astonished gaze of mankind an appalling, humiliating, and saddening spectacle. Treasonable menaces of other days have now ripened into treasonable deeds. Civil war holds its carnival, and reaps its bloody harvest. The nation is grappling with a gigantic conspiracy struggling for existence for the preservation of its menaced life against a rebellion that finds no parallel in the annals of the world.

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Why is it that the land resounds with the measured tread of a million of armed men? Why is it that our bright waters are stained and our green fields reddened with fraternal blood? Why is it that the young men of America, in the pride and bloom of early manhood, are summoned from homes, from the mothers

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