books, it has been retained by the reverence which man is wont to pay to the past and to time-honored precedents? The human mind is so constituted that it is prone to regard as right what has come down to us approved by long usage, and hallowed by gray age. It is a claim that had its origin with the kindred idea that royal blood flows only in the veins of an exclusive few, whose souls are more ethereal, because born amid the glitter of courts, and cradled amid the pomp of lords and courtiers; and, therefore, they are to be installed as rulers and lawgivers of the race. Most of the evils that afflict society have had their origin in violence and wrong enacted into law by the experience of the past, and retained by the prejudices of the present.

Is it not time you swept from your statute-book its still lingering relics of feudalism? blotted out the principles ingrafted upon it by the narrow-minded policy of other times, and adapted the legislation of the country to the spirit of the age, and to the true ideas of man's rights and relations to his Government?-Hon. G. A. Grow, 1860.

FREE HOMES FOR FREE MEN.

I WOULD provide in our land policy for securing homesteads to actual settlers; and whatever bounties the Government should grant to the old soldiers, I would have made in money and not in land warrants, which are bought in most cases by the speculator as an easier and cheaper mode of acquiring the public lands. So they only facilitate land monopoly. The men who go forth at the call of their country to uphold its standard and vindicate its honor, are deserving, it is true, of a more substantial reward than tears to the dead and thanks to the living; but there are soldiers of peace as well as of war, and though no waving plume beckons them on to glory or to death, their dying scene is oft a crimson one. They fall leading the van of civilization along untrodden paths, and are buried in the dust of its advancing columns. No monument marks the scene of deadly strife; no stone their resting pace; the winds sighing through the branches of the forest alone sing their requiem. Yet they are the meritorious men of the Republic-the men who give it strength in war and glory in peace. The achievements of your pioneer army, from the day they first drove back the Indian tribes from the Atlantic seaboard to the present hour,

have been the achievements of science and civilization over the elements, the wilderness, and the savage.

If rewards or bounties are to be granted for true heroism in the progress of the race, none is more deserving than the pioneer who expels the savage and the wild beast, and opens in the wilderness a home for science and pathway for civili

zation.

"Peace hath her victories,

No less renowned than war."

The paths of glory no longer lead over smoking towns and crimsoned fields, but along the lanes and by-ways of human misery and woe, where the bones and sinews of men are struggling with the elements, with the unrelenting obstacles of nature, and the not less unmerciful obstacles of a false civilization. The noblest achievement in this world's pilgrimage is to raise the fallen from their degradation; soothe the broken hearted, dry the tears of woe, and alleviate the sufferings of the unfortunate in their pathway to the tomb.

"Go say unto the raging sea, Be still;

Bid the wild, lawless winds obey thy will;
Preach to the storm, and reason with despair;
But tell not misery's son that life is fair."

If you would lead the erring back from the paths of vice and crime to virtue and to honor, give him a home-give him a hearthstone, and he will surround it with household gods. If you would make men wiser and better, relieve your almshouses, close the doors of your penitentiaries, and break in pieces your gallows; purify the influences of the domestic fireside, for that is the school in which human character is formed, and there its destiny is shaped; there the soul receives its first impress, and man his first lesson, and they go with him for weal or for woe through life. For purifying the sentiments, elevating the thoughts, and developing the noblest impulses of man's nature, the influences of a rural fireside and an agricultural life are the noblest and the best. In the obscurity of the cottage, far removed from the seductive influences of rank and affluence, are nourished the virtues that counteract the decay of human institutions, the courage that defends the national independence, and the industry that supports all classes of the state.

Hon. G. A. Grow, 1860.

TRE HOMESTEAD THE SOURCE OF NATIONAL GREATNESS.

MAN, in defence of his hearthstone and fireside, is invinci ble against a world of mercenaries.

Let us adopt the policy cherished by Jackson, and indicated in his annual message to Congress in 1832, in which he says:

"It cannot be doubted that the speedy settlement of these lands constitutes the true interest of the Republic. The wealth and strength of a country are its population, and the best part of the population are the cultivators of the soil."

Why should the Government hold the public domain longer as a source of revenue, when it has already more than paid all costs and expenses incurred in its acquisition and management? Even if the Government had a right, based in the nature of things, thus to hold these lands, it would be adverse to a sound national policy to do so; for the real wealth of a country consists not in the sum of money paid into its treasury, but in its flocks, herds, and cultivated fields. Nor does its real strength consist in fleets and armies, but in the bones and sinews of an independent yeomanry and the comfort of its laboring classes. Its real glory consists not in the splendid palace, lofty spire, or towering dome; but in the intelligence, comfort, and happiness of the fireside of its

citizens.

"What constitutes a State?

Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,
Thick wall or moated gate;

Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crowned,
Not bays and broad-armed ports,

Where laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;
Not starred and spangled courts,

Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.
No! men, high-minded men.

But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain;
Prevent the long-aimed blow,

And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain :
These constitute a State."

Had the policy advocated by Gracchus, of distributing the public lands among the landless citizens of the nation, been adopted, the Roman fields would have been cultivated by free men instead of slaves, and there would have been a race of men to stay the ravages of the barbarian. The eternal city would not then have fallen an easy prey to the Goth and

the Vandal; but the star of her empire might have waved in triumph long after the ivy twined her broken columns.

The associations of an independent freehold are eminently calculated to ennoble and elevate the possessor. It is the life-spring of a manly national character, and of a generous patriotism; a patriotism that rushes to the defence of the country and the vindication of its honor, with the same zeal and alacrity that it guards the hearthstone and the fireside. Wherever Freedom has unfurled her banner, the men who have rallied around to sustain and uphold it have come from the workshop and the field, where, inured to heat and to cold, and to all the inclemencies of the season, they have acquired the hardihood necessary to endure the trials and privations of the camp. An independent yeomanry, scattered over our vast domain, is the best and surest guarantee for the perpetuity of our liberties; for their arms are the citadel of a nation's power, their hearts the bulwarks of liberty. Let the public domain, then, be set apart and consecrated as a patrimony to the sons of toil; close your land office forever against the speculator, and thereby prevent the capital of the country seeking that kind of investment-from absorbing the hard earnings of labor without rendering an equivalent. While the laborer is thus crushed by the system established by the Government, by which so large an amount is abstracted from his earnings for the benefit of the speculator, in addition to all the other disadvantages that ever beset the unequal struggle between the bones and sinews of men and dollars and cents, what wonder is it that misery and want so often sit at his fireside, and penury and sorrow surround his death bed?

While the pioneer spirit goes forth into the wilderness, snatching new areas from the wild beast and bequeathing them a legacy to civilized man, let not the Government dampen his ardor and palsy his arm by legislation that places him in the power of soulless capital and grasping speculation; for upon his wild battle field these are the only foes that his own stern heart and right arm cannot vanquish.

Hon. G. A. Grow, 1860.

JOHN BROWN'S "INVASION."

I TRUST the calmer judgment of the other side of the House will modify their views heretofore expressed, and limit and soften the sweeping judgment which impeached a whole

political party of conspiracy to promote servile insurrection.

I think they will be inclined to take a somewhat different view of the origin, the character, and the scope of John Brown's crime.

It was no invasion of Virginia at all; still less an invasion of Virginia by or from a free State. It was a conspiracy to free negroes; arrested in the attempt; defended with arms stained with murder, and punished with death. It was a crime to be dealt with by judge and jury and sheriff.

The utmost vigilance of two governments has failed to trace a single connection with any body of men in any State. Two of Brown's confederates were arrested in Pennsylvania without warrant and carried without a guard to jail in Virginia. His arsenal contained two hundred Sharpe's rifles and something over a thousand pikes, his army consisted of about twenty men, and though rumor promised him succor, no one ever saw a body of men or a single man marching to join him or to rescue him. Not a slave joined him voluntarily; not one lifted his hand against his master; all were anxious to return to the bosom of their master's families.

Atrocious as was the crime, and great as is the cause I have to deplore some of the best blood shed, that crime has revealed a state of fact and of feeling, both among our own population and that of the free States, on which our eyes ought to rest with satisfaction, in view of the future.

It negatives the existence of any conspiracy against our peace in the free States of the confederacy. Neither the plan nor the execution revealed any higher intelligence or greater power behind the crazy enthusiasts who acted in the tragedy. To lay this blood at the door of a great political party of our fellow-citizens, who now control the governments of every free State but two, in spite of the indignant denial of all their Representatives here, and without a particle of proof in fact, is not reasonable. It is to call Dirk Hatteraick's defence, in his lair, an invasion of Scotland! It is to lay the bloody deeds of Balfour of Burleigh on the whole body of the Protestants in Scotland!

But the keenness with which gentlemen feel this crime against the peace of a slave State may well enable them to appreciate how the more aggravated events in Kansas inflamed the minds of men in the free States, and fired the fanaticism of Brown to the point of bloody revenge.

That men and women of like mind, in whom, on one subject, the ideas of right and wrong are sadly disordered, sympathized with the convicts; that some papers applauded his