sympathy with them, and hold conventions and peace meetings, and practice treason under that name, are as responsible as they. I condemn them all together; and the judgment of Heaven will condemn them all together; and the indignant people will cry out against them together, for they are all the same in kind. My friend tells me there is something to be said about taxes. Taxes are at all times burdensome, but they are vastly more burdensome without a government than they are with one. In our present case it will be a great deal better to be taxed a half, or even to the full amount of all we possess, if we can maintain our ground, than to have the ploughshare of ruin driven over the whole, and destroy property and government together. I tell you, my fellow-citizens, as a man who has had some experience, and devoted himself somewhat to thought on these questions, that when once you let rebellion succeed in a popular government there is an end of the whole matter; and after that show me the most wealthy man in a community, and I will show you one who has the power of hand to get and keep by the law of main force. Let this rebellion succeed and you will have every other kind of rebellion down to that where, if a vagabond wants your horse, he will take it in spite of you, and there will be no law to help you. The rule will be that "he may take who has the power, and let him keep who can." Are the taxes going to be formidable? Certainly! Who is to blame? Those who have inaugurated the rebellion, or those who are trying to subdue it? I confess I thought we had come to a degenerate time; that there was little of true life or patriotism left in the country, and I do not, for myself, regret this war; it has taught me that there is a popular heart; for I see the people rise in their majesty and cast aside the miserable shackles of politics, and I would like to see a party, however strong, strong enough to hold me on such a question. It must not be made of secession leather, or I will rend it as Samson did the seven green withes. Who objects to taxes? An individual here and there who, not being well informed, thinks if he can have peace it will raise the price of butter. But he who complains of taxes, at such a time as this, is no friend of his country; and when you see a man cry out against the taxes to support such a war, you may believe that Judas Iscariot is laughing in his sleeve to think he was not living in this day, for he would surely have been underbid. No! let every man bare his bosom to the shafts of this great battle. Let him comprehend it in all its vastness, and see that these men in rebellion mean destruction and nothing else, and that their aiders and abettors are no better than they. Let them know they are to have no aid from the North and they will ground their arms. But let them think there is a party here to help them, and they will fight forever. You who cry out for peace should go for a vigorous prosecution of the war, for that is the shortest and only sure way to peace. Throw ten men in where there is but one now, and prosecute it with a vigor becoming this great people. None of us need change our political sentiments. We can go together in this, for it concerns all. But those who are determined, who have made up their minds to oppose their government, there is no use in talking to, I know. "Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar, yet will his foolishness not depart from him," and the same of a secessionist. I talk to those who wish to commune together, that we may compare ideas and determine how to best act. My theory is clear and plain-that you must put down rebellion and treat with fidelity. I had a letter, a few days since, from a gentleman in Kentucky, whom I never saw, but with whom I have sometimes corresponded. He said, "We wish to know what you are going to do in the North. In Kentucky we are prepared to fight out rebellion and put it down forever; but we are told that you in the North are going to give way and put in propositions, for peace." I wrote him back, "In my opinion, so long as there is a loyal citizen, so long as there is a dollar at the North, so long will this war be prosecuted, until this infernal rebellion is put down." You can't change a man's mind who won't be convinced, but you may arrest treason in its thousand walks, and bring it to the judg ment of an indignant people. This question is becoming more and more understood. Men are meeting together to commune upon it; woman at the altar is pouring forth her gentle and availing prayer, and children are raising their hands against the monster that has come to curse them and dim the lustre of their rising star. Let us all act together, and see if we cannot have one occasion where we can rise above the party questions of the day. As for myself, I am enlisted for the war. I will call upon my fellow-citizens far and near to go with me in this great battle of opinion, and see if this country can be sustained and this government upheld, if these glorious Stars and Stripes can float over the sea and land throughout the long tracks of future time, to gladden the many millions who are to come after us. Shall we permit this government to be destroyed? No, I say, never! Let us stand up like men to this great occasion, and let him who fails or falters be called, as he deserves, a traitor. SPEECH DELIVERED AT A UNION MASS MEETING OF THE CITIZENS OF TOMPKINS AND THE ADJOINING COUNTIES, HELD AT ITHACA, N. Y., September 7, 1861. MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN-That there should be a free government, founded upon this continent, wherein no king-craft should bear sway, and where the people themselves should be sovereign, our fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They staked all upon a great issue, and stood the hazard of the die. They asserted the great, the simple, the sublime truth that men were created free and equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that among them were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After having evolved that great idea, so easily understood by all, they marched through peril and hardship, barefoot and over frozen ground, that they might establish and defend and maintain the liberty and the freedom that they had asserted. Go back with me to the issues of that eventful period-not merely in the history of this continent, but in the history of the world, such as man had never before, nor has elsewhere seen; and we find that they laid the foundations of this government broad and deep upon that solid rock of eternal truth, and adorned with all the learning and statesmanship of modern times; and especially they taught that man is a sovereign being. They denied the impious divine. right of kings; they alleged and maintained that every people should govern themselves; and, after having asserted the sublime truth, they went forward upon the untried future, to work out the great experiment. It was an experiment and hope to them; it is realization and fruition to us. The great fact has been established, and its results have sped far beyond what they had anticipated or imagined. The little cloud no bigger than a man's hand has brought the sound of abundance of rain. The sparse colonies that struggled along upon the Atlantic slope have grown to be more than thirty free and prosperous States, not confined to the limits which even those great men and greater minds believed would be prescribed, but have leaped over the Mississippi; scared the eagle from his crag on the Rocky Mountains, and have only paused where the Pacific's wave rolls on the golden sands of California. From the St. John, on the northeast, by a line of coast nearly four thousand miles long, they stretch to the Rio Grande in the southwest, and from Lake Superior in the far north to where the Gulf breezes breathe odors of tropical fragrance; embracing twentyfive degrees of latitude and nearly sixty of longitude, covering the great central and southern portions of the temperate zone upon this continent. The tree of liberty, which our fathers planted in this goodly heritage, has shot deep its roots; its trunk towers in majesty on high, and so widespread are its branches, that all the children of the earth may come and subsist on its fruits, or refresh themselves in its shade: "Woodman, spare that tree! The institutions established in such disinterested heroism, and going forward with a progress that has astonished the world, and wrung from it unwilling admiration, are now threatened with destruction. Is it by a foreign foe? No; they have stood the thunder-storm and defied the world in arms; and now are to be destroyed, if destroyed they must be, by the insidious worm of ambition that is gnawing at their heart. Those who have been reared under this government; who have been pampered at its treasury; upon whose brows have been wreathed its choicest laurels, are now seeking to tear its very heart-strings. And we are told that they are brethren, and that therefore we must not contend with them. Yes, they are our brethren. But shall we stand tamely by and see them bathe their hands in the blood of our revered mother? No: she must be defended at all hazards from these murderous parricides. And the crime is the greater and more heinous because |