before him is huge

right to take ten pounds, implies the right to take a thousand; and what must be the wealth, that avarice, aided by power, can not exhaust. True, the spectre is now small; but the shadow he casts enough to darken all this fair land. Others, in sentimental style, talk of the immense debt of gratitude which we owe to England. And what is the amount of this debt? Why, truly, it is the same that the young lion owes to the dam, which has brought it forth on the solitude of the mountain, or left it amid the winds and storms of the desert.

We plunged into the wave, with the great charter of freedom in our teeth, because the faggot and torch were behind us. We have waked this new world from its savage lethargy; forests have been prostrated in our path; towns and cities have grown up suddenly as the flowers of the tropics; and the fires in our autumnal woods are scarcely more rapid than the increase of our wealth and population. And do we owe all this to the kind succor of the mother country? No! we owe it to the tyranny that drove us from her, to the pelting storms which invigorated our helpless infancy.

MASSACHUSETTS.

MR. PRESIDENT, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts, she needs none. There she is,—behold her and judge for yourselves. There is her history,the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, fallen in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every

State, from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever.

And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it,-if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it; if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather around it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

[Webster.

THE RIGHT OF ENGLAND TO TAX AMERICA.

"BUT, Mr. Speaker, we have a right to tax America." Oh, inestimable right! Oh, wonderful, transcendent right! the assertion of which has cost this country thirteen provinces, six islands, one hundred thousand lives, and seventy millions of money. Oh, invaluable right! for the sake of which we have sacrificed our rank among nations, our importance abroad, and our happiness at home! Oh, right! more dear to us than our existence, which has already cost us so much, and which seems likely to cost us our all. Infatuated man! miserable and undone country! not to know that the claim of right, without the power of enforcing it, is nugatory and idle. We have a right to tax America, the noble lord tells us, therefore we ought to tax America. This

is the profound logic which comprises the whole chain of his reasoning.

Not inferior to this was the wisdom of him who resolved to shear the wolf. What, shear a wolf! Have you considered the resistance, the difficulty, the danger of the attempt? No, says the madman, I have considered nothing but the right. Man has a right of dominion over the beasts of the forest; and therefore I will shear the wolf.

How wonderful that a nation could be, thus deluded. But the noble lord deals in cheats and delusions. They are the daily traffic of his invention; and he will continue to play off his cheats on this house, so long as he thinks them necessary to his purpose, and so long as he has money enough at command to bribe gentlemen to pretend that they believe him. But a black and bitter day of reckoning will surely come; and whenever that day comes, I trust I shall be able, by a parliamentary impeachment, to bring upon the heads of the authors of our calamities the punishment they deserve.

CHARACTER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

[Burke.

HE is fallen! We may now pause before that splendid prodigy, which towered amongst us like some ancient ruin, whose frown terrified the glance its magnificence attracted. Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne a sceptered hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality. A mind, bold, independent, and decisive,—a will, despotic in its dictates,— an energy that distanced expedition; and a conscience pliable to every touch of interest, marked the outline of this extraordinary character,—the most extraordinary, perhaps, that in the annals of this world, ever rose, or

reigned, or fell. Flung into life, in the midst of a revolution that quickened every energy of a people who acknowledge no superior, he commenced his course, a stranger by birth, and a scholar by charity! With no friend but his sword, and no fortune but his talents, he rushed in the list where rank, and wealth, and genius had arrayed themselves, and competition fled from him as from the glance of destiny. He knew no motive but interest, he acknowledged no criterion but success, he worshiped no God but ambition, and with an eastern devotion he knelt at the shrine of his idolatry. Subsidiary to this, there was no creed that he did not profess, there was no opinion that he did not promulgate; in the hope of a dynasty, he upheld the crescent; for the sake of a divorce, he bowed before the cross: the orphan of St. Louis, he became the adopted child of the republic: and with a parricidal ingratitude, on the ruins both of the throne and the tribune, he reared the throne of his despotism. A professed Catholic, he imprisoned the pope; a pretended patriot, he impoverished the country; and in the name of Brutus, he grasped without remorse, and wore without shame, the diadem of the Cæsars!

[Phillips.

man.

A POLITICAL PAUSE.

"BUT we must pause!" says the honorable gentleWhat! must the bowels of Great Britain be torn out,―her best blood be spilled, her treasures wasted,— that you may make an experiment? Put yourselves, O! that you would put yourselves on the field of battle, and learn to judge of the sort of horrors that you excite. In former wars a man might, at least, have some feel

ing, some interest, that served to balance in his mind the impressions which a scene of carnage and of death must inflict.

But if a man were present now at the field of slaughter, and were to inquire for what they were fighting,"Fighting!" would be the answer; "they are not fighting; they are pausing." 'Why is that man expiring? Why is that other writhing with agony? What means this implacable fury?" The answer must be,— “You are quite wrong, sir, you deceive yourself,—they are not fighting,-do not disturb them,-they are merely pausing! This man is not expiring with agony,-that man is not dead,--he is only pausing! Lord help you, sir! they are not angry with one another: they have now no cause of quarrel; but their country thinks that there should be a pause. All that you see, sir, is nothing like fighting, there is no harm, nor cruelty, nor bloodshed in it, whatever; it is nothing more than a political pause! It is merely to try an experiment,—to see whether Bonaparte will not behave himself better than heretofore; and in the meantime we have agreed to a pause, in pure friendship!"

And is this the way, sir, that you are to show yourselves the advocates of order? You take up a system calculated to uncivilize the world,—to destroy order,— to trample on religion,—to stifle in the heart, not merely the generosity of noble sentiment, but the affections of social nature; and in the prosecution of this system, you spread terror and devastation all around you.

[Fcx.