serted the right of the people, and exerted themselves to induce the people to exercise the right, everywhere to rebel against monarchical governments, and overthrow them simply because monarchical; because they assumed the position and character of armed propagandists, and formed among themselves, as they do at this moment, a league or confederation in every country for the express purpose of revolutionizing all monarchical states. The sovereigns of Europe were bound, as the heirs of the historical rights of the European nations, and by their position and coronation oaths, to interfere, and, if possible, save the civilized world from its most deadly enemies; and if they had not interfered, they would have been false to God and to society, and would have deserved the utter reprobation of every friend of civilization.

Now it is precisely sympathy with these banded European conspirators, these Jacobins, red-republicans, socialists, Carbonari, Freemasons, Illuminati, Friends of Light, or by whatever other name they may call themselves or be called by their opponents, and with their detestable principles and criminal movements, that Mr. Webster defends, and undeniably defends, on the ground that their principles are ours, and cannot be denounced without of necessity including the United States and their forms of government. That is, our institutions are founded on the denial of the lawfulness of all forms of government but the democratic, the assertion of the legality of the popular form of government universally, and the indefeasible right of the people everywhere to conspire, to rebel, against monarchy, in utter disregard of public law, or of historical rights, for the sake of establishing it! And this pernicious doctrine is put forth, not by some foreign refugee from the dungeon or the halter, not by some obscure radical desirous of attracting notoriety by the extravagancy of his paradoxes, but by the distinguished lawyer and statesman, Daniel Webster, and by him not as a private citizen, but as secretary of state, by authority of the president of the United States, in a grave official document addressed to a foreign court in defence of the American government and people!

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Non tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis
Tempus eget."

Here is our well-founded objection to Mr. Webster's reply to the Chevalier Hülsemann, a reply which, though

not so intended, really calumniates this country, and insults every loyal American citizen. It is in striking contrast with the principles and policy of Washington, the father of his country; and it adopts principles, and paves the way for a policy, to which we have been accustomed to regard Mr. Webster as the most strenuous and distinguished opponent among American statesmen. His intended defence, but real charge, we need not say, is unfounded, and we evidently cannot identify the principles of the American constitution and government with the principles of the European rebels and revolutionists, without placing ourselves as a people out of the pale of civilized nations. We are, no doubt, a great people, in our way, but it behooves us to remember that we do not give law to the civilized world. The civilized world existed, civilized nations were constituted, public law was settled, and the principles and usages of civilization were determined, some centuries before we as an independent government were born. The fact of our existence has made no alteration in public law, or in the principles and usages of the civilized world; and we, in order to be a member of the civilized family, must not undertake to create anew public law and civilized usages, but conform to them as they existed before us. If we choose to arraign them, or to place ourselves in opposition to them, it is not other nations we uncivilize, but ourselves. The principles and movements of the European liberalists, or revolutionists, are, undeniably, in direct and systematic opposition to all law,-to the principles and usages of the whole civilized world, and we cannot indorse them, and maintain. that our government cannot be defended without defending them, and not maintain that our government stands opposed to the whole civilized world, and therefore is not itself a civilized government.

As an American citizen we protest against this foul dishonor to our government and principles. There is no occasion to appeal to those popular ideas of the age, denounced by the allied sovereigns of Europe, in order to vindicate the lawfulness of our government, and here no more than in Austria or Russia are the sacredness and inviolability of national constitutions or historical rights of authority denied. If, as a fact, the people intervened in forming our constitution, it was because there was here, after the acknowledg ment of our independence, no other power that had a right to do it, and they violated no historical or already existing

rights in doing it. As a matter of fact, however, their actual intervention was in accordance with, if not indeed in virtue of, all the historical rights subsisting in the nation at the time, and was less to found or institute government, than to supply the defects in the already existing government occasioned by the lapse of the crown of Great Britain. But be this as it may, nobody questions, not even the allied sovereigns of Europe themselves question, the natural right of a people who find themselves without government, since government is a prime necessity of society, as society is of man, to assemble in convention and institute a government. This right is universally conceded. But the moment the government is instituted, the moment it can be said to exist, its historical right commences, and the right of the people to found or institute government ceases. This, whatever may be the theory of our unfledged politicians, is the principle of our institutions, sustained by all our laws, as no man knows better than the eminent lawyer now secretary of state. The people here have not one particle of power, except by virtue of historical right. The law admits them to a large share in the administration through the elective franchise, it is true, but that franchise is a trust, not a natural right, and is possessed only by those to whom the law grants it, and can be exercised only in the form and manner the law prescribes. The people may be legally assembled in convention, to amend the constitution, but they can assemble only by virtue of the law, and when so assembled are as much a legal assembly holding under law as any one of our ordinary legislatures. Is it not so? Try the experiment; let the people assemble without being legally convened, let them, on the simple ground of popular sovereignty, form a new constitution, and institute a new government, as they did in Rhode Island, and will it be held to have the right to govern? Not at all, and any act of it to supplant forcibly historical right, or to compel itself to be obeyed as the government, will be by the laws of every state in the Union an act of treason, and punishable as such. The case is not an imaginary one; it has already occurred in our brief history, has been fully argued on both sides, and finally settled by the highest tribunals known to our laws, and settled in favor of the old government, on the ground that it has the historical right, and is the only government historically known. The fact, then, of the intervention of the people here in the formation of the govern

ment, of their large share through the elective franchise in its administration, and of their right, when legally convened, to amend the constitution or the fundamental law, makes no difference, in so far as government, between our governments and the governments of Europe. It has the same rights and duties that they have, and holds its powers under the same divine law under which they hold theirs. It has the same historical rights that they have, the same right that they have, and no other than they have, to protect itself, and to suppress all rebellions against it. Without asserting the sacredness and inviolability of historical rights, of its right to be and to govern because it has been and is the government, and no other has been or is the government, it could not sustain itself a single moment, for it could not rightfully put down a single rebellion against it, or attempt to enforce a single one of its laws. If we must assume historical rights to be sacred and inviolable, as the only condition of sustaining our government, what is more absurd than to maintain, that to assert these rights against the rebels in arms, madmen conspiring everywhere against them, is to deny the lawfulness of our own constitution and forms of government? No government is more interested in sustaining those rights than our own, and it is with no little regret we hear the government itself renouncing its own legality, and every principle on which its lawfulness can be defended, telling us that our sympathy is due, not to those who labor to protect those rights, but to those who scorn them, trample them under their feet, and are everywhere confederated, and about again to take up arms, to render them of no avail.

It is true, Mr. Webster tells us that the American people though they everywhere sympathize with rebels and the sworn enemies of all historical rights, do not propose to take up arms to assist them. "The United States have abstained at all times from acts of interference with the political changes of Europe. They cannot, however, fail to cherish always a lively interest in the fortunes of nations struggling for institutions like our own. But this sympathy, so far from being necessarily a hostile feeling towards any of these parties, is quite consistent with amicable relations with both." Will Mr. Webster explain how we can maintain amicable relations with the sovereign, while we have amicable relations with his rebellious subjects? But this is not the point now under consideration. We do not

believe that as long as Mr. Webster is in the cabinet our government will take any very active measures of interference in behalf of rebels in Europe or elsewhere, but he defends principles which permit such interference whenever we choose. In assuming that our government by its origin and principles denies, with the European rebels, all historical rights, and authorizes and sympathizes with their movements, he denies that so to interfere would be any violation of public right. The rights of nations are all historical, and if we deny them, there is nothing to hinder us from accepting the doctrine of FRATERNITY preached by Mr. Webster's European friends, and then we should have the same right to engage in a struggle for democracy anywhere that the revolutionists themselves have. Nay, Mr. Webster's own assertion, by authority of the president of the United States, of our sympathy with these revolutionists, and his identification of their principles and cause with our own, can be vindicated only on a principle that would allow interference in their behalf to any extent we chose, or thought it prudent for our own sake, to carry it.

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Mr. Webster asserts the prosperity of his own country as superinduced by her peculiar institutions, in the true spirit of a propagandist. The power of this republic is at the present moment spread over a region, one of the richest and most fertile on the globe, and of an extent in comparison with which the possessions of the house of Habsburg are but a patch on the earth's surface." This probably was written with a view to the pit. Suppose this to be a fact, what relevancy has it to the matter in controversy? Does it prove us in the right by proving our dominions are larger than those of Austria, or her in the wrong, because her farm. is less than ours? Even supposing it proved the superiority of republican institutions over monarchical, what has that to do with the question? Austria has not protested against our republicanism, or asserted the superiority of monarchy, and what right has Mr. Webster, if he recognizes the independence of Austria, and proposes to treat with her as a sovereign state, to bring in question the relative superiority or inferiority of the respective forms of the two governments? Why does he travel out of the record, and give vent to a very silly boast? Do his best, he cannot claim for his country any superiority over Austria, except in vain and undignified boasting. But how, in fact, stands the question with regard to this vast extent of territory of the Union?