-

and it was prolonged in that sonorous sentence in our own Constitution-No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property. without due process of law' — 'due process of law,' 'the law which hears before it condemns, and punishes only after conviction.' Cherish, my friends, these great rights thus guaranteed to you in your Constitution never surrender them, never allow them to be compromised, or gainsayed, for they constitute the Keystone of the Arch of Freedom. Take them away, and the springing arch falls in ruins. We only call that Government free, which not only shelters its subjects from the injustice of the many, but from the tyranny of the one or the few. We, as a people, are free, because from ancient times there came laws, as if written with the finger of the Highest-free, because to us in this day, it was thought conscience and opinion were free. It is a glorious thought that the law of the land recognizes there is a part about every man's affairs so sacred that it must not be crossed either by inquisition or inquiry. The freedom of the citizen from all illegal arrest, the freedom of his hearth-stone from arbitrary invasion, and the freedom of his conscience from all manner of restraint; these constitute the Urim and the Thummim, the breastplate of Light and Truth round the heart of the American citizen, in the time of trial and danger; and when he demands rights that have been denied him, they will impart a rich eloquence to his tongue, the wisdom of authority, and the mighty pathos of justice to the utterance of his lips.'

Mr. Wall continued in this strain for over an hour, hold ing the crowd spell-bound upon his lips. After the conclusion of his speech they were invited into his mansion, and for two hours, then, women, and children thronged in to take him by the hand, and thank him for the courage he had manifested, and to sympathize with him in the sufferings he had so bravely borne. At the next session of his State Legislature, after his imprisonment, Mr. Wall addressed a long memorial to that body, denouncing the violation of the BILI OF RIGHTS OF THE STATE, in his person, and arguing the unconstitutionality of the proceeding, and which concluded as follows:

"What course you, the representatives of the State of New Jersey, may deem proper to take, in reference to this wanton outrage upon the constitutionally guaranteed rights of one of your citizens, must be left to your own judgments. It is for you to say whether it shall be passed over without, at least, a solemn remonstrance. If, by your silence now, you constitute such silence as a precedent, it may be for you to declare of what value hereafter shall be those high-sounding clauses in the Bill of Rights, in your own Constitution, to the citizens of New Jersey "That Bill of Rights was intended as the enunciation of certain general principles of free government, to serve as the landmark of liberty and law. Did your present Senator in Congress, Mr. Ten Eyck, when he introduced it in your Constitutional Convention, and his fellow-members, when they voted upon it, consider its clauses only as a mass of glittering generalities? And yet what else do they become, if any cabinet officer may, under one of these general warrants,' invade your State with an armed force, kidnap its citizens, and incarcerate them, beyond the limits of the State, at his sovereign will and pleasure, in one of the military fortresses of the Government? Surely, if such outrages are to be passed over in silence, and such acts done with impu nity, then I do not hesitate to declare that your State Government is a farce, and the clauses in your Bill of Rights the most contemptible and wicked shams.

6

"I speak earnestly, because I feel so. I have been made to know the insolence of arbitrary power. The most degraded criminals in any of your prisons could not have been treated as I have been, without an outcry of indignation from every honest citizen in the State. I have been arrested without the form of legal warrant-condemned without the shadow of a trial, and punished by a degrading imprisonment of weeks, without, to this hour, knowing the nature and cause of the accusations against me. I know and appreciate my rights as a citizen of the United States, and as a citizen of the State of New Jersey; and no man shall invade and trample upon those rights with impunity, if there is any courage or sense of justice left in the community. I envy not the heart, for it is corrupt, nor the brain, for it is diseased, that can attempt to approve, or by reason, justify such an atrocious act of arbitrary power as this. If such an

act can be done in a republic without redress, and with the ap proval of its citizens, then I know no difference between it and the vilest despotism upon earth, save that the latter is the most honest government of the two."

Such, however, was the terrorism of the Federal Govern ment, that the House of Assembly, although largely Democratic, through the Chairman of its Judiciary Committee, Jacob Vannater, Esq., of Morris County, reported that "it was not expedient" to take any action on this memorial, for fear the State Government might be brought into antagonism to the acts of the Federal Government, which was a virtual and cowardly indorsement of arbitrary power.

The next Legislature elected Mr. Wall United States Sena tor, to fill the unexpired term of Hon. John R. Thomson, deceased, and during his short service in that body, his voice was heard in denunciation of the Emancipation Policy proposed to be pursued in the purchase of the slaves of the State of Missouri by the Federal Government, and in opposition to the infamous Bill of Indemnity to screen the President and his subordinates from all the legal consequences of their un constitutional and arbitrary acts. In this last speech he alluded in the following language to his imprisonment :

"But who is it, that takes a retrospective glance over the sti ring, awful history of the last two years, but feels how the fine gold has grown dim beneath the tarnishing touch of the rude hand of despotic power. Those great, absolute rights of the citizen, which were intended to be beyond the reach of arbitrary influence, the right of personal liberty, of property, of free speech and a free press, rudely and ruthlessly violated. Of those absolute rights, during what was not inaptly called the 'Reign of Terror,' there was not one heart, that was not trampled upon by the Executive, or his subordinates; and what was worse than all, every assault that was made upon them was applauded to the echo by timid jurists, divines, and contract-hunting, renegade Democrats, whose cowardly hearts, either ran away with their better judgments, or who really did not comprehend the very first principle of the Constitution under which they lived. Men

were arrested and papers seized without warrant, or oath of probable cause; prisoners were held without presentment or indictment, denied a speedy and a public trial, carried away by force from the State or district where their offence, if any, must have been committed, and incarcerated for months, ay, for years, in the military Bastiles of this Government, and then set free without being even informed of the nature and cause of the accusation against them. Every constitutional outpost was driven in, and every personal guarantee of the citizen brushed away by a tyrannical Executive, as easily as cobwebs by the hands of a giant.

"And this, Mr. President, by a Government professing it was fighting for the Union, the Constitution, and the enforcement of the laws; for these at the outset of the war were the proud watch-words that glittered on your military standards. Doctrines were preached in high places directly at war with the fundamental principles of this Government. The central power, under the bold pretence of preserving the Government, assumed a new and fearful energy, until men went about with 'bated breath and whispering humbleness,' not knowing where the next blow was to fall, or who was the next friend that was to be tricken down at their sides. Of these times, I may exclaim: Quorum pars sui.'

"It was my lot, sir, to have felt the fierce grasp of arbitrary power, and within the damp, grated casemate of one of the Bastiles of this Government, to have discovered how helpless a thing is the citizen, who is deprived of those absolute rights, which, if they do not exist in your Constitution at all times, whether in peace or war, then your Constitution is a delusion and a snare. Having been arrested without cause shown, I was liberated in the same way, after enduring personal indignities which, to a high-spirited man, eat like iron into the soul;' and from the hour of my liberation up to this moment, when I stand pon this floor the representative of a sovereign State, I have been unable to ascertain what those charges were. I have in vain demanded of the proper Department what were the charges against me, claiming the freeman's constitutional privilege 'to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation, and to be confronted with the witnesses against me.

"Great heavens! Mr. President, is it possible that such things can be, under a Constitution whose boast it has been that it was for the protection, of the inalienable rights of man against oppression? If this boast has been in vain, then your Constitution has but a name to live, an outer seeming to beguile and deceiveit is but a delusion and a snare-it is the worthless husk, when the golden grain is gone-the now empty casket from which the jewel has been stolen.

"The liberty, sir, I claim, and those who act with me upon this floor, under our Constitution, is not the liberty of licentiousness, but the liberty united with law, the liberty sustained with the law, and that kind of liberty we have ever supposed was guaranteed to every man, rich or poor, high or low, proud or humble, under all exigencies, whether in peace or in war, or the state in the fearful throes of civil strife. This is my loyalty, and that of my friends upon this floor-the allegiance, the devotion to organic law I know no other loyalty, and will never bow my. self at the shrine of any other. In our republic, its Constitution declares: No citizen shall be deprived of his life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.' We may be made to part with all these by the power of the state; but that power must look well to it, sir, that, in its exercise, it does not transcend the limits within which it is appointed to move. If it does, it be comes despotic, and then among men who know their rights, and, knowing them, dare to maintain them, resistance follows, as naturally as light succeeds darkness. If by a simple mandate, nay by the lightning's flash over the telegraphic wires, as was my own case, any cabinet officer, in States where the people are obedient to law, and where the courts are open, may consign you or me for an indefinite time to the gloomy walls of a government fortress; then the same mandate, or despatch, only altered in its phraseology, may consign us immediately to the hands of the executioner, or deprive us of our properties, confiscating them to the state. If not, why not? The right to have our lives secure against interference without due process of law, is equally guaranteed in the same clause which protects our liberty and our property. These privileges can trace their lineage back to the grassy lawns of Runnymede, where they were born many centuries ago. They were extorted then, and there, by the rebel