of Georgia, and pursued by me, (by the favor of Mr. Knox, of Illinois, in giving me part of his time,) for twenty minutes, for which he had to defend himself; and did it bravely and generously, commanding the applause of the House. There was spirit in the House, and if a few of us could have had a chance at the bill, it would have been smashed into atoms, and the country roused to a knowledge of the meditated crimes. But there was no chance. A vulgar, infuriate tyranny prevailed—greater than ever was seen in the French National Convention in the Reign of Terror; for even there, debate could not be entirely silenced. Members carried arms there; and brave men (but no braver than we were) with loaded pistols in their hands, would say what they pleased, and see Robespierre, Marat, Collot, Merlin, turn pale under their terrific denunciations. We could not carry arms into the national hall of legislation, and parliamentary rules signified nothing against an inexorable majority, some subdued by their fears, some seduced by the administration, some debauched by gambling, and drinking, and plunder legislation; and all driven along by the furious nullifiers, to whom the administration had surrendered the government. Still there was a plenty of good material, if it could have been worked up. Many voted with the majority, who only waited a favorable moment to attack the tyranny of which they were the unwilling and mortified instruments. The war upon the details of the bill would have furnished the opportunity. Successive attacks upon the details, even with the five minutes' speeches, would have been enough; for, in certain conditions of all public bodies -the inflamed and excited condition-long speeches are not wanted they are even bad; and a sudden, vehement, and brief appeal to the passions has often sufficed to overturn a powerful majority, or even a whole government. But the fraudulent use of the rules, and the fatality of having all questions of order decided against us, left us without rights, or favors, in presence of an inexorable majority, which, governed by party machinery, drove on to their object regardless of law, decency, or shame.

A LAST WORD.

I was breaking down under the terrible attack which kept me, for two weeks, face to face with death, when I was writing this Examination; and had to break off abruptly-leaving two entire heads untouched, and not even alluded to. Besides these two heads, now postponed, there was another which I wished to bring before the American people, to wit: The conduct of an Administration and a Senate (called Democratic), which has done, and is doing, what no former administration and Senate, (whether Whig, Federal, Democratic, or Republican,) ever did! that is to say, suppressing and concealing the evidences of a foreign negotiation, after the negotiation is all over and done with; which negotiation is surrounded by circumstances which connect it with a scheme to bring on a separation of the slave from the free States: I speak of the Gadsden negotiation, and of the fifty millions he was authorized to give for a broad side of Mexico, with a port on the Gulf of California, and a railway to it, to suit the United States South after the separation-to which point all the schemes for a Southern Pacific Railroad tend, while the credulous public are made to believe they are hunting the best way to California, where they mean it shall never go, because California rejects slavery. Every Unionloving State Legislature should post its Senator under instructions to bring those hidden negotiations to the public view, though with but little prospect of getting the whole truth after so many years' suppression-the same reasons which have induced suppression thus far, being equally strong to make it perpetual; so that much may be gone past recovery.

WASHINGTON CITY, September, 1857.

1

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