will have become strong by coöperation. No Republican Administration can enforce the law, unless the Republican State authorities first place themselves right before the people, and reconstruct the moral bases of their Governments. By the 4th of March, South Carolina will have the Gulf States united. It will appeal to that economic law which is stronger than sentiment. By its appeal to the interests of the cotton States it will succeed in securing coöperation. Before we enter upon a career of force, let us exhaust every effort at peace. Let us seek to excite love in others by the signs of love in ourselves. Let there be no needless provocation and strife. Let every reasonable attempt at compromise be considered. Otherwise we have a terrible alternative. War, in this age and in this country, sir, should be the ultima ratio. Indeed, it may well be questioned whether there is any reason in it or for it. What a war!

Endless

in its hate, without truce and without mercy. If it ended ever, it would only be after a fearful struggle; and then with a heritage of hate which would forever forbid harmony. Henry Clay forewarned us of such a war. His picture of its consequences I recall in his own language :

"I will not attempt to describe scenes which now happily lie concealed from our view. Abolitionists themselves would shrink back in dismay and horror at the contemplation of desolated fields, conflagrated cities, murdered inhabitants, and the overthrow of the fairest fabric of human government that ever rose to animate the hopes of civilized man. Nor should the Abolitionists flatter themselves that, if they can succeed in their object of uniting the people of the free States, they will enter the contest with a numerical superiority that must insure victory. All history and experience proves the hazard and uncertainty of war. And we are admonished by Holy Writ that the race is not to the swift, nor the bat tle to the strong.

"But if they were to conquer, whom would they conquer? A foreign foe-one who had insulted our flag, invaded our shores, and laid our country waste? No, sir; no. It would be a conquest without laurels, without glory-a self, a suicidal conquest-a conquest of brothers over brothers, achieved by one over another portion of the descendants of common ancestors, who, nobly pledging their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor, had fought and bled, side by side, in many a hard battle on land and ocean, severed our country from the British crown, and established our national independence."

Such a war is the almost unavoidable result of a dissolution of this Confederacy. Mr. Madison (No. 61," Federalist") urged as a reason for the Union, that it destroyed every pretext for a military establishment; "but its dissolution," said he, "will be the date of a new order of things. Fear and ambition would make America copy Europe, and present liberty everywhere crushed between standing armies and perpetual taxes." He augured for a disunited America a worse condition than that of Europe. Would it not be so? Small States and great States; new States and old States; slave States and free States; Atlantic States and Pacific States; gold and silver States; iron and copper States; grain States and lumber States; river States and lake States; all having varied interests and advantages, would seek superiority in armed strength. Pride, animosity, and glory would inspire every movement. God shield our country from

such a fulfilment of the prophecy of the revered founders of the Union. Our struggle would be no short, sharp struggle. Law, and even Religion herself, would become false to their divine purpose. Their voice would no longer be the voice of God, but of his enemy. Poverty, ignorance, oppression, and its handmaid, cowardice, breaking out into merciless cruelty; slaves false; freemen slaves, and society itself poisoned at the

cradle and dishonored at the grave-its life, now so full of blessings, would be gone with the life of a fraternal and united State-hood. What sacrifice is too great to prevent such a calamity? Is such a picture overdrawn? Already its outlines appear. What means the inaugural of Governor Pickens, when he says, "From the position we may occupy toward the northern States, as well as from our own internal structure of society, the government may, from necessity, become strongly military in its organization"? What means the minute-men of Governor Wise? What the southern boast that they have a rifle or shot-gun to each family? What means the Pittsburg mob? What this alacrity to save Forts Moultrie and Pinckney? What means the boast of the southern men of being the best-armed people in the world, not counting the two hundred thousand stand of United States arms stored in southern arsenals? Already What mean Georgia has her arsenals, with eighty thousand muskets! these lavish grants of money by southern Legislatures to buy more arms? What mean these rumors of arms and force on the Mississippi? These few facts have already verified the prophecy of Madison.

Mr. Speaker, he alone is just to his country; he alone has a mind unwarped by section, and a memory unparalyzed by fear, who warns against precipitancy. He who could hurry this nation to the rash wager of battle, is not fit to hold the seat of legislation. What can justify the breaking up of our institutions into belligerent fractions? Better this marble Capitol were levelled to the dust; better were this Congress struck dead in its deliberations; better an immolation of every ambition and passion which have here met to shake the foundations of society, than the hazard of these consequences!

As yet, I do not believe that the defensive conduct of the Executive involves these consequences. Nay, I hope that firmness in resisting aggression, with the kindness which he has endeavored to show, may do much to avert them. Certainly weakness and indecision now will not avail to check the rising tide of public sentiment, and preserve the public peace. I agree with much that my friends from Illinois [Mr. McCLERNAND], New York [Mr. SICKLES], and Ohio [Mr. VALLANDIGHAM] have said as to the interests, dignity, and rights of their own sections. I will not now go into any calculation or contemplation about the results of a disseverance of this Union. Long may it be averted-that picture of Ohio, as the narrow isthmus between a broken East and a divided West, with a hostile southern border! Long may it be averted-that sad picture of New York, a great free emporium, trading to all the world, and closed against the interchange of her own inland! We have gloom enough without these new schemes of division. I invoke the better spirit of Washington, who never spoke so truly prophetic as a statesman as when he said:

"In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as a matter of serious concern, that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, northern and southern, Atlantic and Western, whence designing men may endeavor to incite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings which spring from these misrepresentations. They tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection."

In these days of anticipated trouble, when financial disaster tracks the

1

step of political infidelity; when the violation of compact is followed close by the intemperate zealotry of revolution; when even the property of our Union is seized, and our flag is torn down under its impulses; when, as if premonitory of some great sacrifice, the veil of our political temple seems rent, and the earth about us quakes, and the very graves give up their dead, who come forth to warn, beseech, advise, and moderate, in this hour of our country's deepest gloom and peril-let us heed, with an all-embracing and all-compromising patriotism, the warning of Washington, whose voice, though he be dead, yet speaketh from yonder tomb at Mount Vernon, and whose august presence I would summon here as the PRESERVER of that country whose greatest pride it is, to hail him as its FATHER!

In his sacred name, and on behalf of a people who have ever heeded his warning, and never wavered in the just defence of the South or of the North, I appeal to southern men who contemplate a step so fraught with hazard and strife, to pause. Clouds are about us! There is lightning in their frown! Cannot we direct it harmlessly to the earth? The morning and evening prayer of the people I speak for in such weakness, rises in strength to that Supreme Ruler who, in noticing the fall of a sparrow, cannot disregard the fall of a nation, that our States may continue to be as they have been-one; one in the unreserve of a mingled na* tional being; one as the thought of God is One!

[Here Mr. Cox's hour expired; but, by unanimous consent of the House, he was allowed to go on and conclude his remarks.]

These emblems above us, in their canopy of beauty, each displaying the symbol of State interest, State pride, and State sovereignty, let not one of them be dimmed by the rude breath of passion, or effaced by the ruder stroke of enmity. They all shine, like stars, differing in glory, in their many-hued splendors, by the light of the same orb, even as our States receive their lustre from the Union, which irradiates and glorifies each and all.

zen.

Our aspirations and hopes centre in the proud title of American citiWhether we hail from the land of granite or the everglade of flowers; from the teeming bosom of the West, the sea-washed shore of the East, or the gold-bearing sierras of the Pacific slope-all are imbound by the same rigol of American patriotism. Abroad, at home, in palace or in cabin, in ship or on land, we rejoice in that proud distinction of American citizen. We look upon our nationality as the actual of that ideal described by Edmund Burke in a strain of finished eloquence and sublimest philosophy-as something better than a partnership in trade, to be taken up for a temporary interest and dissolved at the fancy of the parties. We look upon it with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to a gross animal existence of a perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each State is but a clause in the great primeval contract of ETERNAL SOCIETY, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible

with the invisible world, according to a fixed compact, sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical, all moral natures each in their appointed place. Thus regarding our NATIONALITY as more than a life, as the association of many lives in one, as an immortality rather than a life, the people of this country will cling to it with a tenacity of purpose and an energy of will as to the very cross of their temporal salvation, and revere it as the impersonation of their sovereign upon earth, whose throne is this goodly land, and whose mighty minstrelsy, ever playing before it, is the voice of an intelligent, happy, and free people!

V.

EULOGY OF STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS.

Delivered in the House of Representatives on the 9th of July, 1861.

Mr. SPEAKER: Ohio is not separated from Kentucky, either in the estimate of Judge DOUGLAS, which has been so eloquently pronounced by the distinguished statesman [Mr. CRITTENDEN] who has just taken his seat, or in the grief which has been expressed for the premature closing of his illustrious career. That career closed with the opening of this eventful summer. It abounded in friendships, services, and ambitions. It ended while he was enjoying the tumult of universal acclaim, and when all felt the need of its continuance. Labor paused in its toil, bankers shut their offices and merchants their stores, lawyers and judges adjourned their courts, ministers added new fervor to prayer, partisans united in hushed regret, and soldiers draped the flag in crape, to bear their part in the great grief of the nation. He died in the midst of the people who had honored him for a generation; in the city whose growth had been fostered by his vigilance; in the State whose prairies were familiar to his eye from earliest manhood; and in that great Northwest, whose commercial, agricultural, physical, and imperial greatness was the pride of his heart and the type of his own character. There was in him a quick maturity of growth, a fertility of resource, and a sturdiness of energy, which made his life the microcosm of that great section with which he was so closely identified. That mind which had few equals, and that 'will which had no conqueror, save in the grave, were at last wrung from his iron frame. It is hard to believe that he lies pulseless in his sepulchre at Cottage Grove. It is sad to feel that the summer wind which waves the grass and flowers of his loved prairies has, in its low wail, an elegy to the departed statesman. Well might the waters of the lake, just before his death, as if premonitory of some great sacrifice, swell in mysterious emotion. These poor panegyrics, from manuscript and memory, fail to express the loss which those feel who knew him best. One would wish for the eloquence of Bossuet, or the muse of Spenser or Tennyson, to tell in the poetry of sorrow the infinite woe which would wreak itself upon expression. For weeks the public have mourned him as a loss so grievous as to be irreparable in this trying time of the Republic. The lapse of time only