time, and by military force taken before a military tribunal, and by a mode of seizure and duress unknown to the institutions of the State, to answer for an offence, for the trial of which a law had already been passed, and a different tribunal already designated! He is tried, and justice laughs at the mockery. He is sentenced to be thrust within the borders of a formidable rebellion, whose success he had everywhere deprecated. What can come of it? What does it forebode? What does it mean? Horace Greeley told the truth when he said that this banishment was the worst joke which Mr. Lincoln had yet perpetrated. Precisely what Mr. Greeley means I cannot say; but if Mr. Vallandigham declares boldly in the South, as he has in the North, against the independence of their section, and the infernal atrocity of their war against our Government, this exile will be a comedy of errors. If Mr. Vallandigham should, through what he may conceive to be the injustice of the North, or the blandishments of the South, show the least sympathy with the rebellion and its objects, I shall be mistaken in his character. His Democratic friends will be the first to anathematize such recreancy. Time, to which he has appealed, will solve the wisdom or the unwisdom, the seriousness or jocoseness of this peculiar punishment.

3. What crime was sought to be thus punished? Mr. Vallandigham's speech at Mount Vernon was the ostensible, but his sentiments as to the war, expressed for two years, was the real offence. But would these come within the law of July 17, 1862? If so, let him be tried legally for his peace principles under that law. In his Mount Vernon speech he did not indulge in any urgent appeals for peace. He confined himself to denouncing the Administration for the infractions of the Constitution. He urged compliance with law and obedience to legitimate authority. His speech there allayed excitement, and estopped all tendency to violence. It is on record, that on some most material questions, my votes and speeches were not in accordance with Mr. Vallandigham's. I differed with him then, and yet differ, as you know, as to his peace policy; but upon that occasion, I said very little that would not be obnoxious to the same punishment, if, indeed, his speech there were obnoxious. Yet my speech was reported as "harmless;" his as "dangerous." I think I am right in assuming that Mr. Vallandigham's peace policy was the real reason of his arrest. This again enlarges the discussion. Had he a right to indulge in unwise and unpatriotic speeches? Supposing that he is wrong and others right, still there remains an important question, something more momentous than the arrest of one man. It is the right of free speech. It is the right always exercised in time of war by some one in favor of peace; a right indispensable to the attainment of the very object of war, which is peace. This right has been always used in time of war, as well in England as in America. To vindicate that right before you would be superfluous. As well reargue the principle of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, or the existence of light. The time was when John Milton wrote his scholarly defence of unlicensed printing, and proved the thesis of Euripides, fixed in immortal Greek at the head of his chapter, that

"This is true liberty, when freeborn men,

Having to advise the public, may speak free."

Time was when his Puritan thunder echoed through the English land, and made the Parliaments listen to his plea for the liberty of discourse on all subjects, without the imprimatur of censor or the supervision of the provost. With what sterling sense he pleaded for that free speech, which allowed the wise man to gather the gold from the drossiest volume, and which did not fear to add any more folly to the fool. "The State," said he, "shall be my governor, but not my critic!" What he thought then, at the dawn of English popular freedom, the courts of England afterwards applied to both religion and politics. On the 24th of July, 1797, Thomas Williams was tried before Lord Kenyon for printing Tom Paine's attack on Christianity. The great Lord Erskine defended him. While he reprobated the object of the Infidel in his "Age of Reason," he vindicated, with an angelic eloquence which has made his speech the verdict of millions, the most unbounded freedom of discussion, even to the challenging of error in the Constitution itself, and especially in its administration. Hear his noble sentiments:

Although every community must establish supreme authorities, founded upon fixed principles, and must give high powers to magistrates to administer laws for the preservation of the Government itself, and for the security of those who are to be protected by it; yet, as infallibility and perfection belong neither to human establishments nor to human individuals, it ought to be the policy of all free establishments, as it is most peculiarly the principle of our own Constitution, to permit the most unbounded freedom of discussion, even by detecting errors in the Constitution or administration of the very Government itself, so as that decorum is observed, which every State must exact from its subjects, and which imposes no restraint upon any intellectual composition, fairly, honestly, and decently addressed to the consciences and understandings of men. Upon this principle I have an unquestionable right—a right which the best subjects have exercised-to examine the principles and structure of the Constitution, and by fair, manly reasoning, to question the practice of its administrators. I have a right to consider and to point out errors in the one or in the other; and not merely to reason upon their existence, but to consider the means of their reformation. By such free, well-intentioned, modest, and dignified communication of sentiments and opinions, all nations have been gradually improved, and milder laws and purer religions have been established."

Under such a large-minded philosophy, we could tolerate a Wendell Phillips, so long as there is left reason to combat his heresies of hate. But if we are only to have freedom of speech from the Phillipses and other ranters against our system of government, while those are throttled who to preserve that system would correct its administration, then indeed is Liberty manacled and Reason in irons.

These old discussions I had thought would never have been revived, except to honor the heroism of the early martyrs who like Algernon Sidney died for freedom of thought, or to admire their graceful style of expression through which the soul of heroism shone. We had already gemmed upon the forehead of our time the resplendent coronal of free thought and free printing and free speech. They were the crown jewels of popular sovereignty. They have not been shut up in caskets, like the jewels of princes, but set in our fundamental law-not for a life only, but for a nation's life, to shine with their "silent capabilities of light" for an immortality!

With what a glorious fervor Daniel Webster vindicated this right! His sentiment you have recognized by adopting it as one of your resolutions to-day. His comprehensive mind saw in free debate the scholar's

stimulus, the philosopher's stone, the statesman's policy, the citizen's protection, and the religionist's faith! He saw in it the rod for error, the plummet of truth, and the car of advancement. Especially did he find in its guarantee a nation's capacity and repose, a people's liberty and happiness. He saw that reason would lose her great office, the pen its pungency and power, and eloquence its fervor and force, if freedom of thought and speech was circumscribed.

What Webster saw and expressed with the glow of a great heart, Thomas Jefferson has handed down in his inaugural message, wherein he has impearled forever the principles of Democratic liberty: a jealous care of the right of election; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; the diffusion of information, and the arraignment of all abuses at the bar of public reason; freedom of the press and freedom of person, under the protection of the habeas corpus and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages, the blood of our heroes, have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civil instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error and alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

I would to God that I could read to Mr. Lincoln, with such commentary as history furnishes, these principles of his philosophic and Democratic predecessor, that he might retrace his steps with regard to these extraordinary arrests. I would implore him, with that respect due to his high office, and forgetting all considerations but the honor and safety of the people of Ohio whose representative in part I have been so long, to pause before he precipitates any part of our people into the despair which is fast gathering upon their hearts. I would beseech him, in the language of his proclamation for national humiliation, in the name of that God who overrules the designs of Presidents and the orders of Generals, not to add to the "awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land," other and worse "punishments for our presumptuous sins." I would beseech him not to turn away from the earnest question which Horatio Seymour has propounded: "Whether this war is waged to put down rebellion at the South or destroy free institutuons at the North;" but to answer it magnanimously by retracing his steps, releasing and stopping at once and forever this system of arrest and inquisitorial trial. He would thus assure you whose sons and brothers are in the field, that our Government shall not be subverted in the North, while our gallant soldiers are maintaining it with their lives in the South.

MAGNA CHARTA-ITS SANCTITY.

Extract from a speech delivered in Cooper Institute, in November, 1863.

THE traveller who visits that island meadow in the river Thames, near Windsor, now used as a race course, and still known as Runnymede, does not go there to see the racing, but because that meadow marks an era in the progress of human freedom. There, six hundred and forty-four years ago, on the morning of the 12th of August, the iron-clad barons met King John, and wrested from him the same rights which have been violated by Abraham Lincoln, and ostracized by the indemnity bill of the last Congress. [Cheers.] These rights were written in the Latin of that day, "Nullus liber homo capiatur." Dead language, but vital with libertywhich Chatham said was worth all the classics.

"No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or deprived of his own free household, or of his liberties, or of his own free customs, or outlawed, or banished, or injured in any manner, nor will we pass sentence upon him, nor send trial upon him, unless by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." [Cheers.]

This was the germ of our civil freedom, which the pigmies of to-day are endeavoring to uproot, now that it has grown from the acorn to the oak! As another (Judge Thomas of Massachusetts) has so finely expressed it: "From the gray of that morning streamed the rays, which, uplifting with the hours, coursing with the years, and keeping pace with the centuries, have encircled the whole earth with the glorious light of English liberty-the liberty for which our fathers planted these commonwealths in the wilderness; for which they went through the baptism of blood and fire in the Revolution; which they imbedded and hoped to make immortal in the Constitution; without which the Constitution would not be worth the parchment on which it was written." [Cheers.] As if to make this great charter sacred forever in the Anglo-Saxon memory, to connect it with the holiest emotions of religion, and to sanction it by the hopes and the terrors of the unseen world, the Catholic hierarchy of that day-long before Protestantism arose, before the Reformation, before we had the transcendental light of our Puritan preachers [laughter]-this Catholic hierarchy, then the friend of the oppressed and the people, were convoked a few days after the unwilling king signed the charter. Picture to your eye that great convocation. It met in Westminster Abbey, the mausoleum of the dead royalty and genius of Britain. Here was the king upon his throne, sceptred and crowned, impurpled in his robes of office; near him were the lords temporal in their scarlet gowns; on his right were the gentlemen of England representing the Commons, the people of the realm; and within the altar were the lords spiritual, clad in all the pomp of their pontifical apparel! In the midst stood Stephen Langton, the primate of England, Archbishop of Canterbury. The great organ rolls its music amidst the Gothic arches; the air, suffused with a dim religious light from the stained windows, trembles with the thrill of "symphony divine," and the choir sing Te Deum

laudamus-praise to God for the great charter of human freedom! Censers swing and the incense rises, an offering to the God of justice! And in that impressive presence the Archbishop arises, and gathering upon his brow and in his voice the terrors of the invisible and eternal world, he sequesters and excludes, and from the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, from the company of the saints in heaven and the good on earth, he forever excommunicates and accurses every one who should dare violate that great charter of Anglo-Saxon freedom! [Cheers.] Think you, men of New York, these curses are not living yet? A Massachusetts Senator has said that your honored Governor is now being dragged at the chariot of a Federal Executive, usurping the rights of the people and violating the great charter, as eternized in our traditions, our history, and our Constitution. But the people of this country are meeting as of old, not in any Gothic minster, not in the presence of the great hierarchs, not with ceremony of Church and State, not to the music of organ and choir or the rising incense of praise, not amidst the fulminations of primates; but under the great sky of heaven, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi; and they, too, are sequestering and excluding, excommunicating and accursing-and from the body of the just God in heaven and from the company of the good and patriotic everywhere-all the minions of power who have dared in this age and land to violate these sacred rights of personal and constitutional liberty. [Great cheers.]

CONFISCATION.

ITS HISTORY--EXPERIENCE OF IRELAND-CAN BELLIGERENCY AND TREASON EXIST TOGETHER?— PHILOLOGY PROGRESSIVE-CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISIONS-EFFECTS OF CONFISCATION.

"It is advisable to exceed in lenity rather than in severity; to banish but few rather than many; and to leave them their estates, instead of making a vast number of confiscations. Under pretence of avenging the republic's cause, the avengers would establish tyranny. The business is not to destroy the rebel, but the rebellion. They ought to return as quickly as possible into the usual track of government, in which every one is protected by the laws, and no one injured."-Montesquieu.

THE joint resolution explanatory of the Confiscation Act being before the House, on January 14, 1864, Mr. Cox said: --I do not desire to detain the House at any length. The general subject of confiscation, its legality and policy, was exhaustively discussed in the last Congress. I may be allowed to add a few considerations to those which have heretofore been offered here: first, as to the general policy of the confiscation system, with a view to putting down this rebellion; and secondly, as to the specific mode pointed out by this bill and its proposed amendments. My impres sion is, that the confiscation system has been an utter failure. Because it has failed, we are to have it newly tinkered session after session, and from day to day, with a view to encourage rapacity and aggravate griev ances. Such legislation, sir, only stimulates rebellion. It destroys what remnant of Union feeling may be still remaining in the South. It ignores