THE SACRED TRUST OF LIBERTY.

W. F. Otis.

Do we suppose that we can shed our liberty upon other countries without exertion, and let it fall upon them like the dew which stirs not the leaf? No; liberty must be long held suspended over them in the atmosphere, by our unseen and unwearied power. The more intense the heat which oppresses them, the more must it saturate and surcharge the air, till, at last, when the ground is parched dry, when vegetation is crisped up, and the gasping people are ready to plunge into destruction for relief, then will it call forth its hosts from every quarter of the horizon; then will the sky be overcast, the landscape darkened, and liberty, at one peal, with one flash, will pour down her million streams; then will she lift up the voice which echoed, in days of yore, from the peaks of Otter to the Grand Monadnock; then will

"Jura answer through her misty cloud,

Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud.”

We are asked upon what is our reliance in times of excitement; what checks have we upon popular violence; what compensation for human infirmities; what substitutes for bayonets, dragoons, and an aristocracy? I answer, the religion and morality of the people. Not the religion of the state; not the morality of the fashionable. Thank Heaven, our house is of no Philistine architecture! Our trust our only trust—is where it ought to be, the religion and morality of the whole people. Upon that depends, and ought to depend, all that we enjoy or hope. Our strength is in length, in breadth, and in depth. It is in us, and must be felt and exercised by each one and all of us, or our downfall is doomed. For we are the people; we are our governors; we are the Lord's anointed; we are the powers that be, and we bear not the sword in vain. And upon us is the responsibility; humble and obscure, domestic and retiring, secluded and solitary, we may be, - but ours is still the great national trust, go where we will; and to God are we, one and all, accountable. Our responsibility is with us; it weighs upon us; it overhangs us, like the dome of this

house; its universal pressure is the great principle of our protection. If the just rules of religion and morality pervade through all its parts, the prodigious weight is gracefully sustained; but if vice and corruption creep in its divided circles, the enfeebled fabric will yawn in dread chasms, and, crumbling, will overwhelm us with unutterable ruin!

CHARITY SHOULD COMMENCE AT HOME.-J. C. Jones.

Ir this Union is to endure with all its brilliancy, we are the agents and the instrumentalities by which it is to be accomplished; and I submit to every senator here, who loves this Union,—and I would to God that all of them did love it! — if they are ready to take a step which, by possibility, may endanger this Union. What are your sympathies, broad, boundless as they are, compared to the interest, to the honor, to the duty, we owe to our own country? We go throughout the whole world in quest of objects of sympathy, forgetting that we have a country to be saved, and a country that is to be honored, and made prosperous and happy. Sir, I love this Union in all its length, in all its breadth, in all its height, in all its depth. Yes, sir, from the Aroostook to the Rio Grandé, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, throughout all our borders, I love this Union. For it I am ready to live, and, by the grace of God, if necessary, for it I am ready to die. love it, and, because I love it, I want to act so as to preserve it. Why should we endanger this Union by faction, either north or south? I have no affinities for the one or the other. Wherever there is a man, or a community, or principles which endanger the Union, if I had the power, I would borrow some thunderbolt from the armory of heaven, and dash the accursed wretch into utter annihilation!

I

I love this Union, love of the Union is idolatry with me; and it is because I love and cherish it with the fondness of devoted affection, that I am against any of those Utopian schemes, any of those modern doctrines of progress, or manifest destiny, or higher or lower law, come from what sources they may. Why should

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we go abroad? Have we not enough to do at home? Have we not a field broad enough for the sympathies of senators? Are all our sympathies to be exhausted on Hungary? Weep over her wrongs to your heart's content; I will join you in the holy office; but I ask you to come back in the hours of quietude and look to your own country. Have you not enough here to engage your time, to enlist your talents, to enlist the talents of the loftiest intellect of the age? See your country, with twenty-five millions of population, extending from ocean to ocean, a territory of empires in extent, and yet not enough for the enlarged capacity of some gentlemen. The world itself seems scarcely large enough to contain their boundless sympathies. It is enough for me to know that there are interests here that command and demand my attention. Look at the interests of this country! You have a territory almost boundless; unnumbered millions and hundreds of millions of public domain, that might be made the basis upon which the hopes, the prosperity, the happiness, the grandeur and the glory, of the mightiest nation upon earth might be established. And yet, sir, that is a small matter, that concerns nobody. We must go and weep over Hungary. If your sympathies are so large, go into the valley of the Mississippi, that I have the honor in part to represent. I see the honored representative of my district here now. Go there, and see the unnumbered and numberless. lives that are constantly sacrificed to the imbecility and weakness of this government of ours. There is a hecatomb of living spirits carried down into the deep and angry waters of the Mississippi and its tributaries. There is no sympathy for them. We must go. abroad, and shed tears of blood and compassion for the sufferings of Hungary. Better come home, and weep over widows and orphans, left husbandless and fatherless by the neglect of the government to give protection, and to improve her inland and her external commerce. That is enough to engage the time and the talents of the whole Senate of the loftiest genius that ever lived. Yet these are very small matters we may forget them all! We have a sea-coast almost boundless, with harbors to improve, interests to protect, thousands and tens of thousands of American citi

zens languishing for the want of that paternal regard which the government ought to extend them, in giving protection to the honest labor of the country. All that moves no sympathetic chord in those hearts that sympathize with the oppressed of all nations. Come home, gentlemen, come home, and let us see if we cannot do something here. When we shall have made our own people happy and prosperous, when the treasury shall be overflown, when the navy shall find nothing to do, when the army shall be a burden upon our hands, then you may go out and fight the battles of other people. But first let us establish ourselves upon a basis not only honorable, but safe and perpetual.

I hope to see this government go on in the course in which our fathers guided it. I hope to see her growing stronger and stronger every day. My sympathies for the oppressed of other nations are as acute as those of other gentlemen; but I remember that I have a country myself, and that, while I sympathize with the oppressed of other nations, my first duty is to my own country. When I go back, and inquire what have been the achievements, what have been the results that have flown from the policy of our fathers, I confess that I am astounded that gentlemen should choose to change. Why, from feeble colonies, thirteen in number, and three millions in population, we have grown to be a people of about twenty-five millions, with thirty-one states, instead of thirteen. With such results as these, so stupendous and overwhelming, I ask, is it possible that any American can desire to change the policy which has produced such results? As for myself, I desire to see this country go onward. I would invoke the spirit of Him who seems to preside over the deliberations of the Senate, to watch, and guard, and protect, and defend the institutions of our country. I hope that the column which has been laid by Washington may go on rising higher and higher, and higher still, until its proud head shall have pierced the clouds of heaven, and be bathed in eternal light! From its proud summit may the light and the truth of freedom and liberty go out into the whole world, until all its dark recesses shall be enlightened by the revivifying rays that flow from it, and all the world be filled with glory, and

be wrapped in one eternal flame of liberty and freedom, now and forever!

DEATH OF DANIEL WEBSTER.-J. C. Park.

DANIEL WEBSTER, the patriot, the jurist, the statesman, is no more. I rise to pronounce no panegyric, no eulogy! This is neither the time nor occasion; nor am I the man. When the avalanche has fallen from the mountain top, when the thunderbolt has cleft the forest-oak, deep silence succeeds the shock; and now the public pulse has ceased its throbbings, and holy, silent awe is the loudest oratory. Time will be when we shall awake to a full realization of the event; and then eloquent lips will pour forth a nation's feelings.

How many thousands sympathize in the emotions of this hour! The news, lightning-winged, has already pervaded the continent. The fisherman on the banks pauses in his toil to echo back the wail which reaches him from the shore. The trapper in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains catches it, as it rolls across the prairies. The industry of the nation feels that it has lost its best friend; and even on the thrones of Europe the monarchs of the Old World tremble as they learn that that master-spirit, which has wielded a moral power over the destinies of nations more potent than their armed legions or their diplomatic machinery, now stands with the prophets of old and apostles of truth in humble adoration. before the throne of Omnipotence !

Around us, in our very midst, how everything speaks to us of him! Yonder monument to Liberty, baptized in the blood of his eloquence; yonder Pilgrim Rock, consecrated by his lips, in the spirit of Puritan truth; the very landmarks and boundaries of our land, from the bleak north-east to the sultry south-west, are established under his wise, far-seeing guidance. Not a waterfall or a cataract in all New England, rendered useful to mankind by those discreet measures which always met his cordial support, that did not seem, on yesterday's holy morn, to have rolled its course seaward with a more subdued and plaintive murmur.