mission into the Union; repudiate her ratification of the resolutions of annexation; seize the forts and public buildings which were constructed with our money; appropriate the same to her own use, and leave us to pay $100,000,000 and mourn the death of the brave men who sacrificed their lives in defending the integrity of the soil. In the name of Hardin, and Bissell, and Harris, and of the seven thousand gallant spirits from Illinois, who fought bravely upon every battle-field of Mexico, I protest against the right of Texas to separate from this Union without our consent.

Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, 1861.

WAR DEPRECATED.

THE history of the world does not furnish an instance, where war has raged for a series of years between two classes of States, divided by a geographical line under the same national Government, which has ended in reconciliation and reunion. Extermination, subjugation, or separation, one of the three, must be the result of war between the northern and southern States. Surely you do not expect to exterminate or subjugate ten millions of people, the entire population of one section, as a means of preserving amicable relations between the two sections!

I repeat, then, my solemn conviction, that war means disunion-final, irrevocable separation. I see no alternative, therefore, but a fair compromise, founded on the basis of mutual concessions, alike honorable, just, and beneficial to all parties, or civil war and disunion. Is there anything humil iating in a fair compromise of conflicting interests, opinions, and theories, for the sake of peace, reunion and safety? Read the debates of the Federal Convention, which formed our glorious Constitution, and you will find noble examples, worthy of imitation; instances where sages and patriots were willing to surrender cherished theories and principles of gov ernment, believed to be essential to the best form of society, for the sake of peace and unity.

I never understood that wise and good men ever regarded mutual concessions by such men as Washington, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton, as evidences of weakness, cowardice, or want of patriotism. On the contrary, this spirit of conciliation and compromise has ever been considered, and will in all time be regarded as the highest evidence which their great deeds and immortal services ever furnished of their

patriotism, wisdom, foresight and devotion to their country. and their race. Can we not afford to imitate their example in

this momentous crisis? Are we to be told that we must not do one duty to our country, lest we injure the party; that no compromise can be effected without violating the party platform upon which we were elected? Better that all party platforms be scattered to the winds; better that all political organizations be broken up; better that every public man and politician in America be consigned to political martyrdom, than that the Union be destroyed and the country plunged into civil war.

It seems that party platforms, pride of opinion, personal consistency, fear of political martyrdom, are the only obstacles to a satisfactory adjustment. Have we nothing else to live for but political position? Have we no other inducement, no other incentive to our efforts, our toils, and our sacrifices? Most of us have children, the objects of our tenderest affections and deepest solicitudes, whom we hope to leave behind us to enjoy the rewards of our labors in a happy, prosperous, and united country, under the best Government the wisdom of man ever devised or the sun of heaven ever shone upon. Can we make no concessions, no sacrifices for the sake of our children, that they may have a country to live in, and a Government to protect them, when party platforms and political honors shall avail us nothing in the day of final reckoning. Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, 1861.

APPEAL FOR THE CONSTITUTION.

MR. SPEAKER, I ask the people and the people's representatives to maintain the Constitution in its integrity. Let us pass the laws which will enable the Executive to summon the people, the loyal people, not to the conquest of our countrymen, but to the defence of our Constitution. Let the Constitution be saved from violence and overthrow; it is filled with the wisdom and goodness of its great founders; it is the carved work of their poured-out spirits. Maintain it! maintain it inviolate until it fulfills its sublime mission, until this goodly heritage of ours, slumbering between two great oceans that engirdle the world, shall be filled with free commonwealths, in every one of which, without violence to any human being or any human habitation, every unjust fetter shall be broken, and every inherent right maintained. When no State will banish men because they are just, or enslave men because they are weak, or subject men to the perilous

edge of battle because they are strong, or strangle men like felons on the gallows, because, in obedience to the divine command, they remember those that are in bonds as bound with them. Maintain your Constitution until our temple of civil and religious liberty shall be complete, lifting its headstone of beauty above the towers of watch and war, until all nations shall flee unto it, and its glory shall fill the whole earth.-Hon. Kinsley S. Bingham, 1861.

MARYLAND FOR THE UNION.

MARYLAND is placed in a more embarrassing attitude than any other State in the Confederacy. With a long line of two hundred miles of frontier bordering upon Pennsylvania; with a line of eighty miles bordering upon Virginia; with her great railroad-in which she has $30,000,000-running into Virginia, she is surrounded with the gravest embarrassments; and I can only rely on her wisdom and prudence, and accept her decision as my decision, and her destiny as my destiny. But I pray you to relieve her and her sister States from this perilous embarrassment. You can do it; and if you will act wisely and speedily upon the propositions before the house, you will be able to do it successfully. It would crack the very heart-strings of Maryland to be separated from the Union of the States, the foundation-stones of which are cemented with the best blood of her gallant sons, and to which she has always clung with so much loyal devotion and earnest reverence. Spare her, I conjure you, the necessity of even debating a proposition so painful.

I observe, Mr. Speaker, that my hour is nearly out, and I must close, leaving unsaid some things of which I had wished to speak. I have never been able to regard with any favor this idea of a southern confederation, even in its merely economic aspects; and I am not able with any complacency to consider the possibility of my own State being its frontier line. I cannot hope for its permanency, based, as it must be, upon the recognized right of secession, and the consequent ability of any of its component parts at any moment to destroy it. Nor do I desire to see the great mechanical and industrial interests of my State and city subjected to the policy of the cotton States, which are so likely to be its element of controlling power. Free trade and direct taxation do not harmonize with the interests nor accord with the temper of Maryland; and I have little faith in it. Born in

revolt; cradled in passion; nurtured upon excitement; overriding freedom of opinion; disregarding individual rights; burdened with taxation; environed by fearful perils in the present, and destined to encounter more terrible troubles in the future; based, as its foundation-stone, upon the right of any one of its component parts at any moment to secede from the structure, and thus break it up, I regard its promises as delusive, and its results as "Dead Sea fruits, that turn to ashes on the lips ;" and to me the “ gorgeous palaces and cloud-capped towers" that it presents to the gaze of the youthful and the ambitious, are as the sun-lit battlements and lengthening vistas of some treacherous mirage, that flees into airy nothing before the straining gaze and the advancing step of the desert traveller. Rather give to me, and to my people, the Government that has been tested by eighty years of successful trial. Let not my ears be greeted with the music of the " 'Marseillaise," that stirs no pulse of my American blood. Flaunt not before my eyes the flag of a divided nationality, that rouses no emotion of my American heart; but let me and my people, I pray you, go down to our graves with the consecrated melodies of the nation ringing in our ears, and over us the dome of the Union, glorious with all its constellated stars.-Hon. J. M. Harris, 1861.

THE FLAG INSULTED.

SIR, the 7th day of January, 1861, is a day long to be remembered in the annals of the American people. On that day a steamboat, called the Star of the West, was gliding over the waters of the Atlantic into one of the ports of the United States. A cannon ball came hissing and skimming across its prow; the stars and stripes sprung out to the breeze-as if startled by an event so unusual-to tell the persons, whoever they might be, that fired that shot, that the vessel aimed at was under the protection of the national flag. In a moment, another ball comes hissing and plunging into its sides-another, and another-and that flag, for the first time since its folds were unfurled to the breeze, turned and flapped ingloriously by the sides of the mast, and the vessel that bore it returned to the place of its departure. Never before, on the American continent, was that flag insulted. The almanacs that our children will read, among the memorabilia of 1861, opposite the 7th day of January, 1861, will have written, "The American flag, for the first time, fired

upon by American citizens." I do not know how others may feel, but I confess I cannot keep it out of my mindthese balls booming, hissing, disgracing, and defying the flag of the United States, burn and sting to the very quick continually.

Mr. Speaker, it is under these circumstances, with the flag of our country disgraced and insulted-never before dis-. graced or insulted-that we meet here to-day; and it is proposed to compromise, to concede, to conciliate. Compromise with whom? With traitors who have fired on our flag! Conciliate whom? Rebels who have bid your Government defiance! Sir, whatever I might yield under other circumstances, whatever arrangements I might make, whatever compromises I might give my vote to support, never, as God lives, will I vote for one particle of compromise until that insult is atoned, apologized for, or avenged; never!

Hon. Owen Lovejoy, 1861.

MUTUAL ANTIPATHY OF THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH.

THOSE who are intent upon subverting the government, say that the people of the two sections are dissimilar; that they have their peculiarities and prejudices; that they hate each other. Sir, that may all be true to some extent; but there may be more hope of another, and, I trust, a better generation. How long have they been hating each other to that extent, which can justify a separation, and that intensified hate which will be sure to follow fraternal war? The people of the North and South do not hate each other one particle more than did the embittered leaders of the old Whig and Democratic parties at the close of those sanguinary political conflicts which marked our history a few brief years ago. But will they love each other any more sincerely when they are separated into hostile armies, and encamped in battle array? Or, will the bloody traditions, which will disturb the repose of our children, prepare them for a more cordial embrace? True, you may separate upon paper, but the Ohio will be a poor memorial of peace between a rival people and contending States. But I will not agree that you hate each other now. Our lineage is the same; and each should know the other's infirmities by his own. If your constituents could sometimes see how frequently and how loveingly the free-soiler and the southern radical hold kind and familiar council; how often they almost embrace each other,