Page images
PDF
EPUB

new species of veto, because they are repuguant to the con stitution as he understands it. And, after the expiration of every term of the Supreme Court, he should send for the record of its decisions, and discriminate between those which he will, and those which he will not, execute, because they are or are not agreeable to the constitution as he

understands it.

5. Mr. President, we are about to close one of the longest and most arduous sessions of Congress under the present constitution; and when we return among our constituents what account of the operations of their government shall we be bound to communicate? We shall be compelled to say that the Supreme Court is paralyzed, and the missionaries retained in prison in contempt of its authority and in defiance of numerous treaties and laws of the United States; that the executive, through the secretary of the Treasury, sent to Congress a tariff bill which would have destroyed numerous branches of our domestic industry; and, to the final destruction of all, that the veto has been applied to the bank of the United States, our only reliance for a sound and uniform currency; that the Senate has been violently attacked for the exercise of a clear constitutional power; that the House of Representatives have been unnecessarily assailed; and that the President has promulgated a rule of action for those who have taken the oath to support the constitution of the United States, that must, if there be practical conformity to it, introduce general nullification, and end in the absolute subversion of the government.

XXXIV. THE POOR VOTER ON ELECTION DAY.

JOHN G. WHITTIER.

1. The proudest now is but my peer,

The highest not more high;
To-day, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
To-day, alike are great and small,

The nameless and the known;

My palace is the people's hall,
The ballot-box my throne!

2. Who serves to-day, upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong to-day;
And sleekest broad-cloth counts no more
Than home-spun frock of gray.

3. To-day let pomp and vain pretense
My stubborn right abide;

I set a plain man's common sense
Against the pedant's pride.
To-day shall simple manhood try

The strength of gold and land;
The wide world has not wealth to buy
The power in my right hand!

4. While there's a grief to seek redress,
Or balance to adjust,

Where weighs our living manhood less
Than mammon's vilest dust,

[blocks in formation]

[From an address to his constituents on being elected a member of the English Parliament for the city of Bristol.]

1. I am sorry I cannot conclude without saying a word on a topic touched upon by my worthy colleague. I wish that topic had been passed by, at a time when I have so little leisure to discuss it. But since he has thought proper to throw it out, I owe you a clear explanation of my poor sentiments on that subject. He tells you that "the topic of instructions has occasioned much altercation and uneasiness in this city"; and he expresses himself (if I understand him rightly) in favor of the coercive authority of such instructions.

2. Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions to theirs; and, above all, ever and in all cases, to prefer their interests to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of living men. These he does not derive from

your pleasures; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Frovidence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

3. My worthy colleague says his will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If goverment were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?

4. To deliver an opinion is the right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a representative ought always to rejoice to hear, and which. he ought always most scriously to consider. But authoritative instruction, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience, these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.

[ocr errors]

5. Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member, indeed, but when you have chosen him, he

is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament, If the local constituent should have an interest, or should form a hasty opinion, evidently opposite to the real good of the community, the member for that place ought to be as far as any other from any endeavor to give it effect.

6. I beg pardon for saying so much on this subject. I have been unwillingly drawn into it; but I shall ever use a respectful frankness of communication with you. Your faithful friend, your devoted servant, I shall be to the end of my life; a flatterer you do not wish for. On this point of instruction, however, I think it scarcely possible we ever can have any sort of difference. Perhaps I may give you too much, rather than too little, trouble.

7. From the first hour I was encouraged to court your favor, to this happy day of obtaining it, I have never promised you anything but humble and persevering endeavors to do my duty. The weight of that duty, I confess, makes me tremble; and whoever well considers what it is, of all things in the world, will fly from what has the least likeness to a positive and precipitate engagement. To be a good member of Parliament is, let me tell you, no easy task; especially at this time, when there is so strong a disposition to run into the perilous extremes of servile compliance or wild popularity.

8. To unite circumspection with vigor is absolutely necessary; but it is extremely difficult. We are now members for a rich commercial city; this city, however, is but a part of a rich commercial nation, the interests of which are various, multiform, and intricate. We are members for that great nation, which, however, is itself but part of a great empire, extended, by our virtue and our fortune, to the farthest limits of the east and of the west. All these widespread interests must be considered; must be compared; must be reconciled if possible. We are members for a free

« PreviousContinue »