agricultural citizens. You say by that tariff that the manufacturing institutions of this country shall not be brought in competition with those of other parts of the world.

Sir, no sectional boundaries to my love of country prompts these remarks. I call God to witness with what devotion I love every sod and rock and river, mountain, prairie, and forest of my native land. For its happiness and glory it would be sweet

and honorable to die. I reckon no section of it above another. It is all alike to me, all dear and hallowed by the principles of constitutional liberty. But I speak in the name of justice, which is everywhere present, in the name of fraternal and American equality; and I ask you, I implore you, to look at the condition of the Western people. Their interests have been abandoned on this floor by more than half their Representatives, and they stand to-day bearing the hard brunt of the pitiless storm which has burst from the angry sky. They are shut out from all fair markets for their produce. Their natural channels of trade to the South are closed by the impious hand of war, and their avenues to the markets of the North are obstructed by the avarice of railroads. It costs sixty cents to freight a bushel of corn from the Wabash River to New York, and leaves from seven to fourteen cents to the farmer who has caused it to grow and gathered it in, as the reward of his toil. For everything else he receives the same beggarly return. And yet who has lifted up his voice here in behalf of that great, that honest, and oppressed people? Where is their representative in the Committee of Ways and Means, that great despotic committee which matures measures of tariff, of taxation, and of finance, and whose decrees on this floor are as unalterable as the laws of the Medes and Persians? On that committee, which speaks the voice of fate for the weal or woe of the taxpayers of all the land, the great imperial domain of the West, from the feet of the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, has had no member during this important session.

Blow after blow has fallen on her naked head and now she stands exposed to the payment of four-fifths of all the burdens which this Government has to bear. I speak advisedly. She has been trampled under foot. Her rights have been disregarded. She has been plundered for the benefit of others. And from here I call upon her to vindicate herself, to assert her equality, to resist oppression, to scorn the tribute which she is called upon

to pay to a branch of industry which God and nature never intended she should support, to demand from her Government the same protection which others obtain, and to reckon with her oppressors at the ballot box. As for me, I shall join in no such system of injustice, inequality, and wanton extortion against the people whose interests are confided to my care in this House. I shall resist it in all constitutional methods, and denounce it everywhere; and in doing so I shall perform what I conceive to be one of the highest duties of honest, fearless patriotism.

I now take leave of this subject. I have dwelt upon it today, not to discourage or depress the energies of the people, but to awaken my countrymen to a sense of their perilous situation, in order that they may gird up their loins and meet it in a manner becoming the intelligent, free citizens of America. The present, it is true, is dark, and filled with the elements of the tempest; but in the sky of the future the star of hope is still burning with all its ancient lustre. I believe in its promises of returning prosperity, honor, and unity to this Government. Aye, sir, hope, hope, the sweet comforter of the weary hours of anguish, the merciful and benignant angel, walking forever by the side of mourning sorrow, the soothing, ministering spirit of every human woe, the stay and support of great nations in their trials, as well as of feeble men; hope, that never dies nor sleeps, but shares its immortality with the soul itself, will bear us through the Red Sea and the wilderness that are before us. I indulge, Mr. Speaker, in this hope, and cherish it as my friend a friend that always smiles and points upward and onward to bright visions beyond the baleful clouds which now envelop us as a shroud. But the basis of this hope with me is the future action of the people themselves. In the wise, patriotic, and Christian conduct of the American people, I behold this nation lifted up again from its prostration, purified of its bloody pollution, robed in the shining garments of peace; the furious demon of civil war, which has rended us and caused us to sit howling amidst the tombs of the dead, cast out by the spirit of the omnipotent and merciful Master, who walked upon the waters, and bade the winds be still. I expect to see the people raise up the Constitution of our dear and blessed fathers from the deep degradation of its enemies as Moses reared aloft the brazen serpent amidst the stricken children of Israel for the healing of a nation. I expect to see them, wielding the sword in one hand.

and appealing to the ballot box with the other, crush and hurl from power corrupt and seditious agitators against the peace and stability of this Union, armed and unarmed, in the North as well as in the South. I expect to see a Congress succeed this, coming fresh from the loyal and honest masses, reflecting their pure and unsullied love for the institutions handed down to us from the days of Revolutionary glory. To this end let all good men everywhere bend their energies. Then will come again the glory and the happiness of our past-those days of purity, of peace, and of brotherly love, over which all America now mourns as the Jewish captive who wept by the waters of Babylon and refused to sing because Judea was desolate. This Union will be restored, armed rebellion and treason will give way to peaceful allegiance, but not until the ancient moderation and wisdom of the founders of the Republic control once more in this Capitol. Unnatural, inhuman hate, the accursed spirit of unholy vengeance, the wild and cruel purposes of unreasoning fanaticism, the debasing lust of avarice and plunder, the unfair and dishonest. schemes of sectional aggrandizement, must all give way to the higher and better attributes and instincts of the human heart. In their place must reign the charitable precepts of the Bible and the conservative doctrines of the Constitution; and on these combined it is my solemn conviction that the Union of these States will once more be founded as upon a rock which man cannot overthrow, and which God in his mercy will not.

EDMUND WALLER

(1605-1687)

HE poet Waller played a celebrated if ignominious part in the revolution against the Stuarts. He entered Parliament at the age of sixteen, and before the close of the Short Parliament of 1640 he had already acquired such prominence as an advocate of parliamentary supremacy that the Long Parliament chose him to impeach Justice Crawley, one of the judges whose subserviency to the King had made possible the Ship-Money decision under which the King sought to collect taxes that had not been levied by law. Waller's speech against Crawley shows great ability, and the reader ought not to allow the force of its argument to be impaired by the tradition that when Waller and others formed a combination to check the Radical leaders in Parliament, he behaved with "abject meanness," when arrested saving his own life by informing against his associates. He was banished by Parliament, but Cromwell allowed him to return, and he was in considerable favor at court after the restoration of the Stuarts. He showed his moral and intellectual versatility by a poem lamenting the death of Cromwell, followed not very long afterwards by an ode rejoicing at the "happy return" of Charles II. Charles, who, because Vane had a conscience, sent him to the scaffold, laughed at Waller for his lack of it, took him into favor and allowed him to be returned to Parliament, where it is said his wit made him "the delight of the House." He died in 1687, in his eighty-second year.

"THE TYRANT'S PLEA, NECESSITY»

(Impeaching Justice Crawley in the Case of Ship Money Between the King and John Hampden, Delivered July 6th, 1641)

My Lords:

I

AM commanded by the House of Commons to present you with these articles against Mr. Justice Crawley, which when your lordships shall have been pleased to hear read, I shall take leave according to custom, to say something of what I have collected from the sense of that House, concerning the crimes therein contained.

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[Then the charge was read, containing his extrajudicial opinions subscribed, and judgment given for Ship Money; and after a declaration in his charge at an assize, that Ship Money was so inherent a right in the Crown, that it would not be in the power of a Parliament to take it away.]

My lords, not only my wants, but my affections, render me less fit for this employment; for though it has not been my happiness to have the law a part of my breeding, there is no man honors that profession more, or has a greater reverence towards the grave judges, the oracles thereof. Out of Parliament, all our courts of justice are governed or directed by them; and when a Parliament is called, if your lordships were not assisted by them, and the House of Commons by other gentlemen of that robe, experience tells us it might run a hazard of being styled Parliamentum indoctorum. But as all professions are obnoxious to the malice of the professors, and by them most easily betrayed, so, my lords, these articles have told you how these brothers of the coif are become fratres in malo; how these sons of the law have torn out the bowels of their mother; but the judge, whose charge you last heard, in one expression of his excels no less his fellows than they have done the worst of their predecessors in this conspiracy against the Commonwealth. Of the judgment for Ship Money, and those extrajudicial opinions preceding the same (wherein they are jointly concerned) you have already heard; how unjust and pernicious a proceeding that was, in so public a cause, has been sufficiently expressed to your lordships; but this man, adding despair to our misery, tells us from the bench that Ship Money was a right so inherent in the Crown, that it would not be in the power of any act of Parliament to take it away. Herein, my lords, he did not only give as deep a wound to the Commonwealth as any of the rest, but dipped his dart in such a poison, that, as far as in him lay, it might never receive a cure. As by those abortive opinions, subscribing to the subversion of our property, before he heard what could be said for it, he prevented his own; so by this declaration of his he endeavors to prevent the judgment of your lordships too, and to confine the power of a Parliament, the only place where this mischief might be redressed. Sure, he is more wise and learned than to believe himself in this opinion, or not to know how ridiculous it would appear to a Parliament and how dangerous to himself; and therefore, no doubt, but by saying no Parliament could abolish this judgment, this meaning was, that this judgment had abolished Parliaments.