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Never before was a cause of such magnitude sub mitted to human tribunal. My Lords, at this awful close in the name of the Commons and surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand! We call this nation, we call the world, to witness; that the Commons have shrunk from no labor; that we have been guilty of no prevarication; that we have made no compromise with crime; that we have not feared any odium whatsoever, in the long warfare which we have carried on with the crimes, with the vices, with the exorbitant wealth, with the enormous and overpowering influence of Eastern corruption.

My Lords, the Commons will share in every fate with your Lordships; there is nothing sinister which can happen to you in which we shall not be involved. And, if it should happen that your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder, upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, may you feel that consolation which I am persuaded that they felt in the critical moments of their dreadful agony.

My Lords, there is a consolation, and a great consolation it is, which often happens to oppressed virtue and fallen dignity. The Parliament of Paris had an origin very, very similar to that of the great Court before which I stand; the Parliament of Paris continued to have a great resemblance to it, even to its fall. The Parliament of Paris, my Lords, was! it is gone! It has vanished like a dream! It fell pierced by the sword of Comte de Mirabeau. And that man, at the time of his inflicting the death-wound of that Parliament, produced at once the shortest and grand

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est funeral oration that ever was made upon the departure of a great court of magistracy. Though he had himself smarted under its lash, yet he declared that, their hands were as pure as those of justice itself, which they administered.

A great and glorious exit, my Lords, of a great and glorious body! And never was a eulogy, pronounced upon a body, more deserved. They were persons, in nobility of rank, in amplitude of fortune, in weight of authority, in depth of learning, inferior to few of those that hear me. Their enemies the persons who sentenced them to death-were lawyers full of subtlety, they were enemies full of malice; yet they did not dare to reproach them with having supported the wealthy, the great, and powerful, and of having oppressed the weak and feeble, in any of their judgments, or of having perverted justice in any instance whatever.

My Lords, if you must fall, may you so fall! But if you stand-and stand I trust you will!-may you stand as unimpeached in honor as in power! May you stand not as a substitute for virtue, but as an ornament of virtue, as a security for virtue! May you stand long, and long stand the terror of tyrants! May you stand, the refuge of afflicted nations! May you stand, a sacred temple for an inviolable justice!

THE SWORD.

T. S. GRIMKÉ.

LIBERTY has lost by the sword far more than she ever gained by it. The sword was the destroyer of the Lycian Confederacy, and the Achaean League. The sword alternately enslaved and disenthralled Thebes, Athens, Sparta, Syracuse, Corinth. The

sword of Rome conquered every other free state, and finished the murder of Liberty in the ancient world, by destroying herself. What but the sword, in modern times, annihilated the republics of Italy, the Hanseatic towns, and the primitive independence of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland? What but the sword partitioned Poland; assassinated the rising Liberty of Spain; banished the Huguenots from France; and made Cromwell the master, not the servant of the people? What but the sword of republican France destroyed the independence of half of Europe, deluged the Continent with tears, devoured its millions upon millions, and closed the long catalogue of its guilt by founding and defending to the last, the most powerful, selfish, and insatiable of military despotisms?

The sword, indeed, delivered Greece from the Persian invaders; expelled the Tarquins from Rome; emancipated Switzerland and Holland; restored the Prince to his throne, and brought Charles to the scaffold. The sword redeemed the pledge of the Congress of 1776, when they plighted to each other, "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor"; and yet, what would the redemption of that pledge have availed, towards the establishment of our present government, if the spirit of American institutions had not been both the birthright and the birth-blessing of the Colonies? The Indians, the French, the Spanish, and even England, warred in vain, against a people born and bred at the domestic altar of Liberty herself. They had never been slaves, for they were born free. The sword was a herald to proclaim their freedom, but it neither created nor preserved it. Theirs was already the spirit of American institutions, the spirit of Christian freedom, of a temperate, regulated freedom, of a rational, civil obedience. For

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such a people, the law of violence did and could do nothing but sever the bonds which bound her colonial wards to their unnatural guardian. They redeemed their pledge, sword in hand, but the sword left them as it found them, unchanged in character, free men in thought and in deed, instinct with the immortal spirit of American institutions.

THE SWORD AND A NATION'S RIGHTS. T. F. MEAGHER.

THERE are times when arms alone will suffice, in the vindication of national rights; when political ameliorations call for many thousand drops of blood. I learned that it was the right of a nation to govern herself, upon the ramparts of Antwerp; this, the first article of a nation's creed, I learned upon those ramparts where freedom was justly estimated, and the possession of the precious gift was purchased by the effusion of generous blood. Therefore, I do not abhor the sword, in the vindication of national rights. 66 Abhor the sword!" " "Stigmatize the sword!" No! for it swept the Dutch marauders out of the fine old towns of Belgium, scourged them back to their own phlegmatic swamps, and knocked their flag and sceptre, their laws and bayonets, into the sluggish waters of the Scheldt! "Abhor the sword!" "Stigmatize the sword!" No! for in the passes of the Tyrol, it cut to pieces the banner of the Bavarian, and through those cragged passes, struck a path to fame, for the insurrectionist of Innspruck! "Abhor the sword!" "Stigmatize the sword!" No! for at its blow, a giant nation started from the waters of the Atlantic, and by its redeeming magic, and in the quivering of its crimson

light, the crippled Colony sprang into the attitude of a proud Republic,-prosperous, limitless, invincible !

I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral, nor do I conceive it profane to say that the King of Heaven, the Lord of Hosts, the God of battles, bestows His benediction upon those who unsheathe the sword in the hour of a nation's peril. From that evening on which, in the valley of Bethulia, He nerved the arm of the Jewish girl to smite the drunken tyrant in his tent, down to our day, His almighty hand hath ever been stretched forth from His throne of light to consecrate the flag of freedom, to bless the patriot's sword. Be it in the defence, or be it in the assertion of a people's liberty, I hail the sword as a sacred weapon; and if it has sometimes taken the shape of the serpent, and reddened the shroud of the oppressor with too deep a dye, it has at other times and as often, like the anointed rod of the high-priest, blossomed into celestial flowers to deck the freeman's brow.

THE GLORIOUS DESTINY OF ENGLAND.

ROBERT C. WINTHROP.

OUR old mother country has had indeed a peculiar destiny, and in many respects a glorious one. Not alone with her drum-beat, as Webster so grandly said, has she encircled the earth. Not alone with her martial airs has she kept company with the hours. She has carried civilization and Christianity wherever she has carried her flag. She has carried her noble tongue, with all its incomparable treasures of literature and science and religion, around the globe; and with our aid, · for she will confess that we are doing our full part in this line of extension,- it is

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