the greenest in all our recollections of this hurried but delightful tour. On parting with the general, I said to him that we had a long time anticipated his return to America to spend the evening of his days there. "My dear sir,” replied he, "I should be very sorry to think I shall never again see America, but you know how it is. I am confined to France for two or three years to come, by my office as a member of the house of deputies, and what may happen within that time God only knows." SPEECHES IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE.* CONTINENTAL RIGHTS AND RELATIONS. JANUARY 26, 1853. MR. PRESIDENT: On the 23d day February, 1848, John Quincy Adams, of Massachusetts, who had completed a circle of public service filling fifty years, beginning with an inferior diplomatic function, passing through the chief magistracy, and closing with the trust of a representative in Congress, departed from the earth, certainly respected by mankind, and, if all posthumous honors are not insincere and false, deplored by his countrymen. On a fair and cloudless day in the month of June, 1850, when the loud and deep voice of wailing had just died away in the land, the senator from Michigan, of New England born, and by New England reared, the leader of a great party, not only here, but in the whole country, rose in the senate-chamber, and after complaining that a member of the family of that great statesman of the east, instead of going backward with a garment to cover his infirmities, had revealed them by publishing portions of his private diary, himself proceeded to read the obnoxious extracts. They showed the author's strong opinions, that by the federal compact the slaveholding class had obtained, and they had exercised, a controlling influence in the government of the country. Placing these extracts by the side of passages taken from the Farewell Address of Washington, the senator from Michigan said—“He is unworthy the name of an American who does not feel at his heart's core the difference between the lofty patriotism and noble sentiments of one of these documents, and; but I * Continued from vol. i., p. 388. will not say what the occasion would justify. I will only say, and that is enough, the other, for it is another."-"It can not, nor will it, nor should it, escape the censure of an age like this." -"Better that it had been entombed, like the ancient Egyptian records, till its language was lost, than thus to have been exposed to the light of day." The senator then proceeded to set forth by contrast his own greater justice and generosity to the southern states, and his own higher fidelity to the Union. This was in the senate of the United States. And yet no one rose to vindicate the memory of John Quincy Adams, or to express an emotion even of surprise, or of regret, that it had been thought necessary thus to invade the sanctity of the honored grave where the illustrious statesman who had so recently passed the gates of death was sleeping. I was not of New England, by residence, education, or descent, and there were reasons enough why I should then endure in silence a pain that I shared with so many of my countrymen. But I determined, that when the tempest of popular passion that was then raging in the country should have passed by, I would claim a hearing here-not to defend or vindicate the sentiments which the senator from Michigan had thus severely censured, for Mr. Adams himself had referred them, together with all his actions and opinions concerning slavery-not to this tribunal, or even to the present time, but to that after-age which gathers and records the impartial and ultimate judgment of mankind-but to show how just and generous he had been in his public career toward all the members of this confederacy, and how devoted to the Union of the states, and to the aggrandizement of this republic. I am thankful that the necessity for performing that duty has passed by, and that the statesman of Quincy has, earlier than I hoped received his vindication, and has received it, too, at the hands of him from whom it was justly due-the accuser himself. I regret only this-that the vindication was not as generously as it was effectually made. men. There are two propositions arising out of our interests in and around the gulf of Mexico, which are admitted by all our statesOne of them is, that the safety of the southern states requires a watchful jealousy of the presence of European powers in the southern portions of the North American continent; and the other is, that the tendency of commercial and political events |