of history, so long as ink shall stand a faithful sentinel on paper; and darken the dreamy shadows of tradition, when history shall have faded away. But some rushed hastily to pass ordinances of secession without waiting for the concert of aggrieved sisters, or even the sanction of their own people; some seized the federal property within their reach, and armed for avowed conflict, and menaced the federal government, and thus reduced all chances for conciliation, either for restoration or final peaceful separation. One irritation has provoked another; one false and impetuous movement has initiated another, until all rational hope of peace has left us, I fear, forever; and we must drink, drink to the dregs, the cup prepared for us. There was nothing in the relations of the two sections, unfortunate as they were, which ever rendered a resort to arms either justifiable or necessary; and the inauguration of war, over questions capable of pacific adjustment, will be condemned and execrated wherever civilization finds a resting-place; and the widow's wail and the orphan's tears will haunt the last moments of his existence who produced it.

For myself, in our federal relations, I know but one section, one Union, one flag, one government. That section embraces every State; that Union is the Union sealed with the blood and consecrated by the tears of the revolutionary struggle; that flag is the flag known and honored in every sea under heaven; which has borne off glorious victory from many a bloody battle-field, and yet stirs with warmer and quicker pulsations the heart's blood of every true American, when he looks upon its stars and stripes wherever it waves. That government is the government of Washington, and Adams, and Jefferson, and Jackson; a government which has shielded and protected not only us, but God's oppressed children, who have gathered under its wings from every portion of the globe; a government which, from humble beginnings, has borne us forward with fabulous celerity, and made us one of the great and prosperous powers of earth. The Union of these States was a bright vision of my early years, the pride of my manhood, the ambition of my public service. I have sacrificed upon its altar the best energies and choicest hopes of a life checkered by vicissitudes and trial. I had believed the contemplation of its beauties would be the companion of approaching age, and the beguiler

of my vacant and solitary hours. And now that its integrity is menaced, its fair proportions disfigured, it is still dear to my heart, as a great fountain of wisdom, from which incalculable blessings have flowed. I have rejoiced with it in its hey-day of success and triumph, and will, by the grace of God, stand by it in its hour of darkness and peril, and by those who uphold it in the spirit of the constitution. When the timid falter and the faithless fly; when the skies lower, the winds howl, the storm descends, and the tempests beat; when the lightnings flash, the thunders roar, the waves dash, and the good ship Union creaks and groans with the expiring throes of dissolution, I will cling to her still as the last refuge of hope from the fury of the storm; and if she goes down, I will go down with her, rather than revive to tell the story of her ignoble end. I will sustain that flag of Stars and Stripes, recently rendered more glorious by Anderson, his officers and men, wherever it waves-over the sea or over the land. And when it shall be despoiled and disfigured, I will rally around it still as the StarSpangled Banner of my fathers and my country; and so long as a single stripe can be discovered, or a single star shall glimmer from the surrounding darkness, I will cheer it as the emblem of a nation's glory and a nation's hope! And could I see again my beloved and bleeding and distracted country all peacefully reposing beneath it, as in days gone by, I could almost swear, with the devoted Jephtha, that infatuated leader of the hosts of Israel, that "I would sacrifice to the Lord the first living thing of my household that I should meet on my return from victory!"

ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES AT AMHERST COL

LEGE, MASS., June - 1861.

WE are admonished by "the Divinity that stirs within us," as well as by all history and experience in human affairs, that there are principles which can never be subverted, truths which never die. The religion of a Saviour, who at his nativity was cradled on the straw pallet of destitution; who in declaring and enforcing his divine mission was sustained by obscure fishermen; who was spit upon by the rabble, persecuted by power, and betrayed by treachery to envy, has, by its inherent forces, subdued, civilized, and conquered a world; not by the tramp of hostile armies, the roar of artillery, or the stirring airs of martial music, but by the swell of the same heavenly harmonies which aroused the drowsy shepherds at the rock-founded city of Bethlehem, proclaiming in their dulcet warblings, "peace on earth and good will toward men;" not by flashes of contending steel, amidst the bad passions of the battle-field, the shrieks of the dying and the flames of subjugated cities, but by the glowing light which shot athwart the firmament and illumined the whole heavens at his advent. Thus was ushered in that memorable epoch in the world's eventful history, the Christian era; an era which closed one volume in the record of man's existence, an I opened another; which drew aside the dark curtain of death and degradation, exhibiting to life's worn and weary pilgrim along the wastes of gnorance and barbarism, new domains of hope and happiness for exploration and improvement; new fields for him to subdue and fertilize and reap, and new triumphs for him to achieve in the cause of human regeneration. And let him who fails to estimate the priceless value of this divine reformation, in a temporal sense alone, contrast the condition of man, wherever Christian civilization has travelled, with a people groping

amidst the degrading darkness of idolatry, or bowing beneath some imposture still more heaven-daring and impious.

Second only in interest and importance to the religion of Him who spake as never man spake, is that system of political truth which proclaims the doctrine of man's equality, and elevates him in the scale of being to that dignity of station which Heaven destined him to fill. For untold centuries, despotism and king-craft had asserted dominion over the world's masses. Every attempt to break the fetters which held a people in vassalage had resulted in riveting them more securely upon the limbs of servitude. Labor had groaned under the exactions, and the spirit had prayed long and fervently for deliverance, but in vain. The failure to correct organizations so false and vicious and cruel, and to restore the power swayed by the ty rannic few to the plundered many, had been written in human blood, until

"Hope for a season bade the world farewell."

But our fathers, imbued with the spirit of freedom which a free respiration of the air of the New World inspired, and goaded to desperation by the exactions of oppression, rolled the stone from the door of the sepulchre, where crucified and entombed liberty was slumbering, and it arose in light and life, to cheer and bless and give hope to the down-trodden humanity of earth, to emancipate the immortal mind from the slavery by which it was degraded. They asserted the simplest yet sublimest of political truths, that all men were created equal. They arraigned at the bar of a Christian world, trembling, tyrannous, stultified legitimacy, while asserting its impious dogma of Heaven-descended rulers, and they repudiated and laughed to scorn the fraudulent theories, base pretensions, and vain ceremonials of its political hierarchy. They declared in its broadest sense the right of man's self-government, and his capacity for its exercise; and sought release from a proud and haughty monarchy that they might enjoy upon this continent a nation's independence, and found a system which recognized the equality of men, in which their theories should be established. They trusted the future of their "lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor" to the chances of a great experiment; and while the

timid faltered, the treacherous betrayed, the mercenary schemed, and the unbelieving derided, far-seeing patriotism pressed forward with an eye of faith, upon its mission of progress, until hope gave place to fruition; until expectation became success; until the most formidable power of earth learned the salutary lesson, that a proud nation, mighty in armed men, and strong in the terrible material of war by sea and by land, could not conquer the everlasting truth. The experiment, so full of promise and yet so threatened with dangers, became an accomplished fact. Like a grain of mustard, sown in a subdued faith, it shot upward and became an overshadowing tree, so wide-spread and luxuriant that the birds of the air could rest in its branches. Would that none of evil omen had ever taken refuge there.

Thus was planted the germ of liberty in this holy land of freedom. It was nurtured in the warm heart's blood of patriots, and watered by the tears of widows and of orphans; but for a time it was tremulous and slender, and like a frail reed it bowed before every breeze. Oh, what invocations ascended to Him "who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," for that cherished shoot, that the "winds of Heaven might not visit it too roughly." With the fathers of the Revolution, it was remembered at the morning and evening sacrifice. "When its leaves withered they mourned, and when it rejoiced, they rejoiced with it." But those who planted it, and watched over its spring-time with more than a father's solicitude, have gone up to loftier courts, and repose under the fadeless foliage of the tree of life. The gray-haired minister who craved for it God's blessings, has been wafted away like the prophet of old, in a chariot of fire, and the children who sported together on the grass beneath it, now slumber with their fathers. The last revolutionary soldier who rejoiced in its pride, and told with tears its early trials, "shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won," has been mustered into the service of his Lord and master, where the tramp of cavalry and the shock of armies, the neighing of chargers and the blast of bugles shall be heard no more. But the slender shoot of other times has become a giant in the world's extended forest. Its roots have sunk deep in earth; its top has stretched beyond the clouds, and its branches have spanned the continent; its form is grace