dress is merely incidental to the demonstration from the moral and physical nature of man that colonial establishments cannot fulfil the great objects of government in the just purpose of civil society. Is the demonstration complete and unanswerable? I think it is. Had it ever been exhibited before? Not to my knowledge. Let us assume it as a new but demonstrated axiom and examine its bearing upon the past, present and future history of mankind, upon the system of political morality, and upon the future improvement of the human character.

1. It places on a new and solid ground the right of our struggle for independence, considering the intolerable oppression which provoked our fathers to the revolt only as its proximate causes, themselves proof of the viciousness of the system from which they resulted.

2. It settles the justice of the present struggle of South America for independence, and prepares for an acknowledgment upon the principle of public law of that independence, whenever it shall be sufficiently established by the fact.

3. It looks forward prospectively to the downfall of the British Empire in India as an event which must necessarily ensue at no very distant period of time.

4. It anticipates a great question in the national policy of this Union which may be nearer at hand than most of our countrymen are aware of: Whether we too shall annex to our federative government a great system of colonial establish

ments.

5. It points to a principle proving that such establishments are incompatible with the essential character of our political institutions.

6. It leads to the conclusion that great colonial establishments are but mighty engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the

human family to abolish them, as they are now endeavoring to abolish the slave-trade. Did I deceive myself in imagining that by asserting this principle and supporting it by a demonstration, logical in substance and highly, perhaps too highly, oratorical in form, I was offering to the minds of my countrymen matter for meditation other than the inquiry how many times the word sympathy was repeated in the compass of three pages? The eyes of the Boston reviewer see nothing in it, nothing novel, nothing original, nothing comprehensive, nothing dignified, nothing but shadowy metaphysics about sympathy.

Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear

Of sun, or moon or star throughout the year.

Let me give one instance more. The Edinburgh reviewer of Mr. Walsh's book, foreseeing times of future turbulence in his own country, and panting for a revolution with English and Scottish Whigs at its head, descanted largely upon the importance of a good understanding between the Americans and that party, and upon the supposed duty of the United States to take an active part in the impending European conflicts between Power and Right. This doctrine has already twice in the course of our history brought the peace and the permanent welfare of the Union into jeopardy: under Washington's administration at the early stage of the French Revolution; under the present administration in the efforts to entangle us in the South American conflict. The address has presented a principle of duty directly the reverse as that which ought forever to govern the councils of the Union, and has assigned as a reason for it the inevitable tendency of a direct interference in foreign wars, even wars for freedom, to change the very foundations of our own government from liberty to power. Had this view of a ques

tion in political morality transcendently important to the future destiny of this country ever been presented before? Certainly not to my knowledge. It may be controverted no doubt, but I believe the principle to be impregnably true, and it was assuredly no commonplace topic of orations upon Independence. The Boston reviewer is unconscious that it exists in the address at all. I will weary you no more with examples. From the high opinion which your brother expresses of my general style of writing, and from the avowal of his judgment that this address has its merits as well as its defects, I conclude that he discerned some of these things which had escaped the optics of the reviewer. I have given you the clue to the true cause of the defects and perhaps the merits of my style, and I will now point you to the source of all the matter of my composition good or bad.

The merits of whatever compositions I have given to the world, either as a literary man or a politician, consist in the application of moral philosophy to business, in the incessant reference direct or indirect of all narrative, argument, and inference, to the standard of right and wrong. Erroneous moral principle is the most fruitful of all the sources of human calamity and vice. The leaders of nations and parties are generally but accomplished sophists, trained to make the worse appear the better reason. The intercourse of private life is full of sophistical palterings and human law itself, with deference to Hooker be it said, law, itself national, civil and municipal, is too often but a system of formal sophistry substituted for eternal truth and justice. Yet so congenial are truth and justice to the human mind, that it is always vehemently moved by a skilful and forcible appeal to them, and of appeals to them direct or implied, explicit or deductive, the whole substance of my public writings is composed.

You have now the whole secret of the merits, such as they are, and of the defects of my compositions, literary and political. The sources both of their matter and style are before you. I need not add that I am infinitely more solicitous about the substance than about the form. If you have read my lectures on rhetoric you have seen in the 30th, 31st, and 32nd of them my theory of figurative language, and have perceived that it is more indulgent to the excesses of energy and less to the prudery of taste than Dr. Blair, the French critics, or even Quintillian and Horace. In the use of language, as in the conduct of life, I would certainly aim at the precise line between licentiousness and servitude; but so far as mere taste is concerned, if I must err, let it be on the side of liberty.

Your brother has allowed himself a little of this liberty in his description of the estimate which was once made of my talents at composition by those whom he calls your Eastern politicians. I think there never was a time when that class of our fellow citizens had much opinion of the merit, or were at all insensible to the defects of my style. On the very first occasion that I ever presented myself as a writer and speaker in the face of my country, which was by the delivery of an oration upon taking my first degree at Harvard University, an elaborate critical review of the performances of the day from the pen of one of these Eastern politicians was published in a Boston newspaper, pronouncing one of my classmates. who had also delivered an oration on that day my indisputable superior in style, elegance, and oratory. I could prove to you by a long, but it would be a very tedious, historical detail that from that day to this my credit for talents at writing has been very low with those Eastern politicians, and that even while they numbered me in their political ranks, whatever favor they showed me was a tribute not to me

but to a public taste, vitiated as they believed, but stronger than themselves.

I have told you that I have been much in the habit of writing to the public for effect. In the year 1802 I delivered an address to the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society. In that address there was a parallel between Catanea with a burning mountain at its gates, and Boston with a burning mountain within its walls. You were then a child. Did you ever hear that this address, and especially this parallel, contributed to the effect of casting away clapboards and shingles and of building only with incombustible materials? If you did not, ask our common friend to whom your brother's letter is directed whether he remembers it? He may perhaps not remember that it was proved by a newspaper critic of that day, quite to the satisfaction of your Eastern politicians, that there was in this parallel nothing new, nothing original, that it was merely a quotation from Brydone's Travels, and that the use of such words as clapboards and shingles in a public oration was much too vulgar for the relish of refined taste.

In the year 1808 I published a letter to Mr. H. G. Otis upon the embargo. It was defensive against a masked battery which had opened upon me by the Eastern politicians at a crisis and in a manner so adroitly chosen that it was thought it would demolish me to the foundation. About a hundred thousand copies of my letter were printed, and column was piled upon column in the newspapers, and pamphlet upon pamphlet issued from the press, to prove not only that I was a Judas in politics, but that there was not a sentence of common sense or tolerable English in my letter. This was the sound doctrine of the Eastern politicians, who accordingly dismissed me as insultingly as was in their power from the service of the Commonwealth as a Senator