ance of the rights and privileges of all, manifested by her citizens, in piety, morality, and sobriety-and in her sacred observance of the plighted word of her government, the mother of States need fear no comparison with any of her progeny, or with any of her sisters.

Massachusetts is a great State, Sir,-a very great State, indeed, is Massachusetts. She could not well be anything else, sir, for she has Boston, and Bunker Hill, and the Rock of Plymouth! There the Mayflower landed the Pilgrims; and there witches and Indians and Quakers and Catholics, and other such heretics, were in the brave days of old, burned, literally, by the cord! She is unquestionably, sir, a great State, and some of her Representatives on this floor seem to know it; and in the plenitude of their merciful hearts, they pour out a deal of compassion and surplus pity upon poor old Virginia! They not unfrequently raise their sanctified eyes to Heaven, and thank the Lord they are not like that poor publican!

XXVII-MASSACHUSETTS.

J. G. PALFREY.

WHEN the gentleman, calling up affecting reminiscences of the past, appealed to us of Massachusetts to be faithful to the obligations of patriotism, I repeat, that I trust his language fell profitably as well as pleasantly on my ear. He has reminded us of our stern but constant ancestry. I hope we shall be true to their great mission of Freedom and Right, and all the more true for having listened to his own impressive exhortation. The gentleman remembers the declaration of Hume, that "it was to the Puritans that the people of England owed its liberties." May their race never desert that work, as long as any of it is left to do! Sir, as I come of a morning to my duties here, I am apt to stop before the picture in your Rotundo, of the departure from Delft Haven of that vessel, “freighted with the best hopes of the world," and refresh myself by looking in the faces of four ancestors of my own, depicted by the limner in the group on that dismal deck the brave and prudent leader of the company, his head and knee bowed in prayer;-his faithful partner, blending in

her mild but care-worn countenance the expression of the wife, the parent, the exile, and the saint ;-the young maiden and the youth, going out to the wide sea and the wide world, but already trained to masculine endurance and "perfect peace" by the precious faith of Christ. Not more steadfast than those forlorn wanderers were the men, who in the tapestried chambers of England's great sway, with stout sword on thigh, and a stouter faith in the heart, and the ragged flags of Cressy, and Agincourt, and the Armada above their heads,

-"Sat with Bibles open, around the council board,

And answered a king's missive, with a stern

"Thus saith the Lord."

Sir, the spirit of that stubborn race, if somewhat softened by the change in manners and the lapse of time, is not yet extinct in their children. The gentleman is welcome, for me, to have very little respect for any who, in his language, have "made capital" of one kind or another out of human slavery. But I ask him, did the Roundhead ever flinch when battle was to be done for freedom? Sir, I live in the midst of his last bloody struggles for that cause. Humble as I am, I am honored to represent the men who till the earliest battle-fields of American Independence. As I sit in my door of a still summer evening, I hear the bells from Lexington Common. The shaft over the sacred ashes of Bunker Hill rises within three miles of my windows; I leave my home, and in an hour I stand by the ruined abutments of old Concord Bridge, and the green graves of the first two British victims in the hecatombs of the Revolution. Representing, however feebly, such a people in lineage and in office -warned by the lessons and the purest monuments of such a history is it for me to think of helping to extend the foul cause of slavery over another foot of God's fair earth? No, 'here I stand, I can do no otherwise; may God help me.' I boast no courage; I fear I might turn out to be no better than a fearful man; but I do trust that every drop of thin blood in these old veins of mine, would be freely given to stain the scaffold, or boil and bubble at the stake, before, by any act of my doing, the slavery of my brother man should take another forward step on free American soil.

THE CONSTITUTION.

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XXVIII-THE CONSTITUTION.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

WE can give up everything but our Constitution, which is the sun of our system. As the natural sun dispels fogs, heats the air, and vivifies and illumines the world, even so does the Constitution, in days of adversity and gloom, come out for our rescue and our enlightening. If the luminary which now sheds its light upon us, and invigorates our sphere. should sink forever in his ocean bed, clouds, cold, and perpetual death would environ us: and if we suffer our other sun, the Constitution, to be turned from us; if we neglect or disregard its benefits; if its beams disappear but once in the West, anarchy and chaos will have come again, and we shall grope out in darkness and despair the remainder of a miserable existence. I confess that, when I think of the Constitution, I feel a burning zeal which prompts me to pour out my whole heart. What is the Constitution? It is the bond which binds together millions of brothers. What is its history? who made it? Monarchs, crowned heads, lords, or emperors? No, it was none of these. The Constitution of the United States, the nearest approach of mortal to perfect political wisdom, was the work of men who purchased liberty with their blood, but who found that, without organization, freedom was not a blessing. They formed it, and the people, in their intelligence, adopted it. And what has been its history? Has it trodden down any man's rights? Has it circumscribed the liberty of the press? Has it stopped the mouth of any man? Has it held us up as objects of disgrace abroad? How much the reverse! It has given us character abroad; and when, with Washington at its head, it went forth to the world, this young country at once became the most interesting and imposing in the circle of civilized nations. How is the Constitution of the United States regarded abroad? Why, as the last hope of liberty among men ! Wherever

you go, you find the United States held up as an example by the advocates of freedom. The mariner no more looks to his compass or takes his departure by the sun, than does the lover of liberty abroad shape his course by reference to the Constitution of the United States.

XXIX. THE PEACE CONGRESS.

ANONYMOUS.

If we fail, the disappointment is our own; the world can receive no detriment from our exertions, however unsuccessful. But if we succeed,—if our efforts for ameliorating the ot of humanity are triumphant,-what a fountain of the bitterest woes will be dried! what rivers of blood will cease to deluge and destroy the choicest of human bliss! how will the heart of philanthropy exult, and what a smile of unmingled delight will kindle over the face of a suffering and desponding world! That a foul stigma, which for so many ages has defaced the annals of humanity, should be wiped - that man should cease to follow the fratricidal away example of the first of sons and of murderers-that he should lay aside his cannibal ferocity, which, unlike that of the wild beast, is turned against his own race and kindred-that infancy, and age, and feminine helplessness should forever hereafter repose in safety-that our flocks should feed on the green fields in quiet, and the smoke of our cottages still curl on the peaceful breeze - that these sights should hereafter present themselves, instead of the butcheries, the havoc, and the conflagration of war, is an object well worthy the most devont and unwearied efforts of every friend of human honor and human happiness. Great God is such an expectation a chimera, the creature of a duped and sickly imagination? Are the efforts which aim thus at the exaltation and blessedness of the human race, inspired alone by folly? Is any sad and inevitable fatality thus brooding over the fate of mortals? Must reason guide, and success forever crown schemes of hunan wretchedness and human destruction; while disappointment is forever to be the bitter cup of those who thus signally endeavor to render the world better and happier? We are unwilling to believe it; we will not, at least, despair without an effort

LITERATURE PERVERTED.

XXX.-LITERATURE PERVERTED.

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ANONYMOUS.

LITERATURE has been a most powerful agent in feeding the warlike propensity, and this is undergoing a vital and happy change. In former days it was altogether calculated to arouse and foster a martial feeling. The poems, the histories, the orations, which for centuries have delighted mankind, have been replete with the praises of heroes and conquerors. These pictures and descriptions have been seized upon, amplified and issued at second hand, or assumed as a species of model for every imitator, from that day to this. A magical illusion has been attempted, and in a great degree effected The battle-field, with its promiscuous carnage of men and horses, covered with clotted gore, and the frozen fragments of bodies, which else had now been warm with youth, and health, and happiness, blessing and being blessed, is represented as the field of glory. The devastation of fruitful fields, the destruction of happy homes, the cleaving down of the liberties of a free, and prosperous, and happy people, appear under the guise of a splendid conquest. The tears and execrations of a nation of widows and orphans, and childless parents the smothered groans of an enslaved people — these sound the trump of everlasting fame for the author of such accumulated miseries; more loud and more lovely, in proportion as they are mingled more deeply with the tones of despair! And men have listened, and admired, and have been made the dupes of their imaginations.

But the scales of delusion are falling from the eyes of nations, and the literature of the age is turned, and is flowing with the general current. At the present day, he is more applauded who crowns a country with peace and plenty, than he who covers it with bones and putrefaction-he who builds, than he who burns, a city-he who has founded a wise system of laws, than he who has overturned it—he, in short, whose fame is associated with the happiness of his race, than he who has wantonly hurled the firebrand of destruction into the home of that happiness, though the smoke and glare of its conflagration should reach the heavens, and the crash of its ruins shake the earth to its centre. When we reflect upon the influence exerted by a ballad, or a tale, shall we hesitate to hope the most blessed results from this change in the literature of the present age?