LIV. INVIDIOUS DISTINCTIONS.

HUGH S. LEGARE.

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SIR, as a Southern man, I represent equally rent, capital, and wages, which are confounded in our estates; and I protest against attempts to array, without cause, without a color of pretext or plausibility, the different classes of society against each other, as if, in such a country as this, there could be any natural hostility or any real distinction between them—a country in which all the rich, with hardly an exception, have been poor, and all the poor may one day be rich country in which banking institutions have been of immense service, precisely because they have been most needed by a people who had all their fortunes to make by good character and industrious habits. Look at that remarkable picture— remarkable not as a work of art, but as a monument of history-which you see in passing through the rotunda. Two out of five of that immortal committee were mechanics, and such men In the name of God, sir, why should any one study to pervert the natural good sense and kindly feelings of this moral and noble people-to infuse into their minds a sullen envy towards one another; instead of that generous emulation which everything in their situation is fitted to inspire to breathe into them the spirit of Cain, muttering deep curses and meditating desperate revenge against his brother, because the smoke of his sacrifice has ascended to heaven before his own! And do not they who treat our industrious classes as if they were in the same debased and wretched condition as the poor of Europe, insult them by the comparison? Why, sir, you do not know what poverty is. have no poor in this country, in the sense in which that word is used abroad. Every laborer, even the most humble, in the United States soon becomes a capitalist, and even if he choose, a proprietor of land; for the West, with all its boundless fertility, is open to him. How can any one dare to compare the mechanics of this land (whose inferiority, in any substantial particular, in intelligence, in virtue, in wealth, to the other classes of our society, I have yet to learn) with that race of outcasts, of which so terrific a picture is presented by recent writers-the poor of Europe? a race, among no in considerable portion of whom famine and pestilence may be said to dwell continually; many of whom are without mor

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als, without education, without a country, without a God! and may, be said to know society only by the terrors of its penal code, and to live in perpetual war with it. Poor bondmen! mocked with the name of liberty, that they may be sometimes tempted to break their chains, in order that, after a few days of starvation in idleness and dissipation, they may be driven back to their prison house to take them up again, heavier and more galling than before; severed, as it has been touchingly expressed, from nature, from the common air, and the light of the sun; knowing only by hearsay that the fields are green, that the birds sing, and that there is a perfume in flowers. And is it with a race whom the perverse institutious of Europe have thus degraded beneath the condition of humanity, that the advocates, the patrons, the protectors of our working-men, presume to compare them? Sir, it is to treat them with a scorn at which their spirit should revolt, and does revolt.

LV.-EULOGY ON YELL.

H. BEDINGER.

THE gentleman spoke of the gallant conduct of a certain heroic young officer who now has a seat in the other branch of our National Legislature, and of several other gallant men of the South, whose heroic deeds shall never die. But, sir, there was one whose name, greatly to my regret, he did not mention; I say greatly to my regret, only because I know, that with his accustomed ability and fervent feeling, he would have done such justice to the memory of that gallant hero as it never can receive from any poor eulogy of mine. I speak, sir, of one with whom I had the honor of a personal acquaintance, between whom and myself there existed an intimacy which, to me, was always a source of pride and pleasure; of one who, but a short time ago, stood with us upon this floor, and participated in our deliberations; one whose manly and dignified character, whose urbaue and courteous manners, and whose unquestioned integrity, assigned to him the very highest place in the estimation of all who knew him. Sir, I shall never forget his conduct and bearing when the news first reached him, of the uncalled-for, unprovoked, and

infamous outrages perpetrated by the Mexicans upon our troops and our soil. I shall never forget his gallant bearing on that occasion; his flashing eye, his indignant exclamations, and the earnest manner in which he declared his intention to take part in the vengeance which he knew his country would wreak upon those who had thus rashly dared to violate her soil and insult her flag. Sir, the first peal of the tocsin had barely reached us the alarm of war had barely rung out in the land, when he resigned his seat upon this floor, flew to the standard of his country, and upon the glorious field of Buena Vista poured out his life's-blood in defence of her honor and her rights. Sir, I have never heard the name of that gallant man mentioned on this floor, in any of the many complimentary notices which have been taken of our army and our officers. Yet of one thing I am very certain I do know, that so long as patriotism, so long as selfsacrificing devotion to country, shall be deemed a virtue worthy of the estimation of mankind-so long as bravery, chivalry, and noble daring shall be prized by the American people--so long shall live in their grateful recollections, so long shall flourish and grow green in their hearts, the name, the memory, and the virtues of Archibald Yell.

LVI-GENOA IN HER BEAUTY.

CHARLES SUMNER.

LET me bring to your mind Genoa, called the Superb City of Palaces, dear to the memory of American childhood as the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, and one of the spots first enlightened by the morning beams of civilization, whose merchants were princes, and whose rich argosies, in those early days, introduced to Europe the choicest products of the East, the linen of Egypt, the spices of Arabia, and the silks of Samarcand. She still sits in queenly pride, as she sat then, her mural crown studded with towers-her churches rich with marble floors and rarest pictures-her palaces of ancient doges and admirals yet spared by the hand of timeher close streets, thronged by one hundred thousand inhabitants at the foot of the maritime Alps, as they descend to the blue and tideless waters of the Mediterranean Sea-lean

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ing with her back against their strong mountain-sides, overshadowed by the foliage of the fig-tree and the olive, while the orange and lemon fill with their perfume the air where reigns perpetual spring. Who can contemplate such a city without delight?

LVII. BEST POLICY IN REGARD TO NATURALIZATION.

LEWIS C. LEVIN.

EACH hour will behold this tide of foreign emigration rising higher and higher, growing stronger and stronger, rushing bolder and bolder.

The past furnishes no test of the future, and the future threatens to transcend all calculations of this formidable evil. View this great subject in any light, and it still flings back upon us the reflected rays of reason, patriotism, and philanthropy. The love of our native land is an innate, holy, and irradicable passion. Distance only strengthens it-time only concentrates the feeling that causes the tear to gush from the eye of the emigrant, as old age peoples by the vivid memory the active present with the happy past. In what land do we behold the foreigner, who denies this passion of the heart? It is nature's most holy decree, nor is it in human power to repeal the law, which is passed on the mother's breast, and confirmed by the father's voice. The best policy of the wise statesman is to model his laws on the holy ordinances of nature. If the heart of the alien is in his native land—if all his dearest thoughts and fondest affections cluster around the altar of his native gods-let us not disturb his enjoyments by placing this burden of new affections on his bosom, through the moral force of an oath of allegiance, and the onerous obligation of political duties that are against his sympathies, and call on him to renounce feelings that he can never expel from his bosom. Let us secure him the privilege at least of mourning for his native land, by withholding obligations he cannot discharge either with fidelity, ability, or pleasure. Give him time, sir, to wean himself from his early love. A long list of innumerable duties will engage all his attention during his political novitiate, in addition to those comprised in reforming the errors and prejudices of the nursery, and in creating and

forming new opinions, congenial to the vast field which lies spread before him in morals, politics, and life. A due reflection will convince every alien, when his passions are not inflamed by the insidious appeals of senseless demagogues, that his highest position is that of a moral agent in the full enjoyment of all the attributes of civil freedom, preparing the minds and hearts of his children to become faithful, intelligent, and virtuous republicans, born to a right that vindicates itself by the holy ties of omnipotent nature, and which, while God sanctions and consecrates, no man can dispute.

LVIII-AN APPEAL FOR OREGON.

J. J. M'DOWELL.

Is the American heart dead that pulsated so nobly and patriotically in days gone by? Is there no remaining love for the graves of our ancestors, our honor, and our liberty? No, that heart is not dead, thank God! I heard the voice, the other day, on this floor, of an aged and venerable member from Massachusetts, who lived far back in the eighteenth century, asserting that the whole of Oregon was ours, and that the question ought now to be settled. Sir, my heart throbbed a warm response to that patriotic declaration, coming from one who has lived and acted with that noble band of patriots that gave birth to this Republic, imparting to it that vitality and vigor that command the love and admiration of all who can appreciate the liberality of her principles or the sublimity of her destiny. He seemed to be the only remaining one of that group of intellectual constellations that shone in times gone by, and threw a lustre upon the history of their own country and of the world, that time nor circumstances can obscure or destroy. Though the ravages of time are visible in the palsied hand that was raised in attestation of our right to Oregon, and the spray of the political Jordan he had passed, with other worthies that were no more, still was white upon his locks, yet there beat in that bosom on this question an American heart; aye, sir, it pulsates with a warmth that was imparted to it by the fire that fell upon it from the altar of liberty, at which he and the fathers of the Constitution worshipped together in days gone by. May its