Mr. Speaker, it is alleged that this species of legislation will widen the breach existing between the two sections of the country, will offend our southern brethren. Do not gentlemen know that those who are most earnestly asking this legislation are our southern brethren themselves.

They are imploring us to protect them against the conquered enemies of the country, who notwithstanding their surrender, have managed, through their skill or our weakness, to seize nearly all the conquered territory.

This is not the first instance in the world’s history in which all that had been gained by hard fighting was lost by bad diplomacy.

But they, whose feelings are entitled to so much consideration in the estimation of those who urge this argument, are not our southern brethren, but the southern brethren of our political opponents; the conquered rebels, pardoned and unpardoned; traitors priding themselves upon their treason.

These people are fastidious. The ordinary terms of the English language must be perverted to suit their tastes. Though they surrendered in open and public war, they are not to be treated as prisoners. Though beaten in the last ditch of the last fortification, they are not to be called a conquered people. The decision of the forum of their own choosing is to be explained away into meaningless formality for their benefit. Though guilty of treason, murder, arson, and all the crimes in the calendar, they are “our southern brethren.” The entire decalogue must be suspended lest it should offend these polished candidates for the contempt and execration of posterity.

Out of deference to the feelings of these sensitive gentlemen, an executive construction must be given to the word “loyalty,” so that it shall embrace men who only are not hanged because they have been pardoned, and who only did not destroy the Government because they could not. Out of deference to the feelings of these sensitive gentlemen, too, a distinguished public functionary, once the champion of the rights of man, a leader in the cause of human progress, a statesman whose keen foreknowledge could point out the “irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom,” cannot now see that treason and loyalty are uncompromising antagonisms.

It is charged against us that the wheels of Government are stopped by our refusal to admit the representatives of these southern communities. When we complain that Europe is underselling us in our markets, and demand protection for the American laborer, we are told to “admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we complain that excessive importations are impoverishing the country, and rapidly bringing on financial ruin, we are told to “admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we complain that an inflated currency is making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, keeping the prices of even the necessaries of life beyond the reach of widows and orphans who are living upon fixed incomes, the stereotyped answer comes, “Admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we demand a tax upon cotton to defray the enormous outlay made in dethroning that usurping “king of the world,” still the answer comes, and the executive parrots everywhere repeat it, “Admit the southern Senators and Representatives.”

The mind of the man who can see in that prescription a remedy for all political and social diseases must be curiously constituted. Would these Senators and Representatives vote a tax upon cotton? Would they protect American industry by increasing duties? Would they prevent excessive importations? To believe this requires as unquestioning a faith as to believe in the sudden conversion of whole communities from treason to loyalty.

We are blocking the wheels of Government! Why, the Government has managed to get along for four years, not only without the aid of the Southern Senators and Representatives, but against their efforts to destroy it; and in the mean time has crushed a rebellion that would have destroyed any other Government under heaven. Surely the nation can do without the services of these men, at least during the time required to examine their claims and to protect by appropriate legislation our Southern brethren. None but a Democrat would think of consulting the wolf about what safeguard should be thrown around the flock.

Those who advocate the admission of the Senators and Representatives from the States lately reclaimed from the rebellion, as a means of protecting the loyal men in those States and as a substitute for the system of legislation of which this bill is part, well know that the majority in both Houses of Congress ardently desire the full recognition of those States, and only ask that the rights and interests of the truly loyal men in those States shall be first satisfactorily secured.

Much useless controversy has been had about the legal status of those States. There is no difference between the two parties of the country on that point. The actual point of difference is this: the Democrats affiliate with their old political friends in the South, the late rebels, the friends and followers of Breckinridge, Lee, and Davis. The Union majority, on the other hand, naturally affiliate with the loyal men in the South, the men who have always supported the Government against Breckinridge, Lee, and Davis. Each party wants the South reconstructed in the hands of its own “southern brethren.”

In short, the northern party corresponding with the loyal men of the South ask that the legitimate results of Grant’s victory shall be carried out, while the northern party corresponding with the rebels of the South ask that things should be considered as if Lee had been the conqueror, or at least as if there had been a drawn battle, without victory on either side.

This brings the rights of those in whose behalf the opponents of the bill under consideration are acting directly in question, and in order to limit down the field of controversy as far as possible, let us inquire how far all parties agree upon the legal status of the communities lately in rebellion. Now, the meanest of all controversies is that which comes from dialectics. Where the disputants attach different meanings to the same word their time is worse than thrown away. I have always looked upon the question whether the States are in or out of the Union as only worthy of the schoolmen of the middle ages, who could write volumes upon a mere verbal quibble. The disputants would agree if they were compelled to use the word “State” in the same sense. I will endeavor to avoid this trifling.

All parties agree that at the close of the rebellion the people of North Carolina, for example, had been “deprived of all civil government.” The President, in his proclamation of May 29, 1865, tells the people of North Carolina this in so many words, and he tells the people of the other rebel States the same thing in his several proclamations to them. This includes the Conservatives and Democrats, who, however they may disagree, at last agree in this, that the President shall do their thinking.

The Republicans subscribe to this doctrine, though they differ in their modes of expressing it. Some say that those States have ceased to possess any of the rights and powers of government as States of the Union. Others say, with the late lamented President, that “those States are out of practical relations with the Government.”

Others hold that the State organizations are out of the Union. And still others that the rebels are conquered, and therefore that their organizations are at the will of the conqueror.

The President has hit upon a mode of expression which embraces concisely all these ideas. He says that the people of those States were, by the progress of the rebellion and by its termination, “deprived of all civil government.”

One step further. All parties agree that the people of these States, being thus disorganized for all State purposes, are still at the election of the government, citizens of the United States, and as such, as far as they have not been disqualified by treason, ought to be allowed to form their own State governments, subject to the requirements of the Constitution of the United States.

Still one step further. All parties agree that this cannot be done by mere unauthorized congregations of the people, but that the time, place and manner must be prescribed by some department of the Government, according to the argument of Mr. Webster and the spirit of the decision of the Supreme Court in Luther vs. Borden, 7 Howard, page 1.

Yet another step in the series of propositions. All parties agree that as Congress was not in session at the close of the rebellion, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, was bound to take possession of the conquered country and establish such government as was necessary.

Thus far all is harmonious; but now the divergence begins. At the commencement of the present session of Congress three-fourths of both Houses held that when the people of the States are “deprived of all civil government,” and when, therefore, it becomes necessary to prescribe the time, place, and manner in and by which they shall organize themselves again into States while the President may take temporary measures, yet only the law-making power of the Government is competent to the full accomplishment of the task. In other words, that only Congress can enable citizens of the United States to create States. I have said that at the commencement of the session three-fourths of both houses held this opinion. The proportion is smaller now, and by a judicious use of executive patronage it may become still smaller; but the truth of the proposition will not be affected if every Representative and Senator should be manipulated into denying it.

On the other hand, the remaining fourth, composed of the supple Democracy and its accessions, maintain that this State-creating power is vested in the President alone, and that he has already exercised it.

The holy horror with which our opponents affect to contemplate the doctrine of destruction of States is that much political hypocrisy. Every man who asks the recognition of the existing local governments in the South thereby commits himself to that doctrine. The only possible claim that can be set up in favor of the existing governments is based upon the theory that the old ones have been destroyed. The present organizations sprang up at the bidding of the President after the conquest among a people who, he said, had been “deprived of all civil government.”

If the President’s “experiment” had resulted in organizing the southern communities in loyal hands, the majority in Congress would have found no difficulty in indorsing it and giving it the necessary efficiency by legislative enactment.

In this case, too, the President never would have denied the power of Congress in the premises. He never would have set up the theory that the citizens of the United States, through their representatives, are not to be consulted when those who have once broken faith with them ask to have the compact renewed.

Our opponents have no love for the President. They called him a usurper and a tyrant in Tennessee. They ridiculed him as a negro “Moses.” They tried to kill him, and failing that, they accused him of being privy to the murder of his predecessor. But when his “experiment” at reconstruction was found to result in favor of their friends, the rebels, then they hung themselves about his neck like so many mill-stones, and tried to damn him to eternal infamy by indorsing his policy. Will they succeed? Will he shake them off, or go down with them?

But let us suffer these discordant elements to settle their own terms of combinations as best they may. The final result cannot be doubtful.

If ten righteous men were needed to save Sodom, even Andrew Johnson will find it impossible to save the Democratic party.

Our path of duty is plain before us. Let us pass this bill and such others as may be necessary to secure protection to the loyal men of the South. If our political opponents thwart our purposes in this, let us go to the country upon that issue.

I am by no means an advocate of extensive punishment, either in the way of hanging or confiscation, though some of both might be salutary. I do not ask that full retribution be enforced against those who have so grievously sinned. I am willing to make forgiveness the rule and punishment the exception; yet I have my ultimatum. I might excuse the pardon of the traitors Lee and Davis, even after the hanging of Wirz, who but obeyed their orders, orders which he would have been shot for disobeying. I might excuse the sparing of the master after killing the dog whose bite but carried with it the venom engendered in the master’s soul. I might look calmly upon a constituency ground down by taxation, and tell the complainants that they have neither remedy nor hope of vengeance upon the authors of their wrongs. I might agree to turn unpityingly from the mother whose son fell in the Wilderness, and the widow whose husband was starved at Andersonville, and tell them that in the nature of things retributive justice is denied them, and that the murderers of their kindred may yet sit in the councils of their country; yet even I have my ultimatum. I might consent that the glorious deeds of the last five years should be blotted from the country’s history; that the trophies won on a hundred battle-fields, the sublime visible evidence of the heroic devotion of America’s citizen soldiery, should be burned on the altar of reconciliation. I might consent that the cemetery at Gettysburg should be razed to the ground; that its soil should be submitted to the plow, and that the lamentation of the bereaved should give place to the lowing of cattle. But there is a point beyond which I shall neither be forced nor persuaded. I will never consent that the government shall desert its allies in the South and surrender their rights and interests to the enemy, and in this I will make no distinction of caste or color either among friends or foes.

The people of the South were not all traitors. Among them were knees that never bowed to the Baal of secession, lips that never kissed his image. Among the fastness of the mountains, in the rural districts, far from the contagion of political centres, the fires of patriotism still burned, sometimes in the higher walks of life, oftener in obscure hamlets, and still oftener under skins as black as the hearts of those who claimed to own them.

These people devoted all they had to their country. The homes of some have been confiscated, and they are now fugitives from the scenes that gladdened their childhood. Some were cast into dungeons for refusing to fire upon their country’s flag, and still others bear the marks of stripes inflicted for giving bread and water to the weary soldier of the Republic, and aiding the fugitive to escape the penalty of the disloyalty to treason. If the God of nations listened to the prayers that ascended from so many altars during those eventful years, it was to the prayers of these people.

Sir, we talked of patriotism in our happy northern homes, and claimed credit for the part we acted; but if the history of these people shall ever be written, it will make us blush that we ever professed to love our country.

The government now stands guard over the lives and fortunes of these people. They are imploring us not to yield them up without condition to those into whose hands recent events have committed the destinies of the unfortunate South. A nation which could thus withdraw its protection from such allies, at such a time, without their full and free consent, could neither hope for the approval of mankind nor the blessing of heaven.

Speech, of Hon. Charles A. Eldridge, of Wisconsin.

Mr. Speaker: I thought yesterday that I would discuss this measure at some length; but I find myself this morning very unwell; and I shall therefore make only a few remarks, suggesting some objections to the bill.

I look upon the bill before us, Mr. Speaker, as one of the series of measures rising out of a feeling of distrust and hatred on the part of certain individuals, not only in this House, but throughout the country, toward these persons who formerly held slaves. I had hoped that long before this time the people of this country would have come to the conclusion that the subject of slavery and the questions connected with it had already sufficiently agitated this country. I had hoped that now, when the war is over, when peace has been restored, when in every State of the Union the institution of slavery has been freely given up, its abolition acquiesced in, and the Constitution of the United States amended in accordance with that idea, this subject would cease to haunt us as it is made to do in the various measures which are constantly being here introduced.

This bill is, it appears to me, one of the most insidious and dangerous of the various measures which have been directed against the interest of the people of this country. It is another of the measures designed to take away the essential rights of the State. I know that when I speak of States and State rights, I enter upon unpopular subjects. But, sir, whatever other gentlemen may think, I hold that the rights of the States are the rights of the Union, that the rights of the States and the liberty of the States are essential to the liberty of the individual citizen. * * *

Now, it may be said that there is no reason for this distinction; but I claim that there is. And there is no man that can look upon this crime, horrid as it is, diabolical as it is when committed by the white man, and not say that such a crime committed by a negro upon a white woman deserves, in the sense and judgment of the American people, a different punishment from that inflicted upon the white man. And yet the very purpose of this section, as I contend, is to abolish or prevent the execution of laws making a distinction in regard to the punishment.

But, further, it is said the negro race is weak and feeble; that they are mere children—“wards of the Government.” In many instances it might be just and proper to inflict a less punishment upon them for certain crimes than upon men of intelligence and education, whose motives may have been worse. It might be better for the community to control them by milder and gentler means. If the judge sitting upon the bench of the State court shall, in carrying out the law of the State, inflict a higher penalty upon the white man than that which attaches to the freedman, not that I suppose it is ever contemplated to enforce that, yet it would be equally applicable, and the penalty would be incurred by the judge in the same manner precisely.

But I proceed to the section I was about to remark upon when the gentleman interrupted me. The marshals who may be employed to execute warrants and precepts under this bill, as I have already remarked, are offered a bribe for the execution of them. It creates marshals in great numbers, and authorizes commissioners to appoint almost anybody for that purpose, and it stimulates them by the offer of a reward not given in the case of the arrest of persons guilty of any other crime.

It goes further. It authorizes the President, when he is apprehensive that some crime of that sort may be committed, on mere suspicion, mere information or statement that it is likely to be committed, to take any judge from the bench or any marshal from his office to the place where the crime is apprehended, for the purpose of more efficiently and speedily carrying out the provisions of the bill.

The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Thayer) tells us that it is very remarkable that it should be claimed that this bill is intended to create and continue a sort of military despotism over the people where this law is to be executed. It seems to me nothing is plainer. Where do we find any laws heretofore passed having no relation to the negro in which such a provision as this tenth section is to be found? Generally the marshal seeks by himself to execute this warrant, and failing, he calls out his POSSE COMITATUS. But this bill authorizes the use in the first instance of the Army and Navy by the President for the purpose of executing such writs.

The gentlemen who advocate this bill are great sticklers for equality, and insist that there shall be no distinction made on account of race or color.

Why, sir, every provision of this bill carries upon its face the distinction, and is calculated to perpetuate it forever as long as the act shall be in force. Where did this measure originate but in the recognition of the difference between races and colors? Does any one pretend that this bill is intended to protect white men—to save them from any wrongs which may be inflicted upon them by the negroes? Not at all. It is introduced and pressed in the pretended interest of the black man, and recognizes and virtually declares distinction between race and color.

I deprecate all these measures because of the implication they carry upon their face, that the people who have heretofore owned slaves intend to do them harm. I do not believe it. So far as my knowledge goes, and so far as my information extends, I believe that the people who have held the freedmen as slaves will treat them with more kindness, with more leniency, than those of the North who make such loud professions of love and affection for them, and are so anxious to pass these bills. They know their nature; they know their wants; they know their habits; they have been brought up together; none of the prejudices and unkind feelings which many in the north would have toward them.

I do not credit all these stories about the general feeling of hostility in the South toward the negro. So far as I have heard opinions expressed upon the subject, and I have conversed with many persons from that section of the country, they do not blame the negro for anything that has happened. As a general thing, he was faithful to them and their interests, until the army reached the place and took him from them. He has supported their wives and children in the absence of the husbands and fathers in the armies of the South. He has done for them what no one else could have done. They recognize his general good feeling toward them, and are inclined to reciprocate that feeling toward him.

I believe that is the general feeling of the southern people to-day. The cases of ill-treatment are exceptional cases. They are like the cases which have occurred in the northern States where the unfortunate have been thrown upon our charity.

Take, for instance, the stories of the cruel treatment of the insane in the State of Massachusetts. They may have been barbarously confined in the loathsome dens as stated in particular instances; but is that any evidence of the general ill-will of the people of the State of Massachusetts toward the insane? Is that any reason why the Federal arm should be extended to Massachusetts to control and protect the insane there?

It has also been said that certain paupers in certain States have been badly used, paupers, too, who were whites. Is that any reason why we should extend the arm of the Federal Government to those States to protect the poor who are thrown upon the charity of the people there?

Sir, we must yield to the altered state of things in this country. We must trust the people; it is our duty to do so; we cannot do otherwise. And the sooner we place ourselves in a position where we can win the confidence of our late enemies, where our counsels will be heeded, where our advice may be regarded, the sooner will the people of the whole country be fully reconciled to each other and their changed relationship; the sooner will all the inhabitants of our country be in the possession of all the rights and immunities essential to their prosperity and happiness.

Gentlemen of the Literary Societies:—What of the Republic? The trials and triumphs of our free institutions are hackneyed themes. They are the star attractions of every political conflict. They furnish a perpetual well-spring of every grade of rhetoric for the hustings, and partisan organs proclaim with the regularity of the seasons, the annual perils of free government.

But a different occasion, with widely different opportunities and duties, has brought us together. The dissembling of the partisan would be unwelcome, but here truth may be manfully spoken of that which so profoundly concerns us all. I am called to address young men who are to rank among the scholars, the teachers, the statesmen, the scientists of their age. They will be of the class that must furnish a large proportion of the executives, legislators, ministers, and instructors of the generation now rapidly crowding us to the long halt that soon must come. Doubtless, here and there, some who have been less favored with opportunities, will surpass them in the race for distinction; but in our free government where education is proffered to all, and the largest freedom of conviction and action invites the humblest to honorable preferment, the learned must bear a conspicuous part in directing the destiny of the nation. Every one who moulds a thought or inspires a fresh resolve even in the remotest regions of the Continent, shapes, in some measure, the sovereign power of the Republic.

The time and the occasion are alike propitious for a dispassionate review of our political system, and of the political duties which none can reject and be blameless. Second only to the claims of religion are the claims of country. Especially should the Christian, whether teacher or hearer, discharge political duties with fidelity. I do not mean that the harangue of the partisan should desecrate holy places, or that men should join in the brawls of pot-house politicians; but I do mean that a faithful discharge of our duty to free government is not only consistent with the most exemplary and religious life, but is a Christian as well as a civil obligation. The government that maintains liberty of conscience as one of its fundamental principles, and under which Christianity is recognized as the common law, has just claims upon the Christian citizen for the vigilant exercise of all political rights.

If it be true, as is so often confessed around us, that we have suffered a marked decline in political morality and in our political administration, let it not be assumed that the defect is in our system of government, or that the blame lies wholly with those who are faithless or incompetent. Here no citizen is voiceless, and none can claim exemption from just responsibility for evils in the body politic. Ours is, in fact as well as in theory, a government of the people; and its administration is neither better nor worse than the people themselves. It was devised by wise and patriotic men, who gave to it the highest measure of fidelity; and so perfectly and harmoniously is its framework fashioned, that the sovereign power can always exercise a salutary control over its own servants. An accidental mistake of popular judgment, or the perfidy of an executive, or the enactment of profligate or violent laws, are all held in such wholesome check by co-ordinate powers, as to enable the supreme authority of the nation to restrain or correct almost every conceivable evil.

Until the people as a whole are given over to debauchery the safety of our free institutions cannot be seriously endangered. True, such a result might be possible without the demoralization of a majority of the people, if good citizens surrender their rights, and their duties, and their government to those who desire to rule in profligacy and oppression.

If reputable citizens refrain from active participation in our political conflicts, they voluntarily surrender the safety of their persons and property, and the good order and well-being of society, to those who are least fitted for the exercise of authority. When such results are visible in any of the various branches of our political system, turn to the true source and place the responsibility where it justly belongs. Do not blame the thief and the adventurer, for they are but plying their vocations, and they rob public rather than private treasure, because men guard the one and do not guard the other. Good men employ every proper precaution to protect their property from the lawless. When an injury is done to them individually they are swift to invoke the avenging arm of justice. They are faithful guardians of their own homes and treasures against the untitled spoiler, while they are criminally indifferent to the public wrongs done by those who, in the enactment and execution of the laws, directly affect their happiness and prosperity. Do not answer that politics have become disreputable. Such a declaration is a confession of guilt. He who utters it becomes his own accuser. If it be true that our politics, either generally or in any particular municipality or State, have become disreputable, who must answer for it? Who have made our politics disreputable? Surely not the disreputable citizens, for they are a small minority in every community and in every party. If they have obtained control of political organizations, and thereby secured their election to responsible trusts, it must have been with the active or passive approval of the good citizens who hold the actual power in their own hands. There is not a disgraceful official shaming the people of this country to-day, who does not owe his place to the silent assent or positive support of those who justly claim to be respectable citizens, and who habitually plead their own wrongs to escape plain and imperative duties. If dishonest or incompetent appointments have been made, in obedience to the demands of mere partisans, a just expression of the honest sentiments of better citizens, made with the manliness that would point to retribution for such wrongs, would promptly give us a sound practical civil service, and profligacy and dishonesty would end.

Our Presidents and Governors are not wholly or even mainly responsible for the low standard of our officials. If good men concede primary political control to those who wield it for selfish ends, by refraining from an active discharge of their political duties, and make the appointing powers dependent for both counsel and support upon the worst political elements, who is to blame when public sentiment is outraged by the selection of unworthy men to important public trusts? The fruits are but the natural, logical results of good citizens refusing to accept their political duties. There is not a blot on our body politic to-day that the better elements of the people could not remove whenever they resolved to do so,—and they will so resolve in good time, as they have always done in the past. There is not a defect or deformity in our political administration that they cannot, and will not correct, by the peaceful expression of their sober convictions, in the legitimate way pointed out by our free institutions.

You who are destined to be more or less conspicuous among the teachers of men, should study well this reserved power so immediately connected with the preservation of our government. The virtue and intelligence of the people is the sure bulwark of safety for the Republic. It has been the source of safety in all times past, in peace and in war, and it is to-day, and will ever continue to be, the omnipotent power that forbids us to doubt the complete success of free government. It may, at times, be long suffering and slow to resent wrongs which grow gradually in strength and diffuse their poison throughout the land. It may invoke just censure for its forbearance in seasons of partisan strife. It may long seem lost as a ruling element of our political system, and may appear to be faithless to its high and sacred duties. It may be unfelt in its gentler influences, which should ever be active in maintaining the purity and dignity of society and government. But if for a season the better efforts of a free people are not evident to quicken and support public virtue, it must not be assumed that the source of good influences has been destroyed, or that public virtue cannot be restored to its just supremacy. When healthful influences do not come like the dew drops which glitter in the morning as they revive the harvest of the earth, they will most surely come in their terrible majesty, as the tempest comes to purify the atmosphere about us. The miasmas which arise from material corruption, poison the air we breathe and disease all physical life within their reach. The poison of political corruption is no less subtle and destructive in its influences upon communities and nations. But when either becomes general or apparently beyond the power of ordinary means of correction, the angry sweep of the hurricane must perform the work of regeneration. In our government the mild, but effectual restraints of good men should be ceaseless in their beneficent offices, but when they fail to be felt in our public affairs, and evil control has widened and strengthened itself in departments of power, the storm and the thunderbolt have to be invoked for the public safety, and our convulsive but lawful revolutions attest the omnipotence of the reserved virtue of a faithful and intelligent people.

I am not before you to garner the scars and disjointed columns of free government. The Republic that has been reared by a century of patriotic labor and sacrifice, more than covers its wounds with the noblest achievements ever recorded in man’s struggle for the rights of man. It is not perfect in its administration or in the exercise of its vast and responsible powers; but when was it so? when shall it be so? No human work is perfect. No government in all the past has been without its misshaped ends; and few, indeed, have survived three generations without revolution. We must have been more than mortals, if our history does not present much that we would be glad to efface. We should be unlike all great peoples of the earth, if we did not mark the ebb and flow of public virtue, and the consequent struggles between the good and evil elements of a society in which freedom is at times debased to license. We have had seasons of war and of peace. We have had tidal waves of passion, with their sweeping demoralization. We have enlisted the national pride in the perilous line of conquest, and vindicated it by the beneficent fruits of our civilization. We have had the tempest of aggression, and the profound calm that was the conservator of peace throughout the world. We have revolutionized the policy of the government through the bitter conflicts of opposing opinions, and it has been strengthened by its trials. We have had the fruits of national struggles transferred to the vanquished, without a shade of violence; and the extreme power of impeachment has been invoked in the midst of intensest political strife, and its judgment patriotically obeyed. We have had fraternal war with its terrible bereavements and destruction. We have completed the circle of national perils, and the virtue and intelligence of the people have ever been the safety of the Republic.

At no previous period of our history have opportunity and duty so happily united to direct the people of this country to the triumphs and to the imperfections of our government. We have reached a healthy calm in our political struggles. The nation has a trusted ruler, just chosen by an overwhelming vote. The disappointments of conviction or of ambition have passed away, and all yield cordial obedience and respect to the lawful authority of the country. The long-lingering passions of civil war have, for the last time, embittered our political strife, and must now be consigned to forgetfulness. The nation is assured of peace. The embers of discord may convulse a State until justice shall be enthroned over mad partisanship, but peace and justice are the inexorable purposes of the people, and they will be obeyed. Sectional hatred, long fanned by political necessities, is henceforth effaced from our politics, and the unity of a sincere brotherhood will be the cherished faith of every citizen. We first conquered rebellion, and now have conquered the bitterness and estrangement of its discomfiture.

The Vice-President of the insurgent Confederacy is a Representative in our Congress. One who was first in the field and last in the Senate in support of rebellion has just died while representing the government in a diplomatic position of the highest honor. Another who served the Confederacy in the field and in the forum, has been one of the constitutional advisers of the national administration. One of the most brilliant of Confederate warriors now serves in the United States Senate, and has presided over that body. The first Lieutenant of Lee was long since honored with responsible and lucrative official trust, and many of lesser note, lately our enemies, are discharging important public duties. The war and its issues are settled forever. Those who were arrayed against each other in deadly conflict are now friends. The appeal from the ballot to the sword has been made, and its arbitrament has been irrevocably ratified by the supreme power of the nation. Each has won from the other the respect that is ever awarded to brave men, and the affection that was clouded by the passion that made both rush to achieve an easy triumph, has returned chastened and strengthened by our common sacrifices. Our battle-fields will be memorable as the theatres of the conflicts of the noblest people the world had to offer to the god of carnage, and the monuments to our dead, North and South, will be pointed to by succeeding generations as the proud records of the heroism of the American people.

The overshadowing issues touching the war and its logical results are now no longer in controversy, and in vain will the unworthy invoke patriotism to give them unmerited distinction. No supreme danger can now confront the citizen who desires to correct errors or abuses of our political system. He who despairs of free institutions because evils have been tolerated, would have despaired of every administration the country has ever had, and of every government the world has ever known. If corruption pervades our institutions to an alarming extent, let it not be forgotten that it is the natural order of history repeating itself. It is but the experience of every nation, and our own experience returning to us, to call into vigorous action the regenerating power of a patriotic people. We have a supreme tribunal that is most jealous of its high prerogatives, and that will wield its authority mercilessly when the opportune season arrives. We have just emerged from the most impassioned and convulsive strife of modern history. It called out the highest type of patriotism, and life and treasure were freely given with the holiest devotion to the cause of self-government. With it came those of mean ambition, and of venal purposes, and they could gain power while the unselfish were devoted to the country’s cause. They could not be dethroned because there were grave issues which dare not be sacrificed. Such evils must be borne at times in all governments, rather than destroy the temple to punish the enemies of public virtue. To whatever extent these evils exist, they are not the legitimate creation of our free institutions. They are not the creation of maladministration, nor of any party. They are the monstrous barnacles spawned by unnatural war, which clogged the gallant ship of State in her extremity, and had to be borne into port with her. And now that the battle is ended, and the issues settled, do not distrust the reserved power of our free institutions. It will heal the scars of war and efface the stains of corruption, and present the great Republic to the world surpassing in grandeur, might and excellence, the sublimest conceptions ever cherished of human government.

As you come to assume the responsibilities which must be accepted by the educated citizen, you will be profoundly impressed with the multiplied dangers which threaten the government. They will appear not only to be innumerable and likely to defy correction, but they will seem to be of modern creation. It is common to hear intelligent political leaders declaim against the moral and intellectual degeneracy of the times, and especially against the decline in public morality and statesmanship. They would make it appear that the people and the government in past times were models of purity and excellence, while we are unworthy sons of noble sires. Our rulers are pronounced imbecile, or wholly devoted to selfish ends.

Our law-makers are declared to be reeking with corruption or blinded by ambition, and greed and faithlessness are held up to the world as the chief characteristics of our officials. From this painful picture we turn to the history of those who ruled in the earlier and what we call the better days of the Republic, and the contrast sinks us deep in the slough of despair. I am not prepared to say that much of the complaint against the political degeneracy of the times, and the standard of our officials, is not just; but in the face of all that can be charged against the present, I regard it as the very best age this nation has ever known. The despairing accusations made against our public servants are not the peculiar creation of the times in which we live, and the allegation of wide spread demoralization in the body politic, was no more novel in any of the generations of the past than it is now. We say nothing of our rulers that was not said of those whose memory we so sacredly worship. License is one of the chief penalties, indeed the sole defect of liberty, and it has ever asserted its prerogatives with tireless industry. It was as irreverent with Washington as it is with Grant. It racked Jefferson and Jackson, and it pained and scarred Lincoln and Chase, and their compatriots. It criticised the campaigns and the heroes of the revolutionary times, as we criticise the living heroes of our day. It belittled the statesmen of every epoch in our national progress, just as we belittle those who are now the guardians of our free institutions. Perhaps we have more provocation than they had; but if so, they were less charitable, for the tide of ungenerous criticism and distrust has known no cessation. I believe we have had seasons when our political system was more free from blemish than it is now, and that we have had periods when both government and people maintained a higher standard of excellence than we can boast of; but it is equally true that we have, in the past, sounded a depth in the decline of our political administration that the present age can never reach.

You must soon appear in the active struggles for the perpetuity of free government, and some of the sealed chapters of the past are most worthy of your careful study. I would not efface one good inspiration that you have gathered from the lives and deeds of our fathers, whose courage and patriotism have survived their infirmities. Whatever we have from them that is purifying or elevating, is but the truth of history; and when unborn generations shall have succeeded us, no age in all the long century of freedom in the New World, will furnish to them higher standards of heroism and statesmanship than the defamed and unappreciated times in which we live. And when the future statesmen shall turn to history for the most unselfish and enlightened devotion to the Republic, they will pause over the records we have written, and esteem them the brightest in all the annals of man’s best efforts for his race. We can judge of the true standard of our government and people only by a faithful comparison with the true standard of the men and events which have passed away. You find widespread distrust of the success of our political system. It is the favorite theme of every disappointed ambition, and the vanquished of every important struggle are tempted, in the bitterness of defeat, to despair of the government. Would you know whence comes this chronic or spasmodic political despair? If so, you must turn back over the graves of ages, for it is as old as free government. Glance at the better days of which we all have read, and to which modern campaign eloquence is so much indebted. Do not stop with the approved histories of the fathers of the Republic. They tell only of the transcendent wisdom and matchless perfections of those who gave us liberty and ordained government of the people. Go to the inner temple of truth. Seek that which was then hidden from the nation, but which in these days of newspapers and free schools, and steam and lightning, is an open record so that he who runs may read. Gather up the few public journals of a century ago, and the rare personal letters and sacred diaries of the good and wise men whose examples are so earnestly longed for in the degenerate present, and your despair will be softened and your indignation at current events will be tempered, as you learn that our history is steadily repeating itself, and that with all our many faults, we grow better as we progress.

Do you point to the unfaltering courage and countless sacrifices of those who gave us freedom, so deeply crimsoned with their blood? I join you in naming them with reverence, but I must point to their sons, for whom we have not yet ceased to mourn, who equalled them in every manly and patriotic attribute. When wealth and luxury were about us to tempt our people to indifference and ease, the world has no records of heroism which dim the lustre of the achievements we have witnessed in the preservation of the liberty our fathers bequeathed to us. Have corruption and perfidy stained the triumphs of which we boast? So did corruption and perfidy stain the revolutionary “times that tried men’s souls.” Do we question the laurels with which our successful captains have been crowned by a grateful country? So did our forefathers question the just distinction of him who was first in war and first in peace, and he had not a lieutenant who escaped distrust, nor a council of war that was free from unworthy jealousies and strife. Do politicians and even statesmen teach the early destruction of our free institutions? It is the old, old story; “the babbling echo mocks itself.” It distracted the cabinets of Washington and the elder Adams. It was the tireless assailant of Jefferson and Madison. It made the Jackson administration tempestuous. It gave us foreign war under Polk. It was a teeming fountain of discord under Taylor, Pierce and Buchanan. It gave us deadly fraternal conflict under Lincoln. Its dying throes convulsed the nation under Johnson. The promise of peace, soberly accepted from Grant, was the crown of an unbroken column of triumphs over the distrust of every age, that was attacking free government. Do we complain of violent and profligate legislation? Hamilton, the favorite statesman of Washington, was the author of laws, enacted in time of peace, which could not have been enforced in our day even under the necessities and passions of war. And when the judgment of the nation repealed them, he sought to overthrow the popular verdict, because he believed that the government was overthrown. Almost before order began after the political chaos of the revolution, the intensest struggles were made, and the most violent enactments urged, for mere partisan control. Jefferson, the chief apostle of government of the people, did not always cherish supreme faith in his own work. He trembled at the tendencies to monarchy, and feared because of “the dupery of which our countrymen have shown themselves susceptible.” He rescued the infant Republic from the centralization that was the lingering dregs of despotism, and unconsciously sowed the seeds which ripened into States’ rights and nullification under Jackson, and into rebellion under Lincoln. But for the desperate conflict of opposing convictions as to the corner-stone of the new structure, Jefferson would have been more wise and conservative. He was faithful to popular government in the broadest acceptation of the theory. He summed it up in his memorable utterance to his neighbors when he returned from France. He said:—“The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err, but its errors are honest solitary and short-lived.” Politically speaking, with the patriots and statesmen of the “better days” of the Republic, their confidence in, or distrust of, the government, depended much upon whether Hamilton or Jefferson ruled. Dream of them as we may, they were but men, with the same ambition, the same love of power, the same infirmities, which we regard as the peculiar besetting sins of our times. If you would refresh your store of distrust of all political greatness, study Jefferson through Burr and Hamilton, or Washington and Hamilton through Jefferson, or Jackson through Clay and the second Adams, or Clay and Adams through Jackson and Randolph, and you will think better of the enlightened and liberal age in which you live.

No error is so common among free people as the tendency to depreciate the present and all its agencies and achievements.

We all turn with boundless pride to the Senate of Clay, Webster and Calhoun. In the period of their great conflicts, it was the ablest legislative tribunal the world has ever furnished. Rome and Greece in the zenith of their greatness, never gathered such a galaxy of statesmen. But not until they had passed away did the nation learn to judge them justly. Like the towering oaks when the tempest sweeps over the forest, the storm of faction was fiercest among their crowns, and their struggles of mere ambition, and their infirmities, which have been kindly forgotten, often made the thoughtless or the unfaithful despair of our free institutions. Not one of them escaped detraction or popular reprobation. Not one was exempt from the grave accusation of shaping the destruction of our nationality, and yet not one meditated deliberate wrong to the country on which all reflected so much honor. Calhoun despaired of the Union, because of the irrepressible antagonism of sectional interests, but he cherished the sincerest faith in free institutions. But when the dispassionate historian of the future is brought to the task of recording the most memorable triumphs of our political system, he will pass over the great Senate of the last generation, and picture in their just proportions the grander achievements of the heroes and statesmen who have been created in our own time. If we could draw aside the veil that conceals the future from us, and see how our children will judge the trials and triumphs of the last decade, we would be shamed at our distrust of ourselves and of the instruments we have employed to discharge the noblest duties. Our agents came up from among us. We knew them before they were great, and remembered well their common inheritance of human defects.—They are not greater than were men who had lived before them, but the nation has had none in all the past who could have written their names higher on the scroll of fame. We knew Lincoln as the uncouth Western campaigner and advocate; as a man of jest, untutored in the graces, and unschooled in statesmanship. We know him in the heat and strife of the political contests which made him our President, and our passions and prejudices survived his achievements. If his friends, we were brought face to face with his imperfections, and perhaps complained that he was unequal to impossibilities. If his enemies, we antagonized his policy and magnified his errors. We saw him wrestle with the greed of the place-man, with the ambitious warrior and with the disappointed statesman. We received his great act of Emancipation as a part of the mere political policy of his rule, and judged it by the light of prejudiced partisan convictions.

But how will those of the future judge him? When the hatreds which attached to his public acts have passed into forgetfulness; when his infirmities shall have been buried in oblivion, and when all his master monuments shall stand out in bold relief, made stainless by the generous offices of time, his name will be linked with devotion wherever liberty has a worshipper. And it will be measurably so of those who were his faithful co-laborers. It will be forgotten that they were at times weak, discordant, irresolute men when they had to confront problems the solution of which had no precedents in the world’s history. It will not be conspicuous in the future records of those great events, that the most learned and experienced member of his cabinet would have accepted peace by any supportable compromise, and that one of the most trusted of his constitutional advisers would have assented to peaceable dismemberment to escape internecine war. Few will ever know that our eminent Minister of War was one of those who was least hopeful of the preservation of the unity of the States, when armed secession made its first trial of strength with the administration. It will not be recorded how the surrender of Sumter was gravely discussed to postpone the presence of actual hostilities, and how the midsummer madness of rebellion made weakness and discord give way to might and harmony, by the first gun that sent its unprovoked messenger of death against the flag and defenders of the Union. It will not be remembered that faction ran riot in the highest places, and that the struggle for the throne embittered cabinet councils and estranged eminent statesmen, even when the artillery of the enemy thundered within sound of the Capital.

It will not be declared how great captains toyed with armies and decimated them upon the deadly altar of ambition, and how blighted hopes of preferment made jangled strife and fruitless campaigns. Nor will the insidious treason that wounded the cause of free government in the home of its friends, blot the future pages of our history in the just proportions in which the living felt and knew it. It will be told that in the hour of greatest peril, the administration was criticised, and the constitution and laws expounded, with supreme ability and boldness, while the meaner struggles of the cowardly and faithless will be effaced with the passions of the times that created them. And it is best that these defects of greatness should slumber with mortality. Not only the heroes and rulers, but the philanthropists as well, of all nations and ages, have had no exemption from the frailties which are colossal when in actual view. That we have been no better than we have seen ourselves, does not prove that we are a degenerate people. On the contrary, it teaches how much of good and great achievement may be hoped for with all the imperfections we see about us. In our unexampled struggle, when faction, and corruption, and faithlessness had done their worst, a regenerated nationality, saved to perfected justice, liberty and law, was the rich fruits of the patriotic efforts of the people and their trusted but fallible leaders. There is the ineffaceable record we have written for history, and it will be pointed to as the sublimest tribute the world has given to the theory of self-government. The many grievous errors and bitter jealousies of the conflict which weakened and endangered the cause; the venality that grew in hideous strength, while higher and holier cares gave it safety; the incompetency that grasped place on the tidal waves of devotion to country, and the widespread political evils which still linger as sorrowful legacies among us, will in the fulness of time be healed and forgotten, and only the grand consummation will be memorable. This generous judgment of the virtue and intelligence of the people, that corrects the varying efforts and successes of political prostitution; that pardons the defects of those who are faithful in purpose, and without which the greatest deeds would go down to posterity scarred and deformed, is the glass through which all must read of the noblest triumphs of men.

Our Republic stands alone in the whole records of civil government. In its theory, in its complete organization, and in its administration, it is wholly exceptional. We talk thoughtlessly of the overthrow of the old Republics, and the weak or disappointed turn to history for the evidence of our destruction. It is true that Republics which have been mighty among the powers of the earth have crumbled into hopeless decay, and that the shifting sands of time have left desolate places where once were omnipotence and grandeur. Rome made her almost boundless conquests under the banner of the Republic, and a sister Republic was her rival in greatness and splendor. They are traced obscurely on the pages of history as governments of the people. Rome became mistress of the world. Her triumphal arches of costliest art recorded her many victories. Her temples of surpassing elegance, her colossal and exquisite statues of her chieftains, her imposing columns dedicated to her invincible soldiery, and her apparently rapid progress toward a beneficent civilization, give the story of the devotion and heroism of her citizens. But Rome never was a free representative government. What is called her Republic was but a series of surging plebeian and patrician revolutions, of Tribunes, Consuls and Dictators, with seasons of marvelous prowess under the desperate lead of as marvelous ambition. The tranquillity, the safety, and the inspiration of a government of liberty and law, are not to be found in all the thousand years of Roman greatness. The lust of empire was the ruling passion in the ancient Republics. Hannibal reflected the supreme sentiment of Carthage when he bowed at the altar and swore eternal hostility to Rome; and Cato, the Censor, as faithfully spoke for Rome when he declared to an approving Senate—“Carthago delenda!” Such was the mission of what history hands down to us as the great free governments of the ancients. Despotism was the forerunner of corruption, and the proudest eras they knew were but hastening them to inevitable destruction.

The imperial purple soon followed in Rome, as a debauched people were prepared to accept in form what they had long accepted with the mockery of freedom. Rulers and subjects, noble and ignoble, church and state, made common cause to precipitate her decay. At last the columns of the barbarian clouded her valleys. The rude hosts of Attila, the “Scourge of God,” swarmed upon her, and their battle-axes smote the demoralized warriors of the tottering empire. The Goth and the Vandal jostled each other from the degraded sceptre they had conquered, and Rome was left widowed in her ruins. And Carthage!—she too had reared a great government by spoliation, and called it a Republic. It was the creation of ambition and conquest. Her great chieftain swept over the Pyrenees and the Alps with his victorious legions, and even made the gates of the Eternal City tremble before the impetuous advance of the Carthaginians. But Carthage never was free until the cormorant and the bittern possessed it, and the God of nations had “stretched out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.” Conqueror and conquered are blotted from the list of the nations of the earth. We read of the Grecian Republic; but it was a libel upon free government. Her so-called free institutions consisted of a loose, discordant confederation of independent States, where despotism ruled in the name of liberty. Sparta has made romance pale before the achievements of her sons, but her triumphs were not of peace, nor were they for free government. Athens abolished royalty more than a thousand years before the Christian era, and made Athenian history most thrilling and instructive, but her citizens were strangers to freedom. The most sanguinary wars with sister States, domestic convulsions almost without cessation, and the grinding oppression of caste, were the chief offerings of the government to its subjects. Solon restored her laws to some measure of justice, only to be cast aside for the usurper. Greece yet has a name among the nations of the world, but her sceptre for which the mightiest once warred to enslave her people under the banner of the Republic, has long since been unfelt in shaping the destiny of mankind. Thus did Rome and Carthage and Greece fade from the zenith of distinction and power, before constitutional government of the people had been born among men. To-day there is not an established sister Republic that equals our single Commonwealth in population. Spain, France and Mexico have in turn worshiped Emperors, Kings, Dictators and popular Presidents. Yesterday they were reckoned Republics. What they have been made to-day, or what they will be made to-morrow, is uncertain and unimportant. They are not now, and never have been, Republics save in name, and never can be free governments until their people are transformed into law-creating and law-abiding communities. With them monarchy is a refuge from the license they miscall liberty, and despotism is peace. Switzerland is called a Republic. She points to her acknowledged independence four hundred years ago, but not until the middle of the present century did the Republic of the Alps find tranquillity in a constitutional government that inaugurated the liberty of law. Away on a rugged mountain-top in Italy, is the only Republic that has maintained popular government among the States of Europe. For more than fourteen hundred years a handful of isolated people, the followers of a Dalmatian hermit priest, have given the world an example of unsullied freedom. Through all the mutations, and revolutions, and relinings of the maps of Europe, the little territory of San Marino has been sacredly respected. Her less than ten thousand people have prospered without interruption; and civil commotions and foreign disputes or conflicts have been unknown among them. She has had no wealth to tempt the spoiler; no commerce or teeming valleys to invite conquest; no wars to breed dictators; no surplus revenues to corrupt her officials; and in patient and frugal industry her citizens have enjoyed the national felicity of having no history. They have had no trials and no triumphs, and have made civilization better only by the banner of peace they have worshipped through all the convulsions and bloody strife of many centuries.

The world has but one Republic that has illustrated constitutional freedom in all its beneficence, power and grandeur, and that is our own priceless inheritance. As a government, our Republic has alone been capable of, and faithful to, representative free institutions, with equal rights, equal justice, and equal laws for every condition of our fellows. All the nations of the past furnish no history that can logically repeat itself in our advancement or decline. Created through the severest trials and sacrifices; maintained through foreign and civil war with unexampled devotion; faithful to law as the offspring and safety of liberty; progressive in all that ennobles our peaceful industry, and cherishing enlightened and liberal Christian civilization as the trust and pride of our citizens, for our government of the people, none but itself can be its parallel.

In what are called free governments of antiquity, we search in vain for constitutional freedom, or that liberty that subordinates passion and license to law. The refuge from the constant perils of an unrestrained Democracy was always found in despotism, and when absolutism became intolerable, the tide of passion would surge back to Democracy. The people, in mass councils, would rule Consuls, Presidents and Generals, but it was fruitful only of chaos and revolution. The victorious chieftain and the illustrious philosopher would be honored with thanksgivings to the gods for their achievements, and their banishment or death would next be demanded by the same supreme tribunal. Grand temples and columns and triumphal arches would be erected to commemorate the victories of the dominant power, and the returning waves of revolution would decree the actors and their monuments to destruction. Ambitious demagogues prostituted such mockeries of government to the basest purposes. The Olympic games of Greece became the mere instruments of unscrupulous leaders to lure the people, in the name of freedom, to oppression and degradation, and the wealth of Rome was lavishly employed to corrupt the source of popular power, and spread demoralization throughout the Republic. The debauched citizens and soldiers were inflamed by cunning and corrupt devices, against the purest and most eminent of the sincere defenders of liberty; and the vengeance of the infuriated mob, usurping the supreme power of the State, would doom to exile or to death, honest Romans who struggled for Roman freedom. Cato, the younger, Tribune of the people, and faithful to his country, took his own life to escape the reprobation of a polluted sovereignty. Cicero was Consul of the people, made so by his triumph over Cæsar. But the same people who worshipped him and to whose honor and prosperity he was devoted, banished him in disgrace, confiscated his wealth and devastated his home. Again he was recalled through a triumphal ovation, and again proscribed by the triumvirs and murdered by the soldiers of Antony. The Grecian Republic banished “Aristides the just,” and Demosthenes, the first orator of the world, who withstood the temptations of Macedonian wealth, was fined, exiled and his death decreed. He saved his country the shame of his murder by suicide. Miltiades won the plaudits of Greece for his victories, only to die in prison of wounds received in fighting her battles. Themistocles, orator, statesman and chieftain, was banished and died in exile. Pericles, once master of Athens, and who gave the world the highest attainments in Grecian arts, was deposed from military and civil authority by the people he had honored. Socrates, immortal teacher of Grecian philosophy, soldier and senator, and one of the most shining examples of public virtue, was ostracised and condemned and drank the fatal hemlock. The Republic of Carthage gave the ancients their greatest general, and as chief magistrate, he was as wise in statesmanship as he was skillful in war; but in a strange land Hannibal closed his eyes to his country’s woes by taking his own life. Nor need we confine our research to Pagan antiquity alone, for such stains upon what is called popular government. During the present century France has enthroned and banished the Bourbons, and worshiped and execrated the Bonapartes; and Spain and Mexico, and scores of States of lesser note, have welcomed and spurned the same rulers, and created and overthrew the same dynasties.

For the matchless progress of enlightened rule during the last century, the world is indebted to England and America. Parent and child, though separated by violence and estranged in their sympathies even to the latest days, have been coworkers in the great cause of perfecting and strengthening liberal government. Each has been too prone to hope and labor for the decline or subordination of the other, but they both have thereby “builded wiser than they knew.” Their ceaseless rivalry for the approving judgment of civilization and for the development of the noblest attributes of a generous and enduring authority, have made them vastly better and wiser than either would have been without the other. We have inherited her supreme sanctity for law, and thus bounded our liberties by conservative restraints upon popular passions, until the sober judgment of the people can correct them. She has, however unwillingly, yielded to the inspiration of our enlarged freedom and advanced with hesitating steps toward the amelioration of her less favored classes. She maintains the form and splendor of royalty, but no monarch, no ministry, no House of Lords, can now defy the Commoners of the English people. The breath of disapproval coming from the popular branch of the government, dissolves a cabinet or compels an appeal to the country. A justly beloved Queen, unvexed by the cares of State, is the symbol of the majesty of English law, and there monarchy practically ends. We have reared a nobler structure, more delicate in its framework, more exquisite in its harmony, and more imposing in its progress. Its beneficence would be its weakness with any other people than our own. Solon summed up the history of many peoples, when, in answer to the question whether he had given the Athenians the best of laws, he said: “The best they were capable of receiving!” Even England with her marked distinctions of rank, and widely divided and unsympathetic classes, could not entrust her administration to popular control, without inviting convulsive discord and probable disintegration. Here we confide the enactment and execution of our laws to the immediate representatives of the people; but executives, and judicial tribunals, and conservative legislative branches, are firmly established, to receive the occasional surges of popular error, as the rock-ribbed shore makes harmless the waves of the tempest. We have no antagonism of rank or caste; no patent of nobility save that of merit, and the Republic has no distinction that may not be won by the humblest of her citizens. Our illustrious patriots, statesmen, and chieftains are cherished as household gods. They have not in turn been applauded and condemned, unless they have betrayed public trust. They are the creation of our people under our exceptional system, that educates all and advances those who are most eminent and faithful; and they are, from generation to generation, the enduring monuments of the Republic. We need no triumphal arches, or towering columns, or magnificent temples to record our achievements. Every patriotic memory bears in perpetual freshness the inscriptions of our noblest deeds, and every devoted heart quickens its pulsations at the contemplation of the power and safety of government of the people. In every trial, in peace and in war, we have created our warriors, our pacificators and our great teachers of the country’s sublime duties and necessities. It is not always our most polished scholars, or our ripest statesmen who have the true inspiration of the loyal leader. Ten years ago one of the most illustrious scholars and orators of our age, was called to dedicate the memorable battle-field of Gettysburg, as the resting place of our martyred dead. In studied grandeur he told the story of the heroism of the soldiers of the Republic, and in chaste and eloquent passages he plead the cause of the imperiled and bleeding Union. The renowned orator has passed away, and his oration is forgotten. There was present on that occasion, the chosen ruler and leader of the people. He was untutored in eloquence, and a stranger to the art of playing upon the hopes or grief of the nation. He was the sincere, the unfaltering guardian of the unity of the States, and his utterance, brief and unstudied, inspired and strengthened every patriotic impulse, and made a great people renew their great work with the holiest devotion. As he turned from the dead to the living, he gave the text of liberty for all time, when he declared: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Neither birth, nor circumstance, nor power, can command the devotion of our people. Our revolutions in enlightened sentiment, have been the creation of all the varied agencies of our free government, and the judgments of the nation have passed into history as marvels of justice. We have wreathed our military and civil heroes with the greenest laurels. In the strife of ambition, some have felt keenly what they deemed the ingratitude of the Republic; but in their disappointment, they could not understand that the highest homage of a free people is not measured by place or titled honors. Clay was none the less beloved, and Webster none the less revered, because their chief ambition was not realized. Scott was not less the “Great Captain of the Age,” because he was smitten in his efforts to attain the highest civil distinction. But a few months ago two men of humblest opportunities and opposite characteristics, were before us as rival candidates for our first office. One had been a great teacher, who through patient years of honest and earnest effort, had made his impress upon the civilization of every clime. He was the defender of the oppressed, and the unswerving advocate of equal rights for all mankind. Gradually his labors ripened, but the fruits were to be gathered through the flame of battle, and he was unskilled in the sword. Another had to come with his brave reapers into the valley of death. He was unknown to fame, and the nation trusted others who wore its stars. But he transformed despair into hope, and defeat into victory. He rose through tribulation and malice, by his invincible courage and matchless command, until the fruition of his rival’s teachings had been realized in their own, and their country’s grandest achievement. In the race for civil trust, partisan detraction swept mercilessly over both, and two men who had written the proudest records of their age, in their respective spheres of public duty, were assailed as incompetent and unworthy. Both taught peace. One dared more for hastened reconciliation, forgiveness and brotherhood. The other triumphed, and vindicated his rival and himself by calling the insurgent to share the honors of the Republic. Soon after the strife was ended, they met at the gates of the “City of the Silent,” and the victor, as chief of the nation, paid the nation’s sincere homage to its untitled, but most beloved and lamented citizen. Had the victor been the vanquished, the lustre of his crown would have been undimmed in the judgment of our people or of history. Our rulers are but our agents, chosen in obedience to the convictions which govern the policy of the selection, and mere political success is no enduring constituent of greatness. The public servant, and the private citizen, will alike be honored or condemned, as they are faithful or unfaithful to their responsible duties.

When we search for the agencies of the great epochs in our national progress, we look not to the accidents of place. Unlike all other governments, ours is guided supremely by intelligent and educated public convictions, and those who are clothed with authority, are but the exponents of the popular will. Herein is the source of safety and advancement of our free institutions. On every hand, in the ranks of people, are the tireless teachers of our destiny. Away in the forefront of every struggle, are to be found the masters who brave passion and prejudice and interest, in the perfection of our nationality.