Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

If their works betray imperfections, no wonder at the fewness of them. If they erred most in the structure of the union, this was the most difficult to be executed; this is the work which has been new modelled by the act of your convention, and it is that act on which you are now to deliberate and to decide. MADISON.

130.-EXTRACT FROM PRESIDENT JEFFERSON'S INAUGURAL

ADDRESS.

DURING the contest of opinion through which we have passed, the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers, unused to think freely, and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that, though the will of the majority is, in all cases, to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression. then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.

Let us

Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection, without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things; and let us reflect, that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little, if we countenance a political intolerance, as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world; during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking, through blood and slaughter, his long lost liberty; it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some, and less by others; and should divide opinions, as to measures of safety..

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans; we are all

federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.

I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear, that this government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not; I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth.

I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said, that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? or have we found angels, in the form of kings, to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Let us, then, with courage and confidence, pursue our own federal and republican principles; our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated, by nature and a wide ocean, from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties; to the acquisi tions of our own industry; to honour and confidence from our fellow citizens.

Resulting not from birth, but from our actions, and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practised in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Provi dence, which, by all its dispensations, proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter; with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people.

Still one thing more, fellow citizens; a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another; shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement; and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government; and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. JEFFERSON.

[blocks in formation]

WHAT is there that will not be included in the history of nature? The earth on which we tread, the air we breathe, the waters around the earth, the material forms that inhabit its surface, the mind of man, with all its magical illusions and all its inherent energy, the planets that move around our system, the firmament of heaven, the smallest of the invisible atoms which float around our globe, and the most majestic of the orbs that roll through the immeasurable fields of peace; all are parts of one system, productions of one power, creations of one intellect, the offspring of Him by whom all that is inert and inorganic in creation was formed, and from whom all that have life derive their being.

Of this immense system, all that we can examine, this little globe that we inherit is full of animation and crowded with forms organized, glowing with life, and generally sentient. No space is unoccupied; the exposed surface of the rock is incrusted with living substances; plants occupy the bark and decaying limbs of other plants; animals live on the surface and in the bodies of other animals; inhabitants are fashioned and adapted to equatorial heats and polar ice; air, earth, and ocean teem with life; and if to other worlds the same proportion of life and of enjoyment has been distributed which has been allotted to ours; if creative benevolence has equally filled every other planet of every other system, nay, even the suns themselves, with beings organized, animated, and intelligent, how countless must be the generations of the living! what voices which we cannot hear, what languages that we cannot understand, what multitudes that we cannot see, may, as they roll along

the stream of time, be employed hourly, daily, and for ever, in choral songs of praise, hymning their great Creator.

And when in this almost prodigal waste of life we perceive that every being, from the puny insect which flutters in the evening ray, from the lichen which the eye can scarcely distinguish on the mouldering rock; from the fungus that springs up and reanimates the mass of dead and decomposing substances, that every living form possesses a structure as perfect in its sphere, an organization sometimes as complex, always as truly and completely adapted to its purposes and modes of existence, as that of the most perfect animal; when we discover them all to be governed by laws as definite, as immutable, as those which regulate the planetary movements, great must be our admiration of the wisdom which has arranged, and the power which has perfected this stupendous fabric.

Nor does creation here cease. There are beyond the limits of our system, beyond the visible forms of matter, other principles, other powers, higher orders of beings, an immaterial world which we cannot yet know; other modes of existence which we cannot comprehend; yet, however inscrutable to us, this spiritual world must be guided by its own unerring laws, and the harmonious order which reigns in all that we can see and understand, ascending through the series of immortal and invisible existence, must govern even the powers and dominions, the seraphim and cherubim that surround the throne of God himself. ELLIOTT.

132.-EXTRACT FROM MR. M'DUFFIE'S SPEECH ON CORRUP

TION.

SIR,-We are apt to treat the idea of our own corruptibility as utterly visionary, and to ask, with a grave affectation of dignity, What! do you think a member of congress can be corrupted? Sir, I speak what I have long and deliberately considered, when I say, that since man was created, there never has been a political body on the face of the earth, that would not be corrupted under the same circum

stances.

Corruption steals upon us in a thousand insidious forms, when we are least aware of its approaches. Of all the forms

in which it can present itself, the bribery of office is the most dangerous, because it assumes the guise of patriotism to accomplish its fatal sorcery. We are often asked, Where is the evidence of corruption? Have you seen it? Sir, do you expect to see it? You might as well expect to see the imbodied forms of pestilence and famine stalking before you, as to see the latent operations of this insidious power. We may walk amid it and breathe its contagion, without being conscious of its presence. All experience teaches us the irresistible power of temptation, when vice assumes the form of virtue.

The great enemy of mankind could not have consummated his infernal scheme for the seduction of our first parents, but for the disguise in which he presented himself. Had he appeared as the devil, in his proper form; had the spear of Ithuriel disclosed the naked deformity of the fiend of hell, the inhabitants of Paradise would have shrunk with horror from his presence.

But he came as the insinuating serpent, and presented a beautiful apple, the most delicious fruit in all the garden. He told his glowing story to the unsuspecting victim of his guile. "It can be no crime to taste of this delightful fruit. It will disclose to you the knowledge of good and evil. It will raise you to an equality with the angels."

Such, sir, was the process; and in this simple but impressive narrative, we have the most beautiful and philosophical illustration of the frailty of man, and the power of temptation, that could possibly be exhibited. Mr. Chairman, I have been forcibly struck with the similarity between our present situation and that of Eve, after it was announced that Satan was on the borders of Paradise.

We, too, have been warned that the enemy is on our borders. But God forbid that the similitude should be carried any further. Eve, conscious of her innocence, sought temptation and defied it. The catastrophe is too fatally known to us all. She went, "with the blessings of Heaven on her head and its purity in her heart," guarded by the ministry of angels; she returned, covered with shame, under the heavy denunciation of Heaven's everlasting curse.

Sir, it is innocence that temptation conquers. If our first parent, pure as she came from the hand of God, was

« AnteriorContinuar »