the soul of this country eat as good food and as much of it as the soul of Europe? Why should a German or an Englishman sit down to a repast of five hundred thousand books, and an American scholar, who loves truth as well as he, be put on something less than half allowance? Can we not trust ourselves with so much of so good a thing? Will our digestion be impaired by it? Are we afraid that the stimulated and fervid faculties of this young nation will be oppressed and overlaid? Because we have liberty which other nations have not, shall we reject the knowledge which they have and which we have not? Or will you not rather say, that, because we are free, therefore will we add to our freedom that deep learning and that diffused culture which are its grace and its defence? [Mr. Choate then moved certain amendments in conformity with the views of his speech.] MISCELLANEOUS SPEECHES. SPEECH BEFORE THE YOUNG MEN'S WHIG CLUB OF BOSTON, ON THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. DELIVERED IN THE TREMONT TEMPLE, AUGUST 19, 1844. [The meeting having been called to order by Charles Francis Adams, President of the Club, Mr. Choate was introduced. He came forward and spoke as follows:] MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN, I REGARD the approaching election as one of more interest to the whole country, and to the States of the North in a preeminent degree, than any which has preceded it. The peculiarity of this election is, that while it involves all the questions of mere policy, which are ever suspended on the choice of a president, questions of the currency, of the lands, of internal improvements, of protection, of foreign policy, and all else; while it involves in its broadest extent the question, how shall the nation be governed? — it involves the first presidential election that has done sothe further, more fundamental, and more startling question, what shall the nation be; who shall the nation be; where shall the nation be; who, what, and where, is, and is to be, our country itself? Is it to be any longer the Union which we have known; which we have loved, to which we have been accustomed? - or is it to be dissolved altogether? or is it to be a new one, enlarged by the annexation of a territory out of which forty States of the size of Massachusetts might be constructed; a territory not appended equally to the East, the West, the Centre, and the South; not appended equally to the slave States and the free States; to the agricultural and the planting; to the localities of free trade and the localities of protection; not so appended as to work an equal and impartial enlargement and assistance to each one of those various and heterogeneous elements of interest and sentiment and position out of whose struggle comes the peace, out of whose dissonance comes the harmony, of our system; - not so, but appended in one vast accession to one side, one region, one interest, of the many which compose the State; so appended as to disturb the relations of the parts; to change the seat of the centre; to counteract the natural tendencies of things; to substitute a revolution of violent and morbid policy in place of the slow and safe action of nature, habit, and business, under a permanent law; so appended, in short, as not merely to make a small globe into a larger one, but to alter the whole figure of the body; to vary the shape and the range of its orbit; to launch it forth on a new highway of the heavens; to change its day and night, its seed-time and harvest, its solar year, the great cycle of its duration itself. This it is that gives to this election an interest peculiar and transcendent. It is a question, not what the policy of the nation shall be, but what, who, where, shall the nation be! It is not a question of national politics, but of national identity. For even if the Union shall survive the annexation of Texas, and the discussions of annexation, it will be a new, a changed, another Union,- not this. It will be changed, not by time, which changes all things, man, monuments, states, the great globe itself; not by time, but by power; not by imperceptible degrees, but in a day; not by a successive growth, unfolded and urged forward by an organic law, an implanted force, a noiseless and invisible nutrition from beneath and from without, of which every region, every State, takes the risk; but by the direct action of government-arbitrary, violent, and unjust-of which no part has ever agreed to take the risk. It is to this element in the present election, the annexation of Texas, that I wish to-night, passing over all the rest, to direct your attention. I shall consume but little of the time of such an assembly as this, in attempting to prove that the success or failure of this enterprise of annexation is suspended for the presentperhaps for our day -on the result of the pending election. You, at least, have no doubt on this point. Is there one man |