session after armed men were soaking their native soil with their blood, and now he is in the ranks of our enemies.

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"Suppose that in the French Assembly, when the life of France was at stake, as the life of this Nation is now at stake, and when heroic men were struggling to maintain it, some one had arisen and proposed to call back the Bourbons, and place the reins of Government in their hands -how long would he have remained a member of that body? Suppose that the day before the battle of Culloden, or the day after the battle of Preston Pans, some Jacobite had arisen in the House of Commons of England, and declared himself of the opinion that the pretender could not be expelled without the extermination of the Jacobites, and that therefore they should place him on the throne of England! Do you think the traditional liberty of speech in England would have saved him from summary expulsion? Do you think there is any law in England that could have stood between him, and, not expulsion, but death? Would not the act have been considered a crime, and the declaration of it in Parliament have been considered but an aggravation of the crime, demanding his expulsion? Would not the vote of that body have been instantaneous, and his execution swifter than that vote? "Are we to be told here that men are to rise in this Hall, when the guns of the impending battle will echo in our ears, when we only sit here because we have one hundred and fifty thousand bayonets between us and the enemy; when Washington is a great camp, the center of thirty miles of fortifications stretching around us for our protection; are we to be told that here, within this citadel of the Nation, an enemy may beckon with his hand to the armed foe, assuring him of friends within the people's Hall, at the very center of power, and we cannot expel him ?"

There are few if any finer things than the following illus tration of the freedom of opinion, and its limitations:

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Surely, sir, opinion is the life of our nation. It is the measure of every right, the guarantee of every privilege, the protection of every blessing. It is opinion which creates our rulers. It is opinion that nerves or palsies their arms. It is opinion which casts down the proud and elevates the humble. Its fluctuations are the rise and fall of parties; its currents bear the nation on to prosperity or ruin. Its free play is the condition of its purity. It is like the ocean, whose tides rise and fall day by day at the fickle bidding of the moon; yet it is the great scientific level from which every height is measured the horizon to which astronomers refer the motion of the stars. But, like the ocean, it has depths whose eternal stillness is the condition of its

stability. Those depths of opinion are not free, and it is they that are touched by the words which have so moved the House. Men must not commit treason and say its guilt is a matter of opinion, and its punishment a violation of its freedom. Men cannot swear to maintain the integrity of the nation, and avow their intention to destroy it, and cover that double crime by the freedom of speech. That is to break up the fountains of the great deep on which all government is borne, and to pour its flood in revolutionary ruin over the land. To punish that is not a violation of the freedom of opinion or its expression. It is to protect its normal ebb and flow, its free and healthy fluctuations, that we desire to relieve it from the opprobrium of being confounded with the declarations of treasonable purposes here, in the high and solemn assemblage of the Union."

Then in a voice that thrilled through the Representative Hall, and which brought the leaping pulse, and the deep breath of emotion, he exclaimed:

"When a Democrat shall darken the White House and the land; when a democratic majority here shall proclaim that freedom of speech secures impunity to treason, and declare recognition better than extermination of traitors; when McClellan and Fitz John Porter shall have again brought the rebel armies within sight of Washington city, and the successor of James Buchanan shall withdraw our armies from the unconstitutional invasion of Virginia to the north of the Potomac ; when exultant rebels shall sweep over the fortifications, and their bombshells shall crash against the dome of the Capitol; when thousands throughout Pennsylvania shall seek refuge on the shores of Lake Erie from the rebel invasion, cheered and welcomed by the opponents of extermination; when Vallandigham shall be Governor of Ohio, and Bright Governor of Indiana, and Woodward Governor of Pennsylvania, and Seymour Governor of Connecticut, and Wall Governor of New Jersey, and the gentleman from New York city sit in Seymour's seat, and thus, possessed of power over the great centre of the country, they shall do what they attempted in vain before in the midst of rebel triumphs to array the authorities of the States against those of the United States; to oppose the militia to the army of the United States; to invoke the habeas corpus to discharge confined traitors; to deny to the Government the benefit of the laws of war, lest it exterminate its enemies; when the Democrats, as in the fall of 1862, shall again with more permanent success, persuade the people of the country that the war should not be waged till the integrity of the territory of the Union is restored, cost what it might, but that such a war violates the spirit of

free institutions, which those who advocate it wish to overthrow, it should stop, for the benefit of the Democratic party, somewhere this side of absolute triumph, lest there be no room for a compromise; when gentlemen of that party in New York shall again, as in November 1862, hold illegal and criminal negotiations with Lord Lyons, and avow their purposes to him, the representative of a foreign and unfriendly power, and urge him to arrange the time of proffering mediation with a view to their possession of power and their preparation of the minds of the public to receive suggestions from abroad; and when mediation shall appear by the event to be the first step toward foreign intervention, swiftly and surely followed by foreign armed enemies upon our shores to join the domestic enemies; when the war in the cars shall begin, which was menaced at the outbreak of the rebellion, and the friends of Seymour shall make the streets of New York run with blood, on the eve of another Gettysburg less damaging to their hopes; when the people, exhausted by taxation, weary of sacrifices, drained of blood, betrayed by their rulers, deluded by demagogues, into believing that peace is the way to Union, and submission the path to victory, shall throw down their arms before the advancing foe; when vast chasms across every State shall make apparent to every eye, when too late to remedy it, that division from the South is inauguration of anarchy at the North, and that peace without Union is the end of the Republic-THEN the independence of the South will be an accomplished fact, and gentlemen may, without treason to the dead republic, rise in this migratory House, wherever it may then be in America, and declare themselves for recognizing their masters at the South, rather than exterminating them! Until that day, in the name of the American nation; in the name of every house in the land where there is one dead for the holy cause; in the name of those who stand before us in the ranks of battle; in the name of the liberty our ancestors have confided to us, I devote to eternal execration the name of him who shall propose to destroy this blessed land, rather than its enemies.

But until that time arrive it is the judgment of the American people there shall be no compromise; that ruin to ourselves or ruin to the Southern rebels are the only alternatives. It is only by resolutions of this kind that nations can rise above great dangers and overcome them in crisis like this. It was only by turning France into a camp, resolved that Europe might exterminate, but should not subjugate her, that France is the leading empire of Europe to-day. It is by such a resolve that the American people, coercing a reluctant Government to draw the sword, and stake the National existence on the integrity of the Republic, are now anything but the fragments of a nation before the world, the scorn and hiss of every petty tyrant. It is because the people

of the United States, rising to the height of the occasion, dedicated this generation to the sword, and pouring out the blood of their children as of no account, and avowing before high Heaven that there should be no end to this conflict but ruin absolute, or absolute triumph, that we now are what we are; that the banner of the Republic still pointing onward, floats proudly in the face of the enemy, that vast regions are reduced to obedience to the laws, and that a great host in armed array now presses with steady step into the dark regions of the rebellion. It is only by the earnest and abiding resolution of the people, that whatever shall be our fate, it shall be grand as the American nation, worthy of that Republic which first trod the path of Empire, and made no peace but under the banners of victory, 'that the American people will survive in history.

"And that will save us. We shall succeed and not fail. I have an abiding confidence in the firmness, the patience, the endurance of the American people; and, having resolved to stand in history on the great resolve to accept of nothing but victory or ruin, victory is ours. And if with such heroic resolve we fall, we fall with honor, and transmit the name of liberty committed to our keeping, untarnished, to go down to future generations. The historian of our decline and fall, contemplating the ruins of the last great Republic, and drawing from its fate les sons of wisdom on the waywardness of men, shall drop a tear as he records with sorrow the vain heroism of that people who dedicated and sacrificed themselves to the cause of freedom, and by their example will keep alive its worship in the hearts of men, till happier generations shall learn to walk in her paths. Yes, sir, if we must fall, let our last hours be stained by no weakness. If we must fail, let us stand amid the crash of the falling Republic, and be buried in its ruins, so that his tory may take note that men lived in the middle of the nineteenth century worthy of a better fate, but chastised by God for the sins of our forefathers. Let the ruins of the Republic remain to testify to the latest generations our greatness and our heroism. And let Liberty, crownless and childless, sit upon these ruins, crying aloud in a sad wail to the nations of the world, 'I nursed and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.""

Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, closed the debate on the democratic side of the House. He was a gentleman of fine culture, of graceful manners, and, as the candidate of his party for Vice President, in 1864, one of the most popular young men of his party. His speech in reply to Winter Davis was very

able. He said, alluding to the freedom of debate in the British Parliament: *

"I had intended to go back to those splendid demonstrations of English liberty which occurred at the time of our Revolution. I had intended to recall to you the words of Lord Chatham uttered time and again in the British Parliament against the then pending war in America. The inexorable hour rule bids me be brief. In January, 1776, he said:

"The gentleman tells us America is obstinate, America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted. Three million people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.'

"And Mr. Burke, in 1781, after the surrender of Yorktown had secured the defeat of the British in America, exclaimed:

"The noble lord said the war was not disgraceful; it was only unfortunate. For my part I must continue to call it disgraceful, not unfortunate. I consider them all alike, victories and defeats; towns taken and towns evacuated; new generals appointed and old generals recalled; they are all alike calamities; they all spur us on to this fatal business. Victories give us hopes; defeats make us desperate; and both instigate us to go on.' 'Give us back our force, nor protract this burdensome, disgraceful, for it is not an unfortunate war.'

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"And yet, were they censured? Did the 'first gentleman of England' leave the Speaker's chair to move a vote of censure or expulsion?

"But why go so far back? Within this year, in the French Chamber, Thiers, returning after twelve years of exile from office and honors, raised his voice for the liberty of France: 'Give us a free press; give us free ballot; give us free debate in these halls-these are the essentials of free government-and I will be a grateful and obedient subject of the empire. If you will not, I warn you, that as the Dauphin did not succeed Louis XVI, as the Duke of Reichstadt did not succeed the great Napoleon, as the sons of Louis Philippe are now in exile, so neither will this imperial Prince succeed to the throne of his father and perpetuate the dynasty of the second Napoleon.' And when, in the same debate, Count Morny, the President, rudely assailed a speaker who uttered like sentiments, and a Councilor of State followed it up by the use of the word 'traitor,' the indignant members with one accord rose

* Congressional Globe, First Session, Thirty-eighth Congress, p. 1586-87.