is this I use his language: "That clause vests in the Congress of the United States a plenary, supreme, unlimited political jurisdiction, paramount over courts, subject only to the judgment of the people of the United States, embracing within its scope every legislative measure necessary and proper to make it effectual; and what is necessary and proper the constitution refers in the first place to our judgment, subject to no revision but that of the people."

The gentleman states his case too strongly. The duty imposed on Congress is doubtless important, but Congress has no right to use a means of performing it forbidden by the constitution, no matter how necessary or proper it might be thought to be. But, sir, this doctrine is monstrous. It has no foundation in the constitution. It subjects all the States to the will of Congress; it places their institutions at the feet of Congress. It creates in Congress an absolute, unqualified despotism. It asserts the power of Congress in changing the State governments to be "plenary, supreme, unlimited," "subject only to revision by the people of the United States." The rights of the people of the State are nothing; their will is nothing. Congress first decides; the people of the whole Union revise. My own State of Ohio is liable at any moment to be called in question for her constitution. She does not permit negroes to vote. If this doctrine be true, Congress may decide that this exclusion is anti-republican, and by force of arms abrogate that constitution and set up another, permitting negroes to vote. From that decision of Congress there is no appeal to the people of Ohio, but only to the people of New York and Massachusetts and Wisconsin, at the election of representatives, and, if a majority cannot be elected to reverse the decision, the people of Ohio must submit. Woe be to the day when that doctrine shall be established,

for from its centralized despotism we will appeal to the sword!

Sir, the rights of the States were the foundation corners of the confederation. The constitution recognized them, maintained them, provided for their perpetuation. Our fathers thought them the safeguard of our liberties. They have proved so. They have reconciled liberty with empire; they have reconciled the freedom of the individual with the increase of our magnificent domain. They are the test, the touchstone, the security of our liberties. This bill, and the avowed doctrine of its supporters, sweeps them all instantly away. It substitutes despotism for self-government-despotism the more severe because vested in a numerous Congress elected by a people who may not feel the exercise of its power. It subverts the government, destroys the confederation, and erects a tyranny on the ruins of republican governments. It creates unity it destroys liberty; it maintains integrity of territory, but destroys the rights of the citizen.

Sir, if this be the alternative of secession I prefer that secession should succeed. I should prefer to have the Union dissolved, the Confederate States recognized; nay, more, I should prefer that secession should go on, if need be, until each State resumes its complete independence. I should prefer thirty-four republics to one despotism. From such republics, while I might fear discord and wars, I would enjoy individual liberty, and hope for a reunion on the true principles of confederation.

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LAMAR

UCIUS QUINTUS CURTIUS LAMAR, an American jurist, the son of a Georgia jurist of the same name, was born in Jasper county, Georgia, September 1, 1825. He was educated at Emory College in his native State, studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1847. For a short time he taught mathematics in the University of Mississippi, and then settling in Covington, Georgia, practised his profession there for a few years. He sat in the Georgia legislature in 1853 and then returned to Mississippi and entered Congress as representative from that State in 1857. Resigning his seat after the ordinance of secession was passed by Mississippi, he entered the Confederate army as colonel of a Mississippi regiment, and soon after the close of the war he became a professor of political economy in the State University. After a few years he resigned this post, and in 1872 was elected to Congress, serving as representative till 1877, when he entered the Senate. He was not a frequent speaker in Congress, but always eloquent and effective. In March, 1885, he was appointed secretary of the interior in President Cleveland's cabinet, resigning in 1888 in order to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He died at Macon, Georgia, January 23, 1898. Lamar was a man of independent action, and his uncompromising stand against inflation of the national currency gave great offence in his State, the legislature of which instructed him to use his influence and vote against the principles he had hitherto held or resign his seat. Lamar refused to do either, and, defending his position in an eloquent speech before the Senate, received the approbation of men of both parties for his independent attitude. Among other noted oratorical efforts of his may be mentioned the eulogy which he delivered upon Charles Sumner April 27, 1874.

EULOGY OF CHARLES SUMNER

DELIVERED IN THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, APRIL 27, 1874

R. SPEAKER,-In rising to second the resolutions just offered, I desire to add a few remarks which

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have occurred to me as appropriate to the occasion. I believe that they express a sentiment which pervades the hearts of all the people whose representatives are here assembled. Strange as in looking back upon the past the assertion may seem, impossible as it would have been ten

years ago to make it, it is not the less true that to-day Mississippi regrets the death of Charles Sumner and sincerely unites in paying honors to his memory.

Not because of the splendor of his intellect, though in him was extinguished one of the brightest of the lights which have illustrated the councils of the government for nearly a quarter of a century; not because of the high culture, the elegant scholarship, and the varied learning which revealed themselves so clearly in all his public efforts as to justify the application to him of Johnson's felicitous expression, "he touched nothing which he did not adorn;" not this, though these are qualities by no means, it is to be feared, so common in public places as to make their disappearance, in even a single instance, a matter of indifference; but because of those peculiar and strongly marked moral traits of his character which gave the coloring to the whole tenor of his singularly dramatic public career; traits which made him for a long period to a large portion of his countrymen the object of as deep and passionate a hostility as to another he was one of enthusiastic admiration, and which are not the less the cause that now unites all these parties, ever so widely differing, in a common sorrow to-day over his lifeless remains.

It is of these high moral qualities which I wish to speak; for these have been the traits which in after years, as I have considered the successive acts and utterances of this remarkable man, fastened most strongly my attention, and impressed themselves most forcibly upon my imagination, my sensibilities, my heart. I leave to others to speak of his intellectual superiority, of those rare gifts with which nature had so lavishly endowed him, and of the power to use them which he had acquired by education. I say nothing of his vast and varied stores of historical knowledge, or of the wide extent

of his reading in the elegant literature of ancient and modern times, or of his wonderful power of retaining what he had read, or of his readiness in drawing upon these fertile resources to illustrate his own arguments. I say nothing of his eloquence as an orator, of his skill as a logician, or of his powers of fascination in the unrestrained freedom of the social circle, which last it was my misfortune not to have experienced. These, indeed, were the qualities which gave him eminence not only in our country but throughout the world; and which have made the name of Charles Sumner an integral part of our nation's glory. They were the qualities which gave to those moral traits of which I have spoken the power to impress themselves upon the history of the age and of civilization itself; and without which those traits, however intensely developed, would have exerted no influence beyond the personal circle immediately surrounding their possessor. More eloquent tongues than mine will do them justice. Let me speak of the characteristics which brought the illustrious senator who has just passed away into direct and bitter antagonism for years with my own State and her sister States of the South.

Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom, and was educated from his earliest infancy to the belief that freedom is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligent being having the outward form of man. In him in fact this creed seems to have been something more than a doctrine imbibed from teachers, or a result of education. To him it was a grand intuitive truth inscribed in blazing letters upon the tablet of his inner consciousness, to deny which would have been for him to deny that he himself existed. And along with this all-controlling love of freedom, he possessed a moral sensibility keenly intense and vivid, a