POPULAR ELECTIONS.

SIR, if there is any spectacle from the contemplation of which I would shrink with peculiar horror, it would be that of the great mass of the American people sunk into a profound apathy on the subject of their highest political interests. Such a spectacle would be more protentious to the eye of intelligent patriotisin than all the monsters of the earth, and fiery signs of the heavens, to the eye of trembling superstition. If the people could be indifferent to the fate of a contest for the presidency, they would be unworthy of freedom. If I were to perceive them sinking into this apathy, I would even apply the power of political galvanism, if such a power could be found, to rouse them from their fatal lethargy. Keep the people quiet! Peace! peace! Such are the whispers by which the people are to be lulled to sleep, in the very crisis of their highest concerns. Sir, "you make a solitude, and call it peace!" Peace? 'Tis death! Take away all interest from the people, in the election of their chief ruler, and liberty is no more. What, sir, is to be the consequence? If the people do not elect the president, somebody must. There is no special providence to decide the question. Who, then, is to make the election, and how will it operate? You throw a general paralysis over the body politic, and excite a morbid action in particular members. The general patriotic excitement of the people, in relation to the election of the president, is as essential to the health and energy of the political system, as circulation of the blood is to the health and energy of the natural body. Check that circulation, and you inevitably produce local inflammation, gangrene, and ultimately death. Make the people indif ferent, destroy their legitimate influence, and you communicate a morbid violence to the efforts of those who are ever ready to assume the control of such affairs- the mercenary intriguers and interested office-hunters of the country. Tell me not, sir, of popular violence! Show me a hundred political factionists men who look to the election of a president as the means of gratifying their high or their low ambition and I will show you the very materials for a mob; ready for any desperate adventue connected with their common fortunes. The reason of this extra ordinary excitement is obvious. It is a matter of self-interest, of personal ambition. The people can have no such motives They look only to the interest and glory of the country.

GEORGE M'DUFFIE

THE MEXICAN WAR.

I ASK, Mr. President, what has Mexico got from you for parting with two-thirds of her domain? She has given you ample redress for every injury of which you have complained. She has submitted to the award of your commissioners, and up to the time of the rupture with Texas, faithfully paid it. And for all that she has lost (not through or by you, but which loss has been your gain,) what requital do we, her strong, rich, robust neighbor, make? Do we send our missionaries there, "to point the way to heaven?” Or do we send the school. masters to pour daylight into her dark places, to aid her infant strength to conquer freedom, and reap the fruit of the independ ence herself alone had won? No, no; none of this do we. But we send regiments, storm towns, and our colonels prate of liberty in the midst of the solitudes their ravages have made. They proclaim the empty forms of social compact to a people bleeding and maimed with wounds received in defending their hearth-stones against the invasion of these very men who shoot them down, and then exhort them to be free. Your chaplain of the navy throws aside the New Testament and seizes à bill of rights. He takes military possession of some town in California, and instead of teaching the plan of the atonement and the way of salvation to the poor, ignorant Celt, he presents Colt's pistol to his ear, and calls on him to take "trial by jury and habeas corpus, or nine bullets in his head. Oh! Mr. President, are you not the lights of the earth, if not its salt?

What is the territory, Mr. President, which you propose to wrest from Mexico? It is consecrated to the heart of the Mexican by many a well-fought battle with his old Castilian master. His Bunker Hills, and Saratogas, and Yorktowns are there! The Mexican can say, "There I bled for liberty! and shall I surrender that consecrated home of my affections to the AngloSaxon invaders ? What do they want with it? They have Texas already. They have possessed themselves of the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. What else do they want? To what shall I point my children as memorials of that independence which I bequeath to them, when those battle-fields shall have passed from my possession?

Sir, had one come and demanded Bunker Hill of the people of Massachusetts- had England's lion ever showed himself there, is there a man over thirteen and under ninety who would not have been ready to meet him? is there a river on this continent that would not have run red with blood?-is there a field

but would have been piled high with the unburied bones of slaughtered Americans, before these consecrated battle-fields of liberty should have been wrested from us?

THOMAS CORWIN.

PHILLIPS ON AMERICA.

IF, as a man, I venerate the mention of America, what mus. be my feelings toward her as an Irishman. Never, oh, never, while memory remains, can Ireland forget the home of her emigrant, and the asylum of her exile. No matter whether their sorrows sprung from the errors of enthusiasm, or the realities of suffering, from fancy or infliction; that must be reserved for the scrutiny of those whom the lapse of time shall acquit of partiality. It is for the men of other ages to investigate and record it; but surely it is for the men of every age to hail the hospitality that received the shelterless, and love the feeling that befriended the unfortunate. Search creation round, where can you find a country that presents so sublime a view, so interesting an anticipation? What noble institutions! What a comprehensive policy! What a wise equalization of every political advantage! The oppressed of all countries, the martyrs of every creed, the innocent victim of despotic arrogance or superstitious frenzy, may there find refuge; his industry encouraged, his piety respected, his ambition animated; with no restraint, but those laws which are the same to all, and no distinction but that which his merit may originate. Who can deny that the existence of such a country presents a subject for human congratulation! Who can deny, that its gigantic advancement offers a field for the most rational conjecture! At the end of the very next century, if she proceeds as she seems to promise, what a wondrous spectacle may she not exhibit! Who shall say for what purpose a mysterious Providence may not have designed her! Who shall say, that when, in its follies or its crimes, the old world may have interred all the pride of its power, and all the pomp of its civilization, human nature may not find its destined renovation in the new! For myself, I have no doubt of it. I have not the least doubt, that when our temples and our trophies shall have mouldered into dust- when the glories of our name shall be but the legend of tradition, and the light of our achievements only live in song; philosophy will rise again in the sky of her Franklin, and glory rekindle at the wn of het Washington.

ADAMS AND JEFFERSON.

No, fellow-citizens, we dismiss not Adams and Jefferson to the chambers of forgetfulness and death. What we admired, and prized, and venerated in them can never die, nor, dying, be forgotten. I had almost said that they are now beginning to live; to live that life of unimpaired influence, of unclouded fame, of unmingled happiness, for which their talents, and services were destined. They were of the select few, the least portion of whose life dwells in their physical existence; whose hearts have watched while their senses slept; whose souls have grown up into a higher being; whose pleasure is to be useful, whose wealth is an unblemished reputation; who respire the breath of honorable fame; who have deliberately and consciously put what is called life to hazard, that they may live in the hearts of those who come after. Such men do not, cannot die. To be cold, and motionless, and breathless; to feel not and speak not; this is not the end of existence to the men who have breathed their spirits into the institutions of their country, who have stamped their characters on the pillars of the age, who have poured their hearts' blood into the channels of the public prosperity. Tell me, ye who tread the sods of yon sacred hight, is Warren dead? Can you not still see him, not pale and prostrate, the blood of his gallant heart pouring out of his ghastly wound, but moving resplendent over the field of honor, with the rose of heaven upon his cheek, and the fire of liberty in his eye? Tell me, ye who make your pious pilgrimage to the shades of Vernon, is Washington indeed shut up in that cold and narrow house? That which made these men, and men like these, cannot die. The hand that traced the charter of independence is indeed motionless, the eloquent lips that sustained it are hushed; but the lofty spirits that conceived, resolved, matured, maintained it, and which alone, to such men, "make it life to live," these cannot expire:

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These shall resist the empire of decay,

When time is o'er, and worlds have passed away :
Cold in the dust the perished heart may lie,
But that which warmed it once can never die."

EDWARD EVERET

MOLOCH'S ORATION FOR WAR.

My sentence is for open war; of wiles,

More unexpert, I boast not; them let those

Contrive who need; or when they need; not now.

For while they sit contriving, shall the rest,
Millions that stand in arms, and longing wait
The signal to ascend, sit lingering here
Heaven's fugitives, and for their dwelling-place
Accept this dark opprobrious den of shame,
The prison of his tyranny who reigns

By our delay! No, - rather let us choose,
Armed with hell-flames and fury, all at once
O'er heaven's high towers to force resistless way,
Turning our tortures into horrid arms

Against the torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his almighty engine he shall hear
Infernal thunder; and, for lightning, see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his angels; and his throne itself
Mixed with Tartarean sulphur, and strange fire,
His own invented torments. -But perhaps
The way seems difficult, and steep to scale
With upright wing against a higher foe.
Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful lake benumb not still,
That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat: descent and fall
To us is adverse. Who but felt of late,
When the fierce foe hung on our broken rear
Insulting, and pursued us through the deep,
With what compulsion and laborious fight
We sunk thus low! The ascent is easy then:
The event is feared:- should we again provoke
Our stronger, some worse way his wrath may find
To our destruction; if there be in hell

Fear to be worse destroyed. What can be worse
Than to dwell here, driven out from bliss, condemned
In this abhorred deep to utter woe.

MILTON

CASSIUS INSTIGATING BRUTUS AGAINST CÆSAR

HONOR is the subject of my story —

I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but for my single self,
I had as lief not be, as live to be
In awe of such a thing as myself.
I was born free as Cæsar; so were you;