of denunciation of the motives, character, and policy of the opposite sections of the Union, and of all at home who are suspected of having any charity or sympathy with their fellowcitizens at a distance. This, sir, is what grieves and alarms me. Why, if the several portions of the country belonged to different nations; if they were alien in language, in religion, and in race; if they were sworn, like Hannibal at the altar, to wage a war of destruction against each other, they could not use stronger or more bitter language than I have read within a few weeks by men, both at the North and the South, who entertain extreme opinions on the agitating subjects of the day. I say it is this which gives me the greatest alarm for the continuance of the Union. The outward facts are but the manifestation of the spirit of disaffection and bitterness which, if not checked, sooner or later, or rather very soon, will cause the Union to crumble.

I am not an alarmist, I never have been. If I may allude to a matter so unimportant, I would say that, in all my addresses to the public, I have ever looked on the bright side in reference to the future of America. But if there is to be no relaxation of those unkind feelings between the different sections of the country, if men will not make up their minds to live in good feeling and good faith under the constitution and the laws, that constitution which was framed by our fathers, as good, as wise, as patriotic as ourselves, and under which the country has enjoyed a degree of prosperity unexampled in the world; if they will go on indulging this fierce spirit of mutual hostility, it will, at no distant day, result in a separation of the States, to be followed by a war, or rather a series of wars, which will change the aspect of this country, and injuriously affect the cause of constitutional liberty forever. For I regard it as demonstrable that, in the event of a separation, as certainly as the sun will set in the west, the sun of the republic will go down from the meridian and set in blood. I know that some persons of sanguine temperament, dallying, as I think, unwarrantably with these dreadful futurities, have persuaded themselves that it would only be a change of two confederacies instead of one, and that in

other respects all would go on much as it did before. Sir, I am very loath to enter into any speculations of this kind, on one side or the other; but, in my humble judgment, there will not be two confederacies, nor eventually any confederacies, but as many despotic governments as, in the chances of conquest and reconquest, military chieftains may be able and willing to establish. Let Germany teach us. How did she come

out of the chaos of the dark ages, after a thousand years of internecine war? Did she come out of it with two or three confederacies? She counted more than three hundred independent principalities, as they called themselves, but all lying at the mercy of the nearest despot and the strongest army.

I presume not to look into that dark abyss. I turn from it with the same horror, a thousand fold increased, that I felt when in my youth I was surprised on the black and calcined edge of the crater of Vesuvius, while the sides of the mountain were already quivering with the convulsive throes of an approaching eruption. To attempt to give form and outline, to measure the force, to calculate the direction of the molten elements, boiling and bellowing in the fiery depth below, and just ready to be let loose by the hand of God on their pathway of destruction, would be as unavailing and presumptuous in the political as in the natural world. One thing, however, I think is certain. We talk of the separation of these States, assuming that they would still, in other respects, remain the States which they now are; but I think it is certain as demonstration, that their ancient boundaries, founded, in many cases, not at all on features of physical geography, running as they do in open defiance of the mountains and rivers, drawn without the slightest regard to military defence, as if it were the design of Providence that we should be bound together, not by material ligatures, but by the cords of love, boundaries resting on charters, on prescription and agreement, and rendered at last sacred by the constitution and Union of the United States, I think it certain that some of those boundaries would fall the first sacrifice to a separation of the Union. Do you suppose, Mr. Chairman, that thirty-one States, when the constitutional ties which now bind them are broken, and

when a new scramble for separate power shall begin, are going to pay regard to those unseen and mystical intrenchments, within which stout little Rhode Island, in comparison with some other States, rather a cornfield or a flower-garden than a State,-lies as safely fortified as your own imperial New York, which holds the Hudson in the hollow of her hand, and extends her colossal limbs from the lakes to the ocean? When the Union is dissolved, do you think that holy constitutional spell will remain unbroken, which prevents your powerful neighbor, Pennsylvania, enthroned upon the Alleghanies, with the broad Susquehannah for her sparkling cincture, and the twin tributaries of the Ohio for the silver fillets of her temples, from raising so much as a finger against gallant little Delaware, which nestles securely within the fringes of the gorgeous robe of her queenly sister?

Before the revolution there were controversies on the subject of boundary between many of the conterminous States. They were adjudicated by the Privy Council, often arbitrarily enough, generally against the larger and in favor of the weaker colonies. But the decision executed itself. Pacis imponere morem was the motto of the home government. They decided as they pleased. If the colonies liked the decision it was well; if they did not they might do something else, for which there is a homely word, which I will not repeat. When the royal government was thrown off, some of these controversies survived and some new ones sprung up. There had been, or were, disputes between Pennsylvania and Virginia, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts, Massachusetts and all the other New England colonies. But first, the old confederation, with its tribunals, (such as they were,) and then still more, the happy constitution of 1789, breathed their vitality and power into the ancient muniments of the land. Disputes were settled, controversies adjusted. The genius of the Union, with the law of the land in the right hand and the law of love in the left, perambulated (to use the surveyor's expression) the lines between border States, and discord ceased. But, gentlemen, if

you divide this Union, if you take from these boundaries the character of constitutional security which is attached to them in the way I have described, what then is to happen? When the constitution shall be swept away; when the States shall start on a new career of selfish and ambitious ascendency, inflamed by the passions invariably raging at such times between border governments, they will not be held back by parchment titles proceeding from dead kings and queens of England, whose bones for two hundred years have been huddled up in the crypts of Westminster Abbey. When I was in London a few years ago, I was instructed to procure a copy of a patent granted by the Duke of York, afterwards James II., to be used in a controversy between New Jersey and Delaware, about Pea Patch Island, of which, I suppose, you have all heard. I also had to procure a large folio volume of documents from the Royal State Paper Office, to be used in a controversy between my own State of Massachusetts and Rhode Island as to boundary, which ran back to the charter of 1629, and which, whether it is settled at the present day, I am ashamed to say I do not certainly know. And now, sir, when this family of States, no, not family of States, (for we are going to reject that kindly name and the blessed thing it expresses,) but when this group of hostile and rival States shall rush forth against each other, with hostile projects and heated passions, on a new political career, can their hands be kept from each others' throats by dusty parchments, signed by hands which are themselves long since turned to dust? When we have repudiated our Madison and Hamilton, yes, sir, your Hamilton; when we have repudiated their work, I don't think we shall pay superstitious deference to the work of Charles, and James, and Elizabeth. When we have turned a deaf ear to the voice of Washington, and Adams, and Jefferson, and Franklin, the Moses and the prophets of our political dispensation, do you think we are going to permit a creature like the Duke of York, whom his own people, aye, his own daughters, drove with scorn from the throne, to rise from the dead after two hundred years and govern us by a paper sceptre ?

Then, gentlemen, as to the Supreme Court of the United States. I do not know what others may think on the subject, but for myself, sir, (addressed to Chancellor Walworth, who sat by Mr. Everett's side,) I will say, that if all the labors, the sacrifices, and the waste of treasure and blood, from the first landing at Jamestown or Plymouth, were to give us nothing else but the Supreme Court of the United States, this revered tribunal for the settlement of international disputes, (for such it may be called,) I should say the sacrifice was well made. I have trodden with emotion the threshold of Westminster Hall and of the Palace of Justice in France; I thought with respect of a long line of illustrious chancellors and judges, surrounded with the insignia of office, clothed in scarlet and ermine, who within these ancient halls have, without fear or favor, administered justice between powerful litigants. But it is with deeper emotions of reverence, it is with something like awe, that I have entered the Supreme Court at Washington. Not that I have there heard strains. of forensic eloquence rarely equalled, never surpassed, from the Wirts, the Pinkneys, and the Websters; but because I have seen there a bright display of the perfection of the moral sublime in human affairs. I have witnessed, how from the low, dark bench, destitute of the emblems of power, from the lips of some grave and venerable magistrate, to whom years and grey hairs could add no new titles to respect, (I need write no name under that portrait,) the voice of justice and equity has gone forth to the most powerful States of the Union, administering the law between citizens of independent States, settling dangerous controversies, adjusting disputed boundaries, annulling unconstitutional laws, reversing erroneous decisions, and, with a few mild words of judicial wisdom, disposing of questions a hundred fold more important than those which, within the past year, from the plains of Holstein, have shaken the pillars of continental Europe, and all but brought a million of men into deadly conflict with each other.

When the Union is broken, when the States are separated, what is to become of your Supreme Court? How then are