without the slightest approach to mockmodesty, or sentimentality. The work reminds me frequently of passages in Rousseau's Confessions, and in the New Heloise, not that I mean to say that Lamartine has copied in the slightest degree from Rousseau, but from the very nature of his subject it brings to mind that eloquent and impassioned writer. This work, like every other work of genius, will have sincere admirers, and others will sincerely dislike it. How few persons admire Milton or Sterne's writings and I have never known an individual, who did not either relish them thoroughly, or not at all. How strongly Lamartine depicts the selfishness and vanity of youth! The story of Graziella is full of instruction. Every young man trifles with the feelings of woman, and after gaining her affections, he leaves her and flies to some other flower to rifle it of its sweetness. With such an one, the heart soon becomes petrified, the punishment arrives-the wheel comes full circle home --and the heart can neither love, nor is beloved. Ah! how delightful is the first dawn of love, when we meet with some fair young creature, whether flaxen-haired and blue-eyed-or with locks black as the raven and eyes dark as night; when our hearts throb at her approach, and the words stick in the throat-when she is our sole thought, and we think of her by day and dream of her by night; and as the love progresses and deepens, strolls are taken in quiet and out of the way places, by the side of woods where you hear the leaves murmuring praise or in the city, her hand clasped in yours, and you so full of happiness, that it seems as if heaven had descended on the earth; or you go to her home, the hour of parting will come, (and how fondly it is delayed,) and then there

is the leave-taking at the door, your arm around her waist, and you feel her ringlets against your cheeks, and feel the throbbing of her heart, and the moon is pouring down its calm, sad light, or the streets are covered with snow and ice—it is all the same to a lover-and you press repeated kisses "on her rich red lip, until the color. flies," the door closes behind you; you are too full of happiness to go home and sleep; you wander around for a time, but your feet instinctively turn to her dwelling, and you look up at her window, to see her moving about the room, or to behold her shadow on the wall. Ah, the pity that man should be ashamed of such feelings, which ought to be his pride and delight! Ah, Graziella, would that I could have seen thee listening to the reading of Paul and Virginia, or polishing coral, to give thee some slender means of aiding thy little brothers; or see thee coming from church, and among the crowd singling out thy lover; or to have heard thee utter, "I love you, I love you, I love you!" or when you were fading away,

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and the mild thread that held your heart was breaking"-to have beheld the expression of thy face, when writing thy last letter to him who was far away, Oh, if you were here, I should still live!" If it should ever be my good fortune to visit Naples, to look on the isles of Ischia and Procida, thy form, Graziella, would beautify the scene, thy image would be present to me, thy voice sound like music in my ears, adding grace and loveliness to that divinest of climates. Farewell, Graziella! if no pilgrim can visit thy tomb, the genius of thy young lover is now wafting thy name with blessings from "Indus to the pole,"

GENTLEMEN OF THE SOUTH :

The question which affects your present comfort, and your prosperity in future, more nearly than any other, has become, in a manner and with a suddenness wholly unexpected, the leading and organizing question, or test question, in the Northern section of the opposition. The movements of the leaders of the Northern and Western divisions of that party have been such as will give at last an unequivocal and decided majority of votes against the principles and the measures of Mr. Calhoun and his friends. The nature of the question at issue forbids the indulgence of a hope, in their minds, that the advocates of the extension and permanent establishment of slavery will ever rule as they have sometimes ruled, in the councils of the nation. Between them and radical democracy, the union was always a forced and unnatural union. They came together on a ground of mutual service, and a division of power and profit, and never upon a ground of principle. Their union is dissolved, and henceforth we must expect a new order of things. On that order depends your safety and your dignity in the coming times of the republic. It invites your wise and calm consideration. Your action in view of it decides your fate; it makes or mars you.

Perhaps, estimating the future by the past, you will rely upon the continuance of those causes which bound the Southern and the Northern democracy together. But that were a grievous oversight; the causes no longer exist. The friendships are dissolved; the league of interest, maintained only by a common possession of power, is broken by the loss of that power. Northern radicalism allied itself with the Southern slave power only while it felt the need of that power.

Let us examine the real grounds of that alliance.

The anti-tariff opposition in the South arose from two causes: the reluctance of Southern proprietors to pay taxes for the maintenance of manufactures in New England, and their attendant jealousy of the fast increasing wealth and democratic equality of the Northern people. These were, and still continue to be, the grand reasons of the southern opposition to Mr. Clay's American system. I do not mean at present to enter upon any discussion of the justice of those grounds; enough that they existed, and still continue to exist, as a political element, and of value sufficient for the organization of a powerful party.

The grounds of the Southern opposition to banks and to the system of internal improvements, were founded in a similar jealousy and reluctance. The reluctance and the jealousy came first, the invention of arguments to sustain them followed as a matter of course, and of necessity; under a constitutional government the opposition will always invent or discover constitutional arguments.

the opposing body. The elements of that body were simple. On the one side a mass of ignorance and struggling penury, the old fast-failing agricultural interest of the North, crushed by Western competition, and jealous of the rising prosperity and power of the myriads of manufacturers, springing up in villages, and by watercourses among their starved and weedy farms. Ascribing their own miseries to the happiness of those around them, instead of finding its cause in the competition of the great West, they took refuge in theory, and reasoned in the same vein, though in a more humble fashion, with the rich slaveholder; contending that it was an injustice to tax their poverty for the maintenance of a system which made other men rich, and never considering how much greater an injustice it would be to have kept an entire nation poor and dependent, and to have cut off the hope of posterity, by denying industry and enterprise their lawful protection.

On the other side stood the importers, with their arguments for free trade, and the rich farmers of the West, who dreamed of a foreign market, and saw no reason why they should pay highly for cloths and cutlery, to keep up the wealth and industry of the Eastern towns. If New England and Pennsylvania could not live by farming, why, God help them! they would not. Thus, in the natural order of men's thoughts, they adopted a theory of free trade, and by a word of four letters, the little word free, carried half the country with them. England, who by free trade would destroy or suppress the commerce, the agriculture, and the inventive industry of all the world, had the ear of the nation, and through her magazines and newspapers, put a weapon of theory in the hands of every opposer.

In the South it was capital and aristocracy that naturally opposed the American system; in the North it was poverty and numbers. And thus by a forced combination, political extremes met, and Tammany Hall shook hands with the Charleston aristocrats.

The poorer population of the South, unable to engage in commerce for want of capital, and prevented by a just and natural pride from mingling their labor with that of slaves in agriculture, remained

without employment. The enlightened and intelligent Whig statesmen of Georgia contended long with the prejudices of their fellow-citizens, for the establishment of manufactures, to give employment to these unfortunate people. They, indeed, were not sufficiently enlightened to know their own interests. They knew nothing, and could predict nothing. The powerful sympathy which binds together common employments and common interests, was not yet awakened in them to promote a feeling of community and brotherhood with the Northern operatives. They were a silent and an inefficient population, without power, and without hope, living almost a barbarous life. Like the broken farmers of New England, they needed, but had not the energy or the knowledge to provide, a new employment for themselves or their children. The cheap products of the West had impoverished the farmers of Connecticut and Massachusetts; the monopoly of farm labor by negroes had reduced the sand-hillers and poor countrymen of the South to a still more hopeless destitution. For the salvation of both, manufactures were established. In the South, indeed, they have but just begun, but the benefit of the new order of things is so sensibly felt in Georgia, and elsewhere-a great part of the manufactured cottons of that State being already supplied by the labor of her own citizens-it is certain that a strong Whig interest, a new political element, must soon be created there, as in New England, by the mere increase of the free working population, and the accumulation of wealth by artisans and those who employ them. That these classes will increase with great rapidity there can be no doubt. Villages composed entirely of operatives and their employers have already sprung up in Georgia and South Carolina. The prejudices among the poorer whites against this kind of labor are fast vanishing. are fast vanishing. It is not impossible that these States will by and by produce a larger quantity of cotton fabrics and at a lower cost than are now made in Massachusetts. By the Oregon railroad, now in contemplation, connected by branch roads, from Mobile to the foot of Lake Michigan, they will send cottons to Asia at a less cost than from Massachusetts. No man can deny the speedy possibility

of such an event, and the consequent creation in the Southern States of a counterbalancing population, opposed in prejudice and interest to the present political domination of the South.

With these facts, as with the disposition of parties in general, every Southerner is of course familiar. It is not so much to the facts themselves that I wish to call your attention, as to the manner in which they affect a disinterested observer. Is it to be doubted that this growing free population, and the powerful moneyed interest which sustains it, will be opposed in spirit to the institutions of slavery? Is it to be doubted that the vast body of Southern intellect and philanthropy desires an amelioration of those institutions? Does any Southerner, at all versed in the science of political economy, or who has seen with his own eyes the wealth of New England, the happiness and comfort of her people, doubt for a moment the desirableness of establishing a new order of things, a new and more creditable means of employing labor and capital. A free population not only produce, but they consume three times the amount, man for man, that is produced and consumed by a slave population. By creating a free population of white laborers in the South, a vast addition is made to the wealth of the South. Corn and cotton grow side by side in Georgia. You have but to build a mill, and invite a few miserable, halfstarved sand-hillers to work in it, and you have provided a home-market for your corn and your cotton, and soon you have in addition the profits of a boundless foreign market for cloth, which is a product of corn and cotton, of laborer's food and laborer's material. This, surely, is better than sending corn and cotton to England, and paying English manufacturers for having it there converted into cloth!

Let us, then, regarding only the inevitable tendency of things, and relying upon right reason, dismiss, if possible, those hot and crooked prejudices, those personal piques and State jealousies which have so long obscured our vision and biassed our judgment. Abolitionism in the North has leagued itself with radical democracy. That is the great fact of the age. Radical democracy is probably stronger in consequence.

It needed to have a new life infused into it. At a recent meeting of abolitionists in Massachusetts, the American flag was intentionally excluded from the hustings. Abolitionists denounce and defy the Union and the Constitution, because they defend your sovereignty, and keep off the meddling fingers of national reformers from your institutions. And you, too, are democrats! Faith! your devotion to democracy is great. We commend your political insight.

Let the desperate and dying organs of the old party tell you what they may, it is radical democracy which means to crush you, and will do it, too, if you continue to support that faction.

Mr. Van Buren, the head and heart of the old faction, was the head also of the political anti-slavery movement. Since the last election, Mr. Van Buren has not changed his ground. The entire North, Whigs and democrats, are opposed to slavery extension; the Whigs have uniformly opposed it, and will continue to do so. It is certain, that the majority of Whigs in the North and West, as well as the majority of democrats, desire the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. I believe the South would reap a great benefit from that measure, and that her true policy will be to take the matter into her own hands, and be the first to propose the abolition.

The North and West are opposed, en masse, to the extension of slavery. The weight of American opinion, five to one, is against it. It is not a question of Whig or democrat, it is a grand national policy; a necessity of the times. It is idle to contend against it.

Observe the tendency of all popular measures of reform, especially when they have a religious and a moral sanction. That tendency is toward extremes, toward violent and arbitrary measures. Moral fanaticism, on a democratic basis, cannot stop short of a total destruction of all institutions that have grown out of the past. Professing to confer liberty, it subdues the very souls of men. The liberties of States are quite too abstract a fiction of law to be discerned by its gross and muddy vision. Esteeming constitutions to be things easily constructed, it has no

hesitation in destroying them. Its leaders identify the State with their own persons, and they therefore willingly renounce the acts and the debts of their predecessors. Debts which they did not contract, they do not feel bound to pay. Are not we the government, (they say, inwardly,) what then have we to do with our predecessors, or their deeds?

Greatly would any man err at this day, who should assume that the democratic tendencies of modern society are to lead only to good. That that vigilance of which Jefferson speaks when he declares that it is the price of liberty, is a vigilant suppression of every generous and proud sentiment, of every effort of the individual

to shake off the domination of the mass. I believe you will not contradict me when I say that republicanism is the effort of the individual to free himself, in his own personality and independently of all others, from the oppressions of party, the fear of society, and the terror of one or of a number. The entire system of our government is clearly founded in a declaration of individual liberty, a declaration which those only can read intelligently to whom Heaven has granted a real independence. A republican soldier, while he fights in rank, fights in his own behalf-he fights not for king or council. Hence the military prowess and invincible valor of republics. Societies constructed upon this principle are properly self-governed, and their governments are called "agency governments." The laws which they impose are made by the wisdom, not by the will, of their legislative bodies, under the mighty guardianship and enforcement of a constitution which annihilates individual domination, and for oligarchy and autocracy substitutes the acknowledged rights and necessities of the people. This is conservative Whig doctrine, as I understand it.

But perhaps you will say that all this is irrelevant that the doctrine is universally acknowledged, and that to dwell upon it as a party argument were a waste of time and of logic. I will endeavor to show you the contrary.

A Constitution is a body of laws established by the entire mass of the people it is the result of the entire moral power and wisdom of the nation. Whatever gov

erning or deliberative power may exist in the body of the population, is brought to bear for the establishment, during several ages, of a constitutional government. The pride and enthusiasm of the softer sex has a powerful share in it.. Mothers teach their children to revere and love the work of their fathers. A veneration for it is blended with the sentiments of piety, and the equally powerful passions of patriotism. It receives the homage due to holy writ, and has a veritable power of sanctity. The people think of it as of a heavenly decree. It is a work of ancient wisdom, and established by the continued felicity of the Republic, under its beneficent sway, through a series of generations. If we wish to know what it has done for us, we have only to compare our condition with that of other nations, devoid of constitutions; which, indeed, have no efficacy, I might have said no existence, until they are written in the hearts of the people. Constitutions are not established when they are first enacted; their establishment is a work of time. Three generations of men should perhaps have passed away since their enactment, before they can command our undoubting admiration.

The venerable work of our fathers guarranties to you the management of your own governments; it guaranties to every State the management of its own affairs; it attributes a limited sovereignty to every citizen, and a limited sovereignty to every constituted State; and if the first aim of its founders was the establishment of the one, their second but not less important was the establishment of the other. Free men and free sovereignties-the individual shall be absolute master in his acknowledged private and political sphere; the State shall be absolute master in hers, with this sole reservation that she shall not wrest his freedom from the citizenfor it is never to be forgotten that the constitution guaranties to every State, against all the world, a republican form of government. This guaranty establishes forever the liberty of the citizen against faction and oppression in his own State, and entitles him while he lives to the protection of the Union; he cannot be withdrawn from this protection.

From these profound principles arises the stable edifice of the Union. It is to