THE REPRESENTATIVE. 85 sounds of peril fill the air? Is he to be dumb, while a thousand duties impel him to raise the cry of alarm? Is he not, rather, to catch the lowest whisper which breathes intention or purpose of encroachment on the public liberties, and to give his voice breath and utterance at the first appearance of danger? Is not his eye to traverse the whole horizon with the keen and eager vision of an unhooded hawk, detecting through all disguises every enemy advancing, in any form, towards the citadel which he guards? Sir, this watchfulness for public liberty, this duty of foreseeing danger and proclaiming it, this promptitude and boldness in resisting attacks on the Constitution from any quarter; this defence of established landmarks, this fearless resistance of whatever would transcend or remove them,— all belong to the representative character, are interwoven with its very nature. The first object of a free people is the preservation of their liberty; and liberty is only to be preserved by maintaining constitutional restraints and just divisions of political power. Nothing is more deceptive or more dangerous than the pretence of a desire to simplify government. The simplest governments are despotisms; the next simplest, limited monarchies; but all republics, all governments of law, must impose numerous limitations and qualifications of authority, and give many positive and many qualified rights. In other words, must be subject to rule and regulations. This is the very essence of free political institutions. The spirit of liberty is indeed a bold and fearless spirit, but it is also a sharp-sighted spirit; it is a cautious, sagacious, discriminating, far-seeing intelligence; it is jealous of encroachment, jealous of power, jealous of man. It demands checks; it seeks for guards; it insists on securities; it intrenches itself behind strong defences, and fortifies itself with all possible care against the assaults of ambition and passion. It does not trust the amiable weaknesses of human nature, and therefore it will not permit power to overstep its prescribed limits, though. benevolence, good intent, and patriotic purpose come along with it. Neither does it satisfy itself with flashy and temporary resistance to illegal authority. Far otherwise. It seeks for duration and permaIt looks before and after; and building on the experience of the ages past, it labors diligently for the benefit of ages to come. This is the nature of constitutional liberty; and this is our liberty, if we will rightly understand and preserve it. nence. "THE NATURAL HATRED OF THE POOR TO THE RICH." DANIEL WEBSTER. SIR, under the cover of the roofs of the capitol, among men sent here to devise means for public safety and the public good, it has been vaunted forth, as matter of boast and triumph, that one cause existed powerful enough to support everything, and to defend everything; and that was, "the natural hatred of the poor to the rich." Sir, I pronounce the author of such sentiments to be guilty of attempting a detestable fraud on the community; a double fraud, a fraud which is to cheat men out of their property, and out of the earnings of their labor, by first cheating them out of their understandings. "The natural hatred of the poor against the rich! "The danger of moneyed aristocracy!" "A power 66 HATRED OF THE POOR TO THE RICH." 87 as great and dangerous as that resisted by the Rev. olution!" "A call to a new Declaration of Independence." Sir, I admonish the people against the objects of outcries like these; I admonish every industrious laborer in the country to be on his guard against such delusions. I tell him the attempt is, to play off his passions against his interests, and to prevail on him, in the name of lib. erty, to destroy all the fruits of liberty; in the name of patriotism, to injure and afflict his country; and in the name of his own independence, to destroy that very independence, and make him a beggar and a slave. Has he a dollar? He is advised to do that which will destroy half its value. Has he hands to labor? Let him rather fold them, and sit still, than be pushed on, by fraud and artifice, to support measures which will render his labor useless and hopeless. Sir, the great interest of this country, the producing cause of all its prosperity, is labor! labor! labor! We are a laboring community. A vast majority of us live by industry and actual occupation, in some of their forms. The Constitution was made to protect this industry, to give it both encouragement and security; but above all, security. To that very end and with that precise object in view, power was given to Congress over the currency, and over the money system of the country. In forty years' experience, we have found nothing at all adequate to the beneficial execution of this trust but a well-conducted national bank. That has been tried, returned to, tried again, and always found successful. If it be not the proper thing for us, let it be soberly argued against; let something better be proposed; let the country examine the matter coolly, and decide for itself. But whoever shall attempt to carry a question of this kind by clamor and violence and prejudice; whoever would rouse the people by appeals, false and fraudulent appeals, to their love of independence, to resist the establishment of a useful institution, because it is a bank, and deals in money, and who artfully urges these appeals, wherever he thinks there is more of honest feeling than of enlightened judgment, — means nothing but deception. And whoever has the wickedness to conceive, and the hardihood to avow, a purpose to break down what has been found, in forty years' experience, essential to the protection of all interests, by arraying one class against another, and by acting on such a principle as that "the poor always hate the rich," shows himself the reckless enemy of all. An enemy to his whole country, to all classes and to every man in it, he deserves to be marked especially as the poor man's curse. THE LOG-CABIN. DANIEL WEBSTER. Ir appears to some persons, that a great deal too much use is made of the symbol of the log-cabin. But it is to be remembered that this matter of the log-cabin originated not with the friends of the Whig candidate, but with his enemies. Soon after William H. Harrison's nomination, a writer in one of the leading administration papers spoke of his "logcabin" and his use of "hard cider," by way of sneer and reproach. The whole party appeared to enjoy it, or at least they countenanced it by silent acquiescence. But it touched a tender point in the public feeling. It naturally aroused indignation. What was intended as reproach was immediately seized on as merit. "Be it so! Be it so!" was the instant THE LOG-CABIN. 66 89 burst of the public voice. "Let him be the logcabin candidate. What you say in scorn we will shout with all our lungs. From this day forward, we have our cry of rally, and we shall see whether he who has dwelt in one of the rude abodes of the West may not become the best house in the country." All this is natural, and springs from sources of just feeling. Other things have had a similar origin. We all know that the term Whig' was bestowed in derision, two hundred years ago, on those who were thought too fond of liberty; and our national air of "Yankee Doodle" was composed by British officers, in ridicule of the American troops. Yet, erelong, the last of the British armies laid down its arms at Yorktown, while this same air was playing in the ears of officers and men. It is only shallow minded pretenders who either make distinguished origin matter of personal merit, or obscure origin matter of personal reproach. Taunt and scoffing at the humble condition of early life affect nobody in this country, but those who are foolish enough to indulge in them, and they are generally sufficiently punished by public rebuke. A man who is not ashamed of himself, need not be ashamed of his early condition. It did not happen to me to be born in a log-cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a logcabin, raised amid the snowdrifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that, when the smoke rose from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills, there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it, to teach them the hardships endured by the generations that have gone before them. I love to dwell on the |