THE ZERO LINE OF VALOR. 139 never return, to give peace to our conscience. We shall then endeavor to stifle our convictions, by empty honors to their bones. We shall raise high the monument, and trumpet loud their deeds, but it will be all in vain. It canuot warm the hearts which shall have sunk cold and comfortless to the earth. This is no illusion. How often do we see, in our public Gazettes, a pompous display of honors to the memory of some veteran patriot, who was suffered to linger out his latter days in uuregarded penury? "How proud we can press to the fun'ral array Of him whom we shunn'd in his sickness and sorrow; And bailiffs may seize his last blanket to-day, C. THE ZERO LINE OF VALOR. DAVID BARTON. I SHOULD like to see this question in matheriatics figured out in the rule of three, and the quotient fairly stated. If the low war mark or zero line of the Senator's valor, when peace is in all our borders, and not a war speck in the sky, that I can see, be equal to that of Palafox in the passes of the Pyrenees, guarding his native Spain against the invading legions of Napoleon Bonaparte; or of Leonidas, with his three hundred Spartans, at the Straits of Thermopyla, guarding Sparta and all Greece against the million of myrmidons of Xerxes, the king of Persia and of kings; what would be the spring-flood height, or boiling degree of his rage, if placed in the Pine-spur-gap of our own Alleghanies, with his naked war-knife drawn, to guard the magnificent valley of the Mississippi against the invasive Yankees; and upon lifting up his eyes and looking over the plains below, towards the north-east, he should behold the universal Yankee nation, armed cap-a-pie, with drums beating and banners flying, coming to invade us, and lay our valley under one sheet of fire, from the Lake of the Woods to the Balize, and from the sources of the Missouri to the aforesaid Pinespur-gap! and to carry away into captivity the brightest portion of our mulatto beauties! Figures cannot count it. Poets cannot sing it. Homer did his best in Achilles' wrath about the loss of his sweetheart, and while chasing Hector around the walls of Troy; and that barely came up to the zero line of the Senator's valor! And Cervantes is dead! Apropos ! Cervantes was the man for this sort of valor! It all rushes on the mind "like a flood of coming light!" All is not right in the capital! There is more occasion, now, for Dr. Cutbush or Dr. Cutscull, than for any military hero to guard us against the Yankees! These mental illusions have afflicted the frail sons of Adam in other countries, and in climates better than our own! My honorable friend, Don Quixotte de la Mancha, a countryman of Palafox, had a long spell of them! On one occasion he attacked, as he supposed, an army of steel-clad knights, which turned out to be a flock of harmless merinoes! Then a funeral procession, and wounded a friar! Again, a windmill and a fullingmill, imagining them colossal, enchanted giants, more terrible than Æsop's buffalo bull!. But why recount his freaks, when all these honorable Senators have read Cervantes? and they who hope for missions to Spain, South America, or Mexico, have, doubtless, read him in the original! CI-EFFECT OF STEADINESS OF PURSUIT. ASHER ROBBINS. THE most interesting instance of the efficacy of this steadiness of pursuit was given by the city of Athens; the most interesting, because the object was most so. From the earliest times, Athens aspired to literature and the elegant arts. By a steady pursuit of the policy adopted with a view to this end, the city of Athens became such a monument of the arts, that even her imperfect and dilapidated remains are at this day the wonder of the world. What splendors, then, must she have emitted in the day of her splendor! When, in her freshness, she met the morning sun, and reflected back a rival glory! When she was full of the masterpieces of genius in every art-creations, that were said to have exalted in the human mind the ideas of the divinities themselves! The fervid eloquence of Demosthenes failed, unequal to the task, to do justice to those immortal splendors, when employed, as occasionally was, for that purpose, in his addresses to the Athenian people. It was by the steady pursuit of the same policy, that their literary works of every kind came to be equally the masterpieces of human genius; and being more diffused, and less impaired by the injuries of time, than the other monuments of the arts, they were, and still are, the wonder of the world, that, after it, the Athenians themselves could never surpass them; whilst others have never been able to equal them. Now, what has been the effect? Literature and arts have gathered around that city a charm that was, and is felt by all mankind; which no distance, no time, can dispel. No scholar, of any age or clime, but has made (in fancy, at least) a pilgrimage to its shore; there to call around him the shades of the mighty dead, whose minds still live, and delight and astonish in their immortal works. It is emphatically the city of the heart, where the affections delight to dwell; the green spot of the earth where the fancy loves to linger. How poor is brute force-even the most magnificent, even the Roman-compared to the empire of mind, to which all other minds pay their voluntary homage! Her literature and her arts acquired to Athens this empire, which her remains still preserve, and always will preserve. In contemplating the phenomenon of her literary achievements, a great and profound writer could not forbear saying, “that it seemed a providential event, in honor of human nature, to show to what perfection the species might ascend." Call it providential if you please-as every event is, in some sense, providential but it was the effect of artificial causes, as much so as the military power of the Romans; it was the effect of a policy, early adopted, and always after steadily pursued. CII. THE TERRITORIES. ROBERT C. WINTHROP. MR. CHAIRMAN, I see in the territorial possessions of this Union the seats of new States, the cradles of new Commonwealths, the nurseries, it may be, of new Republican Empires. I see, in them, the future abodes of our brethren, our children, and our children's children, for a thousand generations. I see, growing up within their borders, institutions upon which the character and condition of a vast multitude of the American family, and of the human race, in all time to come, are to depend. I feel, that for the original shaping and moulding of these institutions, you and I and each one of us, who occupy these seats, are in part responsible. And I cannot omit to ask myself what shall I do, that I may deserve the gratitude and the blessing, and not the condemnation and the curse, of that posterity whose welfare is thus in some degree committed to my care? As I pursue this inquiry, sir, I look back instinctively to the day, now more than two hundred years ago, when the Atlantic coast was the scene of events like those now in progress upon the Pacific ;-when incited, not, indeed, by the love of gold, but by a devotion to that which is better than gold, and whose price is above rubies, the forefathers of New England were planting their colony upon that rock-bound shore. I look back to the day when slavery existed nowhere upon the American continent, and before that first Dutch ship, "built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,” had made its way to Jamestown, with a cargo of human beings in bondage. I reflect how much our fathers would have exulted, could they have arrested the progress of that ill-starred vessel, and of all other kindred employment. I recall the original language of the Declaration of Independence itself, as first drafted by Thomas Jefferson, assigning it as one of the moving causes for throwing off our allegiance to the British monarch, that "he had waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery into another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." I remember, too, that whatever material advantages may have since been derived from slave labor in the cultivation of a crop which was then unknown to our country, that the moral character and social influence of the institution are still precisely what they were described to be, by those who understood them best, in the early days of the Republic. And I see, too—as no man can help seeing-that almost all the internal dangers and domestic dissensions which cast a doubt upon the perpetuity of our glorious Union, have been, and still are, the direct or indirect consequences of the existence of this institution. And thus seeing, thus remembering, thus reflecting, how can I do otherwise than resolve, that it DANGER OF FACTION. 143 shall be by no vote of mine, that slavery shall be established in any territory where it does not already exist! CIII.-TRIUMPH OF PIETY OVER ARMS. JOSEPH STORY. TIME was, when the exploits of war, the heroes of many battles, the conquerors of millions, the men who waded through slaughter to thrones, the kings whose footsteps were darkened with blood, and the sceptered oppressors of the earth, were alone deemed worthy themes for the poet and the orator, for the songs of the minstrel, and the hosannas of the multitude. Time was, when feats of arms, and tournaments, and crusades, and the high array of chivalry, and the pride of royal banners waving for victory, engrossed all minds. Time was, when the ministers of the altar sat down by the side of the tyrant, and numbered his victims, and stimulated his persecutions, and screened the instruments of his crimesand there was praise, and glory, and revelry, for these things. Murder and rapine, burning cities and desolated plains, if so be they were the bidding of royal or baronial feuds, led on by the courtier or the clan, were matters of public boast, the delights of courts, and the treasured pleasure of the fireside tales. But these times have passed away. Christianity has resumed her meek and holy reign. The Puritans have not lived in vain. The simple piety of the Pilgrims of New England casts into shade this false glitter, which dazzled and betrayed men into the worship of their destroyers. CIV.-DANGER OF FACTION. WILLIAM GASTON. I WOULD not depress your buoyant spirits with gloomy anticipations, but I should be wanting in frankness, if I did not state my conviction that you will be called to the performance of other duties unusually grave and important. Perils surround you and are imminent, which will require clear heads, pure intentions, and stout hearts, to discern and to |