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Mississippi, and embracing the whole temperate zone. thousand miles across, and half that breadth, is the magnificent parallelogram of our domain. We can run a national central road through and through, the whole distance, under our flag and under our laws. Military reasons require us to make it; for troops and munitions must go there. Political reasons require us to make it; it will be a chain of union between the Atlantic and Pacific States. Commercial reasons demand it from us; and here I touch a boundless field, dazzling and bewildering the imagination from its vastness and importance. The trade of the Pacific Ocean, of the western coast of North America, and of eastern Asia, will all take its track; and not only for ourselves, but for posterity.

Sir, in no instance has the great Asiatic trade failed to carry the nation or the people which possessed it to the highest pinnacle of wealth and power, and with it, to the highest attainments of letters, art, and science. And so will it continue to be. An American road to India, through the heart of our country, will revive upon its line all the wonders of which we have read, and eclipse them. The western wilderness, from the Pacific to the Mississippi, will spring into life under its touch. A long line of cities will grow up. Existing cities will take a new start. The state of the world calls for a new road to India, and it is our destiny to give it the last and greatest. Let us act up to the greatness of the occasion, and show ourselves worthy of the extraordinary circumstances in which we are placed, by securing, while we can, an American road to India, central and national, for ourselves and our posterity, now and hereafter, for thousands of years to come.

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T. H. Benton.

LXXVII.

ADDRESS TO POLISH EXILES AT LONDON.

T is eighty-one years since Poland first was quartered by a nefarious act of combined royalty, which the Swiss Tacitus, John Müller, well characterized by saying that "God permitted the act, to show the morality of kings;" and it is twenty-four years since down-trodden Poland made the greatest- - not the last manifestation of her imperishable vitality, which the cab

inets of Europe were either too narrow-minded to understand, or too corrupt to appreciate. Eighty-one years of still unretributed crime, and twenty-four years of misery and exile! It is a long time to suffer, and not to despair.

And all along this time, you, proscribed patriots of Poland, were suffering, and did not despair. You stood up before the world, a living statue, with unquenchable life-flame of patriotism streaming through its petrified limbs; you stood up a protest of eternal right against the sway of imperious might; a "Mene Tekel Upharsin," written in letters of burning blood on the walls of overweening despotism. Time, misery, and sorrow have thinned the ranks of your scattered Israel; you have carried your dead to the grave, and those who survive went on to suffer and to hope. Wherever oppressed Freedom reared a banner, you rallied around; - the living statue changed to a fighting hero. Many of yours fell; and, when crime triumphed once more over virtue and right, you resumed the wandering exile's staff, and did not despair. Many among you, who were young when they last saw the sun rise over Poland's mountains and plains, have your hair whitened and your strength broken with age, anguish, and misery; but the patriotic heart kept the freshness of its youth; it is young in love for Poland, young in aspirations for freedom, young in hope, and youthfully fresh in determination to break Poland's chains.

What a rich source of noble deeds patriotism must be, that has given you strength to suffer so much and never to despair! You have given a noble example to all of us, your younger brother in the family of exiles. When the battle of Canna was lost, and Hannibal was measuring by bushels the rings of the fallen Roman knights, the Senate of Rome voted thanks to Consul Terentius Varro for "not having despaired of the Commonwealth." Proscribed patriots of Poland! I thank you that you have not despaired of resurrection and of liberty. The time draws nigh when the oppressed nations will call their aggressors to a last account; and the millions of freemen, in the fulness of their right, and their self-conscious strength, will pass judgment on arrogant conquerors, privileged murderers, and perjured kings. In that supreme trial, the oppressed nations will stand one for all, and all for one.

L. Kossuth.

LXXVIII.

KOSSUTH ON HIS CREDENTIALS.

LET ambitious fools, - let the pigmies who live on the scanty food of personal envy, when the very earth quakes beneath their feet; let even the honest prudence of ordinary household times, measuring eternity with that thimble with which they are wont to measure the bubbles of small party interest, and, taking the dreadful roaring of the ocean for a storm in a water-glass; let those who believe the weather to be calm, because they have drawn a nightcap over their ears, and, burying their heads in pillows of domestic comfort, do not hear Satan sweeping in a hur ricane over the earth; let envy, ambition, blindness, and the pettifogging wisdom of small times, let all these artistically investigate the question of my official capacity, or the nature of my public authority; let them scrupulously discuss the immense problem whether I still possess, or possess no longer, the title of my once-Governorship; let them ask for credentials, discuss the limits of my commission, as representative of Hungary. I pity all such frog and mouse fighting.

I claim no official capacity, no public authority, no representation; - boast of no commission, of no written and sealed credentials. I am nothing but what my generous friend, the senator from Michigan, has justly styled me, "a private and banished man." But, in that capacity, I have a nobler credential for my mission than all the clerks of the world can write, the credential that I am a 66 man;" the credential that I am a "patriot ;" the credential that I love with all sacrificing devotion my oppressed fatherland and liberty; the credential that I hate tyrants, and have sworn everlasting hostility to them; the credential that I feel the strength to do good service to the cause of freedom;. good service, as perhaps few men can do, because I have the iron will, in this my breast, to serve faithfully, devotedly, indefatigably, that noble cause.

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I have the credential that I trust to God in heaven, · tice on earth; that I offend no laws, but cling to the protection of the laws. I have the credential of my people's undeniable confidence and its unshaken faith; to my devotion, to my manli

ness, to my honesty, and to my patriotism; which faith I will honestly answer without ambition, without interest, as faithfully as ever, but more skilfully, because schooled by adversities. And I have the credential of the justice of the cause I plead, and of the wonderful sympathy which, not my person, but that cause, has met, and meets, in two hemispheres.

These are my credentials, and nothing else. To whom this is enough, he will help me, so far as the law permits and it is his good pleasure. To whom these credentials are not sufficient, let him look for a better accredited man.

TO-DAY

LXXIX.

THE IDES OF MARCH.

O-DAY is the fourth anniversary of the Revolution in Hungary.

Anniversaries of revolutions are almost always connected with the recollections of some patriot's death, - fallen on that day, like the Spartans at Thermopyla, martyrs of devotion to their fatherland.

Almost in every country there is some proud cemetery, or some modest tombstone, adorned on such a day by a garland of evergreen, the pious offering of patriotic tenderness.

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I passed the last night in a sleepless dream; and my soul wandered on the magnetic wings of the past, home to my beloved, bleeding land. And I saw, in the dead of the night, dark veiled shapes, with the paleness of eternal grief upon their brow but terrible in the tearless silence of that grief — gliding over the churchyards of Hungary, and kneeling down to the head of the graves, and depositing the pious tribute of green and cypress upon them; and, after a short prayer, rising with clenched fists and gnashing teeth, and then stealing away tearless and silent as they came, stealing away, because the bloodhound of my country's murder lurks from every corner on that night, and on this day, and leads to prison those who dare to show a pious remembrance to the beloved. To-day, a smile on the lips of a Magyar is taken for a crime of defiance to tyranny; and a tear in his eye is equivalent to a revolt. And yet

I have seen, with the eye of my home-wandering soul, thousands performing the work of patriotic piety.

And I saw more. When the pious offerers stole away, I saw the honored dead half risen from their tombs, looking to the offerings, and whispering gloomily, "Still a cypress, and still no flower of joy! Is there still the chill of winter and the gloom of night over thee, Fatherland? Are we not yet revenged?" And the sky of the east reddened suddenly, and quivered with bloody flames; and from the far, far west, a lightning flashed like a star-spangled stripe, and within its light a young eagle mounted and soared towards the quivering flames of the east; and as he drew near, upon his approaching, the flames changed into a radiant morning sun, and a voice from above was heard in answer to the question of the dead:

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'Sleep yet a short while; mine is the revenge. I will make the stars of the west the sun of the east; and when ye next awake, ye will find the flower of joy upon your cold bed."

And the dead took the twig of cypress, the sign of resurrection, into their bony hands, and lay down.

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Such was the dream of my waking soul. And I prayed; and such was my prayer: Father, if thou deemest me worthy, take the cup from my people, and give it in their stead to me." And there was a whisper around me like the word "Amen." Such was my dream, half foresight and half prophecy; but resolution all. However, none of those dead whom I saw, fell on the 15th of March. They were victims of the royal perjury which betrayed the 15th of March. The anniversary of our Revolution has not the stain of a single drop of blood.

L. Kossuth.

WE,

LXXX.

THE SAME CONTINUED.

E, the elect of the nation, sat on that morning busily but quietly, in the legislative hall of old Presburg, and, without any flood of eloquence, passed our laws in short words, that the people shall be free; the burdens of feudality shall cease; the peasant shall become free proprietor; that equality of duties, equality of rights, shall be the fundamental law; and civil, polit

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