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derived from the personal character of the man, and justifying the most enthusiastic admiration that could be felt for him. The views at present offered, however, are mainly grounded on his letter written last spring, in which he expresses his opinion on the annexation of Texas. It does really seem wonderful that lower considerations, arising from collateral aspects of the question, should have kept in the back-ground the truly elevated position Mr. Clay there assumes, especially when contrasted with that of others who have addressed the public on the same matter. Mr. Polk is for "immediate annexation," reason or no reason, come war come peace, irrespective of national honor, national treaties, the common law of mankind, and even the law of God himself. Gov. Cass and Gen. Jackson rise a little higher. They have a show of reasons, in its pretended importance as a military frontier; reasons, to be sure, which no man's common sense can appreciate, yet still they may be called reasons, if their authors will have it so. Mr. Van Buren, in a manner more honorable to himself, views the question in its relation to foreign nations, to peace and war, the present national treaties, and present obligations. Mr. Calhoun and the southern democrats advocate it on account of its tendency to perpetuate their favorite domestic institutions. The northern abolitionists take ground above all these, and oppose it because the measure is at war with the interests of freedom, and would extend the area of slavery. Mr. Clay, we hesitate not on saying, assumes a position even higher than this; a position which, for its abstract grandeur, ought to call forth the warm admiration of friend and foe, whether at the south or at the north, whether pro-slavery or ultra-abolitionist. It is a position characteristic of himself, because it exhibits that trait which has ever been most prominent during his whole public life. This letter shows him to be what he is, and ever has been, a national man. Contrast with it the contemptible epistle of Polk to Kane, on the subject of protection; contrast with it the letters of the various democratic candidates, before the Baltimore convenvention; contrast with it those miserable productions which, on the eve of an election, are sometimes drawn from men whom third parties, in their usual way, succeed in making hypocrites. The letter of Henry Clay is for the nation;

it is for all time-for all similar cases. It contains words of wisdom, and maxims of statesmanship, that may be quoted, and, we believe, will be quoted, centuries hence. The temporary questions connected with Texas may, in a few years, cease to have any interest; even a war with Mexico, or with England, after having produced the usual amount of blood and death, would pass away, and might even leave some lessons of salutary wisdom to compensate, in some degree, for the evils it had occasioned. Much as such events are to be deprecated, their evils are temporary and remediable. So, also, may we say in regard to the bearings of the question on the subject of slavery, fraught, as they evidently are, with the most tremendous issues. Slavery is but an incident to our original condition and present frame of government, and, be the period longer or shorter, will, in the course of events, have an end. Those who oppose the annexation on this account, do so from noble and elevated motives, and the majority of such, we are persuaded, will cordially support the man who agrees with them in the result, although he arrives at it from considerations more purely national, and more deeply connected with the vital interests of our confederacy. We say that there is a higher reason than those which are connected with the subject of slavery, and this is the reason which naturally and spontaneously presents itself to the mind of Henry Clay. Let us, in imagination, follow him to the retirement of his chamber, as he sits down to answer a request for an expression of his views on this subject. We may suppose him fully aware of the use to which such an answer will be applied; we may imagine the deep personal interest he has in so constructing it as to please the majority, from whose suffrages he is ardently desirous of obtaining the end of a noble ambition. All these influences would strongly concur in inducing him to view the question as other men do, in its merest temporary aspects; and to those temporary aspects he does give an attention commensurate with their importance. But this is not enough for Henry Clay; as he writes on, and his soul becomes warmed, all these considerations vanish. The fixed and long-cherished habits and thoughts of the statesman, which we may suppose, for a moment, to have been superseded by personal

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anxieties in respect to the bearing of the question on his own political prospects, come back to their usual course, and he is himself again. The candidate for of fice is forgotten, and he is once more, in imagination, on the floor of the senatehouse-the legislator, the statesman, the man of enlarged and national feelings. Every consideration is now too narrow for his mind, unless it embrace the whole extent of his country's confederated territory, and the whole period of her national existence. Its collateral bearings are laid aside as he discovers that here, in this very measure, got up and concocted, as it evidently was, for the vilest of mere party purposes, there is, nevertheless, involved a profound constitutional question. Here is to be considered a grave rule of national action-a rule to be settled now, and the issues of which, if settled wrong, are fraught with evils which no man can calculate; for they reach beyond peace and war, beyond even slavery and anti-slavery, into the most vital principles, into the very heart of our confederacy. Shall such a question, he asks himself, become the game of a political canvass? Shall it be settled in the heat of an excited general election? Shall it be a matter of majorities? No, says Henry Clay; here are other issues involved, of far more consequence. It is not a question of admitting a young sister territory within our acknowledged limits, and which had been, from infancy, fostered and nursed with the expectation of being received into the family of states; the constitution had clearly provided for that. It is the far more momentous question of the incorporation of a foreign state, as much foreign as France or England. There is, then, a point to be first settled, in comparison with which the present election, considered merely in itself, the military advantages of Texas, the plans of England, or even the far higher considerations of its present bearings upon slavery, are all to be postponed. This, surely, is not a matter to be decided simply by majorities. It is no question of ordinary internal legislation. Here, all should be strict constructionists, whatever measure of liberality we might be inclined to indulge in other and more domestic matters; here, if ever, the doctrine of state-rights has some meaning-in fact, a most important significance. If in any sense we are a partnership, a confederacy of states, we are

most certainly such in respect to this. Viewed in any light, and on either of the contested theories of our constitution, it swells into a question of equal magnitude and importance. If we should ever act in reference to the will of the whole nation, instead of the will of any part, be it larger or smaller, majority or not; or, in other words, if there are any acts which should be pre-eminently, and in the very highest sense, national, this, of all others, is such an act. It should be viewed with no reference to Southern institutions, or Northern opposition to them. It involves a national proceeding back of all ordinary enactments, back even of the constitution, which contains no provision for such a step, and which must be so essentially modified by it-a national proceeding requiring something of a renewed exercise of that original vitality which gave birth to the constitution itself. Adopt whatever theory we please; whether we argue as the advocates of the confederated or more national aspect of our government, it is, in the one case, nothing less than the admission of a new and foreign member into a partnership originally formed with no reference to it, and, in the other, a violation of the national identity. It is a measure in direct opposition to those state-right principles, insisted on by none more than by those Southern men who are now so clamorous for immediate annexation by a bare majority, and who contradict their own doctrines in that very point, when even the most strenuous opponents of their favorite theory of the constitution would admit that they had some application. For, certainly, if a single state can justly refuse obedience to a law of internal legislation, which a majority of the other parties to the compact have deemed sanctioned by the constitution, and by a regard to those very objects which were specially in view in the formation of the government, why may not a single state dissent to the admission of an external power, never contemplated in the national articles, and whose incorporation would most seriously affect every interest of the previous national organization? Considerations of equal if not greater force present themselves in that aspect of our government which is regarded as opposed to the doctrine of a confederacy. If, in the one case, the effect of the measure, unless unanimously adopted, would be virtually to dissolve the compact, and leave each part at lib

erty to refuse association with the foreign intruder, with which it had never formed alliance, it would be, in the other, a complete change of the national identity. It would be, in fact, the creation of a new nation, with new relations, new responsibilities, unknown to the previous organization of the body politic. Our present constitution was for these United States. If extended to Texas, it would require a new title and a new ratification; it would be, in fact, a new firm, and, according to all laws of partnership, there would be need of a new promulgation to the world, and a new acknowledgment of its corporate existence, by all parties with whom it might maintain intercourse; there would even be need of a new national flag, and a new inscription on the national coin.

Considerations such as these presented themselves to the mind of Henry Clay, and every lower aspect faded in the comparison. Whatever might be his own personal opinions, as to the mere temporary effects of the step, supposing it to be taken constitutionally, honorably, peaceably, and without the fearful responsibility of extending the area of slavery,-whatever might be his sentiments as a Southern man, not viewing, as he most frankly admits, Southern institutions in the same light with the people of the North,-all these were comparatively of but little moment, to the adjustment of the other great national principle, which, when left unsettled, or settled in a wrong way, disarranges all below it, and leaves the most sacred elements of our national life to be the sport of every presidential election, and the game of such men as John Tyler and his treaty-making cabinet.

These, then, were the grounds of that most noble declaration, that whatever might be his personal views, (which he frankly admits were on the side of the South,) he should oppose the annexation of Texas, irrespective of the particular advantages or disadvantages of the measure, as long as any respectable minority, of any part of the Union, and for any reasons, refused its assent. In the admission of a new partner into the confederacy, or in introducing a new modification of the national existence, he would have even the smallest portion exercise, not only an influence, but a controlling influence. Even Vermont, if she stood alone, should be heard. The reception of this foreign territory might deeply affect her dearest interests. Such an expansion of

the national being might (in this day of strict construction in regard to all matters of healthy legitimate internal legislation) proportionably restrict the free exercise of those national prerogatives she had conceded for the common benefit of the confederacy of her sister states, but never for the benefit of Texas. Her interests might clash, or seem to clash, with those of some other members of the original Union, and here she would compromise, if no other method was found effectual, because mutual concession was in the national bond. She might have a strong dislike to certain institutions of other sister states; these, however, she must tolerate for the same reason; but she could not, at the will of a mere majority, consent that this bond should be opened for the admission of other parties, who might hereafter claim from her other compromises, and other concessions, for which she had never stipulated,-who, after having been themselves admitted through the door of the widest latitudinarianism, might hereafter be loudest in the demand of strict construction. Conceding, that there was something in the spirit of her assent to the constitution which required her to make compromises of her just claims with South Carolina, no principle of justice, equity, or the constitution, no national feeling, no law of majorities, rightly demanded of her to place herself in a position, when Texas hereafter might successfully require the abandonment of protection to her domestic industry, or that she should be employed in the degrading work of arresting fugitive slaves, who had escaped from this extended area of freedom. Hard as was its fulfilment, she had, in consideration of great national interests, promised this to South Carolina, but she never had given the other states, be it larger or smaller majorities of them, power to bind her to the same conditions to Texas, or Canada, or Cuba, should the latter also ever seek to enlarge the area of freedom, by transferring her domestic institutions and her nationality to the United States.

Such are the views most prominent in Mr. Clay's letter. They are noble views

far-reaching, statesman-like views. How immeasurably superior does he appear in this respect to the Polks, the Jacksons, the Casses, and the Tylers, by whom he is assailed! I wonder his own friends have not given them more prominence, instead of being so much occupied with those mere temporary bear

ings of the question, which Mr. Clay does indeed discuss in a masterly manner, while yet he makes them all inferior to that higher principle, which is identified with the national life, which must live as long as the national existence, and on which, as on a rock of eternal adamant, he takes his immoveable position. I wonder that even the reflecting abolitionist, strong as may be his dislike to Mr. Clay as a Southern man and a slaveholder, is not struck with admiration at this noble stand, and does not feel that the destinies of the nation may be safely left in the hands of that man, who is so strongly identified with the national integrity. The obvious determination of a portion of the politicians of this class, to do all in their power to elect Mr. Polk instead of Mr. Clay, and with the full knowledge that the annexation of Texas will be the almost certain result, presents one of the strangest phenomena of the present canvass.

Much as I respect the Whig party, as combining the great mass of the intelligence, patriotism, and national feeling of the country, I cannot but feel that on this and similar great questions Henry Clay is in advance of them. Look at the noble stand he has taken, and the glowing speeches he has repeatedly made in respect to those violations of law and order, which have so long been rife in the Loco-Foco party, and which in the late mob-meeting at Providence received the distinct approbation of all their principal leaders. How little have his earnest exhortations on this point been heeded by a great portion of the Whig press, who ought to have made these things the theme of their loudest and most constant alarm, instead of having been so exclusively occupied with the inferior, although important topics of tariff and distribution! How mortifying the result, if, notwithstanding all this, his party should fail him at the time when he ought to receive the reward of his long career of elevated statesmanship! Above all, how great the disgrace, not to the Whig party, but to the whole nation, that such an affair as this Texas issue, so got up and by such men-so evidently designed (some of our most strenuous opponents openly admitting the fact) to effect the lowest, basest, and most selfish endsshould carry into the presidential chair a man who, but for some circumstances arising out of this measure, would never have been named in connection with the

office! To have Henry Clay beaten by James K. Polk, and on such an issue! Would that every Whig would revolve the mortifying consideration in his mind till his whole soul was fired, and he had resolved to give himself no rest, and his neighbors no rest-to omit no exertion, until the contest is closed and Henry Clay placed in the presidential chair! We have long wanted just such a man there. The station is fast becoming degraded. The succession of James K. Polk to John Tyler would fill up the measure of our country's humiliation. No doubt many of our opponents themselves, after the excitement of the election had subsided, would feel most keenly the humbling result, and most earnestly wish, if it were possible, the disgraceful deed undone. We want men of a far different stamp from those who, on so important a question as this, will answer at once, "immediate annexation," with all the greediness of a dog snapping at the offered bone-without taking time to assign even the most miserable reasons for it, lest some other candidate might put in for the job before him. The country has been cursed enough already with such narrow, canine politicians. As Coleridge says, "We want public souls; yes, we want public souls, we want them." We want national souls. We want a man who can look beyond a presidential canvass, whose opinions and whose measures are for the whole nation, and look to its whole existence. Yes, we had better have the faults and errors of such a man, than the mean virtues, if they possess any, of his adversaries.

Irrespective of measures, or even if he should have some measures of mere temporary policy which we might not approve, there is something so healing, so truly conservative, so inspiring to the feeling of national honor, in the elevation to office of such a candidate, as to outweigh all other consideration. Give us an honorable high-minded man, (and such is Henry Clay, with all his alleged faults, his very enemies being judges,) and we may trust him for his measures, because we know the soundness and elevation of his principles. The distinction conveyed by these two words is but little understood by the corrupt and superficial politician. Principles we would never sacrifice, but we hesitate not to say, that there are times when we would prefer men to measures-although a mistake in the latter might perhaps work temporary injury.

It is indeed but temporary, even should it occur, and may be borne; but whose arithmetic can calculate the evils, perhaps the never-to-be-remedied evils, of a corrupt principle, engrafted by corrupt men into our institutions-into the very elements of our national life?

There are some few men, Whigs in every other respect, who hesitate on the ground of the tariff. We would not here meddle with their free trade notions, but we would solemnly ask them if they can suffer this single matter to outweigh all other considerations connected with this most important canvass? We would appeal to a gentleman of this city who stands high in the literary world, who has heretofore been a most efficient member of the Whig party, and who is now said to be in the predicament above described. We are perfectly sure that that gentleman must look with abhorrence upon Dorrism. We are certain that all his religious and political views must be shocked with that Rhode Island demagoguism, with which all the leaders of the Loco-foco party openly avow themselves to be infected. We would not so underrate his intelligence as to suppose him not to be fully aware of the tremendous consequences of that doctrine to all our institutions, and how vastly, if carried out, they must exceed all the temporary evils which he may see in a tariff. We cannot imagine that he does not look with utter loathing upon the corrupt manner in which this wretched Texas issue has been forced into the canvass, and we cannot therefore deem it possible, that such a man, and others who think with him, can make this one principle of free trade the sole turning point of their conduct in the present election. Methinks that such Whigs might learn a lesson of consistency from some of the worst examples of Loco-focoism. We would point them to the course of that section of the Polk party represented by the Evening Post. How bravely do they adhere to their man, notwithstanding they admit that he received his nomination on the strength of one of the most "contemptible measures and corrupt intrigues that ever disgraced the nation-that he was selected on no other ground, and that the measure itself is "fraught with the most alarming evils to the country." Yet must we suppose (for we would not charge such honorable men with a corrupt inconsistency) that they are led to support all this by their unaffected admi

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ration for the character of James K. Polk. His brilliant career as a statesman, his close identification with all the great measures of his country's history, his elevated views on all other subjects, his strong national feeling, his noble frankness and magnanimity, his utter scorn at the very appearance of deception, as manifested in his letter to Mr. Kane of Pennsylvania, the celebrity of his ancestral name-all these considerations, doubtless, combine with these gentlemen to outweigh this small affair of Texas. Cannot some Whigs learn a lesson from this, and is there nothing in the character of Henry Clay which would justify them in reversing this picture in every single point, and drawing from it ten-fold stronger motives for his support; although in the earlier part of his life he may have fought a duel, or his notions on free trade may differ from their own?

We repeat it then, we want noble men, with noble principles, and we may trust them for their measures. The very election of such men as Clay and Frelinghuysen, after the long reign of corruption and intrigue, is worth more to the country than the mere success of any measure of mere internal, temporary legislation. In electing them we secure the continuance of the present most beneficial tariff, a settlement much to be desired of the perplexing question of the national currency, the distribution of the proceeds of the public lands, and the adoption of other measures most necessary to the national welfare. We also prevent the infamous annexation of Texas, against which our candidate's word is pledged, on the highest of all groundsa pledge which no man doubts he will most honorably maintain. But the sublimest result of the victory will be, that we rebuke that foul spirit of anarchy and disorganization, which has found so much countenance with the other party. We cut off the heads of all that young brood of radical Hydras, which, though as yet of comparatively feeble growth, are constantly sprouting up from the venomous Typhon of Loco-focoism and infidelity. We purge that political charnel-house at Washington, which has so long tainted our moral atmosphere; threatening, unless speedily removed, to breed an incurable pestilence in the body politic; and last, though not least, we do, by the highest national act, incorporate among the permanent interpretations of the Constitution Mr. Clay's noble protest against the

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