APPENDIX. AN ADDRESS, DELIVERED IN ST. JAMES'S HALL, DEC. 19, 1861. MR. CHAIRMAN AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN :— A recent startling event, of which all Europe is keenly cognisant-the arrest of the British mail steamer Trent by the American war steamer San Jacinto-has turned anew the attention of peoples and Governments to the state of feeling and affairs in the late united and happy States of America. It is simply owing to the fact that I have personally watched and witnessed the progress of events on both sides of the dividing line between the North and the South that I am invited to appear before you this evening. As I am but little in the habit, ladies and gentlemen, of addressing public assemblies, I must beg you at once to dismiss all expectation of oratory, and hear me simply for my cause-a grave and momentous one-which I literally approach with fear and trembling. In order to come to a more direct and familiar understanding, I will begin, as they say in Parliament, with a "personal explanation," an apology, if necessary, for attempting to discuss the difficult and dangerous question that now rends and divides my unhappy country. An utter stranger, perhaps even by name, to almost all X who hear me, permit me to say, by way of introduction, that I am an American citizen, a native of the North-of New England. I was born near that famous Rock-the stepping-stone of the New World, on which my ancestors and namesakes landed from the little shallop of the Mayflower, in the memorable winter of 1620; and I was brought up at the feet of Webster, the great expounder of the American Constitution, the indefatigable defender o the American Union. I sat by his death-bed at Marshfield, and saw him laid In his grave by the sounding sea; His great and glowing speeches in defence of the Union, which, next to the solar system itself, he admired and revered, were my earliest schoolboy declamations; and the solemn prayer that his last sun might set before our Union should be broken and destroyed, has never ceased to reverberate like a Cathedral Miserere through the hills and valleys of New England. In his memorable debate in the Senate in reply to Hayne of South Carolina, Mr. Webster closes in a lofty strain of prophetic sadness scarcely equalled since the days of the Prophet Jeremiah : When my eyes shall turn to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonoured fragments of a once glorious Union! on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent! on a land rent with civil feud, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honoured throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies shining in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured; bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those other words of delusion and folly, of "Liberty first and Union after wards!" but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment dear to every American heart-Liberty and Union -now and for ever-one and inseparable. Surely, since the inspired seer foretold the destruction of Jerusalem, no coming event was ever more fearfully or faithfully foreshadowed. As editor, for some fifteen years, of a daily journal in the city of New York-a journal that never faltered in its persistent opposition to Abolitionism on one hand and Secessionism on the other-I claim to have done what little I could to preserve the Union and avert the calamity of dissolution, which required no prophet to foresee inevitably approaching. Before the golden bowl of our hopes was broken, or the silver cord that bound us together was loosened, the Conservatives of all parties, both North and South, were chanting perpetual pæans to our "glorious Union." It was the very god of our political idolatry. Who has not heard a thousand times repeated the beautiful apostrophe of our poet Longfellow-the Tennyson of America-the Laureate of the Republic : Thou, too, sail on, O ship of State! |