If it is not constitutional, then, sir, when the proper tribunal shall have decided that question, what is there, I ask, in the history of Massachusetts which will lead us to believe that she will not abide by that result? I say there is nothing in the history of the State of Mississippi, or of South Carolina, early or recent, which makes Massachusetts desirous of emulating their example. I, sir, agree with the South Carolina authority I have quoted here in regard to the legislation of Massachusetts.

Sir, my time is passing away and I must hasten on. The State of Massachusetts is the guardian of the rights of her citizens and of the inhabitants within her border line. If her citizens go beyond the line into distant lands or upon the ocean then they look to the federal arm for protection. But old Massachusetts is the State which is to secure to her citizens the inestimable blessing of trial by jury and the writ of habeas corpus.

All these things must come from her and not from the federal government. I believe, with her great statesmen and with her people, that the Fugitive Slave Law is unconstitutional. Mr. Webster, as an original question, thought it was not constitutional; Mr. Rantoul, a brilliant statesman of Massachusetts, said the same thing; they both thought that the clause of the constitution was addressed to the States. Mr. Webster bowed to the decision of the supreme court in the Prigg case; Mr. Rantoul did not.

Massachusetts believes it to be unconstitutional; but whether it be constitutional or not she means so long as the federal government undertakes to exe

cute that law, that the federal government shall do it with its own instruments, vile or otherwise. She says that no one clothed with her authority shall do anything to help in it so long as the federal government undertakes to do so. But, sir, I pass from this.

I did intend to reply seriatim to all the attacks which have been made upon the State, but I have not half time enough. The gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Bennett] after enumerating a great many things he desired Massachusetts to do, said, amongst other things, that she must tear out of her statute book this personal liberty law. When she had done that and a variety of other things too numerous to mention, then he said "the South would forgive Massachusetts." The South forgive Massachusetts! Sir, forgiveness is an attribute of divinity. The South has it not. Sir, forgiveness is a higher quality than justice, even. The South-I mean the slave power cannot comprehend it.

Sir, Massachusetts has already forgiven the South too many debts and too many insults. If we should do all the things the gentleman from Mississippi desired us to do, then the gentleman from Alabama [Mr. Shorter] comes in and insists that Massachusetts shall do a great variety of other things before the South probably will forgive her.

Among other things, he desired that Massachusetts should blot out the fact that General Hull, who surrendered Detroit, had his home in Massachusetts. Why, no, sir; she does not desire even to do that, for then she would have to blot out the fact that his

gallant son had his home there that gallant son who fell fighting for his country in the same war at Lundy's Lane—that great battle, where Colonel Miller, a Massachusetts man by adoption, when asked if he could storm certain heights, replied, in a modest Massachusetts manner, "I will try, sir." He

stormed the heights.

The gentleman desires, also, that we should blot out the history of the connection of Massachusetts with the last war. Oh, no! She cannot do that. She cannot so dim the lustre of the American arms. She cannot so wrong the Republic. Where, then, would be your great sea-fights? Where, then, would be the glory of "Old Ironsides," whose scuppers ran red with Massachusetts blood? Where, then, would be the history of the daring of those brave fishermen, who swarmed from all her bays and all her ports, sweeping the enemy's commerce from the most distant seas?

Ah, sir! she cannot afford to blot out that history. You, sir, cannot afford to let her do it-no, not even the South. She sustained herself in the last war; she paid her own expenses and has not yet been paid entirely from the treasury of the nation. The enemy hovered on her coast with his ships, as numerous almost as the stars. He looked on that warlike land and the memory of the olden time came back upon him. He remembered how, more than forty years before, he had trodden on that soil; he remembered how vauntingly he invaded it and how speedily he left it. He turned his glasses toward it and beheld its people rushing from the mountains to the sea to

defend it; and he dared not attack it. Its capital stood in the salt sea spray, yet he could not take it. He sailed south, where there was another capital, not far from where we now stand, forty miles from the sea. A few staggering, worn-out sailors and soldiers came here. They took it. How it was defended let the heroes of Bladensburg answer!

Sir, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Keitt] made a speech; and if I may be allowed to coin a word, I will say it had more cantankerosity in it than any speech I ever heard on this floor.

It was certainly very eloquent in some portions— very eloquent indeed, for the gentleman has indisputably an eloquent utterance and an eloquent temperament. I do not wish to criticise it much, but it opens in the most extraordinary manner with a weird torchlight," and then he introduces a dead man, and then he galvanizes him, and puts him in that chair, and then he makes him "point his cold finger" around this hall.

Why, it almost frightens me to allude to it. And then he turns it into a theatre, and then he changes or transmogrifies the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Colfax], who has just spoken, into a snake and makes him "wriggle up to the foot-lights;" and then he gives the snake hands, and then "mailed hands," and with one of them he throws off Cuba, and with the other clutches all the Canadas. Then he has men with glozing mouths," and they are " and they are "singing psalms through their noses, " and are moving down upon the South "like an army with banners." Frightful, is it not? He talks about rotting on dead seas. He

calls our party at one time a "toad," and then he calls it a "lizard;"" and more, which e'en to mention would be unlawful." Sir, his rhetoric seems to have the St. Vitus's dance. He mingles metaphors in such a manner as would delight the most extravagant Milesian.

But I pass from his logic and his rhetoric, and also over some historical mistakes, much of the same nature as those made by the President, which I have already pointed out, and come to some of his sentences, in which terrific questions and answers explode. He answers hotly and tauntingly that the South wants none of our vagabond philanthropy. Sir, when the yellow pestilence fluttered its wings over the southern States and when Massachusetts poured out her treasures to a greater extent in proportion to her population than any other State, was that vagabond philanthropy? I ask the people of Virginia and Louisiana.

But, sir, the gentleman was most tender and most plaintive when he described the starving operatives. Why, sir, the eloquence was most overwhelming upon some of my colleagues. I thought I saw the iron face of our speaker soften a little when he listened to the unexpected sympathy of the gentleman i with the hardships of his early life. Sir, he was an operative from boyhood to manhood-and a good one, too.

Ah, sir, he did not appreciate, as he tasted the sweet bread of honest toil, his sad condition; he did not think, as he stood in the music of the machinery. which came from his cunning hand, how much better