16 ORATION. enriched with the blood of so many brave men must forever be a free land. Since we must fight, it should be with every power, and for the highest prize.” They argued truly, that foreign nations which would care little for a technical issue of constitutional law, would be moved to sympathy when the contest concerned the freedom of a continent. These bolder counsels, and safer, became bolder, finally prevailed, and our country took its place among the nations of the earth. I need hardly point out the parallel of our own day. In 1861, Congress, “by a vote nearly unanimous,” resolved that Government had no right and no purpose to attack slavery in the States; and, as the conservatives of ’75 turned to the resolutions of 74, so do many worthy men cling to the vote of 1861. But the people have said: “ Events have changed, and our rights have changed with them. Slavery is no longer a quiet, ‘ domestic institution.’ It is an aggressive force; it has become the strength of the Rebellion. It is an engine of war which treason uses against us, and which we ought to turn against treason.” They have called upon our rulers to put on the whole armor of the powers with which the fact of war has supplied them. They have urged that in repressing Rebellion, it is not only a right but a duty to wield “ the State’s vdiole thunder.” And as history records that the folly of Stamp Act, and Tea Tax and Port Bill made us an independent nation, so future historians will relate that
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