exertion of our faculties, directed to one end, will generally insure
success. Would you, for instance, be rich? Do you think that single point
worth the sacrifice of everything else? You may then be rich. Thousands
have become so, from the lowest beginnings, by toil, and patient diligence,
and attention to the minutest articles of expense and profit. But you must
give up the pleasures of leisure, of mental ease, of a free, unsuspicious
temper. If you preserve your integrity, it must be a coarse-spun and vulgar
honesty. Those high and lofty notions of morals which you brought with you
from the schools, must be considerably lowered, and mixed with the baser
alloy of a jealous and worldly-minded prudence. You must learn to do hard,
lf not unjust things; and as for the nice embarrassments of a delicate and
ingenuous spirit, it is necessary to get rid of them as fast as possible.
You must shut your heart against the Muses, and be content to feed your
understanding with plain household truths. In short, you must not attempt
to enlarge your ideas, or polish your taste, or refine your sentiments, but
must keep on in one beaten track, without turning aside either to the right
or to the left. "But you say, I cannot submit to drudgery like this; I feel
a spirit above it." 'Tis well, be above it then; only do not repine that
you are not rich.
Is knowledge the pearl of price in your estimation? That, toy may be
purchased by steady application, and long solitary study and reflection.
Bestow these, and you shall be learned. "But," says the man of letters,
"what a hardship is it, that many an illiterate fellow, who cannot construe
the motto of the arms on his coach, shall raise a fortune and make a
figure, while I have little more than the common conveniences of life!" Was
it, then, to raise a fortune, that you consumed the sprightly hours of
youth in study and retirement? Was it to be rich that you grew pale over
the midnight lamp, and distilled the sweetness from the Greek and Roman
springs? You have then mistaken your path, and ill employed your industry.
"What reward have I then, for all my labor?" What reward! A large,
comprehensive soul, well purged from vulgar fears, and perturbations, and
prejudices; able to comprehend and interpret the works of man,--of God; a
rich, flourishing, cultivated mind, furnished with inexhaustible stores of
entertainment and reflection; a perpetual spring of fresh ideas, and the
conscious dignity of superior intelligence. Good Heaven! What other reward
can you ask besides!
"But is it not some reproach upon the economy of Providence, that such a
one, who is a mean, dirty fellow, should have amassed wealth enough to buy
half a nation?" Not in the least. He made himself a mean, dirty fellow for
that very end. He has paid his health, his conscience, his liberty for it;
and will you envy him his bargain? Will you hang your head and blush in his
presence, because he outshines you in equipage and show? Lift up your brow
with a noble confidence, and say to yourself "I have not these things, it
is true; but it is because I have not sought, because I have not desired
them; it is because I possess something better. I have chosen my lot; I am
content and satisfied." The characteristic mark of a great and noble mind
is to choose some high and worthy object, and pursue that object through
life.
Mrs. Barbauld.
XIV.
THE PATRIOT'S SWORD VINDICATED.
But my Lord, I dissented from the resolutions before us, for other reasons.
I dissented from them, because I felt that my giving them my assent, I
should have pledged myself to the unqualified repudiation of physical force
in all countries, at all times, and under every circumstance. This I could
not do. For, my Lord, I do not abhor the use of arms in the vindication of
national rights. There are times, when arms will alone suffice, and when
political ameliorations call for a drop of blood, and many thousand drops
of blood. Opinion, I admit, will operate against opinion. But, as the
honorable member for Kilkenny has observed, force must be used against
force. The soldier is proof against an argument, but he is not proof
against a bullet The man that will listen to reason, let him be reasoned
with. But it is the weaponed arm of the patriot that can alone prevail
against battalioned despotism.
Then, my Lord, I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral, nor do I
conceive it profane to say that the King of Heaven--the Lord of Hosts! the
God of Battles!--bestows his benediction upon those who unsheathe the sword
in the hour of a nation's peril. From that evening, on which, in the valley
of Bethulia, he nerved the arm of the Jewish girl to smite the drunken
tyrant in his tent, down to our day in which he has blessed the insurgent
chivalry of the Belgian priest, his almighty hand hath ever been stretched
forth from his Throne of Light, to consecrate the flag of freedom--to bless
the patriot's sword! Be it in the defense, or be it in the assertion of a
people's liberty, I hail the sword as a sacred weapon; and if, my Lord, it
has sometimes taken the shape of the serpent and reddened the shroud of
the oppressor with too deep a dye, like the anointed rod of the High
Priest, it has at other times, and as often, blossomed into celestial
flowers to deck the freeman's brow.
Abhor the sword--stigmatize the sword? No, my Lord, for, in the passes of
the Tyrol, it cut to pieces the banner of the Bavarian, and, through those
cragged passes, struck a path to fame for the present insurrectionist of
Inspruck!
Abhor the sword--stigmatize the sword? No, my Lord; for at its blow, a
giant nation started from the waters of the Atlantic, and by its redeeming
magic, and in the quivering of its crimson light, the crippled Colony
sprang into the attitude of a proud Republic--prosperous, limitless, and
invincible!
Abhor the sword--stigmatize the sword? No, my Lord; for it swept the Dutch
marauders out of the fine old towns of Belgium--scourged them back to their
own phlegmatic swamps--and knocked their flag and scepter, their laws and
bayonets into the sluggish waters of the Scheldt.
My Lord, I learned that it was the right of a nation to govern herself--not
in this hall, but upon the ramparts of Antwerp. This, the first article of
a nation's creed, I learned upon those ramparts, where freedom was justly
estimated, and the possession of the precious gift was purchased by the
effusion of generous blood.
My Lord, I honor the Belgians, I admire the Belgians, I love the Belgians
for their enthusiasm, their courage, their success; and I, for one, will
not stigmatize, for I do not abhor the means by which they obtained a
citizen king, a chamber of deputies.
T. F. Meagher.
XV.
ON BEING FOUND GUILTY OF TREASON.
A jury of my countrymen have found me guilty of the crime for which I stood
indicted. For this I entertain not the slightest feeling of resentment
towards them. Influenced, as they must have been, by the charge of the lord
chief justice, they could have found no other verdict. What of that charge?
Any strong observations on it I feel sincerely would ill befit the
solemnity of this scene; but I would earnestly beseech of you, my
Lord,--you who preside on that bench,--when the passions and prejudices of
this hour have passed away, to appeal to your own conscience, and to ask of
it, was your charge as it ought to have been, impartial and indifferent
between the subject and the crown?
My Lords, you may deem this language unbecoming in me, and perhaps it will
seal my fate. But I am here to speak the truth, whatever it may cost; I am
here to regret nothing I have ever done--to retract nothing I have ever
said. I am here to crave, with no lying lip the life I consecrate to the
liberty of my country. Far from it, even here--here, where the thief the
libertine, the murderer, have left their footprints in the dust; here on
this spot, where the shadows of death surround me, and from which I see my
early grave in an appointed soil opened to receive me--even here, encircled
by these terrors, the hope which has beckoned me to the perilous sea upon
which I have been wrecked still consoles, animates, enraptures me.
No; I do not despair of my poor old country--her peace, her liberty, her
glory. For that country I can do no more than bid her hope. To lift this
island up,--to make her a benefactor to humanity, instead of being the
meanest beggar in the world; to restore her to her native powers and her
ancient constitution,--this has been my ambition, and this ambition has
been my crime. Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails the
penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains this crime, and
justifies it. Judged by that history, I am no criminal, I deserve no
punishment. Judged by that history the treason of which I stand convicted
loses all its guilt, is sanctioned as a duty, will be ennobled as a
sacrifice. With these sentiments, my Lord, I await the sentence of the
court.
Having done what I felt to be my duty,--having spoken what I felt to be the
truth, as I have done on every other occasion of my short career,--I now
bid farewell to the country of my birth, my passion, and my death; the
country whose misfortunes have invoked my sympathies; whose factions I have
sought to still; whose intellect I have prompted to a lofty aim; whose
freedom has been my fatal dream. I offer to that country, as a proof of the
love I bear her, and the sincerity with which I thought and spoke and
struggled for her freedom, the life of a young heart, and with that life
all the hopes, the honors the endearments, of a happy and an honored home.
Pronounce, then, my Lords, the sentence which the laws direct, and I will
be prepared to hear it. I trust I shall be prepared to meet its execution.
I hope to be able, with a pure heart and perfect composure, to appear
before a higher tribunal--a tribunal where a judge of infinite goodness as
well as of justice will preside, and where, my Lords, many, many of the
judgments of this world will be reversed.
T. F. Meagher.
XVI.
ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN TROOPS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF LONG ISLAND.
The time is now near at hand, which must probably determine whether
Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any
property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be
pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness
from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions
will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our
cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance
or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or
to die. Our own, our country's honor, calls upon us for a vigorous and
manly exertion; and, if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to
the whole world. Let us, then, rely on the goodness of our cause and the
aid of the Supreme Being, in whose hands victory is, to animate and
encourage us to great and noble actions. The eyes of all our countrymen are
now upon us; and we shall have their blessings and praises, if happily we
are the instrument of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them.
Let us, therefore, animate and encourage each other, and allow the whole
world that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior
to any slavish mercenary on earth.
Liberty, property, life, and honor, are all at stake. Upon your courage and
conduct rest the hopes of our bleeding and insulted country. Our wives,
children, and parents expect safety from us only; and they have every
reason to believe that Heaven will crown with success so just a cause. The
enemy will endeavor to intimidate by show and appearance; but remember they
have been repulsed on various occasions by a few brave Americans. Their
cause is bad,--their men are conscious of it; and, if opposed with firmness
and coolness on their first onset, with our advantage of works, and
knowledge of the ground, the victory is most assuredly ours. Every good
soldier will be silent and attentive, wait for orders, and reserve his fire
until he is sure of doing execution.
Washington.
XVII.
CHARACTER OF CHATHAM.
The secretary stood alone; modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original
and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of
antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns
thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove
him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no
narrow system of vicious polities, no idle contest for ministerial
victories, sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing,
persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was
fame.
Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal
age unanimous. France sunk beneath him. With one hand he smote the house of
Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England. The sight of
his mind was infinite; and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the
present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by
which these schemes were accomplished,--always seasonable, always
adequate, the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardor, and
enlightened by prophecy.
The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent, were unknown
to him. No domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness, reached him; but,
aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its
intercourse, he came occasionally into our system, to counsel, and to
decide. A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
authoritative, astonished a corrupt age; and the treasury trembled at the
name of Chatham, through all her classes of venality. Corruption imagined,
indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of
the inconsistency of his glory and much of the ruin of his victories; but
the history of his country, and the calamities of the enemy, answered and
refuted her.
Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence was an era
in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic
sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or
the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder,
and sometimes the music of the spheres. He did not, like Murray, conduct
the understanding through the painful subtlety of argumentation; nor was
he, like Townshend, forever on the rack of exertion; but rather lightened
upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of the mind,
which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be followed. Upon
the whole, there was in this man something that would create, subvert, or
reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence, to summon mankind to
society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder; something to rule the
wilderness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could
establish, or overwhelm empire, and strike a blow in the world, that should
resound through the universe.
H. Grattan.
XVIII.
THE PRESS AND THE UNION.
It were good for us to remember that nothing which tends, however
distantly, however imperceptibly, to hold these States together, is beneath
the notice of a considerate patriotism. It were good to remember that some
of the institutions and devices by which former confederacies have been
preserved, our circumstances wholly forbid us to employ. The tribes of
Israel and Judah came up three times a year to the holy and beautiful city,
and united in prayer and praise and sacrifice, in listening to that
thrilling poetry, in swelling that matchless song, which celebrated the
triumphs of their fathers by the Red Sea, at the fords of Jordan, and on
the high places of the field of Barak's victory. But we have no feast of
the Passover, or of the Tabernacles, or of the Commemoration. The States of
Greece erected temples of the gods by a common contribution, and worshiped
in them. They consulted the same oracle; they celebrated the same national
festival: mingled their deliberations in the same amphictyonic and
subordinate assemblies, and sat together upon the free benches to hear
their glorious history read aloud, in the prose of Heroditus, the poetry of
Homer and of Pindar. We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we
consult no common oracle but the Constitution. We can meet together to
celebrate no national festival. But the thousand tongues of the
press--clearer far than the silver trumpet of the jubilee,--louder than the
voice of the herald at the games,--may speak and do speak to the whole
people, without calling them from their homes or interrupting them in their
employments. Happy if they should speak, and the people should hear, those
things which pertain at least to their temporal and national salvation!
R. Choate.
XIX.
AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE UNION.
In leaving this subject, I cannot help suggesting, at the hazard of being
thought whimsical, that a literature of such writings as these, embodying
the romance of the whole revolutionary and ante-revolutionary history of
the United States, might do something to perpetuate the Union itself. The
influence of a rich literature of passion and fancy upon society must not
be denied merely because you cannot measure it by the yard or detect it by
the barometer. Poems and romances which shall be read in every parlor, by
every fireside, in every school-house, behind every counter, in every
printing-office, in every lawyer's office, at every weekly evening club, in
all the States of this confederacy, must do something, along with more
palpable if not more powerful agents, towards moulding and fixing that
final, grand, complex result,--the national character. A keen, well
instructed judge of such things said, if he might write the ballads of a
people, he cared little who made its laws. Let me say, if a hundred men of
genius would extract such a body of romantic literature from our early
history as Scott has extracted from the history of England and Scotland,
and as Homer extracted from that of Greece, it perhaps would not be so
alarming if demagogues should preach, or governors practice, or executives
tolerate nullification. Such a literature would be a common property of all
the States,--a treasure of common ancestral recollections,--more noble and
richer than our thousand million acres of public land; and, unlike that
land, it would be indivisible. It would be as the opening of a great
fountain for the healing of the nations. It would turn back our thoughts
from these recent and overrated diversities of interest,--these
controversies about negro-cloth, coarse-wooled sheep, and cotton
bagging,--to the day when our fathers walked hand in hand together through
the valley of the Shadow of Death in the War of Independence. Reminded of
our fathers, we should remember that we are brethren. The exclusiveness of
State pride,--the narrow selfishness of a mere local policy and the small
jealousies of vulgar minds, would be merged in an expanded comprehensive,
constitutional sentiment of old, family, fraternal regard. It would
reässemble, as it were, the people of America in one vast congregation. It
would rehearse in their hearing all things which God had done for them in
the old time; it would proclaim the law once more; and then it would bid
them join in that grandest and most affecting solemnity,--a national anthem
of thanksgiving for the deliverance, of honor for the dead, of proud
prediction for the future!
R. Choate.
XX.
THE LOVE OF READING.
Let the case of a busy lawyer testify to the priceless value of the love
of reading. He comes home, his temples throbbing, his nerves shattered,
from a trial of a week; surprised and alarmed by the charge of the judge,
and pale with anxiety about the verdict of the next morning, not at all
satisfied with what he has done himself, though he does not yet see how he
could have improved it; recalling with dread and self-disparagement, if not
with envy, the brilliant effort of his antagonist, and tormenting himself
with the vain wish that he could have replied to it,--and altogether a very
miserable subject, and in as unfavorable a condition to accept comfort from
a wife and children as poor Christian in the first three pages of the
"Pilgrim's Progress." With a superhuman effort he opens his book, and in
the twinkling of an eye he is looking into the full "orb of Homeric or
Miltonic song;" or he stands in the crowd--breathless, yet swayed as
forests or the sea by winds--hearing and to judge the pleadings for the
crown; or the philosophy which soothed Cicero or Boethius in their
afflictions, in exile, prison, and the contemplation of death, breathes
over his petty cares like the sweet south; or Pope or Horace laughs him
into good humor; or he walks with Æneas and the Sibyl in the mild light of
the world of the laurelled dead; and the court-house is as completely
forgotten as the dreams of a pre-adamite life. Well may he prize that
endeared charm, so effectual and safe, without which the brain had long ago
been chilled by paralysis, or set on fire of insanity!
R. Choate.
XXI.
ELOQUENCE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
Men heard that eloquence in 1776, in that manifold and mighty appeal by the
genius and wisdom of that new America, to persuade the people to take on
the name of nation, and begin its life. By how many pens and tongues that
great pleading was conducted; through how many months before the date of
the actual Declaration, it went on, day after day; in how many forms,
before how many assemblies, from the village newspaper, the more careful
pamphlet, the private conversation, the town-meeting, the legislative
bodies of particular colonies, up to the hall of the immortal old Congress,
and the master intelligences of lion heart and eagle eye, that ennobled
it,--all this you know. But the leader in that great argument was John
Adams, of Massachusetts. He, by concession of all men, was the orator of
that Revolution,--the Revolution in which a nation was born. Other and
renowned names, by written or spoken eloquence, coöperated effectively,
splendidly, to the grand result,--Samuel Adams, Samuel Chase, Jefferson,
Henry James Otis in an earlier stage. Each of these, and a hundred more,
within circles of influence wider or narrower, sent forth, scattering
broadcast, the seed of life in the ready virgin soil. Each brought some
specialty of gift to the work: Jefferson, the magic of style, and the
habit and the power of delicious dalliance with those large, fair ideas of
freedom and equality, so dear to man, so irresistible in that day; Henry,
the indescribable and lost spell of the speech of the emotions, which fills
the eye, chills the blood, turns the cheek pale,--the lyric phase of
eloquence, the "fire-water," as Lamartine has said, of the Revolution,
instilling into the sense and the soul the sweet madness of battle; Samuel
Chase, the tones of anger, confidence, and pride, and the art to inspire
them. John Adams's eloquence alone seemed to have met every demand of the
time; as a question of right, as a question of prudence, as a question of
immediate opportunity, as a question of feeling, as a question of
conscience, as a question of historical and durable and innocent glory, he
knew it all through and through; and in that mighty debate, which,
beginning in Congress as far back as March or February; 1776, had its close
on the second and on the fourth of July, he presented it in all its
aspects, to every passion and affection,--to the burning sense of wrong,
exasperated at length beyond control by the shedding of blood; to grief,
anger, self-respect; to the desire of happiness and of safety; to the sense
of moral obligation, commanding that the duties of life are more than life;
to courage, which fears God, and knows no other fear; to the craving of the
colonial heart, of all hearts, for the reality and the ideal of country,
and which cannot be filled unless the dear native land comes to be breathed
on by the grace, clad in the robes, armed with the thunders, admitted an
equal to the assembly of the nations; to that large and heroical ambition
which would build States: that imperial philanthropy which would open to
liberty an asylum here, and give to the sick heart, hard fare, fettered
conscience of the children of the Old World, healing, plenty, and freedom
to worship God,--to these passions, and these ideas, he presented the
appeal for months, day after day, until, on the third of July, 1776, he
could record the result, writing thus to his wife: "Yesterday the greatest
question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater,
perhaps, never was, nor will be, among men."