This bill passed, and these and other similar undertakings completed, we may indulge the patriotic hope that our union will be bound by ties and interests that render it indissoluble. As the general government withholds all direct agency from these truly national works, and from all new objects of internal improvement, ought it not to yield to the states, what is their own, the amount received from the public lands? It would thus but execute faithfully a trust expressly created by the original deeds of cession, or resulting from the treaties of acquisition. With this ample resource, every desirable object of improvement, in every part of our extensive country, may in due time be accomplished.-Placing this exhaustless fund in the hands of the several members of the confederacy, their common federal head may address them in the glowing language of the British bard, and, Bid harbours open, public ways extend, I confess I feel anxious for the fate of this measure, less on account of any agency I have had in proposing it, as I hope and believe, than from a firm, sincere and thorough conviction, that no one measure ever presented to the councils of the nation, was fraught with so much unmixed good, and could exert such powerful and enduring influence in the preservation of the union itself and upon some of its highest interests. If I can be instrumental, in any degree, in the adoption of it, I shall enjoy, in that retirement into which I hope shortly to enter, a heart-feeling satisfaction and a lasting consolation. I shall carry there no regrets, no complaints, no reproaches on my own account. When I look back upon my humble origin, left an orphan too young to have been conscious of a father's smiles and caresses; with a widowed mother, surrounded by a numerous offspring, in the midst of pecuniary embarrassments; without a regular education, without fortune, without friends, without patrons, I have reason to be satisfied with my public career. I ought to be thankful for the high places and honours to which I have been called by the favour and partiality of my countrymen, and I am thankful and grateful. And I shall take with me the pleasing consciousness that in whatever station I have been placed, I have earnestly and honestly laboured to justify their confidence by a faithful, fearless and zealous discharge of my public duties. Pardon these personal allusions. CLAY. 138.-EXTRACT FROM SIR JAMES M'INTOSH'S SPEECH ON THE TRIAL OF M. PELTIER. GENTLEMEN, I must entreat you to bear with me for a short time to allow me to suppose a case which might have occurred, in which you will see the horrible consequences of enforcing rigorously principles of law, which I cannot counteract, against political writers. We might have been at peace with France during the whole of that terrible period which elapsed between August 1792 and 1794, which has been usually called the reign of Robespierre! The only series of crimes, perhaps, in history, which, in spite of the common disposition to exaggerate extraordinary facts, has been beyond measure underrated in public opinion. I say this, gentlemen, after an investigation, which I think entitles me to affirm it with confidence. Men's minds were oppressed by atrocity and the multitude of crimes; their humanity and their indolence took refuge in skepticism from such an overwhelming mass of guilt; and the consequence was, that all these unparalleled enormities, though proved not only with the fullest historical, but with the strictest judicial evidence, were at the time only half believed, and are now scarcely half remembered. When these atrocities were daily perpetrating, of which the greatest part are as little known to the public in general as the campaigns of Genghis Khan, but are still protected from the scrutiny of men by the immensity of those voluminous records of guilt in which they are related, and under the mass of which they will be buried, till some historian be found with patience and courage enough to drag them forth into light, for the shame indeed, but for the instruction of mankind. When these crimes were perpetrating, which had the peculiar malignity, from the pretexts with which they were covered, of making the noblest objects of human pursuit seem odious and detestable; which have almos made the names of liberty, reformation, and humanity synonymous with anarchy, robbery, and murder; which thus threatened not only to extinguish every principle of improvement, to arrest the progress of civilized society, and to disinherit future generations of that rich succession which they were entitled to expect from the knowledge and wisdom of the present, but to destroy the civilization of Europe, which never gave such a proof of its vigor and robustness, as in being able to resist their destructive power; when all these horrors were acting in the greatest empire of the continent, I will ask my learned friend, if we had then been at peace with France, how English writers were to relate them so as to escape the charge of libelling a friendly government? When Robespierre, in the debates in the national convention on the mode of murdering their blameless sovereign, objected to the formal and tedious mode of murder called a trial, and proposed to put him immediately to death, "on the principles of insurrection," because to doubt the guilt of the king would be to doubt of the innocence of the convention; and if the king were not a traitor, the convention must be rebels; would my learned friend have had an English writer state all this with "decorum and moderation?" Would he have had an English writer state, that though this reasoning was not perfectly agreeable to our national laws, or perhaps to our national prejudices, yet it was not for him to make any observations on the judicial proceedings of foreign states? When Marat, in the same convention, called for two hundred and seventy thousand heads, must our English writers have said, that the remedy did, indeed, seem to their weak judgment rather severe; but that it was not for them to judge the conduct of so illustrious an assembly as the national convention, or the suggestions of so enlightened a statesman as M. Marat? When that convention resounded with applause at the news of several hundred aged priests being thrown into the Loire, and particularly at the exclamation of Carrier, who communicated the intelligence, "What a revolutionary torrent is the Loire !" when these suggestions and narra tions of murder, which have hitherto been only hinted and whispered in the most secret cabals, in the darkest caverns of banditti, were triumphantly uttered, patiently endured, and even loudly applauded by an assembly of seven hundred men, acting in the sight of all Europe, would my learned friend have wished that there had been found in England a single writer so base as to deliberate upon the most safe, decorous, and polite manner of relating all these things to his countrymen? When Carrier ordered five hundred children under fourteen years of age to be shot, the greater part of whom escaped the fire from their size, when the poor victims ran for protection to the soldiers and were bayoneted clinging round their knees! would my friend-but I cannot pursue the strain of interrogation. It is too much. It would be a violence which I cannot practise on my own feelings. It would be an outrage to my friend. It would be an insult to humanity. No! Better, ten thousand times better, would it be that every press in the world were burnt, that the very use of letters were abolished, that we were turned to the honest ignorance of the rudest times, than that the results of civilization should be made subservient to the purposes of barbarism, than that literature should be employed to teach a toleration for cruelty, to weaken moral hatred for guilt, to deprave and brutalize the human mind. I know that I speak my friend's feelings as well as my own, when I say, God forbid that the dread of any punishment should ever make an Englishman an accomplice in so corrupting his countrymen, a public teacher of depravity and barbarity! Mortifying and horrible as the idea is, I must remind you, gentlemen, that even at that time, even under the reign of Robespierre, my learned friend, if he had then been attorney-general, might have been compelled by some most deplorable necessity, to have come into this court to ask your verdict against the libellers of Barrere and Collot d'Herbois. Mr. Peltier then employed his talents against the enemies of the human race, as he has uniformly and bravely done. I do not believe that any peace, any political considerations, any fear of punishment, would have silenced him. He has shown too much honour, and constancy, and intrepidity, to be shaken by such circumstances as these. 1 My learned friend might then have been compelled to have filed a criminal information against Mr. Peltier, for "wickedly and maliciously intending to vilify and degrade Maximilian Robespierre, president of the committee of public safety of the French republic!" He might have been reduced to the sad necessity of appearing before you, to bely his own better feelings; to prosecute Mr. Peltier for publishing those sentiments which my friend himself had a thousand times felt, and a thousand times expressed. He might have been obliged even to call for punishment upon Mr. Peltier for language which he and all mankind would for ever despise Mr. Peltier if he were not to employ. Then indeed, gentlemen, we should have seen the last humiliation fall on England; the tribunals, the spotless and venerable tribunals of this free country, reduced to be the ministers of the vengeance of Robespierre! What could have rescued us from this last disgrace? The honesty and courage of a jury. They would have delivered the judges of this country from the dire necessity of inflicting punishment on a brave and virtuous man, because he spoke truth of a monster. They would have despised the threats of a foreign tyrant, as their ancestors braved the power of oppression at home. In the court where we are now met, Cromwell twice sent a satirist on his tyranny to be convicted and punished as a libeller; and in this court, almost in sight of the scaf fold streaming with the blood of his sovereign, within hearing of the clash of his bayonets which drove out parlia ment with contumely, two successive juries rescued the intrepid satirist from his fangs, and sent out with defeat and disgrace the usurper's attorney-general from what he had the insolence to call his court. Even then, gentlemen, when all law and liberty were trampled under the feet of a military banditti; when those great crimes were perpetrated in a high place and with a high hand against those who were the objects of public veneration, which, more than any thing else, break their spirits and confound their moral sentiments, obliterate the distinctions between right and wrong in their understanding, and teach the multitude to feel no longer any reverence for that justice which they thus see triumphantly dragged at the chariot-wheels of a *yrant; even then, when this unhappy country, triumphant |