137..-MR. CLAY'S SPEECH ON OCCASION OF INTRODUCING HIS PUBLIC LANDS BILL. MR. PRESIDENT,-Although I find myself borne down. by the severest affliction with which Providence has ever been pleased to visit me, I have thought that my private griefs ought not longer to prevent me from attempting, ill as I feel qualified, to discharge my public duties. And I now rise, in pursuance of the notice which has been given, to ask leave to introduce a bill to appropriate, for a limited time, the proceeds of the sales of the public lands of the United States, and for granting land to certain states. I feel it incumbent on me to make a brief explanation of the highly important measure which I have now the honour to propose. The bill which I desire to introduce, provides for the distribution of the proceeds of the public lands in the years 1833, 1834, 1835, 1836 and 1837, among the twenty-four states of the union, and conforms substantially to that which passed in 1833. It is therefore of a temporary character; but if it shall be found to have salutary operation, it will be in the power of a future congress to give it an indefinite continuance; and, if otherwise, it will expire by its own terms. In the event of war unfortunately breaking out with any foreign power, the bill is to cease, and the fund which it distributes is to be applied to the prosecution of the war. The bill directs that ten per cent. of the net proceeds of the public lands sold within the limits of the seven new states, shall be first set apart for them, in addition to the five per cent. reserved by their several compacts with the United States; and that the residue of the proceeds, whether from sales made in the states or territories, shall be divided among the twentyfour states, in proportion to their respective federal population. In this respect the bill conforms to that which was introduced in 1832. For one, I should have been willing to have allowed the new states twelve and a half instead of ten per cent.; but as that was objected to by the president, in his veto message, and has been opposed in other quarters, I thought it best to restrict the allowance to the more moderate sum. The bill also contains large. and liberal grants of land to several of the new states, to place them upon an equality with others to which the bounty of congress has been heretofore extended, and provides that, when other new states shall be admitted into the union, they shall receive their share of the common fund. * * * Mr. President, I have ever regarded, with feelings of the profoundest regret, the decision which the president of the United States felt himself induced to make on the bill of 1833. If the bill had passed, about twenty millions of dollars would have been, during the last three years, in the hands of the several states, applicable by them to the beneficent purposes of internal improvement, education or colonization. What immense benefits might not have been diffused throughout the land by the active employment of that large sum? What new channels of commerce and communication might not have been opened? What industry stimulated, what labour rewarded? How many youthful minds might have received the blessings of education and knowledge, and been rescued from ignorance, vice, and ruin? How many descendants of Africa might have been transported from a country where they never can enjoy political or social equality, to the native land of their fathers, where no impediment exists to their attainment of the highest degree of elevation, intellectual, social and political! where they might have been successful instruments, in the hands of God, to spread the religion of his Son, and to lay the foundation of civil liberty. But, although we have lost three precious years, the secretary of the treasury tells us that the principal of this vast sum is yet safe; and much good may still be achieved with it. The spirit of improvement pervades the land in every variety of form, active, vigorous and enterprising, wanting pecuniary aid as well as intelligent direction. The states are strengthening the union by various lines of communication thrown across and through the mountains. New York has completed one great chain. Pennsylvania another, bolder in conception and more arduous in the execution. Virginia has a similar work in progress, worthy of all her enterprise and energy. A fourth, further south, where the parts of the union are too loosely connected, has been projected, and it can certainly be executed with the supplies which this bill affords, and perhaps not without them. 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, Bid temples worthier of the God ascend. 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 almost 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? 66 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 narrations of murder, which have hitherto been only hinted and |