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sion 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.

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XV.

ON BEING FOUND GUILTY OF TREASON.

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 libertinę, the murderer, have left their foot-prints in the dust; here on this spot, where the shadows of death surround me, and from which I see my early grave in an unanointed 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 tc 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.

HE time is now near at hand, which must probably deter

THE

mine 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 show 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 chi

canery, no narrow system of vicious politics, 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 зeasonable, 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.

IT

XVIII.

THE PRESS AND THE UNION.

T 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 worshipped 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 same 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.

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