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becoming your exalted situation, make the first advances to concord, to peace and happiness; for that is your true dignity, to act with prudence and justice. That you should first concede, is obvious, from sound and rational policy. Concession comes with better grace and more salutary effect from superior power. It reconciles superiority of power with the feelings of men, and establishes solid confidence on the foundations of affection and gratitude.

From "Speech on Removing the Troops from Boston," 1770.

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THE EXILE'S FATE.

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RICHARD LALOR SHEIL.

THE prison of this town will present, on Monday next, a very afflicting spectacle. Before the prisoner ascends the vehicle which is to convey him for transportation to Cork, he will be allowed to take leave of his wife and children. She will cling to his bosom; and while her arms are folded round his neck-while she sobs, in the agony of anguish, on his breast his children, who used to climb his knees in playful emulation for his caresses * I will not go on with this distressing picture-your own emotions will complete it. The pains of this poor man will not end at the threshold of his prison. He will be conveyed in a vessel, freighted with affliction, across the ocean, and will be set on the lonely and distant land from which he will depart no more; the thoughts of home will haunt him, and adhere with a deadly tenacity to his heart. He will mope about in a deep and settled sorrow-he will have no incentive to exertion, for he will have bidden farewell to hope. The instruments of labor will hang idly in his handshe will go through his task without a consciousness of what he is doing. Thus every day will go by, and at its close, his sad consolation will be to stand on the shore, and, fixing his eyes in that direction in which he will have been taught that his country lies, if not in the language, he will, at least, exclaim, in the sentiments which have been so simply and so pathetically expressed in the song of exile:

"Erin, my country, though sad and forsaken,

In dreams I revisit thy sea-beaten shore;

But, alas! in far foreign lands I awaken,

And sigh for the friends that can meet me no more.
Where is my cabin-door, fast by the wild wood,

Sisters and sire, did you weep for its fall,
Where is the mother that looked on my childhood,
And where is the bosom-friend dearer than all ?"

From "Speech at the Clonmel Aggregate Meeting," 1829.

RELIGIOUS CHARITY.

RICHARD LALOR SHEIL,

LET there be an end to national animosities as well as to sectarian detestations. Perish the bad theology, which, with an impious converse, makes God according to man's image, and with infernal passions fills the heart of man! Perish the bad, the narrow, the pernicious sentiments, which, for the genuine love of country, institutes a feeling of despotic domination upon your part, and of provincial turbulence upon ours;—and while upon pseudo-religion and pseudo-patriotism I pronounce my denunciation, live (let me be permitted to pray) the spirit of philanthropic, forbearing, forgiving Christianity amongst us! and, combined with it, live the lofty love of country, which associates the welfare of both islands with the glory of this majestic empirewhich, superior to the small passions that ought to be as ephemeral as the incidents of which they were born, acts in conformity with the imperial policy of William Pitt, and the marvellous discovery of James Watt-sees the legislation of the one ratified by the science of the other, and, of the project of the son of Chatham, in the invention of the mighty mechanist, beholds the consummation.

From "Speech on the Irish Reform Bili," 1836.

DEFENCE OF JOHN O'CONNELL.

RICHARD LALOR SHEIL.

You will not consign him to the spot to which the attorney-general invites you to surrender him. When the spring shall have come again, and the winter shall have passed-when the spring shall have come again, it is not through the windows of a prison-house that the father of such a son, and the son of such a father, shall look upon those green hills on which the eyes of many a captive have gazed so wistfully in vain, but in their own mountain home again they shall listen to the murmurs of the great Atlantic; they shall go forth and inhale the freshness of the morning air together; "they shall be free of mountain solitudes;" they will be encompassed with the loftiest images of liberty upon every side; and if time shall have stolen its suppleness from the father's knee, or impaired the firmness of his tread, he shall lean on the child of her that watches over him from heaven, and shall look out from some high place far and wide into the island whose greatness and whose glory shall be for ever associated with his name. In your love of justice-in your love of Ireland-in your love of honesty and fair play-I place my confidence. I ask you for an acquittal, not only for the sake of your country, but for your own. Upon the day when this trial shall have been brought to a termination, when, amidst the hush

of public expectancy, in answer to the solemn interrogatory which shall be put to you by the officer of the court, you shall answer, "Not guilty," with what a transport will that glorious negative be welcomed! How will you be blest, adored, worshipped; and when retiring from this scene of excitement and of passion, you shall return to your own tranquil homes, how pleasurably will you look upon your children, in the consciousness that you will have left them a patrimony of peace by impressing upon the British cabinet, that some other measure besides a state prosecution is necessary for the pacification of your country! From "Speech in the Court of Queen's Bench," 1843.

IRON LINKS.

RUFUS CHOATE.

ONE splendid effort has been made to lay hold of the West and North-west. One more may be undertaken, and there is no more afterwards to be made. Sir, if the East, if Maine, if that large but desert territory away up under the North Star, her coast iron bound, her soil sterile, her winters cold-if Maine needs two ocean communications, do you think that the Great West will not pay for two only? Yet two are all that can be considered practicable. And the last of these two is to be accomplished by you, or not at all. These are the opportunities that make me regret my want of participation in public life.

"Non equidem invideo, miror magis."

You remember that passage in which a great English statesman, on the verge of the grave, so pertinently expressed himself, that he “would not give a peck of refuse wheat for all that there is of fame or honor in this world." That sentiment may be a true one. But to connect ourselves with an act of public utility, to do an act that shall stand out clear and distinct among all the aggregate of acts that have made Massachusetts what she has become, to rivet one more chain that shall bind the East to the free North-west for ever, to contribute to a policy that shall make it quite certain that if the great Central Constellation is to be placed over the sky, New England shall claim its share in the brightness-this is worth far more than all for which ambition has ever sighed; and this, Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, is permitted to-day to you.

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From "Speech in a Railroad Case," 1850.

THE LEARNING FOR A JUDGE.

RUFUS CHOATE.

THE good judge should be profoundly learned in all the learning of the law, and he must know how to use that learning. Will any one stand up here to deny this? In this day, boastful, glorious for its advancing popular, professional, scientific, and all education, will any one disgrace himself by doubting the necessity of deep and continued studies, and various and thorough attainments, to the bench? He is to know not merely the law which you make and the legislature makes, not constitutional and statute law alone, but that other, ampler, that boundless jurisprudence, the common law, which the successive generations of the state have silently built up; that old code of freedom which we brought with us in the Mayflower and Arabella, but which in the progress of centuries we have ameliorated and enriched and adapted wisely to the necessities of a busy, prosperous, and wealthy community, that he must know. And where to find it? In volumes which you must count by hundreds, by thousands; filling libraries; exacting long labors; the labors of a lifetime, abstracted from business, from politics; but assisted by taking part in an active judicial administration; such labors as produced the wisdom and won the fame of Parsons, and Marshall, and Kent, and Story, and Holt, and Mansfield. If your system of appointment and tenure does not present a motive, a help for such labors and such learning; if it discourages, if it disparages them, in so far it is a failure.

From "Speech in Massachusetts Convention."

THE INCORRUPTIBLE JUDGE.

RUFUS CHOATE.

In the next place, he must be a man, not merely upright, not merely honest and well-intentioned-this of course-but a man who will not respect persons in judgment. And does not every one here agree to this also? Dismissing, for a moment, all theories about the mode of appointing him, or the time for which he shall hold office, sure I am, we all demand, that as far as human virtue, assisted by the best contrivances of human wisdom, can attain to it, he shall not respect persons in judgment. He shall know nothing about the parties, everything about the case. He shall do everything for justice, nothing for himself, nothing for his friend, nothing for his patron, nothing for his sovereign. If on the one side is the executive power, and the legislature, and the people— the sources of his honors, the givers of his daily bread-and on the other, an individual nameless and odious, his eye is to see neither great nor small; attending only to the "trepidations of the balance." If a law

is passed by a unanimous legislature, clamored for by the general voice of the public, and a cause is before him on it in which the whole community is on one side, and an individual nameless or odious on the other, and he believes it to be against the Constitution, he must so declare it, or there is no judge. If Athens comes there to demand that the cup of hemlock be put to the lips of the wisest of men, and he believes that he has not corrupted the youth, nor omitted to worship the gods of the city, nor introduced new divinities of his own, he must deliver him, though the thunder light on the unterrified brow.

From "Speech in Massachusetts Convention."

STATES PROTECTED BY THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT.

T. F. MARSHALL.

THE exterior states are the bulwarks of her safety-the impregnable fortresses which break the storm of war, and keep far distant from her borders its ravage and its horrors. She views them as such, and regards their rights, their safety, and their liberty as her own. She is one of a system of nerves which vibrate at the least touch from without from the remotest extremity to the centre. The frontier of New York is her frontier; the Atlantic seaboard is her seaboard; and the millions expended in fortifying the one or the other, she regards as expended for her defence. A blow aimed at New York is a blow aimed at herself; an indignity or an outrage inflicted upon any state in this Union, is inflicted upon the whole and upon each. To submit to such were to sacrifice her independence and her freedom-to make all other blessings valueless, all other property insecure. Not all the unsettled domain of the Union, in full property and jurisdiction, could bribe her to such a sacrifice. The blood she has shed on the snows of Canada and in the swamps of Louisiana, give ample testimony to her readiness to meet danger at a distance. She seeks no separate destiny; she feels no interest alien from the common country. She wants this money to strengthen herself, and, by strengthening herself, to make the whole country stronger and better able to maintain any future conflict in which its interests or its safety may involve it.

From "Speech on the Land Bill," 1841.

MODERN TOLERATION.

T. F. MARSHALL.

MEN have been known to fight for their religion and their franchises. John Huss was an obscure professor in a German university. The Emperor Sigismund, when he burnt him at Constance, little dreamed

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