Page images
PDF
EPUB

honorable gentleman rely on the report of the House of Lords for the foundation of his assertion? If he does, I can prove to the committee there was a physical impossibility of that report being true. But I scorn to answer any man for my conduct, whether he be a political cowomb, or whether he brought himself into power by a false glare of courage or not.

I have returned, not as the right honorable member has said, to raise another storm - I have returned to discharge an honorable debt of gratitude to my country, that conferred a great reward for past services, which, I am proud to say, was not greater than my desert. I have returned to protect that Constitution, of which I was the parent and founder, from the assassination of such men as the right honorable gentleman and his unworthy associates. They are corrupt, they are seditious, and they, at this very moment, are in a conspiracy against their country. I have returned to refute a libel, as false as it is malicious, given to the public under the appellation of a report of the committee of the Lords, Here I stand ready for impeachment or trial. I dare accusation. I defy the honorable gentleman; I defy the government; I defy their whole phalanx; let them come forth. I tell the ministers, I will neither give quarter nor take it. I am here to lay the shattered remains of my constitution on the floor of this House, in defence of the liberties of my country.

CXXXIX.

SPEECH OF TITUS QUINCTIUS TO THE ROMANS.

γου

have seen
it
consulship of Titus

posterity will know it! in the fourth Quinctius, our enemies came in arms,

-

But

may neither

to the very gates of Rome, and went away unchastised! who are they that our dastardly enemies thus despise? the consuls, or you, Romans? If we are in fault, depose us, or punish us yet more severely. If you are to blame gods nor men punish your faults! only may you repent! - No, Romans, the confidence of our enemies is not owing to their courage, or to their belief of your cowardice: they have been too often vanquished, not to know both themselves and you. Dis

cord, discord is the ruin of this city! The eternal disputes, between the senate and the people, are the sole cause of our misfortunes. While we set no bounds to our dominion, nor you to your liberty; while you impatiently endure Patrician magistrates, and we Plebeian; our enemies take heart, grow elated, and presumptuous. In the name of the immortal gods, what is it, Romans, you would have? You desired Tribunes; for the sake of peace, we granted them. You were eager to have Decemvirs; we consented to their creation. You grew weary of these Decemvirs; we obliged them to abdicate. Your hatred pursued them when reduced to private men; and we suffered you to put to death, or banish, Patricians of the first rank in the republic. You insisted upon the restoration of the Tribuneship; we yielded; we quietly saw Consuls of your own faction elected. You have the protection of your Tribunes, and the privilege of appeal; the Patricians are subjected to the decrees of the Commons. Under pretence of equal and impartial laws, you have invaded our rights; and we have suffered it, and we still suffer it. When shall we see an end of discord? When shall we have one interest, and one common country? Victorious and triumphant, you show less temper than we, under defeat. When you are to contend with us, you can seize the Aventine hill, you can possess yourselves of the Mons Sacer.

The enemy is at our gates, the Esquiline is near being taken, and nobody stirs to hinder it! But against us you are valiant, against us you can arm with diligence. Come on, then, besiege the senate-house, make a camp of the forum, fill the jails with our chief nobles, and when you have achieved these glorious exploits, then, at last, sally out at the Esquiline gate, with the same fierce spirits, against the enemy. Does your resolution fail you for this? Go then, and behold from our walls your lands ravaged, your houses plundered and in flames, the whole country laid waste with fire and sword. Have you anything here to repair these damages? Will the Tribunes make up your losses to you? They will give you words as many as you please; bring impeachments in abundance against the prime men in the State; heap laws upon laws; assemblies you shall have without end; but will any of you return the richer from those assemblies? Extinguish, O Romans, these fatal divisions,

generously break this cursed enchantment, which keeps you buried in a scandalous inaction. Open your eyes, and consider the management of those ambitious men, who, to make themselves powerful in their party, study nothing but how they may foment divisions in the commonwealth.

CXL.

THE BOSTON MASSACRE.

ye

TELL me, ye bloody butchers! ye villains high and low ! wretches who contrived, as well as you who executed, the inhuman deed! do you not feel the goads and stings of conscious guilt pierce through your savage bosoms? Though some of you may think yourselves exalted to such a height that bids defiance to the arms of human justice, and others shroud yourselves beneath the mask of hypocrisy, and build your hopes of safety on the low arts of cunning, chicanery, and falsehood; yet do you not sometimes feel the gnawings of that worm which never dies? Do not the injured shades of Maverick, Gray, Caldwell, Attucks, and Carr, attend you in your solitary walks, arrest you even in the midst of your debaucheries, and fill even your dreams with terror?

Ye dark, designing knaves! ye murderers! parricides! how dare you tread upon the earth which has drank in the blood of slaughtered innocents, shed by your wicked hands? How dare you breathe that air which wafted to the ear of Heaven the groans of those who fell a sacrifice to your accursed ambition ? But, if the laboring earth does not expand her jaws; if the air you breathe is not commissioned to be the minister of death; yet hear it, and tremble! the eye of Heaven penetrates the darkest chambers of the soul; traces the leading clew through all the labyrinths which your industrious folly has devised; and you, however you may have screened yourselves from human eyes, must be arraigned, must lift your hands, red with the blood of those whose deaths you have procured, at the tremendous bar of God.

John Hancock

CXLI.

ENTERPRISE OF NEW ENGLAND.

AS to the wealth, Mr. Speaker, which, the colonies have

drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value; for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised, ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry.

Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagactity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

When I contemplate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered

to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

E. Burke.

CXLII.

THE RIGHT OF ENGLAND TO TAX AMERICA.

BUT,

UT, Mr. Speaker, "we have a right to tax America." Oh, inestimable right! Oh, wonderful, transcendent right! the assertion of which has cost this country thirteen provinces, six islands, one hundred thousand lives, and seventy millions of money. Oh, invaluable right! for the sake of which we have sacrificed our rank among nations, our importance abroad, and our happiness at home! Oh, right! more dear to us than our existence, which has already cost us so much, and which seems likely to cost us our all. Infatuated man! Miserable and undone country! not to know that the claim of right, without the power of enforcing it, is nugatory and idle. We have a right to tax America, the noble lord tells us, therefore we ought to tax America. This is the profound logic which comprises the whole chain of his reasoning.

Not inferior to this was the wisdom of him who resolved to shear the wolf. What, shear a wolf! Have you considered the resistance, the difficulty, the danger of the attempt? No, says the madman, I have considered nothing but the right. Man has a right of dominion over the beasts of the forest; and therefore I I will shear the wolf.

How wonderful that a nation could be thus deluded! But the noble lord deals in cheats and delusions. They are the daily traffic of his invention; and he will continue to play off his cheats on this House, so long as he thinks them necessary to his purpose, and so long as he has money enough at command to bribe gentlemen to pretend that they believe him. But a black and bitter day of reckoning will surely come; and whenever that day comes, I trust I shall be able, by a parliamentary impeachment, to bring upon the heads of the authors of our calamities the punishment they deserve.

E. Burke.

« PreviousContinue »