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ARGUMENT.

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen:

The hearing of this cause has consumed a great deal of your time, and pretty severely tried your patience, and the argument of it, as we have seen, may very easily be expanded indefinitely, and over an infinite variety of topics, relevant and irrelevant. If it should last as long as the apparent kindness of the committee, I do not very well see that it could ever have an end. To me it seemed, however, much meditating upon this question, now and formerly, to be at last quite narrow and quite simple, turning on admitted facts and great principles, and susceptible, if I have at all appreciated it, of a very easy and satisfactory determination.

It seems to me, Sir, as, since I thought I understood the subject at all, it always seemed, that on the facts, substantially uncontradicted, we present a clear and urgent case for a new county, according to the universal and immemorial practice of Massachusetts in this behalf, and within every principle of fitness, and public good, and ease and convenience to the people, upon which a question of the creation of a new county or the change of the lines of an old one, must ever depend.

We present, as it seems to me, a case, stronger and more urgent by far, than any one on which Massachusetts has made or altered a county for two hundred years, and one, on which I respectfully submit-so long as the people continue to be distributed into counties at all, and until the dream of our friend, Mr. Brooks, shall be accomplished, and the whole State shall be merged into a single county, for the easy, prompt and economical administration of justice; for the settlement of the estates of the recently dead; and for the registration of the titles, and the conveyance of real estate and shall ever maintain that we have a right to a county of

our own.

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I am not afraid, indeed, that I shall be thought extravagant if much farther, and say that I do not believe, upon my honor, I do not believe that there is a single instance this day in the United States, certainly there is not a solitary instance in the free United States, in which the real pressing and considerable interests and needs of living men, and especially the men of this generation, the young men just now coming forward on the stage of active life, have been in so remarkable a manner, and to so extraordinary a degree postponed and sacrificed to an old, and transmitted, and obsolete state of things, to old ideas; old inveterate habits, old prejudices, no longer applicable to the existing state of things, as in this very protracted refusal to the people of North Worcester of the precious privileges of a local county organization. I feel bound to say, sir, in the very outset, that there seems to me in this case, a sort of conflict, not only with all our Massachusetts policy and experience, but with all our American policy and experience. Sir, is it not quite true, that the general law of American and Massachusetts civil life is growth? Is it not undoubtedly true that the general law is, a ready and prompt and perpetual adaptation of the instru mentalities, and devices, and contrivances, and means, from day to day, to the varying circumstances of the hour? Is it not entirely true that the general law of life in Massachusetts and America is, that the world belongs to the living, to the present and to the emerging and visible future, and not to the past and to the dead; is not this true everywhere, and in regard to everything, and especially is it not true in regard to all things which are mere instrumental contrivances, and devices, and accommodations for our daily and hourly life; for the conduct of our daily business; for the obtaining of our civil rights, and for the bettering of our material estate? Great ideas, undoubtedly fundamental institutions, we maintain, substantially as we inherited them from the past; we reverence, certainly, though we reform even them. We cherish the great ideas of liberty, and equality, and independence; the union, the constitution; our forms of written republican government; our general system of popular education; religious tolerance; the boundary line, the inherited glories of the Commonwealth, as our fathers delivered them to us-these, I agree, we are bound to

cherish reverentially almost! But in regard to the mere contrivances and instrumentalities for the transaction of our daily business of our life, we have no such superstition. We hold and cherish the constitution to-day, substantially as John Adams and James Bowdoin wrote and transmitted it; but the old ploughs, and scythes and muskets of our fathers; the old modes of agriculture; the old modes of ascending and descending our rivers-the Hudson and the Mississippi and of communication across the land; our old school houses; our old lines of school districts, and of towns and counties, of a hundred years ago-where are these? These things all belong to that class of mere and minor details and tools and agencies, of mere temporary material contrivances for the daily use of man; and our universal course in all other cases and things is, to hold that they should and shall be changed, as a garment from day to day and hour to hour, to meet the varying demands, and the varying lights, and the varying interests of life; these things, as contradistinguished from those larger considerations, we change, we have changed, in every other instance but this single instance of the outline of the county of Worcester. This it is that has made us what we are. It is to these great ideas on the one hand, of steadfastness, and love and veneration for great principles and fundamental and established institutions; and on the other hand, a ready adaptation of great instrumental means and contrivances to essential ends,-this it is, I respectfully submit, that has made us exactly what we are.

But now, sir, I feel bound to say, that in regard to this matter of a change of the county line of Worcester, it does seem to me, that, all our policy in this behalf, has been strangely and totally reversed. Here we have been, I do not know how many years, for what; Sir? one might suppose we were here to ask you to give away a part of Massachusetts; to change her constitution; to abandon her policy; to dishonor and forget her past; and yet we are here for nothing but to solicit a slight, an ordinary, a harmless, and a useful change in one of the merest instrumental arrangements, for the ease and convenience of important business, which it is possible to conceive.

We are here, and have been here for the last four or five

years, until we are not wearied, but until we are anxious, and our hearts are sick,-simply, respectfully, and earnestly to submit that our county accommodations are inadequate to the great and specific ends, for which counties are organized, that they are appreciably inferior to those which without prejudice to others, we might enjoy, and that we are touched and grieved by it.

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We are here merely to say that we are an area, and a mass of persons and interests so large, that our great distance from the seats of justice, from the place for the settlement of the estates of the dead, the place for the registration of titles of land, constitutes a great practical evil, wholly unnecessary and unreasonable, because it is easy to be redressed, because it can be changed by the stroke of a pen, without injury to a single human being; and of this therefore we complain; we are here to say that in exactly the same circumstances,-aye in circumstances not a ten thousandth part as strong and urgent as those we present,-Massachusetts has universally granted the specific and particular instrumental accommodations that we ask; and therefore it seems to us, that we are suffering somewhat under the inequality of a mere discriminating and unintelligent injustice.

How are we met? We are met--and I mean no injustice and no disrespect to the great ability with which these topics have been maintained, when I say, that we are met by nothing but that old stereotyped, old fogy, phraseology, by which a certain class of minds resist every change of everything, everywhere. Sir our case is not met.

In the first place, I respectfully submit that they have never controverted the great principle on which, I am to contend this Commonwealth has universally changed, and made from one of its counties a new one. If that principle be admitted to be a sound one, I submit that they have not satisfied you that I do not bring my facts within it. They cannot maintain,-without erasing the records of Massachusetts from 1636 to this hour-and they never have maintained that on such a case as this, Massachusetts, in any generation, has ever refused the relief we ask. How then, do they meet us? only by that same description of topics, although in a new dress,-over and over again, that are applicable to every de

scription of change in the world. It is all at least, no more than— "Things are pretty well as they are" "Let pretty well alone"-"It will do our time out "-" It is not so dreadfully bad any way after all"" It might be a great deal worse than it is"-"Your Fathers bore it did not they? Other people, in other counties, suffer inconveniences, and should'nt you be able to put up with yours? Who knows what evils may come of change? Think how your expenses must be aggravated,-$200,000 for new county buildings, to start with." "Consider what a respectable and glori ous a thing it is to belong to so wealthy and old a county as Worcester, and how long before this young county of Fitchburg can make such a show!" "Has not Worcester, on the whole, gone on increasing, big as it is?" "And then can you bear to contemplate" (in the beautiful and eloquent language of his Excellency), "the consequences of a great gloomy, glittering, dominant, centralization in Fitchburg to over-see and guard that subjected land?” These are the topics with which they meet us, when we come here to ask you to change, nothing fundamental, nothing cherished, nothing that affects those things for which we love and venerate the fathers, but merely to ask an accommodation in one of the minutest and merest instrumental devices and contrivances, by which we may do the ordinary business of life. I say, they are the same line of topics, that in every stage of human advancement, for six thousand years have been used against every attempt, large and little, to better the condition of man's estate; topics which, if they had produced the effects aimed at by those who employed them, we should be this day navigating the Hudson River with sloops instead of steam-boats; and carrying our passengers across the country from Boston to Saint Louis at the heels of horses in stage coaches; Barnstable would become again part of Plymouth, Norfolk of Bristol, Maine of Massachusetts; and these free and rising and immortal republican states become again subjects of his Majesty of Great Britain.

Thus far this resistance, on these topics, has been completely successful-thus far, strange as it is, the interests of living men; the ancient and uniform practice of Massachusetts in all other cases the reason and justice of the cause as we put it to you on

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