the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed in separating it from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain over the friends who gather around it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

LIBERTY AND UNION INSEPARABLE

DANIEL WEBSTER

[From the reply to Hayne. This noble burst of patriotic feeling would alone keep Webster's fame alive.]

I PROFESS, sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in view the prosperity and honor of the whole country, and the preservation of our Federal Union. It is to that Union that we owe our safety at home, and our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union that we are chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country. That Union we reached only by the discipline of our virtues, in the severe school of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its benign influences these great interests immediately awoke, as from the dead, and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its duration has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings; and, although our territory has stretched out wider and wider, and our population spread farther and farther, they have not outrun its protection or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious fountain of national, social, and personal happiness. I have not allowed myself, sir, to look

beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union may best be preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it should be broken up and destroyed.

While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and for our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that, in my day at least, that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!

Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as, "What is all this worth," nor those other words of delusion and folly, "Liberty first, and Union afterwards"; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart, — Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

SOUTH CAROLINA IN THE REVOLUTION

ROBERT Y. HAYNE

[These words were spoken by Hayne in his famous debate with Daniel Webster in the senate of the United States in 1830. In the course of the debate both men felt that their respective states had been assailed, and each made a spirited reply.]

If there be one State in the Union, and I say it not in a boasting spirit, that may challenge comparison with any other, for an uniform, zealous, ardent, and uncalculating devotion to the Union, that State is South Carolina.

From the very commencement of the Revolution, up to this hour, there is no sacrifice, however great, she has not cheerfully made, no service she has even hesitated to perform. She has adhered to you, in your prosperity; but in your adversity she has clung to you with more than filial affection. No matter what was the condition of her domestic affairs, though deprived of her resources, divided by parties, or surrounded by difficulties, the call of the country has been to her as the voice of God. Domestic discord ceased at the sound; every man became at once reconciled to his brethren, and the sons of Carolina were all seen crowding together to the temple, bringing their gifts to the altar of their common country.

What was the conduct of the South during the Revolution? I honor New England for her conduct in that glorious struggle. But, great as is the praise which belongs to her, I think at least equal honor is due the South. They espoused the quarrel of their brethren with a generous zeal which did not suffer them to stop to calculate their interest in the dispute. Favorites of the mother-country, possessed of neither ships nor seamen to create a commercial rivalship, they might have found, in their situation, a guarantee that their trade would be forever fostered and protected by Great Britain. But, trampling on all considerations, either of interest or of safety, they rushed into the conflict; and, fighting for principle, perilled all in the sacred

cause of freedom. Never were there exhibited in the history of the world higher examples of noble daring, dreadful suffering, and heroic endurances than by the Whigs of Carolina during the Revolution! The whole State, from the mountains to the sea, was overrun by an overwhelming force of the enemy. The fruits of industry perished on the spot where they were produced, or were consumed by the foe. The "Plains of Carolina" drank up the most precious blood of her citizens. Black and smoking ruins marked the places which had been the habitations of her children. Driven from their homes, into the gloomy and almost impenetrable swamps, even there the spirit of liberty survived, and South Carolina, sustained by the example of her Sumters and her Marions, proved, by her conduct, that, though her soil might be overrun, the spirit of her people was invincible.

A NAVAL DUEL: THE CONSTITUTION AND
THE GUERRIÈRE

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JR.

[From an address before the American Historical Assocation in 1912; reprinted by permission from the American Historical Review. As Adams points out, the American navy from 1800 to 1812 was pitiably weak, while English naval pride was on the crest of the wave. Nelson and his English had, in 1805, defeated the combined naval forces of France and Spain at Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain.

England now claimed the right to search American vessels in quest of English deserters. When she found an able-bodied seaman, she was not always too particular about his nationality. It is estimated that thousands of American seamen were impressed into the English service during the years just preceding the War of 1812.]

I PROPOSE to specify the exact day of the year and month and week, the hour and almost the minute at which the United States blazed as an indisputable world power on the astonished

and, for some time yet, incredulous nations. To be specific, it was at thirty minutes after six o'clock of the afternoon of Wednesday, August 19, 1812. On that day and at that hour, just twenty weeks over a hundred years ago, this country, I confidently submit, became a nationality to be reckoned with; and such it has ever since been.

When the year 1812 came in, this country of ours, rated as a power of the third class - less considered, for instance, than Portugal, and more nearly on the level of Algiers - had for a score of years been the unresenting football of antagonists as overbearing as they were powerful. . . . With Napoleon and the country of Nelson and Wellington locked in a long death-grapple, the young American nation had thought to traffic on their fields of battle. Regardless of buffets and insults, it had done this systematically and as a matter of policy. A people, no more than an individual, can pursue such a course in a pure spirit of gain, accepting kicks and cuffs as incident thereto, still preserving its manhood.

Americans during the period in question were accustomed to read of themselves in the columns of the English press as "spaniel-like in character," a people who "the more they were chastised the more obsequious they became"; and one, moreover, which "could not be kicked into a war." Submitting to it all, the confidence of the people in themselves was gone. They questioned their own man-to-man fighting capacity. By sufferance, they continued to exist.

Recalled through the century vista, the situation in 1812 was, withal, in every respect spectacular. Trafalgar was then seven years passed, and England during the period which followed Trafalgar was fairly drunk with consciousness of maritime power. Britannia did indeed then rule the wave. On the ocean, none questioned her supremacy; for, almost immemorially, hers had been a record of unbroken naval victory - victory on a scale both large and small. Contemptuously ignoring all international rules of courtesy or conduct,