AN 
 
 ORATION 
 
 DELIVERED BY 
 
 BENJAMIN F. HALLETT, 
 
 AT 
 
 MIIiL.BURT, MASS.,, 
 July 4, 1839. 
 
ORATION 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 DEMOCRATIC CITIZENS 
 
 WORCESTER COUNTY 
 
 MASSACHUSETTS, 
 
 AT ]?IIL,L.BURY, 
 
 0? 
 
 c^*eS 
 
 JULY 4, 183a /' jggj 
 
 BY BENJAMIN FRANKLIN HALLETT. 
 
 WORCESTER: 
 PUBLISHED BY E.W.BARTLETT 
 
 1839. 
 
 7r 
 
Entered according to an Act of Congress, in the year 1839, 
 
 By E. W. Bartlett, 
 in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. 
 
 E. W. BARTLETT, PRINTER. 
 
 O^. 
 
 V^^ 
 
MiLLBURY, July 10, 1839. 
 B. F. Hallett, Esq., Boston : 
 
 Sir — The citizens from the several towns in Worcester County, who 
 united in the late Democratic County Celebration of the 4th of July, at 
 Millbury, appointed us a committee to tender to you their thanks for the 
 able — spirited — and very appropriate Oration, delivered by you, on that 
 occasion, and to request a copy of the same for publication. In making 
 this request, permit us to say that it is not made as a matter of course 
 compliment, but from the belief that the publication would promote the 
 cause of Democratic principles — rational liberty, and sound morality. 
 With the highest respect, we are. Sir, 
 
 Your Fellow Citizens, 
 
 ASA H. WATERS, 
 SAMUEL D. SPURR, 
 E. A. JOHNSON. 
 
ORATION. 
 
 n' 
 
 ENS : — "Where are we now, in the progress 
 
 le between the rights of the many and the 
 
 which to-day numbers its 63d anniversary 
 
 . of time ? 
 
 Hall' d ever on this day, be the names, and green be 
 
 i.' ries of the great apostles and martyrs of Liberty, 
 
 v.j 'le price of blood and toil and treasure, laid for 
 
 i^v^^iority to build upon, the only enduring foundation of 
 
 free government, unrestrained popular Sovereignty; and who 
 
 enjoined it upon all succeeding generations, to perfect what 
 
 they began — to go forward, with high faith in humanity, and in 
 
 the light of truth and hope and virtue; "in the name of God" 
 
 and "for the general good," establish "Jwsf and equal laws'^* 
 
 to extend the Democratic principle. 
 
 Up to this day and this hour, sixty-three years ago, the 
 servile dogma of government, which had bound mankind in 
 chains for fifty centuries, was strong in all its despotic force — 
 
 * See the first written free Constitution on earth; the compact on board 
 the May Flower at Cape Cod, Nov. 11, ]620. "In the name of God, 
 Amen. We do covenant and bind ourselves together into a civil body pol- 
 itic, for our better ordering and preservation, and by virtue hereof, do 
 enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws as shall be most 
 meet and convenient/o?' the general good." 
 
 Hutchinson well remarks upon this model of a democratic Constitu- 
 tion, (which has apparently been forgotten by our modern state legisla- 
 tors,) that the framers of it "Seemed cautiously to have reserved as much 
 of their natural liberty as could be consistent with the maintenance of 
 government and good order." — 2 Hutch. 410. 
 1* 
 
"that the people were only an appendage, and not a power in 
 the State." It was then that Liberty first put forth and en- 
 forced her holy creed that men were not made for Govern- 
 ments, but that "governments are instituted among men, de- 
 riving their just powers from the consent of the governed," 
 and designed solely to secure to all "the inalienable rights 
 of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 
 
 Large and boundless was the chart of Freedom our fathers 
 spread before us. Not a stint, not a limit, not a special 
 privilege, not an exclusive power was reserved to one that 
 was not guaranteed to all. 
 
 Equal and just laics and their impartial administration was 
 the foundation of the great moral structure of human rights, 
 then first reared, in fair proportion, amid the waste of ages of 
 almost changeless despotism. 
 
 Blessings on the memory of the great and glorious dead! 
 that they forsook all and followed Liberty till they rescued 
 her from the grasp of tyrants, and placed her in our midst, 
 the presiding genius of our country; the only earthly power 
 before which erect man should be made to bow in willing sub- 
 mission! 
 
 But greater blessings still be on their venerated names, that 
 they sought not to bind posterity within their limits, nor to 
 prescribe the boundaries of self-government, as if fearing that 
 future generations would grow wiser and freer than them- 
 selves. 
 
 "The wide, the unbounded prospect lies before us," and 
 on this day let us take an observation in the full blaze of the 
 sun of Freedom over our heads, and learn if we are still 
 moving right onward in the glorious work they began. 
 
 Hitherto this has been a day for eulogy of the past. 
 The time has arrived, when forgetting the past, or remem- 
 bering it only as the incentive to higher excellence, we 
 should press forward, as a people, for the prize of the high 
 calling of the sons of Liberty. 
 
Vain was the struggle of tyranny to keep back the dawn- 
 ing of this glorious day. But though it did dawn in the face 
 of the haughty ones of the earth, and for a time blinded the 
 eyes of the worshippers of divine right, and startled, in their 
 seats of power, the rulers of men, claiming to be tyrants "by 
 the Grace of God;" — yet from that day to this, as hard has 
 been the struggle of the privileged few to roll back that glo- 
 rious light and retard its mounting to meridian splendor 
 whence it should diffuse equal blessings on all; as was the 
 effort of the hardened unbelievers in man's capacity for self- 
 government, who for five thousand years before had succeed- 
 ed in keeping him in outer darkness and bending his form, 
 (predestined ever to be erect, save in the presence of his 
 God,) in slavish submission at the footstool of usurped 
 power. 
 
 Why, what a peevish fear is this of man, which would 
 always keep him in chains, lest, if loosed, he should turn and 
 rend those who had bound him! 
 
 What a mockery of 6cnc/iccwce is that which aflects, by 
 the special guardianship of the /etf, to restrain man in his 
 free agency as an accountable being, lest he should prove his 
 own worst enemy, and use his liberty only to commit moral 
 suicide! 
 
 What a bigoted and insolent faith in humanity is that 
 which sets up, in government, a class of men as especially 
 designed to rule over and use the rest ? 
 
 What an insult to Deity, who created man equal and in 
 his own image; that a few of his miserable creatures should 
 have set themselves to work, to mar his great purpose by 
 making inequality and injustice the only conditions on which 
 it is pretended society and government can subsist ? 
 
 "Some really suppose that man cannot be trusted to govern himself. 
 Have we then found angels in the form of kings (or corporations) to gov- 
 ern him ? Let history answer."* 
 
 Away, then, with this impious folly on such a day and in 
 * Thomas Jefferson. 
 
8 
 
 such aa age as this! Away with the wretched dogmas and 
 timid doubts of the self-styled constrvativCy who helplessly 
 clings to an old abuse as better than a new virtue. 
 
 Away with the selfish bigotry of the privileged few, who 
 heap up their ill-gotten hoards of vested rights robbed from 
 the many, and cemented by the sweat of the brow of the 
 honest laborer, and think to stop the moral Universe in its 
 mighty revolutions, lest it may crush their paltry pelf in its 
 majestic, steady, onward course! 
 
 Let man but be true to man; let him but firmly hold to 
 faith in man, and as vain will be the efforts of Special Legis- 
 lation., which now constitutes "the Dynasty of modern 
 States," to check the mighty movements of the common 
 mind and stop the great moral and political progress of hu- 
 manity, as were the hireling armies and navies of despotism, 
 to strike from existence the glorious Declaration of man's 
 Independence which our fathers made and achieved in the 
 face of the enthralled nations of the earth. 
 
 No, Fellow Citizens! The end is not yet. The Umit 
 to human freedom and human happiness is not reached. The 
 capacity of man for the full enjoyment of equal rights and 
 equal laws, is not yet filled. It is ours and our children's 
 to perfect what the venerated fathers of our Liberty, but 
 began. Let our motto, on this day and henceforward, be 
 drawn from the only true creed of Democracy, "Union 
 AND Onward!" "Always hastening reform, yet always 
 conservative;" for doubt it who may, in his narrow percep- 
 tion of the high destinies of man, it is an eternal and ever- 
 living truth, that "Mind refuses to rest, and active, progress- 
 ing freedom is a necessary condition of intelligence." 
 
 Let us then, brethren of the pure faith in man, of the hope 
 in human progress which maketh not ashamed, which work- 
 eth no evil ; let us on this consecrated day, as in the pres- 
 ence of the justified spirits of our great ancestors, invoke 
 heaven-born Democracy, in her wide-spread beneficence. 
 
9 
 
 her holy philanthropy, her abiding faith in human virtue — to 
 descend in our midst and shed her blessed influences over 
 us, — that our hearts, touched as with a live coal from off her 
 altar, may be filled with a goodly portion of that benign in- 
 spiration of the spirit of Freedom, which, in its first advent 
 to earth, caused the morning stars to sing together, and pro- 
 claimed, as the great charter of Liberty in its largest sense, 
 "peace on earth and good will to man." 
 
 It is this Democracy the people are calling for, not only 
 here, but throughout the oppressed and down-trodden nations 
 of the earth; and deep uttereth to deep her voice, as the an- 
 imated mass over all Europe in the awful stillness of their 
 own hearts, are preparing to cry aloud, in the burning lan- 
 guage of Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses, 
 when all around him paused and trembled — "I know not 
 what other men think, but as for me, give we liberty or give 
 me death!"* 
 
 And is this, think you, a country in which the Democrat- 
 ic principle is to be checked and stopped in its onward 
 course by the heartless selfishness of exclusive money privi- 
 leges; the cant cry of setting the poor against the rich — and 
 the still more pitiful expedient of a false panic clamor about 
 exchanges, paper bills, and fancy stocks? Is man to move 
 forward everywhere else, and to standstill only here, where 
 the first free impulse was given to the ball of those revolu- 
 tions that has since rolled over Dynasties and Despotisms, 
 and sunk them in ruin for the rights of the people to rise 
 above them, like the mighty swell of the majestic ocean? 
 
 While twenty millions of the laboring people of Great 
 Britain are preparing for a bloodless revolution, roused by 
 the conviction that they and theirs have for centuries been 
 slaves in all but name, merely that a few proud and privileg- 
 
 * The Chartists of England have presented a petition to Parliament, 
 of the size of a cart wiieel, when rolled up, signed by 1,200,000 men, 
 demanding "Free suffrage, the ballot, and annual elections." It will be 
 refused now, bat how niuth longer? 
 
10 
 
 ed thousands might live in idle splendor — while they are 
 loudly demanding in language that must be answered by con- 
 cession or defeat in their rulers; the ballot, the suffrage, 
 equal representation, and Parliaments accountable to the peo- 
 ple! shall we pause and hold back, and reckon cent, per cent, 
 till the land our freedom was wrenched from, has surpassed 
 our own in free government! 
 
 Shall we stop at the wretched "half-way house" of bank- 
 rupt conservatism, convey away to corporations our great 
 birthright, (popular Sovereignty,) for fear the Banks should 
 stop discounting, and be meanly content 
 
 " To sell the ample space of our large honors 
 For so much trash as may be grasped thus ?" 
 
 Shall the stale and silly jokes of the opponents of liberal 
 institutions, the political infidels in human virtue, about "Sub- 
 Treasuries with legs," pass for substantial argument vi^ith 
 men who have souls and self-consciousness? — Shall the trash 
 of lying newspapers suffice for a moment to convince a peo- 
 ple that, in fact, honesty and good faith and trust-worthiness 
 and inviolate promises are no longer to be found in "unac- 
 commodated man," but must be sought for in soulless Banks 
 and Corporations ? — and that too when the human locomo- 
 tives that move these paper machines are found to be endow- 
 ed with legs quite as propelling as the like appendages of the 
 vilest Swartwouts or Prices current in the land ! 
 
 No ! the tide of panic that but a year ago seemed sweep- 
 ing over the land, as if 
 
 " Virtue had fled to brutish beasts, 
 And men had lost their reason," 
 
 has been rolled back upon the juggling manufacturers of 
 the artificial tempest that raised it. "The sober second 
 THOUGHT OF THE PEOPLE," * has Set in, in its strong and 
 
 "" The author of this oration had the pleasure of first introducing to the 
 public this sublimely Democratic sentiment of Mr. Van Buren, in a 
 speech at a Democratic Convention in Barnstable, during the reign of 
 terror under the panic of 1836. It was taken from a private letter of Mr. 
 Van Buren to the present Attorney General of New York, written at a 
 peculiar crisis in the affairs of the Democratic party in that State. It 
 
11 
 
 steady and resistless current; and what, when we last met on 
 this day, might have been doubt in the breast of the patriot 
 as to the onward progress of the democratic principle, is 
 now a bright, and clear, and glorious certainty — without a 
 cloud in the horizon as big as a man's hand, to obscure the 
 open sea of success upon which Democracy gallantly floats 
 to her destined haven in eighteen hundred and forty! — with 
 the same steady hand and watchful eye at the helm, that re- 
 laxed not, dimmed not when the tempest was loudest in its 
 fury, — "the man whom the people delight to honor," — "The 
 
 PILOT THAT WEATHERED THE STORM 
 
 »" 
 
 The democratic President of a democratic people! What 
 higher title among earth's rulers! and how pleasingly, at this 
 moment, is exemplified in the person of the Chief Execu- 
 tive of our nation, the practical extension of the democratic 
 principle. After an absence of nearly three years in the 
 high station to which he is called by the free choice of a 
 great people, he is returning to his quiet native village in the 
 unassuming simplicity of a private citizen — his body guard 
 his own good conscience, his standing army the respect of a 
 whole people, his attendants the friends of his household. 
 True, there are loud greetings and immense gatherings as he 
 passes on in his unheralded way — but it is the frank greeting 
 of manly Freemen, meeting their Chief Magistrate as their 
 friend and equal, and honoring in him the high purpose to 
 which he was called and has been so true, — of embodying 
 and carrying forward the spirit of the age in the extension of 
 the democratic principle. 
 
 was prophecy then, but it is history now, in every day's development 
 of the adoption by the people, of the great leading measure of Mr. 
 Van Buren's Administration. The sentiment is so universally quoted, 
 we repeat it in its connexion, as peculiarly applicable to the present time. 
 "The Republican party succeeds best and only well, when it reposes 
 upon its original elements. They have stood the test of time and per- 
 secution ; have their foundation in the habits, feelings and judgments of 
 the people, and will (whatever may be the hopes and fears of others) 
 maintain its ascendency long beyond our day. The past has disap- 
 pointed all calculations which have been made upon a different result, 
 and the future will do the same. The sober, second thought of 
 
 THE people, is NEVER WRONG AND ALWAYS EFFICIENT." 
 
12 
 
 The feastlngs and fawnings — the costly pomps and formal 
 parades — the select dinners and choice drinkmgs '-'■ five 
 fathoms deep" — that have attended the political marches of 
 the utterly hopeless aspirants of power in another party, un- 
 til the whole country sickened with surfeits and sycophancy, 
 are all modestly, unaffectedly declined by the man who actu- 
 ally possesses what these revellers so vainly long for. 
 
 And this, friends, is an event worth recording in the pro- 
 gress pure democracy has made in the hearts of a vast ma- 
 jority of this people. It is the first time that a popular 
 President has been permitted, by the good sense of the peo- 
 ple, to pass thus unostentatiously through the land with the 
 manly homage of free hearts and frank hands only to greet 
 him. 
 
 The venerated Washington, when at the head of the na- 
 tion, though himself a man of republican simplicity, deem- 
 ed it indispensible to the dignity of his office and the public 
 expectation, not to exhibit himself in the streets, save in 
 state, with a coach and six, and the appropriate trappings 
 and attendants of such an equipage. 
 
 He was correct in this deportment, for the public sense, 
 
 at that day, would have been shocked with a less display; so 
 
 did the gaudy trappings of royalty still glitter in the eyes of 
 
 ' the ruled, as the inseparable ensigns of authority in the 
 
 Ruler. 
 
 When we have so changed this false taste, let us not des- 
 pair of nobler and higher changes in the moral and political 
 equality of man. 
 
 To-day, the Chief Ruler of fifteen millions of Free citi- 
 zens, travels in a private way, at his own private expense, 
 receiving an annual appropriation only sufficient to maintain 
 the republican hospitality becoming his office, while in 
 boastful Europe millions are robbed and rendered wretched 
 that a dozen Kings and Queens may live in royal state. At 
 this moment the nine principal nations of Europe are taxed 
 
13 
 
 annually, to support that number of splendid paupers called 
 Sovereigns, the enormous sum of thirty-six millions of dollars, 
 five millions of which, the most intellectual nation of the 
 old world. Great Britain, gives to her little Doll Queen, that 
 in her petty caprice she may rule the destinies of twenty-four 
 millions of human beings! 
 
 "The fear of the people!" — "the dread of progress!" — 
 "the terror of anarchy!" — "the plunder of property !" — 
 these have ever been and still are the stale cries of the privi- 
 leged few to keep down the risings of liberty, whenever the 
 common mind has moved toward a great object of common 
 right and common good. 
 
 "There is a general buzzing among the people, great with 
 expectation of, they know not what," was the expressive mes- 
 sage of the Gesler of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, to 
 his mercenary followers in Boston, in 1689. 
 
 But the people did know what they wanted, and on that 
 very day the whole town rose in arms, with the most unani- 
 mous resolution that ever inspired a people, and a Declara- 
 tion was read from the balcony of the Old State House, de- 
 fending insurrection as a duty to God and the country ! 
 
 The petty tyrant, Andros, the man who was sent to New- 
 England to substitute military power for chartered immuni- 
 ties, was on the same day seized by the populace, who 
 knew how to sting as well as buz — marched in disgrace 
 through the streets where he had first displayed his scarlet 
 coat and arbitrary commission to lord it over God's heritage, 
 and then committed to prison, by virtue of a process higher 
 than all official warrants — the sovereign will of a people de- 
 termined to be free! 
 
 From that day to this, every breathing of the people for 
 more of liberty, more of equality in laws, — every struggle 
 of Democracy to substitute freedom for privilege, moral 
 agency for penal statutes creating the artificial crimes they 
 punish; has been cried out against by despots, tories, fanat- 
 
14 
 
 ics, and exclusives, in the very spirit of Andros and his 
 men, as "a buzzing of the ignorant people for they know 
 not what!" — "a war of the poor upon the rich!" — a hanker- 
 ing of the appetites of the vulgar that must be legislated 
 down in daily drinks and meats by the exact measure of a 
 penal statute, which, according to the approved rule of mod- 
 ern patent philanthropy and self-righteousness, most charita- 
 bly offers to protect the man of small means from himself, 
 while it holds out a premium to excess in the rich, by the 
 wholesale! 
 
 But the people do know what they want, and knowing, 
 will achieve and maintain it. Already have they proved it 
 on the party of privilege by seizing the great monopolizer of 
 all other charters, the head of the daring money conspiracy 
 against their liberties, the Bank — as the patriots of Boston 
 did the usurper Andros; shutting it up in prison, and turn- 
 ing upon it the hey of the Veto! 
 
 What a clamor of sacrilege, and usurpation, and ruin then 
 came from those benevolent gentlemen who expend all their 
 philanthropy in trying to protect the dear people from them- 
 selves ! 
 
 Chaos had come again, if but a tithe of what the prophets 
 of woe foretold, should be fulfilled! But where now are 
 the prophecy and the panic, and the ruin? Remembered 
 only as the threats of a caged madman, 
 
 'A tale told by an idiot, 
 
 Full of sound and fury, signifying — nothing.'" 
 
 This has ever been and ever will be the cry of despotism and 
 exclusive power — "The people know not what is for their 
 good!" — "the people are their own worst enemies!" — "the 
 people are never to be trusted!" 
 
 But vain has been, and vainer still will be, this cry, to 
 frighten men at themselves. 
 
 There is a general buzzing now among the people, and 
 they will continue to buz so long as but a single unequal law, 
 
15 
 
 or a single unjust enactment, or a single exclusive privilege, 
 save what arises from the consideration of services rendered 
 to the public, remains upon the Statute Book. 
 
 There is a mighty impulse for good, stirring the common 
 mind, and woe to the men and the party that cling to the 
 scattered fragments of exclusive power, and struggle to hold 
 back the movements of the age! 
 
 Such a party may call itself vihig or conservative, or even, 
 if it dare, in its blasphemy, ^'■Democratic Wliig;'^ but it 
 can never conserve itself, nor delude the people. 
 
 Such a party has existed from all time and in all govern- 
 ments, but instead of being able to establish itself here, it 
 will ere long be crushed even in the nations w'here Liberty 
 has not yet found an abiding place. It will soon sink into 
 utter insignificance in the home of the free, the land of Con- 
 stitutions, supreme only in the public will, — the soil whose 
 only master is the common mind and the universal ballot box. 
 
 Already the privileged foes of that same Democracy 
 which one of their great leaders and expounders, Fisher 
 Ames, proclaimed to be "aw illuminated hell," — begin to 
 see their certain destiny in short perspective. 
 
 Already do they find, and some of them openly confess, 
 that their great and mighty men, their "expounders," and 
 their "godlikes," and the whole host of their "availables," 
 and "unavailables," can no more enter within the magic circle 
 ofpopular favor, without assuming for the occasion the disguise 
 of democracy, than could Lucifer and his fallen hosts pass 
 the verge of heaven, without taking the form of angels of 
 light! * 
 
 * An amusing illustration of the fact that the whig leaders finding they 
 cannot subdue the people by threats and starvation, now propose to "de- 
 scend into the forum and take the voters by the hand," was ojven on 
 the very day this was uttered, by the gentleman who is accidentally the 
 federal Governor of Nev/ York for two years. Mr. Wm. H. Seward 
 was made Governor by the money and influence, under the panic, of the 
 aristocracy of New York, who despise the people, as Mr. Seward himself 
 has shown he does, throughout his servile agency for the U. S. Bank. 
 His party have always strictly denied that there is or can be any such 
 
16 
 
 "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." Aris- 
 tocracy yields a Hke tribute to Democracy by assuming its 
 guise and tone; and "we the people," if we will but lis- 
 ten, can hear it even now discoursing most lovingly of "de- 
 scending from the forum to take the voters by the hand!" 
 Descend! poor, proud things! — Let them wait till the people 
 elevate them, and then they may talk of descending. If they 
 really wish to descend, it will cost no effort, for whenever 
 their "availables" venture forth upon the sea of popular 
 favor, 
 
 "Like wanton boys that swim on bladders," 
 
 their pride breaks under them, 
 
 "And then they fall, never to rise again." 
 
 What then is it that the people do want? Is not the an- 
 swer seen in every movement of society? The extension of 
 the democratic principle — the practice in laws, as well as 
 the theory in professions, of the Declaration of American 
 Independence. 
 
 The all-pervading influence of those truths proclaimed to 
 be self-evident in 1776, but which law-makers and law-ex- 
 pounders have ever since labored to make obscure and self- 
 contradictory — "that all men are created free and equal," 
 
 tiling as an Aristocracy in this country, and they rail at every allusion to 
 it as an attempt to set the poor against the rich. So s^id Mr. Webster, in 
 Congress. And yet, Governor Seward of New York, who holds the 
 same doctrine, descended to the mean hypocrisy of uttering the follow- 
 ing democratic sentiment to disguise his own, in his Address to the Sun- 
 day Schools on Staten Island, July 4, when the President was present. 
 
 "From the beginning of time aristocracy has existed, and society has 
 been divided into classes— the rich and the poor — the strong and depend- 
 ent — the learned and the unlearned — and from this ineqvality of social 
 condition have resulted the ignorance, the crime, and the sufferings of the 
 people. Let it excite no wonder when 1 say that this inequality exists 
 among us, and that aristocracy has a home even in this land of freedom. 
 It does not indeed deprive us of our civil rights, but it prevents the dif- 
 fusion of prosperity and happiness. We should be degenerate de- 
 scendants OF our hekoic forefathers did we not assail this aris- 
 tocracy, remove the barriers between the rich and the poor, 
 break the control of the few over the many, extend the lar- 
 gest LIBERTY TO THE GREATEST NUMBER, AND STRENGTHEN IN EVERY 
 WAY THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES OF OUR CONSTITUTION." 
 
17 
 
 that "they are endowed by their Creator with certain in- 
 ahenable rights, such as life, hberty, and the pursuit of 
 liappiness" — arid that to secure these rights to all (and not 
 vested rights to corporations, nor patent rights of legislating 
 upon appetite to bigoted moral reformers,) "governments are 
 instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the con- 
 sent of the governed." 
 
 But It is not enough to have secured ihe forms of free gov- 
 ernment if the spirit and the fact are wanting. Our whole 
 history shows us that legislatures and especially courts ot 
 law, deriving their original powers solely from the people, 
 may, if not jealously watched, become perverted to the 
 worst uses of tyranny. The tendency of delegated power 
 always is to usurp more power, and legislatures and lawyers, 
 like doctors, will go just so far in experimenting on their 
 patients as they think their fears about preserving their Con- 
 stitutionSj will bear. 
 
 There has been one very bad vein in the legislation of 
 Massachusetts ever since the enactment of the first law 
 against witchcraft in 1636, and it has shown itself, at inter- 
 vals, ever since. Old Hutchinson says, in his history, and 
 we see the fruits and effects of it to this day: 
 
 "The people of Massachusetts, from the beginning, en- 
 deavored to preserve two distinct ranks or orders of men, 
 gentry and commonalty. There was a general disposition to 
 elect the Governor, &c. from the former ranks; their m,inis- 
 ters preached it as a christian and moral duty." * 
 
 To this false notion, we must trace the fact, that in Massa- 
 chusetts more than any other State in the Union, the bigot- 
 ed doctrine prevails among the aristocracy, that it is the 
 business of government to take care of the rich, and let the 
 rich take care of the poor; "and that laws are enacted es- 
 
 * The Rev. Hubbard Winslow, a demagogue clergyman, denouncing 
 "demagogue lawyers," is obviously a legitimate successor of the "politi- 
 cal parsons" of that day, as Osgood and Parish were in the last war. 
 
 o* 
 
18 
 
 pecially to restrain the ^'■commonalty." To this error, and the 
 false preaching of party ministers, I trace the present license 
 law. It is one of its outbreaks, in this generation, as witch- 
 craft, Quaker hanging, and law religion were in former times. 
 
 Massachusetts legislation has been peculiarly subject to 
 these sort of intermittent fevers of moral reform. She has 
 had more special legislation in exclusive privileges and cor- 
 porations, than any State in the Union; and as the people 
 begin to resist this, a like power is to be substituted in 
 another form; for there is as much of special legislation in 
 morals as in money, and this is the engine aristocracy now 
 relies on to subdue the people, under the old specious pre- 
 text for all tyranny, of tying their hands and closing their 
 mouths for their own good! 
 
 Bigots and fanatics who distrust man's moral agency, as 
 aristocrats do his capacity for self-government, always rely 
 on penal statutes as a better regulator of that moral agency 
 than conscience. It is but very recently that this class of 
 law-makers could be compelled to let go their hold in this 
 Commonwealth, upon men's consciences, through laiv-re- 
 ligion and penal statutes, to regulate creeds and the support 
 of public worship. It was verily believed that it would nev- 
 er do to trust the people with their own rehgion, and that 
 without /ate, there could be no piety! 
 
 That dogma had its day and was exploded by democratic 
 truth; and now, the same influences operating upon legisla- 
 tion, are found invading the hitherto free empire of voluntary 
 morals, and the same arguments are used to sustain this coer- 
 cive legislation over individual discretion, as were resorted 
 to for centuries to sustain the banishment of Anabaptists, the 
 persecutions of Quakers, the hanging of witches, and that 
 whole system of detestable tyranny which the ^'gentry" and 
 the clergy who, though they had crossed the waste of waters 
 to escape from the despotism of the '■'■Lords Bishops," 
 could so self-complacently inflict upon dissenters from their 
 
19 
 
 creed, when they took upon themselves to enact the part of 
 "the Lords Brethren.'' 
 
 ReHgious persecutions, under forms of law, have all 
 grown out of the short method to get at ends, regardless of 
 means, which lazy and ambitious reformers, from Mahomet 
 down to the itinerant moral reform lecturers of our time, 
 have always adopted — namely, that force is stronger than 
 argument, and that when moral suasion fails to proselyte fast 
 enough to suit the impatient reformer, he must call in "the 
 strong arm of the law." 
 
 It is at this point that the true friend of freedom and de- 
 mocracy should stop, in any favorite aim of reform. He 
 should never suffer himself to forget Liberty, in his love of 
 sect or success. He may be sure he is wrong when he has 
 got to gain his ends by disparaging the '■^commonalty," the 
 people, and doubting their moral sense, and moral agency, as 
 less to be relied on than that of the well born and the 
 wealthy. His motto should be, whenever he sees a moral 
 reform sect asking that their creed may be made law, "j^nn- 
 cipiis ohsta." 
 
 For these reasons, I am unable to perceive how, on dem- 
 ocratic principles, any man can approve of legislation in any 
 form of a sumptuary law, and least of all, when that legisla- 
 tion is designed to restrain the appetites of the laboring 
 classes, and leave free indulgence to the rich. A democrat, 
 to be consistent, must either demand total prohibition of sale 
 and use to rich and poor alike, or he must leave this, as all 
 moral reforms should be left, to moral influences and whole- 
 some general regulations. 
 
 Moral reforms should never be brought into legislation, as 
 party measures. 
 
 Fundamental principles are ever disregarded in such a 
 struggle, while the fit lasts. The doubtful or dangerous 
 character of the means used is wholly overlooked in the sup- 
 posed sanctifying purposes of the great end in view — and on 
 
20 
 
 men go from one absurdity to another, until the monomania 
 that lias seized them, cures itself by its own violence or re- 
 vulsion, or even revolution comes to the rescue, and the 
 dogma of the bigot and the fanatic shares the fate that has 
 sooner or later attended all such false prescriptions for sup- 
 posed moral diseases in the body politic. 
 
 But while the dog-star of any particular fanaticism of the 
 day rages in its zenith, it is the sovereign dogma of the oc- 
 casion. And the dogmas of sects and associations, when 
 they get possession of legislatures, are the most usurping of 
 despots, and for the time, rule Vi^ith a sway that baffles 
 reason. 
 
 Every man, however, who will take his stand on the firm 
 ground of democratic truth; which is "to govern as much as 
 possible by moral influences, and as little as possible by penal 
 acts," may see the certain end of this dogma of law temper- 
 ance. 
 
 It will be in this, as in all similar contests, though proba- 
 bly much more speedily. In the long run the liberal doctrines 
 come uppermost, and men marvel that such a delusion could 
 have existed; especially that it could ever have enlisted, as all 
 such moral delusions ever have, (from the statute on witchcraft 
 to the statute on fifteen gallon kegs,) a large portion of up- 
 right, sincere, honest, and rigidly conscientious followers. 
 
 Even the leaders who carry their associations into the er- 
 ror, seem to be honest, and verily believe they are so, for an 
 enthusiast cannot feign long without at last thinking he feels 
 what he at first feigned. 
 
 But the worst consequence is that while the contest lasts, 
 and reaction is silently going on, the higher and nobler pur- 
 poses of humanity are suspended, or perverted, either to be 
 brought out as auxiliaries to the sovereign dogma, or to wait 
 the issue of the struggle. It soon degenerates into a party 
 scuffle for power; not a mere effort to do good; and from a 
 labor of love is transformed into the harsh work of an Inqui- 
 
21 
 
 sition, with its agents of spies and informers, and its tor- 
 tures of fine and imprisonment. 
 
 Religion was always put back by every such process, and 
 so will it fare with temperance, frugality, or any other virtue 
 depending on a voluntary act of the will, where the act to be 
 abstained from, is not wrong in itself, and only wrong in the 
 consequences that follow excess. 
 
 It is said that Democrats do not all agree in opposing 
 special legislation of this sort. I am aware that it was so for 
 some time, as to special legislation in Banks and Corpora- 
 tions, and out of this grew conservatism, until the honest 
 democrats discovered their error, and left conservatism to be 
 absorbed in federalism. I sincerely think that some of our 
 friends are falling into a like error, as to this special legisla- 
 tion in morals. In their temperance conservatism, they may, 
 for a time, forget the democratic doctrine, that the world is 
 already too much governed, and honestly wish for a greater 
 power than any monarch in the civilized world now has; that 
 of prescribing diet and drink for the people, in order to im- 
 prove their morals. I respect their motives, and have no 
 design of setting up my opinion or practice in this matter, 
 for a standard, any more than I have of submitting to a 
 standard for my faith, or morals, or temperance, by virtue of a 
 penal statute. But I firmly believe that this error of philan- 
 thropy, as it may well be called, will not last as long nor ex- 
 tend as far as has the error in regard to Banks and Corpora- 
 lions. 
 
 Men, and especially Democrats, (who have that innate 
 sense of equal rights, without which it is hard to be a dem- 
 ocrat,) do not so often differ in principle, as in the applica- 
 tion of fundamental principles to a favorite end. All men 
 claim to act on principle, and if honest, really mean to do 
 so; but very many upright and good men misapply a princi- 
 ple, under particular circumstances. 
 
 Thus the Democratic principle holds as the highest article 
 
22 
 
 in its creed, opposition to all special legislation, to all unjust 
 distinctions; and it must, therefore, to be consistent, incul- 
 cate, in the enactment of laws, inflexible hostility to all re- 
 strictions upon one class, under pretence that they are less 
 qualified to exercise moral agency than their supposed bet- 
 ters; and must rigidly deny, to such assumed betters, any in- 
 dulgence, on the ground that they can be trusted to take care 
 of themselves, and have a higher perception of right and 
 wrong, because they happen to possess more property — still 
 those who adhere to these doctrines in the main, may honest- 
 ly differ, for the time, in their application. But the safest 
 rule in such case, would obviously be to take the liberal side 
 of the question at issue. The course of the democratic 
 party, as a whole, must always be liberal in legislation, or it 
 will become the federal party. It must, in every contro- 
 versy, as to power, take that side in which law interferes 
 least with individual acts, not criminal in themselves; for of 
 all legislation in free governments, that is the least democrat- 
 ic and the most reprehensible which creates artificial offences 
 in order to punish them. 
 
 Above all, men conscious of right, should never be de- 
 terred from maintaining that right by being called hard names 
 or placed in a false classification of society, by their oppo- 
 nents. The worst dogmas in government have ever been 
 upheld in this way. Men have done violence to their con- 
 sciences in admitting what they lacked courage to deny. 
 
 "The divine right of kings" was once the only orthodox 
 doctrine in government, and whoever spoke against it was 
 denounced as an anarchist, and this process long upheld that 
 dogma because men dreaded anarchy more than they feared 
 despotism and the royal prerogative. 
 
 "The union of Church and State" was for centuries ce- 
 mented by the blood of martyrs, because all who dissented 
 from that dogma were excommunicated as infidels, and men 
 abhorred infidelity more than they hated persecution. 
 
23 
 
 So "the union of Bank and State" found its strongest 
 support in the charge made against its opponents, of a design 
 to incite a war of the poor upon the rich; because avarice 
 is a stronger passion with a great portion .of mankind than 
 love of hberty, and some men are weak enough to surrender 
 a principle rather than be called Jacobins and loco focos. 
 
 By the same process, penal laws to coerce abstinence from 
 a particular class who have not the means possessed by the 
 more favored classes, to indulge their appetites in lawful 
 ■quantities, are upheld with seeming temporary success, by 
 denouncing all who oppose the means as enemies to the avowed 
 end, the promotion of temperance. For the time, this classi- 
 fication will have its effect in keeping up this dogma, as it 
 has all others of the same school in legislation; and many a 
 brave man, who would go to the stake sooner than yield to 
 the old dogma of law-religion, will nevertheless uphold laic- 
 temperance, as the only expedient to escape excommunica- 
 tion as a temperance man, and will cease to be the friend of 
 "liberty in its largest sense," for fear of being called the 
 friend of the drunkard, in a false sense. 
 
 Verily, had the people been frightened by hard names, 
 where would Freedom, since the world began, have found 
 an altar, or Liberty a worshipper? 
 
 "Resist with care the spirit of innovation upon the prin- 
 ciples of your government, however specious the pretexts," 
 was the farewell advice of Washington. 
 
 It is the specious pretext which brings to life every abuse 
 that creeps into the legislation of a free people. 
 
 All such abuses have had their origin in a momentary dis- 
 regard by legislators of the means used, in their eagerness to 
 attain a desired good end. The ready reply of the enfor- 
 cers of a doubtful law, to an appeal to the "sober, second 
 thought," is, "try the law! only try it!" — "It is law, and 
 you must submit to it, till repealed;" and then the moment the 
 experiment upon the forbearance of the people is acquiesced 
 
24 
 
 in, and the law quietly submitted to, the authors of the 
 abuse claim it as a full approval by the sovereign popular 
 will, and ascribing to it all the good results tending to the 
 same end growing out of moral and social influences, they 
 proclaim the obnoxious Act as the very foundation of all law 
 and order which none must presume to disturb, lest the 
 whole fabric of society should tumble about their ears! 
 
 Thus, however gross an abuse may be in its origin, and 
 however surreptitiously forced into legislation by the exter- 
 nal application of fanatical stimulants; if those who contriv- 
 ed it can only make the people, for a time, acquiesce in the 
 notion that it is indispensible to social order and the exis- 
 tence of government, the abuse is soon able to support itself 
 on this very assumed sanction of the people, and goes into 
 a precedent for a whole series of like abuses and restraints 
 on individual freedom. 
 
 History will show that no great abuse was ever hardened 
 into legislation without some plausible pretext for it at the 
 time; but when the pretext has gone, the abuse remains, and 
 has acquired strength enough to claim to be a right. The 
 abuse goes from the legislature to the courts, and the legis- 
 lature, like the king, through the judges, being supreme in 
 the courts, (from their irresponsibility to the people, and 
 their tendency as schoolmen of the common law, to technical 
 and arbitrary, rather than enlightened and liberal views of 
 free government) — the abuse (especially if the courts can 
 control and alarm the juries,) gets the constructive sanction 
 of the Constitution with ease, because it merely touches the 
 rights of the poor and not the rich; and then the interested, 
 the exclusive, the timid, and the time-serving, cry out to de- 
 ter the people from any attempt to reform the abuse, under 
 pretence that it will overturn government and law, and that 
 it is no better than sacrilege to doubt the infalibility of three 
 upright and learned Judges who hold their offices as kings 
 do theirs for life, and like kings, are held to be incapable to do 
 
25 
 
 wrong, except under the meref/ieory of impeachment; as if real- 
 ly, the people of Massachusetts meant to have three men, hold- 
 ing offices for life, the absolute rulers in the Commonwealth, 
 higher than the legislature, juries, or people! 
 
 Thus the abuse, if acquiesced in, without any "buzzing 
 among the people," as old Andros called it, acquires the 
 sacredness of a right until its origin is lost, and from a rank 
 usurpation, becomes a settled institution. 
 
 In the train of this revival of the old dogma of law-reli- 
 gion in the form of law-temperance, come other abuses, as 
 a matter of course, to sustain one wrong by other wrongs. 
 Thus you find every obnoxious law in the old Colony Sta- 
 tutes, and the very worst laws in the Revised Statutes, com- 
 placently quoted, to sustain this Act; as if it were verily true 
 that two wrongs would make one right. 
 
 When did you ever hear a liberal law, a law that trusted 
 in human virtue, that regarded men as equal in moral worth 
 though unequal in amount of money — when did you hear 
 such a law cited as a precedent for this blue law of the 19th 
 century? 
 
 But the old dogma most to be feared by every liberal 
 man, by every true democrat who desires the extension of 
 the democratic principle, and which this controversy is 
 about to revive in all its strength, is the doctrine oi passive 
 obedience; a doctrine that blocked the wheels of hum^an 
 progress for fifty centuries. 
 
 When crushed humanity rose against despotism, religion 
 was invoked on the side of passive obedience, and while the 
 law hung the body of the traitor, the Church thundered ana- 
 themas on his soul; and thus despotism with this aid, at its 
 last need, still kept humanity under. 
 
 In our time, when freedom in the will is claimed as an equal 
 right of high and low, rich and poor, and when special legis- 
 lation is just losing its hold on the people; a new moral agent, 
 as blessed and as pure as religion itself, when unperverted — 
 
26 
 
 Temperance, is enlisted on the side of arbitrary power. 
 And that respect for law and order which a free people 
 should ever cherish as an abiding faith where laws respect 
 equal rights, is invoked to teach passive obedience to the 
 process of coercive enactments, that, if persisted in, can on- 
 ly end in making men slaves or hypocrites. The advocates 
 of exclusive special legislation are especially desirous to in- 
 volve the democracy in this experiment of special legislation 
 in morals; not for the sake of temperance, but for the sake 
 of banks and corporations. With this precedent of assumed 
 power, there is no act of arbitrary or exclusive legislation for 
 the (ew, that may not be justified as equal and constitutional, 
 
 "You were never more exposed to the loss of your priv- 
 ileges than at the present juncture; your danger is the greater 
 as it proceeds from an unexpected quarter, from those in 
 whom you ought generally to place your highest confidence, 
 the members of your legislature." 
 
 This was the warning to the people of Massachusetts 
 against their legislature, by an enlightened patriot in 1788. 
 Should its solemn injunction be less regarded now ? 
 
 Law may be made as great a tyrant as absolute despotism, 
 if the will of tlie legislature, like the will of the despot, is to 
 be passively acquiesced in, merely because it exists. 
 
 Strange indeed would be the doctrine that although the 
 Constitution was not permitted to take from the people the 
 right to alter the government itself whenever one of the great 
 objects of government, to provide for an equitable mode of 
 making laws, should fail to be secured — yet a law with no 
 just claim of constitutional right, and of dangerous tendency, 
 is to be elevated in the regards of the people as of higher 
 sanctity than the Constitution itself ! as a law too sacred to 
 be opposed at every step by all lawful means! 
 
 Whenever legislation assumes a higher power than revela- 
 tion, and proclaims that to be crime which the moral sense of 
 mankind, the practice of all ages, and the precepts and mir- 
 
27 
 
 acles of holy writ concui in pronouncing to be no crime ; you 
 may persuade the citizens to submit quietly to the penalties 
 of such a law, after all legal defence has failed, but it is idle 
 to appeal to them to respect such a law, or to aid, by the de- 
 testable means of spies and informers, in its enforcement. 
 
 The true distinction in a free government is, between op- 
 position to an obnoxious law, and resistance to a legal pro- 
 cess under that law. 
 
 The last should never be resorted to, but as a prelude to 
 revolution. The worst traitor to popular sovereignty is he 
 who raises his hand to obstruct a legal process or invade a 
 private right, while the shield of the law is over them. Nor 
 is he less a traitor to human progress who counsels servile 
 acquiescence in an unjust law merely because it has the form 
 of law; for the encroachments of law upon the rights of a 
 passive people may be more dangerous to Liberty than the 
 invasion of an army. 
 
 In a word, no freeman should resist the due process of 
 law until the people are prepared for revolution; but every 
 citizen who believes that a law trenches on fundamental lib- 
 erty, is verily guilty of forging his own chains if he acquiesces 
 in such a law merely because it is an enactment, without of- 
 fering all legal and constitutional obstructions to its enforce- 
 ment; and submits silently to the process that is to harden it 
 into unmalleable despotism, before his eyes. 
 
 On this point let those who hold to the infallibility of the 
 Legislature of 1838, or of the Supreme Court, should it concur 
 with that Legislature, take, as an offset, the language of 
 the same Legislature in 1809, and tell us which is the true 
 faith ! 
 
 "We cannot agree, (say the legislature of 1809, in an- 
 swer to the Address of the Governor,) that in a free country 
 there is any stage at which the constitutionality of an Act may 
 no longer be open to discussion and debate — at least it is on- 
 ly upon the high road to despotism that such stages can b© 
 
28 
 
 found. The government undertaking to extend its powers 
 beyond the spirit and intent of the Constitution, degenerates 
 into tyranny, and the people will eventually triumph over all 
 such usurpations." 
 
 "Were it true, that when the measures of government are 
 once passed into an Act, the constitutionality of that act is 
 stamped with the seal of infallibility, and is no longer a sub- 
 ject for the deliberation or remonstrance of the citizen, to 
 what monstrous lengths might not an arbitrary and tyrannical 
 administration carry its power!" 
 
 What stamps the fame of James Otis as foremost in the 
 holy cause of Liberty, but the truth of the memorable dec- 
 laration made by Governor Hutchinson, that "the opposi- 
 tion to the authority of Parliament in the stamp act, began 
 in Boston and was moved and conducted by James Otis." 
 
 The officers of the King attempted then the same detes- 
 table system of conspiracy, espionage, and artificial stimulants 
 to enforce that law, as is now resorted to by the advocates 
 of a law of our time; with this honorable exception in favor 
 of the King's pimps, that they only employed spies and in- 
 formers to detect committed offences, but did not, on the im- 
 proved modern plan, tempt their fellow citizens to violate a 
 law by committing one half of the crime in order to qualify 
 themselves to become witnesses and prosecutors! 
 
 The spies and informers of 1770 were not strong enough 
 to enforce the stamp act, against the people, and they applied 
 to the Courts for the famous writs of assistance, to enable 
 them to search into the privacy of any man's house at pleas- 
 ure, on the ^'■specious pretext" that all private rights must 
 yield to the great end of detecting smugglers of rum and 
 molasses! James Otis, employed by the merchants of Bos- 
 ton as the advocate of liberal principles, opposed the applica- 
 tion, and in the face of the arrogant Chief Justice exclaimed: 
 '■'■I have fully considered this subject, and I solemnly declare 
 that I will, to my dying day, oppose, with all the poxoers God 
 
29 
 
 has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand 
 and villany on the other." 
 
 The Courts, always on the side of power, granted the 
 writs of tyranny, as a matter of course, and "Otis was 
 charged by the ruling powers as an abettor of mobs and trea- 
 son; but with the opposers of arbitrary power and the great 
 body of the people, he found favor and admiration." 
 
 At an earlier period in the history of this Colony lived 
 another than James Otis, one Chief Justice Stoughton, the fa- 
 mous witch hanger, who should have been reserved for our 
 own age and for this very occasion. When the IMiddlesex 
 juries (who were told in that day, by an insolent Judge, as 
 it is arrogantly attempted to tell them noio, that they must sur- 
 render their consciences to the Judge although they are 
 judges of law and fact in criminal matters,) began to weary 
 of perjuring themselves in convicting persecuted women; 
 and when listening to their own consciences and common 
 sense and convictions of right, they acquitted in spite of the 
 charge of the Judge; Chief Justice Stoughton was moved to 
 anger, and leaving the Court, declared he would sit no more 
 on the Bench that session. "We were in a fair way, said 
 he, to have cleared the land of Satan's subjects, had not 
 these jurors obstructed the course of justice, but now the 
 Lord be merciful to the country!" How many are there, 
 in our day, who view a modern Act, and the manly, honest 
 independence of modern jurors, through the same false me- 
 dium old Stoughton did the witch law and the Middlesex ju- 
 ries: '-'The Lord have mercy upon the country!" they ex- 
 claim, if the juries are to think for themselves instead of the 
 Judge thinking for them ! 
 
 Pardon me, fellow citizens, if I have dwelt too long on 
 this topic, or if I have offended or hurt one of you in the 
 freedom with which I have discussed it. To me the princi- 
 ples at issue seem of such high moment, and the occasion so 
 fitting for a manly and free expression of them, that I could 
 3* 
 
30 
 
 not have felt iny duty honestly discharged had I suffered the 
 day to pass without my solemn protest against all these en- 
 croachments, under color of law, upon the equal rights and 
 the moral agency of freemen. 
 
 In the simplicity of my heart, and in the voluntary practice 
 of years of entire abstinence from the indulgence against 
 which is thundered this modern Bull of self-constituted As- 
 sociations, claiming to be wiser and purer than other men, and 
 whose Rulers, like the Pharisees of old, thank God that they 
 are not even as these pubhcans — I cannot for my life perceive, 
 how legislation or judicial decisions can make that an equal 
 and just law which says that the poor man shall not have his 
 money's loorth of the same article of necessity or luxury which 
 the rich man may buy at pleasure^ because he can buy in 
 large quantities! I cannot find a particle of the pure faith 
 of Democracy in that creed which holds that the temperance, 
 the self-denial, the virtue of the laboring classes are to be 
 preserved only by penal laws against the exercise of their 
 own discretion and appetite; while the preservation of these 
 good qualities by men of wealth and superior condition, may 
 be safely entrusted to their own private custody! I cannot 
 comprehend why it should be made unlawful to sell alcohol 
 to a laboring man in ruin, gin, or brandy, and be lawful to sell 
 it to "squires and gentlemen" in Madeira, Champaign, and 
 Sherry ! 
 
 In a word, I cannot detect by what conjuration or necro- 
 mancy our grave and reverend legislators have arrived at the 
 grand discovery in voluntary morals, that "the Imp of the 
 bottle" is to be found only in the gill-cup, and the angel of 
 Temperance in a fifteen gallon Jug ! 
 
 And this brings us back to the point from whence we 
 started, true faith in humanity, and confiding trust in man. 
 Let this be our test of measures and of men, in the creeds 
 and practices of parties. 
 
 Whenever you find, in a class or a party, distrust of the 
 
SI 
 
 people — the pretended or real fear of loco foco anarchy and 
 riot, should the people rule ; be sure that the men or the 
 party who so think or act, are unfit to be trusted by the 
 people. 
 
 "Confidence in another man's virtue is no slight evidence 
 of a man's own — therefore God is pleased to favor such a 
 confidence," says the philosopher Montague. 
 
 When you find men boasting of their want of confidence 
 in their fellow men, you may be sure that they suspect others 
 to be designing and dishonest because they know they are so 
 themselves. 
 
 "In every age there is good enough, if a man will but put 
 himself into harmony with it, to enable him to produce more 
 good out of it." 
 
 It is by distrusting humanity and causing men to fear men, 
 that tyranny has ever got possession of or kept power. Look 
 through the history of all time, and just in proportion as 
 the people were distrusted and distrusted each other, will 
 you find the degree of tyranny or liberty. The absolute 
 party in France held as their first maxim of despotism, "that 
 humanity needs severity, and that if the sovereigns who gov- 
 ern do not rule according to this principle, there is reason to 
 fear it will fall into all manner of disorder." 
 
 For five thousand years the world was governed by the 
 /eu', because the many were taught to believe they would fall 
 into anarchy if they attempted to govern themselves. 
 
 This raw head and bloody bones story, so long rife in the 
 nurseries of despotism to scare the people, has been super- 
 ceded in our time by the terrors about the loss of cent, per 
 cent, in money making. If you extend the democratic prin- 
 ciple you are told that the people will become clamorous, 
 and look upon property as their prey and plunder; and every 
 approach toward that equality of political rights, which 
 Hamilton himself admitted that all but depraved minds would 
 desire, if it could be attained consistent with order, is clam- 
 
32 
 
 ored against as the war of the poor upon the rich. Just as 
 if the poor, that is the industrious classes, had not the same 
 right to demand the restoration of the equahty which special 
 legislation has wrested from them and given to the rich, as 
 the rich and the well-born in former times had to demand a 
 restoration of their political rights from the grasp of des- 
 potism. 
 
 Be not alarmed by this senseless cry, and while you re- 
 spect the rights of property, forget not to respect yourselves 
 as freemen. 
 
 This notion, which lies at the bottom of all the movements 
 of the modern whig party, that the whole object of govern- 
 ment is to enable the (ew to accumulate wealth, is even more 
 degrading to humanity than was the feudal system in its 
 worst form. That made and kept men ignorant, and then 
 ruled them at will, because they were so. This pretends to 
 sacrifice every thing to the acquisition of the means to ac- 
 quire knowledge and influence, and yet keeps the masses de- 
 pressed by instilling into them the fear that if they move for- 
 ward a step to better their condition, they will destroy all 
 the means of acquisition, and break up property rights. 
 
 It is well said by a sound political writer in France, that 
 "if the design of government was the mere purpose of mak- 
 ing money, there would be no need of virtue." 
 
 In this view we see how demorahzing the tendency of that 
 doctrine is, which places the greatest good in the acquisition 
 of wealth, and regards the repeal of an exclusive charter, 
 the cutting off of an absurd dogma of the Common Law, or 
 the derangement of the exchanges, as a greater calamity in 
 the State, than the entire sacrifice of Liberty on the altar of 
 Mammon. 
 
 It is this doctrine that has tended more than any other in- 
 fluence, to build up that inequality in condition, which, be- 
 fore the resistance offered to it by the Democracy in the 
 recent great panic struggle, had almost perfected the British 
 
33 
 
 system among us, which Hamilton longed for, but failed to 
 introduce into the Constitution. 
 
 The stupendous credit system of Great Britain, was in- 
 troduced here, for the very purpose of supplying by means 
 of incorporations, that perpetuity of weahh in particular hands, 
 which was cut off by our laws for the distribution of estates. 
 
 But there has been a lively waking up of the public mind 
 on this great subject of equal rights, and the people cannot 
 now be easily brought to give up a sound principle in politi- 
 cal equality, merely to preserve the money interest of invest- 
 ments in special legislation. And why should they do so? 
 
 When we look at our own hands, our own energies, at the 
 difference between the labor that produces and the mere 
 agency that passes this production from hand to hand, and 
 accumulates, not by creating, but by increasing the distance 
 and enhancing the price of things between the producer and 
 consumer, — when we reflect on the different means requisite 
 to stamp a piece of paper with a nominal value, and to earn 
 that value by honest industry ; we see at once the great 
 fundamental truth in political economy which is so carefully 
 excluded from the practical knowledge of the people, viz: 
 that labor is the only source of ^oealth; and when we look 
 with this view at the tendencies of legislation and institutions 
 in government, we are surprised to find Jioio small a portion 
 of this loealth, in all civilized countries, even the best governed, 
 is left in the hands that create it. 
 
 This is the great political lesson which it should be the 
 aim of every lover of Freedom, and especially of democratic 
 young men, to impress on the public mind. 
 
 Be not dazzled by the exterior splendor, beauty and mag- 
 nificence of this Aladin edifice which the modern credit sys- 
 tem rears at the touch of its paper wand. Look beneath it, 
 examine its foundations, and see the mass of the crushed en- 
 ergies of the laboring classes, upon which it is erected. 
 
 The men among us, the party of privilege, the party op- 
 
34 
 
 posed to the extension of the democratic principle, who have 
 hankered after the leeks and onions of Egypt ever since our 
 fathers came out from the land of bondage, invariably point 
 to England, as the great and glorious exemplar of the credit 
 system they are striving to establish here. And what is the 
 effect of that system in England, but the concentration of 
 wealth in the hands of the few, while the mass whose labor 
 produces this wealth are reduced to a condition of slavery 
 in all but the name ? 
 
 Marshall's Statistics of the British Empire furnish some 
 practical facts upon which Americans should deeply ponder 
 before they adopt the modern whig principles of monarchy, 
 which set up the credit system of England as the highest mod- 
 el of good government. That recent publication shows that 
 in Great Britain there are twenty -four millions three hundred 
 and six thousand of people. Of these, twenty-four millions 
 and thirty-one thousand are devoted to a condition of unre- 
 mitting labor for their subsistence; a labor which barely gives 
 a subsistence to a portion, leaving the rest, to a greater or 
 less extent, dependent on pubUc charity. And all for what? 
 Why, that the other class, the two hundred and seventy-five 
 thousand belonging to the privileged orders, the nobility, the 
 capitalists, the bankers, &c., may live in splendor without the 
 labor of their own hands or heads. 
 
 The result of the system is that about one hundred persons 
 must be reduced to a condition as hopeless of improvement 
 beyond mere subsistence as slavery itself, in order to main- 
 tain one of these privileged persons in splendor, and keep 
 up this glorious credit system. 
 
 And shall we, here in this sacred earth, consecrated to 
 liberty two hundred years ago by the pure in heart who 
 erected their altar in the barren solitude of the wilderness 
 to the God of Freedom, and not to the God of this world, 
 the mammon of unrighteousness; — shall we be seduced from 
 the original design of this great experiment in the progress of 
 
35 
 
 humanity, to listen to the wild dreams of the speculator, the 
 broken promises of the banker, the sordid avarice of the 
 money hoarder, the reckless extravagance of the blind pro- 
 jector, the senseless pride of pompous wealth — the restless 
 desire of men to live by their wits rather than their labor? 
 Shall we be content to substitute a greedy love of money- 
 making without honest labor, for the blessed and ever bless- 
 ing virtues of frugality, industry, patient gains, and pure love 
 of country? 
 
 And this too, with the example of England held up as our 
 model! Listen then before you adopt this system, which the 
 party I have described so eagerly press upon you, to the re- 
 sults of that system as detailed by a British writer who drew 
 this picture not one year ago. 
 
 "The progressively increasing privation and degradation of a great 
 portion of tlie population amid a progressive accumulation of capital^ 
 ascendancy of money influence and consequent display of luxury ; an 
 unparalleled extension of mechanical power and increased facility of in- 
 tercourse ; successive alternations of seeming prosperity and exjt;^-eme de- 
 pression; progressively increasing pauperism and its concomitant crimes, 
 and the threatened change of long established institutions — are all circum- 
 stances which call imperiously for the most profound consideratioii' and 
 regard of all the friends of social order and integrity of interests." 
 
 Among those whom I have the pleasure to m-eet to-^^i|^, 
 . . . ■ # "^ ' 
 
 in on-e of the richest agricultural counties of New Eaigland, a ,. 
 
 large proportion are independent farmers; the sons of toil anji-^s'' 
 temperance, of frugality and of pure enjoyment; — -ihe mM'"' 
 who labor in the earth, and while they acquire the means to 
 live, insure by the wholesome process of that acquisition, the, ^ 
 only true means of enjoying life; health and contentment. 
 
 To this virtuous and independent class of men, we maiTify v 
 owe it, that the institutions of Massachusetts, though so long 
 within the numerical control of the party of privilege, have 
 ever been essentially democratic in spirit, thaugh exclusive 
 in tendenc/; and notwithstanding the load of special legisla- 
 tion Jhat has covered thq State all over with corporations, ;v^' 
 and w!^ich now.Jiolds, in a kind of mdrtoain, more than one '>■ 
 hundrefl^miUio^s of property, besides the virtual naortgage of 
 
 \ 
 
 
36 
 
 every farm in the Commonwealth to the extent of six mil- 
 lions and upwards, for the benefit of individual directors and 
 stockholders. 
 
 Our town governments, which the founders of New Eng- 
 land cherished as a first principle in popular representation, 
 are the purest democracies in the world; and so long as they 
 have the wisdom to retain their ancient corporate right of 
 representation, which secures in the most numerous branch 
 a preponderance of the agricultural class, instead of giving it 
 to the agents of cities and large districts; so long the dem- 
 ocratic principle cannot be wholly overcome by special legis- 
 lation; and will, at times, assert its supremacy, in spite of 
 the struggles of party leaders to discipline their majority into 
 particular measures. 
 
 Hence it is that you often find a mere handful of democrats 
 in the House, taking the lead out of the hands of the party 
 managers of the majority, and, in spite of party drill, defeat- 
 ing the favorite objects of a whole session, from which the 
 exclusive few, who had previously concerted them in Direc- 
 tors' rooms in State-street, had hoped to derive especial ad- 
 vantages at the expense of the many. 
 
 From the time of the allotment of estates upon the land- 
 ing at Plymouth, in 1620, at the rate of one acre a head to 
 each member of a family, the struggle has been going on in 
 this country, between the laboring classes to extend the dem- 
 ocratic principle of "just and equal laws for the general 
 good," and the exclusive classes, to resist that tendency in 
 popular institutions. 
 
 In the old world power has always had at command, to 
 put down right, hereditary distinctions and standing armies. 
 In this country, the only instrument to effect the like pur- 
 pose, is SPECIAL legislation; and on this issue the battle 
 of freedom is to be fought between equality and privilege. 
 
 Look through the whole history of special legislation in 
 all its forms of church and corporation powers, from the first 
 
unequal and unjust law of 1645, excluding all but church 
 members from the rights of freemen, and you will find that 
 its tendencies have uniformly been against the most numer- 
 ous class, the tillers of the soil, and who now constitute five 
 sevenths of the population of this Commonwealth. 
 
 The reason is sim.ply because in governments of written 
 Constitutions, like ours, without the operation of the old 
 feudal system or the laws of primogeniture and entailment to 
 perpetuate families and estates, the agricultural class will al- 
 ways remain too numerous and too equal to admit of great 
 concentration of wealth or power in the hands of a (ew of 
 that class. 
 
 It was never known in the history of governments, that 
 the farmers combined together to help themselves by special 
 legislation to the injury of others, although they have had 
 the numerical control of suffrage from the origin of repre- 
 sentative government to the present time. There is not an 
 Act in the Statute book which gives to the richest farmer, as 
 such, a single privilege that is not extended, in equal propor- 
 tion, to the poorest laborer; while that same Statute book is 
 full of laws designed to confer exclusive and special favors 
 and distinctions upon particular classes of merchants, manu- 
 facturers, lawyers, ministers, and doctors. So little has spe- 
 cial legislation regarded the agricultural interest, that it is not 
 only the last to be favored when the State treasury is full, but 
 the first to be stinted when it is empty. 
 
 When it was found, at the last session of the legislature, 
 that the measures of the party in power, had, within two 
 years, involved the State in an excess of ^72,000 expendi- 
 tures over the receipts of the past year, with an anticipated 
 deficit of over ^^1 00,000, for the current year, besides cre- 
 ating a floating debt of ^583,000, and a pledged debt of 
 $6,230,000; no serious effort was made to reduce salaries or 
 to withdraw special grants from corporations, but the first ob- 
 ject of retrenchment was held to be, the bounty to the 
 
38 
 
 farmer on wheat, by which some twenty or thirty thousand 
 dollars were to be deducted from the footing of the accounts; 
 as if there could be no apprehension that too many bank bills 
 would be put in circulation, but that there was great fear that 
 too much wheat would be raised in the State ! 
 
 Another favorite measure of retrenchment was to throw 
 the State paupers and the expenses of criminal justice, from 
 the Treasury upon the Counties; as if it were a grand dis- 
 covery in political economy that it would bfe a great saving 
 to the people for them to pay the public expenses in the form 
 of county and town taxes, instead of the State doing it from 
 its own resources or by a direct tax ; if it must come directly 
 from the pockets of individuals. 
 
 Failing in two of these sage measures of reform, by which 
 >'^70,000 were to have been saved, through the profound finan- 
 cial operation of putting it into the County bills, instead of 
 the accounts of the general treasury ; another and even more 
 objectionable expedient was resorted to, after the rejection 
 of the unequal Militia Bill, and that was abolishing the in- 
 considerable compensation of $5 to each member of a vol- 
 unteer Company, who should equip himself in uniform and 
 perfom all the extra duties required of him. 
 
 There were about six thousand pubhc spirited young men, 
 organized in fine independent corps, sustaining a very con- 
 siderable personal expenditure in equipments, music and 
 camp exercises, besides holding numerous drills and parades, 
 while the standing Militia was called out but once in a year. 
 On these men the civil authorities relied, in every emergency, 
 to support the laws, and yet the $30,000, which did not 
 meet one fifth of their unavoidable expenses, was singled 
 out as an item of saving to the State, by leaving it to be paid 
 by the citizen soldier, in addition to his other taxes of which 
 he was to bear the same proportion as all other citizens. 
 The sum was nothing to individuals, but as a whole, coming 
 to a corps, it formed an important item to encourage and sus- 
 
tain the Independent Companies. This compensation, small 
 as it was, for a public service, was taken away, but the service 
 required remained the same, and the Act, though obviously 
 much more objectionable and unjust than the addition of 
 fifty cents to the pay of the members of the legislature, 
 which the Governor refused to sign two years ago, was not 
 vetoed by an Executive who claimed to be the special friend 
 and patron and eulogizer of the INIilitia. It was, in fact, 
 raising a contribution of ^^30,000 from the young men en- 
 rolled in the Independent Companies, in order to help make 
 up the political balance sheet for the current year, and shield 
 the executive from the charge of extravagance in the public 
 expenditures. 
 
 The same political managers who urged the voting of 
 ^40,000 as a bonus to an old bridge corporation for a pre- 
 tended franchise which the United States Supreme Court had 
 declared was no franchise at all, did not hesitate to rob the 
 young men, of whom extra and important public services 
 were required, of the small consideration allowed for that 
 service. Such an Act might well have been checked by an 
 Executive veto, for it openly disregards the fundamental 
 principle in the Constitution which declares that no unequal 
 contributions to the public service shall be required of any 
 class of citizens, without an equivalent. The Independent 
 Companies had accepted the allow^ance, small as it was, as 
 an equivalent for extra service. The legislature and the 
 Governor have abolished the allowance and continued the 
 demand for extra service. 
 
 What a clamor would have been raised, had a public bur- 
 den of this sort been imposed upon corporations, without an 
 equivalent? But it is the tendency of all special laws, which 
 is the same under all forms of government, to apply the bene- 
 fits to the few and the burdens to the many, and the tax and 
 the inequality are always borne, directly or indirectly, by the 
 agricultural and laboring classes, and by the young men, who 
 
40 
 
 have nothing but their hands and heads for capital. The 
 special laws that concentrated wealth in a monarchy, estab- 
 lished an hereditary aristocracy. The laws of like tendency 
 in a free State, establish a credit aristocracy of associated 
 wealth. 
 
 The struggle of power against the people, in the old world, 
 is to keep up hereditary abuses at their expense. The strug- 
 gle in the new' world is, under pretence of general good 
 and public improvement, to induce the people, who are the 
 sovereign here, to consent to the estabhshment of the same 
 abuses, in all but name and title. 
 
 First it was commerce, for which all special laws were 
 made, to concentrate wealth, not in the hands of the many 
 seamen who toiled, but of the few merchants who planned. 
 Next it w-as manufactures, taxing the consumer wnth high 
 duties, and giving to credit capital in the hands of the few, 
 the lion's share of the joint proceeds of capital and labor. 
 
 And now it is corporations in every form and of every ap- 
 plication, for whose especial benefit the whole power and 
 credit of the State are to be invested as trading capital, and 
 against whose claims to "the eminent domain," the rights of 
 individuals, if in their track, can present no obstacle. 
 
 And under this process of legislating for particular classes, 
 instead of making "standing laws" for the general good, the 
 State expenses have gone on increasing, to their present con- 
 dition of insolvency. To test this, compare known results. 
 
 In 1825, when there was little special legislation, under a 
 Democratic State Administration,* the State revenue ex- 
 ceeded the expenses of the year, by $56,000. 
 
 In 1828, when special legislation for the manufacturers was 
 at its height, the State expenses exceeded the revenue 
 $67,000. 
 
 In 1835, when Banks and Corporations had acquired the 
 
 * Marcus Morton was acting Governor, after the decease of Eustis, 
 in 1825. 
 
41 
 
 control of legislation, the State expenses exceeded the in- 
 come $47,000. 
 
 In 1S36, there was a slight check to this influence, caused 
 by the Bank failures and suspensions, and the excess of ex- 
 penditure was reduced to $28,000. 
 
 In 1837, corporate power again assumed the supremacy, 
 and the balance against the Treasury rose to $48,000. 
 
 And the last year, 1838, with special legislation in morals 
 as well as stocks imposed upon the people; and with private 
 Associations combined with private Corporations to lohhy 
 the legislature into giving the form of law to their particular 
 creeds and speculations ; the excess of the outgoes over the 
 public income, was seventy-two thousand dollars, 
 with $300,000 borrowed on scrip credit and a liability to an 
 ultimate annual interest of upwards of $360,000 for the 
 pledged credit of the Commonwealth to private Companies! 
 
 And so long as this special legislation shall rule the public 
 councils, so long the hand of labor must be kept open to sup- 
 ply, from the only source of revenue, the producer, the 
 deficiency in the public wants created by the inordinate de- 
 mands of corporate cupidity. 
 
 Party lines are now distinctly formed, and will hencefor- 
 w'ard be permanently defined, on this fundamental principle, 
 viz: — whether equal and just laios shall be made for the ge- 
 neral good, or unequal and unjust ^Icts (or special advantage. 
 
 The whole array of route and ruin for the administration 
 and the country, founded on the treasury order, the specie 
 suspension, the Bank, the exchanges, and all the combustible 
 materials that made up the panic^ having vanished even be- 
 fore the false prophets had ceased foretelling, the Opposition 
 to the present Democratic Administration of the Union, is 
 in fact reduced to this single point. The whole of the rest- 
 less struggle of the federal whig party to get into power, no 
 matter through what candidate or by what means, is kept 
 
 alive solely by the discontent of particular and exclusive 
 
 4* 
 
42 
 
 classes, (who constitute the leaders and managers of that 
 party,) at the determined course of the Administration in 
 "extending the Democratic principle," by separating general 
 from special legislation, State from Bank, and bringing back 
 the action of the Government to the popular basis it was 
 made to rest upon in the first free constitution ever framed 
 by a people, viz: — the compact for a government solely of just 
 and equal laws, entered into in the cabin of the May Flower, 
 where humanity recovered those rights of which she had been 
 robbed before for centuries, by special legislation, and which, 
 for two centuries since, the same grasping special legislation 
 has struggled to re-usurp. 
 
 Such is the head and front and aim of the opposition to a 
 Democratic Administration; and therefore it is not so much 
 a matter of surprise as of regret, that the merchants, to a 
 great extent, as a class, and from their relations to the BankS;, 
 are enlisted in this indiscriminate opposition. Having means 
 to acquire more than others, they regard government as a 
 sort of special partner and guarantor for the success of those 
 means, and thus readily fall into the mistaken notion that the 
 government must of course be hostile to them because it 
 aims to be just to all. 
 
 There are many honorable exceptions to this classification, 
 but it is a striking illustration of the tendency of special legis- 
 lation in narrowing liberal and enlightened views, to contrast 
 the position of the commercial interest in regard to govern- 
 ment, at the commencement of the Revolution, with its pre- 
 sent party relation. 
 
 At the former period the merchants (particularly of Bos- 
 ton) were foremost in opposing the odious Navigation Act of 
 Charles II. and the detestable Writs of Assistance to en- 
 force it; those dogmas of the false school of monopoly which 
 impelled to the resistance that gave the first impulse to the 
 ball of the American Revolution. 
 
 In our day the merchants and manufacturers who oppose 
 
43 
 
 the general government because it will not give them a Na- 
 tional Bank, or loan them the public revenue to trade upon, 
 are found on the side of monopoly against equality — of re- 
 strictive laws against free trade; while the great majority of 
 the people who sustain the Administration in its leading 
 measure, an Independent Treasury and the separation of 
 Bank and State, are impelled by the same principle on which 
 our fathers contended against the special legislation of Par- 
 liament that was designed to secure exclusive advantages to 
 the merchants of Great Britain at the expense of the Am.er- 
 ican merchants. 
 
 Is it not unwise then, and only to be accounted for by the 
 false position in which a large body of intelligent and enter- 
 prising business men have suffered themselves to be placed 
 by party leaders who have labored to enlist commerce and 
 trade in indiscriminate opposition; that the merchants of the 
 United States, as a class, should be among the last to per- 
 ceive and act upon the great truth which now influences the 
 wisest statesmen in all civilized countries, and forms the basis 
 of the measures of the Administration of this, viz: — "that 
 general and not partial prosperity increases individual advan- 
 tage, and that nations gain most, not by depressing, but by a 
 free intercourse with each other." 
 
 It is often urged as proof that the Government is wrong 
 because the credit classes, and particularly the merchants in 
 commercial cities, are generally opposed to it. Rightly con- 
 sidered this is the strongest practical demonstration that the 
 Government is right and acts as the true representative of the 
 W'hole people and not as the special agent of privileged 
 classes; because the latter are not and never can be the major- 
 ity where free suffrage elects the rulers, and whenever they 
 control legislation the government must be, in fact, a govern- 
 ment of money and not of men. 
 
 Under monarchical and despotic governments, the mer- 
 chants and great manufacturers have generally been on the 
 
44 
 
 side of the Democratic principle, and opposed to arbitrary- 
 power. The reason is obvious. They were not, in such 
 forms of government, the representative of the aristocratic 
 principle. There were other classes above them, whom 
 they were compelled to support. They were struggling to 
 wrest rights from the sovereign power, the king and the no- 
 bility, who were the great monopolizers and the favorites of 
 special legislation. In demanding their own rights, (as the 
 Barons of England demanded theirs,) from usurped preroga- 
 tive; they necessarily advanced the rights of the people to a 
 certain extent, but never to an equality of privilege with 
 themselves. 
 
 In this country the same class have also generally opposed 
 every Democratic administration from Jefferson to Van Bu- 
 ren, and for precisely the same reason; because their rela- 
 tive position to the government is directly changed. Here 
 credit-wealth is the representative of the only aristocracy and 
 the government the representative of the popular sovereignty, 
 the unprivileged mass which is wholly disregarded in monar- 
 chical governments. 
 
 The sovereignty in such governments is always jealous of 
 any power that may restrain it, and an old hereditary aris- 
 tocracy always fears the encroachments of a new aristocracy 
 of wealth. The mass of the people having no power, are 
 not taken into the account. Here the sovereignty being in 
 fact with the people, and an aristocracy of credit wealth be- 
 ing founded on exclusive privileges drawn from that sov- 
 ereignty by pretended vested rights and all the forms of spe- 
 cial legislation, it becomes the direct interest of that class to 
 resist the tendencies of a democratic form of government to 
 equality, and this brings them in conflict with the popular 
 sovereignty. So that whenever the Government, in State or 
 Nation, will not aid them by special legislation, they oppose 
 the government. And hence arises their dread of free suffrage, 
 their fears that property will become the prey and plunder of 
 
45 
 
 the voters without large property quahfications to hmit the 
 number; and their total unbelief in the capacity of the people 
 for self-government. 
 
 No government has ever done so much for the merchants 
 as ours is now doing, for it is granting what all other powers 
 have denied, — "letting them alone," so far as their commer- 
 cial intercourse is concerned, while it has protected their 
 ships in every part of the globe, secured a sacred immunity 
 to the American flag, opened the markets of the world by 
 honorable treaties, enforced the revenue laws to protect the 
 honest importer, and distributed millions of recovered indem- 
 nities, long held to be utterly hopeless demands on the justice 
 of foreign powers. 
 
 For the merchants, therefore, as a class, to complain of 
 the hostihty of the government, is extremely unjust as well as 
 utterly unavailing. If they will adhere to the policy of indis- 
 criminate opposition to a Democratic Administration, it will 
 not, and it should not change the course of that administra- 
 tion, for there can be no hostility to their interests, while the 
 government regards equally and justly the interests of all. 
 
 But if the political support of the merchants, as a class, is 
 only to be secured by giving to them exclusive privileges 
 over other classes, why then they must continue to oppose 
 the government, and the present democratic administration 
 must rely, as all its predecessors have, upon the mass of the 
 people ; the farmers, the mechanics and the producers ; for 
 under no circumstances can it honestly accede to such terms 
 when demanded by the few at the expense of the many. 
 
 At no time could a democratic administration have stood 
 upon special legislation. Least of all could it so stand now, 
 when the people are alive to the extension of the democratic 
 principle. It is this which the opposition most fear, the re- 
 solving of the government, in fact, into a democratic form of 
 government. The first start of the opposition leaders in Con- 
 gress was against the liberal doctrine laid down in President 
 
46 
 
 Van Buren's Message, that it was the duty of every man to 
 give to the Constitution a direct democratic tendency. They 
 complained that the design of the Message was to give an ad- 
 ditional impetus to the democratic principles of the govern- 
 ment, and denied that the object of the constitution was to 
 establish a Democracy. 
 
 Here is the grand distinction in parties. We are for ex- 
 tending the popular will and for securing a practical, popular 
 sovereignty. They despise or fear the popular virill, which 
 they regard as a mere theory, and would have it only a seem- 
 ing sovereignty, that they can use and restrict and control by 
 special legislation. 
 
 In old governments the forms of unwritten constitutions 
 are only supposed concessions wrested from the ruling Mo- 
 narch to protect or extend the special privileges of favored 
 classes. 
 
 In our government the constitution is no act of concession 
 or grace, but an original power of attorney from the people, 
 who establish the government, to their public agents who are 
 to exercise only the powers therein defined, and no others; — 
 an instrument to be altered or revoked at the sovereign will 
 of the principal. 
 
 The democracy so regard and construe constitutions, and 
 are prepared, deliberately and carefully, to change and im- 
 prove them as human progress may require, for the advance- 
 ment of the common good. 
 
 On the other hand, the party that insist on special legisla- 
 tion as the only conservative principle in government, look 
 upon constitutions just as a corporation does upon its charter; 
 merely as an instrument to protect them against the people, 
 in the enjoyment of exclusive privileges. 
 
 There is but one way to settle this conflict, and that is by 
 settling the principle that government is no longer to be used 
 for special purposes, and that it has no power to bestow 
 favors upon partial applications. 
 
47 
 
 Finally, fellow-citizens, the inference from the positions I 
 have endeavored to maintain must be this great truth which 
 the whole course of history demonstrates, viz: — that from the 
 beginning the democratic principle has been strugghng with 
 the monarchical principle, for a greater approach to political 
 equality; and that Liberty has advanced just in proportion as 
 the democratic principle has been extended among a people. 
 
 Why then, should we be alarmed at the extension of this 
 principle ? Why should any friend of liberty strive to hold 
 it back, when all experience shows that no progress that has 
 been made in human advancement, has ever gone backward ? 
 
 No, thank heaven! the human race has never gone back- 
 ward in the struggles of centuries to advance the principle of 
 equality, founded on just laws and free institutions. Under 
 no discouragements has the forward movement of society, by 
 popular impulse, gone back to the point from which it start- 
 ed. 
 
 It did not go back under the weight that almost crushed it, 
 after the fall of the Roman Empire. It did not go back 
 after the long night of the dark ages had apparently extin- 
 guished the last glimmering of the light of Liberty. Even 
 the slavery of the feudal system did not, as it was designed 
 to do, bring it back to its former debasement; and the mod- 
 ern substitute^ special legislation and exclusive privileges, 
 will fail to accomplish a like purpose. "After centuries of un- 
 availing efforts" to crush the extension of the democratic 
 principle, "tyrants and aristocrats must despair of the work 
 of human degradation !" 
 
 How befitting, then, is it, for the friends of freedom, and 
 especially the young men of this country, to put themselves 
 in harmony with this great movement of the age. Shall not 
 the young men of Massachusetts, from this day, resolve to go 
 forward in this great purpose? Let them apply this principle 
 as the test of measures and of party, and they will never be 
 at a loss to determine which is on the side of special privi- 
 
lege, and which on the side of popular right; and as they find 
 so let them act, in unison with the great moral purpose of 
 free government. 
 
 Let them, with deep reverence for the purely democratic 
 principles of Christianity, and with high hope in moral and 
 intellectual advancement, "ponder on true equality." Let 
 them trace out and check whatever unjustly retards its exten- 
 sion, whether through unequal laws or by their own or other 
 men's injurious estimate of the rights of their fellow men, and 
 the desire to gain, by special advantage, more than an equal 
 share of the common good. 
 
 Let them never put faith in the false creed of the unbeliev- 
 ers in man's capacity for self-government, who hold that with 
 the extension of suffrage must come the plunder of property, 
 and who represent the Almighty, in his gifts to man, as hiding 
 
 " The excellence of moral qualities 
 From common understandings, leaving truth 
 And virtue, difficult, abstruse and dark, 
 Hard to be found, and only by the few." 
 
 And while they lament the obstacles to human progress on 
 the one hand, and rejoice in the sure promise of its advance- 
 ment on the other; with all the elements of improvement so 
 bountifully bestowed upon society in this favored land, — 
 
 " The charities that soothe and heal and bless, 
 
 The generous inclination, the just rule. 
 
 Kind wishes and good actions and pure thoughts," 
 
 they will find, that it is not the necessary inequality in life, 
 but unequal laws; — not God but man^ who, in his social and 
 political condition, has made 
 
 "So wide a difference betwixt man and man." 
 
 #