Their freedom pays the tickling of their ears.’
“Your political adversaries made such an outcry about your imprudent severity and unjustifiable personalities, that I cautiously examined whether there was any ground for such an allegation. Few persons have stronger aversion to harsh epithets and personal vituperation than I have, but I confess I could find nothing in your Kansas Speech which offended either my taste or my judgment. You rebuked States and individuals merely as the representatives of that ever-encroaching Slave Power, whose characteristic artifice, arrogance, and despotism it was necessary for you to portray in connection with the subject under debate.”
These testimonies, which reveal the feelings of the time, might be multiplied indefinitely. The “sequel,” to which Mr. Clay refers, and to which allusion is made by other correspondents, will be found at the end of the speech in an Appendix.
SPEECH.
MR. PRESIDENT,—You are now called to redress a great wrong. Seldom in the history of nations is such a question presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of Government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you inflict no shock. The machinery of Government continues to move. The State does not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, Liberty in a broad Territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country, with our good name in history forevermore.
Take down your map, Sir, and you will find that the Territory of Kansas, more than any other region, occupies the middle spot of North America, equally distant from the Atlantic on the east and the Pacific on the west, from the frozen waters of Hudson’s Bay on the north and the tepid Gulf Stream on the south,—constituting the precise geographical centre of the whole vast Continent. To such advantages of situation, on the very highway between two oceans, are added a soil of unsurpassed richness, and a fascinating, undulating beauty of surface, with a health-giving climate, calculated to nurture a powerful and generous people, worthy to be a central pivot of American institutions. A few short months have hardly passed since this spacious mediterranean country was open only to the savage, who ran wild in its woods and prairies; and now it has drawn to its bosom a population of freemen larger than Athens crowded within her historic gates, when her sons, under Miltiades, won liberty for mankind on the field of Marathon,—more than Sparta contained, when she ruled Greece, and sent forth her devoted children, quickened by a mother’s benediction, to return with their shields or on them,—more than Rome gathered on her seven hills, when, under her kings, she commenced that sovereign sway which afterwards embraced the whole earth,—more than London held, when, on the fields of Crécy and Agincourt, the English banner was borne victorious over the chivalrous hosts of France.