RE we so low, so base, so despicable, that we may not express our horror, articulate our detestation, of the most brutal and atrocious war that ever stained the earth, or shocked high Heaven, with the ferocious deeds of a brutal soldiery, set on by the clergy and followers of a fanatical and inimical religion, rioting in excess of blood and butchery, at the mere details of which the heart sickens; if the great mass of Christendom can look coolly and calmly on, while all this is perpetuated on a Christian people, in their own vicinity, in their very presence, let us, at least, show that, in this distant extremity, there is still some sensibility and sympathy for Christian wrongs and sufferings; that there are still feelings which can kindle into indignation at the oppression of a people endeared to us by every ancient recollection, and every modern tie.
But, sir, it is not first and chiefly for Greece that I wish to see this measure adopted. It will give them but little aid,—that aid purely of a moral kind. It is, indeed, soothing and solacing, in distress, to hear the accents of a friendly voice. We know this as a People. But, sir, it is principally and mainly for America herself, for the credit and character of our common country, that I hope to see this resolution pass; it is for our own unsullied name that I feel.
What appearance, sir, on the page of history, would a record like this make:—“In the month of January in the year of our Lord and Saviour 1824, while all European Christendom beheld with cold, unfeeling apathy the unexampled wrongs and inexpressible misery of Christian Greece, a proposition was made in the Congress of the United States,—almost the sole, the last, the greatest repository of human hope and of human freedom, the representatives of a nation capable of bringing into the field a million of bayonets,—while the freemen of that nation were spontaneously expressing its deep-toned feeling, its fervent prayer for Grecian success; while the whole Continent was rising, by one simultaneous motion, solemnly and anxiously supplicating and invoking the aid of Heaven to spare Greece, and to invigorate her arms; while temples and senate-houses will be resounding with one burst of generous sympathy;—in the year of our Lord and Saviour,—that Saviour alike of Christian Greece and of us, a proposition was offered in the American Congress to send a messenger to Greece, to inquire into her state and condition, with an expression of our good wishes and our sympathies;—and it was rejected!”
Go home, if you dare,—go home, if you can,—to your constituents, and tell them that you voted it down! Meet, if you dare, the appalling countenances of those who sent you here, and tell them that you shrank from the declaration of your own sentiments; that, you cannot tell how, but that some unknown dread, some indescribable apprehension, some indefinable danger, affrighted you; that the spectres of scimitars and crowns, and crescents, gleamed before you, and alarmed you; and that you suppressed all the noble feelings prompted by religion, by liberty, by national independence, and by humanity! I cannot bring myself to believe that such will be the feeling of a majority of this House.
DANIEL WEBSTER.
THE DEFENDER OF NATIONAL UNION.
MONG the men who may properly be called the makers of the nation, Daniel Webster holds a foremost place. If Washington was “the father of his country,” and Lincoln its “saviour,” it may also be said that it was Webster, more than any other one man, who laid down the principles upon which it was made possible for the nation to endure; for it was he who maintained that the Federal Constitution created not a league, but a nation, thus enunciating far in advance the theories which were wrought into our constitutional law at the expense of a long and bloody Civil War.