Great American Legislators: Source Extracts

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J.H. Miller, 1900 - Statesmen - 247 pages
 

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Page 73 - ... constitutional and highly expedient; and there the duties are to be paid. And yet we live under a government of uniform laws and under a Constitution too which contains an express provision, as it happens, that all duties shall be equal in all the states. Does not this approach absurdity? If there be no power to settle such questions, independent of either of the states, is not the whole Union a rope of sand?
Page 73 - It is, Sir, the people's constitution, the people's government, — made for the people, — made by the people, — and answerable to the people.
Page 148 - The right of property is before and higher than any Constitutional sanction; and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and its increase is the same and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever.
Page 82 - I hear with distress and anguish the word " secession," especially when it falls from the lips of those who are patriotic, and known to the country, and known all over the world, for their political services. Secession ! Peaceable secession ! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion! The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep without ruffling the surface ! Who is so foolish, I beg everybody's pardon, as to expect...
Page 82 - Peaceable secession! Peaceable secession! The concurrent agreement of all the members of this great republic to separate! A voluntary separation, with alimony on one side and on the other. Why, what would be the result? Where is the line to be drawn? What States are to secede? What is to remain American? What am I to be?
Page 73 - I claim no powers for the government by forced or unfair construction. I admit, that it is a government of strictly limited powers; of enumerated, specified, and particularized powers; and that whatsoever is not granted, is withheld. But notwithstanding all this, and however the grant of powers may be...
Page 56 - There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence. Transplanted in a foreign land, they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law, and liberty.
Page 189 - We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.
Page 150 - Territory in any lawful way, against the wishes of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State constitution? I answer emphatically, as Mr. Lincoln has heard me answer a hundred times from every stump in Illinois, that in my opinion the people of a Territory can, by lawful means, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State constitution.
Page 58 - WE are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man.

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