Speech of Hon. D. W. Voorhees, of Indiana PDF Download

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ISBN: 9781331055945
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Excerpt from Speech of Hon. D. W. Voorhees, of Indiana: Delivered in the House of Representative, March 9, 1864 The House being in Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union - Mr. VOORHEES said: Mr. Chairman: I arise to address the House to-day with feelings of profound depression and gloom. It is a melancholy spectacle to behold a free government die. The world it is true is filled with the evidences of decay. All nature speaks the voice of dissolution, and the highway of history and of life is strewn with the wrecks which time, the great despoiler, has made. But hope of the future, bright visions of reviving glory are no where denied to the heart of man save as he gazes upon the downfall of legal liberty. He listens sorrowfully to the autumn winds as they sigh through dismantled forests, but he knows that their breath will be soft and versal in the spring, and that the dead flowers and the withered foliage will blossom and bloom again. He sees the sky overcast with the angry frown of the tempest, but he knows that the Bun will reappear, and the stars, the bright emblazony of God, cannot perish. Man himself, this strange connecting link between dust and deity, totters wearily onward under the weight of years and pain towards the gaping tomb, but how briefly his mind lingers around that dismal spot. It is filled with tears and grief, and the willow and the cypress gather around it with their loving, but mournful embrace. And is this all? Not so. If a man die shall he not live again? Beyond the grave, in the distant Aiden, hope provides an elysium of the soul where the mortal assumes immortality and life becomes an endless splendor. But where, sir, in all the dreary regions of the past, filled with convulsions, wars, and crimes, can you point your finger the tomb of a free commonwealth on which the angel of resurrection has ever descended or from 7 hose mouth the stone of despotism has ever been rolled away? Where, in what age and in what clime, have the ruins of constitutional freedom renew their youth and regained their lost estate by whose strong grip has the dead corpse of the Republic once fallen ever been raised? The merciful Master who walked upon the waters and bade the winds be still lelt no ordained apostles with power to wrench apart the jaws of national death and release the victims of despotism. The wail of the heart-broken over the dead is not so sad to me as the realization of this fact. But all history, with a loud unbroken voice, proclaims it, and the evidence of what the past has been is conclusive to my mind of what the future wi Ube. Wherever in the wide domain of human conduct a people once possessed of liberty, with all power in their own hands, have surrendered these great gifts of God at the command, of the usurper they have never afterwards proves themselves worthy to regain their forfeited treasures. Sir, let history speak on this point. Bend your ear, and listen to the solemn warnings which distant ages perpetually utter in their uneasy slumbers. Four thousand years of human experience are open and present for the study of the American people. Standing as we do the last and greatest Republic in the midst of the earth, it becomes us most deeply ih this Crisis of our destiny to examine well the career and the final fate of kindred governments in the past. The principles of self-government are of ancient origin. They were not created by the authors of the American Constitution. They were adopted by those wise and gifted minds from the models of former times and applied to the wants of the American people. Far back in the gray, uncertain dawn of history, in the laud of mystery and of miracles, the hand of Almighty benevolence planted the seeds of constitutional government by which life, liberty, and property were made secure. Abraham and Lot each governed his household and his herd men by law; and although they became offended at each other, yet under the d.