e the hazard!"

Again a cheer and shout which the Vice-President's gavel could not
quell. When the murmur at last died away the speaker's voice had dropped
to low appealing tenderness.

"We do this, Senators, not in hostility to others, not to injure any
section of our common country, not for our own pecuniary benefit, but
from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights
we inherited, which we will transmit unshorn to our children. We seek
outside the Union that peace, with dignity and honor, which we can no
longer find within.

"I trust I find myself a type of the general feeling of my constituents
towards yours. I am sure I feel no hostility toward you, Senators from
the North--"

He paused and swept the Northern tiers with a look of tender appeal.

"I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may
have been between us, to whom I can not now say in the presence of my
God, I wish you well!"

Seward turned his head from the speaker, his eyes dimmed--the scheming
diplomat and unscrupulous politician lost in the heart of the man for
the moment.

"Such I am sure is the feeling of the people whom I represent toward
those whom you represent. I but express their desire when I say I hope
and they hope for peaceful relations with you, though we must part--"

He paused as if to suppress emotions too deep for words while a silence,
intense and suffocating, held the crowd in a spell. The speaker's voice
dropped to still lower and softer notes of persuasive tenderness as each
rounded word of the next sentence fell slowly from the thin lips.

"If war must come, we can only invoke the God of our fathers, who
delivered us from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages
of the bear, and putting our trust in Him and in our firm hearts and
strong arms we will vindicate the right as best we may--"

No cheer greeted this solemn utterance. In the pause which followed, the
speaker deliberately gazed over the familiar faces of his Northern
opponents and continued with a suppressed intensity of feeling that
gripped his bitterest foe.

"In the course of my service here, associated at different times with a
great variety of Senators, I see now around me some with whom I have
served long. There have been points of collision, but, whatever offense
there has been to me, I leave here. I carry with me no hostile
remembrance. For whatever offense I may have given which has not been
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