of an executive act meant in good faith for their protection against
the invader? We are all citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of
Philadelphia, in this hour of their peril, and with the enemy at work
in our own harbors, we begin to understand the difference between a good
and bad citizen; the man that helps and the man that hinders; the man
who, while the pirate is in sight, complains that our anchor is dragging
in his mud, and the man who violates the proprieties, like our brave
Portland brothers, when they jumped on board the first steamer they
could reach, cut her cable, and bore down on the corsair, with a habeas
corpus act that lodged twenty buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in the
whirlpool of national destruction. If our borders are invaded, it is
only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to rouse his
slumbering mettle. If our property is taxed, it is only to teach us that
liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for. We are pouring out
the most generous blood of our youth and manhood; alas! this is always
the price that must be paid for the redemption of a people. What have we
to complain of, whose granaries are choking with plenty, whose streets
are gay with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose industry
is abundant enough to reap all its overflowing harvest, yet sure of
employment and of its just reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is
an inexhaustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores
of heat and power, imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all
the inhabitants and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered
ages, whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over
beds of golden sand,--what have we to complain of?

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do and
bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne over and
over again for their form of government? Could England, in her wars with
Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must we faint under
the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.? Was she content to
negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and that paid in
depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin with our
national stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par, and the
"five-twenty" war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount
of nearly two hundred