ificance of the grave--a degraded, defeated, emasculated people,
frightened by the results of one battle, and scared at the visions
raised by the imagination of the Senator from Kentucky upon this floor?
No, sir; a thousand times, no, sir! We will rally--if, indeed, our words
be necessary--we will rally the people, the loyal people, of the whole
country. They will pour forth their treasure, their money, their men,
without stint, without measure. The most peaceable man in this body may
stamp his foot upon this Senate-Chamber floor, as of old a warrior and
a senator did, and from that single stamp there will spring forth armed
legions. Shall one battle determine the fate of an empire? or, the loss
of one thousand men or twenty thousand, or $100,000,000 or $500,000,000?
In a year's peace, in ten years, at most, of peaceful progress, we can
restore them all. There will be some graves reeking with blood, watered
by the tears of affection. There will be some privation; there will
be some loss of luxury; there will be somewhat more need for labor to
procure the necessaries of life. When that is said, all is said. If we
have the country, the whole country, the Union, the Constitution,
free government--with these there will return all the blessings of
well-ordered civilization; the path of the country will be a career of
greatness and of glory such as, in the olden time, our fathers saw in
the dim visions of years yet to come, and such as would have been ours
now, to-day, if it had not been for the treason for which the Senator
too often seeks to apologize.

MR. BRECKENRIDGE. Mr. President, I have tried on more than one occasion
in the Senate, in parliamentary and respectful language, to express my
opinions in regard to the character of our Federal system, the relations
of the States to the Federal Government, to the Constitution, the
bond of the Federal political system. They differ utterly from those
entertained by the Senator from Oregon. Evidently, by his line of
argument, he regards this as an original, not a delegated Government,
and he regards it as clothed with all those powers which belong to an
original nation, not only with those powers which are delegated by the
different political communities that compose it, and limited by the
written Constitution that forms the bond of Union. I have tried to
show that, in the view that I take of our Government, this war is
an unconstitutional war. I do not think the Senator from