drill,
our dress, and our weapons are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the
storm shall be past he shall find us still Americans, no less devoted to
the continued union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.

Finally, the Judge invokes against me the memory of Clay and Webster, They
were great men, and men of great deeds. But where have I assailed them?
For what is it that their lifelong enemy shall now make profit by assuming
to defend them against me, their lifelong friend? I go against the repeal
of the Missouri Compromise; did they ever go for it? They went for the
Compromise of 1850; did I ever go against them? They were greatly devoted
to the Union; to the small measure of my ability was I ever less so? Clay
and Webster were dead before this question arose; by what authority shall
our Senator say they would espouse his side of it if alive? Mr. Clay was
the leading spirit in making the Missouri Compromise; is it very credible
that if now alive he would take the lead in the breaking of it? The truth
is that some support from Whigs is now a necessity with the Judge, and for
this it is that the names of Clay and Webster are invoked. His old friends
have deserted him in such numbers as to leave too few to live by. He
came to his own, and his own received him not; and lo! he turns unto the
Gentiles.

A word now as to the Judge's desperate assumption that the compromises of
1850 had no connection with one another; that Illinois came into the Union
as a slave State, and some other similar ones. This is no other than a
bold denial of the history of the country. If we do not know that the
compromises of 1850 were dependent on each other; if we do not know that
Illinois came into the Union as a free State,--we do not know anything.
If we do not know these things, we do not know that we ever had a
Revolutionary War or such a chief as Washington. To deny these things is
to deny our national axioms,--or dogmas, at least,--and it puts an end to
all argument. If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat and reassert,
that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument
that can stop him. I think I can answer the Judge so long as he sticks to
the premises; but when he flies from them, I cannot work any argument into
the consistency of a mental gag and actually close his mouth with it. In
such a case I can only commend him to the seventy thousand answers just in
from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indi