n.

Question history, and learn how all the defenders of liberty, in all
times, have been overwhelmed by calumny. But their traducers died
also. The good and the bad disappear alike from the earth; but in
very different conditions. O Frenchmen! O my countrymen! Let not your
enemies, with their desolating doctrines, degrade your souls and
enervate your virtues! No, Chaumette, no! Death is not "an eternal
sleep"! Citizens, efface from the tomb that motto, graven by
sacrilegious hands, which spreads over all nature a funereal crape,
takes from suppressed innocence its support, and affronts the
beneficent dispensation of death! Inscribe rather thereon these words:
"Death is the commencement of immortality!" I leave to the oppressors
of the People a terrible testament, which I proclaim with the
independence befitting one whose career is so nearly ended; it is
the awful truth,--"Thou shalt die!"

Secession

BY ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.

[Delivered at the Georgia State Convention, January, 1861.]

Mr. President: This step of secession, once taken, can never be
recalled, and all the baleful and withering consequences that must
follow will rest on the convention for all coming time. When we and our
posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war,
which this act of yours will inevitably invite and call forth; when our
green fields of waving harvest shall be trodden down by the murderous
soldiery and fiery car sweeping over our land; our temples of justice
laid in ashes; all the horrors and desolation of war upon us; who but
this convention will be held responsible for it? And who but him who
shall have given his vote for this unwise and ill-timed measure, as I
honestly think and believe, shall be held to strict account for this
suicidal act by the present generation, and probably cursed and
execrated by posterity for all coming time, for the wide and desolating
ruin that will inevitably follow this act you now propose to perpetrate?
Pause, I entreat you, and consider for a moment what reasons you can
give that will even satisfy yourselves in calmer moments--what reasons
you can give to your fellow-sufferers in the calamity that it will
bring upon us. What reasons can you give to the nations of the earth to
justify it? They will be calm and deliberate judges in the case; and
what cause or one overt act can you name or point, on which to rest the
plea of justification? What right has the North assa