these important items. Look at another necessary branch of
government, and learn from stern statistical facts how matters stand in
that department. I mean the mail and post-office privileges that we now
enjoy under the general government as it has been for years past. The
expense for the transportation of the mail in the free States was, by
the report of the Postmaster-General for the year 1860, a little over
$13,000,000, while the income was $19,000,000. But in the slave States
the transportation of the mail was $14,716,000, while the revenue from
the same was $8,001,026, leaving a deficit of $6,704,974 to be supplied
by the North for our accommodation, and without it we must have been
entirely cut off from this most essential branch of government.

Leaving out of view, for the present, the countless millions of dollars
you must expend in a war with the North; with tens of thousands of your
sons and brothers slain in battle and offered up as sacrifices upon
the altar of your ambition--and for what, we ask again? Is it for
the overthrow of the American Government, established by our common
ancestry, cemented and built up by their sweat and blood, and founded on
the broad principles of right, justice and humanity? And as such, I must
declare here, as I have often done before, and which has been repeated
by the greatest and wisest of statesmen and patriots, in this and other
lands, that it is the best and freest government--the most equal in
its rights, the most just in its decisions, the most lenient in its
measures, and the most aspiring in its principles, to elevate the race
of men, that the sun of heaven ever shone upon. Now, for you to attempt
to overthrow such a government as this, under which we have lived for
more than three-quarters of a century--in which we have gained our
wealth, our standing as a nation, our domestic safety, while the
elements of peril are around us, with peace and tranquillity accompanied
with unbounded prosperity and rights unassailed--is the height of
madness, folly, and wickedness, to which I neither lend my sanction nor
my vote.

Birds

Birds are singing round my window,
Tunes the sweetest ever heard,
And I hang my cage there daily,
But I never catch a bird.
So with thoughts my brain is peopled,
And they sing there all day long;
But they will not fold their pinions
In the little cage of song!

--_Richard Henry Stoddard_.