d have been ours now, to-day, if it had not been for the Treason
for which the Senator too often seeks to apologize."

This remarkable speech was the last utterance of that glorious and
courageous soul, in the National Senate. Within three months, his
lifeless body, riddled by Rebel rifle balls, was borne away from the
fatal field of Ball's Bluff--away, amid the lamentations of a Nation
--away, across land and ocean--to lie beside his brave friend Broderick,
on that Lone Mountain whose solemn front looks out upon the calm
Pacific.

He had not lived in vain. In his great speech at the American Theatre
in San Francisco, after his election by Oregon (1860) to represent her
in the United States Senate, he had aroused the people to a sense of
shame, that, as he said: "Here, in a land of written Constitutional
Liberty it is reserved for us to teach the World that, under the
American Stars and Stripes, Slavery marches in solemn procession; that,
under the American flag, Slavery is protected to the utmost verge of
acquired territory; that under the American banner, the name of Freedom
is to be faintly heard, the songs of Freedom faintly sung; that, while
Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, every great and good man in the World,
strives, struggles, fights, prays, suffers and dies, sometimes on the
scaffold, sometimes in the dungeon, often on the field of battle,
rendered immortal by his blood and his valor; that, while this triumphal
procession marches on through the arches of Freedom--we, in this land,
of all the World, shrink back trembling when Freedom is but mentioned!"

And never was a shamed people more suddenly lifted up from that shame
into a grand frenzy of patriotic devotion than were his auditors, when,
with the inspiration of his matchless genius, he continued:

"As for me, I dare not, will not, be false to Freedom. Where the feet
of my youth were planted, there, by Freedom, my feet shall ever stand.
I will walk beneath her banner. I will glory in her strength. I have
watched her in history struck down on an hundred chosen fields of
battle. I have seen her friends fly from her; her foes gather around
her. I have seen her bound to the stake; I have seen them give her
ashes to the winds. But when they turned to exult, I have seen her
again meet them face to face, resplendent in complete steel, brandishing
in her strong right hand a flaming sword, red with Insufferable light!
I take courage. The People gather around