honor to make me their organ on this occasion, I hope they will forgive me if I say to them, that, for the evils which they suffer, they themselves must assist to furnish the remedy. A gentleman on the other side of the Senate has said, and said truly, that these great questions must be settled at the polls. To the polls, then, let them be brought. If the right of suffrage be not an idle form, if self-government be not a delusion, if there be any thing true in the idea of popular intelligence, then political mismanagement must be corrected by political elections. I have said so often that redress can come only from the people themselves, that it must fatigue the ear to hear it again. I beseech the good citizens of Albany to lay this truth to heart.

If they are in earnest, if they really feel the evils of misrule, let them touch the right spring to restore proper action to the machinery of government; let them take hold of the right lever. They complain of violation of law; let them seek to obtain the passage of other laws which shall redress such violation. They complain of executive encroachment; as far as depends on them, let there be a legislature which shall allow no such encroachment. Some of them, with other citizens of the State, have lately acted on the principles of a motto, taken from the words of a great and good man, now removed from this scene of things. I would beseech those who have adopted that sentiment for one occasion to apply it to another of still broader interest. It is a sentiment fit for any crisis, and especially suited to the present. It is a sentiment becoming republicans. It is a sentiment fundamental to all free governments. I cherish it, not only as it is expressed in the words of a valued friend not now among the living, but for its plain truth and its mighty importance. I beseech all who value the blessings of free government, and of civil liberty, to embrace it, and act upon it. I pray them to give it scope and energy, such as the present exigency of the country requires. Let it have power to overcome minor differences; let its conciliating influence unite the heart of man to man; let it melt all smaller objects into one great purpose of honest and resolute patriotism; and let all who mean to die as they live, citizens of a free country, stand together for the su

PREMACY OF THE LAWS.

On Tuesday, April 25th, Mr. Webster presented a memorial from three thousand citizens of Ontario County, New York, against the removal of the deposits, with the following remarks:

THESE memorialists are farmers, mechanics, merchants, and other citizens. They represent that they inhabit a portion of Western New York essentially agricultural, and second to none in fertility of soil and other natural advantages. This will be readily admitted by all acquainted with the county. It is in the beautiful Lake country, is large, constituting a Congressional district by itself, and is doubtless in the very first class of agricultural counties. Its great products are wheat and cattle, and its principal manufacture that of flour, although there are in the county manufactories both of wool and cotton. Ontario, in its leading character, is a county of intelligent farmers. It belongs to that interest which is at once the most general in the United States, and is also the basis of other pursuits. Its rich lands, and other local advantages, have invited into it, as the memorialists state, considerable capital, and stimulated strongly the industry of the people. The growth of the county is good proof of this. This growth resembles the vigor with which population has spread forth, and penetrated the wildernesses, in regions beyond the Alleghany. I am old enough to remember when he who had seen the Seneca Lake had performed a journey from the Atlantic coast fit to be spoken of; and I see it stated, indeed, in some interesting recent account of the settlement of this part of New York, that, when the county of Ontario was established, it contained only a thousand inhabitants, though it extended from the Seneca Lake to Lake Erie, carrying the whole breadth of the State between Canada and Pennsylvania, an extent of country now embracing thirteen or fourteen counties, with a population of nearly four hundred thousand. A country so rapidly growing, with so much necessity of sale, purchase, and exchange, of course requires credit, and confidence, and a stable currency, to conduct its business beneficially. The memorialists declare that the effect of recent measures of government has been most disastrous on all their great interests. The farmer, the merchant, the mechanic, all feel alike the pressure of the times. Produce has fallen from twenty-five to thirtythree per cent. in price, since the interference of the executive with the public revenue; and land, land itself, the great capital

of the county, the form in which the vast proportion of its property consists, has fallen, within the same time, to the same extent. I receive this information from sources to which I give entire credit.

Here, then, is a reduction of twenty-five or thirty-three per cent. in the whole property of the people, a striking off, at a blow, one quarter or one third of the whole value of what they possess! Sir, is this tolerable? All this, too, done under pretence of an experiment, but really and truly out of hostility to a banking corporation; out of hostility to an institution which has existed with great usefulness to the country, which is now approaching a time when it might be modified, altered, and accommodated to any new state of things, or so as to accord with the lights of past experience, and be continued, with every prospect of advantage to the country. How can conscientious men feel themselves justified in pushing, with such ruinous effects on the people, a quarrel of this kind to this extent? How do they find within their own bosoms a monitor to tell them that all this is right? If the bank was not to be renewed, why not let it quietly expire? and why not leave the public moneys in it till it should expire? A measure so causeless, so uncalled for, so destitute of all reasonable object and all just purpose, and so disastrous in its effects on the whole body of the people, is, so far as I know, nowhere else to be heard of. This changing the custody of the public money, without authority of Congress, is, as a measure of policy, wholly without justification, and, as a blow on the prosperity of the country, wholly without example. The people ought not to submit to it. Their respect, their attachment for any individual, however strong that respect and attachment may be, ought not to make them willing to submit to such an extension of executive power, and to the consequences which flow from it. And I am sure they will not submit. The country is effectually roused. The people feel a spirit stirring within them, which they know is the spirit that has come down to them with the blood which fills their veins. It is the spirit of their fathers, who did not wait till unjust power had crushed them, but who saw its approach in the lowering storm, snuffed it in the tainted gale, and met it, and resisted it, and repelled it. It is the most alarming circumstance in our whole condition, that, in order to justify the re

moval of the deposits, principles are advanced by the executive which threaten a change in the substantial character of our government. The argument which is to justify the executive in this instance seems to me to leave little or no control to Congress over the public treasure. We thus see a constant advance in the claims of power. Those who defended the paper read to the Cabinet probably never expected to be called on to support such reasons as were afterwards given by the Secretary; and those who made up their minds to stand by the Secretary's report could not have foreseen, that, ere long, they must prepare themselves for the doctrine of the Protest. And what is next to

be put forth, time only can show.

Sir, a month or two ago an honorable member of New York spoke with pleasure of the unanimity of feeling which prevailed in New York, and of the quieting, in some measure, of what he thought an unhappy controversy, which had existed heretofore in the western parts of that State particularly. I think, too, Sir, there are signs of union, and much stronger signs than there were when the gentleman alluded to the subject. Sir, the letter addressed to the honorable member from Kentucky and myself, committing this memorial to our care, is signed by names many of them not unknown here. They are Nathaniel W. Howell, John C. Spencer, Mark H. Sibley, James D. Bemis, Z. Barton Stout, John Dixson, Phindres Prouty, H. R. Schermerhorn, Robert Carey Nicholas, Abraham C. Post, Samuel Rawson, Stephen Bates, and Moses Fairchild.

Those who know these gentlemen will recognize among them persons whose political opinions have not been the same on all subjects, nor their political objects always identical. Yet they are united. They are united, as in a common cause, and seeking to remove a common evil. They come with one voice to Congress; they speak with one voice to the people; and I trust they will act with one heart and one mind in the present exigency of public affairs. It is to this union, to these united counsels and united efforts, to this sense of common danger and this common sacrifice of minor differences to high patriotic duties, that I look, and look confidently, for the salvation of the country. Every day accumulates new proofs of this growing harmony of public sentiment. Far and near, there is a rallying for the Constitution and the laws. Three days ago, we heard

of the clamorous and factious shouts of the citizens of Baltimore. Another peal now reaches us from the multitudes assembled in those same streets; and in this peal mingle many new voices of powerful tone. Sir, the American people are so well schooled in the great doctrines of free government, that they are competent to teach first principles, even to their rulers, if unhappily such teaching should become necessary. They will teach them that public complaint for maladministration of government is not clamor; that indignation for unnecessary and severe national suffering is not treason, either legal or moral; that to resist the encroachments of power is not to cabal against government; and that the people themselves are not a faction.

ON Tuesday, May 20th, Mr. Webster presented to the Senate a memorial from citizens of Columbia, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, remonstrating against the measures of the executive, in relation to the Bank of the United States, and the executive Protest against the proceedings of the Senate.

MR. PRESIDENT, I am more fortunate than the gentleman near me, the member from Pennsylvania, as I am about to present to the Senate a paper, in the sentiments of which I heartily concur. It is a paper which records the proceedings of a Whig meeting in the town of Columbia, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Columbia is a respectable town, as most of the Senate know, on the Susquehannah, containing two or three thousand inhabitants, and by its position much connected with the inland trade in lumber and articles of agricultural product, as in the great line of communication between Pittsburg and Philadelphia by those noble canals and railroads by which the enterprise of Pennsylvania has connected those two important points. The memorialists partake in the evil of the times. They have not escaped that impartial and undistinguishing scourge, "the experiment." They feel its heavy hand upon them, in the stagnation of trade, the want of employment, the disappearance of credit, and the flight of commercial confidence. Sentiments like theirs, strongly and ably expressed, have just been heard, in the memorial of the Antimasons of Alleghany County. Like the Antimasons of Alleghany County,