truth, and its ultimate triumph when properly wielded. (Applause.)

Another matter of grievance alluded to by my honorable friend was the navigation laws. This policy was also commenced under the Administration of one of these Southern Presidents who ruled so well, and has been continued through all of them since. The gentleman's views of the policy of these laws and my own do not disagree. We occupied the same ground in relation to them in Congress. It is not my purpose to defend them now. But it is proper to state some matters connected with their origin.

One of the objects was to build up a commercial American marine by giving American bottoms the exclusive carrying trade between our own ports. This is a great arm of national power. This object was accomplished. We have now an amount of shipping, not only coastwise, but to foreign countries, which puts us in the front rank of the nations. of the world. England can no longer be styled the Mistress of the Seas. What American is not proud of the result? Whether those laws should be continued is another question. But one thing is certain: no President, Northern or Southern, has ever yet recommended their repeal. And my friend's efforts to get them

repealed were met with but little favor, North or South.

These, then, were the true main grievances or grounds of complaint against the general system of our Government and its workings-I mean the administration of the Federal Government. As to the acts of the Federal States, I shall speak presently, but these three were the main ones used against the common head. Now, suppose it be admitted that all of these are evils in the system, do they overbalance and outweigh the advantages and great good which this same Government affords in a thousand innumerable ways that cannot be estimated? Have we not at the South, as well as at the North, grown great, prosperous, and happy under its operation? Has any part of the world ever shown such rapid progress in the development of wealth, and all the material resources of national power and greatness, as the Southern States have under the General Government, notwitstanding all its defects?

Mr. TOOMBS-In spite of it.

Mr. STEPHENS-My honorable friends says we have, in spite of the General Government; that without it I suppose he thinks we might have done as well, or perhaps, than we have done this in spite of it. That may be, and it may not be; but the

great fact that we have grown great and powerful under the Government as it exists, there is no conjecture or speculation about that; it stands out bold, high, and prominent like your Stone Mountain, to which the gentleman alluded in illustrating home facts in his record-this great fact of our unrivalled prosperity in the Union as it is admitted; whether all this in spite of the Government-whether we of the South would have been better off without the Government--is, to say the least, problematical. On the one side we can only put the fact against speculation and conjecture on the other. But even as a question of speculation I differ with my distinguished friend.

What we would have lost in border wars without the Union, or what we have gained simply by the peace it has secured, no estimate can be made of. Our foreign trade, which is the foundation of all our prosperity, has the protection of the navy, which drove the pirates from the waters near our coast, where they had been buccaneering for centuries before, and might have been still had it not been for the American Navy under the command of such spirits as Commodore Porter. Now that the coast is clear, that our commerce flows freely outwardly, we cannot well estimate how it would have been under other circumstances. The influence of the

Government on us is like that of the atmosphere around us. Its benefits are so silent and unseen that they are seldom thought of or appreciated. We seldom think of the single element of oxygen in the air we breathe, and yet let this simple, unseen, and unfelt agent be withdrawn, this life-giving element be taken away from this all-pervading fluid around us, and what instant and appalling changes would take place in all organic creation.

It may be that we are all that we are in "spite of the General Government," but it may be that without it we should have been far different from

to ours.

what we are now. It is true there is no equal part of the earth with natural resources superior perhaps That portion of this country known as the Southern States, stretching from the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande, is fully equal to the picture drawn by the honorable and eloquent Senator last night, in all natural capacities. But how many ages and centuries passed before these capacities were developed to reach this advanced age of civilization? There these same hills, rich in ore, same rivers, same valleys and plains, are as they have been since they came from the hand of the Creator; uneducated and uncivilized man roamed over them for how long no history informs us.

It was only under our institutions that they could

be developed. Their development is the result of the enterprise of our people under operations of the Government and institutions under which we have lived. Even our people without these never would have done it. The organization of society has much to do with the development of the natural resources of any country or any land. The institutions of a people, political and moral, are the matrix in which the germ of their organic structure quickens into life takes root and develops in form, nature and character. Our institutions constitute the basis, the matrix, from which spring all our characteristics of development and greatness. Look at Greece. There is the same fertile soil, the same blue sky, the same inlets and harbors, the same Ægean, the same Olympus; there is the same land where Homer sung, where Pericles spoke; it is in nature the same old Greece-but it is living Greece no more. (Applause.)

Descendants of the same people inhabit the country; yet what is the reason of this mighty difference? In the midst of present degradation we see the glorious fragments of ancient works of art-temples with ornaments and inscriptions that excite wonder and admiration the remains of a once high order of civilization which have outlived the language they spoke-upon them all Ichabod is written-their glory has departed. Why is this so I answer, their in