heir protection against the invader? We are all
citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour of
their peril, and with the enemy at work in our own harbors, we begin to
understand the difference between a good and bad citizen; the man that
helps and the man that hinders; the man who, while the pirate is in
sight, complains that our anchor is dragging in his mud, and the man who
violates the proprieties, like our brave Portland brothers, when they
jumped on board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable, and
bore down on the corsair, with a habeas corpus act that lodged twenty
buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in the
whirlpool of national destruction. If our borders are invaded, it is
only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to rouse his
slumbering mettle. If our property is taxed, it is only to teach us that
liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for. We are pouring out
the most generous blood of our youth and manhood; alas! this is always
the price that must be paid for the redemption of a people. What have we
to complain of, whose granaries are choking with plenty, whose streets
are gay with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose industry is
abundant enough to reap all its overflowing harvest, yet sure of
employment and of its just reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is an
inexhaustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores of
heat and power, imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all the
inhabitants and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered ages,
whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over beds of
golden sand,--what have we to complain of?

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do and
bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne over and
over again for their form of government? Could England, in her wars with
Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must we faint under
the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.? Was she content to
negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and that paid in
depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin with our national
stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par, and the "five-twenty"
war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount of nearly two
hundred millions, without any check to the flow