and Germany,
Massachusetts and Carolina, in the hearts of those who call them
mother, with an image of maternity at once more tender and more
majestic.

There is a past for which Republicans have indeed no respect,--but it
is one of recent date; there is a history from which they refuse to
take lessons except for warning and not example,--but it is a history
which is not yet written. When the future historian shall study that
past and gather materials for writing that history, he will find cause
for wonder at the strength of that national vitality which could
withstand and survive, not the efforts of Mr. Choate's dreadful
reformers, but of an administration calling itself Democratic, which,
with the creed of the Ostend Manifesto for its foreign, and the
practice of Kansas for its domestic policy, could yet find a scholar
and a gentleman like Mr. Choate to defend it.

Mr. Choate charges the Republicans with being incapable of a
generalization. They can, at least, generalize so far as this, that,
when they find a number of sophistries in an argument, they conclude
that the cause which requires their support must be a weak one. One of
the most amusing of these in the oration before us is where (using the
very same arguments that were urged in favor of that coalition in
Massachusetts against the morality of which the then party of Mr.
Choate exclaimed so loudly) he extols the merits of Compromise in
statesmanship. In support of what he says on this subject, he quotes
from a speech of Archbishop Whately a passage in favor of
Expediency. It is really too bad, that the Primate of Ireland, of all
men living, should be made the abetter in two fallacies. In the first
place, Mr. Choate assumes that there are certain deluded persons who
affirm that all compromises in politics are wrong. Having stuffed out
his man of straw, he proceeds gravely to argue with him, as if he were
as cunning of fence as Duns Scotus. One would think, from some of the
notions he deems it necessary to combat, that we were living in the
time of the Fifth-Monarchy men, and that Captain Venner with his troop
was ready to issue from the garrets of Batterymarch Street, to find
Armageddon in Dock Square, and the Beast of the Revelation in the
Chief of Police. There is no man who believes that the ship of State,
any more than an ordinary vessel, can be navigated by the New
Testament alone; but neither will be the worse for having it
aboard. The Puritans sailed