claration on his death-bed, when the friends
gathered around it imagined he had breathed his last; and the same words
might be uttered by the Speech of the 7th of March, could it possess the
vocal organ which announces personal existence. Between the time it was
originally delivered and the present year there runs a great and broad
stream of blood, shed from the veins of Northern and Southern men alike;
the whole political and moral constitution of the country has
practically suffered an abrupt change; new problems engage the attention
of thoughtful statesmen; much is forgotten which was once considered of
the first importance; but the 7th of March Speech, battered as it is by
innumerable attacks, is still remembered at least as one which called
forth more power than it embodied in itself. This persistence of life is
due to the fact that it was "organized."

Is this power of organization common among orators? It seems to me
that, on the contrary, it is very rare. In some of Burke's speeches, in
which his sensibility and imagination were thoroughly under the control
of his judgment, as, for instance, his speech on Conciliation with
America, that on Economical Reform, and that to the Electors of Bristol,
we find the orator to be a consummate master of the art of so
constructing a speech that it serves the immediate object which prompted
its delivery, while at the same time it has in it a principle of
vitality which makes it survive the occasion that called it forth. But
the greatest of Burke's speeches, if we look merely at the richness and
variety of mental power and the force and depth of moral passion
displayed in it, is his speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts. No speech
ever delivered before any assembly, legislative, judicial, or popular,
can rank with this in respect to the abundance of its facts, reasonings,
and imagery, and the ferocity of its moral wrath. It resembles the El
Dorado that Voltaire's Candide visited, where the boys played with
precious stones of inestimable value, as our boys play with ordinary
marbles; for to the inhabitants of El Dorado diamonds and pearls were as
common as pebbles are with us.

But the defect of this speech, which must still be considered, on the
whole, the most inspired product of Burke's great nature, was this,--
that it did not strike its hearers or readers as having _reality_ for
its basis or the superstructure raised upon it. Englishmen could not
believe then, and most of