e eight governments five lasted over five years. Broadly speaking,
then, our executive governments have lasted about the length of your
fixed term. As for ministers swept away by a gust of passion, I can only
recall the overthrow of Lord Palmerston in 1858 for being thought too
subservient to France. For my own part, I have always thought that by
its free play, its comparative fluidity, its rapid flexibility of
adaptation, our cabinet system has most to say for itself.

Whether democracy will make for peace, we all have yet to see. So far
democracy has done little in Europe to protect us against the turbid
whirlpools of a military age. When the evils of rival states,
antagonistic races, territorial claims, and all the other formulas of
international conflict are felt to be unbearable and the curse becomes
too great to be any longer borne, a school of teachers will perhaps
arise to pick up again the thread of the best writers and wisest rulers
on the eve of the revolution. Movement in this region of human things
has not all been progressive. If we survey the European courts from the
end of the Seven Years' War down to the French Revolution, we note the
marked growth of a distinctly international and pacific spirit. At no
era in the world's history can we find so many European statesmen after
peace and the good government of which peace is the best ally. That
sentiment came to violent end when Napoleon arose to scourge the world.

_ROBERT TOOMBS_

ON RESIGNING FROM THE SENATE, 1861

(Abridged)

The success of the Abolitionists and their allies, under the name of the
Republican party, has produced its logical results already. They have
for long years been sowing dragons' teeth and have finally got a crop of
armed men. The Union, sir, is dissolved. That is an accomplished fact in
the path of this discussion that men may as well heed. One of your
confederates has already wisely, bravely, boldly confronted public
danger, and she is only ahead of many of her sisters because of her
greater facility for speedy action. The greater majority of those sister
States, under like circumstances, consider her cause as their cause; and
I charge you in their name to-day: "Touch not Saguntum."[37] It is not
only their cause, but it is a cause which receives the sympathy and will
receive the support of tens and hundreds of honest patriot men in the
nonslaveholding States, who have hitherto maintained constitutional
rights, and who res