resource for the preservation of the Constitution? Reason and argument? You might as well reason and argue with the marble columns encircling them, etc. Are we then to stand to our arms with the hotheaded Georgian? No [and I say no, and South Carolina has said no]; that must be the last resource. We must have patience and long endurance with our brethren, etc., and separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left are a dissolution of our union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers. Between these two evils, when we must make a choice, there can be no hesitation."

Such, sir, are the high and imposing authorities in support of the "Carolina doctrine," which is, in fact, the doctrine of the Virginia resolutions of 1798.

Sir, at that day the whole country was divided on this very question. It formed the line of demarcation between the Federal and Republican parties; and the great political revolution which then took place turned upon the very question involved in these resolutions. That question was decided by the people, and by that decision the Constitution was, in the emphatic language of Mr. Jefferson, "saved at its last gasp." I should suppose, sir, it would require more self-respect than any gentleman here would be willing to assume, to treat lightly doctrines derived from such high sources. Resting on authority like this, I will ask gentlemen whether South Carolina has not manifested a high regard for the Union, when, under a tyranny ten times more grievous than the Alien and Sedition Laws she has hitherto gone no further than to petition, to remonstrate, and to solemnly protest against a series of measures which she believes to be wholly unconstitutional and utterly destructive of her interests. Sir, South Carolina has not gone one step further than Mr. Jefferson himself was disposed to go in relation to the present subject of our present complaints; not a step further than the statesmen from New England were disposed to go under similar circumstances; no further than the Senator from Massachusetts himself once considered as within "the limits of a constitutional opposition." The doctrine that it is the right of a State to judge of the violations of the Constitution on the part of the Federal Government, and to protect her citizens from the operations of unconstitutional laws, was held by the enlightened citizens of Boston, who assembled in Faneuil Hall on the twenty-fifth of January, 1809. They state, in that celebrated memorial, that "they looked only to the

State legislature, who were competent to devise relief against the unconstitutional acts of the General Government. That your power [say they] is adequate to that object is evident from the organization of the confederacy."

A distinguished Senator from one of the New England States [Mr. Hillhouse], in a speech delivered here on a bill for enforcing the Embargo, declared:

"I feel myself bound in conscience to declare (lest the blood of those who shall fall in the execution of this measure shall be on my head) that I consider this to be an act which directs a mortal blow at the liberties of my country-an act containing unconstitutional provisions to which the people are not bound to submit, and to which, in my opinion, they will not submit.»

And the Senator from Massachusetts himself, in a speech delivered on the same subject in the other House, said:

"This opposition is constitutional and legal; it is also conscientious. It rests on settled and sober conviction that such policy is destructive to the interests of the people and dangerous to the being of government. The experience of every day confirms these sentiments. Men who act from such motives are not to be discouraged by trifling obstacles, nor awed by any dangers. They know the limit of constitutional opposition; up to that limit, at their own discretion, they will walk, and walk fearlessly."

How "the being of the Government" was to be endangered by "constitutional opposition" to the Embargo, I leave to the gentleman to explain.

Thus it will be seen, Mr. President, that the South Carolina doctrine is the Republican doctrine of 1798; that it was promulgated by the fathers of the faith; that it was maintained by Virginia and Kentucky in the worst of times; that it constituted the very pivot on which the political revolution of that day turned; that it embraces the very principles, the triumph of which at that time saved the Constitution at its last gasp, and which New England statesmen were not unwilling to adopt when they believed themselves to be the victims of unconstitutional legislation. Sir, as to the doctrine that the Federal Government is the exclusive judge of the extent as well as the limitations of its powers, it seems to me to be utterly subversive of the sovereignty and independence of the States. It makes but little difference, in

my estimation, whether Congress or the Supreme Court are invested with this power. If the Federal Government in all or any of its departments is to prescribe the limits of its own authority, and the States are bound to submit to the decision and are not to be allowed to examine and decide for themselves when the barriers of the Constitution shall be overleaped, this is practically "a government without limitation of powers." The States are at once reduced to mere petty corporations, and the people are entirely at your mercy. I have but one word more to add. In all the efforts that have been made by South Carolina to resist the unconstitutional laws which Congress has extended over them, she has kept steadily in view the preservation of the Union by the only means by which she believes it can be long preserved — a firm, manly, and steady resistance against usurpation. The measures of the Federal Government have, it is true, prostrated her interests, and will soon involve the whole South in irretriev able ruin. But even this evil, great as it is, is not the chief ground of our complaints. It is the principle involved in the contesta principle, which, substituting the discretion of Congress for the limitations of the Constitution, brings the States and the people to the feet of the Federal Government, and leaves them nothing they can call their own. Sir, if the measures of the Federal Government were less oppressive, we should still strive against this usurpation. The South is acting on a principle she has always held sacred-resistance to unauthorized taxation. These, sir, are the principles which induced the immortal Hampden to resist the payment of a tax of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have ruined his fortune? No! but the payment of half twenty shillings, on the principle on which it was demanded, would have made him a slave. Sir, if in acting on these high motives-if animated by that ardent love of liberty which has always been the most prominent trait in the Southern character we should be hurried beyond the bounds of a cold and calculating prudence, who is there with one noble and generous sentiment in his bosom that would not be disposed, in the language of Burke, to exclaim: "You must pardon something to the spiri of liberty!"

WILLIAM HAZLITT

(1778-1830)

AZLITT'S lectures on English literature and other literary topics were among the earliest of those platform addresses by

critics, scholars, scientists, and philosophers, for which the nineteenth century has been distinguished above all others in history. Hazlitt has been frequently attacked as a critic by other critics, who accuse him of "cramming for each occasion." If that habit be more criminal than the habit much more general among critics of disregarding the facts they have not time or inclination to "cram," the unquestionable and striking eloquence of Hazlitt's lectures has nevertheless immortalized them. The friend of Leigh Hunt, of Godwin, of Coleridge, and of Charles Lamb, he represents the intellectual tradition of a period in English literature which in many respects strikingly approximates the "Golden Age» of Elizabeth. Hazlitt was born April 10th, 1778, at Maidstone. His father was a Presbyterian clergyman, who sent him to the Unitarian College at Hackney to complete his education. It is said he received there the bent towards metaphysics which is so frequently apparent in his writings. In 1802 he determined to be a painter, and did finally open a studio in London, where he made a complete failure as an artist, and was accordingly forced into the field for which he was eminently fitted,- that of a lecturer and essayist on literature. His private life was irregular and unhappy. The nervous temperament which gave him the susceptibility necessary for the expression of his genius subjected him to constant depression as the price of his effectiveness, and he died, prematurely, September 18th, 1830, attended to the last by his friend Charles Lamb, who so strikingly resembled him in temperament.

M^N

ON WIT AND HUMOR

(From His Lectures on the English Comic Writers)

AN is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters: we laugh

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at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles. We shed tears from sympathy with real and necessary distress; as we burst into laughter from want of sympathy with that which is unreasonable and unnecessary, the absurdity of which provokes our spleen or mirth, rather than any serious reflections on it.

To explain the nature of laughter and tears is to account for the condition of human life, for it is in a manner compounded. of these two. It is a tragedy or a comedy-sad or merry, as it happens. The crimes and misfortunes that are inseparable from it shock and wound the mind when they once seize upon it, and, when the pressure can no longer be borne, seek relief in tears; the follies and absurdities that men commit, or the odd accidents that befall them, afford us amusement from the very rejection of these false claims upon our sympathy, and end in laughter. If everything that went wrong, if every vanity or weakness in another gave us a sensible pang, it would be hard indeed; but as long as the disagreeableness of the consequences of a sudden disaster is kept out of sight by the immediate oddity of the circumstances, and the absurdity or unaccountableness of a foolish action is the most striking thing in it, the ludicrous prevails over the pathetic, and we receive pleasure instead of pain from the farce of life which is played before us, and which discomposes our gravity as often as it fails to move our anger or our pity.

Mere wit, as opposed to reason or argument, consists in striking out some casual and partial coincidence which has nothing to do, or at least implies no necessary connection with the nature of the things, which are forced into a seeming analogy by a play upon words, or some irrelevant conceit, as in puns, riddles, alliteration, etc. The jest, in all such cases, lies in the sort of mock identity, or nominal resemblance, established by the intervention of the same words expressing different ideas, and countenancing, as it were, by a fatality of language, the mischievous insinuation. which the person who has the wit to take advantage of it wishes to convey. So when the disaffected French wits applied to the new order of the Fleur du lys the double entendre of Compagnons d'Ulysse, or companions of Ulysses, meaning the animal into which the fellow-travelers of the Hero of the 'Odyssey' were transformed, this was a shrewd and biting intimation of a galling truth (if truth it were) by a fortuitous concourse of letters of the alphabet, jumping in "a foregone conclusion," but there was