Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/438

 Such thing's very frequently occur. At all events, as the memorial has been prepared with great care, and as the gentlemen who have signed it have been anxious that their views should be laid before the Senate of the United States, lest other measures embracing similar principles should be introduced, I can see nothing improper in allowing them to lay their views respectfully before the Senate. I do not think there is any evidence that the gentlemen who have signed the memorial have any disposition to establish theocracy in our country, or that they wish to take the Government into their own hands, and exercise a controlling influence over it. We find that those who have signed this document are of different sects and various denominations. I think there is no danger that such an amalgamation of interests and opinions will take place as to embody a force sufficient to make any great impression on the institutions of this country, or to endanger our liberties.

Mr. President, this memorial is regarded as a substantive and independent matter, as intended to produce agitation, and to insult the Senate; but it is really the effect of a measure which I predicted would have this influence upon the community. The cause exists in the Senate. It exists in the amendment inserted into the Nebraska Bill proposing the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and this is but responsive action to that. The cause is not in the clergymen who have signed this memorial. The memorial is the effect of a cause brought forward and presented in the Senate. The memorial impugns the action of no one. It is true the memorialists speak of the measure as immoral. Surely that ought not to insult Senators. They are not such paragons of morality that they can not bear to have their moral character questioned, if they should happen to do anything which would not be strictly moral, according to some standards, but which I should not think to be very immoral. But is their morality of such a delicate texture as to be affected by a memorial coming from "the land of steady habits"?

We are told that there is a great principle involved in the bill to which this memorial refers. This is a very formidable and very visible response to that great principle which it is said has lain dormant. Sir, I need not name the number of years that it has lain dormant. No bright genius ever elicited it; no brilliant conception ever discovered it until this session had progressed for some time, when the great principle of non-intervention at once sprang up to illumine the world, to be regarded as one which, at some future day, would be a universally-recognized principle. Sir, I recognize the principles of self-government, but I do it in sovereignty. A people in tutelage can not exercise sovereignty, but States can. A people who are in a territorial existence which is fitting them to become States, exercise what may be called a quasi sovereignty. They are never really sovereign until they are recognized by Congress as such, and are received into the Union as sovereign States. Then is the time for the operation of self-government, but it grows out of sovereignty. Is it to be in five squatters? They may pass a law to-day and repeal it to-morrow, and the next day they may pass another law, and so on successively from day to day, and from year to year, they may pass and repeal laws. The Territories have no power to pass organic laws until the attributes of sovereignty are about to attach, or have actually attached to them. That is what I call non-intervention. That is what I call sovereignty and self-government. This is the great principle which it is said is involved in the bill which we have passed; and now we