Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/182

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS imbecility from slavery, confessed throughout the Revolution, followed by its more shameful assumptions for slavery since. He can not have forgotten its wretched persistence in the slave trade as the very apple of its eye, and the condi- tion of its participation in the Union. He can not have forgotten its Constitution, which is Republican only in name, confirming power in the hands of the few, and founding the qualifica- tions of its legislators on ''a settled freehold es- tate and ten negroes." And yet the senator, to whom that ** State" has in part committed the guardianship of its good name, instead of moving with backward treading steps, to cover its nakedness, rushes forward in the very ecstacy of madness, to ex- pose it by provoking a comparison with Kansas. South Carolina is old; Kansas is young. South Carolina counts by centuries, where Kansas counts by years. But a beneficent example may be bom in a day; and I venture to say that against the two centuries of the older *' State" may be already set the two years of trial, evolv- ing corresponding virtue, in the younger com- munity. In the one is the long wail of slavery ; in the other, the hymns of freedom. And if we glance at special achievements, it will be difficult to find anything in the history of South Carolina which presents so much of heroic spirit in an heroic cause as appears in that repulse of the Missouri invaders by the be- 172