Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/223

 TOOMBS Senators, my countrymen have demanded no new government; they have demanded no new Constitution. Look to their records at home and here from the beginning of this national strife until its consummation in the disruption of the empire, and they have not demanded a single thing except that you shall abide by the Con- stitution of the United States; that constitu- tional rights shall be respected, and that justice shall be done. Sirs, they have stood by your Constitution; they have stood by all its require- ments, they have performed all its duties un- selfishly, uncalculatingly, disinterestedly, until a party sprang up in this country which en- dangered their social system — a party which they arraign, and which they charge before the American people and all mankind with hav- ing made proclamation of outlawry against four thousand millions of their property in the Ter- ritories of the United States; with having put them under the ban of the empire in all the States in which their institutions exist outside the protection of federal laws; with having aided and abetted insurrection from within and invasion from without with the view of sub- verting those institutions, and desolating their homes and their firesides. For these causes they have taken up arms. I have stated that the discontented States of this Union have demanded nothing but clear, dis- tinct, unequivocal, well-acknowledged constitu- tional rights — rights affirmed by the highest 213