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[69] and said, “Let posterity cheer for us” ; and they were silent. Now, if Daniel Webster has done anything on the subject of slavery which posterity will not have the kindness to forget, may he get cheers for it, fifty years hence, and in this hall; using my Yankee privilege, however, “I rather guess” some future D'Israeli will be able to put that down in continuation cf his grandfather's chapter of “events that never took place.” I much, I very much doubt, whether, fifty years hence, Massachusetts will not choose men with back-bones to send to Washington; not men who go there to yield up to the great temptations, social and political, of the capital, the interests and the honor of Massachusetts and New England. I believe, no matter whether the Abolitionists have done much or little, that the average of political independence has risen within the last ten or fifteen years. I know that strange sounds have been heard from the House of Representatives and the Senate within the last ten or fifteen years: that the old tone so often breathed there of Northern submission has very much changed since John Quincy Adams vindicated free speech on the floor of that House. I read just now a speech worthy, in some respects, of Faneuil Hall, from the lips of Robert Rantoul, in rebuke of a recreant Abolitionist from the banks of the Connecticut (George T. Davis). I know not what may be the future course of Mr. Rantoul on this question; I know not how erect he may stand hereafter; but I am willing to give him good credit in the future, so well paid has been this his first bill of exchange. [Great cheering.] He has done, at least, his duty to the constituency he represented. He looked North for his instructions. The time has been when no Massachusetts representative looked North; we saw only their backs. They have always looked to the Southern Cross; they never turned their eyes to the North Star. They never looked back to

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