power, the large ones by domestic vice.  And union, and confederacy, the association of societies—­a confederate republic of republics, is also no new invention.  Greece has known it and flourished by it, for a while.  Rome has known it; by such associations she attacked the world.  The world has known them; with them it defended itself against Rome.  The so-called Barbarians of Europe, beyond the Danube and the Rhine, have known it; it was by a confederacy of union that they resisted the ambitious mistress of the world.  Your own country, America, has known it; the traditionary history of the Romans of the West, of those six Indian Nations, bears the records of it, out of an older time than your ancestors settled in this land; the wise man of the Onondaga Nation has exercised it long before your country’s legislators built upon that basis your independent home.  And still it proved in itself alone no security to all those nations who have known it before you.  Your own fathers have seen the last of the Mohawks burying his bloody tomahawk in the namesake flood, and have listened to the majestic words of Logan, spoken with the dignity of an Aemilius, that there exists no living being on earth in the veins of whom one drop of the blood of his race did flow.  Well, had history nothing else to teach us, than that all what the wisdom of man did conceive, and all that his energy has executed through the innumerable days of the past, and all that we take to be glorious in nations and happy to men, cannot so much do as to ensure a future even to such a flourishing commonwealth as yours; then weaker hearts may well ask, What good is it to warn us of a fatality which we cannot escape; what good is it to hold up the mournful monuments of a national mortality to sadden our heart, if all that is human must share that common doom?  Let us do as we can, and so far as we can, and let the future bring what it may.  But that would be the speech of one having no faith in the all-watching Eye, and regarding the eternal laws of the universe not as an emanation of a bountiful Providence, but of a blind fatality, which plays at hazard with the destinies of men.  I never will share such blasphemy.  Misfortune came over me, and came over my house, and came over my guiltless nation; still I never have lost my trust in the Father of all.  I have lived the days when the people of my oppressed country went along weeping over the immense misfortune that they cannot pray, seeing the downfall of the most just cause and the outrageous triumph of the most criminal of all crimes on earth; and they went along not able to pray, and weeping that they are not able to pray.  I shuddered at the terrible tidings in the desolation of my exile; but I could pray, and sent the consolation home, that I do not despair; that I believe in God, and trust to His bountiful providence, and ask them who of them dares despair when I do not?  I was in exile, as I am now, but arrogant despots were debating