we are at least agreed who ought not to be.  I fully believe, Sir, that gratifying intelligence is already on the wing.  While we are yet deliberating in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania is voting.  This week, she elects her members to the next Congress.  I doubt not the result of that election will show an important change in public sentiment in that State; nor can I doubt that the great States adjoining her, holding similar constitutional principles and having similar interests, will feel the impulse of the same causes which affect her.  The people of the United States, by a countless majority, are attached to the Constitution.  If they shall be convinced that it is in danger, they will come to its rescue, and will save it.  It cannot be destroyed, even now, if THEY will undertake its guardianship and protection.

But suppose, Sir, there was less hope than there is, would that consideration weaken the force of our obligations?  Are we at a post which we are at liberty to desert when it becomes difficult to hold it?  May we fly at the approach of danger?  Does our fidelity to the Constitution require no more of us than to enjoy its blessings, to bask in the prosperity which it has shed around us and our fathers? and are we at liberty to abandon it in the hour of its peril, or to make for it but a faint and heartless struggle, for the want of encouragement and the want of hope?  Sir, if no State come to our succor, if everywhere else the contest should be given up, here let it be protracted to the last moment.  Here, where the first blood of the Revolution was shed, let the last effort be made for that which is the greatest blessing obtained by the Revolution, a free and united government.  Sir, in our endeavors to maintain our existing forms of government, we are acting not for ourselves alone, but for the great cause of constitutional liberty all over the globe.  We are trustees holding a sacred treasure, in which all the lovers of freedom have a stake.  Not only in revolutionized France, where there are no longer subjects, where the monarch can no longer say, I am the state; not only in reformed England, where our principles, our institutions, our practice of free government, are now daily quoted and commended; but in the depths of Germany, also, and among the desolated fields and the still smoking ashes of Poland, prayers are uttered for the preservation of our union and happiness.  We are surrounded, Sir, by a cloud of witnesses.  The gaze of the sons of liberty, everywhere, is upon us, anxiously, intently, upon us.  They may see us fall in the struggle for our Constitution and government, but Heaven forbid that they should see us recreant.