your public duties; you cannot obscure yourselves, nor bury your talent.  In the common welfare, in the common prosperity, in the common glory of Americans, you have a stake of value not to be calculated.  You have an interest in the preservation of the Union, of the Constitution, and of the true principles of the government, which no man can estimate.  You act for yourselves, and for the generations that are to come after you; and those who ages hence shall bear your names, and partake your blood, will feel, in their political and social condition, the consequences of the manner in which you discharge your political duties.

Having fulfilled, then, on your part and on mine, though feebly and imperfectly on mine, the offices of kindness and mutual regard required by this occasion, shall we not use it to a higher and nobler purpose?  Shall we not, by this friendly meeting, refresh our patriotism, rekindle our love of constitutional liberty, and strengthen our resolutions of public duty?  Shall we not, in all honesty and sincerity, with pure and disinterested love of country, as Americans, looking back to the renown of our ancestors, and looking forward to the interests of our posterity, here, to-night, pledge our mutual faith to hold on to the last to our professed principles, to the doctrines of true liberty, and to the Constitution of the country, let who will prove true, or who will prove recreant?  Whigs of New York!  I meet you in advance, and give you my pledge for my own performance of these duties, without qualification and without reserve.  Whether in public life or in private life, in the Capitol or at home, I mean never to desert them.  I mean never to forget that I have a country, to which I am bound by a thousand ties; and the stone which is to lie on the ground that shall cover me, shall not bear the name of a son ungrateful to his native land.

[Footnote 1:  President Jackson.]

[Footnote 2:  On the 10th of June following the delivery of this speech, all the banks in the city of New York, by common consent, suspended the payment of their notes in specie.  On the next day, the same step was taken by the banks of Boston and the vicinity, and the example was followed by all the banks south of New York, as they received intelligence of the suspension of specie payments in that city.  On the 15th of June, (just three months from the day this speech was delivered,) President Van Buren issued his proclamation calling an extra session of Congress for the first Monday of September.]

SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.

REMARKS MADE IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, ON THE 10TH OF JANUARY, 1838, UPON A RESOLUTION MOVED BY MR. CLAY AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR THE RESOLUTION OFFERED BY MR. CALHOUN ON THE SUBJECT OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.

[On the 27th of December, 1837, a series of resolutions was moved in the Senate by Mr. Calhoun, on the subject of slavery.  The fifth of the series was expressed in the following terms:—­