I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing’s proposal, and yet something ought to be done.  We must put up with what we have already, I suppose, and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand rests,—­no bad type of the great man’s state of mind after the nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a penal statue.  But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues?  I go back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment.  I had even gone so far as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our graven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects enumerated in the divine ordinance.  Perhaps a double-barrelled statute might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the monumental difficulty.  Let a law be passed that all speeches delivered more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all eulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel of the Deaf and Dumb asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds of the Institution for the Blind.  Let the penalty for infringement in the one case be to read the last President’s Message, and in the other to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual punishments.

Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should pass so self-denying an ordinance.  They might, perhaps, make all oratory but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed by a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be by an appetite for slate pencils. Vita brevis, lingua longa. I protest that among lawgivers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence.  The ancient Greeks also (though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions, especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the advantage of communication with America.  Now the Greeks had a Muse of Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more excellent Muse of Leaving-off.  The Spartans, I suspect, found her out and kept her selfishly to themselves.  She were indeed a goddess to be worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!

Endlessness is the order of the day.  I ask you to compare Plutarch’s lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts and zeroes.  Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity.  Yet the evils of print are as dust in the balance to those of speech.