our self-governing system is a figment which its contrivers laugh over among themselves.  Do the citizens of Harrisburg or of Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the strict legality of an executive act meant in good faith for their protection against the invader?  We are all citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour of their peril, and with the enemy at work in our own harbors, we begin to understand the difference between a good and bad citizen; the man that helps and the man that hinders; the man who, while the pirate is in sight, complains that our anchor is dragging in his mud, and the man who violates the proprieties, like our brave Portland brothers, when they jumped on board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable, and bore down on the corsair, with a habeas corpus act that lodged twenty buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in the whirlpool of national destruction.  If our borders are invaded, it is only as the spur that is driven into the courser’s flank to rouse his slumbering mettle.  If our property is taxed, it is only to teach us that liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for.  We are pouring out the most generous blood of our youth and manhood; alas! this is always the price that must be paid for the redemption of a people.  What have we to complain of, whose granaries are choking with plenty, whose streets are gay with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose industry is abundant enough to reap all its overflowing harvest, yet sure of employment and of its just reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is an inexhaustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores of heat and power, imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all the inhabitants and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered ages, whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over beds of golden sand,—­what have we to complain of?

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do and bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne over and over again for their form of government?  Could England, in her wars with Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must we faint under the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.?  Was she content to negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and that paid in depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin with our national stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par, and the “five-twenty” war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount of nearly two hundred millions, without any check to the flow of the current pressing inwards against the doors of the Treasury?  Except in those portions of the country which are the immediate seat of war, or liable to be made so, and which, having the greatest interest not to become the border states of hostile nations, can best afford to suffer now, the state of