_Fifth._ Whether the people of that settlement, or a majority of them, or any of them, have ever submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas or of the United States, by consent or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying tax, or serving on juries, or having process served upon them, or in any other way. _Sixth._ Whether the people of that settlement did or did not flee from the approach of the United States army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops, _before_ the blood was shed, as in the messages stated; and whether the first blood so shed was or was not shed within the inclosure of one of the people who had thus fled from it. _Seventh._ Whether our citizens whose blood was shed, as in his messages declared, were or were not at that time armed officers and soldiers, sent into that settlement by the military order of the President, through the Secretary of War. _Eighth._ Whether the military force of the United States was or was not so sent into that settlement after General Taylor had more than once intimated to the War Department that in his opinion no such movement was necessary to the defense or protection of Texas. It would have been impossible for the President to answer these questions, one by one, according to the evidence in his possession, without surrendering every position he had taken in his messages for the last two years. An answer was probably not expected; the resolutions were never acted upon by the House, the vote on the Ashmun proposition having sufficiently indicated the view which the majority held of the President's precipitate and unconstitutional proceeding. But they served as a text for the speech which Lincoln made in Committee of the Whole, which deserves the attentive reading of any one who imagines that there was anything accidental in the ascendency which he held for twenty years among the public men of Illinois. The winter was mostly devoted to speeches upon the same subject from men of eminence and experience, but it is within bounds to say there was not a speech made in the House, that year, superior to this in clearness of statement, severity of criticism combined with soberness of style, or, what is most surprising, finish and correctness. In its close, clear argument, its felicity of illustration, its restrained yet burning earnestness, it belongs to precisely the same class of addresses as those which he made a dozen years later. The ordinary Congressman can never conclude inside the limits assigned him; he must beg for unanimous consent for an extension of time to complete his sprawling peroration. But this masterly speech covered the whole ground of the controversy, and so intent was Lincoln on not exceeding his hour that he finished his task, to his own surprise, in forty-five minutes. It is an admirable discourse, and the oblivion which overtook it, along with the volumes of other speeches made at the same time,