Worse to bear--oh, far worse!--than the evil speaking of others is the conduct of some of her own children. It is hard to see the scholarship which has been drawn from her cisterns, and the riches accumulated under her hospitable shelter, now employed to weaken and discredit that cause which is above riches or scholarship. It is hard, while fellow-citizens in Kansas plead for deliverance from a cruel Usurpation, and while the whole country, including our own soil, is trodden down by a domineering and brutal Despotism, to behold sons of Massachusetts in sympathy, open or disguised, with the vulgar enemy, quickening everywhere the lash of the taskmaster, and helping forward the Satanic carnival, when Slavery shall be fastened not only upon prostrate Kansas, but upon all the Territories of the Republic,--when Cuba shall be torn from a friendly power by dishonest force,--and when the slave-trade itself, with all its crime, its woe, and its shame, shall be opened anew under the American flag. Alas, that any child of Massachusetts, in wickedness of heart, or in weakness of principle, or under the delusion of partisan prejudice, should join in these things! With such I have no word of controversy at this hour. But, leaving them now, in my weakness, I trust not to seem too severe, if I covet for the occasion something of the divine power “To bend the silver bow with tender skill, While, void of pain, the silent arrows kill.”[6] Gladly from these do I turn to another character, yet happily spared to Massachusetts, whose heart beats strong with the best blood of the Revolution, and with the best sentiments by which that blood was enriched. The only child of one of the authors of American Liberty, for many years the able and courageous Representative of Boston on the floor of Congress, where his speeches were the masterpieces of the time, distinguished throughout a long career by the grateful trust of his fellow-citizens, happy in all the possessions of a well-spent life, and surrounded by “honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,” with an old age which is second youth, JOSIAH QUINCY, still erect under the burden of eighty-four winters, puts himself at the head of our great battle,--and never before, in the ardor of youth, or the maturity of manhood, did he show himself so grandly conspicuous, and add so much to the heroic wealth of our history. His undaunted soul, lifted already to glimpses of another life, may shame the feebler spirits of a later generation. There is one other personage, at a distant period, who, with precisely the same burden of winters, asserted the same supremacy of powers. It is the celebrated Dandolo, Doge of Venice, at the age of eighty-four, of whom the historian Gibbon has said, in words strictly applicable to our own Quincy: “He shone, in the last period of human life, as one of the most illustrious characters of the times: under the weight of years he retained a sound understanding and a manly courage,