shut upon sorrowing mankind? Rather let it be that the gate should be
forever open, and an emblematic flag, hereafter as heretofore, wave a
welcome to all to come to the modern Abdella--fugitives from political
oppression.

Senator Davis dwelt at some length on the right of search question--on
the insulting claim which Great Britain made to a peace-right to visit
our ships. Under the pretence of stopping the slave trade--a trade
against which the United States was the first nation to raise its
voice--she had interrupted and destroyed a lucrative commerce we had
enjoyed in ivory and other products on the coast of Africa. The late
outrages in the Gulf found us, as a people, with domestic quarrels on
our hands; but if this power counted on existing divisions and on
making them wider, the result showed how great was her error. The
insult was resented by a united people; the Senate, as one man, leaped
up against British pretensions; while England, as suddenly,
astonished, withdrew her pretensions. The claim she so long preferred
is given up--entirely abandoned. The same spirit that resented insult
in the past will resent it in the future. I stand, said the Senator,
substantially on the deck of an American vessel; it is American soil;
the American flag floats over it; its right to course the ocean
pathway is perfect. When the blue firmament reflected its own color in
the sea, it was the unappropriated property of mankind; and it was
arrogant and idle for any nation to deny to the United States her full
enjoyment of this common property. It was for the full and undisturbed
enjoyment of this right that out fathers, when much less prepared for
war than we are now, engaged in the conflict of 1812; and for this
right we were ready to strike in 1858. Let a feign power, under any
pretence whatever, insult the American flag, and it will find that we
are not a divided people, but that a mighty arm will be raised to