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.
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