loo on slavery, every man of them shall have a fair chance, and no privilege, and everybody may enact everything, if he can."

And now, in the name of all common sense, in the whole history of elective government, was a free people ever called on to commit power, the whole vast enginery, the whole thunder of the State, to such a ruler as this! Slavery, they do say, they will oppose, right and left; but what other one maxim of government they will adopt, state or national; what one law, on what one subject, they will pass; what one institution, or one policy of the fathers they will spare; what one sentiment they will inculcate; what one glory they will prize; what of all that government can cause or cure, they will cause or cure or try to we have no more to guide us than if they were an encampment of a race never seen before, poured by some populous and unknown North, from her frozen loins! How mad, how contemptible to deliver ourselves over to such a veiled enthusiast as this! Better the urn and the lot of Solon-better the fantastic chances of hereditary descent, a thousand fold.

Well, on their one single specialty of slavery, what are they going to do? And I say that we have not one particle more of evidence, what specific thing, or what thing in general they mean to do on slavery, than on anything else. I do say this, however, that those honest men, who, in the simplicity of their hearts, have sympathized with this new party in the hope of having the Missouri Compromise restored, have not one particle of assurance that they would do it if they could; or that if they could, they would rest there, or within half the globe of it. Loud they are in their reprobation of the repeal. So are we all! But is it a restoration they seek? No, nothing so little. When, a few days ago, a respectable Whig gentleman presented himself at one of their meetings, and being invited to speak, began by saying that they were all there to unite for the repeal of the repeal, they hissed him incontinently. Less discourteously in the manner of it, quite as unequivocally they have set forth in terms the most explicit, in the address of their convention, that the restoration of the Compromise of 1820 is not what they desire. What are they to do, then, if they win power? Either nothing at all which Whigs could not do, and would not do, if a wise and large statesmanship permit it; or they bring on a conflict which separates the States. Nothing

at all which we would not do, if our fidelity to the Constitution would allow us, or that which under the Constitution cannot be done. Nothing at all, or just what their agitation from 1835 to this hour, has accomplished, -rivet the iron chains of the slave, loose the golden bands of the Union. So much for the good it will do.

But now survey the evil it would do. We cannot, of course, foreknow exactly what it would do, if it could, nor how much, exactly, it could do, if it would. We cannot know, in other words, exactly where or when or how, if it attained the whole power that it seeks, it would bring on the final strife. But one thing we know, that they cannot, by possibility, go through the process of merely and completely organizing such a party but by elaborately and carefully training the men on this side of their line to "abhor" and "avoid" the men on the other. The basis of the organization is reciprocal sectional hate. This is the sentiment at bottom. This, and nothing else. To form and heighten this; to fortify and justify it; to show that it is moral and necessary and brave, the whole vast enginery of party tactics is to be put in request. If the ingenuity of hell were tasked for a device to alienate and rend asunder our immature and artificial nationality, it could devise nothing so effectual!

I take my stand here! I resist and deprecate the mere attempt to form the party. I don't expect to live to see it succeed in its grasp at power. I am sure I hope I shall not, but I see the attempt making. I think I see the dreadful influence of such an attempt. That influence I would expose. Woe! woe! to the sower of such seed as this! It may perish where it falls. The God of our fathers may withhold the early and latter rain and the dew, and the grain may die; but woe to the hand that dares to scatter it.

Painful it is to see some of whom a higher hope might have been cherished, on motives and with views I dare say satisfactory to themselves, giving aid and comfort to such a thing. In looking anxiously out of my own absolute retirement from every form of public life, to observe how the movers of this new party mean to urge it upon the people, what topics they mean to employ, what aims they mean to propose, and, above all, what tone and spirit they mean to breathe and spread, and

what influence to exert on the sectional passions or the national sentiments of our country- I have had occasion to read something of their spoken and written exhortations - this inaugu ration eloquence of sectionalism—and think I comprehend it. And what work do they make of it? Yes-what? With what impression of your country, your whole country — that is the true test of a party platform and a party appeal — do you rise from listening to the preachers of this new faith? What lesson of duty to all, and of the claims of all, and of love to all, has it taught you? Does not our America seem to lose her form, her color, her vesture, as you read? Does not the magic of the metamorphosis come on her?

Does it not seem as if one half of the map were blotted out or rolled up forever from your eye? Are you not looking with perplexity and pain, your spirits as in a dream all bound up, upon a different, another, and a smaller native land? Where do you find in this body of discourse one single recollection that North and South compose a common country, to which our most pious affections are due, and our whole service engaged? Where, beneath this logic and this rhetoric of sectionalism, do you feel one throb of a heart capacious of our whole America? The deep, full, burning tide of American feeling, so hard to counterfeit, so hard to chill, does it once gladden and glorify this inauguration oratory and these inauguration ceremonies? Is not the key-note of it all, that the slaveholders of the South are an aristocracy to be " abhorred " and "avoided;" that they are insidious and dangerous; that they are undermining our republic, and are at all hazards to be resisted? Do they not inaugurate the new party on the basis of reciprocal hate and reciprocal fear of section to section? Hear the sharp and stern logic of one of these orators: — Aristocracy, through all hazards is to be abhorred and avoided. But a privileged class are sure to become, nay, are an aristocracy already. The local Southern law, and the national Constitution, make the slaveholders a privileged class. They are, therefore, an aristocracy to be abhorred and avoided." Such is the piercing key-note of his speech. To this he sets

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his whole music of discord. To this he would set the whole music of the next presidential canvass. To this, the tens of thousands of the free States are to march. "Abhor" and "avoid" the aristocracy of the South! Organize to do it the better! They are insidious and dangerous. They are undermining republican liberty. March to defend it! Aye, march, were it over the burning marl, or by the light which the tossing wave of the lake casts pale and dreadful.

"I might show," the same orator proceeds, "that the Constitution is wrong in thus conceding to a privileged class. I might show, a priori, that such a class would be dangerous. I choose rather to teach you so to read the history of America, that you shall find its one great lesson will be hatred and dread of the aristocracy of the South, for its conduct even more than for its privileges." And so he unrolls the map, and opens the record. He traces the miraculous story; he traces the miraculous growth from the birthday of the Constitution, and from the straitened margin of the old thirteen States, through all the series of expansion, the acquisition of Louisiana, and the adoption of that State into the Union; the successive adoption, also, of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Missouri; the annexation of Florida and Texas, and California, a growth in fifty years, from a narrow heritage between the Atlantic and Alleghany, and the spring-heads of the Connecticut and the mouth of the St. Mary's in Georgia, to the dimensions of Roman, of Russian, of Asiatic boundlessnessthis he traces across the Alleghanies, across the imperial valley and the Father of Rivers, through the opened portals of the Rocky Mountains to the shores of the great tranquil sea aye, and beyond these shores to richer dominion over the commerce of the East, to which it opens a new and nearer way— this majestic series, our glory, our shame, he runs over; and the one single lesson he gathers and preaches from it is, that the aristocracy of the South is as insidious and dangerous and undermining in practice as it is threatening a priori; that we should" abhor " and "avoid" it, for what it has done, as well as for what the Constitution and the laws secure to it. This is the lesson of the History of America. As he studies the map and reads the history, so is the new party to do it; so are the fathers, and so are the children of the free States all to read

it; it is to teach them all one dull lesson, and to sound in their ears one single, dreary, and monotonous warning. The annexation of Louisiana, the master-work of Jefferson, unless you say the Declaration of Independence is his master-work; the annexation of Florida, by treaty, for which John Quincy Adams acquired so just a fame, and which stipulates for the incorporation of its inhabitants into the Union; the victories of Palo Alto, Monterey, Buena Vista, and Contreras, which crowned the arms of America with a lustre imperishable, although they could not vindicate to justice and history, the administration or the politics which brought on the war, nor the Free Soilers of New York, whose tactics caused the election of that administration; this expansion, so stupendous - this motion, silent and resistless, of all the currents of national being towards the setting sun-like that of our astronomical system itself, towards the distant constellation; this all is to kindle no emotion, to inspire no duty, to inculcate no truth, but to "abhor" and "avoid" the aristocracy, whose rapacious use or insidious fabrication of opportunity, so strikingly illustrates the folly of the Constitution.

Oh! how soothing and elevating to turn from this to the meridian brightness, the descending orb, the whole clear day, of our immortal Webster! How sweet, how instructive to hang again on the lips now mute, still speaking, whose eloquence, whose wisdom, were all given ever to his whole America! How grand to feel again the beat of the great heart which could enfold us all! He saw, too, and he deplored the spread of slavery. He marked, and he resisted the frenzy of the politics by which the then administration gave it so vast an impulse by annexing Texas and making war with Mexico. He had surveyed-no man had so deeply done itthe growth of his country from the rock of Plymouth and the peninsula of Jameston to the western sea. But did he think it just to trace it all to the aggressive spirit of the aristocracy who hold slaves? Could his balanced and gigantic intelligence and his genuine patriotism have been brought to believe and to teach that the single desire to find a new field for slavery to till, has in fifty years transformed a strip of sea coast into a national domain larger than Europe?

Is nothing to be ascribed to the necessities of national situ