to have left a very unfortunate, it may prove some day a very dangerous gap. It is possible that a construction may close that gap, but none has closed it yet. It declares, in the event of the death, resignation, or disability of the President and Vice-President happening after entrance into office, Congress may declare what officer shall discharge the duties of President till removal of the disability, or an election.

Congress has provided that the President of the Senate becomes, for the time being, the President, and in his absence the Speaker of the House of Representatives becomes the President. But there seems to be no provision for a failure to elect both President and Vice-President. The Constitution-and the law which was intended to provide for the vacancy of the presidency follows the language of the Constitution-does not authorize Congress to provide for that case. There seems to be no provision any where for the case of the presidential office being absolutely vacant at the commencement of a term-the case of an absolute failure to elect either a President or Vice-President. Whether, in that contingency, the President pro tempore of the Senate would assume to exercise the powers of President of the United States, or whether it would be treated by the Senate (the only legal body existing on the 4th of March) as vacant, no mind can now determine; and legal arguments may possibly be adduced on both sides. We may very well rest assured that the majority of the Senate will settle it in whichever way will best suit their interests. It rests with them; it rests with no one else; you and I have no power over it. When the matter goes to the Senate, if they see fit to make no election, we are pushed upon this dangerous alternative, a vacant or a disputed presidency.

If the people wish to run afoul of these difficulties, well and good. They were not originally intended to be made by bargaining politicians. The provision of the Constitution is for a case of accident or failure, after a bona fide effort of the people to elect, not for a conspiracy of a few politicians in a corner, in one State of the United States, to adjourn their political difficulties and their personal hatreds into the halls of Congress. I therefore enter my protest solemnly against any such style of electioneering. Others may engage in it. In the State of New York it is none of my business. I am not called upon to vote for Mr. Douglas or Mr. Breckinridge, and I have nothing more to say about it, except

that it is with them; but it is not our style, here in Maryland, of standing to our principles, and conducting our canvass, and doing our best to elect our own candidates. (Great applause.)

What I have said, gentlemen, covers the exposition I desired to make to you this evening. I am aware that there is a great cry about sectionalism, and a great scramble for the vacant title of national. I wish, gentlemen, that there were a national candidate for the presidency. I wish there were a really national partynot merely one which has principles that will suit the whole land, but one whose power extended unbroken from North to South, as did the Whig party in its days of glory. (Applause.) I trust that, ere I die, I shall again see the lines of these divisions obliterated. But when people talk about sectionalism, and one party casts upon another the imputation of being sectional, I am free, for my part, to say that they are all sectional, in any proper sense. Mr. Douglas-is he a national candidate? He is, it would seem, the regular nominee of the Democratic party; but the Democratic party is not the nation; for the regular Democratic party is as much a whole party as a man is whole when cloven by a sabre from head to heels. Where is his strength? In the North! He has a few supporters in the South, it is true. Mr. Breckinridge-is he a national candidate? He has great strength in the South. Whether it will be as powerful there as he supposes, remains to be seen. Circumstances now indicate that somebody else will have a say in political matters in the South besides the Democrats hereafter; but his strength is in the South. In the North, it is the shrunk shank of a decrepit old man. Mr. Lincoln's strength is undoubtedly in the North; he has supporters in some of the border slave States. Is not Mr. Bell's strength in the South, although he has supporters sporadically over the whole North?

Gentlemen, it is the misery of our condition that, turn wherever we may, we find that this infernal strife has split every body into a thousand pieces, and no man can tell where to find the piece that belongs to him. (Laughter.) Nay, more, gentlemen, if I may be allowed to quote words which I heard in a sacred place, from a very eloquent gentleman [Rev. Mr. Stockton], whom doubtless many of you have heard in the pulpit here in Baltimore, I say of the condition of the people of this country and its party, especially of that great opposition party to the Democrats which

now is rent into fragments and struggling together, as he said of the Christian religion-that the vase in which the precious spirit. of Christianity was held had been broken by sectarian strife into so many pieces, that not only was its beauty marred and gone, and its precious essence poured out and lost, but that he who, on a mission of love, attempted to collect its fragments and put them together, was in danger, in the attempt to reconstruct the vase, of cutting his fingers. It is the danger-it is the sickness of the times; and, instead of attemptng to cure it, men who ought to know better are acting so as to aggravate it. The patient is in a fever, and they wrap him up in blankets. His blood is boiling, and they dose him with strong drinks and fire-water, and call that curing!

Gentlemen, there is a degree of timidity that is, of all things in my judgment, the most dangerous in political life. Half the blood that was shed in the French Revolution was shed from sheer terror. It was not courage, it was not ferocity, it was sheer terror, that made them cut their neighbors' throats to-day, lest those neighbors should cut theirs to-morrow. That is the state of mind in which the conduct of too many in this canvass tends to throw the people of the United States. I lift my voice against it.

Whether these sentiments are popular here or not is to me a matter of secondary moment. I have a duty to perform to myself as well as to you. I agree with that most honorable and distinguished gentleman, my friend, Mr. Millson, of Norfolk, who, in his late letter, said, if I am not mistaken, that he thought it his duty to warn his constituents, as well when there was danger of invasion of their rights as when, in point of fact, there was none. And, acting upon that high principle, I say here now, this night, that peace is within our grasp, if we only see fit to hold fast to it. If we choose to encourage war, we may encourage it too far.

Gentlemen, there has been a sort of hesitation on the part of the opponents of the Democratic party to meet them directly in the eye, to make formally the issue with them as to the correctness and safety of their principles and policy, and their mode of conducting the government. And the reason the opposition have failed in other parts of the South is, in my judgment, because they have not met the Democrats in that way; the reason that we have not failed in Maryland is because we have not been afraid to strike a blow that would overthrow our enemy. (Applause.) It only

requires that there should be energy and union, and the day is

ours.

Gibbon tells us that, as Christianity progressed and spread as far as Egypt, the idols roused the ire of the faithful. There was at Alexandria an image of Serapis, which superstitious faith in ancient prophecies protected from their iconoclastic rage.

"It was confidently affirmed that, if any impious hand should dare to violate the majesty of the god, the heavens and the earth would instantly return to their original. chaos. An intrepid soldier, animated by zeal, and armed with a mighty battle-axe, ascended the ladder; and even the Christian multitude expected with some anxiety the event of the combat. He aimed a vigorous stroke against the cheek of Serapis; the cheek fell to the ground; the thunder was still silent, and both the heavens and the earth continued to preserve their accustomed order and tranquillity. The victorious soldier repeated his blows; the huge idol was overthrown and broken in pieces, and the limbs of Serapis were ignominiously dragged through the streets of Alexandria. His mangled carcass was burnt in the amphitheatre, amid the shouts of the populace; and many persons attribute their conversion to this discovery of the impotence of their tutelar deity."

Gentlemen, smite fearlessly the Democratic party! The Union will survive its fragments. (Enthusiastic applause.)

ADDRESS TO THE VOTERS OF THE FOURTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT.

THE election in November, 1860, resulted in the choice of Mr. Lincoln, and the success of the Republican party. The leaders in the South now set about the work of making good the threats which had thus proved useless for again driving the North and West to submission. Unwilling to afford a breathing space or moment for reflection to the people, which they knew must prevent the consummation of such suicidal folly, they at once, the result of the election being ascertained, proceeded to carry out the conspiracy. The first cry was raised in Charleston, and the Governor of South Carolina at once recommended to the Legislature that steps should be taken for the assembling of a "Sovereign Convention." Similar proceedings were had in the Gulf States, and every where throughout the South the emissaries of sedition, secession, and disunion were traveling to and fro to finish the work they had undertaken. The Secretary of War of the United States (Floyd) had joined the conspiracy, and had accumulated large quantities of arms and munitions of war at the arsenals, forts, and military posts belonging to the United States in the Southern States, and had, at the same time, in pursuance of the wishes of the Southern conspirators, removed all the larger garrisons from those posts, and sent them to the Northwest, and to other remote and not easily accessible points.

The militia in the Southern States were called out, were armed, uniformed, and drilled. Their cities and chief towns were filled with volunteers and armed men, called out "to defend the State from invasion," and "to drive back the Abolition and Black Republican hordes.”

The people of the Northern and Western States could not at first be brought to believe that the attempt at disunion would really be made. They had heard, on many previous occasions, the same threats by South Carolina, which had failed either before the resolution of Andrew Jackson or the good sense of the Southern people. And now they saw no more cause for alarm in the South than before; they readily, therefore, supposed the tumult would be quieted by the firmness of the federal government and on appeal to the Southern popular vote. They were ignorant of the extent, of the violence, of the intimidation of the conspiracy, of the numbers of the conspirators, of their positions in the cabinet, and in the highest offices of the government. To this state of ignorance rapidly succeeded