coax a faithful but obnoxious instrument out of the way, to avoid the scandal of a public dismissal, and the greater scandal of a confession of blunders worse than crimes, and weakness worse than wickedness.

If there were no such men within the party, it is unfit to guide the destinies of the country; and if there were, then are they thrice unworthy to hold a power they have so grossly abused. Sir, that scene in the executive mansion-the proconsul of the President narrating that he let the life-blood of the province he ruled run unavenged and unstanched, the very flowers of her franchises be trampled down at the sacred ballot-box, marauders from either pole run a muck over her peaceful population, himself buried to the eyes and ears in private speculations in public lands over which he ruled of questionable legality and of unquestionable evil example, and deaf to the cry of helpless agony that rang through his domain, content to leave his people to their enemies, if the protector and the President could agree on the color to be put on the scandal and adjust the division of the responsibility, confessing these things to the President of the republic, and that President driving a bargain for a foreign mission instead of instant and ignominious expulsion from office, and the negotiation failing, dismissing him gently for illegal speculation, silent as the tomb to the civil war that he allowed to rage, the outraged law he failed to avenge, the rights of suffrage violated with impunity, and the yoke of a legislation born in violence and fraud by his judgment fastened on the necks of American freementhese things, established by a vast mass of resistless testimony, form a new and melancholy chapter in the history of the republic.

Sir, the party whose policy, however well intended, has given occasion to stain the American name with civil blood by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, is not likely to stand well with the men of the North, whose brethren have been the sufferers. Their denial of the outrages, their extenuations, their apologies, day after day, in this House, till the stupendous mass of the committee's evidence overwhelmed them, and their cavils at the evidence to my judgment unimpeached, and, if so, of crushing weight scarcely tends to improve the odor of the Democratic party in the Northern nostrils. That is my opinion of the result of the Kansas investigation: I dare not impute perjury to men by the hundred; the concurrence of so many is itself conclusive

against the hypothesis of fabrication; and I must be pardoned if my legal habits will not allow me to weigh partisan denials against testimony sworn in the face of cross-examination. I make no plea for some strained or one-sided inferences which my friend from Ohio has drawn from that evidence. I tender no apology for the one-sided results drawn by my friend from Missouri. I am here, sir, for no party. I am speaking this day for the Constitution and the Union; I am pleading for the great rights of American citizens; I am pleading for the honor and integrity of the American government and the American name. I will set down no word in malice that would tinge the honor of the country, or hide one dark trait which the people of the country ought to know. The reason that the North is opposed to the Democratic party is that they have done these things.

Now, sir, perhaps we begin to see why the Northern people will not support Mr. Buchanan. Why will they not support him? Why will not the Conservative vote be given for him?for there is a Conservative majority. They will not vote for the Democratic party, or for the Democratic nominee, because they have been guilty of these things. They will not vote for them because they have never repented in sackcloth and ashes. They will not vote for them because they have denied the wrongs before the proof, and defended them after the proof. They will not vote for them because they have reiterated the insult. They will not vote for them because they have blazoned on their banner the very words of the ambiguous oracle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the very cause and declaration of war, now no longer deluding any one, but plainly, and in bloody letters, interpreted on the fields of Kansas.

These are reasons they think sufficient, and they are likely to continue to think them sufficient. If Mr. Fillmore were in that position they would not vote for him. Ay, sir, even a conservative Northern man, tempted by a spirit of revenge and retaliation, would have to argue with himself a long time before he could bring himself down to vote for this man, who has outraged all the feelings with which these men have been brought up. The best and most conservative of them-thousands of degrees from abolitionism - men who are supporting the Constitution and the Union-men who are willing to support and defend the institution of slavery-men like those of Boston, who execute the Fugi

tive Slave Law, marched down the streets of that city with loaded arms to shoot down their own citizens, that you, men of the South, might be protected-these are the men you have driven from you. Where will they go if Mr. Fillmore were not offered to them as the symbol of peace?

Sir, I put it to my honorable friends to apply to them the arguments they hold valid at the South. The Northern men are of like passions with us, moved by insult, not above revenge, and not given to prefer, in a sectional contest, the candidate of their opponents. My Democratic friends from every hustings in the South exhort the people to vote for Mr. Buchanan because he is the Southern candidate-because he is for the Kansas-Nebraska Act -because he is against compromise in a Southern sense-because he is the strongest man opposed to the Northern sectional candidate and by this sort of argument they admit that the sectional candidate at the North represents the same class of men at the North that they represent at the South-men who are no more unreasonable in a Northern than they in a Southern sense. As they appeal to the South, so do the men who support Mr. Fremont appeal to the North. Gentlemen of the Democratic party, judge ye how far they are entitled to weight. Are they conclusive? Do they compel me to yield my political preferences? Is it right that I shall go for Mr. Buchanan? Am I bound to bow the knee to him? Is it so desperate a case that I must stomach the slurs and imputations which were hurled on me and the American party during two or three months of this session? Shall I, for these considerations of a merely sectional character, because he is, as you say, the candidate of my section, abandon those who stood by us? I pray you to recall to your memories, and weigh well the obloquy cast on the American party. We were, you say, an unconstitutional party-yea, the very enemies of the Constitution. We were opposed to civil and religious liberty; we were for depriving men of equal rights; we were for driving the honest foreigners from our shores; we were midnight assassins, stained with the blood and dirt of riotous mobs; we had taken unconstitutional oaths not to obey the Constitution; we could not be touched in the speaker's contest; no compromise could be made with us; no exchange of candidates could be thought of for a moment. The honorable gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fuller), who better accords with their notions on slavery, in theory and in

practice, than the honorable member from Illinois, so long their candidate, could not be touched. The very meeting in Convention-the very meeting in caucus-ay, sir, the very meeting for open consultation, was scorned, and flung back in our faces. They could not touch such political lepers. A plurality rule was an alternative they preferred, knowing the consequences of the vote would be to place the present speaker in the chair.

Such was their conduct to us-so conciliatory, so amiable, so loving, so winning; yet, in the face of this rough wooing, they urge uș, because of our connection with the South, to abandon Mr. Fillmore, the choice of our hearts, for Mr. Buchanan, because Mr. Buchanan is the safe and strong man for the South, the representative of Southern interests. So intensely did they hate us-so much more did they hate us than the gentleman from Massachusetts (the speaker); yet so paramount do they regard the allegiance to the sectional candidate that they ask us to sacrifice our personal preferences, our political connections, our outraged dignity, for their triumph.

Be it so. Is that the intensity of their sectional devotion? I ask them to apply the argument north of Mason and Dixon's line, and tell me who, if he is not utterly abandoned and degraded, can, under these circumstances, vote for that candidate who holds the position their candidate holds at the South, and toward the South. I make here no argument of my own. I take honorable gentlemen upon their principles. I commend to their lips the chalice. they mixed and poisoned for mine, and I dare them to the task. I know that my friends, in rashness and in hot party strife, have done many things to endanger the Constitution. I do not believe they wish to elect Fremont; but, sir, if they had been bent directly on that purpose, no man could find out any manner which would more directly and more inevitably accomplish that result than that which has been pursued.

I wish to free it from all collateral issues, and put this one great argument before the country, so that there shall be an end; to get rid of Mr. Fillmore by this appeal to Southern prejudices, I wish to deal with that and nothing else to-night. I say, sir, if Mr. Fillmore be not supported by the South, the whole North, and every state of it, must and will, conservative men and madmen, vote for Mr. Fremont, by the very same reason that Southern Democrats urge to induce Southern gentlemen to abandon

Mr. Fillmore for Mr. Buchanan. There needs but these words to accomplish it: "Fillmore is deserted by the South he saved." That one line would be a quietus undoubtedly of this contest. Democrats must accept that result of their own reasoning. They claim every Southerner in the name of sectional interest. The Republicans will claim every Northern man in the name of Northern interests. If he must obey, they must obey. Is the North, will the Democrats admit, less excitable, less hostile than themselves? If not, the sectional feeling must press them at least equally. Will they be likely to listen more readily to reasons for Mr. Buchanan than Southern men to reasons for Mr. Fremont? Or will not both be more accessible to arguments for Mr. Fillmore than either? Do they suppose the Northern laborer to be less interested than the Southern planter in the question of free and slave labor? or is he more cool and unprejudiced, when his livelihood and personal dignity are involved, than the Southern planter, whose property only is affected?

The argument, therefore, must be abandoned, or it must be admitted as unquestionably true that the logical result is to drive the whole North, not into the arms of Mr. Buchanan, but into the arms of Mr. Fremont.

The Democratic party at the North has melted away into the Fremont party. They form its strength. They have done so because they were specially grieved by the use made of their representatives in the Kansas-Bill conflict. They had always been what in other people the Southern Democrats called Free Soil. That shone out in the remarks of the honorable gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Leiter), whose series of resolutions for fifteen years. spoke the language-beginning in the Democratic Conventions and ending in the Republican Conventions-with a unity of sentiment and language defying the detection of the point where the Democrat shaded off into the Republican. It is for this reason that this blow has been so fatal to the Democratic party of the North-that the hatred of the North is so deadly against it, and yet is confined to it, and yet so sagaciously under control, so much of method in their madness, that they will not allow a chance to Mr. Buchanan of the election by pluralities, but will defeat that by any combination.

This view should determine the South to disentangle its cause from the fragments of the broken, powerless, and obnoxious Dem