is without influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn, and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms.  Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune?  Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people?  Are we of the North better off as provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain?  Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it?

We of the Free States are confessedly without our fair share of influence in the administration of national affairs.  Its foreign and domestic policy are both directed by principles often hostile to our interests, sometimes abhorrent to our sense of right and honor.  Under loud professions of Democracy, the powers of the central government and of the Executive have increased till they have scarcely a match among the despotisms of Europe, and more than justify the prophetic fears of practical statesmen like Samuel Adams and foresighted politicians like Jefferson.  Unquestionably superior in numbers, and claiming an equal preeminence in wealth, intelligence, and civilization, we have steadily lost in political power and in the consideration which springs from it.  Is the preponderance of the South due to any natural superiority of an Aristocracy over a Democracy? to any mental inferiority, to lack of courage, of political ability, of continuity of purpose, on our own part?  We should be slow to find the cause in reasons like these; but we do find it in that moral disintegration, the necessary result of that falsehood to our own sense of right forced upon us by the slave-system, and which, beginning with our public men, has gradually spread to the Press, the Pulpit, nay, worse than all, the Home, till it is hard to find a private conscience that is not tainted with the contagious mange.

For what have we not seen within the last few years?  We have seen the nomination to office made dependent, not on the candidate’s being large enough to fill, but small enough to take it.  Holding the purity of elections as a first article of our creed, we have seen one-third of the population of a Territory control the other two-thirds by false or illegal votes; hereditary foes of a standing army, we have seen four thousand troops stationed in Kansas to make forged ballots good by real bullets; lovers of fair play, we have seen a cowardly rabble from the Slave States protected by Federal bayonets while they committed robbery, arson, and Sepoy atrocities against women, and the Democratic party forced to swallow this nauseous mixture of force, fraud, and Executive usurpation,