with that of the Southern slaves.  The Northern politicians struck hands with the Southern slaveholders, and the great majority of the most enlightened citizens of the Northern States, absorbed in the pursuit of wealth and the extension and consolidation of their admirable and wonderful national prosperity, abandoned the government of their noble country and the preservation of its nobler institutions to the slaveholding aristocracy of the South—­to a mob of politicians by trade, the vilest and most venal class of men that ever disgraced and endangered a country—­to foreign emigrants, whose brutish ignorance did not prevent the Democratic party from seizing upon them as voters, and bestowing on the Irish and German boors just landed on their shores the same political privileges as those possessed and intelligently exercised by the farmers and mechanics of New England, the most enlightened men of their class to be found in the world.

The gradual encroachment of the Southern politicians upon the liberties of the North, by their unrelaxing influence in Congress and over successive cabinets and presidents, was not without its effect in stimulating some resistance on the part of Northern statesmen of sufficient intelligence to perceive the inevitable results towards which this preponderance in the national counsels was steadily tending; and I need not remind you of the rapidity and force with which General Jackson quelled an incipient rebellion in South Carolina, when Mr. Calhoun made the tariff question the pretext for a threatened secession in 1832, of the life-long opposition to Southern pretensions by John Quincy Adams, of the endeavour of Mr. Clay to stem the growing evil by the conditions of the Missouri compromise, and all the occasional attempts of individuals of more conscientious convictions than their fellow-citizens on the subject of the sin of slavery, from Dr. Channing’s eloquent protest on the annexation of Texas, to Mr. Charles Sumner’s philippic against Mr. Brooks of South Carolina.

The disorganisation of the Democratic party, after a cohesion of so many years, at length changed the aspect of affairs; and the North appeared to be about to arouse itself from its apathetic consent to Southern domination.  The Republican party, headed by Colonel Fremont, who was known to be an anti-slavery man, nearly carried the presidential election six years ago, and then every preparation had been made in the South for the process of secession, which was only averted by the election of Mr. Buchanan, a pro-slavery Southern sympathiser, though born in Pennsylvania.  Under his presidency, the Southern statesmen, resuming their attitude of apparent friendliness with the North, kept in abeyance, maturing and perfecting by every treasonable practice, for which their preponderating share in the cabinet afforded them fatal facilities, the plan of the violent disruption of the Union, upon which they had determined whenever the Republican