We are on the eve of a highly important Presidential election.  In two or three months the people of this country will be called upon to elect an executive chief magistrate of the United States; and all see, and all feel, that great interests of the country are to be affected, for good or evil, by the results of that election.  Of the interesting subjects over which the person who shall be elected must necessarily exercise more or less control, there are especially three, vitally connected, in my judgment, with the honor and happiness of the country.  In the first place, the honor and happiness of the country imperatively require that there shall be a chief magistrate elected who shall not plunge us into further wars of ambition and conquest.  In the second place, in my judgment, the interests of the country and the feeling of a vast majority of the people require that a President of these United States should be elected, who will neither use official influence to promote, nor feel any desire in his heart to promote, the further extension of slavery in this community, or its further influence in the public councils.  In the third place, if I have any just estimate, if an experience not now a short one in public affairs has enabled me to know any thing of what the public interest demands, the state of the country requires an essential reform in the system of revenue and finance such as shall restore the prosperity, by prompting the industry and fostering the labor of the country, in its various branches.  There are other things important, but I will not allude to them.  These three I hold to be essential.

There are three candidates presented to the choice of the American people.  General Taylor is the Whig candidate, standing upon the nomination of the Whig Convention; General Cass is the candidate of the opposing and now dominant party in the country; and a third candidate is presented in the person of Mr. Van Buren, by a convention of citizens assembled at Buffalo, whose object, or whose main object, as it appears to me, is contained in one of those considerations which I have mentioned, and that is, the prevention of the further increase of slavery;—­an object in which you and I, Gentlemen, so far as that goes, entirely concur with them, I am sure.

Most of us who are here to-day are Whigs, National Whigs, Massachusetts Whigs, Old Colony Whigs, and Marshfield Whigs, and if the Whig nomination made at Philadelphia were entirely satisfactory to the people of Massachusetts and to us, our path of duty would be plain.  But the nomination of a candidate for the Presidency made by the Whig Convention at Philadelphia is not satisfactory to the Whigs of Massachusetts.  That is certain, and it would be idle to attempt to conceal the fact.  It is more just and more patriotic, it is more manly and practical, to take facts as they are, and things as they are, and to deduce our own conviction of duty from what exists before us.  However respectable and distinguished in the line