the party platform which they proposed, not merely the abstract rightfulness and lawfulness of slavery, but the duty of Congress itself to make any provision that might be necessary to protect it in the Territories.  To this the Northern majority of the delegates could not consent; they carried an amendment declaring merely that they would abide by any decision of the Supreme Court as to slavery.  Thereupon the delegates, not indeed of the whole South but of all the cotton-growing States except Georgia, withdrew from the Convention.  The remaining delegates were, under the rules of the Convention, too few to select a candidate for the Presidency, and the Convention adjourned, to re-assemble at Baltimore in June.  Eventually, after attempts at reunion and further dissensions, two separate Democratic Conventions at Baltimore, a Northern and a Southern, nominated, as their respective candidates, Stephen Douglas, the obvious choice with whom, if the Southerners had cared to temporise further, a united Democratic party could have swept the polls, and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a gentleman not otherwise known than as the standard bearer on this great occasion of the undisguised and unmitigated claims of the slave owners.

Thus it was that the American Democratic party forfeited power for twenty-four years, divided between the consistent maintenance of a paradox and the adroit maintenance of inconsistency.  Another party in this election demands a moment’s notice.  A Convention of delegates, claiming to represent the old Whigs, met also at Baltimore and declared merely that it stood for “the Constitution of the country, the union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws.”  They nominated for the Presidency John Bell of Tennessee, and for the Vice-Presidency Edward Everett.  This latter gentleman was afterwards chosen as the orator of the day at the ceremony on the battlefield of Gettysburg when Lincoln’s most famous speech was spoken.  He was a travelled man and a scholar; he was Secretary of State for a little while under Fillmore, and dealt honestly and firmly with the then troublous question of Cuba.  His orations deserve to be looked at, for they are favourable examples of the eloquence which American taste applauded, and as such they help to show how original Lincoln was in the simpler beauty of his own simpler diction.  In justice to the Whigs, let it be noted that they declared for the maintenance of the Union, committing themselves with decision on the question of the morrow; but it was a singular platform that resolutely and totally ignored the only issue of the day.  Few politicians can really afford to despise either this conspicuously foolish attempt to overcome a difficulty by shutting one’s eyes to it, or the more plausible proposal of the Northern Democrats to continue temporising with a movement for slavery in which they were neither bold enough nor corrupted enough to join.  The consequences, now known to us, of a determined stand