The President thinks the great body of us Fremonters, being ardently attached to liberty, in the abstract, were duped by a few wicked and designing men.  There is a slight difference of opinion on this.  We think he, being ardently attached to the hope of a second term, in the concrete, was duped by men who had liberty every way.  He is the cat’s-paw.  By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further use.  As the fool said of King Lear, when his daughters had turned him out of doors, “He ’s a shelled peascod” ("That ’s a sheal’d peascod").

So far as the President charges us “with a desire to change the domestic institutions of existing States,” and of “doing everything in our power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral authority,” for the whole party on belief, and for myself on knowledge, I pronounce the charge an unmixed and unmitigated falsehood.

Our government rests in public opinion.  Whoever can change public opinion can change the government practically just so much.  Public opinion, on any subject, always has a “central idea,” from which all its minor thoughts radiate.  That “central idea” in our political public opinion at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, “the equality of men.”  And although it has always submitted patiently to whatever of inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady progress toward the practical equality of all men.  The late Presidential election was a struggle by one party to discard that central idea and to substitute for it the opposite idea that slavery is right in the abstract, the workings of which as a central idea may be the perpetuity of human slavery and its extension to all countries and colors.  Less than a year ago the Richmond Enquirer, an avowed advocate of slavery, regardless of color, in order to favor his views, invented the phrase “State equality,” and now the President, in his message, adopts the Enquirer’s catch-phrase, telling us the people “have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all of the States of the Union as States.”  The President flatters himself that the new central idea is completely inaugurated; and so indeed it is, so far as the mere fact of a Presidential election can inaugurate it.  To us it is left to know that the majority of the people have not yet declared for it, and to hope that they never will.

All of us who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand.  But in the late contest we were divided between Fremont and Fillmore.  Can we not come together for the future?  Let every one who really believes and is resolved that free society is not and shall not be a failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the last contest he has done only what he thought best—­let every such one have charity to