exercised the right of a freeman and discharged the duty of a Southern citizen.  Was it for this cause that he had been signalized as a slavery propagandists?  He admitted in all its length and breadth the right of the people of Maine to decide the question for themselves; he held that it would be an indecent interference, on the part of a citizen of another State, if he should arraign the propriety of the judgment they had rendered, and that there was no rightful power in the federal government or in all the States combined, to set aside the decision which the community had made in relation to their domestic institutions.  Should any attempt be made thus to disturb their sovereign right, he would pledge himself in advance, as a State-rights man, with his head, his heart and his hand, if need be, to aid them in the defence of this right of community independence, which the Union was formed to protect, and which it was the duty of every American citizen to preserve and to guard as the peculiar and prominent feature of our government.

Why, then, this accusation?  Do they fear to allow Southern men to converse with their philosophers, and seek thus to silence or exclude them?  He trusted others would contemn them as he did, and that many of our brethren of the South would, like himself, learn by sojourn here, to appreciate the true men of Maine, and to know how little are the political abolitionists and the abolition papers the exponents of the character and the purposes of the Democracy of this State.

And now having brushed away the cob-webs which lay in his path, he would proceed to the consideration of subjects worthy of the audience he had the honor to address.

Democrats, patriots, by whatever political name any of you may be known, you have a sacred duty to perform to your ancestry and to posterity.  The time is at hand when for good or for evil, the questions which have agitated the public mind are to be solved.  Is it true as asserted by northern agitators that there is such contrariety between the North and the South that they cannot remain united!  Or rather, is it not true as our fathers deemed it, that diversity in the character of the population, in the products and in the institutions of the several States formed a reason for their union and tended to secure to their posterity the liberty which was the common object of their love, and by cultivating untrammeled intercourse and free trade between the States, to duplicate the comforts of all?

There was a time when the test of patriotism was the readiness to sever the bond which bound the colonies to the mother country.  Recently our people with joyous acclamation have welcomed the connection of the United States with Great Britain, by the Atlantic cable.  The one is not inconsistent with the other.  When the home government violated the charters of the colonies, and assumed to control the private interests of individuals, the love of political liberty, the