No greater calamity can befal a nation than the death of those men who represent in their persons the dignity and virtue of the people. In Republics especially, the decease of great and worthy citizens, able to sustain the responsibilities of high office, is to be esteemed among the greatest of calamities. The death of President Taylor has cast a gloom over the nation: It has abated confidence: It has cast down the hopes of many: It has dimished security. The favorite of the people, to whom all eyes were turned, in whom all hopes were concentrated for the guidance of public affairs, for the preservation of the Union, and the maintenance of the constitution, is taken suddenly away; and for a moment, following upon the shock, there is a feeling of uncertainty and confusion. No man can estimate the consequences of so sudden a blow. The venerable character of the President, his popularity, the respect and affection with which he was regarded by the masses of the people, had placed the destiny of the nation, had he lived, in his sole control. The known firmness of his character, and the high constitutional cast of his intellect, strengthened by a life-long allegiance to the Union, and obedience to its laws, left no doubt, in the minds of those who knew him best, as to what course he would have pursued. He came into office pledged to sustain and to execute the laws, as a law-executor and not as a law-maker. He represented the executive principle, and as far as he was suffered, in the mysterious order of Providence, to work out the pledges under which he came into power, he fulfilled them. We are not called upon to pronounce his eulogy: that will be read in the history of the time.

Meanwhile the solemnity of the occasion is not unfavorable to a serious examination of ourselves, and the position which we, as

a party, entrusted with the defense of certain principles for which our votes are registered, and toward the establishment of which our speech and actions are required to be exerted,-occupy at this moment. The safety of the Union is in the hands of the Whig party; disunion lies not at their door, if it comes. We are entering upon the second stage of that factious war which is endangering, or which seems to endanger, our existence as a nation. It is unwise to shut our eyes to the facts, or to endeavor to conceal from ourselves and others the real posture of our affairs.

Two powerful factions are laboring to destroy the republic. A faction in the North, small in numbers, but loud and active, and influential by their activity and by their position as a third party, whose alternative is either a dissolution of the Union or the wresting of the powers of the general government to their peculiar purposes.

A faction in the South, also small in numbers, and still louder and more dangerous, (through the influence they exert upon the Southern population,) whose alternative is disunion, or the wresting of the powers of the general government to their peculiar purposes.

As to where the agitation began, we need not now enquire. It is the present phasis of the contest which immediately interests us. For the Southern faction there is this excuse, or at least, this appearance of an excuse, - that they are contending for what they conceive to be their rights. For the Northern faction there is no excuse. They have neither right nor interest to offer, but only a theory of what is best for the future; and for this imaginary best they hesitate not to destroy all that is good and desirable in the present.

These two factions have their representatives, who go beyond the wishes of their constituents, and react upon and exas

perate them; the same ultimate purpose inspires both; we confidently affirm it on the authority of no mean witnesses, and that is, the destruction of the present system of the Union. They are weary of the Union; it is too great a weight for them to carry; they wish to see it dissolved, they inspire their constituencies with their own wishes, and if things go on as they are now proceeding, the constituencies, too, will become weary of the Union, and will see nothing but evil in it.

There is but one party in the nation that remains sound at heart and unmoved amid the tumult, and that is the original Whig party of the Union. Theirs is the sole doctrine able to unite the extreme divisions of that party, and that is the doctrine of union and nationality. In the full strength -and capacity of this doctrine lies the strength of the Whig Republican party.

Inheriting from the old Republican party that profound respect and consideration for the rights and equalities of the local > sovereignties, which was the guiding light and the actuating spirit of the early founders of the Republic, the Whig party adds to that a genuine republicanism; a feeling of the integrity of the entire people, apart from all opinions and above all local interests.

Dismissing from our thoughts all considerations of the abstract right or wrong of negro servitude, as a question which, in the critical aspect of our affairs, it is, at present, almost criminal to agitate before the people, let us pause in our career of violence and inquire whether there are not other things, some other things of at least equal moment, to be discussed: let us ask ourselves whether white men were created solely to legislate for the happiness and the multiplication of negroes, or whether a sudden or a gradual change in the political position of a portion of our population, and that portion the most abject and the least valuable of all-whether the accomplishment of such a change is so extremely desirable, so indispensible and divine a thing, we are determined to go to our deaths in order to accomplish it. Whether the hopes of the world and the glory of the universe are to be forever extinguished, and the happiness and prosperity of seventeen millions, an entire people, is to be annihilated, in order that a body of slaves may receive a liberty which it is by

no means certain they would not use for their own destruction. Let men reflect before they act and agitate. Have the people of New England weighed carefully the moral, social and physical calamities which must attend the success of those schemes which are on foot among them. Do they believe that the South will yield without a struggle? Have they counted the cost? Have they estimated the ruin and the devastation of civil war? Have they considered what must follow upon the suspension of commercial intercourse incident to a border war, enlarging to a general civil war, between the two sections of the continent? The materials of their industry are drawn from those fields which they are ready to over-run and devastate. Those materials are wrought from the bosom of the earth by the industry of the negro, from whose hands these agitations must snatch the implements of agriculture and substitute for them knives and fire-brands.

Let us yield quietly to the progress of events, and Providence will work out for us our just desires. The tide of population is moving Southward and Westward over all the continent. The gradual influx and intermingling of white populations must inevitably change and ameliorate the condition of the black, if it does not wholly emancipate him. Under any circumstances, however, the interference of a foreign power will only crush and ruin what it seeks to ameliorate. Interference on the part of the North is at least as inhumane as it is unlawful.

On the other side, what is it that the South desires?-or rather what is it that the nation can concede to that portion of the South who are agitating what they conceive to be their rights. To such of them as demand the dissolution of the Union there is one reply to be made and they know well what that reply is. Every step which they make in that direction draws war after it. Let them estimate their forces; let them count the numbers they can bring into the field; let them calculate the cost; let them imagine themselves finally successful and the division made, and the two nations established where there is now but one; have they secured to themselves anything beyond what they already possess?