the South is destroyed. The cotton, which brought us $200,000,000 per annum, a good part of which came to Ohio to purchase pork, corn, flour, beef, and machinery, where is it? Gone. What of the cotton fabric, almost as common as bread among the laboring classes? With 4,000,000 of indolent negroes, its production is destroyed, and the ten millions of artisans in the world who depend on it for employment, and the hundred millions who depend on it for clothing, will find the fabric advanced a hundred per cent. So with sugar, and other productions of slave labor. For all these results, labor will curse the jostling elements which thus disturb the markets of the world. Another indirect effect upon the labor of the North, and especially of Ohio, is that the markets of the South will be closed, not by blockade, but forever. Our prices of corn, wheat, pork, beef, &c., will be reduced by a contracted market. The surplus in Ohio, the past year, was, of grain 25,000,000 bushels, of hogs 1,000,000, of cattle 300,000, exports from the State, or more than $50,000,000 worth; while other articles of export were worth $50,000,000 more. This production is above that which Ohio can use. If our market is restricted, who suffers? The farmer. If he suffers, who will pay the taxes in Ohio? Prices must be remunerative or agriculture suffers. If agriculture suffers in Ohio, every man, woman, and child feels it. If this scheme for Africanizing the State, by destroying southern labor, succeeds, no fostering care or scientific skill can make up the loss to the farmer. Such schemes, by destroying the sources of labor, destroy themselves. Yet these dreamers cling to their notions with the happy impudence of Munchausen, who went to the moon for the silver hatchet, by means of a Turkey bean which grew up to its horns. When his bean was dried by the heat, he twisted a rope of straw by which to descend, fastening one end to the horns. Alas! like many similar schemes, it was too short. But, holding fast by the left hand, with his right he cut the long and useless upper part, which, when tied to the lower end, brought him safely to the earth! Such will be the result of these lunatic experiments upon the labor systems of the country. The sooner they descend from the moon with their rope of straw, the better. Thus, with loss to the South and damage to the North, both irreparable, and no gain to either, the year of negro jubilee is to be ushered into existence.

In conclusion, then, if the negro cannot be colonized without burdens intolerable, and plans too delusive; if he cannot be freed and left South without destroying its labor, and without his extermination; if he cannot come North without becoming an outcast and without ruin to Northern industry and society, what shall be done? Where shall he go? He answers for himself. The paterfamilias of a drove of negroes, the other day in the Valley of Virginia, was asked, "Where are you going?" "Dun' no, massa, dun' no; gwine somewhere, I reckon." [Laughter.] His friends can answer very little better. But such answer is not statesmanship. What shall be done? I answer, Representatives! that our duty is written in our oath! IT IS IN THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES! Leave to the States their own institutions where that instrument leaves them, keep your faith to the Crittenden resolutions, be rid of all ambiguous schemes, and trust under God for the revelation of His will concerning these black men in our land, and the overthrow by our power of this

rebellion. Have you no faith in God, who writes the history of nations? Great as is our power, wise as is our system of government, brave as are our soldiers, unequalled as our fleets are of iron, it is only for Him to breathe upon us, and our power will fade. I know that His power can solve these dark problems of our fate. Let us do our duty to the order established by our fathers, under His wise inspiration, and all may be well. In this night of our gloom my faith has been in Him, even as my oath to the Constitution which He inspired is made, "so help me God!" Cleaving to that, I can see the dawn of hope! Leaving it, I see nothing but perjury, fraud, and a darker night of disaster. In our Constitution alone, under God, is our national salvation!

But I have no faith in, and no hope of this Congress, for they have no faith in God or the Constitution. Greece had a law called yрaon Tapavouwv, whereby any man was tried and punished in a common court like a criminal, for any law which had passed on his motion in the assembly of the people, if that law appeared unjust or prejudicial to the public. If there were such a law here, how few of the majority of this House would escape the dock of the criminal and the rope of the gibbet. The member from Illinois [Mr. LOVEJOY] would then receive the beatitudes which follow suspended animation. [Laughter.] But what of the member from Pennsylvania [Mr. KELLEY]? He has been ever ready, in his defence of black men and black character, to assail personally those with whom he differed. He could not pass by my humble speech as to Hayti without some sarcastic flings and much misrepresentation, which he refused to allow me to answer. He did not like my style of description, and wondered why there was no laugh at my humor about the negro in court dress. He is more successful. He never speaks but he is laughed at. His speeches have been well described as being every word a sepulchre, every sentence a tomb, and every speech a graveyard. [Laughter.] In this graveyard he thought to bury me, as he had buried others. But even that voice of his, vox et præterea nihil, which may be likened to the "cry of an itinerant bull, in pursuit of society, moaning upon the broad prairies of the West" [great laughter], would, if that Grecian law existed, be choked forever. He would then find his melodramatic performances close before the fifth act, in a tragedy, which an admiring audience would applaud to the echo! Faithless to their own resolves, faithless to the President's message and proclamations, faithless to their pledges to the army and the people, faithless to the memories of the past and the hopes of the future, faithless to the Constitution and to the God of their oath, these maddened zealots pursue the work of destruction. A few short months, and even the blacks of America will curse them as their worst enemy. This Congress, which ought to be engaged in holding up the hands of the Execu tive, and in giving aid and counsel in putting down this armed rebellion, has striven to circumvent the plans of the President, by its immature and vindictive bills of confiscation. It has been coopering away at the vessel, hooping it around with infinite pains, by emancipation, while its bottom, like the tub of the Danaides, is full of holes and can hold no water. Weary in watching its mad designs of revolution and its crazy crotchets of black freedom, and for the self-preservation of my native State and the North from the black immigration with which it is threatened, I shall

go to my home and ask the ballot to speak its denunciation. A few months, and that expression will be had. On it depends the fate of the Republic. My belief is, that the people will write the epitaph of this Congress, nearly as Gladstone wrote that of the Coalition ministry during the Crimean war:

Here lies the ashes of the XXXVII. Congress!
It found the United States in a war of
gigantic proportions, involving
its very existence.

It was content to wield the sceptre of Power
and accept the emoluments of office;
and used them to overthrow

the political and social system of the country, which
it was sworn to protect.

It saw the fate of thirty-four white commonwealths in peril;
but it babbled of the
NEGRO!

It saw its patriotic generals and soldiers in the
field, under the old flag.

It slandered the one, and in the absence of the other,
it destroyed his means of labor.

It talked of Liberty to the black, and
piled burdens of taxation on white people
for utopian schemes.

The people launched at it the thunderbolt.
of their wrath;

and its members sought to avoid punishment,
by creeping into dishonored
political graves
Requiescat!

MEANING OF THE ELECTIONS OF 1862.

CONSERVATISM AND RADICALISM-PERVERSION OF THE WAR-ITS PROLONGATION-DISMISSAL OF GENERALS-18 COMPROMISE POSSIBLE? IF SO, WHEN?-LAWS OF WAR-MAXIMS OF VATTEL -HOW PEACE MAY BE HAD-ENGLISH PERFIDY-FRENCH AND FOREIGN

NATIONAL CONVENTION.

MEDIATION

Delivered in the House of Representatives December 15, 1862.

Mr. CHAIRMAN: It has been a custom in all civilized countries and a part of the Constitution of all free countries, for the administration to yield to the popular will whenever it is clearly ascertained. In England, when the Ministry are voted down, they surrender their portfolios to the Queen. Even in parliament, which is but an imperfect representative of the British people, no Minister, however popular, can withstand the sentiment of the Commons. He must resign or rule under the scorn of the nation. In 1832, even the Duke of Wellington was not "iron" enough to resist the popular cry of "Reform." In 1846, when Cobden and Bright on the hustings, Villiers, in the House, and Elliott in song, raised the cry of Repeal of the Corn Laws and cheap bread for the people, the landed aristocracy, who had the power, crumbled before the

power of the popular voice. Sir Robert Peel, the greatest statesman since Chatham, bowed to the decree. The nation yet honors him for this magnanimous statesmanship. Later, during the Crimean war, its gross mismanagement, shown up by an untrammelled press, drove an incompetent Ministry from power, by a vote of the Commons. In Prussia, in France, and even in Austria, the sovereign and his advisers do not fail to conciliate the public mind by some graces of obedience. But here, sir, in this boasted free country, when our great States have pronounced against this Congress, and against its emancipation and other schemes, we have mockery, defiance, and persistency in wrong doing. The people have raised their voice against irresponsible arrests; this House, on its first day, votes down my resolutions, drawn in the language of every Bill of Rights in America, and refuses inquiry into these outrages upon the citizen. The people have condemned that worst relic of the worst times of French tyranny, the lettres de cachet; yet this House, with indecorous hurry, lash through a bill of indemnity, which is to confiscate all the rights and remedies of the outraged citizen-a bill, sir, which, if pleaded by a minion of power, the Courts would laugh to scorn. The people have condemned the edict of emancipation-an edict which Mr. Seward, on the 10th of March last, in a letter to Mr. Adams, declared “would reinvigorate the declining insurrection in every part of the South;" yet we have the Presidential Message, which proposes to adhere to the condemned proclamation; and in addition thereto proposes a compensated system of emancipation, running to the end of the century. The people desired the war to be continued on one line of policy, declared by us last July a year, for the Constitution and the Union; but this contumacious assembly are determined to force it from that line, or abandon the Union.

:

My colleague [Mr. HUTCHINS] spoke the other day for the majority here, and gloried in that radicalism which would "reinvigorate the rebellion." I think the Irish orator had my colleague in his eye, when he spoke of the "universal genius of emancipation." He glories in being a radical because he goes to the root. I propose to tap that root for a few moments. His speech is not upon a new theme, nor is it freshly handled. Its point is its audacious disregard of the sentiment of his own State and of the North. He is wiser than the "elders" of the Republic, whom he stigmatizes for they never found, what he has learned from other and recent sources, that Slavery and freedom are incompatible in our system. He pretends that the real cause of the rebellion lies in this irreconcilable antagonism. He forgets that seventy-five years of our history disprove his fallacies. He urges such antagonism for military reasons; when the truth is, his party got power by propagating this very heresy of hate. The scheme of exterminating slavery as a war measure is an afterthought. He claims moreover the right under the Constitution to free all the slaves, because slavery is incompatible with that clause which guarantees to each State a republican form of government. He grows wiser than the "elders," who framed the Constitution, and who lived in Slave States when it was made. He thinks the Congress and the Executive can unmake the State governments and make new governments for the South when subjugated. He thus becomes as much of a Disunionist and traitor as Davis. My colleague reproves the President for his delusion, because the Presi

dent hopes for relief by compensated emancipation in 1900. In this, the daring radicalism of my colleague outstrips even that of the Administration. He favors a "Union as it will be, when slavery is eradicated," and that makes him a radical. He says radicalism goes to the root. So it does. So the savants whom Gulliver found employed the hog to do ploughing, to save the wear and tear of honest agriculture. He would have us root out slavery or die. Indeed, in picturing our armies penetrating the territory of the rebellion, carrying with them this military order of freedom inscribed upon their banner," he would have his halting friends, like the President, "dare" more; he quotes the language of Mirabeau, the revolutionist, urging no revolt-no revolt-by halves, no timidity, no hesitation from a sense of duty, no sacrifice of passion, no half-way indecision in treason; and he exhorts his confederates in abolition that it is better to be resolutely bad than indecisively honest! This is the language of revolution, and the spirit of Satan as Milton pictures him in hell. The quotation of my colleague is felicitous; but it is a relief to know that his comrades in revolt have not the daring of Davis, the manliness of Mirabeau, or the intellect of Satan. He indulges in comparisons between this radicalism, which he espouses, and that conservatism which is now organized under the Democratic name. The word conservative is not the name of a party. It is an element now dominant among the people. It represents the principle of repose and strength; the ideas of order and law. It defends the Constitution. It would restore the Union. When the gentleman likens it to the Israelites who hankered for the slavery of Egypt; when he says that those who prefer the Union as it was, are like the Tories of the Revolution; when he likens them to the Scribes and Pharisees, who preferred the doctrines of the elders, he perpetrates superficial nonsense. To stigmatize those who are in favor of the Union of Washington as like the Tories whom Washington fought, is worse than the silliest bathos of a mediocre poet, whom Horace says gods, men, and booksellers despise. To liken the conservative voice just uttered at our elections to the lust of the Israelites for the fleshpots of Egypt, has not the dignity of a schoolgirl's rhapsody. The simile which he drew between the Scribes and Pharisees, and those who reverence the Constitution because it is the work of the "elders," smacks of a supercilious egotism which it is idle to answer. There are no such analogies between the parties of the day. No comparisons are needed to show the differences between the radicalism which uproots to destroy, and the conservatism which would guard to save. I would like to know the difference in spirit between the radicalism of secession, which contemned the constitutional majority and set up for itself on slavery principles, and the radicalism which now defies the people's will to set up for itself on anti-slavery ideas.

This radical party of the gentleman has been in power 651 dayssince the 4th of March, 1861, to the present time. What is the result? I do not now ask who has caused this result; but what is our condition under the agents selected at Chicago by a sectional organization, acting with those of similar radical views in the South? 1st. A confederation of thirty-three States, to which appurtenant were seven Territories, has been torn into two parts, under severed and belligerent governments. 2d.