"Resolved, That we regard our obligations to the Constitution and the Union as superior to the ties of any of the political parties to which we may hitherto have belonged, and that on all future occasions we will range ourselves under the banners of that party whose principles and practice are most calculated to uphold the Constitution, and to perpetuate our glorious Union."

This contains the key to much that is hard to understand in this portion of our history, · to a purpose of forming a new party out of the worst portions of the other two, which may give another Presidential possibility to desperate politicians. That Mr. WEBSTER is ready for such a party the conclusion of the following passage of the characteristic letter addressed by him to the meeting, conclusively shows.

"No man is at liberty to set up, or affect to set up, his own conscience as above the law, (great cheering,) in a matter which respects the rights of others, and the obligations, civil, social, and political, due to others from him. Such a pretence saps the foundation of all government, and is of itself a perfect absurdity; and while all are bound to yield obedience to the laws, wise and well-disposed citizens will forbear from renewing past agitation, and rekindling the flames of useless and dangerous controversy. (Cheers and applause.)

"If we would continue one people, we must acquiesce in the will of the majority, constitutionally expressed; and he who does not mean to do that, means to disturb the public peace, and to do what he can to overturn the government. (Applause.)

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'Gentlemen, I am led to the adoption of your last resolution, in an especial and emphatic manner, by every dictate of my understanding, and I embrace it with full purpose of heart and mind. Its sentiment is my sentiment. With you, I declare that I " range myself under the banners of that party whose principles and practice are most calculated to uphold the Constitution, and to perpetuate our glorious Union."

At the end of November, the patriotic citizens of Boston held their meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Call, like that of the Castle Garden meeting, being numerously signed. Messrs. BENJAMIN R. CURTIS and RUFUS CHOATE Were the two principal speakers. The first gentleman did not defend the morality of the Slave clause in the Constitution. He only justified its framers on the ground of their own selfish necessities. He put the right of Massachusetts to restore a Fugitive on this ground. In 1776 Massachusetts became a Sovereign State. A Sovereign State has the right of excluding such foreigners as she pleases from her soil. Therefore she has the right to exclude these black for

eigners. As if birth and ancestry did not make the blacks of the South inhabitants of the country as well as the whites! As though, if they be strangers, common humanity and protection could be withheld from them without the grossest inconsistency and baseness! How changed is the character of the people since their ancestors proclaimed, two centuries ago, that their colony was a refuge for all "TO FLY TO HER FROM THE TYRANNY AND OPPRESSION OF THEIR PERSECUTORS!" Mr. CHOATE'S speech was a rhetorical rhapsody, intended to persuade the people that some terrible danger actually overhung them, solemnly protesting his belief that the Union had been in imminent peril, — and declaring that the discussion of the matter must stop! The other two orators, Messrs. BENJAMIN F. HALLETT and SAMUEL D. BRADFORD were the two Democrats who were to keep the balance even, and to show, as they did with all possible malignity, that the worst parts of both parties were well matched in political depravity. In Philadelphia, about the same time, a Great Meeting was held for the same purpose, and of a similar description. Many other meetings for the express purpose of preaching the Gospel of Slave-catching, of elevating it to the rank of a Virtue, and investing it with the authority of a Duty, were held in various towns in New England and the Middle States, in humble imitation of those great precedents.

Strange, indeed, is the moral spectacle presented by these meetings! To catch Slaves or not to catch Slaves is the great question which now distracts the northern mind. A new definition of patriotism has been elaborated by learned lawyers, and blessed by reverend divines, which makes it identical with catching Slaves! Law and Gospel are made to bend to this new Exposition of Civil Duty, and treason and infidelity are the least of the hard words which the recusants and heretics who refuse to accept it have to expect. Solemn Meetings have been held in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and some other lesser places, to promulgate this new Dispensation. Its apostles have displayed the most martyrly spirit, and are clearly ready to be offered up, by proxy, be it always understood. The resignation which they display to the sufferings of the poor Fugitives who are to experience to scourge, the chain, the stake, of this new persecution, is truly admirable. For the sake of being comfortable and safe themselves, in consideration of their own business and quiet, they are content to do "with alacrity" what the Grand Turk thought it scorn to think of. Statesmen and jurists are content to teach that the great practical result which crowned the American Revolution, as far as we are con

černed, is the privilege of catching our fellow-Slaves for our masters at the South, and of being governed, insulted, and kicked by them as our share in the benefits of the glorious Union, in return. And Doctors of various shades of Divinity (some of them very dark shades) agree, if in nothing else, in declaring that this is indeed the House of God and the Gate of Heaven! that the straight and narrow way which is to conduct American Christians to the Celestial City is that in which they can best pursue a miserable flying wretch to thrust him down to an earthly hell!

And what do all these demonstrations prove, if they prove anything? Is it the strength or the weakness of the Union, its health or its sickness? "They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick," was said of old, and we suppose is as true now as ever it was. If so, the glorious Union under which we live must needs be sick unto death, if one may judge from the throng of regular and irregular practitioners that flock to its rescue. Not one of the State physicians at Washington, whatever may be the school of his practice, but must try his hand at the restoration to health of this most interesting patient. Not a quack, North or South, but must interpose his nostrum between the Union and its demise. Not a speech can be made in Congress or in State Legislature, not a toast given at a festival or patriotic banquet, but involves some prescription for the disease, or at least, some prayer for the sufferer. The political papers, of all complexions, are as full of panaceas for the body politic as of empirical remedies for the corporal essence, and of puffs of the one as of the other. And yet the tone in which the Union is spoken of is usually one applicable to an immortal soul rather than to a perishable body. Its immortality is assumed, and still everybody seems to think that it is in imminent danger of a violent death. Such a general anxiety as seems to prevail as to the pulse of the Union, and such a desire to postpone its dissolution as is everywhere expressed, must inevitably stand for some type in Nature, for some distemperature that lays siege to the citadel of life. Protestations of loyalty are not loud when the crown is in no danger. It is "when dubious title shakes the madded land," that men think it necessary to renew their professions of allegiance. The fact is, that men feel, North and South, that the foundations of the Union are not everlasting, nor laid in the eternal nature of things. Though the great and terrible image, which we are bid to fall and worship has a front of brass and limbs of iron, its feet are but clay: and the stone is already cut out of the mountain without hands which will break it in pieces

and grind it to powder. And this is felt in the secret chambers of all men's thoughts, who have any to which to retire; and it is made manifest in every political and ecclesiastical demonstration in this direction.

All this is but another statement of the existence of a Divine Government, which, whatever Mr. WEBSTER may think, is the true model of the schemes which men may seek to construct. There are certain eternal laws of mind and of matter, in opposition to which it is in vain to set up the devices of men. Constitutions and Institutions are permanent just in the proportion that they are in accordance with the everlasting laws of God and Nature. It is as vain for men to endeavor to give immortality to a lie by tying it to a truth as to seek to restore a dead body to life by binding it to a living one. The Union of the States cannot endure because there is no natural, but only a mechanical, cohesion between its parts. Their tendency is not centripetal but centrifugal. It is not merely want of moral sensibility, but of intelligent appreciation of self-interest, that keeps the North in the Union. No aristocracy exists except by the consent of the subject multitude. As the many become enlightened, the power of the oligarchy is broken. This dissemination of intelligence cannot be hindered, even in the most absolute despotisms or most compact aristocracies of the old world. In this country, in the northern States at least, there is no possibility of stopping the diffusion of knowledge on this subject. Mr. WEBSTER'S Boston backers may return him their humble thanks for having "recalled them to their duties under the Constitution,' to wit, of eating all their words against the Annexation of Texas and the Extension of Slavery, and of suffering the Minority in Congress to bully the Majority into obedience; but they constitute but a tenth part of the voters of Boston, and only a hundred and sixty-ninth (or thereabouts) of those of the State. But these gentlemen cannot keep the knowledge from the rest that a handful of some seventy-five thousand voting Slaveholders, by virtue of their Slaveholding, do what they like with the other twenty millions of inhabitants. And it is not likely that they will forever submit to such a state of things.

Herein consists the hope of our deliverance. The Anti-Slavery agitation never can die out. It has been going on increasing from the day of its small things in spite of the steady opposition of the State and the Church, and of all the usually controlling influences of Society. It has taken possession of Congress and turned it into a great Anti-Slavery Debating Society, with the whole country for an audience. In

creasing attention to the subject must be followed by growing intelligence and a more earnest sense of responsibility and duty. These feelings will take various shapes and will approach the object that excites them by different ways. But they will never cease to haunt it and make it uncomfortable in its wickedness. Fortunately it does not take many to ring the Alarm-bell (that bell which Burke tells us we should rejoice to hear when the City is on fire,) and as it has been kept clashing for twenty years, with few hands at the rope, and with a neighborhood hating the disturbance more than the conflagration, we think it is more than Mr. CLAY or Mr. WEBSTER can do to silence it. That the American Union must come to an end, if the element of Slavery be not eliminated, is as certain as that the Union between the Thirteen Colonies and England must have ceased, at some time, even if it had been postponed from 1776, or as it is that great changes must take place in the political arrangements of Continental Europe. It is merely a question of time. And all the professions of loyalty and allegiance with which our great great men and little great men think it necessary to garnish their speech withal, are symptoms not of health but of conscious weakness. The true friends of the country are they who are proving that the Union is a delusion and a snare, as now constituted, strong only for evil and impotent for good. Increasing multitudes are growing up to the knowledge of this truth, and the day of its reduction to practice will be that from which History will date the birth of the Republic.

THE OPERATION OF THE FUGITIVE BILL.

The "pacification of the country" having at length been effected by the admission of California, which could not be helped, and the Abolition of the District Slave Trade, on the one side, and by the permission to Slavery to enter in and possess the Territories of New Mexico and Utah, and the enactment of the Fugitive Bill, on the other, there were great rejoicings over this work of Peace throughout the southern country and the great northern cities. But the public indignation which was aroused throughout the Free States, especially by the last named atrocity, soon checked the Pro-Slavery Jubilee. A more general and unanimous roar of indignation never went up to Heaven than was called forth by the first certain knowledge that it had become a law. Almost every newspaper in the northern States was full of the