party held a large majority of the Senate, and nearly equally divided the House of Representatives. Disaffection lurked, if it did not openly avow itself, in every Department and in every bureau, in every regiment and in every ship-of-war; in the post-office and in the custom-house, and in every legation and consulate from London to Calcutta. Of four thousand four hundred and seventy offi cers in the public service, civil and military, two thousand one hundred and fifty-four were representatives of states where the revolutionary movement was openly advocated and urged, even if n actually organized. Our system being so completely federativ representative, no provision had ever been made, perhaps could have been made, to anticipate this strange dented disturbance. The people were shocked by astounding developments of what the statute

nounced to be sedition and treason, but the magistracy was demoralized and the laws were powerless. By degrees, however, a better sentiment revealed itself. The executive administration hesitatingly, in part, reformed itself. The capital was garrisoned; the new President came in unresisted, and soon constituted a new and purely loyal administration. They found the disunionists perseveringly engaged in raising armies and laying sieges around national fortifications situate within the territory of the disaffected states. The Federal marine seemed to have been scattered everywhere except where its presence was necessary, and such of the military forces as were not in the remote states and territories were held back from activity by vague and mysterious armistices which had been informally contracted by the late President, or under his authority, with a view to postpone conflict until impracticable concessions to disunion should be made by Congress, or at least until the waning term of his administration should reach its appointed end. Commissioners who had been sent by the new confederacy were already at the capital demanding recognition of its sovereignty and a partition of the national property and domain. The treasury, depleted by robbery and peculation, was exhausted and the public credit was prostrate.

It would be very unjust to the American people to suppose that this singular and unhappy condition of things indicated any extreme favor or toleration of the purpose of a permanent dissolution of the Union. On the contrary, disunion at the very first took on a spe

cious form, and it afterwards made its way by ingenious and seductive devices. It inculcated that the Union is a purely voluntary connection, founded on the revocable assent of the several states; that secession, in the case of great popular discontent, would induce consultation and reconciliation, and so that revolution, instead of being war, is peace, and disunion, instead of being dissolution, is union. Though the ordinances of secession in the seceding states were carried through impetuously, without deliberation, and even by questionable majorities, yet it was plausibly urged that the citizens who had remained loyal to the Union might wisely acquiesce, so as ultimately to moderate and control the movement, and in any event that if war should ensue, it would become a war of sections, and not a social war, of all others, and especially in those states, the form of war most seriously to be deprecated. It being assumed that peaceful separation is in harmony with the Constitution, it was urged as a consequence that coercion would, therefore, be unlawful and tyrannical; and this principle was even pushed so far as to make the defensive retaining by the Federal government of its position within the limits of the seceding states, or where it might seem to overawe or intimidate them, an act of such forbidden coercion. Thus it happened that for a long time, and in very extensive districts even, fidelity to the Union manifested itself by demanding a surrender of its powers and possessions, and compromises with or immunity towards those who were engaged in overthrowing it by armed force. Disunion under these circumstances rapidly matured. On the other hand, the country was bewildered. For the moment even loyal citizens fell naturally into the error of inquiring how the fearful state of things had come about, and who was responsible for it, thus inviting a continuance of the controversy out of which it had arisen, rather than rallying to the duty of arresting it. Disunion, sustained only by passion, made haste to attain its end. Union, on the contrary, required time, because it could only appeal to reason, and reason could not be heard until excitement should in some degree subside. Military spirit is an element always ready for revolution. It has a fuller development in the disaffected than in the loyal states. Thousands of men have already banded themselves as soldiers in the cause of disunion, while the defenders of the Union, before resorting to arms, everywhere wait to make sure that it cannot be otherwise preserved. Even this cautious and pacific, yet

patriotic disposition has been misunderstood and perverted by faction to encourage disunion.

I believe that I have thus presented the disunion movement dispassionately and without misrepresenting its proportions or its character.

You will hardly be asked by responsible statesmen abroad why the new administration has not already suppressed the revolution. Thirty-five days are a short period in which to repress, chiefly by moral means, a movement which is so active while disclosing itself throughout an empire.

You will not be expected to promulgate this history, or to communicate it to the British government, but you are entitled to the President's views, which I have thus set forth in order to enable you to understand the policy which he proposes to pursue, and to conform your own action to it.

The President neither looks for nor apprehends any actual and permanent dismemberment of the American Union, especially by a line of latitude. The improvement of our many channels of intercourse, and the perfection of our scheme of internal exchanges, and the incorporation of both of them into a great system of foreign commerce, concurring with the gradual abatement of the force of the only existing cause of alienation, have carried us already beyond the danger of disunion in that form. The so-called Confederate States, therefore, in the opinion of the President, are attempting what will prove a physical impossibility. Necessarily they build the structure of their new government upon the same principle by which they seek to destroy the Union, namely, the right of each individual member of the confederacy to withdraw from it at pleasure and in peace. A government thus constituted could neither attain the consolidation necessary for stability, nor guarantee any engagements it might make with creditors or other nations. The movement, therefore, in the opinion of the President, tends directly to anarchy in the seceding states, as similar movements in similar circumstances have already resulted in Spanish America, and especially in Mexico. He believes, nevertheless, that the citizens of those states, as well as the citizens of the other states, are too intelligent, considerate, and wise to follow the leaders to that disastrous end. For these reasons he would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs, namely, that the Federal government could not reduce the

seceding states to obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the state. This federal republican system of ours is of all forms of government the very one which is most unfitted for such a labor. Happily, however, this is only an imaginary defect. The system has within itself adequate, peaceful, conservative, and recuperative forces. Firmness on the part of the government in maintaining and preserving the public institutions and property, and in executing the laws where authority can be exercised without waging war, combined with such measures of justice, moderation, and forbearance as will disarm reasoning opposition, will be sufficient to secure the public safety until returning reflection, concurring with the fearful experience of social evils, the inevitable fruits of faction, shall bring the recusant members cheerfully back into the family, which, after all, must prove their best and happiest, as it undeniably is their most natural home. The Constitution of the United States provides for that return by authorizing Congress, on application to be made by a certain majority of the states, to assemble a national convention, in which the organic law can, if it be needful, be revised so as to remove all real obstacles to a reunion, so suitable to the habits of the people, and so eminently conducive to the common safety and welfare.

Keeping that remedy steadily in view, the President, on the one hand, will not suffer the Federal authority to fall into abeyance, nor will be, on the other, aggravate existing evils by attempts at coercion which must assume the form of direct war against any of the revolutionary states. If, while he is pursuing this course, commended as it is by prudence as well as patriotism, the scourge of civil war for the first time in our history must fall upon our country during the term of his administration, that calamity will then have come through the agency, not of the government, but of those who shall have chosen to be its armed, open, and irreconcilable enemies; and he will not suffer himself to doubt that when the value of the imperilled Union shall be brought in that fearful manner home to the business and the bosoms of the American people, they will, with an unanimity that shall vindicate their wisdom and their virtue, rise up and save it.

It does not, however, at all surprise the President that the confidence in the stability of the Union, which has been heretofore so universally entertained, has been violently shocked both at home and abroad. Surprise and fear invariably go together. The period of four months which intervened between the election which designated the head of the new administration and its advent, as has already been shown, assumed the character of an interregnum, in which not only were the powers of the government paralyzed, but even its resources seemed to disappear and be forgotten.

Nevertheless, all the world know what are the resources of the United States, and that they are practically unencumbered, as well as inexhaustible. It would be easy, if it would not seem invidious, to show that whatever may be the full development of the disunion movement, those resources will not be seriously diminished, and that the revenues and credit of the Union, unsurpassed in any other country, are adequate to every emergency that can occur in our own. Nor will the political commotions which await us sensibly disturb the confidence of the people in the stability of the government. It has been necessary for us to learn, perhaps the instruction has not come too soon, that vicissitudes are incident to our system and our country, as they are to all others. The panic which that instruction naturally produced is nearly past. What has hitherto been most needful for the reinvigoration of authority is already occurring. The aiders, abettors, and sympathizers with disunion, partly by their own choice and partly through the exercise of the public will, are falling out from the civil departments of the government as well as from the army and the navy. The national legislature will no longer be a distracted council. Our representatives in foreign courts and ports will henceforth speak only the language of loyalty to their country, and of confidence in its institutions and its destiny.

It is much to be deplored that our representatives are to meet abroad, agents of disunion, seeking foreign aid, to effect what, unaided, is already seen to be desperate. You need not be informed that their success in Great Britain would probably render their success easy elsewhere. The President does not doubt that you fully appreciate the responsibility of your mission. An honored ancestor of yours was the first to represent your whole country, after its independence was established, at the same court to which you