pus, exemption of private property from arbitrary seizure and confiscation, exemption from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, secret trial and punishment, exemption of private contracts from tender laws, exemption of the people from Federal conscription, exemption from ex post facto laws and bills of attainder, the supremacy of civil over military power, have all been trodden into nonentity by a willing soldiery, at the needless silly bidding of a vengeful political party, whose most honest members are to be found among those of them who are sincere fanatics. That it was silly as well as wicked to resort to the unfounded pretext of necessity as a justification for these acts of tyranny, is now apparent. The final development of the feebleness of the South and of the vastly superior strength of the North in numbers and military resources, shows that there never was the slightest need for a resort to such means, and that they only served to prejudice instead of aiding the Union cause, their only real effect having been to cause division and dissension at the North. But neither silliness nor timidity alone caused the resort to those measures. They were prompted by party hate, in pursuit of party vengeance. So I repeat, do what you can to bridle and curb party power. That is the enemy to your liberties most to be feared, as it is also Nor is this the worst. The late Presidential election gave the irreversible sanction of the nation to all these tyrannical usurpations and abuses of power, and they are to stand as unimpeachable precedents for all that any political party may want to do toward wreaking their vengeance upon their opponents. How we are ever to be relieved from this degradation, how the Constitution is to be reinstated in its intended needful supremacy, no man can tell me. My own reflections point to only one remedy. That is, perhaps a revival at some distant future of the appreciation of liberty, and a manly effort to regain it by a rebellion against the then usurping party, causing another severe civil war, which, if resulting in favor of the rebellion, will reinstate the Constitution by the voice and power of the people, and cause it to be respected for a long time. Bad as this is, it is our only chance. It would appear to be an ever-enduring part of the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race to win their freedom by rebellion and to preserve it by rebellion.

to ours.

We were told that these usurpations were war measures, justi

fied by State necessity, and that when peace returned they would all instantly cease. But we do not find it so. For some six weeks or more there has not been an armed rebel anywhere in the field from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; yet these usurpations have by no means ceased. Military commissions still usurp the power to try and punish private citizens outside the rebel States and in loyal States where the civil courts are in full, unimpeded operation. Notwithstanding the express prohibition of the Constitution, the ruling power continues to perpetrate other similar enormities.

We had thought that the improper dominance of a political party through the Federal Government was amply guarded against by a written Constitution carefully defining its power, also by a subdivision of its powers between a Congressional, Judicial, and Executive Departments, and by a large reservation of power to be exclusively exercised by the separate State Governments. But all this has proved illusory. The practical working has proved it to be throughout the Government of a political party. The President, the members of Congress and of the State Governments all belong to the dominant party, work in its interest as a paramount duty, far above all others of a political character, and instead of acting as a counterpoise or check, serve as a great aid to the arbitrary domination of the party. This suicidal vice in our institutions was seen long ago, and it has been the principal endeavor of my life for more than thirty years to arouse public opinion as to the danger necessarily to ensue from such a state of things. With this view the Essays on the Presidency contained in the first volume were published and republished. It was predicted that the collisions between parties in their contests for power would lead to just such a civil war as we have passed through, and having proved that the power and patronage of the Presidency was the principal occasion of these conflicts, recommended the substitution of some other method than that of a popular election for obtaining our Presidents. With that view the plan you will find in the present volume was carefully prepared and laid before the Senate at its last session, but was not acted upon by that body. The principal motive of this address to you is to invite your attention to that plan, with the hope you will place before our nation your opinion of it, whatever

that opinion may be. If you should happen to think that it will successfully rescue the Presidential office from the clutch of political parties, or that it will cause the cessation of parties formed or kept up for the main purpose of obtaining its power and patronage, your recommendation may cause leading minds here to give the subject their serious attention, and perhaps enlist their active service in obtaining popular consent to some such change. Most respectfully,

Your colaborer in the cause of civil liberty,

LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, June 9, 1865.

S. S. NICHOLAS.

CONSERVATIVE ESSAYS.

CHAPTER I.

A PLATFORM ADDRESS.

Introductory.

THE following plan of an Address was prepared for and sent to the Chicago Convention; but, from want of time or from deeming an address inexpedient, it was not acted on by the Committee having the platform in charge.

It is thought by most intelligent men not belonging to the Convention, to have been a great blunder not to have adopted a full, detailed platform, particularizing and denouncing many of the multitudinous crimes and blunders of the dominant party; or at least to have done so in the usual mode of an address to the nation. This omission was a great fault, more or less pernicious. in its effect on the election. The insufficient, timidly tame thing adopted as a platform, served to give the Abolition party a quasi absolution, which they freely and perhaps successfully claimed, because of the absence of all specification of crimes or faults. It may be that no mode of platform or address could have materially altered the result of the election-still the fault was great. The occasion was appropriate for a proper indictment against that party from such an authoritative, respectable source, representing, as the Convention did, near a half of the loyal part of the nation. It was due to that very large minority that an indictment should have been adopted, setting forth specially many of the multifarious party acts of usurpation, of tyrannical abuse of power, of corruption, and of blundering incompetency. It was due also to the whole nation, to posterity, and to history. It (13)

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was especially due to all patriots of every denomination who still cherish a hopeful trust or belief in the resuscitation of American liberty. The want of something of the kind will permit those faults and crimes to pass down to posterity as unchallenged precedents. If so, they will eradicate every semblance of the nation's liberty. Ours will forever cease to be a government of law, and remain what it has been for the last four years, a consolidated absolutism, under the unrestrained rule of every party majority.

The sudden change of party tactics evinced by this failure of the Convention is incomprehensible. Heretofore, in the prosperous days of the party, when it took the field against an adversary, it was for no gloved conflict, but, under the battle-cry of "war with the knife and the knife to the hilt," its trumpets uttered "no puling strain of the sucking dove," but one "as sonorous as the roaring lion." It boastfully claimed for itself the proud cognomen of "the great unterrified." If it has not lost all pretension to that title, why evade its duty, at so momentous a crisis, by such a specimen of shameful timidity as this pretense of a platform? If that platform gave entire satisfaction to any single member of the Convention, it has had no such success with any intelligent man outside the Convention and the Abolition party. Its timid insufficiency has been freely denounced by all others, not excepting peace Democrats, whose propitiation was the ostensible pretext.

Most of the following plan of an Address was published last October, and its republication now in this form is made from no expectation of serving in the slightest degree to supply the pernicious omission of the Convention, but, as Colonel Benton would have said, "as an aid to history," or as an aid, however small, toward keeping alive the principles of liberty. The materials for attack were so superabundant as to make selection the principal difficulty in its preparation. For the same reason there was no need to strain or mis-glose facts. The principles relied on are those that every one knows, or should know—are the teachings of the fathers of the Republic; and nearly all of them such as were never questioned until within the last four years. Without a boast, the assertion may well be ventured, as to those facts and principles, that, as John Quincy Adams said of his book, "they