will abide unshaken the test of human scrutiny, of talents, and of time."

TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.

The Conservative and Democratic friends of the Union and the Constitution, having met in Convention for the purpose of nominating candidates for President and Vice-President, will set forth their views as to true national policy and those fundamental principles on which it should be based, with some of the reasons for their opposition to the acts and policy of the dominant Abolition party, past, present, and prospective.

The National Situation.

1. We are in the midst of two perilous wars-the war against the Union and the war against the Constitution.

2. The war against the Union is the result of the co-operative aid of bad men North and South, in fomenting sectional jealousy and hate, depreciating the supposed value and weakening the longcherished love of the Union, and of party strife degenerated into sectional contests for power. This is felicitously expressed in the following resolution, adopted in 1859 by the Legislature of Tennessee when wholly untainted with disunionism:

"All the evils growing out of intense slavery agitation-all the discord, alienation, and bitter hatred between the North and the South--are the legitimate fruit, not of any necessary or 'irrepressible conflict' between free and slave labor, but of a conflict between rival aspirants in the race of ambition, North and South, urged on by an inordinate greed of official power and plunder."

3. The responsibility for the disunion war rests heavily upon the dominant Abolition party and its President. When, in despite the reiterated earnest warnings of wiser and better menof all discreet, intelligent men not engaged in their enterprise— they, in the reckless pursuit of political power, availed themselves of the universal prejudice against negro slavery to organize a purely sectional party, whose principal avowed aim was hostility to negro slavery, they enabled the disunionists South to organize an opposing sectional party for protection against that hostility. The inevitable effect of the division of the nation into two such

parties, as foreseen and predicted by all intelligent, disinterested men, was, by their collision, to cause civil war and perhaps disunion. Having disregarded the warning, and by their acts fulfilled the prediction, they come under one of two alternatives, which equally prove them unworthy of popular trust. They either had not the intelligence to see the necessary consequence of their acts, though so obvious to all other men, or, seeing those consequences, they desired them or were regardless of them, while "urged on by an inordinate greed of official power and plunder."

4. For the great calamity of the war these men owe the nation a signal atonement; but, instead of making any atonement, or even manifesting a decent contrition, they impudently deny their responsibility, and impiously attempt to shift it from themselves over upon Providence. Instead of doing anything to soothe that fear of Abolition hate and misrule which they were so instrumental in arousing, and which was the main cause of the rebellion, they have done all they could to intensify that fear, and to prove that it had been from the first well founded. Instead of doing anything to alleviate or abridge the great national calamity of their inflicting, they have done all they could toward its increase and prolongation, by precluding all chance of amicable restoration.

5. By adopting and propagating the false dogma of the "irrepressible conflict," invented by a secessionist for disunion purposes, these men hoped to disguise their real aim in pursuit of political power; as, by its incessant reiteration now, they hope to disguise their real present object, the gratification of their unappeasable hate in the infliction of a demoniac vengeance upon the whole people of the South, one-half of whom are the mere victims of their own great crime in instigating the war. The preaching of a dogma which carried such persuasive argument in favor and even justification of disunion-though meeting nothing but derision from disinterested intelligence-and their close affiliation with those Abolitionists who for long years had been publicly seeking disunion, and who avowed their hate for the Union and the Constitution as "covenants with death and leagues with hell," brought these men under the just suspicion of being influenced by similar want of loyalty to Union and Constitution. They have done nothing to remove but everything to increase this suspicion.

Since the war has reached a stage where it was deemed impracticable for the non-abolitionized part of the Northern people to withdraw their support, or injuriously to manifest their opposition to its prosecution for abolition purposes, they have ceased all attempts at hypocritical concealment, and shown that Union restoration was a secondary, subordinate object.

6. The counterparts of these men at the South—the original secessionists-skillfully availing themselves of their acts to propagate disunion feeling among Southern people, and having adroitly obtained control of their legislatures, were enabled to precipitate the civil war contrary to the desire of even a majority of the Southern people, according to the very probable showing of President Lincoln. Their attempts at disunion they wish to justify under the assumed right of secession; a right having no basis whatever in the letter or spirit of the Constitution, and wholly repugnant to permanent national prosperity. So far as the attempt rested on any idea of sectional benefit it was wholly a delusion, there being no clearer demonstrable truth than that the South was full as much interested in the preservation of the Union as the North. So far as it rested on the fear of abolitionism it was an ill-advised, unmanly fear, resting mainly upon the accidental election of President Lincoln by a minority of the nation, and the want of proper confidence in the loyalty to the Constitution of a large majority of their Northern countrymen. So far as it depended upon the trick of precipitation, frustrating a fair, deliberate expression of the will of the Southern people, it required the perpetration of one of the greatest crimes ever committed. For this those desperadoes must be condemned as among the worst conspirators and traitors of all time; and their consciences, if they have any, must be agonized by the contemplation of the irremediable ruin they have already brought upon the South. This censure should be increased from the very probable fact that irritation at the loss and despair of regaining political party power had full as much, if not more, to do with the action. of those desperadoes than any serious belief in benefit to the South from disunion. Great as the crime of treason always is, its aggravation is enhanced by imputable selfish motives in the perpetrators, especially when directed against a country like ours, enjoying the inestimable blessing of popular self-government,

under a constitution-guarded liberty, and more especially when sundering those cherished ties of every patriot heart which keep us in undivided connection with and boastful remembrance of the pure, unselfish, ever-glorious patriotism of the revolutionary sires.

That genuine patriotism, the life-giving principle of all true national renown, of all permanent national prosperity, has been too successfully assailed in their respective sections, by abolitionists and secessionists, and hence this accursed civil war against the Union.

7. That other treasonable war, of equal importance and still greater peril to the nation-the war against liberty and the Constitution is being waged by perjured officials. That Constitution, equally glorious and still more precious than the Union, in which is garnered most of our national pride, with all of our national hope, which organized if it did not create our nationality, which is the very political life of our nationality, but, above all, in which American liberty must forever live or know no life, in which is contained the only true salus populi, and whose preservation is the highest of all national necessities.

Popular Self-Government.

The right of self-government in a people necessarily implies their right, when framing a government for themselves, to define and limit the powers of their official servants. The novel modern idea that a people cannot rightfully deny to those servants necessary or "indispensable" powers, is a pernicious absurdity, which would effectually destroy the very basis of all right of self-government, and relapse us back more than two centuries to the exploded doctrine of the absolutists of England.

Absolutism can obtain no foothold in this country till the nation proves recreant to the principles of civil liberty as taught by the great founders of the Government. According to that teaching, "absolute despotic power over the lives, the liberties, or the property of freemen, exists nowhere in a Republic, not even in the largest majority of the people." This great principle having been inconsiderately questioned in more modern times, the people of at least two States have thought proper to consecrate it by express adoption into their Constitutions. Of course the usurpation of despotic power cannot obtain even a moral sanction from any

supposed or implied approval by such majority of the people. Indeed the most eminent of enlightened philosophic English statesmen went still further, declaring that such power could not rightfully exist under any form of government. All governmental power depending for its moral basis, as he contended, upon the presumed assent of the Supreme Being, such power could rightfully exist nowhere, not even with the assent of the governed, as it would be impious to imply the assent of a beneficent God to its existence.

The Constitution.

After accomplishing independence and testing the inadequacy of the old articles of confederation, when the nation resolved to risk a national government with all powers necessary to a federative nationality, the main object was "to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity." This object is not merely proclaimed in the preamble, but is legible in the whole scope of the Constitution. All things were subordinated to that main idea, that chief desire.

Hence the great care to prevent consolidation as the deathdoom of liberty. In the language of the platform upon which President Lincoln was elected, and which he repeated in his inaugural speech, "the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially of the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions, according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend."

Hence the reservation, "to the States or the people of all power not delegated;" and the refusal to delegate any not deemed indispensable for national purposes, leaving much the larger amount of all governmental powers with the separate States, including its control of all domestic relations, the control of their elections, and the control of their militia through the appointment of militia officers.

Hence the subdivision of the power granted among three separate bodies of magistracy, neither of which was to exercise any power given to the others-one to make, another to adjudicate, and the third to execute the law.

Hence the guarantee that "the trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury;" also the guarantee of