been comparatively little complaint among the Pennsylvanians on that border against the institution as prejudicial to them. Their sole complaint has rather been against runaway or emancipated negroes as a nuisance. Abolitionism has found lodgment and active encouragement to much extent only in the remote parts of the State, where the practical working of negro slavery was unfelt and unknown. Pennsylvania has never given active aid to the abolition movement with the ascertained, unequivocal consent of a majority of her people.

Massachusetts, far away from all contact from negro slavery, feeling no effects from it but those of commercial benefit, acting under the irritation of prolonged exclusion from Federal power, and having the expulsion of her two sons from the Presidency to avenge, lent herself heartily to the Free-soil party movement, so soon as it ceased to be under the auspices and for the seeming benefit of antitariff Democrats. Being so deeply tainted with the sin of negro slavery by her extensive participation in its very worst crime, the African slave-trade, and by having sold her vote in the convention for keeping open that trade, she felt that she could not with decency place her co-operation in the movement upon humanitarian grounds, upon any philanthropic pretext. She therefore adopted the dogma with avidity, and has industriously propagated it as a cloak to her real purpose-the pursuit of political power. Nor is it surprising that she was not deterred from this selfish pursuit by the warnings of the danger of disunion, so earnestly pressed by nearly all our eminent statesmen, her own most distinguished sons included. If the feeling of pure, disinterested patriotism, of loyal love for Union and Constitution, had not been entirely worn out by the exacerbating effects of party conflicts, her conduct, as the originator of secession and attempted disunion, proves that the sentiment was greatly impaired. Pennsylvania stands a disinterested witness against the truth of the dogma, while Massachusetts is a tainted, suspected witness in its favor.

As further evidence of the irrepressible conflict between white and black labor, may be cited the many mob violences which free negroes have suffered in cities of the free States, and especially at Detroit, from white laborers, in the midst of those professing the most philanthropic sympathy for the poor negro. The unaf

fected revulsion or prejudice of race was so much more sincere and energetic, that the moral sentiment, real or feigned, had to succumb. So it must continue to be. It is much the bitterest part of the unfortunate doom of the poor negro, that in this, the land of his nativity, he can never find a happy home, even after emancipation. He can never enjoy in full measure the rights of a freeman, not even the most indispensable of all—the sure protection of the law. The inveterate, ineradicable prejudice of race will always prove stronger than the law. As said by Jefferson: "Nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same government, so insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinions have established between them." So also thought all our eminent statesmen of the past generation, unless John Quincy Adams be an exception, and so thought that distinguished foreigner and most enlightened observer of our institutions, De Tocqueville.

The fact being that the only conflict is between white and black and not between free and slave labor, nothing is done by emanci pation toward mitigating, much less toward eradicating the conflict and its cause. On the contrary, emancipation at the South will only serve to open there a new and more extended area for the conflict, while it will send to the North vastly increased numbers of free negroes to feel its merciless influence and bring additional reproach upon the impotency of the law. Experience has proved that prohibitory laws cannot keep free negroes from settling in the North. This evasion of the law will long be promoted by abolition sympathizers, until the accumulation becomes so great that black labor will stand forth an obvious competitor with white labor for inadequate employment. Whenever that day comes the black laborer will have to flee or perish, and your laws cannot protect him. His idleness, his thievingness, and his filthiness will afford palliatives if not seeming justification for the mob violence by which he will be oppressed.

If a thorough remedy for the only labor conflict be sought for, it must be found, as it can only be found, not in the eradication of slavery, but in the eradication of the negro.

This view of the subject will enable every voter better to judge

the trustworthiness of the dominant party, who have abolitionized the war, and who are undisguisedly prosecuting it, not for Union restoration, but for abolition. It will enable him to judge the statesmanship and patriotism of President Lincoln, as manifested by his recent pronunciamento, in which he proclaims, as an unalterable sine qua non to any terms of pacification or restoration, the unqualified surrender by the Southern States of their right to self-government by their submission to his dictated abolition.

CHAPTER III

SANCTITY OF THE CONSTITUTION.

FIRST PUBLISHED JULY, 1864.

No. I.

"Give me liberty or give me death!" the noble sentiment which inaugurated the American Revolution, was also the controlling principle while inaugurating our nationality under the safeguard of the Federal Constitution.

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. To that end a free republic was ordained—that is, a government of law, and liberty-securing government of law, was deemed the only government worth having. All things were subordinated to that main idea, that chief desire. There can be no such government unless the law be supreme. To make it so and keep it so resort was had to the then comparatively new device or experiment of a written constitution, defining the powers of the governors and the rights of the governed. This it was hoped and believed would preserve the law in constant supremacy, at all times and under all circumstances. As the organizer, if not the very creator, of our nationality, the Constitution would have peculiar claims to popular reverence and affection. As the great law of the nation's own making, as our great national compact, as the great national compact of a nation of freemen, defining their rights and duties toward each other and all the duties of patriotism toward a common country, as the great conservator of the nation's liberty, it would be entitled to receive, and, as it was confidently believed, would receive, the nation's unstinted reverence and love. All knew the necessity of this. All knew that where law ceases tyranny begins; that there can be no life for

liberty but in the unceasing supremacy of the law. But it was also known, by the practical men who framed the Government, that mere feelings of affection, mere sense of duty, were not always sufficient to keep men in obedience to any written law, however sacred and important. It was not deemed sufficient by precept and example to teach that the Constitution should always be viewed as the American holy of holies, as the consecrated depository, the only safeguard of the nation's liberty; it was therefore ordered that its support should be more effectually insured by a solemn oath to be taken by all officials, Federal and State. There being one officer who, from the vast extent of his power, his peculiar liability to be influenced by bad passions and sinister personal inducement, was the object of peculiarly jealous dread, an official oath was required of him of especial emphasis. The President was required solemnly to swear: "I will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

This comprehensive oath admits no evasion, permits no mental reservation, allows nothing but implicit obedience. In the earlier and better days of the Republic the imputation of a willful violation of this oath would have been deemed as a charge of want of personal honor and veracity, as a recreancy to the highest duty of patriotism. That man's conscience is not a thing to be admired, who will take the oath to obtain power and then use the power to destroy the Constitution; who takes the oath with a mental reservation of the right to break it whenever he should deem it "indispensable" to use non-granted power, substituting his own wisdom and discretion for those of the nation as to what are or are not indispensable; who takes the oath and then substitutes his own arbitrary will in lieu of law and Constitution; or, who takes the oath and then in betrayal of his great trust, substitutes a military despotism for our free Republic.

The excuse of violating the Constitution for the purpose of preserving it, having no possible basis in fact or morality, can only serve to justify the worst suspicion as to the real motive of those resorting to such pretext as even an extenuation, much less a justification of their great crime in the violation of their official oaths. There is but the one only mode of preserving the Constitution—that is, obedience. All other modes, whatever the simu