AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE NATIONAL CLUB OF SALEM, MARCH 13, 1863. BY JOEL PARKER. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON. AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE NATIONAL CLUB OF SALEM, MARCH 13, 1863. By JOEL PARKER. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON. Mem. It may well be supposed, from its length, that some portions of this Address were omitted in the delivery. order more fully to develop the argument. Additions have been made, in ADDRESS. GENTLEMEN OF THE NATIONAL CLUB: We are prone to believe what we wish to be true. "Thy wish was father to that thought," expresses a great truth as fully to-day as it has ever done heretofore. Especially is this tendency of the mind active and conspicuous in times of excitement, when of course the exercise of the reasoning faculties is the more difficult, and the temptation to adopt the results of feeling and inclination is all the more powerful. In such periods, it requires much less of effort on the part of designing, interested, unscrupulous politicians, to impose their fallacies and their sophisms, their false premises and their mischievous conclusions, upon an excited, and therefore, to some extent, greater or less, an unreasoning community. In such periods, great and sudden changes of opinion on the part of the leaders of a party are followed by corresponding changes, not only among those who hang upon their skirts for the purpose of procuring preferment, favor, profitable contracts, for the purpose of passing off shoddy as a merchantable fabric, for the purpose of covering up defalcations as public agents,- for the purpose of escaping punishment for abuses of power, but also on the part of that portion of the rank and file of the party who are ever ready to believe that the party is right, because they desire its success. In nothing has this tendency of the mind, and this course of action, been made more manifest, recently, than in meas-" ures adopted by the administration of the General Government, and in the support of those measures, which are founded upon interpretations of the Constitution at variance with its plainest principles; and in assumptions of power which convert republican institutions, framed for the purpose |