Some of the states were not established on this principle. They were established a long time ago, and under circumstances which prevented the adoption of this principle. For those states, members of our Union, who have been unable or even unwilling to adopt this principle, I have only to say that I leave them free to enjoy whatever of happiness, and to attain whatever of prosperity, they can enjoy and attain with their system. But when I am called upon to establish a government for a new state, then I demand the application of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that every man ought to be and shall be a free man. Society can have but two forms by which the individual can defend himself from oppression. One is that which puts a musket into his hand and tells him as the last resort to defend himself and his liberty. The other is that which puts into his hand the ballot, and tells him in every exigency to defend his rights with the ballot. I do maintain that in founding a new state we have the perfect liberty as well as the perfect right to establish a government which shall secure every man in his rights; or rather, I do say that you must put into every man's hand, not the hands of one, the ballot; or put into every man's hand, and not into the hands of a few, the bullet, so that every man shall be equal before the law in his power as a citizen. All men shall have the ballot, or none; all men shall have the bullet,

or none.

Having engaged to be in Chicago on the second of October, Mr. Seward was now obliged to pursue his journey with as few delays as possible. He left St. Joseph early in the morning of Saturday, the thirtieth of September, and reached St. Louis about midnight. Here, also, he had hoped to escape any public attention. But the telegraph had reported his coming an hour before his arrival, and the usual demonstrations of a procession, music and fireworks had been quickly prepared for his reception. Notwithstanding the unseasonable hour and the fatigue of a long day's travel, Mr. Seward could not resist the earnest appeals of the multitude to address them. It was one o'clock in the morning when he began to speak. The people were, nevertheless, enthusiastic, and attentive in their listening.

'Mr. Seward said that he had come across the Mississippi, not to see St. Louis or the people of Missouri, but to see Kansas, which was entitled to his gratitude and respect. Missouri could take care of herself: she did not care for republican principles, but warred with them altogether. If, forty years ago, Missouri had chosen to be a free state, she would now have four millions of people, instead of one million. He was a plain-spoken man, and was here talking treason in the streets of St. Louis. He could not talk anything else, if he talked as an honest man; but he found himself out of place here. Here, said he, are the people of Missouri, who ask me to make a speech, and, at the same time, have laws regulating what I shall say. The first duty that you owe to your city and to yourselves is to repeal and abrogate every law on your statute book that prohibits a man from saying what his honest judgment and sentiment and heart tell him is the truth.

Though I have said these hard things about the state of Missouri, I have no hard sentiments about it or St. Louis, for I have great faith and hope-nay, absolute trust-in Providence and the American people. What Missouri wants is courage, resolution, spirit, manhood—not consenting to take only that privilege of speech that slaveholders allow, but insisting on complete freedom of speech.

"But I have full trust that it will all come right in the end; that, in ten years, you will double your population, and that, in fifteen or twenty years, you will have four millions of people. To secure that, you have but to let every man who comes here, from whatever state or nation, speak out what he believes will promote the interests and welfare of mankind. What surprised me in Kansas was to see the vast improvements made there within six years, with so little wealth or strength among the people; and what surprises me most in Missouri is, that, with such a vast territory and with such great resources, there is, after so long a settlement, so little of population, improvement and strength to be found. I ought not, perhaps, to talk these things to you. I should have begun at the other end of the story. But how could I? It is true, a citizen of any other state has as much liberty here as the citizens of Missouri; but he has less liberty than I like. I want more than you have. I want to speak what I think, instead of what a Missourian thinks. I certainly want to speak for myself, or else not to speak at all. Is not that fair? I think you are in a fair way of shaming your government into an enlightened position on this subject of slavery. You are in the way of being Germanized into it. I would much rather you had got into it by being Americanized instead of Germanized; but it is better to come to it through that way than not to come to it at all.

"It was through the Germans Germanizing Great Britain that Magna Charta was obtained, and that that great charter of English liberty came to be the charter of the liberties of the sons of England throughout the whole world. Whatever lies in my power to do to bring into successful and practical operation the great principle that this government is a government for free men and not for slaves or slaveholders, and that this country is to be the home of the exile from every land, I shall do. This, however, can only be done by the exercise of free speech. You can do little yourselves in the same direction until you have secured free debate. Therefore, I finish, as I began, by exhorting you to secure freedom of speech. That once gained, all other freedoms shall be added thereto."

1

Mr. Seward resumed his journey early on Monday morning. At Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln, the train stopped for twenty minutes. Mr. Seward was cordially greeted here by a great crowd of the citizens, among whom were Mr. Lincoln and Senator Trumbull. Mr. Seward, in response to the general desire, made a few remarks to the people assembled. Standing on the platform of the car, in company with his distinguished friends, after the cheers of the multitude and the firing of cannon had ceased, he said:

Mr. Seward's remarks were loudly cheered. It was replied that the laws against free specek were a dead letter, and that St. Louis was already a free city-" as free as Boston."

"I am happy to express, on behalf of the party with whom I am traveling, our gratitude and acknowledgments for this kind and generous reception at the home of your distinguished fellow citizen, our excellent and honored candidate for the chief magistracy of the United States. If there is in any part of the country a deeper interest felt in his election than there is in any other part, it must of course be here, where he has lived a life of usefulness; where he is surrounded by the companions of his labors and of his public services. We are happy to report to you, although we have traveled over a large part of the country, we have found no doubtful states.

"You would naturally expect that I should say something about the temper and disposition of the state of New York. The state of New York will give a generous and cheerful and effective support to your neighbor Abraham Lincoln. I have heard about combinations and coalitions there, and I have been urged from the beginning to abandon this journey and turn back on my footsteps.

Whenever

I shall find any reason to suspect that the majority which the state of New York will give for the republican candidate will be less than sixty thousand votes, I may do so. The state of New York never fails-never flinches. She has been committed from the beginning, as she will be to the end, under all circumstances, to the great principles of the republican party.

"She voted to establish this a land of freedom for you in 1787. She sustained the ordinance of '87 till you were able to take care of yourselves. Among the first acts of her government, she abolished slavery for herself. She has known nothing of compromises, nothing of condition or qualification in this great principle, and she never will. She will sustain your distinguished neighbor because she knows he is true to this great principle, and when she has helped to elect him, by giving as large a majority as can be given by any half dozen other states, then you will find that she will ask less, exact less, from him, and support him more faithfully than any other state can do. That is the way she did with John Quincy Adams, that is the way she sustained General Taylor, and that is the way she will sustain Abraham Lincoln."

Mr. Seward reached Chicago about seven o'clock in the evening. The depot, and the streets around, were crowded with people. An imposing escort accompanied him to the hotel. The streets through. which the procession passed were thronged with enthusiastic multitudes. Fireworks were displayed from many of the public and private buildings, and the whole scene was a grand ovation. At the hotel, Mr. Seward, alighting from the carriage, reached the house only by the efficient intervention of the police, returning the salutations of the people as he passed. He soon appeared on the balcony in company with John Wentworth, the mayor of Chicago. After an introductory speech' from the mayor, Mr. Seward addressed the large assemblage as follows:

See Appendix.

"MR. MAYOR AND FELLOW CITIZENS: The exaggerated terms in which you have spoken of such public services, recent or long past, as I have rendered will not mislead me. I have a stern conscience, the approval of which I must seek, and which must be the guide for my public conduct. But I should be ungracious to you, and ungrateful to my fellow citizens, who have honored me with this magnificent manifestation of their respect and esteem, if I did not freely and openly confess my entire satisfaction with its sincerity and my appreciation of the affection and respect which it testifies. How deeply, how sincerely that respect and affection touch me, there is nobody but myself can know, and I, unfortunately, can never tell. [A voice, Louder!'] I beg pardon, my dear friend, I can speak no louder; I have been speaking for a month. You must take me as I am. If I had possessed the power I should have done more than I have already, elsewhere. Besides I have some duty to perform to-morrow.

MR. MAYOR AND CITIZENS OF CHICAGO: I may say in almost one sentence all that I can claim for myself. From my earliest experience as a citizen of this country, I was not ignorant of the advance of empire across the Alleghany mountains and into the valley of the Mississippi. The number of states, which since my manhood, have been added to the Federal Union, and their location in the west are hardly more certain in my knowledge now than they were in my conjectured anticipation at that early period.

"And I knew another truth, which has been a guide to me throughout my experience as a representative man; I knew that, whereas in other countries commerce and those engaged in it had been the controlling element and the controlling power of modern civilization; yet that in this country and under the circumstances surrounding us, commerce was not to be the controlling power, but that I have never been ignorant-never for a moment been unconscious-that the political power which directs the destinies of this nation, is exercised by those of our countrymen who cultivate the soil, not those who sell its products in the market.

"Even the wayfaring man, though a fool, might know where the mass of those people who should till the soil would be found. They could be found nowhere else but westward from the Alleghany mountains, and eastward from the Pacific ocean, somewhere between British America on the one side and the gulf of Mexico on the other. This being so, it has seemed to me the simplest duty of policy to take care that those people who were to till the soil-this American soil-and in the act of cultivating it become the rulers of the destinies of this mighty nation, should, in the first place, be located, as far as circumstances would allow, not upon slave soil, but upon free soil-that they should not be owned by masters or owners, but that they should own themselves. And if my public life, my present system-that which I commend to the acceptance of my countrymen with such ability as I may have-need any exposition whatever, this is the simple truth and the whole of it.

Neither you nor I have any power to disturb those of our fellow citizens in the southern states who maintain a different system; and having no power there we have no responsibility. We need not fear that right, and justice, and humanity, will not prevail in this world, even though we are not in all the fields where battles are to be fought, or instructions are to be given to secure their triumph. There have been already six of the thirteen original states of this confederacy redeemed by the citizens of those states themselves, without interference or inter

vention from abroad. All the others that remain may be left under the influence -the increasing influence of Christianity, to say nothing of policy, to deliver themselves from that curse from which we have been saved without any interference of our own.

Non-intervention in the states by free men is but half, however, of the motto of the republican party-non-intervention by slaveholders in the territories of the United States is the residue

"And so, having abused your hospitality and kindness by setting forth a creed, which I had better reserved for another occasion, I beg you to accept my apology for failing to deliver you a longer address now, and to accept my best wishes that you may repose in peace and quiet to-night, and to-morrow, although it is said to be a great loan to ask, I will pray you to lend me your ears and I will try to see how many of them I can fill."

The trains and steamboats which arrived during the night and early the following morning brought into Chicago, from all the northern portions of Illinois and vicinity, an unprecedented number of people.' At noon, a hundred thousand had filled the city. Mr. Seward spoke, in an open square, to as many as could come within the reach of his voice, while thousands, at the same time, were listening in other places to James W. Nye and Owen Lovejoy. Mr. Seward's speech, which will be found in succeeding pages, is one of the most interesting of the series made by him during the campaign. It touched the hearts of the thousands who heard it, and of the millions who have read it. In the evening Mr. Seward was serenaded by the wide-awakes, in a procession that seemed interminable.

He left Chicago on the following day, arriving in Cleveland on the morning of the fourth. The day was rainy, but a handsome reception was given to him by the citizens of Cleveland and its neighborhood, who, in large numbers, assembled in the city park, where he was to speak. He commenced with an earnest appeal for the starving population of Kansas:

"We have visited Kansas, and I ask your leave to bring the condition of that territory before you, for your careful and kind consideration. The soil and the skies of Kansas are as propitious as any people on earth ever enjoyed—the people as free, as true, and as brave as any in the world. They are suffering severely from a drought so great that I think it was scarcely exaggerated when they told me they had had no rain in a large portion of the territory for a whole year. We found that whole districts had produced less vegetable support for human life than are to be found in many a garden which we have passed in coming through the state of Ohio. Districts in which the winter wheat, sowed last year, was neces

The number was estimated at over fifty thousand.