go to my home and ask the ballot to speak its denunciation. A few months, and that expression will be had. On it depends the fate of the Republic. My belief is, that the people will write the epitaph of this Congress, nearly as Gladstone wrote that of the Coalition ministry during the Crimean war:

Here lies the ashes of the XXXVII. Congress!
It found the United States in a war of
gigantic proportions, involving
its very existence.

It was content to wield the sceptre of Power
and accept the emoluments of office;

and used them to overthrow

the political and social system of the country, which
it was sworn to protect.

It saw the fate of thirty-four white commonwealths in peril ;
but it babbled of the
NEGRO!

It saw its patriotic generals and soldiers in the
field, under the old flag.

It slandered the one, and in the absence of the other,
it destroved his means of labor.

It talked of Liberty to the black, and
piled burdens of taxation on white people
for utopian schemes.

The people launched at it the thunderbolt
of their wrath;

and its members sought to avoid punishment,
by creeping into dishonored

political graves
Requiescat!

MEANING OF THE ELECTIONS OF 1862.

CONSERVATISM AND RADICALISM-PERVERSION OF THE WAR-ITS PROLONGATION-DISMISSAL OF GENERALS-IS COMPROMISE POSSIBLE? IF SO, WHEN?-LAWS OF WAR-MAXIMS OF VATTEL -HOW PEACE MAY BE HAD-ENGLISH PERFIDY-FRENCH AND FOREIGN MEDIATIONNATIONAL CONVENTION.

Delivered in the House of Representatives December 15, 1862.

Mr. CHAIRMAN: It has been a custom in all civilized countries and a part of the Constitution of all free countries, for the administration to yield to the popular will whenever it is clearly ascertained. In England, when the Ministry are voted down, they surrender their portfolios to the Queen. Even in parliament, which is but an imperfect representative of the British people, no Minister, however popular, can withstand the sentiment of the Commons. He must resign or rule under the scorn of the nation. In 1832, even the Duke of Wellington was not "iron" enough to resist the popular cry of "Reform." In 1846, when Cobden and Bright on the hustings, Villiers, in the House, and Elliott in song, raised the cry of Repeal of the Corn Laws and cheap bread for the people, the landed aristocracy, who had the power, crumbled before the

power of the popular voice. Sir Robert Peel, the greatest statesman since Chatham, bowed to the decree. The nation yet honors him for this magnanimous statesmanship. Later, during the Crimean war, its gross mismanagement, shown up by an untrammelled press, drove an incompetent Ministry from power, by a vote of the Commons. In Prussia, in France, and even in Austria, the sovereign and his advisers do not fail to conciliate the public mind by some graces of obedience. But here, sir, in this boasted free country, when our great States have pronounced against this Congress, and against its emancipation and other schemes, we have mockery, defiance, and persistency in wrong doing. The people have raised their voice against irresponsible arrests; this House, on its first day, votes down my resolutions, drawn in the language of every Bill of Rights in America, and refuses inquiry into these outrages upon the citizen. The people have condemned that worst relic of the worst times of French tyranny, the lettres de cachet; yet this House, with indecorous hurry, lash through a bill of indemnity, which is to confiscate all the rights and remedies of the outraged citizen-a bill, sir, which, if pleaded by a minion of power, the Courts would laugh to scorn. The people have condemned the edict of emancipation-an edict which Mr. Seward, on the 10th of March last, in a letter to Mr. Adams, declared "would reinvigorate the declining insurrection in every part of the South;" yet we have the Presidential Message, which proposes to adhere to the condemned proclamation; and in addition thereto proposes a compensated system of emancipation, running to the end of the century. The people desired the war to be continued on one line of policy, declared by us last July a year, for the Constitution and the Union; but this contumacious assembly are determined to force it from that line, or abandon the Union.

My colleague [Mr. HUTCHINS] spoke the other day for the majority here, and gloried in that radicalism which would "reinvigorate the rebellion." I think the Irish orator had my colleague in his eye, when he spoke of the "universal genius of emancipation." He glories in being a radical because he goes to the root. I propose to tap that root for a few moments. His speech is not upon a new theme, nor is it freshly handled. Its point is its audacious disregard of the sentiment of his own State and of the North. He is wiser than the "elders" of the Republic, whom he stigmatizes for they never found, what he has learned from other and recent sources, that Slavery and freedom are incompatible in our system. He pretends that the real cause of the rebellion lies in this irreconcilable antagonism. He forgets that seventy-five years of our history disprove his fallacies. He urges such antagonism for military reasons; when the truth is, his party got power by propagating this very heresy of hate. The scheme of exterminating slavery as a war measure is an afterthought. He claims moreover the right under the Constitution to free all the slaves, because slavery is incompatible with that clause which guarantees to each State a republican form of government. He grows wiser than the "elders," who framed the Constitution, and who lived in Slave States when it was made. He thinks the Congress and the Executive can unmake the State governments and make new governments for the South when subjugated. He thus becomes as much of a Disunionist and traitor as Davis. My colleague reproves the President for his delusion, because the Presi

dent hopes for relief by compensated emancipation in 1900. In this, the daring radicalism of my colleague outstrips even that of the Administration. He favors a "Union as it will be, when slavery is eradicated,” and that makes him a radical. He says radicalism goes to the root. So it does. So the savants whom Gulliver found employed the hog to do ploughing, to save the wear and tear of honest agriculture. He would have us root out slavery or die. Indeed, in picturing our "armies penetrating the territory of the rebellion, carrying with them this military order of freedom inscribed upon their banner," he would have his halting friends, like the President, "dare" more; he quotes the language of Mirabeau, the revolutionist, urging no revolt-no revolt-by halves, no timidity, no hesitation from a sense of duty, no sacrifice of passion, no half-way indecision in treason; and he exhorts his confederates in abolition that it is better to be resolutely bad than indecisively honest! This is the language of revolution, and the spirit of Satan as Milton pictures him in hell. The quotation of my colleague is felicitous; but it is a relief to know that his comrades in revolt have not the daring of Davis, the manliness of Mirabeau, or the intellect of Satan. He indulges in comparisons between this radicalism, which he espouses, and that conservatism which is now organized under the Democratic name. The word conservative is not the name of a party. It is an element now dominant among the people. It represents the principle of repose and strength; the ideas of order and law. It defends the Constitution. It would restore the Union. When the gentleman likens it to the Israelites who hankered for the slavery of Egypt; when he says that those who prefer the Union as it was, are like the Tories of the Revolution; when he likens them to the Scribes and Pharisees, who preferred the doctrines of the elders, he perpetrates superficial nonsense. To stigmatize those who are in favor of the Union of Washington as like the Tories whom Washington fought, is worse than the silliest bathos of a mediocre poet, whom Horace says gods, men, and booksellers despise. To liken the conservative voice just uttered at our elections to the lust of the Israelites for the fleshpots of Egypt, has not the dignity of a schoolgirl's rhapsody. The simile which he drew between the Scribes and Pharisees, and those who reverence the Constitution because it is the work of the "elders," smacks of a supercilious egotism which it is idle to answer. There are no such analogies between the parties of the day. No comparisons are needed to show the differences between the radicalism which uproots to destroy, and the conservatism which would guard to save. I would like to know the difference in spirit between the radicalism of secession, which contemned the constitutional majority and set up for itself on slavery principles, and the radicalism which now defies the people's will to set up for itself on anti-slavery ideas.

This radical party of the gentleman has been in power 651 dayssince the 4th of March, 1861, to the present time. What is the result? I do not now ask who has caused this result; but what is our condition under the agents selected at Chicago by a sectional organization, acting with those of similar radical views in the South? 1st. A confederation of thirty-three States, to which appurtenant were seven Territories, has been torn into two parts, under severed and belligerent governments. 2d.

From a state of concord the people of these States have been made hostile ; and one-half of the people of these States, capable under the law of bearing arms, have become consumers instead of peaceable producers of wealth. 3d. That these men, numbering perhaps two millions, connected with the armies of the North and South, are costing the people at least $1,000,000 per day, which is not being replaced; for all that is spent in war is, by the laws of economy, a loss to those who spend it, as a mere pecuniary transaction, and not counting ultimate and moral results. 4th. That since this Administration came into power there has been lost to this country, merely as a matter of business, not counting debt and taxes of a national or State character, at least three hundred millions in the destruction of property, interference with established business, increase in wages, spoliation of railroads, depots, produce, corn, wheat, flour, cotton, hay, crops, &c. 5th. That the debt of this country at this time, if all the liabilities not liquidated are included, and not including the eighty millions left by the preceding Administration, amounts to the sum of one thousand millions; and by the 1st of July, 1864, will, in my judg ment, amount to twenty-five hundred millions. The estimates for the army alone for the next year are $700,000,000. 6th. That we have now a system of taxation by tariff which imposes a burden on the West, to benefit manufacturing in New England, and pays indirectly sixty millions into the Treasury and hundreds of millions into the pockets of capitalists, from the consumers, who are mostly farmers of the West. 7th. That we have now a system of internal taxation, costing for collection some four millions extra, which might have been saved, and levying in one year $150,000,000 as interest only on a great national debt, and with an army of newly made office-holders, with exorbitant salaries. 8th. That within these 651 days, a party has succeeded which proposes, by legislation and proclamation, to break down a labor system in eleven States, of four millions of negroes whose industry has been productive hitherto, worth, on or before the 4th of March, 1861, an average of $500 apiece, being in all two thousand millions of dollars; and when this capital is destroyed, the objects of this pseudo-philanthropy will remain on hand, North and South, as a mass of dependent and improvident black beings, for whose care the tax will be almost equal to the war tax, before their condition will again be fixed safely and prosperously. 9th. That within these 651 days, the rights of personal liberty, freedom from arrest without process, freedom for press and speech, and the right of habeas corpus have been suspended and limited, and, at times, destroyed; and in the place of resurrected and promised liberty to four million blacks, we have had the destruction of that liberty which the past 800 years have awarded to the Anglo-Saxon race. 10th. That for the specie currency of a few years ago, we have already in circulation millions of depreciated government promises to pay, ranging from $1,000 notes down to five cent shinplasters. 11th. That we have the promise of a bankrupt law at this session, as the wholesale result of these commercial derangements. 12th. That we have had killed in these 651 days at least 150,000 of the best youth of the country on bloody fields of battle, and nearly the same number by sickness in camps and hospitals. 13th. That by the decision of the courts, already given as to the laws of this Congress-the legal tender and the confisca

tion acts-we learn that there is a general encroachment by one department of the government upon the other. 14th. That the Christian religion has been defiled by its teachers, and civilization set back a half century by the demoralization incident to these unhappy events.

This is the radicalism of my colleague. Conservatism has played the radical so far as to uproot this gigantic upas tree, whose shade poisons the nation's life. It would cover over and refresh the exposed roots of the goodly tree planted by the fathers, that it may grow again, and blossom and bear fruit for the children.

Is it necessary to illustrate the differences between the radicalism and conservatism now operating in our politics? I will not go back to Egypt, or Palestine, or even to the Revolution. We have in our midst subjects of comparison. The gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. STEVENS], with an intellect like a demi-god, clamoring for a Dictator, and scoffing at the Constitution, infinite in his power of mischief, might well illustrate radicalism; while the gentleman from Kentucky [Mr. CRITTENDEN], with a heart as large as his intellect, would illustrate the opposite. One defends contractors, palliates peculation, and assaults investigating committees. Given the leadership here in this time of peril, he uses it to preach a salus populi suprema lex, as of higher sanction than his oath to the Constitution. He deals in invective, and talks of being provoked by a constitutional opposition or a modest suggestion. He would tear down the fabric of his government to vent his spite on an institution about which he has no business. During this session he voted for the dismemberment of Virginia, and gave these radical reasons:

"For I will not stultify myself by supposing that we have any warrant in the Constitution for this proceeding. This talk of restoring the Union as it was under the Constitution as it is, is one of the absurdities I have heard repeated until I have become sick about it. This Union can never be restored as it was. There are many things which render such an event impossible. This Union shall never with my consent be restored under the Constitution as it is, with slavery to be protected by it."

Such language would befit the Richmond Congress. He who utters it, is indeed no Conservative. Turn to that other in our midst—a man of gray hairs-no counterfeit glory upon his head, but the glory of a long, useful, and patriotic career. He comes to us from his retirement in Kentucky to represent the people among whom Henry Clay lived and died, to counsel us in this our country's trial. He bids us manifest temperance in the very torrent and tempest of this anti-slavery frenzy. His course may arouse the sneers and ire of the radical. He may be likened to the sensual Israelite, the hypocritical Pharisee, or the obsequious Tory; but the people know him as one who would have saved them from the war, and who would now lead them to an honorable peace. His conservatism would not pull down. It would build up. It abounds not in empty cries of humanity about the blacks. It would save this western world to constitu

tional freedom for the white. It looks forward to the day when the old time shall come again, under the old flag. It fears to let loose vengeance in the form of atrocious confiscations and cruel spoliation of non-combatants and deluded fellow-countrymen. It would give laws to war. It would conserve the home, the State, the institutions of the country-the Republic! It would never heal political grudges by mercenary contracts. It