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CORRESPONDENCE.

MANCHESTER, N. H., Feb. 16, 1861.

RICHARD H. DANA, JR., Esq.-Dear Sir: By the unanimous vote of the Repub. lican Club of this city, we take pleasure in inviting you to address the Republicans of Manchester, Tuesday evening next, upon the questions now agitating our country, and the demands they make upon us as loyal citizens thereof.

FREDERICK SMYTH,

President of Republican Club. A. B. SHATTUCK, Secretary.

The undersigned, Republicans of Manchester, having read with great satisfaction your speech delivered on Monday evening last to the Republicans of Cambridge, Mass., gladly join in the above request, and trust that you may find it convenient to accept the invitation of our city club :

Herman Foster, E. A. Straw, Moody Currier, Isaac W. Smith, Thomas Wheat, D. L. Stevens, S. D. Lord, Waterman Smith, Samuel Upton, David Cross, D. I. Daniels, I. B. Chase.

BOSTON, Feb. 18, 1861.

GENTLEMEN: As Congress, and the Legislatures of most of the States, and the Advisory Convention, are in session, from which we hear daily men who speak from the vantage-ground of public office; as events change rapidly the complexion of public affairs; and especially, as two weeks will bring us the inaugural address of the new President; I should not think, in my own judgment, that a speech by a private citizen could be of much value or interest.

I presented this view frankly to your Committee, when they called upon me. The response has been your letter of the 16th inst., largely signed, I am told, by men of chief influence and prominence in your city.

I cheerfully yield to this request, hoping that your call will shield me from the suspicion of having put forward a claim upon public attention.

I am gratefully, with high respect,

Yours truly,

RICHARD H. DANA, JR.

The Officers of the Republican Club, and Hon. Herman Foster, Hon. Moody Currier, and others.

SPEECH.

Mr. President, AND FELLOW-CITIZENS OF MAnchester :

The President-elect was entirely right when he said that there has been no crisis, but an artificial, a factitious crisis. The movement which has disturbed our peace, and periled the Government, and from which we are not yet wholly escaped, has not been a spontaneous movement of the Southern mind to resist threatened wrong, and to obtain security against apprehended danger. A large number of leading public men have acted in co-operation to effect a revolution, contemplating the exercise of military force in the last resort, if necessary. In other words, it has been a conspiracy!

So far as resort to force is concerned, -so far as an attempt to coerce the General Government by intimidation is concerned, we have perhaps escaped the peril, and may draw a long breath of relief. But the causes and many of the effects remain; and there is yet much for the people to think about, to determine upon, and upon which it is our duty, as well as it is our right, to make our determination known.

I cannot better perform the duty you have assigned me, than by attempting to examine into the past and present of this dark period, in the hope of getting the necessary light for our immediate action.

By the sweat of our brow, we are to eat our bread. Enjoyment of every kind is conditioned upon labor of some kind. By the sweat of our brow, we are to carry on this Republic. Popular selfgovernment is conditioned on the intelligent labor of the great body of the people in public affairs. When that ceases, from whatever cause, the sun of the republican system declines to the horizon. Anarchy may not, and probably will not follow. Government of some sort, a living social system, is a necessity of divine ordination, in which great powers must be lodged somewhere, and exercised somehow. All republics but ours, whether in ancient or modern times, have been built upon an aristocratical basis. Upon the theory that the government which is best administered is best, and upon the fact that the few possessed the intelligence and the stake necessary to make able and responsible governors, the few did govern. This is somewhat the case in most of the Southern States of our Union, though not from an avowed aristocratical theory, but from the inevitable result of an exclusive slave labor of a different race. But, in the Northern States, the tribunal of original jurisdiction and of final appeal is the great body of the people. It is true, the people never vote upon measures; we only

vote for men. But our votes for and against men, representing principles, and the various ways we have of influencing our appointed agents who vote on measures, lodge with us the responsibility for public affairs.

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In times of peace and prosperity, we leave all to routine, and trust, in overweening confidence, to the working of machinery. These are often periods of our greatest danger. It is not without wise purpose that the Liturgy calls for divine deliverance, - “in all time of our prosperity." We are now in the midst of events which remind us of our duty, and of the danger of neglecting it. Every man who does not do his best to understand these questions is unfaithful to his trust. Every man who is ignorant of them is a nullity. Every man who misunderstands them is a nuisance. If the farmer would not have his ploughshares beaten into swords; if the lawyer would not have his laws silent among arms; if the merchant would not carry to the account of loss the results of a disorganized and ineffectual government, each must consent to give the best of his moral and mental strength, for a while, to his public duties. Edmund Burke tried to raise the torpid minds of the House of Lords to an unwonted elevation, by telling them that, in the trial of Warren Hastings, they were trying "the cause of Asia in the presence of Europe." We, too, though without the pomp of heraldry, are trying a great cause, in a great presence, the cause of a Continent, in the presence of the civilized world. For my small share in this cause, I should be ashamed of myself if I hesitated to give the hours of this evening to a conference, at this centre of political influence in a sister State, upon such an invitation as has been tendered to me by you. I think you will find a sufficient definition of a Conservative, for practical purposes, to be this: A man who is able to form the same opinions before attaining to administration, which the responsibilities of administration will inevitably bring him to. This sort of conservatism I have always endeavored to attain unto. It has its drawbacks. It obliges a man to measure his words. It compels him to preserve some relations between the ends he aims at and his means, between his plan and the execution of it; and, above all, it compels him to deny himself that most exquisite of American luxuries, the luxury of unrestrained rhetoric. But it has its satisfactions; one of the greatest of which is that in times of exigency, a man is not put to the mortification of being obliged to recede from opinions and positions which he has himself held, and which he has encouraged others to hold. And I can truly say that I have seen nothing in the present aspect of public affairs, nothing in the events of the last few months, which has compelled me, as a single private person, to abate anything from the political principles which I have held the last twelve years.

We are often told, fellow-citizens, that the North can save the Union; and men from the South are constantly saying to us, "You from the North can save the Union from its danger." The South

can do more than that. The South can prevent the danger. The Union is safe, if the South does nothing.

I have said that this has not been a spontaneous movement of the Southern people, but a factitious crisis, brought on by conspiring men. It is too soon, now, to fathom this attempt at revolution, and to state with precision its ends and means. But some things are of established knowledge.

Nearly thirty years ago, Gen. James Hamilton was crying to the people of South Carolina, "I know you will go to the death with me for my sugars." Gen. Jackson, in his letter to Mr. Crawford in 1833, said, “The tariff was only a pretext, and disunion and a Southern Confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro or slavery question."

Mr. Madison, in his letter to Henry Clay in 1833, said, "It is painful to see the unceasing efforts to alarm the South by imputations against the North of unconstitutional designs on the subject of slavery. You are right, I have no doubt, in believing that no such intermeddling disposition exists in the body of our Northern brethren."

Mr. Calhoun's resolves of 1837 were described in the newspaper of Mr. Isaac Hill, of this State, as "the beginning of the agitation." Even Mr. Buchanan charged Mr. Calhoun with increasing the agitation, and making Washington its centre. Mr. Crittenden declared that "the course of irritation, agitation, and intimidation he [Mr. Calhoun] has chalked out, is the surest method of destroying the Union." Mr. Clay speaks of it as "increasing and exasperating the existing agitation." Of the same character and tendency have been the gag-laws, or rules respecting petitions, Mr. Calhoun's resolves of 1847, the continued annexations and attempts at further annexations South, the desire to extend slavery over all the territories, the attempt to force it upon Kansas, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the attempts to obtain decisions from the Supreme Court, fastening Slavery on the Republic, both politically and territorially.

The effect of these measures has been to change slavery from a State question and a moral question, into a national and political question, and to make slavery a legitimate and necessary matter of debate in Congress and before the people.

Col. Benton's diary, for the last twenty years of his life, is an accumulation of overwhelming proof of the desire and design of the "Calhoun democracy" to dissolve the Union, or, at least, to coerce a reconstruction of it upon a southern, slaveholding basis. Such has been the belief of Madison, Jackson, Clay, and Benton. Such became gradually the avowal of Calhoun. His posthumous correspondence now establishes the fact, by his own confession, that his policy, from 1837 until his death, was, in his own words, to "shift the basis of Southern union," from the tariff to the slavery question, and to "force this issue on the North." And now the mask is thrown off by all, and the desire of thirty years' growth has borne fruit in overt treason.

The revolutionists may be divided into two classes: those whose object has been a Southern Confederacy, and those whose object has been a reconstruction of the Constitution on a slaveholding basis, with such free States as could be induced to acquiesce in the change. It is certain that South Carolina has been openly and boldly in the former class. It is not certain how far other States and their public men have been treating secession as an end, and how far as a means of coercion. But whether the one or the other, these men have co-operated. The States were to follow one another in rapid and precipitated acts of secession. Virginia was to stand sponsor and guardian for secession, to protect the seceding States from coercion, and in due time to come in herself. This was to have swept away Maryland. The District of Columbia having been ceded by Maryland, it was to be claimed that the secession of Maryland operated a retrocession of the seat of a government which was to be declared dissolved. The Capitol was to be taken possession of, the treaties and all the symbols of government seized, and the new dynasty proclaimed to be the United States of America, and then such terms offered as would bring in some, and neutralize others of the free States; and those that remained faithful to the present Constitution would be left out, and driven to the alternative of a military invasion of the Capitol, or acquiescence in the result. This was to have been pre-eminently the fate of New England. Twice before have plans been laid for dissevering New England from the rest of the country; once by the army of Burgoyne, and once by the treason of Arnold! Å

like disastrous defeat awaited them all.

It is hard to realize, to believe that such a conspiracy could have been planned, in our day, and so nearly executed; yet so, in all probability, must it be read in history. But a kind Providence had not written that our beloved Republic was to perish thus and now. Certain events, providentially ordered, and certain men, no less providentially raised up, have averted the catastrophe. The discovery of the immense money scheme of the Secretary of War, and the simple movement of an officer from one post to another in Charleston harbor, bore the same relation to this plot that the arrest of André did to the treason of Arnold. The darkest hour was that in which General Cass resigned, disheartened at the treachery and imbecility of the Government. The first hope dawned with the heroic patriotism of General Scott, his "undying grip on the Constitution and the Union." Not Lundy's Lane, nor Chippewa, nor the pacifications of the Eastern and Western frontiers, nor the glories of Vera Cruz or Cherubusco, will so irradiate and so endear to all Americans, as will these last acts in the great drama of his life, the name of Winfield Scott!

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The nation owes much to the patriotic firmness of Governor Hicks, of Maryland. In the Cabinet, it owes much to the untiring and energic struggles of Holt and Stanton, and latterly, of General Dix. In Congress, we owe much to those true friends of the

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