follow, is only a New-York lawyer, and will not attempt such a problem-to show how a vote for Mr. Fillmore can be substantially given to Mr. Buchanan and thrown away at the same time, and we may leave one of these sage suggestions to answer the other. Nor am I, for one, yet ready to admit, in face of the demonstrations which have recently been made, and which are still going on, in other States, that Mr. Fillmore has no chance. of success. But even if it were so, my own course would be unaltered. There are contests in these days like those described by a Roman historian in days of yore, from which, whatever may be the result, neither army can go away joyful-neutra acies læta ex eo certamine and in which true patriotism may well shrink from promoting the success of either. Nor, in my opinion, is an honest and conscientious vote ever thrown away. It may not serve to swell majorities. It may not secure to him who casts it any special claim to offices or honors or spoils of victory. It may lose all significance in the columns of an election return, and be figured up only among the nameless scattering which are proverbially the subject of ridicule. But if that vote bears the impress of the deliberate decision of an independent judgment, not bent upon any whimsical or capricious love of singularity, but resolved not to bow to the behests of party management, or caucus intrigue, or sectional animosity, or local proscription,if it be cast from a lofty regard to principle and a dispassionate sense of duty, which could find no satisfaction in choosing between any of the regular or more favored candidates, nor see the country's safety in the success of either of them,—such a vote, so prompted and so cast, is a thousandfold more entitled to respect, than a vote dictated by a blind allegiance to party, or a selfish calculation of chances, or a passionate spirit of resentment, and only thrown to swell the aggregate of some predestined triumph. If such a vote tells nowhere else, it will tell on the character of the man who casts it, and will secure him the cheering consciousness of having contributed all that any one man could contribute, to the purity and dignity of a freeman's ballot. Such a vote I am ready to give, now if never before, as a humble but earnest protest against sectional violence at both ends of the Union; and if this be called throwing away my

vote, I only wish that the whole people of the country would throw away their votes also. Indeed, if they would all throw them away in the same manner and in the same direction that I shall, I think we shall all agree that Mr. Fillmore's chances at least would be none the worse for it.

But, I repeat, Mr. President, if Mr. Fillmore's cause were as absolutely desperate as his worst enemies would gladly have it considered, and if the election of Mr. Fremont were as certain as his warmest partisans in this quarter would fain represent it, I should still, and in still another view, regard the support of Mr. Fillmore as a most desirable and important thing for the welfare of the country. Indeed, sir, I do not hesitate to express the opinion, paradoxical as it may seem, that if Mr. Fremont shall ultimately be placed in the Presidential chair, he will owe more of the safety and success of his administration to the Fillmore men, who have voted against him, and to the very fact that they have voted against him, than to the great mass of his own friends, who have given him so unwise and intemperate a support. I know of nothing which would be so ominous to the domestic peace of our country as an absolutely united North arrayed against an absolutely united South; and the friends of Mr. Fremont ought especially to deprecate such a result. They ought to see, and some of them I believe are beginning to see, that, however earnestly they may desire to secure votes enough to elect their candidate, the best hope of continued peace and union, if he should be, and after he should be elected, would be found in the existence of a party of middle and moderate men, sympathizing with each other, and co-operating with each other throughout the whole country,- forming a chain of friendly and kindly communication and concert between the North and the South, and ready to act for the maintenance and upholding of the Constitution and the Union, whoever may be President. And of such a party you and I, sir, and all of us here to-night, are members, and mean to continue members as long as there is a Union and a Constitution to be maintained and upheld.

There is no end, Mr. President, to the inconsistent censures which are cast upon us old Whigs by some of those who are seeking to justify their own course at our expense. They reproach

us with supporting a Democrat for the second office of the nation, -taking care to ignore the fact that they themselves are supporting a Democrat for the first. They charge us with being insensible to the danger of the annexation of Cuba, omitting to remember that the strongest speech ever made in favor of that annexation, was made, if I remember right, by one of their own co-operators and sympathizers, Gerritt Smith. They charge upon our candidate the earliest suggestion of resistance to the will of the people, the earliest qualification of the modern Republican doctrine of passive submission to the powers that be, not choosing to remember that from the very same lips by which an off-hand and misconstrued remark of Mr. Fillmore has been most severely criticised and condemned, there had previously fallen the distinct and deliberate declaration, that "some of his father's blood was shed on Bunker Hill at the commencement of one revolution, and that there is a little more of the same sort left, if it shall prove that need be, for the beginning of another!" These were the well-remembered words, as lately as the 2d of June last, of that learned head of the neighboring Law School, who has felt called upon within a few weeks past to quit his official chair, and compromise the neutrality of his position, in order to arraign Mr. Fillmore for having counselled resistance to authority; and who availed himself of the same opportunity, if the newspaper reports are correct, to question the propriety and ridicule the position of Mr. Winthrop and Mr. Hillard at the late Whig Convention. I shall not follow his example further than to say, that I should be greatly relieved, as a friend to the University and the Law School, if I could have as clear a perception of the propriety of his course, as I have of that of my friend Mr. Hillard, or even of my own.

But, finally, these gentlemen are never tired of speaking despitefully of Mr. Fillmore for having associated himself with the American party, while they are themselves sustaining and applauding to the echo a dozen gentlemen, whom I need not name, who have not only been initiated into Know Nothing Lodges, but some of whom, certainly, have been seen ducking and diving in and out of them for a year or two past like so many Jack-o'Lanterns, appearing in a Republican Convention one day, and the next in an American Lodge, and sometimes in both on the

same day, literally jumping from platform to platform, and back again, with as much agility as any of the circus celebrities of Astley's or Franconi's, performing a grand equestrian feat on two horses! And these are the persons by whom these old friends of ours choose that Massachusetts shall again be represented in Congress. These are the names which the Republican party presents as the fit types of its own character and of the old Puritan Commonwealth. Yes, notwithstanding that the Walleys and Uphams and Grinnells and Eliots and Rockwells and Duncans and Hudsons and the rest, men whom I can never mention without respect, or part from even temporarily in politics without unfeigned regret, and who I know are following their conscientious convictions of duty, notwithstanding such men as these are all acting in concert with them and might have been adopted as candidates, they are all postponed to the superior claims of the present incumbents. And thus the very men who managed to supplant their predecessors, although each one of those predecessors had been strenuous in opposing the Nebraska bill, have succeeded in establishing it as the very shibboleth of fidelity to Kansas, that they themselves should all be sent back again to Congress. I must be pardoned, fellow-citizens, if, in view of such a state of things, I recall to mind one of those inimitable periods of Edmund Burke's, which seem to find an application in every land and in every age: "A species of men," says he, "to whom a state of order would become a sentence of obscurity are nourished into a dangerous magnitude by the heat of intestine disturbances, and it is no wonder that by a sort of sinister piety they cherish in their turn the disorders which are the parents of all their consequence."*

I heartily trust that if the Fillmore movement shall have no other effect in Massachusetts, it may at least give us a chance for attempting a reform in our Congressional representation, and I rejoice that I live myself in a district where I may cast a vote, which, haply, may not be altogether thrown away, for a man of so much real value to Congress and the country as that upright, intelligent, and experienced merchant, WILLIAM APPLETON,

a

* Cicero anticipated Burke in a part of this idea: "Honores, quos, quietâ republicâ desperant,-perturbatâ consequi se posse arbitrantur."-2 Cat., Sect. IX.

man without an enemy in the world, — whose life has been a continued blessing to the community among which it has been spent, and whose history will be found, not in the rhetoric of the stump or the wrangling of the Capitol, but in the records of the hospitals he has endowed, the chapels he has erected, and the daily and hourly charities which he has delighted to dispense: a man whose punctual presence in the Committee of Ways and Means, and whose friendly intercourse with men of all sections and parties, have rendered his Congressional career more valuable to his constituents and to the whole Union, than that of a whole delegation of declaimers, or a whole college of wit-crackers.

And now, fellow-citizens, in bringing these remarks to a close, I cannot withhold a renewed expression of my astonishment at hearing gentlemen, some of whom I esteem and respect, asserting and asseverating so roundly that the self-styled Republican party is not a geographical party. Why, what meaning do any of us attach to the name of a geographical party, except that of a party which is separated from all other parties by certain geographical lines? If yonder votive canvas could speak, if the lips of the Father of his Country could at this moment be unsealed, what other meaning could he give to his own memorable words of warning? When can the true idea of a geographical party ever be realized, if not by one whose whole sphere of operation and of existence is, from its very nature and intention, bounded by certain lines on the map which are not the lines of the whole country? And now we have waited and waited until within a few weeks, and almost a few days of the election, and where is the promised evidence that there is any substantial support, or any show of support to be given to this Republican party beyond the boundary lines of the free States?

Not a geographical party! Why, my friends, how long is it since it was distinctly declared by some of the present leaders of the Republican party, that the great remedy for existing evils was the formation of a party which should have no Southern wing, -yes, that was the phrase,-no Southern wing, for it was added, that as long as there was a Southern wing, there must be compliances and concessions to the South, and compromises would be the order of the day. Away back in 1847, that was the object