positions is in the course of preparation, and will appear in the Evening Post,' D.V., just one week from to-morrow afternoon, and to the paper of that date [the day after the election] we refer Mr. Tilden and his friends, if they will be so good as to wait, for the facts and figures upon which the Republican cause and its representatives rest their case. In anticipation of that event, however, we have a few words to say of its main features.

"Mr. Tilden commences with a somewhat elementary statement of the secret virtue of our federative and representative system, by which the will of all parts of the community is collected, averaged, and represented in the policy finally agreed upon. This is the method of selfgovernment.'

"Upon this he argues that the Republican party, having no extensive organization in the slave States, is a phenomenon new and startling, and, if allowed to triumph, by virtue of its Northern strength will place the slave States in the relation of a foreign government to the federal administration.'

"Mr. Tilden and ourselves would not agree as to the actual strength of the Republican party at the South, and still less as to what he states as one of the causes of its weakness there. This condition of things,' he says, 'is not an accident. It is the result of five years of earnest discussion before the Southern people of the character and objects of the Republican party.'

"Will Mr. Tilden pretend that the character and objects of the Republican party have ever had a hearing before the Southern people? Will he pretend that there is a statesman or a press in any of the Southern States south of Virginia that would be permitted to explain and vindicate Republican principles for a single hour? It is only a week or two since the news reached us of a Methodist clergyman. being hung like a dog, on suspicion of favoring the election of Lincoln; and one of the three presidential candidates

whom Mr. Tilden advises his friends to vote for at the coming election had the grace to taunt the Republican candidate with not daring to visit the grave of his father, who lies buried in Kentucky. We do not dwell upon the insolent pride with which Mr. Douglas seems to contrast his privileges with Mr. Lincoln's in the slave States; we refer to the case only to show by the most signal illustration that could well be imagined, how far from the truth is Mr. Tilden's assertion that the character and objects of the Republican party have ever been earnestly discussed or fairly open to discussion in the Southern States. The fact is notorious, that the policy and purposes of the Republican party are not much better understood by the great body of the people in the South to-day than they are in Mongolia or Crim-Tartary, nor will they be till the federal government passes into the hands of men who will administer it in the interest of the whole nation, and not for the exclusive advantage of an oligarchy.

"It is their misfortune and not our fault that they will not allow our journals and tracts to circulate in their borders, that they burn those who come among them to utter our doctrines, that they destroy the presses established to advocate them, that they ransack and plunder the mails, and by deliberate legislation and lawless violence exclude every ray of light that may be directed from any Republican source to their understanding.

Besides, Mr. Tilden is aware that the Republican party does not aim at any interference with slavery in the States; that it never professed to go further than to limit slavery to the Territory of which it has constitutional possession. He fears, however, that the South misunderstands us, and that we are fostering a public sentiment in regard to their social institutions which is fatal to their repose and prosperity. That is certainly the gravest assault upon the system which can be made. If slavery cannot bear the example which the free States are setting them, the eloquence of industry

with which the meadows and the wharves and the mills of the North resound, it is certainly not expected that the North should interfere to check that prosperity, to silence her mills, and scuttle her ships, and close her stores. We propose no other interference with the Southern States than an honorable competition for the wealth and commerce of the world. If we can succeed best by free labor, shall we not use free labor? and if the South can succeed best with slave labor, the Republican party certainly does not propose to interfere with it.

"We are satisfied at the North that free labor is best for us and for the free Territories, and we mean to keep them and our own States free from slave labor if we can. Have we not a right to make this effort? Is it disorganizing and revolutionary for us to use all lawful and constitutional means to accomplish this result, if we are satisfied that it is best all around that we should? Mr. Tilden, though one of the rebels of 1848, and a famous Jeffersonian-Ordinance man in those days when his party listened to his speeches [he had been hissed off the platform at Tammany Hall a few nights previous when attempting to teach them some unwelcome truths], says 'No!' He says. here are his

words:

"As the policy operates to restrain the emigration of the owner and the slave, but not the white man who owns no slaves, must not the effect be to cause the latter to emigrate? Must not the proportion of the black race to the white be incessantly increasing by the operation of a permanent cause? At last, when the system culminates in emancipation, must not the result be communities almost exclusively of blacks? Can the whites live in such communities? Should we not, in the ultimate effects of the restrictive policy, convert our sister States into negro governments?

"Now, is not the natural increase by which one hundred and twenty thousand are every year added to the slave

population, as much a necessity as the existence of the present four millions? Is not another four millions of blacks within the next twenty-five years just as much a fact as the present four millions? Can any man stop it? Is not the fact which is to come an inevitable incident of the fact which now exists? Must it not be dealt with as a part of the one great fact? To ignore this inevitable incident, is it not shallow in the philosophy, inadequate in policy, disastrous failure in government?'

"And what of the free States of the North and the white men? Do they not increase? Is it not just as much a fact that they will want twice and four times the room they now occupy at some future day, as that the blacks and their owners will? When Mr. Tilden helped to raise the flag of rebellion at the Baltimore convention in 1848, because that body would not admit an adherent of the Wilmot Proviso dogma to be a Democrat and entitled to a seat in that body, more than half of the United States was slave territory, occupied by less than one-third of the population of the country. Was not that fully the slaveholders' share? Have the white population, in appropriating less than half, taken an unreasonable proportion for their natural increase? We are surprised that a mind, ordinarily so logical and so conscientious as Mr. Tilden's, should have been betrayed by such a shallow sophism into a political situation which reflects upon the best and noblest endeavors of his life.

"We are now compelled to dismiss this topic, which has already occupied a disproportionate space in our columns to-day, and to refer our readers for what remains unsaid to the columns of this paper on Wednesday next. They will then and there see whether the people coincide in the opinions of Mr. Tilden, that the vote of a non-slaveholder is of less value than the vote of a slaveholder, or the vote of a slave State than of a free State. If they decide as we expect them to do, we hope Mr. Tilden and those who have

been misled by a similar course of reasoning will correct their reckonings by the people's compass, which, after all, is the only one a statesman can trust.

९९

We have not noticed the alarm which Mr. Tilden seems to feel for the Union in case of Mr. Lincoln's election, because we can't comprehend it. Such anxiety does not seem to us entitled to serious discussion. If we felt called upon any man, we should

to argue the matter with him or
resort to the logic of the nursery for our weapons.

Their

case and our reply are fully summed up in the following choice lines of Mother Goose:

er

We are with Moses and the fashion, and that is to hold on to the Union now and forever.""

On the 7th of November, the day after the election, the "Evening Post" published the following:

REPLY TO THE LETTER OF SAMUEL J. TILDEN, CONTINUED

AND CONCLUDED.

"The people of the United States voted yesterday upon the questions at issue between the Republicans and their adversaries, as represented by Lincoln and Hamlin, candidates of the former, and by Douglas and Johnson, Breckinridge and Lane, and Bell and Everett, representing the latter, with the following result: