ble it is that my voice can convey to all the little I may have to say. Had I consulted my own personal inclination, I should have declined this honor. I have for many years avoided the turmoil of politics, and have surveyed its annual contests only from an outside stand-point.

If I had consulted my own inclination, I should not have been here to-night, but I cannot but feel that this is a fault to which our people have been but too prone-this yielding to personal inclination, to avoid the din and the strife of politics, and consequently commit some of their dearest interests to the keeping of the mere professional politician. Still, I doubt whether such consideration would have induced me to leave my quiet country home, to come here with the small mite, the very small mite, that I may have to offer to the conservative cause, did I not fear that I saw in the imminence of the peril that now stares us in the face great apprehensions for the future.

My friends, the dangers at this time urgentiy demanding our particular attention are the dangers of disunion. The great peril that overshadows all other perils, is the apparent determination of some of the States of this Union, to tear asunder its government, and split up our country into two or more rival confederacies. How shall Maryland best act to avert, if possible, such a catastrophe? Maryland-the heart of this Union so long as it can be preserved—Maryland, the Belgium of this continent, so soon as it shall be dissolved. Her local position, the conservative character of her people, their long established and well known attachment to the Constitution and the Union demand that she should well consider the step that is so important to her weal or woe.

In order that we may act advisedly and effectually upon this subject, let us satisfy ourselves at the outset, as far as possible, of some of the latent causes which stand in the way of a settlement of this vexed question between the North and the South. These questions, my friends, upon their face would seem to ordinary minds to be so extremely easy of adjustment, and in point of any practical importance, to be so vastly subordinate to the mighty interests they are

suffered to control, that it is impossible to believe that a genuine faith in their intrinsic importance is the bona fide actual influence now governing sectional parties at both ends of the Union. No, my friends. The affected sympathy for the slave upon the one side, and affected fear of the loss of his services on the other, are, to a great extent, the shallow pretexts invented simply to screen the selfish ambition of selfish partisans in both ends of the country.

The politician at the North, with an appetite for office, whetted by long abstinence, having found at last the practical value of this pretext in bringing him to power is calculating, with his accustomed shrewdness, how much of it he can safely afford to part with without relinquishing the station he has won; whilst his extreme adversary at the South, born and bred in office-with an appetite that has grown by what it has fed on-seems to have come to regard it at last as a sort of chartered right, eminently befitting a gentleman of leisure and sooner than surrender it, or sooner than risk its chance of becoming President, Cabinet Officer, or Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States, he will carve out for himself a new political hemisphere, and become the President, Cabinet Officer, or Minister Plenipotentiary of a little Republic of his own.

Let us, my friends, therefore, at the outset of our proceedings, be assured that no lingering hope of mere partisan supremacy, to be either acquired or retained, mingles itself with the legitimate influences that should actuate our conduct at the present crisis. Let us turn a deaf ear to all such appeals as address themselves to past political organizations, or anything even in the remotest degree to stir up old political feuds.

I myself, my friends, have entertained, in my day, strong political attachments, have recognized party leaders, for whom I felt an almost filial reverence, and have, no doubt, like other men, been swayed by political animosities that occasionally have swerved my better judgment; but, if I know myself, there never was a day yet, in times most memorable for political excitement-in 1840 and 1844

when, if this Union had been assailed and insulted, as it is this day, by the leader whom I most idolized, and my most obnoxious political adversary had said to me, "let's try and save it," that I would not have turned my back upon that idol, and grasped the hand of my adversary, in sworn fellowship forever.

If, therefore, we expect Maryland to exert the influence to which she is entitled, in saving this Union, her citizens must agree to forget all past political distinctions, must agree to surrender all lingering thoughts of revivifying that old party, or retaining power and office, for this and our conservative people, remembering only the interest they have in the preservation of this Union, and the peculiar dangers to which they will be exposed should it be dissolved, must unite all their energies in the consummation of the glorious task before them.

If then, my fellow-citizens, we are agreed upon this preliminary fact, that it is to the conservative men of the country that we are to look for a rescue at this period of imminent peril, if the people, separating themselves from scheming politicians and divesting themselves of old partisan ties, have made up their minds to put forth their strength to save the Union, the question is: "How shall that strength be best exerted? In what direction shall their batteries be pointed? Upon this my own, convictions are clear and decided.

To such a condition, my friends, has this bitter sectional feud, has this partisan controversy, been at last reduced, that if the national men of the country expect to exercise their due weight in quelling it, they must each address himself to the task of rebuking this sectional violence in that particular section to which he may belong. Suppose' that the conservative men at the North-and I am happy to know that there are thousands still to be found theresuppose that they, through their presses and in their assemblies, overlooking the unconstitutional aggressions committed by their own citizens, were to confine their denunciations to the revolutionary violence of the Southern seceders, whilst such a course would but aggravate that

violence, their own political fanatics would feel themselves encouraged by such an implied endorsement in obstinately refusing to repeal their unconstitutional legislation.

But the conservative men at the North are pointing their arguments and appeals in a different direction. Every where their conservative presses and national men, of all political complexion, are dirccting their anathemas against the reckless obstinacy of their own destructives, and its good effect is manifest in bringing some of the most influential of the Republican journals to advocate the repeal of their obnoxious legislation, and is still more forcibly and practically apparent in the defeat of the Republican candidates, and the election of sound national conservative men in some of the strongest Republican districts.

Whilst, therefore, our co-operators at the North are directing their assaults chiefly against the aggressive violence of the abolitionists, let us, the conservatives of the South, and particularly us, the conservatives of Maryland, concentrate the whole force of our efforts upon those open revolutionists at the South, now contemptuously defying .every authority of the Government.

Let us not, my friends, weaken the effect of these efforts by pausing to inquire into the primary cause of these sectional parties-by wasting all our strength upon the Northern aggressor as the earliest wrong-doer. When the master finds his ship just upon the brink of the breakers, he does not stop to inquire how she came there, or whose was the fault-whether it was the neglect of the pilot at the wheel, or the false light of the wreckers on the beach, but he calls all hands around him, and puts her about if possible, ere she makes the last fatal plunge into the fearful gulf beyond. Such is the character of the peril which brings us together here this evening. One link in the bright chain in which our glorious States have been united claims to have pulled itself loose from the others, and it is our purpose to save as many as possible of those that still remain. I can hardly realize the fact, my friends, that the day has come when it is necessary to address you, the people of Maryland, arguments to keep you within the Union.

When in the course of the late Presidential canvass it was sometimes suggested that some of the Southern politicians had connected themselves with an ultimate design upon the integrity of this Union, the intimation was every where met with indignant scorn and denial; and some of those against whom the imputation pointed were brought from the extreme South and stumped the State, it would seem, for the express purpose of correcting this impression. The imputation was denounced as a mere political trick, invented without authority to operate upon the votes of Union-loving Maryland.

But yet, in fifty days from the election in which we were then engaged, not only are the very men against whom these imputations pointed, found in open revolution, but many of those who here denounced these imputations as political calumnies, are justifying the revolutionary proceedings, and using all their efforts to unite Maryland in the same rebellion. Various false issues have been framed. New and visionary theories invented, and a new republic is contrived, in which Maryland and her commercial metropolis are made to assume a conspicuous part, in the hope that, by such procedure, she may be warped into that measure. We hear a great deal about the sympathy due from Maryland to the Cotton States of the South, whose right of property has been assailed by Northern legislation, and in which description of property we have a common interest. The State of Maryland, without regard to questions of selfinterest, will be always ready to render sympathy towards any community suffering under oppression. But when we speak of those mutual sympathies existing between the Cotton States and ours in relation to the subject of slavery, and of the mutual obligations subsisting between them, there seems a strange inclination to reverse the natural current of their sympathy and those obligations.

If South Carolina, or any of her immediate neighbors, were situated as we are, with one hundred miles of territory running side by side with a Free State, with nothing running between us but a mere imaginary line, and if we occupied her position, with no foot of territory within one