ution for Loyalty's
sake, of the men who, having aided in achieving great victory, were
resolved that it should not fail to bear its legitimate fruits. The
delegates from all the States first assembled in Independence Square,
and after a meeting of congratulation, marked by great enthusiasm,
proceeded to form into two conventions,--one containing the loyalists
who had called the convention, and the other the Northern delegates who
had met to welcome them. Of the Southern Convention Mr. Thomas J.
Durant of Louisiana was selected as temporary chairman, and Honorable
James Speed of Kentucky as permanent chairman; and of the Northern
Convention Governor Curtis of Pennsylvania was both temporary and
permanent chairman. The motive for thus separating was to leave the
Southern loyalists entirely untrammeled in their proceedings, in order
that their voice might have greater weight in the country than if it
were apparently directed by a large majority of Northern men assembling
in the same body with them.

The Northern Convention concluded its proceedings on the third day with
a mass-meeting larger than any that had ever assembled in Philadelphia.
The Southern Convention remained in session full five days. The
interest was sustained from beginning to end, and besides the delegates
present, a vast assemblage of people thronged the streets of
Philadelphia during all the sessions of the conventions. In an off
year, as partisans call it, there had never been seen so great
excitement, enthusiasm and earnestness in any political assemblage.
Mr. Durant called the Southern Convention to order with the same gavel
that had been used in the Secession Convention in South Carolina.
Governor Hamilton of Texas, who presented it for the occasion,
reminded his audience that the whirligig of time brings about its
revenges, and that it seemed a poetic retribution that a convention
of Southern loyalists should be called to order with the same
instrument that had rapped the South into disunion and anarchy.

On taking the chair as permanent president of the Southern Convention,
Mr. Speed spoke of the Administration, of which for the past few
months he had been a reluctant member, with a freedom which, during his
connection with it, would have been improper if not impossible. He
described the late convention in this place as one with which "we could
not act." "Why was that convention here? It was here in part because
the great cry came up fr