st interests of the
country. Do you dare to complain of this deliverance? You ought rather
to go on your knees every day of your life, and devoutly thank the kind
Providence which gave you such an unexpected opportunity to escape from
so demoralizing a servitude.

Do not allow your attachment to party names and party associations to
warp your judgment or limit your patriotism. You need have no fear that
any one of the sound and beneficent ideas which the Democratic party has
ever impressed upon the mind of the nation will perish or be forgotten.
Whatever features of the organization, whatever principles which it has
labored to inculcate, are essential to the just development of our
intellectual activity or our material resources, will survive the
present struggle, perhaps to reappear in the creed and be promulgated by
the statesmen of some future party; or who shall say that the Democratic
party, freed from its corrupting associations, rejecting the leaders who
have been its worst enemies, and the political heresies which have
wrought its temporary ruin, may not again wield its former power, and
once more direct the destinies of the country?

But, returning to considerations of more immediate importance, what, I
ask, is the obvious duty of every true and loyal citizen in such a
crisis as this? You resent, as insulting, any imputation of disloyalty,
and therefore I have a right to infer that you are unwilling to be
ranked among the enemies of your country. But who are those enemies?
Clearly, those whose avowed intention or whose thinly disguised design
is, to divide the Union and to rend the Republic in twain. How are those
enemies to be overcome? Only by a hearty and earnest cooeperation with
the measures devised by our legally constituted Government for the
suppression of the Rebellion. I can easily understand that you may not
be willing to give your cordial assent to all the measures and all the
appointments of the Administration. It is not the Administration which
you would have selected, or for which you voted. But, nevertheless, it
is our rightful government, and nothing else can save the nation from
absolute anarchy. Postpone, therefore, I beseech you, all merely
partisan prejudices, and remember only that the Union is in danger. You
are a Democrat. Adopt, then, during the continuance of this war, the
noble sentiments of a distinguished Western Democrat:[J]--"The whole
object of the Rebellion is to destroy the pr