estion. Would you
have that question reduced to its former proportions? Go back to that
old policy. What has been will be again, under the same conditions.
If you would have the peace of the old times, readopt the precepts and
policy of the old times.

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny
it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown
was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican
in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty
in that matter, you know it, or you do not know it. If you do know it,
you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact.
If you do not know it, you are inexcusable to assert it, and especially
to persist in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the
proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does
not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.

Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the
Harper's Ferry affair, but still insist that our doctrines and
declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it.
We know we hold no doctrine, and make no declaration, which were not
held to and made by "our fathers who framed the Government under which
we live." You never dealt fairly by us in relation to this affair.
When it occurred, some important State elections were near at hand, and
you were in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame
upon us, you could get an advantage of us in those elections. The
elections came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled. Every
Republican man knew that, as to himself at least, your charge was a
slander, and he was not much inclined by it to cast his vote in your
favor. Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied with a
continual protest against any interference whatever with your slaves,
or with you about your slaves. Surely, this does not encourage them to
revolt. True, we do, in common with "our fathers who framed the
Government under which we live," declare our belief that slavery is
wrong; but the slaves do not hear us declare even this. For anything
we say or do, the slaves would scarcely know there is a Republican
party. I believe they would not, in fact, generally know it but for
your misrepresentations of us in their hearing. In your political
contests among yourselves, each faction charges the other with symp