o think--that the majority may not choose to remain
permanently rebuked by that minority.

The President thinks the great body of us Fremonters, being ardently
attached to liberty, in the abstract, were duped by a few wicked and
designing men. There is a slight difference of opinion on this. We think
he, being ardently attached to the hope of a second term, in the
concrete, was duped by men who hate liberty every way. He is the
cat's-paw. By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to
eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as
unfit for further use. As the fool said of King Lear, when his daughters
had turned him out of doors, "He's a shelled peascod."

So far as the President charges us with a desire to "change the
domestic institutions of existing States," and of "doing everything in
our power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral authority,"
for the whole party on belief, and for myself on knowledge, I pronounce
the charge an unmixed and unmitigated falsehood.

Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public
opinion can change the government practically just so much. Public
opinion, on any subject, always has a central idea, from which all its
minor thoughts radiate. That central idea in our political public
opinion at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be,
the equality of men. And although it has always submitted patiently to
whatever of inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity,
its constant working has been a steady progress toward the practical
equality of all men. The late presidential election was a struggle by
one party to discard that central idea and to substitute for it the
opposite idea that slavery is right in the abstract, the workings of
which as a central idea may be the perpetuity of human slavery and its
extension to all countries and colors. Less than a year ago the Richmond
"Enquirer," an avowed advocate of slavery regardless of color, in order
to favor his views, invented the phrase "State equality," and now the
President, in his message, adopts the "Enquirer's" catch-phrase, telling
us the people "have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all
the States of the Union as States." The President flatters himself that
the new central idea is completely inaugurated; and so indeed it is, so
far as the mere fact of a presidential election can inaugurate it. To us
it is left to know tha