PETITION AND MEMORIAL
OF
DAVID QUINN,
ASKING FOR THE
RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF NEGRO SLAVERY
IN THE
UNITED STATES.

Gentlemen :

The undersigned, an American citizen, respectfully petitions your honorable body, and prays that measures may be immediately taken for the re-establishment of Negro slavery in the States from which it has just been ejected, and also for its establishment by law in all the other States and Territories, of our federal Union; and in support of his petition, he herewith submits the following

MEMORIAL.

He is by no means insensible of the opposition he is likely to encounter at the hands of the half-learned, the vain and the vicious; but as the roar of the battle no longer drowns the voice of reason, he expects to be heard, and when heard to be respected, and his policy sooner or later adopted. The tempest, he is also aware, still sweeps on in its old direction; but the bending forest is beginning to rise, light to break, and when it comes, in that serenity which follows the storm, he looks for the calm and candid judgment, not of the vicious, but of the patriotic people of his nation.

At the foundation of all polities there are principles—equality at the basis of democracy, and inequality [Pg 2] at the basis of all other systems. But whatever may be the propriety or impropriety of either, all human laws to be wholesome must conform to the laws of nature. From these there can be no variance without harm, therefore is it incumbent on the statesman, who is of necessity a philosopher, to study nature, and to conform all his policy to her demands. Her star is the polar star of all wise legislation, but from it you have turned aside, and inclined your ears to the siren songs of countries beyond the seas until you are transformed into beasts, and become the destroyers of your own kindred and kind. You have joined your enemies in their false cry of liberty —a device invented for your ruin; and in your delusion have assumed, as self-evidently true, propositions which are as self-evidently false. You have assumed a general equality of all the human races, and the equal adaptability of all localities to their propagation and development. These are both false, and in their falsity is to be found the great volume of that disorder which has converted our States into antagonisms, drawn the sword of the father upon the son, sent a million of our young men to untimely graves, and burdened the living with a national debt which is, even now, grinding them into the ground.

The superiority of mankind, we readily concede, is not determined by shades and shadows; the standard is much higher. But as mind conforms to matter, [Pg 3] or matter to mind, mentalities are as diversified as are the shades and colors of human skins. The exterior is but an index of the interior, or life within; consequently, as exteriors differ, so do interiors, and as gradation rises, so do equalities disappear, as the sage, and all intermediate ascendencies, rise above the fool. But nature rises by degrees, and, in the harmony of her adjustments, divides and subdivides her divisions, as by the walls of a prison, from which there can be no escape. She has classified her works into orders , genera and species , and to each fixed a boundary as immutable as are the stars and the hills. Education may improve, but it never can pass the specific or generic barriers which nature has erected through all her works.

The dog which is a genus , ranked in the world of letters as the genus canis , has his specific divisions, as hound, bull, cur, terrier, and the like—each marked by a peculiarity designating its kind. These may be cultivated, but never changed or overcome. The dog that runs by scent may be cultivated in his powers—may be taught to scent closer and to increase his speed; so, too, may he that runs by sight be improved in the same manner; but neither one can be transformed into the other, for the specific division must continue to the end of time.

These laws apply with no greater power to inferior than to superior natures—are no more forcible on the beast than on the man; but, on the contrary, [Pg 4] as all nature is divided, the cat, the dog, the horse, the sheep, the goat, the ox and the swine, each into his specific kind, so, too, is divided the Genus Homo , or genus man.

The number of species of this genus —the crowning ultimate of animated things—may, in the present condition of our knowledge, be very imperfectly, if at all, determined. But enough is known to give us, at least, seven varieties of men—the Mongolian, the Malay, the Australian, the Indian, the Arctic, the Negro and the Caucasian—whose divisions are as well marked as the divisions which separate the spaniel from the hound, the tiger from the leopard, or the panther from the cat. Their variances are all diversified, are physical, mental and instinctive, and creative of different wants, so that as one spaniel seeks the water while another shuns it, so do the various species of men require different rules and forms, privileges and restrictions, for the regulation of their aggregation in associated life.

The American Indian shuns the cultivated field and populous city, and clings to his native forest. There, though his fare be humble, all the other wants of his nature are best supplied. Thus do his instincts act to their end. He finds a restraint in civilization which drives him to the forest, as heat drives the whale and the walrus to polar seas. This instinct is the opposite of the Caucasian’s, and, as a consequence, points to a specific line. It is fundamental [Pg 5] in nature, and there must forever remain. Could it be overcome, the vast tribes who once occupied our country would not now be numbered with the past, but would be with us still in the character of civilized men.

Instincts mark the specific divisions with unerring certainty, but mentalities are equally patent to the observing mind. The Indian’s instinct contents him with his wigwam, but look to the outshoots of his mentality, and you will find the division between him and the Caucasian equally marked and legible. His man-of-war is a bark canoe; his artillery, a bow and arrow; and his capitol of state, the limbs of the forest which overhang the smoldering fire around which his chiefs assemble in council. What but an inferiority of mentality, coupled with a peculiarity of instinct, divides him thus from the loftier outshoots of the Caucasian mind? And as the division is fundamental, why is it not specific?

The Malay alone runs a muck. Why does he do so, if there be not implanted in his nature a latent madness which belongs to no other division of man? And as it so exists as a peculiarity, does it not mark a specific division as effectually as does the scent of one hound divide him from the sighting proclivities of another?

But let us not linger in discussion on either the Indian or Malay nature; but, in the emergency of time, turn to that division of man, which, with reference [Pg 6] to your long and unceasing disquisitions, has been termed, and by no means inappropriately, the “Eternal Negro.”

He is the opposite of the white man in color, and, as we shall presently see, alike so in instinct and turn of mind. He also differs from the Indian, for, unlike him, he does not seek an exclusive independence, but inclines to the presence of his opposite race—the white man. He seeks it by choice, and wheresoever found with it, no matter what may be his condition before the law, equal or unequal, he will be found menial and of secondary rank. He will brush his hair, groom his horse, wait on his stables, dust his coat, and black his boots, and when held as a slave, will value himself, not by his own, but by his master’s worth. Why is this so, if nature does not give the disposition?

His brain is from ten to fifteen per cent. smaller than the Caucasian’s, and, at the same time, darker colored and differently disposed. His back brain, or cerebellum, is comparatively larger, while his fore brain, or cerebrum, the organ of thought, is much smaller. Thus is he inferior as well as differently molded in the organ of mind. Why, then, is he not below the white man in the scale of being, and designed by nature for a secondary rank in the great work assigned to man of “subduing the world?”

He is inferior as a mental being. But though less endowed in one particular, is higher favored in [Pg 7] another; for, while his brain is smaller, his nervous system is larger, and, as a consequence, stronger. This gives him power where the white man not unfrequently fails. But it is a power which comes with greatest adaptability to his condition as a slave: for it fortifies him against the wounds of reproof, and aids his inferior mentality in overcoming the sting of degradation under which the white man pines when subjected to the lash.

Other properties of a defensive nature pertain to him in a similar way. He shows his keeping as does a horse, an ox or an ass. If he be well fed, he will be sleek, black, and glossy; but if ill fed, he will be of a dull, dirty or ashy color. Thus is he defended, for in this peculiarity of his nature is there a secret monitor telling the world of a master’s care or of a master’s neglect.

But returning from properties to structure, we find his feet larger and flatter than the white man’s, his arms longer, his head rounder, his lips thicker, his nose flatter, and his eyes smaller; and what is equally a mark of specific nature, we find his eyes and his hair, with its kinks, always of the same color—invariably black. These are marks of his being. But in descending the stream of reproduction, an even more important peculiarity is displayed in transmission. All of his offspring partake, in exact proportions, of these general characteristics. They are all black eyed and black haired—rigidly [Pg 8] so fixed in nature. But no such uniformity follows the reproduction of the white man. On the contrary, his children are never exact copies of himself, nor, like beans, fac-similes of one another, but vary throughout—in the color of their hair and their eyes, and in the different shades and tinges of their complexions.

These peculiarities not only mark specific lines, but greatly widen the divisions by the properties which are found pertaining to them.

It is by these properties—the variability on the one hand, and non-variability on the other—that men of science have classified animated things into improvable and non-improvable species. Those unchangeable in reproduction, as the lion, the tiger, the leopard and the bear, who partake in exact proportions of the stripes, and spots, and colors of their progenitors, are assigned to the division of non-improvables, while the horse, the dog and the ox, who vary their colors in reproduction, are assigned to the division of improvable things.

The non-improvable are also non-progressive, consequently, as the negro falls within that division, he must be assigned to the non-progressive department of animated beings.

But how far the rule is general, we do not pretend to know, but apprehend that, like most other rules, it is subject to exceptions. Still, there can be no difficulty in perceiving that the little dark [Pg 9] eyes, bullet head and inexpressive countenance of the negro are not the accompaniments of high mental unfoldings, nor is it likely that civilization, though forced into the mind, could long be retained when all these characteristics of inferiority are regularly transmitted in reproduction. By the constant power of tuition he may be forced to a particular limit, but, like the soft magnet, he lapses into his native condition whenever the charging power is withdrawn.

In his native country his mentality, like a heavy fluid, has scarcely, if ever, presented a ripple. Does not this point to a non-progressive nature? The same sun which has risen and set upon the white man, has also, with the same brilliancy shone upon him, and for precisely the same number of revolving years. Why, then, has he remained so far below the white man, if he be not of an inferior species?

By the flow may we determine the character of the fountain; and, as governments and laws are the outshoots of the minds which make them, by such productions may normal status be determined. “Show me your laws,” said a philosopher, “and I will tell you what you are.” Show me that you have no laws, and the rule will apply with equal force and precision, for then you prove yourself a barbarian. By this rule then, as well as by any other, let the negro be measured.

All Africa, under the dominion of the negro [Pg 10] mind—from the desert to the cape—with her fifty to a hundred millions of people, is a country of masters and slaves, nailed down by nature to the lowest possible level of barbarian life. Men, women and children mingle together in unbroken nudity, bask in their sands, feed on bugs and reptiles, and even on the flesh of one another. The men strut as warriors, though slaves to petty princes, and the women bend to their lots as bearers of burdens. Are these nature’s arguments in favor of negro with white equality before the law!

With all these facts before us, it is scarcely possible for us to conceive of any two species of the same genus being more opposite to each other than the white man and the negro. But men, educated to a religious belief of a common origin, will cling to it, and on it form theories of restorable natures, in spite of the most commanding evidences which, in every way, thicken around them. Cain’s wife may or may not have been of the seed of Adam. But whether she was or was not, or of a different species, is a subject of but little consequence to us in the present time, for we have to deal with things, not as they were, nor as they may have been, but as we actually now find them in being.

No common type of this great genus, man, has ever been produced by either change of climate or country, nor by cross in reproduction. But, on the contrary, amalgamation is found to be the down-hill [Pg 11] to the grave of all the species. The American Indian has disappeared by the operation of many causes, but none other have been so fatal as the intermingling of his blood with the Caucasian’s. The mulatto, or mule man, of the black and white cross, also travels downward, and soon disappears, if not reinforced with pure blood from one or the other species. “He will not,” says a learned American writer, “reproduce after the third remove from the original unity.” Consequently, if the rule be unexceptionable, a mulatto, in the fourth remove, unaided by an intervening black or white parent, does not exist upon the whole face of the world. Why should not such propositions be investigated, and facts determined, before a country is torn to atoms by a madness built on the assumption of universal equality, without regard to race or species? But men seeking power through deception—the churchman seeking dominion over other sects—the tory, the ascendency of the British crown—the half-starved politician, the spoils of office—the vain, a strap or two of tinsel, and the covetous trader, the plunder of a camp—may find negro equality as convenient as any other device.

But you proclaim an age of progress, and dignify folly with the name of an experiment—an ideal pomp around which has ever clustered the frivolous and the vain. But do you not know that experiments are far more common with the ignorant [Pg 12] than with the learned? They experiment because they know not of the experiments which have gone before them.

Africa is as old as Europe, Asia or America—her days as bright, her years as long, and her seasons as refreshing. Why, then, does she linger behind them? They educated themselves; why has she not also done like them? If her children be claiming an equality before the law, should they not be required to show us their equality behind it?

But you are trying, you tell us, an experiment—a point which we concede as readily as you offer it. But in what way are you trying? You are experimenting with the circle of darkness drawn close up around you; for in that darkness, beyond your vision, every experiment which you are attempting has been tried a hundred, and possibly a thousand, times before.

For almost countless centuries, in the high antiquity of the past—as is now shown by monumental Egypt—the negro mingled with the people of the Nile; but was then, as he has ever since been, until madness overthrew modest nature, the slave of a higher order of men.

Rome, at a remove of not less than three thousand years further down the stream of time, and two thousand above the period on which we now stand, also sought his elevation—bore him to the land of the learned; but failed, as all others failed, both before [Pg 13] and since, to force the light of civilization and self-supremacy through the thick skull which encompassed his little brain.

The Moors, also, midway between the Romans and the English theorists and their American apes, bore him in triumph to conquered Spain; but failed, as all others failed, to crowd him a single round further up the ladder of light.

Here reason would have been content. But darkness again drew her circle in contraction around the European mind—shut out the light of history—and, accordingly, a new brood of “experimenters” revived the old struggle with patient old Nature’s laws. A religious change had come upon the world, and, as living gods are always more powerful than dead ones, Africa, it was conceived, could be moved by the power of the Cross, where Isis burned her fires in despair, and Jove’s thunders fell harmless at the negro’s feet. Accordingly Portugal, about four centuries ago—then wild with the pomp of a fancied greatness, and stimulated with papal attention (a bull from Pope Martin V)—dashed forth in what she vainly conceived to be a new enterprise in the affairs of the world. It may, in its origin, have been the outshoot of philanthropic desire, but in its continuance, like all other movements of its kindred, swelled with the impulses of fanatical thought, and grew in its energy with the emotions which ultimately gave it force. Expedition after expedition [Pg 14] was sent forth—missionaries provided, salaried and commissioned, and “school-marms” drawn from Lisbon, as they are now drawn from the “Hub of the Universe,” to teach the negro idea how to shoot. But, after a long and determined effort, nature over vanity prevailed. African mentality still clung to its old level—instincts ran in their old channels; the white man died, or returned to his native Europe, and all that now remains of the gigantic enterprise are a few moldering ruins, overgrown with brambles, yet to be seen near the mouth of the Congo river.

This, with the wise, would also have determined the measure of might. But, in the variation of creeds and changing dominion of sects, other experimenters also arose, and pressed on in the same display of fancies. Protestant England must needs be as energetic as her Catholic mother, and, in the pomp of an equal vanity, must needs toss her lances into the same mountain. Accordingly the old struggle, under new phases, was again begun, and, through changes, cessations and variations, continued down even to the present time. But, notwithstanding so powerful and continued a struggle, running through three centuries from its beginning, the negro continues to-day as the worshipers of Osiris, on the Nile, fifty centuries ago, found him in his native jungles. He is still a barbarian—runs in his nakedness, feeds on human flesh, worships reptiles, [Pg 15] and dignifies the funerals of his princes with the wholesale slaughter of subjects or slaves.

In the first half of the Protestant struggle many enterprises rose and fell, leaving scarcely a shadow behind them. But the one most gigantic—aided by Church and State, and intended not only to civilize, but to anglicise the negro and his continent—has left, like the Catholic effort on the Congo, a few moldering ruins yet to be seen near the mouth of the Niger; but all else has drifted away with the winds. Thus did experiment succeed experiment, and failure succeed failure, until the mind of the learned sickened, while the ignorant as successively thought of experimenting again.

But men of thought finally faltered and reflected, and though they reasoned from various points of view, ultimately united in assuming that nature had not created the negro without at the same time coupling his being with a design. But no design was tangible until the American plantations called for laborers, and the negro was found fitted for the demand. Then opened there, upon the minds of civilized nations, a secret which until then had been wrapped up among the mysteries of the world. It was then seen that the negro as a slave, and the white man as a master, could be united for each other’s good. Consequently a commerce was opened with the African coast, and all Christendom united in commending and approving the trade. A new [Pg 16] era thus opened, and all the world said, Amen! But European kings were not then troubled with a republic which, for their own safety, they deemed it best to destroy, nor were white slaves at home controlled by fixing their attentions on black slaves abroad. Interests were different. Europe owned America, and sought its welfare. England was not then an enemy, nor was there a tory party on this side of the water, crushed by a revolution, struggling for resurrection and re-establishment in power.

The slave trade thus encouraged grew into vast proportions, and, by its expansion and appendages of cruelty, swelled from a propriety into a withering curse. But taken as a whole, it has been productive of great good. It civilized America, subdued the forest, and built up the best as well as the last system of civilization which has yet appeared upon the world. The best, because the most harmonious and nearest in conformity to the requisitions of nature’s laws—a system, which, by force of individual capital, existing in slaves, makes population rural, draws it from cities, and plants it upon fields—a system, which scatters concentrated vice and to which poorhouses and penitentiaries are but little known.

This was the system under which America rose and flourished, and through which she commanded the respect and admiration of the world. But as the Genius of evil wandered up and down, his eyes [Pg 17] fell upon “my servant Job,” and—permitted to torture—he belched forth, in deep, grinding hatred, his mighty volumes of dark and malignant spite. He first planted his batteries at a great distance, and masked them in artful disguise. He commenced in an English pulpit, in the name of philanthropy, and from thence spread his fire through kings and nobles, and by degrees to commoners, until finally reaching the tory mind of America, he let forth the full volumes of his hate and his crushing powers, until he saw the blood of the nation gushing from a million of streams, and liberty weltering and struggling beneath the grinding weight of an insurmountable national debt. Thus has America fallen and her enemies triumphed through deception and design.

Experiments were numerous abroad, but had not the circle of darkness crowded up to the very tips of your noses, you would see that the experiment which you are trying, or at least pretending to try, had already been tried, and its vanity proved within the reach of your own hands, and at the very stoops of your own doors. The Eastern and Middle States, of the Union, in a spirit of mistaken philanthropy, about the close of the revolutionary war, emancipated, or rather turned their negroes loose without masters to direct them in life. Such was the action. What, then, has been the result? It is simply this: that not one of those emancipated people is now [Pg 18] alive upon the world; nor have they—if the sphere of our own observations be an index of the whole—left a progeny equal to one tenth of their own numbers. They have died out under a mistaken liberty, while the slaves of the South have greatly outrun the multiplication of their white masters. Is this the millennium with which your experiment is to bless the negro?

You can answer the question yourselves by simply citing us to the wants of your Freedmen’s Bureau—to the mortality among the negroes—and to such scenes as that of Memphis in the winter of 1863, when four hundred out of forty thousand contrabands were daily consigned to “hospitable graves.”

Malpractice may be covered by a shroud, and the remains of African experiments overgrown with brambles; but such stupendous monuments of folly or of spite, or ulterior design, are not easily overlooked by men not interested in keeping them from public view. The negro you have started on a rapid down-hill march to the grave, and will so find his movement written in every succeeding census that will hereafter be taken in the United States. But let us turn from your follies to your sum of excuses.

You have done all, if your own words may be taken as expressive of your intentions, for the sake of that beau ideal of the world called civil or political liberty. But have you ever stopped in your [Pg 19] career long enough to ask yourselves what such liberty is?

The German radical sees it only in equality, the toper in his drams, the brigand in his plunder, and even Mr. Wendell Phillips, whom you have followed as the sheep with the bell, has displayed but little, if any, more wisdom in his definitions. It is, he tells us, “The reservation of all natural rights with civil liberty to defend them.”

Could inconsistency be more complete? If all natural rights be retained, from whence come the civil ones? Of what materials are they made? If my natural rights be undisturbed, by what authority am I crowded from the fields of my neighbor? Did nature give him more dominion over them than she gave to me? Or, if the proposition be not as empty as the air on which it floated, by what authority did the United States government wage that war against the Southern States, for the support of which Mr. Phillips was even then, while making the utterance, haranguing the people? Did not the government assume that the Southern people had surrendered certain natural rights , which they could not, at pleasure, resume?

Sir William Blackstone, whose views have stood the abrasion of time with as much durability as any other of his fellow contributors, discusses the subject with as much clearness and precision as is, we apprehend, in any other place to be found. He divides [Pg 20] the subject into three heads, and to each gives particular bounds—into absolute liberty, natural liberty, and that division which is called civil or political liberty.

The first—absolute liberty—he tells us is “The power of one to do whatever he sees fit.”

The second—natural liberty—is “The power of one to do whatever he sees fit to do, subject only to the laws of nature,” and the third and last—civil liberty—is “Natural liberty so far restrained, and no farther than is essential for the public good.”

The first of these, it will no doubt readily be seen, can have no existence below him to whom all things move by command. For none other can do whatever he sees fit to do, consequently such liberty has no existence in the world of men.

But natural liberty—the power of one to do whatever he sees fit to do, subject only to the laws of nature—may have an existence, as by a man placed alone on a mountain, in a desert, or, like Selkirk, on an island in the ocean, for then, there are none his rights to dispute. But as man is a being of many wants, which he can not himself supply, such liberty is possibly the most grievous of all oppressions.

From such liberty man flees to a state of society, and, in doing so, surrenders a portion of his natural rights that he may secure and enjoy others. This state, we concede, when natural liberty is so far restrained and no farther than is just essential, etc., is [Pg 21] civil liberty. But what amount of restraint is just so essential is the great practical problem, at the very beginning of which the commentator’s theory ends. Settle this, and in the language of “great Cesar,”

But how will you settle it by declaring unequals in nature, equals by force of law?

The problem, by your theory of a general equality of the genus homo , ignoring the distinction of races, can not be solved, nor can peace and happiness return to the nation while legislation and nature are at war. You must concede the division of inequality of species, and upon that division frame your laws. Then may true civil liberty be assigned to all.

Nature, though our greatest friend, is, at the same time, our greatest oppressor; for she keeps us in a constant struggle for life. We must be fed, and clothed, and sheltered, and, to be happy, must have many other wants supplied. To secure these we retreat into society, throw off native rights, and continue our retreat until we find the point at which our wants are best supplied. When we have done this, then have we found the true measure of our civil liberty. But, as species differ, both in their abilities and in their instincts, no two find their measures [Pg 22] at the same point, but are scattered all along the line from the lowest to the highest endowment of intellectual man. The white man, in obedience to the demands of his own nature, must reserve dominion over himself, for the moment he surrenders it, he loses his liberty. But it is not so with the negro, for he is differently endowed, and a being of different wants. Where the white man’s nature craves for dominion, his craves for protection, and as that point is not attained short of an absolute surrender, he gives up self-dominion that he may receive, in return, that shelter which his nature desires. When this is done—when he has made the surrender and secured the protection, then has he attained to his time measure of civil liberty: then his cares of the future are thrown upon his master, and, as a consequence, he can sing, and dance, and chatter, regardless alike of what is or is to be, and live out his life in accordance with his own nature. Thus his civil liberty and the civil liberty of the white man are as opposite as are the colors of their skins. One man is a being dominant and commanding; the other inferior and subordinate, and by this opposition do they harmonize in civil life. One supplies what the other wants; one thinks and directs, the other labors and obeys, and, as a consequence, the circle is complete. If one gets hands to do his physical labor, the other gets a mind, superior to his own, for his care and protection.

[Pg 23]

The negro, as a slave, is contented with his lot, and, under it, is the freest as well as the happiest man in the world; for he is freed from the cares of life, and particularly from the cares of state, which, on the civilized plane, he has ever found himself unable successfully to manage.

His subordination as a race of man pertains to him alone; and yet we have a very marked parallel within the very limits of our own species. We are males and females; but to the male alone belongs the desire of dominion. Our women reject the right of suffrage and official position in the state. They do not want to be voters, or legislators, or officers in command, nor do they even want the position of suitors in our courts of law; because such rights to them are burdens, therefore do they reject them, and find their civil liberty, not by accepting, but by rejecting those very rights which alone make their husbands freemen. Why is this so? It is because, in nature, the woman is subordinate to the man, as is also the negro to the Caucasian species.

This is almost a parallel case. The woman has not the rights which make the man free. But does this make her a slave? If it does, then is her slavery just what her nature requires.

The “woman’s-rights man” sees this parallel, and very properly concludes that if the negro be oppressed by a deprivation of political rights, the woman, whose very existence, both political and [Pg 24] legal, is merged in that of her husband, can be none the less so. Here we must approve his arguments, and, with him, censure the abolitionist for inconsistency who is not also a woman’s-rights man; for if the negro be enslaved by being relieved of rights which to him are burdens, why is not the woman equally a slave who is, in the same way, excluded. His logic, from his premises, is, we think, unanswerable. But he does not seem to have discovered that different natures require different rules, limits and extensions for the attainment of proper civil status in society. When he discovers this, he may find, as others have found before him, that,

Here, for the present, we take our leave of the negro, and turn our attention more directly to that loftier shoot of humanity, who, for a name, applicable alike to the whole of a general division—to the blue-eyed Teuton as well as to the black-eyed Arab—we have (in obedience to the classification of others) called the Caucasian.

He is a native of Western Asia, Northern Africa, and of the whole of Europe, and, within these limits, flourishes to a native fullness, and multiplies with a profusion which is now forcing his children out upon all the world. But the problem of his like success in other localities yet remains to be solved. Will he [Pg 25] multiply and continue, on this continent, as he multiplies and continues on his own?

The Aztecs are already gone. The builders of our ancient American monuments (supposed to have been of our own race) unknown—gone probably through a decline, from causes which may still be cropping out. But the Caucasian is here master, as he is wherever else he moves upon the world. But he is not here actually native, for nature did not here place him at first. Why this exclusion, we may never know; or why the red-man of the forest was assigned to the continent long hid in the western seas. But if it be held that all men sprung from a common progenitor , and that countries and climates have divided them into races or species, why, then, are we not now in a transition from the Caucasian to the Indian? But as no such tendency is apparent, and our sphere of action is limited to things, not as they were, or as they may have been, but to that form in which we now actually find them, we need not linger on probabilities so remote and indefinable. Ours is the present time, and elements ours only as they exist. But whatever may be the operating influences of our continent, no one can help seeing that the Caucasian in America is undergoing a change. Where it will ultimate, time only can determine, but social conditions have already varied its course. The combination of white master and [Pg 26] negro slave has given it one direction, while general individuality has given it another.

The French Celt of Lower Canada—now about a million in his individual numbers—has already, at the end of two centuries of American life, dwindled into a pigmy compared with his European progenitors, and the same is correspondingly true of the Castilian of Peru and Mexico. Do these facts determine, or rather, do they not throw shadows, on the ultimate of that experiment now in the full tide of its progress—the replanting of one continent with a people who are alone indigenous to another?

Situated between these extremes—between Canada on one side and Mexico on the other—is it probable that nature to us will be more kind than she has been to them. But evidences of changing natures is already patent among us. Our American men, say intelligent clothiers of our Northern cities, are from two to three inches less around the chest than are the Europeans. This is a significant fact. But he who opens his eyes, and looks upon our slender-waisted and light-muscled American women, and compares them with the heavy-chested and strong-armed women of Europe, will see even a greater change. The European women are the heaviest.

Men of science tell us that the Caucasian in America loses a portion of that cellular cushion which underlies the skin, or intervenes between it and [Pg 27] what is called the aponeurosis; and that, as a consequence, not only does the chest diminish, but the face loses its fullness, the features sharpen, and the system generally experiences a change. This may be an immediate cause, for few facts are more patent among us than the marked fullness of European, and particularly of Teutonic faces; but for the ultimate cause, there has not yet been given, or, within our knowledge, even an attempted solution.

Facts thus patent are strongly suggestive of a decline. But whatever they may be in reality, even appearances were not always so. The American man was not always below the measure of his European progenitors, nor is he now so in all localities and under all conditions of associated life. Our American men of the Revolution “were larger and stronger,” says Mr. Cobbett, an English writer of that period, “than the British troops, and by that superiority made,” he further says, the result of that war “such as an English pen refuses to write.” ( Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men , §§275, 276 and 277.) This is European authority. But it stands not alone, for we find it fortified in records of proportions, which show our generals of that period, with but one exception, to have been all above the avoirdupois of two hundred pounds. Compare this with the weight of our like officers of the present day, and the superiority, of greater development, [Pg 28] will be unhesitatingly accorded to the men of Revolutionary times.

We learn of no distinctions then existing between the different sections of our country, but on the contrary, as the information reaches us, there is room for no other conclusion than that every where alike, our American men were “larger and stronger than the British troops.” Such is the information given us, but such are not the conditions now, for, while the Northern man is reported to be of less compass of body than the European, the men of most, if not all, of that country lying south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and above the feverish swamps of the gulf and the Mississippi River, have kept up to their Revolutionary standard. No one fact, concerning our Western people, is more patent to the observer on the banks of the Ohio River than the fact, that the Kentuckians are larger, taller, and heavier than the people of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois who for eight hundred miles skirt their northern border. The same is true of the Virginians. They are larger, both in height and circumference than their northern neighbors; and in every other Southern State, with the exceptions above noticed, we understand, that a similar development among the higher orders of society exists.

An English tourist, who visited both the Northern and Southern armies during the late war, observed this greater development of the Southern men, and [Pg 29] so reported it for Blackwood’s Magazine. But the fact is presented with probably more precision by the records of the Smithsonian Institute, whose visitors, for more than twenty years, have been weighed, measured, and their nativities noted. These records, say our informers, showed a difference, before the war, of three inches in height and twenty pounds in weight in favor of the Southern over the Northern man.

Such facts can not too forcibly command the attention of every man who aspires to the distinction of making public laws. They show the men of the South, at the beginning of the late war, in the same proportions that they show the men of the whole republic in the days of our revolution, when all the States or colonies, North as well as South, held negro slaves. To what cause, then, are we to impute the greater development of the Anglo-American at those particular times, and in those particular localities, than to the institution of negro slavery?

But this development of the Americanized Caucasian under the relation of white master and negro slave, though a commanding fact in determining the application of laws to localities, is nevertheless but little, if any thing, more than a story half told; for in addition to the greater physical proportions of the individual man, the institution has given us our loftiest shoots of intellectual power. It has given us a Washington, a Jefferson, a Madison, and, as its limits [Pg 30] were national in the dawning period of our republic, an Adams, a Hamilton, a Franklin, and, in fact, almost every other intellect of which the nation is justly proud. It was this institution which gave lofty manhood to the American mind, and threw the glove of defiance at the feet of the great Herculian English power. It gave birth to a nation of freemen, and when cut down in its limits by Northern folly, fanaticism, and design, its remaining noblemen, with but one third of the republic in population, for half a century gave direction to it all. They were giants in debate, and by their superiority, in the clash of sections, stung the pride of the opinionated Yankee, who, brooding over his wounds, sought that redress in the physical clash of numbers which he could not obtain in the battle of mind. Then, when Northern numbers, swelled by immigration to overpowering proportions, he, in the true spirit of a low cunning, discovered that “The Union was no longer worth a cus without the letting of a little blood;” and, as a consequence, hurried on—in his security of numbers—his vaunted “Irrepressible conflict of contending and induring forces.”

There could be no retreat from a conflict “irrepressible” in its nature. The child begotten must be born, and when defiance responds to aggression, there must come the shock of arms. It did come, and with a force that now tells the world of the madness in which it was conceived. Armies have [Pg 31] met and have fought. The storm of war has passed over the nation, and beneath its debris now lies the American man, overcome and subdued, not by individual superiority, but by the force of mighty numbers—the madmen of his own country, in alliance with a world of immigrants and imported mercenaries, arrayed in arms against him. It was a conflict of unequal numbers and resources. Still it was a mighty struggle, for it was that shock in which “comes the tug of war.”

The American man, who fought his battles alone, went down, but he fell, as he ever falls, from the lakes to the gulf, “with his back to the ground and his feet to the foe.” With a population of but five millions, and but poorly provided, he disputed, for four long and bloody years, every inch of ground, against the twenty-five millions, who, with all the engines of modern warfare, and with all Europe at their command for soldiers, hurled their mighty armies against him. But he fell, and why should he not have fallen, when the herring is known to have smothered the whale?

The native Indian was brave and undaunted—no Roman was his superior, until he was cowed and subdued by the superiority of the bayonet and bomb over his war-club and his arrows. He met his doom, resigned and unshaken, as fate determined it, and so, too, now does his Anglo-successor—a proof [Pg 32] in nature that the American man is designed for a soldier and a master, and not for a serf or slave.

The transplanted European in America may lose a portion of his cellular tissue, under one form of association, and may regain it, or expand it, under another; the cause of which may not readily be comprehended. But there is one point, not of proportions, but of physical action, resulting from some cause, known or unknown, and alike common to all forms of association, which can not, we think, impress itself too forcibly on the mind of every American legislator. It is the undeniable fact, that the Anglo-American man has not the same endurance, as a drudge or laborer, that pertains to the European—that he is less enduring, and, as a consequence, in labor’s conflict, loses ground. He is more fleet, and may do more for a time, but at the end of the year the European will, as a general rule, subject, of course, to its exceptions, make the best report.

By this superiority is the American forced from the field of labor, and his place monopolized by the immigrant from abroad. Look around you, and see who do your work! Look to your railroads and canals; look through your workshops, to your various modes of transportation, and your menial services, and when you have done so, tell me if you can keep up a supply, or even man a single boat on the Western waters, without the aid of immigrated [Pg 33] hands. Business, in fact, would stop in almost every department, requiring heavy labor, if the European man was taken away. Is not this a dependence reaching to the very foundation of that liberty of which the Americans, more than any other people, are most prolific in their boasts? Can a people be free who are dependent on another people, equals with themselves before the law, for all the necessaries which labor alone can produce? Mexico bows to a master from abroad; and the United States, through the folly of her legislators, now leans dependent on foreign hands.

Labor, in the conflict of life, draws to itself the capital of that country in which its productions are used, or to the hands which produce them; consequently, when a society is composed of two kinds, or divisions of people, one of whom are better, or more enduring laborers than the other, that division, so favored, will, sooner or later, obtain the property, and with it political and social dominion of the nation.

Already is our property in rapid transit from native to immigrated hands, and we, even rejoicing at the opportunities which circumstances give us, of selling or giving our country away. Look around you, and see who are vendors and who are purchasers of real estate, and the point will at once become palpable and plain. See, too, who are becoming landlords, and who are becoming tenants; and, under the new [Pg 34] order of things—outside of that combination of wholesale swindlers who converted our property into national securities, and then stole to their fullness—who are the holders of our national bonds? Look at them here and abroad, as they are now sporting on property wrenched from American hands, and you may have some idea of the condition into which you are driving your nation.

The political tendency is no less marked than the transition of estates, and may by as simple an effort be disclosed. You can try it by the same rule, no matter what may be your party relations. If you be a democrat, try and elect even a constable in any ward of any city of the United States without first consulting your Irish supports, and then see the point at which your efforts will end. Or if you be a republican, and think your condition more tolerable, try the same “experiment” without in like manner first asking permission of “my German friends,” and when you have ended the trial let us know the end of the horn at which you made your exit. You know that you can not so elect, therefore are you humbled to influences from abroad.

Such are conditions before the ballot. Americans no longer masters of their own position. But what are conditions behind it?

When you wanted revenue, you unhesitatingly imposed a duty of two dollars on a gallon of whisky; but when you came to lager beer, you very modestly [Pg 35] stopped at the short figures of three cents on the gallon. Why did you do so? We will not venture an answer for you; but, as Americans make whisky, and Germans make lager beer, we have no trouble in seeing who are favored, and who are oppressed. The American man, and particularly the Western one, whipped out of his independence, submits to whatever you dare to impose. But Deitrich is not quite so pliable. He waits upon his servants in force. This he did with his various committees, while his servants were imposing duties, and, shaking his fingers in their faces, with a leer of the eye, and a significant turn of the mouth, said: “You must not dax te lager peer!” What then followed? Deitrich knew his power, and Mr. Congressman his dependence—both, of course, alike manly, unterrified, and impartial. But when the bill came forth, we found a tax of two dollars on whisky and three cents on beer. Further comment might be disrespectful.

In this picture may you see your condition. Deprived of your own laborer, and made dependent on laborers from abroad, you are passing into subjugation almost as fast as you transformed four millions of useful negroes into four millions of vagabonds.

Why are you thus hastening downward? It is because you have drank of foreign ideas until you have become frenzied, and, in an apish vanity of foreign things, have turned your backs on advantages [Pg 36] which the God of nature, has, during the whole of your existence, been arduously forcing upon you.

He prepared your country for a great purpose, brought it forth at the proper period of time, and made it the joint receptacle of two great species of the genus man—the one a race of masters, the other a race of subordinates or slaves.

To the subordinate, in his subordinate condition, he gave an increase of physical power, and to the superior whom he deprived of some portion of his laborious indurance, that he might be charitable and humane, gave a high-toned manhood, an undaunted spirit, and, for the privation which he imposed, gave him the subordinate hands with which to do his labor. Thus, in this, as in all other things, is he alike good in what he gives and in what he denies. But you, in your spite or vanity, have rejected his blessings.

Our Northern system—now made national—is but the European system in all its material phases, and under its present character—equality of whites and blacks, States reduced to dependencies, power centralized, bond-holding lords sapping the labor of the people, and the foreign mind controlling interior forces—is probably little, if any thing, more or less than the European system botched or spoiled. It is a system under which men of fortune, having their wealth in money, seek the localities in which profit and luxury unite, and as the poor, the menial, and [Pg 37] the artful, like the mistletoe, draw their succor from larger boughs, they, too, congregate around the same centers, and thus are made up great cities which, under a political and social view, have very justly been characterized as great sores.

But it is not so where the institution of white master and negro slave exists, for there the same law of self-interest works to a different end. Wealth existing in slaves, the owner selects that order of life in which his property may be best protected and yield him the best return; consequently he eschews the city, and settles down on a plantation where both he and his negroes are alike protected against the contaminating influences of congregated luxury, poverty, and vice. For these reasons have penitentiaries been few, and poorhouses scarcely known in the Southern States, while both have been numerous and crowded from their cellars to their garrets in the North.

Why, then, have you destroyed negro slavery? and I particularly use the word negro, for no white blood should ever be held in such bondage. Are you madmen, or knaves sacrificing your country for party ends, or have you dropped from the high mentalities of your fathers down to a generation of fools?

Spite is a fierce motive power in the human mind, and when it breaks forth from a long pent up fountain, it comes forth with terrific power. So, we fear, has it been in our time. The tory, who fell with [Pg 38] Lord North in 1776, rose again with Abraham Lincoln in 1860; and writhing under the stings of long defeat, found no bounds to his vengeance. He therefore, in the consummation of his “irrepressible conflict,” wanted “a little blood.”

But let us not be misunderstood or inappropriate in the application of names to conditions.

The tory has a character by which he may be known under all disguises, as effectually as the ass was known by his bray when clothed in the skin of the lion. He is generally a worshiper of money, and to get it and hold it to himself and his children forever, to keep the rich rich, and the poor poor, or, in his own language, to steady the ship of state, he seeks a centralization of power in a congress or in a crown .

He is the man who sees all national perfections abroad, and all imperfections at home; the man who tells you that “England did so and so”—that England abolished slavery—that England has a great national debt—that England has a subjugated Ireland, and that we, of necessity, to be great must be just like England. These points alone mark the tory. He is a centralizationist and British in his proclivities. But he has other stripes, ear-marks, and croppings by which he may be known. He is the man who governs by fraud or force, who sees wisdom in deception, and honesty as a twin sister of ignorance, and vulgar life—he is often artfully [Pg 39] pious; but runs the nation wildly into debt, converts its property into national bonds, then steals them or divides them with his friends without the least compunction of conscience, but is shockingly horrified if some one happens to say repudiation, or, no more high tariffs, stamp duties, or excise taxes. He is often exceedingly reverential, but very forgetful when new desires conflict with old obligations. He goes into a Know-nothing lodge, swears immortal hatred to all foreigners, and particularly to that division of our species whom he has politely styled “the d—d Dutch,” and also in the same obligation swears unchanging fidelity to his native brother, but, on the next day, joins in a crusade with these very identical “d—d Dutch” to murder and destroy those very men whom, on the day preceding, he as arduously swore ever to defend and never to desert.

He is the man who steals the goods, and then diverts attention by crying “stop thief!”—the man who has revolutionized our government, without incurring the responsibility of a rebellion.

His views vary exceedingly under the influence of the stand-point which he occupies as a member of the ins or of the outs . Under one condition, he sees the bonds of our federal Union as “a league with hell and a covenant with death,” and, in some individualities, “struggles for sixteen years to get fifteen States out of it.” But under the other, he becomes more Union than Union itself—runs forth, [Pg 40] with his mouth wide open, shouting his devotions with all the power of his lungs, and with a rope in his hand to hang all persons whose roaring capacities are not equal to his own.

He also, under one condition, sees our “star-spangled banner” as “a flaunting lie,” and a “hated rag.” But under the other, lashes himself into a blazing fury, and breathes forth blood, and murder, and annihilation against his own countrymen—but not against foreigners—who dare to insult that time-honored emblem of a great nation’s pride, liberty and honor.

He is the man who divided our country into two party sections, because he had power in the one and not in the other; then held his Convention at Chicago, and, as a war challenge to the other section, nominated his candidates in a wigwam, with a bowie-knife eight feet long, hanging over his speaker’s chair.

He is the man who converted the pulpit into a political rostrum, and from it, in the name of religion, preached politics and sectarian and sectional spite.

He is the man who is always humble in defeat, but who, when successful, never gets done kicking a fallen foe.

He changes nature (in his own estimation) by changing names; but is here no way punctilious in regard to proprieties. He says “ Colored People”—can’t say Negro, for that would be paying too much [Pg 41] respect to nature’s divisions; therefore, he adopts, and clings to the prefix colored , though his philosophy of light tells him that black is not a color, but the absorption of all colors and the reflection of none. If he were honest he would here pause; but the deception is the very thing which alone sweetens the morsel to his tongue: for, by saying “colored people,” he may so work on the imagination of some fool, as to make him believe, that all that divides the negro from the Caucasian is merely the exterior shade or color of his skin.

He is deceptious and often pretentiously pious; but, in addition to both, is excessively malignant, and hates from the very bottom of his soul, wherein is generated the deepest spite, which, in its struggle for vent from its dark-vaulted, heaving and burning interior, bursts forth with such fulminations as “Copperhead” and “Locofoco.” They are the effusions of his own soul—display his own character, and, by their escape, give him relief.

He was for the Union when the Southern States wished to get out of it; and against the Union when they wished to be counted in. Thus is he a good Christian—by being all things to all men.

He is sufficiently variable to be counted among the progressive species; for, like his brother, the dandy, he changes his clothing with every change of fashion. At one time he is a federal, at another a national republican, at another a whig, at another [Pg 42] a republican without a prefix, and at another, par excellence , a Union man. Thus does he change, in his exterior, with times and fashions. But follow him back to his nakedness, and you will always find him a centralizationists, and an admirer of English polity, or an English church, or an English crown. He will be somewhere lurking under the curtain, and, although the way be dark and mysterious, wherever you hear the spiteful utterances of “Copperhead” or “Locofoco,” or kindred fulminations, or the soft and plaintive whispers of “Colored People,” you may know that you are in the right course to that dark nucleus of many exteriors known to our revolutionary dialect as the American tory.

This explains what we mean by a term which otherwise might be regarded as improper or inappropriate in these connections. But let us return from so long a digression.

Our bird of liberty has already flown to the mountains, and left us, not independent, as we are wont to be, but dependent—dependent for American labor on European hands, and through that dependence and other kindred relations—the result of kindred policies—subject to the European mind in our affairs of State. This is all the result of unwise legislation. But it began long anterior to present time; still to you has been reserved the infliction of the most fatal of all inflicted blows. You have, as [Pg 43] already noticed, converted four millions of laborers into four millions of vagabonds—have transformed or inverted them from a natural to an unnatural condition, and there left them to pay the penalty of your own crimes, by a rapid decline and ultimate extinction. You have forced our American youth to unequal competition in the field of labor, and not contented with holding our delicate-muscled American women—the most beautiful, I have not a doubt, beneath the sun, and designed by nature for ladies to command—to an unequal conflict with the heavy armed laboring woman of the old world; but you have forced them to a still more unequal and degraded conflict with the gross and insensitive negroes, yet wavering between imposed civilization and native barbarism.

You have destroyed our own kindred that you may give their lands away to immigrants from abroad—to a people of another continent, who even now darken the seas with their numbers, on their ways to receive and appropriate to themselves homes made desolate by your destruction of American men, women, and children. You will not deny the impeachment, but will interpose your plea of loyalty—the plea of the tory over three quarters of a century ago—but can you hide the fact that, had there been no abolitionists there would have been no secessionists or secession ?

But the battle is over, and we may now count [Pg 44] the loss, and in the sequel see how effectually your blows have rebounded to the injury of all sections, both North and South. You have destroyed a million of our most valuable men, and imposed upon us a debt of three thousand millions of dollars—the heaviest burden, computing its interest at but six percent, while England’s draws but three, that now bears on any people in the known world. But even this, though great beyond indurance, for neither principal nor interest ever can be paid, is not the greatest of the afflictions which you have imposed upon us: you have destroyed the unity of sections, and killed our own goose that laid our golden eggs. This a few figures will effectually explain.

Take for elucidation, of American commerce and production, any one year, when nature was unobstructed by the clash of arms, and it will unfold, not only the suicidal nature of your policy, but the great fountain out of which has flown American wealth and prosperity. Take, for example, the year 1859, the year preceding the tory rise and the American fall, and it will elucidate the point in question.

The whole agricultural exports—the only reliable foundation of our national prosperity—of that year were, in round numbers, just $199,000,000, of that sum $161,000,000 was cotton, and $21,000,000 tobacco, leaving but $17,000,000 as the whole export of our cereals and provisions of that year. This [Pg 45] whole sum of Northern exports would not now pay Ohio’s share of the interest on the national debt. How then is she to pay taxes and support life when the currency of the country, now blown into a froth, shall again have settled down to a solidity? She can not pay; nor can any other State not upheld by arbitrary laws, robbing other people for her benefit.

In two years out of three, and probably three out of four, the Baltic and Black Sea, with their cereals and provisions, can undersell us in the markets of Western Europe, consequently a reliance on a direct trade of our northern productions with countries beyond our own, would be so uncertain as to leave us two years out of three, and probably three out of four, in a condition almost as helpless as if we had raised nothing above our own consumptive wants.

Under such conditions one half of the Northwest would probably relapse into a wilderness—into that condition into which it would undoubtedly have remained had your policy began with the history of the nation. But our conditions have been of a very different character, and until disturbed by madmen, were, I have not a doubt, the best regulated for the production of national prosperity that any where existed upon the face of the world.

The Northwest was the cereal garden of the South. We fed the negro while he raised cotton; thus our productions went into the bale, and with it, [Pg 46] or of it, were exported to Europe, and there sold for money. This sent a stream of gold across the ocean, which spread over all our country, nourishing our corn-producing fields of the North, as well as the cotton fields of the southern plantations. This was the fountain of our prosperity. It brought the best market in the world to our western doors, and among its consequences forced out a stream of emigration from abroad which set into our country to head the golden tide which, by American labor alone, under American regulations, preceded it. But now, this stream is already more than half dried up, and still diminishing in its volume.

What, then, unless some specialty, as a foreign famine or European war, comes to our relief, is to be our future? Our old channels of commerce broken up—our great American staple vastly reduced in its volume—our corn without a market in the world—a mountain of debt bearing down upon us—a tax on every thing around us, on all we eat, and drink, and wear—and a revenue stamp demanded wherever a stamp can be made to stick;—our people, like their prosperity, by force of institutions, on the decline, and Europe, both internally and externally, exerting a moving influence on our nation! Does not the fate of Mexico already look down upon us? and will not some future Napoleon send to us some future Maximilian to collect interests on United States bonds, as well as the present one now does on the [Pg 47] bonds of Mexico? Is any result more certain, if your present wild and senseless policy be continued and pursued?

Europe, with reference to humanity, is the great positive pole of the world. Her waves radiate from a center, and have swept, and will continue to sweep around the earth, unless, in the combination of elements, new barriers be formed that will break her surges and roll back her billows. This has been done in America, and, by its power, forced the dominion of European kings from American shores. It was done by the unity of two elements directly opposite in their natures—the Caucasian and the negro; the one as subordinate, and the other as supreme. But the moment this unity has been severed, the ramparts of the state have weakened, and foreign waves have again broken in upon us.

What, then, shall we do in the advancement of our own greatness, or in the defense of our own rights and liberties? Shall we, like stupid toads, lend a suppliant ear to the siren songs of distant royalty, and extinguish ourselves in an apish effort to duplicate some other people? Or shall we not rise, in the dignity of our Revolutionary independence, and conform our society to the requisitions of nature at home. This, if you be wise, you will do—you will, with some modifications of past systems, re-establish negro slavery; and, instead of giving your country away—retreating [Pg 48] before new tides, and beckoning for new invasions in the name of immigrations—you will re-open the slave-trade, and bring your laborers from the coast of Africa. Then you will have a laboring power of your own—a power which you can transmit, with your lands, to your children—and so protect the generations which are to follow you, against that dependence with which the youth of the present age are sorely oppressed.

Then you will have your social laws based on nature’s laws, and each man, with his species, in his appropriate condition, enjoying the highest measure of civil liberty that nature and good government can, by possibility, afford. Then will America be free, and her sons, in reality, independent. Then will they roll back the tide of foreign insolence, presumption and dictation. Then will they have a national character; and, standing to their arms as soldiers, drilled to the military art, protect their rights, their laws, and their liberties against whomsoever may dare to intrude.

Very respectfully, yours,

DAVID QUINN.

Chicago, Ill. , June 13th, 1866.

To the People of the United States :

It was the intention of the undersigned, when writing the within article, to present it to Congress immediately, but on reflection he has concluded, that, inasmuch as the prayer of the petition reaches beyond Congress, to the Constitution-making power of the nation, it may be best to withhold the presentation until the paper can be read by the people. He will therefore delay bringing the subject, formally, before Congress until next winter, and in the meantime publish the article and endeavor to get it before the nation.

For this reason the paper will be placed in the hands of some publisher, as soon as one can be procured, and the pamphlets sold at such prices as will merely cover expenses. But for the present, any orders addressed to us at Chicago, will be attended to and the books forwarded at ten cents a piece.

Publishers and readers who wish to interest themselves in the sale or circulation, are requested to write to us, and newspaper publishers are requested to notice the article, or to publish it if they desire, and for doing either, will, if they send us their paper, marked, be forwarded two copies of the pamphlet.

David Quinn.

Chicago, Ill. , June 13, 1866.