pointed rebuke of bad ones. He says the
people did it. He forgets that the "people," as he complacently
calls only those who voted for Buchanan, are in a minority of the
whole people by about four hundred thousand votes--one full tenth
of all the votes. Remembering this, he might perceive that the
"rebuke" may not be quite as durable as he seems to 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 had
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." [That's a
sheal'd 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.

[Sidenote] Illinois "State Journal," December 16, 1856.

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 towards 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