ng
power and place, through violence and fraud and falsehood at the
so-called "elections" in the Solid Southern States, now threatens the
Country once more with iniquitous Free-Trade legislation, and all its
attendant train of commercial disasters and general industrial ruin.

Were Abraham Lincoln able bodily to revisit the United States to-day,
how his keen gray eyes would open in amazement, to find that many
legitimate fruits of our Union victories had been filched from us; that
--save the honorable few, who, accepting the legitimate results of the
War, were still honestly striving for the success of principles
harmonizing with such results, and inuring to the general welfare--they
who strove with all their might to wreck the Government,--were now,
--through the fraudulent and forcible restriction of voters in their right
to vote--at the helm of State; that these, who sought to ruin the
Nation, had thus wrongfully usurped its rule; that Free-Trade--after
"running-a-muck" of panic and disaster, from the birth of the Republic,
to the outbreak of the Rebellion, with whose failure it should naturally
have expired--was now reanimated, and stood, defiantly threatening all
the great industries of our Land; that all his own painstaking efforts,
and those of the band of devoted Patriots who stood by him to free the
Southern Slaves, had mainly resulted in hiding from sight the repulsive
chains of enforced servitude, under the outward garb of Freedom; that
the old Black codes had simply been replaced by enactments adapted to
the new conditions; that the old system of African Slavery had merely
been succeeded by the heartless and galling system of African Peonage;
that the sacrifices made by him--including that of his martyrdom--had,
to a certain extent, been made in vain; that all the sacrifices, the
sorrows, the sufferings, of this Nation, made in blood, in tears, and in
vast expenditures of time and treasure, had, in some degree, and in a
certain sense, been useless; that the Union, to be sure, was saved--but
saved to be measurably perverted from its grand purpose; that the power
which animated Rebellion and which was supposed to have expired in the
"last ditch" with the "Lost Cause" had, by political legerdemain and
jugglery and violence, been regained; that the time had actually come
for Patriots to take back seats, while unrepentant Rebels came to the
front; that the Republic still lived, but only by sufferance, with the
ha