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.

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 of 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 that the
majority of the people have not yet declared for it, and to hope that they
never