of the
President, in whose favour every presumption should be given. The
suspension of the writ of _habeas corpus_ and the long list of
arbitrary arrests had provoked Seymour as it did many conservative
Republicans, but however much individual rights may be violated, he
said, so long as the country is engaged in a struggle for its
existence, confidence, based upon the assumption that imperative
reasons exist for these unusual measures, must be reposed in the
Administration. This was the incarnation of loyalty.

But Seymour closed his address with an ugly crack of the whip.
Dropping his well-selected words with the skill of a practised
debater, he blended the history of past wrongs with those of the
present, thus harrowing his auditors into a frame of mind as
resentful and passionate as his own. When the public safety permits,
he said threateningly, there will be abundant time to condemn and
punish the authors of injustice and wrong, whether they occupy the
presidential chair or seats in the cabinet. "Let them remember the
teachings of history. Despotic governments do not love the agitators
that call them into existence. When Cromwell drove from Parliament the
latter-day saints and higher-law men of his day, and 'bade them cease
their babblings;' and when Napoleon scattered at the point of the
bayonet the Council of Five Hundred and crushed revolution beneath his
iron heel, they taught a lesson which should be heeded this day by men
who are animated by a vindictive piety or a malignant philanthropy....
It is the boast of the Briton that his house is his castle. However
humble it may be, the King cannot enter. Let it not be said that the
liberties of American citizens are less perfectly protected, or held
less sacred than are those of the subjects of a Crown."

The slavery question was less easily and logically handled. He denied
that it caused the war, but admitted that the agitators did, putting
into the same class "the ambitious man at the South, who desired a
separate confederacy," and "the ambitious men of the North, who reaped
a political profit from agitation." In deprecating emancipation he
carefully avoided the argument of military necessity, so forcibly put
by John Cochrane, and strangely overlooked the fact that the South, by
the act of rebellion, put itself outside the protection guaranteed
under the Constitution to loyal and law-abiding citizens. "If it be
true," he said, "that slavery must be abolished to