man of experience and ability, but he assumes the reins of government in circumstances of no ordinary difficulty, and which are well fitted to try the best of men, and to call forth the firmness, energy, and decision of the greatest. If he proves equal to his position, carries the government safely through the present crisis, and leaves at the end of four years the party of the Union united and strong enough to administer the government on constitutional principles in spite of all sectional opposition, he will render his administration memorable in our annals, and deserve to be ranked as the second Father of his country.

The most of us who at the North voted for Mr. Buchanan did so on Union principles, for the purpose of defeating what we regarded as a Northern sectional party on the one hand, and an intolerant, un-American party on the other. We ourselves supported him not from any attachment to the Democratic party as such, but as the candidate opposed to Know-Nothingism and Abolitionism, the two most threatening dangers that existed prior to the election. But there are other extremes also to be guarded against. Know-Nothingism we regard as dead and buried. The danger now arises almost solely from the question of negro-slavery, a question which has no place rightfully in our Federal politics, but which has found a place there through the fault of the South as well as of the North, and cannot without a fearful struggle now be excluded. The incoming administration cannot prudently stave off this question, but must meet it boldly, firmly, and dispose of it, or it will dispose of the Democratic party. The Cincinnati platform endorses the policy embodied in the Kanzas-Nebraska Bill, but unless the administration gives to that policy a very liberal interpretation, it will prove the rock on which the party will split, and perhaps the Union itself.

The Kanzas-Nebraska policy, not, however, adopted for the first time, in the Kanzas-Nebraska Bill, was designed to combine the Slave States as a solid phalanx in support of the Democratic party, so as by the aid of two or three Democratic States in the non-slaveholding section of the Union, to secure the election of its candidates for the presidency against all the rest, and even against the majority of the popular vote. There may be

political conjunctures, when such a policy is excusable, but regarded as the permanent policy of a party that professes to consult the welfare of the whole Union, we want language to express the abhorrence in which it should be held.

We shall be believed when we say that we do not oppose this policy on slavery or anti-slavery grounds. We condemn that policy solely for its bearing on the distribution of power, and on the administration of the government. The Slave States constitute not the strongest section of the Union, but the slave interest is stronger than any other one interest in the country, and is more than a match for all the others taken singly. It can combine a larger political minority in its favor than any other, though after all only a minority. To combine all the slaveholding States around that interest, and secure them the administration of the government by the aid of one, two, or three Democratic Free States against the votes of all the rest, is really to place the government in the hands of the sectional, slaveholding minority, because that minority is the immense majority of the party that elects the President. To suppose such a policy to be permanent is to suppose that the slave interest is to govern the country, and that the majority of the Union is to submit to the slaveholding minority. If fully carried out and consolidated, the policy would virtually disfranchise, as to the general government, the majority of the American people, and render the non-slaveholding States the subjects, ultimately the slaves, of the minority, held together by a particular interest, and that too an interest which has no right to enter into the politics of the Union. No statesman, worthy of the name, can for one moment believe the Free States would long submit to be thus deprived of their legitimate influence in the affairs of the country, and quietly acquiesce in the domination of some three hundred thousand slaveholders, in a single geographical section. Having, as they well know, the absolute majority, having also, as they fully believe, the power, they would rebel against their Southern masters, and form a Northern sectional party, do their best to defeat and subject the slave interest, and in their turn attempt to bring the slaveholding States under the domination of

Northern manufacturers, bankers, brokers, and stockjobbers.

There are anti-slavery men at the North,-and we have found anti-slavery men also at the South,-but it would be a great mistake to suppose that it is a real antislavery feeling that has in the late elections given the socalled Republicans their immense majorities in the Free States. It is no such thing. The large majority of the electors in the non-slaveholding States are neither "nigger-drivers" nor "nigger-worshippers," to use the homely but expressive terms of the New York Herald, and while strongly opposed to the extension of the area of slavery, they have no disposition to interfere with it where it now legally exists. It is in the power of the South to make every man, woman, and child, north of Mason and Dixon's line, an abolitionist, but as yet the majority are not so, and are willing to leave slavery to the disposition of the several States in which it exists. The real struggle between the North and South is a struggle for power. The South seeks to extend and consolidate the slave interest, because that interest gives her a power in the Union to which she is not entitled by her numbers, and the North opposes slavery, not because of its alleged sinfulness, but because it would prevent it from becoming predominant, and excluding the Free States from their legitimate influence in the Union. Here is the significance of the struggle that is now raging, and which the incoming administration will be obliged to face as best it may.

The Kanzas-Nebraska policy may be thought to have elected Mr. Buchanan, and his natural temptation may be to administer the government in accordance with the Southern interest which has contributed the most to his election. The Southern minority is the immense majority of the party that has elected him. In all except two or three Free States the Democratic party is for the present in a hopeless minority; a very large majority of the popular vote of the Union was cast against it, and without the union of the South, where is Mr. Buchanan to look for support for his administration? And how is he to retain the South united, without supporting the policy of the slave interest? But, if he does support that policy, if he makes it a point to favor that interest, and carry out

the views of those who aim through it to control the administration, as Nicholas Biddle hoped to control the credit system of the world by buying up the cotton crop of the South, he will not only administer the government as a Southern Sectional President, but inevitably prepare the way for the accession of a Northern Sectional President in 1860. The experiment of the last election is one that cannot be repeated with success. There is a spirit aroused at the North, whether good or bad, that cannot prudently be tampered with, and Mr. Buchanan's safety lies alone in administering the government on strictly Union principles, -justice to all sections of the Union, but partiality to none. He must interpret the Kanzas-Nebraska policy to mean really and truly the non-intervention of Congress. in the question of slavery, the complete exclusion of that question from Federal politics.

The Kanzas-Nebraska Bill professed, but falsely professed, to be framed on the principle of non-intervention. Slavery, we hold, is a local institution, and not placed within the province of the Federal government. That government is bound to respect it where it legally exists, as it is bound to respect all the laws and institutions of the several States, not in derogation of the Constitution and laws of the United States, and to provide for reclaiming by their owners persons held to service in one State and escaping into another; but further than that it has no constitutional power over it. It can neither abolish it where it exists, nor authorize it where it does not exist, unless it be in the District of Columbia. The Kanzas-Nebraska Bill is opposed to this principle, and is an attempt on the part of Congress to enable slavery to gain a legal introduction into new territory, under the pretence of leaving it to the Territorial people to decide for themselves whether they will have slaves or not. But the people of a Territory not yet erected into a State, have no political or civil powers, except those conferred by Congress, and Congress can confer no power which it does not itself possess, or authorize them to do any thing which it has not the constitutional right to do itself. Congress having itself no right to say whether slavery shall or shall not be allowed, it cannot, of course, authorize the people to do so.

The attempt to get over the lack of power on the part

of Congress, by the recognition of so-called "squatter sovereignty," is unworthy of high-minded and honorable statesmen. Squatter sovereignty is an absurdity, and repugnant to the first principles of all legal order. Under our system of government the people as States possess original and underived sovereignty, and sovereignty, under God, in its plenitude, save so far as by their own free and irrevocable act they have delegated its exercise to the Union. But the inhabitants of a Territory have no original and underived sovereignty at all; they have no existence as a sovereign people, and no inherent political or civil rights and powers. Whatever legislative authority the territorial legislature may have, it holds it as a grant from Congress. To recognize in the people of the Territory original and underived legislative power is a contradiction in terms; for it is to recognize them as a State, while they are only a Territory. When they receive permission from Congress to organize themselves as a State, and to form a State Constitution preparatory to admission into the Union, they may authorize slavery or not as it seems to them good, for then they act as a State, from their own inherent sovereignty, but not till then; for till then, they can act only under the authority of Congress. The clause in the Bill remitting the decision of the question of slavery to the Territorial people is, therefore, in our judgment, totally unconstitutional, and all acts done under it are null and void from the beginning.

Congress can neither legislate slavery into a Territory nor out of it, because slavery is not within the scope of its constitutional powers, and is a matter over which the States have supreme and exclusive jurisdiction. This, as we understand it, is Southern doctrine, and we believe it sound. Let the South and the North each have its advantages and submit to its disadvantages. The slaveholding States ought to be satisfied with it, and the Free States, if they love the Constitution, have no reason to object to it, for it excludes slavery from all territory under the Union, till it becomes a State. The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that slavery is a local institution, and exists only by virtue of local law. The right of the master, then, to his slave is not a right that adheres to him, and which he can carry with him into other territory, or