sition can carry the country if they choose to do so. They have it in their power, through union, to strike down the revolutionists at Washington, and to place the government once more in the hands of men who will administer it according to the terms of the Constitution. With such candidates as FREMONT and DAYTON they can unite with perfect propriety, those candidates being the representatives of ideas that are entertained by three fourths of the voters of the country, and which therefore ought to predominate in and control the councils of government. Union is victory always, but it is emphatically so in this election, on the part of the opposition. The very fact that the electoral system operates most unequally against us should cause us to contend the more earnestly, so that our success shall be the more striking, and more the result of our labors than of the favors of fortune.

COL. FREMONT'S LETTER OF ACCEPT

ANCE.

NEW YORK, July 8, 1856.

Gentlemen-You call me to a high responsibility by placing me in the van of a great movement of the people of the United States, who, without regard to past differences, are uniting in a common effort to bring back the action of the Federal Government to the principles of Washington and Jefferson. Comprehending the magnitude of the trust which they have declared themselves willing to place in my hands, and deeply sensible to the honor which their unreserved confidence in this threatening position of the public affairs implies, I feel that I cannot better respond than by a sincere declaration that, in the event of my election to the Presidency, I should enter upon the execution of its duties with a single-hearted determination to promote the good of the whole country, and to direct solely to this end all the power of the government, irrespective of party issues, and regardless of sec tional strifes.

The declaration of principles embodied in the re

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solves of your Convention, expresses the sentiments in which I have been educated, and which have been ripened into convictions by personal observation and experience. With this declaration and avowal, I think it necessary to revert to only two of the subjects embraced in the resolutions, and to those only because events have surrounded them with grave and critical circumstances, and given to them especial importance.

I concur in the views of the Convention deprecat ing the foreign policy to which it adverts. The assumption that we have the right to take from another nation its domains, because we want them, is an abandonment of the honest character which our country has acquired. To provoke hostilities by unjust assumptions, would be to sacrifice the peace and character of the country, when all its interests might be more certainly secured and its objects attained by just and healing counsels, involving no loss of reputation.

International embarrassments are mainly the results of a secret diplomacy, which aims to keep from the knowledge of the people the operations of the government. This system is inconsistent with the character of our institutions, and is itself yielding gradually to a more enlightened public opinion, and to the power of a free press, which, by its broad dissemination of political intelligence, secures in advance to the side of justice the judgment of the civilized world. An honest, firm and open policy in our foreign relations, would command the united support of the nation, whose deliberate opinions it would necessarily reflect.

Nothing is clearer in the history of our institutions than the design of the nation in asserting its own independence and freedom to avoid giving countenance to the extension of slavery. The influence of the small, but compact and powerful class of men interested in slavery, who command one section of the country, and wield a vast political control as a consequence, in the other, is now directed to turn back this impulse of the revolution, and reverse its principles. The extension of slavery across the continent is the object of the power which now rules the government, and from this spirit has sprung those kindred wrongs in Kansas, so truly portrayed in one of your resolutions, which prove that the elements of the most arbitrary governments have been vanquished by the just theory of our own.

It would be out of place here to pledge myself to any particular policy that may be suggested to terminate the sectional controversy engendered by political animosities operating on a powerful class, banded together by a common interest. A practical remedy is the admission of Kansas into the Union as a free State. The South should, in my judgment, earnestly desire such a consummation. It would vindicate its good faith; it would correct the mistake of the repeal, and the North, having practically the benefit of the agreement between the two sections, would be satisfied, and good feeling be restored. The measure is perfectly consistent with the honor of the South, and vital to its interests.

That fatal act which gave birth to this purely sectional strife, originating in the scheme to take from free labor the country secured to it by a solemn covenant, cannot be too soon disarmed of its pernicious force. The only genial region of the middle latitudes left to the emigrants of the Northern States for homes, cannot be conquered from the free laborers, who have long considered it as set apart for them in our inheritance, without provoking a desperate struggle. Whatever may be the persistence of the particular class which seems ready to hazard everything for the success of the unjust scheme it has partially effected, I firmly believe that the great heart of the nation which throbs with the patriotism of the free men of both sections, will have power to overcome it. They will look to the rights secured to them by the Constitution of the Union, as their best safeguard from the oppression, of the class, which by a monopoly of the soil, and of slave labor to till it, might, in time, reduce them to the extremity of laboring upon the same terms with the slaves. The great body of non-slave