2

Untitled.

When Abraham Lincoln was nominated by the Chicago convention for the presidency, no man ever thought of claiming for him ability, capacity or experience. They harped upon his extreme "honesty," and his funny stories and quaint jokes were copied and laughed at from one end of the Union to the other. To all the arguments of his opponents against his wisdom of his statesmanship, the only reply was that at all events he was honest. As he had never been detected in pilfering from the cash drawer of a dry goods store, nor charged with breaking into a stable for the sake of a horse, this argument was a staggerer, and no one thought of denying or attempting to disprove the assertion. But three years in the white house have demonstrated to every man's satisfaction that this nation never has so dishonest a ruler, or one so utterly and flagrantly regardless of his most solemn and repeated pledges. He has kept faith with nobody, except the negroes and them he has left to starve and perish in the camps to which his proclamation has enticed them. He swore to uphold and defend the constitution, while he was the first to violate and to strike it down; he told the people he had neither the right nor the intention to make war upon the institutions of the southern states, and straight way employed the whole federal army in the task of enforcing abolition at the point of the bayonet; he pledged the solemn faith of his office that he would make no appointments in the southern states distasteful to the people, and has sent Dick Busteed as district judge to Alabama: in brief, it has come to be customary for the people to expect the very opposite of what Mr. Lincoln avows his determination to do. As for his joking qualifications, we adopt the language of Geo. Wilkes, one of the most supernaturally "loyal" men in the country, who says, "We can conceive how a popular tumult may, in its first emotions, upheave some joscose clodpote to the apez, but we can not conceive how, in the face of dripping guillotines and a rocking empire, Jack Bunsby could be elected to preside over a period like that of the old French revolution, for a second term."