will need to be told that but for President Buchanan’s fidelity to his constitutional oath, and to the behest of the party which elected him in 1856 to “uphold the Union,” the Civil War would probably have begun in Washington itself before Mr. Lincoln set foot within the capital. On the day of Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, a day never to be forgotten by any American who witnessed the scene, it was the presence by the side of Mr. Lincoln of his great Northern Democratic rival, Senator Douglas, which more than all the bayonets of the troops assembled for the protection of Washington by General Scott, under orders from President Buchanan, convinced the most intelligent of the Southern men that the Union was not to be dissolved like snow in the sunbeams, and gave all the weight of the Democratic masses of the North and West to the new President’s deliberate declaration that the forts and property of the United States would be “held and occupied” by all the power of the unseceded States. The one member of Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet who from the beginning foresaw the gravity of the impending contest, and who put the whole pressure of his personal influence upon the new President almost to the extent of compelling him into asserting his authority by force of arms, was not the Whig who had organised the “Republican” party, Mr. Seward, It was Mr. Montgomery Blair, a “Democrat” by training, the son of the confidential adviser of President Jackson and the brother of a Democratic general in the Union armies who was afterwards nominated for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Seymour of New York in 1868 by the Democratic party. Mr. Montgomery Blair himself left Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet in July 1864, escaped the war made by the “Republican” party under Sumner and Stevens upon the friends of President Lincoln, after the assassination of the President by a melodramatic madman, and became a trusty ally of Governor Tilden of New York, the Democratic candidate who was elected to the Presidency of the United States in 1876 by a popular majority of nearly 300,000 votes in a total poll of a little over 8,000,000, and by a majority of one vote in the electoral colleges, only to be defrauded of his office by the audacious tampering of a cabal of Republican office-holders with the votes of three Southern States.