Among our Californian passengers, we had many strong party men, and political conversation never flagged throughout the voyage. In every discussion it became more and more clear that the Democratic is the Constitutional, the Republican the Utilitarian party--rightly called “Radical,” from its habit of going to the root of things, to see whether they are good or bad. Such, however, is the misfortune of America in the possession of a written Constitution, such the reverence paid to that document on account of the character of the men who penned it, that even the extremest radicals dare not admit in public that they aim at essential change, and the party loses, in consequence, a portion of the strength that attaches to outspoken honesty. The President‘s party at their convention--known as the “Wigwam”--which met while I was in Philadelphia, maintained that the war had but restored the “Union as it was,” with State rights unimpaired. The Republicans say that they gave their blood, as they are ready again to shed it, for the “Union as it was _not;_” for one nation, and not for thirty-six, or forty-five. The Wigwam declared that the Washington government had no constitutional right to deny representation in Congress to any State. The Republicans ask how, if this constitutional provision is to be observed, the government of the country is to be carried on. The Wigwam laid it down as a principle, that Congress has no power to interfere with the right possessed by each State to prescribe qualifications for the elective franchise. The Radicals say that State sovereignty should have vanished when slavery went down, and ask how the South is to be governed consistently with republicanism unless by negro suffrage, and how this is to be maintained except by Federal control over the various States--by abolition, in short, of the old Union, and creation of a new. The more honest among the Republicans admit that for the position which they have taken up, they can find no warrant in the Constitution; that, according to the doctrine which the “continental statesmen” and the authors of “The Federalist” would lay down, were they living, thirty-five of the States, even if they were unanimous, could have no right to tamper with the constitution of the thirty-sixth. The answer to all this can only be that, were the Constitution to be closely followed, the result would be the ruin of the land.