The occasion which provoked it was the following account, which appeared a day or two previous in the _Evening Post_, of a meeting at the Cooper Union of malcontents, having little in common to unite them but their hostility to the party which had nominated Abraham Lincoln for President. They were mostly the unaccounted-for _débris_ of the old Whig party, who tried to disguise themselves by taking the name of "Merchants of New York." Mr. Tilden was invited to speak, but this motley audience did not care to listen long to so prominent a political partisan of Jackson and Van Buren, who had also been the most formidable critic of all Whig measures during all their successive administrations: "THE TREMENDOUS DEMONSTRATION "The 'Dry-Goods party,' as by general consent the fusionists have come to be designated, held what they called a 'Union meeting' last night at the Cooper Institute. They did not meet at Tammany Hall, for obvious reasons, though it must have made some of the gentlemen who contributed towards the expense of the entertainment feel a little queer when they found themselves associating politically with a class of men who could not be persuaded to put a foot inside of the old Wigwam. It has been observed that political parties, as they decline in strength, lengthen the list of officers supposed to officiate at their public gatherings, just as the shadows of mountains lengthen as the sun goes down. The Dry-Goods party did not attempt to be an exception; on the contrary, they seem to have made all of their party vice-presidents that they did not make president and secretaries. In looking over the list of gentlemen who figure on this occasion, we could not but be struck with what Clay called the 'mutability of all human opinion.' It seemed as if the milky portion of the old barn-burning party of '48 which had soured from the effects of Republican thunder, had been specially served up for the public entertainment. There was Dix, who ran for Governor with Van Buren in 1848 against Cass, nominated for chairman by Wilson G. Hunt, largely in the dry-goods line, who supported Van Buren and free soil as zealously and liberally as he now supports Breckinridge, Douglas, Bell, Sam & Co.