"Our old friend Tilden, who stood at the wheel during all those troublous times; who was one of the counsel for the Barnburners in the Baltimore convention of 1848, and who helped to lead the _Evening Post_ into all its free-soil heresies without ever showing it any decent way out of them, offered the resolutions and made a short speech. It would have been longer, but the audience wished to hear Wood. Either Wood or a song they must have, and so Mr. Tilden retired with his speech just as good as new, and, as it appeared, too good for his audience, that they might hear a song from a Mr. Cosgrove, Wood being returned by the officer 'not found.' The preference for Wood is explained, perhaps, by the fact that the first vice-president, W. B. Astor, was one of the ten or dozen gentlemen who certified to Mayor Wood's character when a candidate a second time for the '_mayorality_'--as Mr. Wood is in the habit of spelling the dignity he at present enjoys--and who recommended him warmly to the suffrages of the people. All the rest of the gentlemen who signed that 'character,' Moses Taylor, M. Aspinwall, the Browns, etc., figure also among the vice-presidents, and it is not strange, therefore, that a meeting thus officered should prefer a speech from Fernando Wood to a speech from Samuel J. Tilden. "Then there was Henry Grinnell, who paid liberally towards raising the standard of rebellion at the park meeting, held shortly after the nomination of Cass, in 1848, and whose name was freely used by the Barnburners until about the time that the Union-saving steamship companies began to be incorporated and subsidized by Congress. Since then he has had little or no interest in anything North, this side of the Arctic circle. "John Cochrane, Dan Norris, Henry Eveson, William F. Havemeyer, Stephen Cambreleng, Charles A. Secor, Myndert Van Schaick, whom, to his great disappointment, the Barnburners failed to elect Mayor of the city before the days of fusion, T. B. Tappen, John Van Buren, A. B. Conger, Addison Gardiner, etc., etc., make up the list of distinguished Barnburners of the milky sort who have 'turned,' and now form the cheesy pillars and architrave of the Dry-Goods party. "The speakers for the evening were James W. Gerard and Charles O'Conor, two of our ablest lawyers, skilled to make the worse appear the better reason, and, from long professional training, about as much at home on one side of a question as another. As neither of these gentlemen were in good standing with the old Democratic party, the first being an old Whig and the other a fractious and crockery-breaking independent, they were listened to with patience by an assembly conspicuously impatient of anything savoring of old-fashioned Democracy.