"GENTLEMEN,--Regretting that I cannot personally attend the celebration of the Fourth of July by the Tammany Society, to which you have invited me, I nevertheless concur most cordially in the patriotic sentiments so eloquently expressed in the address of the sachems. "Your venerable society may well felicitate itself upon its political retrospect. It did everything in its power to avert civil strife by a policy which was represented as too conciliatory by those who did not comprehend the danger. When the conflict of arms came it cordially maintained the nationality of our people in a confederated republic, which Jefferson and Madison and Jackson always held to be incapable of being dissolved except by a revolutionary destruction of the Constitution. And now that peace has once more happily returned, it claims that constitutional rights shall be restored throughout our whole country; that every State shall be replaced in its constitutional orbit; that we shall once more present to the world a continental system of States, bound together by a constitutional union--founded on the twin principles of local self-government and industrial liberty, and sustained by the voluntary action of a people among whom government is everywhere carried on by the consent of the governed. "Alas! that this benign work of peace should be more difficult than the fierce struggle of war. But so it is. "Multitudes of our fellow-citizens are so infatuated with fear of the danger of disunion, which has now passed, that they create a danger of centralism fatal to all liberty--to all constitutional government--and at last by inevitable reaction to the Union itself. "Instead of restoring the system of our fathers, the purpose to do which alone consecrated our cause against secession as righteous, they would erect upon this fair continent eleven Polands, eleven Hungaries, eleven Irelands! "And the same principles of despotism which they would apply to our recent enemies they freely extend to the whole Northern people. "I say the principles of despotism. For _centralism_ is _despotism_. Was centralism ever before so rampant as now? The distinguishing characteristic of the controlling element of the so-called Republican party which now sways the two Houses of Congress is a total disregard of all limitations of power established by our written Constitution; an overwhelming contempt for all fundamental law, whether State or Federal. "No right of localities or of individuals is deemed sacred. "The principles which underlie our whole political system are not respected; they do not seem to be even comprehended. "The present Congress and the advanced Republican party are a rule unto themselves. Their own opinion of what it is convenient or expedient they should do, is the only limitation of power which they acknowledge; and it is their opinion that they should do pretty much everything, in all places and with respect to everybody.