In returning home through your city on Saturday last, I had the unexpected honor of receiving your kind invitation to partake of a public dinner at such time as might best suit my own convenience. For this distinguished and valuable token of your regard, please to accept my most grateful acknowledgments; and, whilst regretting that circumstances, which it would be too tedious to explain, will deprive me of the pleasure of meeting you at the festive board, you may rest assured that I shall ever highly prize the favorable opinion you express of my poor public services. To the city of Baltimore I have ever been attached by strong ties. In early life I had selected it as the place where to practice my profession; and nothing prevented me from carrying this purpose into effect but my invincible reluctance, at the last moment, to leave my native State. The feeling which prompted me in 1814, during the last war with Great Britain, to march as a private to Baltimore, a circumstance to which you kindly allude, resulted from a patriotism so universal throughout Pennsylvania, that the honor which may fall to the lot of any one of the thousands of my fellow-citizens who volunteered their services on that trying occasion, scarcely deserves to be mentioned. If I rightly read “the signs of the times,” there has seldom been a period when the Democratic party of the country, to which you and I are warmly attached, was in greater danger of suffering a defeat than at the present moment. In order to avert this catastrophe, we must mutually forget and forgive past dissensions, suffer “bygones to be bygones,” and commence a new career, keeping constantly in view the ancient and long established landmarks of the party. Most, if not all the great questions of policy which formerly divided us from our political opponents, have been settled in our favor. No person, at this day, thinks of re-establishing another national bank, or repealing the Independent Treasury, or distributing the proceeds of the public lands among the several States, or abolishing the veto power. On these great and important questions, the Whigs, after a long and violent struggle, have yielded; and, for the present, at least, would seem to stand upon the Democratic platform. The compromise measures are now a “finality”—those who opposed them honestly and powerfully, and who still believe them to be wrong, having patriotically determined to acquiesce in them for the sake of the Union, provided they shall be faithfully carried into execution.