In his message to Congress, President Buchanan had said: "Congress alone has power to decide whether the present laws can or cannot be amended so as to carry out more effectually the objects of the Constitution." With Congress rested the whole responsibility of peace or war, and with them the message left it. But Congress behaved like a body of men who thought that the calamities of the nation were no special business of theirs. The members from the extreme South were watching for the proper moment to retire; those from the middle slave States were a minority which could only stand and wait upon the movements of others; while the great and all-powerful Northern party was what the French minister called "a mere aggregation of individual ambitions." They had always denied the possibility of a dissolution of the Union in any conjuncture of circumstances; and their habit of disregarding the evidence was too strong to be suddenly changed. In the philosophy of their politics it had not been dreamed of as a possible thing. Even when they saw it assume the shape of a fixed and terrible fact, they could not comprehend its meaning. They looked at the frightful phenomenon as a crowd of barbarians might look at an eclipse of the sun: they saw the light of heaven extinguished and the earth covered with strange and unaccountable darkness, but they could neither understand its cause nor foresee its end,--they knew neither whence it came nor what it portended. The nation was going to pieces, and Congress left it to its fate. The vessel, freighted with all the hopes and all the wealth of thirty millions of free people was drifting to her doom, and they who alone had power to control her course refused to lay a finger on the helm. Only a few days before the convening of this Congress the following letter was written by Hon. Joseph Holt, Postmaster-General, afterward Secretary of War, under Buchanan:-- WASHINGTON, NOV. 30, 1860.