"The ballot is a power in this country which should not be lost sight of by us. Were it more generally exercised by the colored people, the effect would be very perceptible. Those of them residents of the states that deny them the privilege of the elective franchise, should earnestly strive to have the right and the power secured to them; those who have it should never let an occasion pass, when they may consistently exercise it, without doing so. We know that the government and the states have acted most unfairly in their relation to us; but that government and the states, in doing so, have clearly disregarded justice, as well as perverted the legal interpretation of the supreme law of the land, as set forth in its constitution; which facts alone require that we exercise the right to vote, whenever we can, towards correcting this injustice. Were it known on election day that any colored man would deposit a vote, that there would be a concert of action in doing so, the effect would be irresistible. Cannot such a vote be cast at the approaching presidential election? Will the Republican party (a party which is entitled to credit for the service it has rendered to the cause of freedom) put in nomination, in 1860, a man for whom we can, with some degree of consistency, cast our ballots? It has such men in its ranks--prominent men of the party--men who are available. "I would have it noted, that we cannot vote for a man who subscribes to the doctrine that, in struggling for freedom in a presidential or any other election, he ignores the rights of the colored man. "There is an increased as well as an increasing respect for us in community. This is not simply because we have friends (all praise to them) who speak out boldly and uncompromisingly for the right,--in fact, the most of their efforts have been directed towards relieving the country of the blight and of the injustice of slavery,--but it is because our character, as a class, is better understood." Mr. Downing is a native of New York, but spends his summers at Newport, where he has an excellent retreat for those seeking that fashionable watering-place, and where he stands high with the better class of the community. ROBERT PURVIS. Few private gentlemen are better known than Robert Purvis. Born in Charleston, S. C., a son of the late venerable William Purvis, Esq., educated in New England, and early associated with William Lloyd Garrison, Francis Jackson, and Wendell Phillips, he has always been understood as belonging to the most ultra wing of the radical abolitionists. Residing in Philadelphia when it was unsafe to avow one's self a friend of the slave, Mr. Purvis never was known to deny his hatred to the "peculiar institution." A writer for one of the public journals, seeking out distinguished colored persons as subjects for his pen, paid him a visit, of which the following is his account:--