The loyal people of our country, those who are determined to restore the Union, are well aware that it cannot be maintained by force. That great political organization was voluntary in its origin, based on the consent of the governed; and it has been upheld through all its marvellous career of prosperity by the free and unconstrained will of the people, who rejoiced in its common benefits and blessings. The novel system on which it was built, not only required the largest liberty for its very conception and for its practical embodiment, but was also admirably devised to secure the complete and permanent enjoyment of that individual independence in thought and action, which is the first of human privileges. Those States of the Union which are preeminently loyal to it, have ever cherished the most liberal principles of civil polity, and have framed their constitutions in accordance with the most modern and advanced maxims of popular rights. So far are they from any disposition to usurp authority or to impose unjust or unnecessary restraints upon the political action of the people, that they are charged with the opposite fault of carrying liberty to the extreme of ungoverned license. Of all the American States, these are the least likely to interfere with the great principles of civil liberty, or to impose an unacceptable government on the people by force. All the violence, so far as any has been shown, is wholly on the other side. Leaving entirely out of view the exceptional irregularities arising from a state of civil war, and it must be acknowledged that the social and political system of the Southern States is one which rests on arbitrary force as its corner stone. It is this arbitrary and tyrannical spirit embodied in Southern institutions which has seized on the pretext of secession in order to destroy the Government of the Union. The efforts of the loyal States and of the Federal authority in the present war are antagonistic to this spirit. Their purpose is to break down and destroy this system of arbitrary power, which has set itself up against the Union; and in its stead to bring into play the great principle of popular assent to the fundamental principles and conditions of government. Annihilate the despotism which controls in the pretended confederacy, give the masses of the people absolute freedom of choice under the conditions necessary for deliberate and intelligent decision, and they will certainly pronounce for the restoration of the old Union, under which they have enjoyed such boundless prosperity. No friend of the Union entertains any serious thought of disregarding or destroying the great principle that governments are only rightly founded on the consent of the governed. But it is not every temporary aberration of thought, nor every outbreak of revolutionary violence, which may properly be allowed to avail in changing the forms of an established government. Some respect is due to obligations once assumed and long