Has the past, with all its glittering monuments of genius and patriotism, furnished no beacon by which we may direct our footsteps in the future? If we but prove true to ourselves, and worthy of our ancestry, we have nothing to fear; our Revolutionary sires have devised and bequeathed to us an almost perfect national policy. Let us cherish, and defend, and build upon, the fundamental principles of that polity, and we shall most assuredly reap the golden fruits of unparalleled power, virtue and prosperity. Heaven forbid that a desperate faction of slaveholding criminals should succeed in their infamous endeavors to quench the spirit of liberty, which our forefathers infused into those two sacred charts of our political faith, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States. Oligarchal politicians are alone responsible for the continuance of African slavery in the South. For purposes of self-aggrandizement, they have kept learning and civilization from the people; they have wilfully misinterpreted the national compacts, and have outraged their own consciences by declaring to their illiterate constituents, that the Founders of the Republic were not abolitionists. When the dark clouds of slavery, error and ignorance shall have passed away,--and we believe the time is near at hand when they are to be dissipated,--the freemen of the South, like those of other sections, will learn the glorious truth, that inflexible opposition to Human Bondage has formed one of the distinguishing characteristics of every really good or great man that our country has produced. The principles, aims and objects that actuated the framers of the Constitution, are most graphically and eloquently set forth, in the following extract from a speech recently delivered by the Hon. A. H. Cragin, of New Hampshire, in the House of Representatives: "When our forefathers reared the magnificent structure of a free Republic in this Western land, they laid its foundations broad and deep in the eternal principles of right. Its materials were all quarried from the mountain of truth; and, as it rose majestically before an astonished world, it rejoiced the hearts and hopes of mankind. Tyrants only cursed the workmen and their workmanship. Its architecture was new. It had no model in Grecian or Roman history. It seemed a paragon, let down from Heaven to inspire the hopes of men, and to demonstrate the favor of God to the people of a new world. The builders recognized the rights of human nature as universal. Liberty, the great first right of man, they claimed for 'all men,' and claimed it from 'God himself.' Upon this foundation they erected the temple, and dedicated it to Liberty, Humanity, Justice, and Equality. Washington was crowned its patron saint."