2. Looking to the men who formed it, and who now represent it as its leading oracles, Seward, Hale, Sumner, Wilson, Chase, Giddings, Wade, Lovejoy, not forgetting John A. Andrews of Massachusetts, with his negro guard of wide-awakes, nor excepting John Brown, the martyr, nor excepting the comparatively unknown Abraham Lincoln, whom the crisis of the divided house has made famous--and looking also to the Philadelphia and Chicago platforms on which the party stands, with their logical inconsistencies, and the end which those platforms, as well as the public addresses and working machinery of their advocates contemplate--I regard the so-called Republican party, whose candidates are Lincoln and Hamlin, as essentially a sectional, slavery prohibition and slavery abolition party, bound by political action, through the power of the Federal government; _first_, to prohibit slavery in all the territories of the United States; _second_, to admit no more Slave States, and ultimately by State action and Federal action too, when the Free States have become three-fourths of the whole, and sufficiently powerful to make the Federal Constitution what they please, to abolish slavery in all the States, so that, to use the language of William H. Seward at Chicago, on 2d October instant, "_Civilization may be maintained and carried on, on this continent by Federal States, based on the principles of free soil, free labor, free speech, equal rights and universal suffrage_." This is _the creed_ of the Republican party as declared by Mr. Seward, and he affirms that it is _a positive party_ that will take no more compromises in geographical lines or squatter sovereignties. This is the logical end of the platforms of the Republican party; the practical end, following the attempt to realize the other, will be disunion, with all the dire results portrayed by Daniel Webster, when in that great effort of his majestic intellect, his defence of the American Union, he prayed that when "his eyes should be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, he might not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!" I am conscious that many Republicans, whom I esteem and respect, may object to this opinion of their party and platforms. Be that as it may, the opinion is a sincere one, and I believe can be sustained by a fair analysis of the records of Republican leaders and of the proceedings of the party.