Contrast that state of feeling and that state of facts with the condition in which we now see the country. Mutual denunciation is the business even of the Representatives of the people on the floor of this Hall. Members of Congress recommend the circulation of books calculated to sap and undermine the foundations on which the whole fabric of wealth, of respectability, and of civilization, of one-half the Union is based. We meet here, not to strengthen the bonds that bind us together in the Union, but to weaken them, as far as human ingenuity can do so. To such a point has this state of things culminated, that the people of State after State in the Southern portion of the Confederacy have met in convention and declared their belief that there is a probability that the time is rapidly approaching when they "_must provide new guards for their future security_." The State which I have the honor in part to represent has made that declaration. And it is charged here on the floor of this Hall, by almost every member of the Republican party who has addressed this committee on the subject of the state of the Union, that it is the Democratic party which is responsible for this condition of things; that the Democratic party have departed from the lessons of wisdom taught us by the example of our forefathers, and have thus precipitated on the country all these evils, by the manner in which they have treated the slavery question. It shall be my purpose, Mr. Chairman, in the short time allotted to me, to endeavor to vindicate from the charge that party of which I am an humble member. The district which I represent, and the State in which that district is situated, are Democratic by an overwhelming majority; and I assert here, and am prepared to prove incontestibly, that the Democratic party are not the authors of the mischief under which the country labors. I am prepared to prove that they have not departed from the lessons of wisdom inculcated by the example of the founders of the Republic. I will show, if history does not lie, that it is the Republican party, the anti-slavery party, that is the cause of all the evils with which the country is afflicted; and it is they, and not the Democratic party, who have abandoned the legislative precedents and examples of our fathers. Why, sir, how are we responsible for the slavery agitation that has produced all the evils and mischief which afflict the country?