Your President—for he is the work of your hands—went into office pledged to your policy in Kansas and in Central America. He attempted to deceive you in Kansas, and your leaders drove him to the course he was forced to pursue. Like sheep to the slaughter he and his Northern friends were led to the support of Southern policy in Kansas; but what has resulted from their sacrifice, or from all the efforts the Southern leaders made to drag them to the altar? Was Kansas admitted into the Union? Did you have even the empty pleasure of boasting over a barren victory? The Kansas contest was made, as all admitted, for an abstract right. Your leaders were true to you, because you were true to yourselves, when contending for an “abstract right”; let us see whether you and they were equally faithful to your honor and your interests when contending for a right not abstract. The President was pledged to your policy in Central America even more explicitly than to your Kansas measures. The resolutions of the Cincinnati Convention on the Central American policy were drawn by no trembling or unsteady hand.[2] They were not couched in the Delphic sentences behind which timid politicians shrink when they seek the support of their constituents. Clear, distinct, and unmistakeable, they could not be read in a dozen senses by the jugglers, who fancy all political wisdom consists in deceiving the people with words which seem other than they are. Have the pledges given at Cincinnati been redeemed? Have those words, so full of meaning and of resolution, taken shape in acts; or have they died into the sobs and sighs and moans of a party which aspired to greatness yet dared not its accomplishment? It needs no new word to tell you how basely the pledges made at Cincinnati have been violated. It was not enough to trample under foot the promises made, in the name of a party, to the country; it was necessary also to disregard all the principles of public law, and to proclaim before the world that the end justified the means. Violated faith excused violated law: and when the message of the President, excusing the acts of Commodore Paulding at Punta Arenas, in December, 1857, was sent to the senate, Mr. Seward might well say, in a double sense, that his Excellency had become a convert to the “higher law” doctrine.