On taking the chair as permanent president of the Southern Convention, Mr. Speed spoke of the Administration, of which for the past few months he had been a reluctant member, with a freedom which, during his connection with it, would have been improper if not impossible. He described the late convention in this place as one with which "we could not act." "Why was that convention here? It was here in part because the great cry came up from the white man of the South,--My Constitutional and my natural rights are denied me; and then the cry came up from the black man of the South--My Constitutional and my natural rights are denied me. These complaints are utterly antagonistic, the one to the other; and this convention is called to say which is right. Upon that question, if upon the truth as you feel it, speak the truth as you know it, speak the truth as you love permanent peace, as you may hope to establish the institutions of this Government so that our children and our children's children shall enjoy a peace that we have not known. . . . The convention to which I have referred, as I read its history, came here to simply record in abject submission the commands of one man. That convention did his commands. The loyal Congress of the United States had refused to do his commands; and whenever you have a Congress that does not resolutely and firmly refuse, as the present Congress has done, to merely act as the recording secretary of the tyrant at the White House, American liberty is gone forever." Mr. Speed's language was a complete revelation, more emphatic than had yet been made, of the great differences which had prevailed in the Cabinet of the President with respect to his policy; and his words naturally created a sensation, not alone in the convention, but throughout the country. The fact of his identification with the President, in the closest official intercourse, ever since his accession, added vastly to the weight of Mr. Speed's address and gave to it an influence which he had not, perhaps, anticipated when he delivered it. This influence was doubtless enhanced by the fact that the author of the speech was a native and citizen of the South. It was a stimulus to the patriotic zeal of Northern Republicans to find a man from the South taking advanced ground that possibly involved peril to himself before the angry contest should be finally settled.