through "the city," the immense marble structure in Threadneedle Street, known as the Bank of England. It is certain that he has read the history of that bank, inasmuch as it is twice or thrice alluded to in his Message; he cannot be ignorant, therefore, that the "circulation" of England has essentially "a specie basis"; that no banknotes are issued there for less than the amount of twenty-five dollars; that the banks at all times keep on hand cite dollar of gold for every three dollars of their circulation and deposits and that the laws of bankruptcy are alike rigid in regard to institutions and individuals. These are precisely the provisions which he commends to the adoption of wise and patriotic State legislatures as an admirable corrective for suspensions; yet he forgets to explain to us now it happens that the Bank of England, to which they are all applied, has virtually suspended payment six times in the course of its existence, having been saved from open dishonor only by the timely assistance of the government—while the trade of England, in spite of the staid and conservative habits of the people, is quite as liable to those terrific tarantula-dances, called revulsions, as our own. Before urging his "restraints," the President ought to have inquired a little into the history of such restraints; and he would then have saved himself from the absurdity of patronizing remedies which an actual trial had proved ludicrously inapt and inefficacious.
With regard to the second topic of the Message,—our foreign relations,—it may be said that the positions assumed are frank, manly, and explicit; unless we have reason to suspect, in the slightly belligerent attitude towards Spain, a return, on the part of the President, to one of his old and unlawful loves,—the acquisition of Cuba. In that case, we should deplore his language, and be inclined to doubt also the sincerity of his just denunciations of Walker’s infamous schemes of piracy and brigandage. Until events, however, have developed the signs of a sinister policy of this sort, we must bestow an earnest plaudit upon his decided rebuke of the filibusters, coupling that praise with a wish that the "vigilance" of his subordinates may hereafter prove of a more wide-awake and energetic kind than has yet been manifested.
But for the terms in which the President has disposed of his third topic,—the Kansas difficulty,—we can scarcely characterize their disingenuousness and meanness. We have already spoken of the object of this part of the document as atrocious,—and we repeat the word, as the most befitting that could be used. That object is nothing less than an attempt to cover the enormous frauds which have marked the proceedings of the Pro-Slavery agents in Kansas, from their initiation, with a varnish of smooth and plausible pretexts. Adroitly taking up the question at the point which it had reached when his own administration began, he leaves out of view all the antecedent crimes, treacheries, and tricks by which the people of the Territory had been led into civil war, and thus assumes that the late Lecompton Convention was a legitimate Convention, and that the Constitution framed by it (or said to have been framed by it,—for there is no official report of the instrument as yet) was framed in pursuance of proper authority or law. He does not tell us that the Territorial legislature which called the Convention was a usurping legislature, brought together, as the Congressional records show, by an invading horde from a neighboring State; he does not tell us, that, even if it had, been a properly constituted body in itself, it had no right to call a Convention for the purpose of superseding the Territorial organization; he does not tell us that the Convention, as assembled, represented but one-tenth of the legal voters of the Territory; nor does he seem to regard the fact, that the other nine-tenths of the people were virtually disfranchised by that Convention, so far as their right to determine the provisions of their organic law is concerned, as at all a vital and
