The Federal Government can not reach the people on a demand for their services except by a requisition made on the authorities of the respective States. Such, at least, is the theory of the Constitutionthe compact between the people and the Federal Government, or, rather, the compact among the people which is attempted to be enforced by the means of the Federal Government.

No such organization as a National or Federal militia is contemplated by the Constitution. The militia referred to by the Constitution are State forces, until mustered into the service of the Federal Government. When, therefore, the Federal Government, by means of its executive and legislative branches, undertakes to conscript American citizens into the Federal army without regard to State authority and State laws, and without regard, too, of the Constitution of the United States, these branches of the Government, and by their means the Government itself, undertake to do an act for which there is not only no warrant of authority whatever, but which is contrary to the evident intent and meaning of the Constitution, and violative not only of that compact, but of the rights of individuals and the sovereignty of States.

The fourth act, which will be cited in all time to come as a reproach, not only on the Federal Government, but on the American people, is that which attempts to indemnify the President for his acts, violative both of the Constitution which he is sworn to support as a condition of his being invested with executive functions, and of the rights of American citizens whom he is specially chosen to protect in the enjoyment of their rights and liberties. The Constitution provides that the President shall be impeached for malfeasance in office, and if found guilty, removed in disgrace; but the Thirty-seventh Congress, under the influence of fanatical partisans, who care more for power and plunder than they do for the rights, liberties, or interests of the people, ignore and disregard the Constitution, and even willfully violate it, by making those acts of the President virtues which the Constitution and the laws had previously made criminal, triable by impeachment, and punishable by removal from office, stigmatized by disgrace.

These four acts of Congressional and Executive despotism may be thus briefly characterized:

I. The Tax Bill, by which the necessaries of life, the implements of mechanical and agricultural labor, the multifarious commercial, legal, and financial transactions of the people are subjected to onerous exactions, while capital invested in Government securities is specially exempted by law from bearing any share of the burden imposed by

the hundred million upon the industry, labor, and absolute necessities of the people at large.

II. The Conscription Bill, by which a price-three hundred dollars-is set upon the body and life of a white man, and by which those who can not afford to redeem themselves at that price are conscripted into the Federal army, and compelled to do such service as the President may order by proclamation, regardless of the Constitution of the United States, to which, and not to the President, the allegiance of citizens is due.

III. The Finance Act, by which all the property of the country, real and personal, except such as is invested in Government securities, is mortgaged as security for the payment of the debt created by this and other acts of Congress, and which debts amount, in the aggregate, to as much as a third of the whole value of all the property in the States adhering to the Federal Government, and which, with semiannual interest, must be paid out of the profits of this property and out of the labor, industry, and by a tax on the necessaries of life of the people for ages to come, and in consequence of which debt the American people will be subjected while it exists to all the exactions, oppressions, grievances, and evils of bad government which the down-trodden people of Europe experience from similar causes.

IV. The Indemnity Act, which nullifies and violates the Constitution by exempting the President from trial or punishment for any illegal act of despotism and tyranny which he might commit, and which protects him and his subordinates from prosecution, no matter how flagrant may be his or their acts against the constitutional rights of the people of the United States, and which places in his power-a power to be exercised according to his own will, since not restrained by law-the person of every citizen of the United States who may venture to exercise his rights as such, as these rights are prescribed in the Constitution of the United States, and of every individual State in the Union; and which vests in the President not only the power to deprive every citizen of his constitutional rights, but also the power to subject every citizen to such indignities, outrages, and torments, as he or any of his subordinates choose to inflict, and to deprive citizens of their lives without the judgment of any court except of such a one as the President may choose to constitute, and which, if constituted, will be but an instrument of his will and malevolence.

These four acts are linked together in this place with such comments as present them to the reader in their true colors, both as regard their effects and the objects designed to be accomplished by

those who enacted them. They are such acts of folly, wickedness, despotism, and tyranny as no people ever endured complacently, and as were never imposed with impunity upon a people, even by governments which did not depend upon the popular will for their power, or on the popular judgment for authority. It remains to be seen whether the American people are more tolerant than those of all other nations of acts of government flagrantly violative of their personal rights, manifestly subversive of their political liberty, and evidently designed to bring them under the subjection of arbitrary power exercised over them by a partisan faction, which, by the accident of division among conservative people and by the calamity of war provoked against the South by Northern fanatics, have acquired control of the Government and of its armed power and moral authority. If the American people submit to all this, history will have it to say for the first time that a nation of freemen became voluntarily the slaves of their public servants; that a people who prided themselves on their personal independence, and made a boast of their control over the Government of their country, became, by the mere enactment of a few statutes, the most subservient to arbitrary power, the most servile adulators of despotic masters, all of whose power and authority were derived originally from those who voluntarily conferred it, and became subjects without rights in place of sovereigns with all the attributes and dignity of freemen. The whole form and system of our Government have been changed by the Administration. The powers withheld by the Constitution have been assumed and exercised by it, and the rights and privileges declared to be sacred to the people it has ruthlessly violated. By the operations of this Finance Act the people are, indirectly, subjected to the will and pleasure of the Secretary of the Treasury. While their persons are subjected to the control of the President by means of the Conscript Act, their property is subjected to the will of the President, through the Secretary of the Treasury, by the Finance and Tax Acts.

Thus in person and property are the American people made as much the subjects of one man's will as are any people on the face of the globe reduced to the servitude of a ruler. Where is there in the civilized world a parallel case in which the persons and property of the people are placed so much under the control of a ruler as are the persons and property of the American people placed at the disposal of the President of the United States and of his subordinates? Not only are the purse and sword, the money and property of the people and their person (with the exceptional cases of those who can purchase exemption for three hundred dollars), placed under the control

of the President by the Conscript Act, Tax Bill, and Finance Bill, but their liberty, their right to act as freemen, are also taken away by the Indemnity Bill. In vain does the Constitution interpose itself as a restraint upon Executive usurpations of power. In vain does it define and prescribe the duties of the Executive and Congress. In vain does it stipulate on behalf of the people with the Government created by it that the reserved rights of the people shall be respected inviolate by the Government, and protected if assailed from any source. In vain, indeed, was it that a Constitution was given to the Federal Government as its rule of action. As well might the Constitution have said, in a few words, that there shall be a President and Congress, and that their joint powers and authority shall be unlimited in extent and unrestrained in their exercise over the persons and property of the people of the United States. This is practically what the Constitution has become in relation to the people under the Administration of Abraham Lincoln. No more proof of this allegation is needed to convince the people of its truth than the enactment by Congress and the approval by the President of these four acts of despotism-the Tax Bill, the Conscript Bill, the Indemnity Bill, and the Finance Bill. These acts will stand on record as imperishable proofs of the despotism and tyranny of the Administration of Abraham Lincoln, and of the subserviency of its partisan supporters in these and other acts subversive of the constitutional Government of the United States.

Ir the ingenuity of those who own among them the wealth of the country were put to the test of devising a measure by which the burdens of supporting the Federal Government might be placed upon the comparatively poor, the result could not be more perfect than the Tax Bill passed by Congress, and approved by the President on the 1st of July, 1862, and the amendments thereto passed and approved on the 3d of March, 1863.

It is estimated that by these acts $150,000,000 will be drawn from the people by direct taxation, besides some $50,000,000 by duties upon imported commodities, making in all not less than $200,000,000 per annum, the people will be required and obliged to pay for the wickedness of a fanatical party, and for the folly of having suffered. this party to acquire the control of the Federal Government. Of this two hundred millions, the greater portion of it is ingeniously imposed upon the comparatively poor. It is assessed upon necessaries of life and implements of labor, rather than upon luxuries indulged in only by those who could afford to pay a tax upon such luxurious indulgence. A cup of coffee is as necessary to the health, strength, and comfort of a poor man as it is to a rich man, and more so, and a poor man uses, or should be able to use, as much coffee as a rich man. Yet this necessary of a poor man's life is taxed more, according to its value, than many of the luxuries of the rich man. And so of various other commodities. The tax is made to bear upon what is most universally used, by poor as well as by rich, and by this means the poor man, whose wages and means of procuring the necessaries of life are scarcely sufficient for that purpose, is required to pay as much taxes as the rich man for the necessaries of life? Is not this fair? some one might inquire. Ought not taxes to be equal? Personal taxes ought, perhaps, to be equal, because the protection given to one person by the Government is the same generally as it gives to another; but taxes upon property, whether of consumption or otherwise, should be in proportion to the ability of the possessor to pay them, and to the expense it is to the Government to