unless she takes the initiative in desertion, she will herself be abandoned by the Middle States, and her way barred to the Atlantic; while the Middle States are elsewhere in their turn assured that the West will leave them and make her own bargain for the Mississippi. The Press of Monday contains a letter from the pen of Mr. F. W. Hughes, professedly intended to warn his fellow-citizens here that they cannot keep the West without prostrating themselves at the feet of the South, and excluding New England from the Union if she will not join in the humiliation; but really meant to inspire jealousy between East, West, and North, in order that secession may at last triumph over the Union and Constitution. Peace with the rebellion—peace at any price first—the disorganization of the North next—and, finally, their own triumph—is the programme of these conspirators; and they are ready to do and submit to anything to attain their object. The worse that peace is, the harder its conditions, the greater the shame, the better it will suit the end in view, by rendering the condition of the people here so intolerable, that they will be ready to adopt the views and submit to the designs of Mr. Hughes and his associates. For, unhappily, Mr. Hughes is not the only laborer in this scheme of treason, which, though not yet able and ready to strike, is sufficiently bold and audacious to proclaim its expectation that the hour will soon arrive when the stars and stripes shall be replaced by the flag of the Confederates, the American nation become a thing of the past, and its place be filled by a multitude of States struggling with each other for empire or existence, making sordid compacts to-day which will be broken to-morrow, and all hastening on the downward path that leads through anarchy and intestine war to military despotism. The proofs of this do not consist only in the letter of Mr. Hughes, or the attempt which he made, two years ago, to induce the Democratic party to assist in breaking up the Union. They lie all around, and he must be blind, or resolutely determined to close his eyes, who does not see them. No one among them, perhaps, is more striking, or fraught with more past and prospective evil, than the resolution prepared by Mr. William B. Reed, and adopted at his instance and that of other politicians of the same school, at the Democratic meeting held on January 17th, 1861, to neutralize the effect of one which had been convened, without distinction of party, a short time before, to sustain Major Anderson in the course which he had adopted of placing his command within the walls of Fort Sumpter. This resolution was, to use Mr. Reed’s own language, “ adopted with enthusiastic unanimity,” and is as follows: Resolved, That in the deliberate judgement of the Democracy of Philadelphia, and, so far as we know it, of Pennsylvania, the dissolution of the Union by the separation of the whole South—a result we shall most sincerely deplore— may release this Commonwealth from the bonds which now connect it with the Confederacy, and would authorize and require its citizens, through a Convention to be assembled for that purpose, to determine with whom their lot shall be cast: whether with the North and East, whose fanaticism has precipitated
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