TO THE UNION MEETING. Gentlemen,—I regret that your invitation to address the citizens who will assemble to-morrow evening for the purpose of ratifying the nominations for our approaching State elections, came to hand so late that previous engagements make it impossible for me to accept it. I should otherwise have felt great pleasure in contributing my humble share to the important meeting. The State flections which will soon take place in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and other portions of our imperiled country, are of the last importance with reference to the issue of our great war, to the character of our foreign relations—now of a magnitude to which they have never before attained—and to the serious condition of affairs within the different Northern States. The arguments urged against us in our present struggle, manifold as they are, may be reduced to the following main points : Secession, it has been urged, is revolution ; it is a struggle for independence; and what right have you, whose entire government and national existence are founded on the idea that there exists such a thing as a right of revolution, according to which a new government may be established—what right have you to resist the South if its people choose to establish a separate polity ? All my friends who return from Europe tell me that this is the ever-repeated argument dinned in the ears of Northerners traveling in that portion of the globe. This argument sounds, indeed, as if separation, without any reference to the reasons or objects,
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