Christian or Pagan civilization would be searched in vain for a parallel to the perfidy which in the past twelve months first deluded and then coerced ad humiliated the people of Kentucky at the feet of a small but audacious faction, composed of her own sons, aided by allies beyond the State.

You have seen your own friends and associates caught like felons, manacled,and carried out of the State, committed to the dungeons of a fortress, and detained therein without accusation, without explanation, and without real offense against the laws of the land, yet you have been passive.

You have seen others exiled flee from their homes at night to escape those who would have committed them ruthlessly to the bastiles of Lincoln, only because they would not bow tamely to his yoke.

You have seen the conspicuous citizen, as well as the humble man, wrested from his interests, his business, his wife, children, friends, and State in plain violation of all his rights, yet you have been passive.

You have known the vandals to burn your court-houses, poison your wells by throwing dead bodies into them, tear up the records in your public offices to destroy the evidences of property, spoliate upon private estate, shoot unoffending citizens, raze private edifices to the ground, and enter the private sanctity of the family to desecrate the very chastity of Kentucky's fair daughters, yet you have been passive.

You know how we begged for peace, how we accepted first one and then another proposition of our political adversaries in order to secure the repose and quiet of the State; but because we insisted upon the enjoyment of our constitutional rights in the State we were pursued and hunted down. The decree had been signed that we were to be enslaved and subjugated.

Every altar of private right was invaded, the midnight lurid with the flames of Kentucky dwellings, the air resonant with the cries of kidnaped men and with the shrieks of innocent and injured women, and yet you have not moved nor murmured.

Now, I present you a case in which the dignity, the sovereignty, of the State, which is officially and peculiarly in your charge, is about to be violated in the insane effort by our adversaries to prosecute this most nefarious was upon the Southern States. I ask you whether your mind cannot now bring you to act so as to prevent this desecration?

You know it would be useless to appeal to the great body of the people of Kentucky unless you will first act in the direction I have indicated, because they cannot proclaim the infraction of their sovereignty, the violation of their neutrality, unless you, as the constitutional organ of the body-politic, will move in their behalf.

I submit to your consideration, then, whether it is not your duty to act at once and decisively in your official capacity, to the end that Kentucky may thus have her rights respected and ultimately become, in fact, the mistress of her own destiny.

We can make no overtures to the men we denounce. Having wronged us most foully, they will be unwilling to witness the withdrawal of the Northern troops from Kentucky, for during their invasion of our rights these foreign auxiliaries have alone shielded them from merited punishment. They know that though they audaciously speak in the name of Kentucky, they are afraid to trust her future to the free and fair vote of the people, although thousands of the truest men of the Commonwealth are now absentees from choice or compulsion.

The are afraid to withdraw the Northern hordes and leave a military solution of Kentucky's future to her own sons. Yet they boats that