theirs. We are, however, debarred from the renewal of fromer proposals for peace, because the retlentless spirit that actuates the Government at Washington leaves us no reason to except that they would be received with the respect naturally due by nations in their intercourse, whether in peace or war.

It is under these circumstances that we are driven to protect our own country by transferring the seat of war to that of an enemy who pursues us with an implacable and apparently aimless hostility. If the war must continue, its theater must be changed, and with it the policy that hes heretofore kept us on the defensive on our own soil. So far, it is only our fields that have been laide waste, our people killed, our homes made desolate, and our frontiers ravaged by rapine and murder. The sacred right of self-defense demands that henceforth some of the consequences of the war shall fall upon those who persist in their refusal to make peace. With the people of the Northwest rests the power to put an end to the invasion of their homes, for, it unable to prevail upon the Government of the United States to conclude a general peace, their own State governments, in the exercise of their sovereignty, can secure immunity form the desolating effects of warfare on their soil by a separate treaty of peace, which our Government will be ready to conclude on the most just and liberal basis.

The responsibility, then, rests with you, the people of the Northwest, of continuing and unjust and aggressive warfare upon the people of the Confederate States. And in the name of reason and humanity I call upon you to pause and reflect what cause of quarrel so boody have you against these States, and what are you to gain by it. Nature has set her seal upon these States and marked them out to be your friends and allies. She has bound them to you by all the ties of geographical contiguity and conformation and the great mutual interests of commerce and productions. When the passions of this unnatural war shall have subsised and reason resumes her sway, a community of interest will force commercial and social coalition between the great grain an stock growing States of the Norhtwest and the cotton, tobacco, and sugar regions of the South. The Mississippi River is a grand artery of their mutual national lives which men cannot sever, and which never ought to have been suffered to be distrubed by the antagonisms, the cupidity, and the bigotry of New England and the East. It is from the East that have come the germs of this bloody and most unnatural strife. It is from the meddlesome, grasping, and fanatical disposition of the same people who have imposed upon you and us alike those traffs, internalimprovement, and fishing-bounty laws whereby we have been taxed for their aggrandizement. It is from the East that will come that taxgatherer to collect from you the mighty debt which is being amassed mountain night for the purpose of ruining your best customers and natural friends.

When this war ends, the same antagnoisms of interest, policy, and feeling which have been pressed upon us by the East, and forced us from a political union where we had ceased to find safety for our interests or respect for our rights, will bear down upon you and separate you from a people whose traditional policy it is to live by their wits upon the labor of their neighbors. Meantime you are being used by them to fight the battle of emancipation, a battle which, if successful, destroyes our prosperity, and with it you best markets to buy and sell. Our mutual dependence is the work of the Creator. With our peculiar productions, convertible into gold, we should, in a state of peace, draw from you largely the products of your labor. In us of the South you