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4 tiifii® REV. A. J. RYAN, Editor- AUGUSTA, GA, AUGUST 1,1 M THE QUADRENNIAL ELECTION—WHAT IS IT? Every four years the Americans have a errand Presidential election. The whole country is changed into a vast amphithe atre, or lecture room, domed by the blue vault of Heaven, where spirits white, black, and gray, mount the rostrum and instruct the dear people, teaching them like children, educating them up to the momentuous issues of the day, the ande _ nouement, like a college exhibition, to come off in November. What a magnifi cent spectacle when seen from afar '• Rich and poor, intelligent and igno rant, a whole Nation in tact, assembled like a Congress of Ambassadors, listen ing for four months to the exposition of the broad principles of Liberty, and the checks and guarantees against oppression and despotism—to the unfolding of the theories of finance, of taxes, and to all the the great questions of political econ omy—mighty, resistless orators, pa triots who, on bended knees at night, prayed God, that the effort of the coming day would show the fruits of so many months of hard study, and would direct their countrymen to adopt those measures which would best insure the Government in fulfilling its mission—in attaining that proud position among the sisterhood of States, which its obligation to high moral laws, and its benignant protection of all alike, high and low, justly entitle it. But, alas! this is a picture seen from the inverted end of the telescope. On the contrary, at every Presidential elec tion the country turns out, like at a race course or cock-fight, where betting and blackening of character are among the minor evils. This moral, Puritanical people, become a great concourse of gam blers ; men, women, and children, all bet on the election, men stake on this game their thousands, and little boys their five cents and marbles. Doctrines and ideas of all kinds are preached and believed,and every creed,like a sudden original proposition,is questioned and its merits canvassed. Nothing, for the moment, is true, sacred, or holy. Every Dogma that ever consoled or tortured the ingenuity of man has to come down from the Altar of Truth, to pass through the Plebeian crucible of public opinion. And the inconsistency. Man on the stump, asking for votes to-day, is true, noble, an emanating scintillation from the Deity —the American Eagle soaring still on high, his eye glistening in the noonday sun, and his bosom bathed in the clouds, looks with proud complacency on the “best Government the sun ever shone upon.” But the next day, at the Meeting or Church, man is depraved, incapable of a good action; the country mourning in sack-cloth and ashes, and into the Eagles aerie lias crawled a dirty, filthy Buzzard, our true emblem, that revels and feeds on corruption from the charnel house at Washington. Can both sides of the picture be true ? Is not Truth one ? If man be depraved and incapable of good before God, on Sunday, is he not equally so at the hustings before his fel man ? lie cannot be good vis-a vis his country, and bad before God, nor vice versa. Truth is one, and harmonizes with other truths. Let us start from axioms, revealed truth, confirmed and linked together by the unbroken chain of tradition, and no amount of accurate de velopment, nor logical analysis, will or can put our politics in contradiction with our religion. Once get them to go hand in hand, and the mighty destiny of this country is on the path of realization, The responsibility of the American politician and statesman is far from being small. He takes the boy after he be comes a man, and there, on the stump, by the elegance of his address, and the witchery of words, poisons the mind of the public by doctrines that would dis grace a respectable Pagan. Think you, because office is attained, and your candi date elected, the moral law trampled under foot and violated, here or here after, Justice will not assert her preroga’ tive and have the violator or trifler pun ished? Frivolity, that bane of all mixed Government, where Religion exists not to compel obedience to law,and to counteract liberty' when running to license, as the subtle virus that has tainted all the streams of science, and has so spread its deadly Upas over this country, even till gangrene is fast setting in. There is frivolity in everything. The light, yel low-covered literature; the cheap, infidel science, that tries to doubt that it doubts; frivolity in education; and even frivolity in the practice of religion. Bear with us a moment, whilst we en deavor to find the cause of this frivolity. In the exact sciences, mathematics for instance, we find none of these frivolous amateurs, who talk a conscious superior ty and glibness that would make Quin tillion stare and gasp. Why ? In math ematics we have a few axioms, fundamen tal truths, that no one doubts, yet no one can prove, that all admit firmly and fixed ly, without ifs or ands; and upon this small basis,by close logic is built the huge, massive, Doric superstructure of mathe matics, You begin by believing some thing, and then you proceed developing and analyzing. This is Catholic. We start off, believing the catechism; we com mence ontologically, though we do not wholly discard psychslogy. Hence, in the exact sciences, there arc no outside ama teurs, pour faix Vesprit fort, and to throw obloquy on Truth,or ridiculeYirtue* Everything is certain; the moment a doubt arises, it is tested by facts known, compared with the old landmarks, and the dispute is for ever settled. The sys tem that has rendered science impassible (for politics is a science,) and certainty in everything uncertain, was, in a measure, commenced by that robust fellow of Wur temberg, but more particularly put forth by him who dressed the lair Goddess of Science in beautiful gauze, and placed her on the pedestal of doubt. From doubt nothing but doubt can come, and all sub sequent study is tainted with the bastar dy of doubt. Alas, for Descartes and his cogito ergo sum. It would be easy to show, from this frivolity, that the late war produced no gigantic minds that could grapple with the mighty issues of the contest, and bend the exigencies of the times to the wants of a people hungering for Lib erty. We allude not to pure military men, for Stonewall Jackson, who sleeps in his grave, enshrouded in “the Con querrcd Banner,” will always bring the pearly drop from the moist eye ol the old Confederate. We allude to the Cabi net on either side of the line, whether at Richmond or Washington. Lnsound philosophy, defective education, and gen eral frivolity, can do nothing, however varied and sound the material it has, upon which to work. The country is not de ficient in mind, but it is in its training and in its method. When we believe not undoubtingly, we can never throw the whole soul of our energies into an en terprise, nor will we adhere to the prin ciples and wreck of our cause, when the cargo is lost. hen Gen. Robt. L. Lee wrote to his son at school, “Duty is the sublimest word in our language,” lie con veyed a depth of Philosophy more than meets the eye. There can be no duty on one side, without correlative right on the other. Right is never opposed to right. And when oppression trampled down the young Confederacy, drank up her life-blood, and, vampire-like, has ever since sucked her impoverished veins of every remnant of sustenance, placed upon her fair, unwilling form, a Negro Constitution, the shirt of Nessus, never to mmii m ffliHsim be removed but by a Herculean effort, which will leave the fair form of em body politic all quivering in every limb, and bleeding from every pore; unless we bow the proud head in submission and kiss the rod that chastises. Still, we sub mit and suffer, but feel the keen sting like a wound. We do not murmur, though wronged; and this is sublimer than duty— ’tis sacrifice. Our parole told us to go home (home?) jind the United States would protect and guarantee us in our rights—we have kept our word; has the Government kept hers? There is a moral obligation on the part of the Government to fulfill her contracts, or we are absolved from our duty. The contract has been broken—wo have performed our part of the bargain—who has a right to rebel now ? Junius says in the shipwreck of State everything solid and weighty sinks to the bottom, and is lost forever; whilst trifles light, airy, and rotten, float on the sur face, and are preserved. It must be so in our case. The first minds of the South, those which were true to their states, liked and cherished her behests as a boy obeys his mother; who went forth like the youths of Lacsedemon in obedience to her laws, prompt in the ranks at the first tap of the drum, and remained until our or ders came to cease; which alone could have compelled our obedience; these and their kindred dead, were they alive, all, all, woald stand disfranchised to-day, and at this election. And with all this viola tion of equity and justice, iniquity is added as embroidery. The Southern mind, which, heretofore, left its impress on every important piece of legislation that benefitted the country—the Southern gentleman who left Congress in 18G1, to join the army of his home, left the coun try in whose service he had devoted the energies of his mind, powerful at home, respected and feared abroad, and without a cent of debt, finds to-day his place in the Councils of the Nation occupied by bis former slave. When the care and direction of the ship of State is taken from the Captain and Pilot, its proper officers, and turned over to the galley-slaves oil board, who were to be transported to Liberia, or Van Dieman’s Land, it requires no prophetic or telescopic view into futurity, to see what will become of the ship. When the feet, not the head, rule, when the intelligence, honesty, and truth, of the South are disfranchised, and the ebon-skin and gizzard foot sent (no pun,) to the General Assembly,we may expect legislation on the the level of the terrapin. Exnihilo nihil fit. OUR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. Why do not our people give their pa tronage to their own local institutions ? How expect our institutions of learning to prosper, if from them we withdraw that support upon which they depend? In the main, are they not as well officered, and as wisely conducted, as the edu cational establishments of the North ? We know they are; and still, as former ly, so now we have reason to complain of the lack of that substantial support which they deserve, and which is neces sary, not only for their prosperity, but for their very existence. It has always been our fault, and neither the late war nor time has yet remedied it. By our patronage, we secure the stability of in stitutions a thousand miles away, while, by our culpable neglect, we let our own drag out a precarious existence. It should not be so. Founded, as our home institutions have been, in our midst, and for our benefit, we should feel an especial interest iu their prosperity; and, depend ing, as they do, on ourselves for their success, we should do all in our power to secure it. It seems that “ distance lends enchantment to the view,” in regard to educational institutions, as well as in re gard to scenery. Many of our people seem to imagine that the farther away a college or boarding-school is situated, the better it is to send our children to them. There is not, in the South, a pride in home institutions. A teacher from the North is more patronized in our own midst, than one of our own people. By no means do we wish to disparage North ern teachers or institutions, but we do think that our own teachers and our own schools should be our first choice, and that, as a general rule, the children of the South should bo taught and trained in the institutions of the South. Apart from many reasons which we might, if we wished, adduce in favor of this course, there is one not without great weight, which, we are sure, will pei suade many to uphold our o*tvn institu tions. Local attachments, and, in par ticular, our love for birth-place, are cer tain to be much weakened, if not alto gether destroyed, by years of absence in distant educational institutions. Our own land becomes a stranger land to us— and the land of the stranger becomes our home. Ties binding us to our coun try are sundered; new associations take the place of the old; and then gradually grows up an indifference to the interests of the land that gave us birth. This alone should be motive cogent enough to keep the children of the South in the South—to have them taught and trained by Southern minds in Southern in stitutions, and to have them thus drink in, with every lesson and from every page of every book, more and more love for their native land. Institutions enough, and good enough, we possess. Teachers we have who will compare fa vorably with any others. And all they need to do their work for Southern edu cation is Southern support. If they fail, the fault is ours who fail them. If they succeed, the praise is ours, who support them. We call on our people, most urgently, to give their preference to their own insti tutions. Let Southern minds educate Southern minds. Let Southern boys and girls be trained in Southern schools, and thus you will keep the rising generation Southern in spirit, and in character, and in principles, and in sentiments; and thus, deep in the hearts of the young, you will lay the foundation which the future will yet need for the building up of a Southern Nation. THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATIONS. GENERAL FRANK BLAIR’S LETTER ACCEPT ING THE NOMINATION FOR VICE PRESI DENT. Omaha, Nebraska, July 13, 1868. General George IF. Morgan , Chairman Committee National Democratic Con vention : General : —I take the earliest oppor tunity of replying to your letter, notifying me of my nomination for Vhe President of the United States by the National Dem ocratic Convention, recently held in the city of New York. I accept without hesitation the nomina tion tendered in a manner so gratifying, and give you and the committee my thanks for the very kind and complimentary lan guage in which you have conveyed to me the decision of the Convention. I have carefully read the resolutions adopted by the Convention, and most cor dially concur in every principle and senti ment they announce. My opinion upon all of the questions which discriminatethe great contending parties have been freely expressed on all suitable occasions, and I do not deem it necessary at this time to reiterate them. The issues upon which the contest turns are clear, and cannot be obscured or dis torted by the sophistries of our adversa ries. They all resolve themselves into the old and ever-renewing struggle of a few men to absorb the political power of the nation. This effort, under every conceiva ble name and disguise, has always charac terized the opponents of the Democratic party, but at no time has the attempt as sumed a shape so open and daring as in this contest. The adversaries of free and constitutional government, in defiance of the express language of the Constitution, have erected a military despotism in ten of the States of the Union, have taken from the President the powers vested in him by the supreme law, aud have de prived the Supreme Court of its jurisdic tion. The right of trial by jury, and the great writ of right, the habeas corpus — shields of safety for every citizen, and which have descended to us from the ear liest traditions of our ancestors, and which our revolutionary fathers sought to secure to their posterity forever in the fundament al charter of our liberties —have been ruthlessly trampled under foot by the fragment of a Congress. Whole States and communities of people of our own race have been attainted, convicted, condemned and deprived of their rights as citizens, without presentment, ortrial, cr witnesses, but by Congressional enactment of ex post facto laws, and iu defiance of the constitu- tional prohibition denying even to a f u ]j and legal Congress the authority to p a „' s any bill of' attainder or ex post facto law" The same usurping authority has suLsril tuted as electors in place of the men of'ou r own race, thus illegally attainted and diV. franchised, a host of ignorant negroes who are supported in idleness with the public money, and combined together to strip the white race of their birthright through the management of Freedn.en Bureaus and the emissaries of conspire tors in other States; and, to complete ch « oppression, the military power of the nation has been placed at their disposal, ; n order to make this barbarism supreme. The military leader under whose prestige this usurping Congress has taken refuge since the condemnation of their schemes by the free people of the North in the elections of the last year and whom t , y have selected as their candidate to shield themselves from the result of their own wickedness and crime, has announced his acceptance of the nomination, and his willingness to maintain their usurpations over eight millions of white people at the South, fixed to the earth with his bayonets. He exclaims: “Let us have peace.'' “Peace reigns in Warsaw,” was the an nouncement which the doom of the liberties of a nation. ‘The Empire :s peace,” exclaimed Bonaparte, when free dom and its defenders expired under the sharp edge of his sword. The peace to which Grant invites us is the peace of despotism and death. Those who seek to restore the Constitu tion by executing the will of the people condemning the reconstruction acts,already pronounced in the elections of last year, and which will, lam convinced, be still more emphatically expressed by the elec tion of' the Democratic candidate as the President of the United States, are de nounced as revolutionists by partisans of this vindictive Congress. Negro suf frage, which the popular vote of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Connecticut, and other States have condemned as expressly against the letter of the Constitution, must stand, be cause their Senators and Representatives have willed it. If the people shall again condemn these atrocious measures by the election of the Democratic candidate for President, they must not be disturbed, al though decided to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and although the President is sworn to maintain and support the Constitution. The will of a fraction of a Congress, reinforced with its partisan emissaries sent to the South and sup ported there by the soldiery, must stand against the will of the people and the de cision of the Supreme Court, and the sol emn oath of the President to maintain and support the Constitution. It is revolutionary to execute the will of the people. It is revolutionary to execute the judgment of the Supreme Court! It is revolutionary in the President to keep inviolate his oath to sustain the Constitu tion ! This false construction of the vital principle of our Government is the last resort of those who would have their arbi trary reconstruction sway and supersede our time-honored institutions. The nation will say the Constitution must be restored, and the will of the people again prevail. The appeal to the peaceful ballot to attain this end is not war, is not revolution. They make war and revolution who at tempt to arrest this quiet mode of putting aside military despotism and the usurpa tions of a fragment of a Congress, asserting absolute power over that benign system of regulated liberty left us by our fathers. This must be allowed to take its course. This is the only road to peace. It wiii come with the election of the Democratic candidate, and not with the election of that mailed warrior, whose bayonets are now at the throats of eight millions of people in the South, to compel them to support him as a candidate for the Presidency, and to submit to the domination of an alien race of semi-barbarous men. No perver sion of truth or audacity of misrepresenta tion can exceed that which hails this can didate in arms as an angel of peace. I am, very respectfully, Your most obedient servant, Frank P. Blair. Corrcspond.encc Nevj York Sun. GOV. SEYMOUR AT HOME. THE GOVERNOR’S RESIDENCE—IIIS STATE MENTS IN REGARD TO THE CONVENTION. Utica, N. Y., July 20, 1868.— Horatio Seymour is just now possessed of a great number of friends, and before the ide> ot November will have a great many more, all of whom are and will be very anxious to see him. Already the number seeding him to profess their love for him is some thing remarkable. “The Governor,” as the Democratic nominee is familiarly known by all h* friends and neighbors—and that inclu les pretty much everybody iu this region-' “The Governor” resides in a plain, m;p - ' tending farm cottage, about two north of and overlooking the city oH k- Something iu the outward appearance • the house, though not exactly in the arch' tccture, something in the pastoral air tnat surrounds it,something in the approacn : • it, and in the view from the verandah ra stretches along its front —something th is in all these features of the Governor home, that, while not affording parti a -of resemblance, inevitably eg one’s mind Mount \ ernou. A snug 1 farm of about three hundred and fifty a l ' surrounding the rural retreat has bm n property of Mr. Seymour and hisanee-t; :/ for half a century. The house in wnioi the proprietor now resides was built 1 tenant of the farm, and when, a few yeai-