He would be offering a premium to political minorities who
should say that the six doubtful States, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois—had the right to designate the candidate of
the Chicago Convention; but he who presumes to set up his opinions of the probable action of those States, in opposition to
the positive knowledge of the capable
and intelligent delegates whom they have sent here, would be rushing blindly
and insanely to destruction. The Republicans of these States know what battle
they have to fight and the difficulties which stand in the way of success. They
are anxious for a victory over the Sham Democracy as the members of the party
elsewhere; and the supposition that they have not representatives here who have
not the sense to see and the honesty to declare the true condition of political
affairs in their respective localities, is an insult which ought not to be
meekly borne. We will not condescend to argue that Illinois and Indiana as well
as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, and Connecticut know their
own wants; nor to demonstrate that their views, so long as they do not extend
beyond and outside of the Republican party and the Republican platform, cannot
be safely disregarded. Both propositions are self evident. If the Convention
will not listen to entreaties and remonstrances against the pursuit of a line
of policy which those states declare to be fatal, the consequences of the
infatuation will be felt when the day for retrieving errors and blunders has
gone by.
We have yet to learn that the States that we have named will
presume to say who among the many acceptable candidates before the convention
should receive the high honor it will bestow. No man claims for them that [prerogative].
But it is not too much to say that, when they unanimously declare that under
the lead of any candidate whom they may point out, defeat is certain, he is [presumptuous]
and unsafe who would assume to challenge the honesty or correctness of their
decision.
For the small blowers and strikers whom incessant drunken
babble in bar-rooms and on street corners impugns the deliberate judgment of
six Republican State Conventions regularly called and acting under a sense of
the infinite responsibilities of their position, there can be only the contempt
which is bestowed upon ignorance and impudence. For the proper reproof of a
couple of newspapers in Chicago, of limited circulation and less influence—both
of which act upon the hypothesis that the late Republican convention in this
State was an assemblage of knaves and fools who said one thing and meant
another,—for these, the punishment visited upon them by their few hundred
readers will be sufficient.
SOURCE: “The Six States,” The
Press and Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, Wednesday, May 16, 1860, p. 2, col. 1
