"NEW YORK, _Dec. 1860_.
"MY DEAR SIR,--Immediately on receiving your note I caused 50 copies
of my letter to Judge Kent to be sent to your address. I acknowledge
a deep sense of the favorable estimate you express of that effort, on
a sudden occasion, amid the toils which fell upon me as one of the
Union committee, to recall our Northern people to the duty of justice
and fraternity towards our Southern fellow-countrymen. I have delayed
writing to you to say so until I could seize a moment in which to add
a suggestion as to the future; and, in the mean time, how rapidly, how
fearfully, have events been hurrying forward!
"It seems, too, that these events cast largely upon the Virginia
statesmen of this generation the momentous duty of saving from
destruction a political system which we and the world owe mainly to the
Virginia statesmen of the golden era of the Republic."