Hon. William D. Kelley

HON. WILLIAM D. KELLEY.

THE Republican party is the legitimate heir of the old Federal and Whig parties—the parties of Washington and Webster—which, in the ancient and mediaeval periods of the Republic, as they may be termed, illustrated the sentiment and the idea of nationality as opposed to the heresy of State sovereignty.

There is, nevertheless, flowing in the veins of this great Republican organization much of the best blood of the old Democratic party. The men who adopted the political teachings of Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the inspirer of the ordinance of 1789, who heartily believed the great American doctrines of the freedom and equality of all men, and the power and duty of the nation to protect the national domain from the pollution of human slavery, passed, by a natural transition, into the Republican ranks when the Democratic party abandoned the faith of its fathers, and became the embodiment of a "creed outworn."

Among the men of the Democratic party who earliest separated from "its decaying forms," and contributed to organize a new party, in the light of truth and reason, on the basis of inherent, inalienable right, was the subject of this sketch—WILLIAM DARRAH KELLEY.