West Indies and Central America, are doubtless very desirable, but we have patiently waited for them, and are now likely to wait until they can be acquired without receiving slavery with them, or extending it over them. Nay, all the resistance we have ever met in adding Spanish American territories to our republic, has resulted from our willful and perverse purpose of subverting freedom there, to blight the fairest portion of the earth, when we found it free, by extending over it our only national agency of desolation. We may doubtless persist still further. We may add conquest to conquest, for resistance to our ambition daily grows more and more impossible, until we surpass in extent and apparent strength the greatest empires of ancient or modern times, all the while enlarging the area of African bondage; but after our already ample experience, I think no one will be bold enough to deny that we equally increase the evils of discontent and the dangers of domestic faction.

While I lament the national divergence I have thus described, I do not confess it to be altogether inexcusable. Much less do I blame any one or more of our politicians or parties, while exempting others. All are, in different degrees perhaps, responsible alike, and all have abundant, if not altogether adequate excuses. Deviations once be gun, without realizing the immediate presence of danger, it was easier to continue on than to return. The country has all the time been growing richer and more prosperous and populous. It was not unnatural that we should disregard warnings of what we were assured by high though interested authorities, always were distant, improbable and even visionary dangers. It cannot be denied that the African races among us are abject, although their condition, and even their presence here, are due not to their will or fault, but to our own, and that they have a direct interest in the question of slavery. How natural has it been to assume that the motive of those who have protested against the extension of slavey, was an unnatural sympathy with the negro instead of what it always has really been, concern for the welfare of the white man. There are few, indeed, who ever realize that the whole human race suffers somewhat in the afflictions and calamities which befall the humblest and most despised of its members.

The argument, though demanding the most dispassionate calmness and kindness, has too often been conducted with anger and broken out into violence.

Moreover, alarms of disunion were sounded, and strange political inventions like the floating fire ships sent down the St. Lawrence, by the besieged in Quebec, to terrify the army of Wolfe on the island of St. Louis, appeared suddenly before us whenever we proposed to consider in good earnest the subject of federal slavery.

We love, and we ought to love the fellowship of our slaveholding brethren. How natural, therefore, has it been to make the concessions so necessary to silence their complaints, rather than by seeming impracticability in what was thought a matter of indifference, to lose such congenial a companionship. Again, at least, present peace and safety, together with some partial guaranties and concessions of freedom, were from time to time obtained by compromises. Who had the right, or who the presumption to say, with the certainty of being held responsible for casting imputations of bad faith upon our southern brethren, that these compromises would, when their interests should demand it, be disavowed and broken?

Other nations, we have assumed, are jealous of our growing greatness. They have censured us, perhaps with unjust asperity, for our apostacy in favor of slavery. How natural and even patriotic has it been on our part to manifest by persistence our contempt and defiance of such interested and hostile animadversions. Besides, though slavery is indeed now practically a local and peculiar institution of the south, it was not long ago the habit and practice of the whole American people. It is only twenty-five years since our British brethren abolished slavery in their colonies, and only half a century since we or any European nation interdicted the African slave trade. Scarcely three generations have passed away since the subject of the wrongfulness of slavery first engaged the consideration of mankind.

You and I indeed understand now very well how it is that slavery in the territories of the United States is left open by the constitution to our utmost peaceful opposition, while within the slave states it is entrenched behind local constitutions beyond the reach of external legislation. But the subject is a complex one, and the great masses of the people to whom it has only been recently presented, and doubtlessly often presented, under unfavorable circumstances, might well desire time for its careful and deliberate examination.

It seems a bold suggestion to say, that a great nation ought to reconsider a practice of forty years' duration; but forty years of a VOL. IV.

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nation's life are equivalent to only one year of the life of an individual. The thought is at least consistent with political philosophy, for it is not more true that personal persistence in error leads inevitably to ruin, than it is that every nation exists by obedience to the same moral laws which direct individual life, that they are written in its original constitution, and it must continually reform itself according to the spirit of those laws or perish.

My humble advice, then, fellow citizens, is, that we return and reëstablish the original policy of the nation, and henceforth hold, as we did in the beginning, that slavery is and must be only a purely local, temporary and exceptional institution, confined within the slave states where it already exists, while freedom is the general, normal, enduring and permanent condition of society within the jurisdiction, and under the authority of the constitution of the United States.

I counsel thus for a simple reason incapable of illumination. Slavery, however it may be at any time or in any place excused, is at all times and everywhere unjust and inhuman in its very nature; while freedom, however it may be at any time or in any place neglected, denied or abused, is in its nature right, just and beneficent. It can never, under any circumstances, be wise to persevere, voluntarily, in extending or fortifying an institution that is intrinsically wrong or cruel. It can never be unwise, wherever it is possible, to defend and fortify an existing institution that is founded on the rights of human nature. Insomuch as opinions are so materially, and yet so unconsciously, affected and modified by time, place and circumstances, we may hold these great truths firmly, without impeaching the convictions or the motives of those who deny them in argument or in practice.

I counsel thus for another reason quite as simple as the first. Knowledge, emulation and independence among the members of a social state are the chief elements of national wealth, strength and power. Ignorance, indolence and bondage of individuals are always sources of national imbecility and decline. All nations in their turns. have practised slavery. Most of them have abolished it. The world over, the wealthiest and most powerful nations have been those which tolerated it least, and which earliest and most completely abolished it. Virginia and Texas are thrown into a panic even now by the appearance or even the suspicion of a handful of men within their

borders instigating civil war. Massachusetts and Vermont defied British invasion backed by treason, eighty years ago.

Thirdly. There is no necessity now to fortify or extend slavery within the United States or on the American continent. All the supposed necessities of that sort ever before known, have passed away forever. Let us briefly review them. With the discovery and conquest of America confessedly came a responsibility to reclaim it from nature and to introduce civilization. Unfortunately Spain and Portugal, the discoverers and conquerors, were, of all the European states in the sixteenth century, the worst qualified and least able to colonize. They were neither populous, nor industrious, nor free; but were nations of princes and subjects; of soldiers, navigators, nobles, priests, poets and scholars, without merchants, mechanics, farmers or laborers. The art of navigation was imperfect; its practice dangerous, and the new world that the pope had divided between his two most loyal crown-wearing children was in its natural state pestilential. European emigration was therefore impracticable. In the emergency the conquerors, with ruffian violence, swept off at once the gold and silver ornaments which they found in the temples and on the persons of the natives, ignorant of their European values, and subjugated and enslaved the natives themselves. But these simple children of the forest, like the wild flowers when the hurricane sweeps over the prairies, perished under cruelties so contrary

to nature.

The African trade, in prisoners of war spared from slaughter, afforded an alternative. The chiefs sold ten men, women or children for a single horse. The conquerors of America brought this unnatural merchandise to our coasts. When the English colonists of North America, happily in only a very limited degree, borrowed from their predecessors this bad practice of slavery, they borrowed also the wretched apology, a want of an adequate supply of free labor. It was then thought an exercise of Christian benevolence to rescue the African heathen from eternal suffering in a future state, and through the painful path of earthly bondage to open to him the gates of the celestial paradise. But all this is now changed. We are at last no feeble or sickly colonies, but a great, populous, homogeneous nation, unsurpassed and unequaled in all the elements of colonization and civilization. Free labor here continually increases and abounds, and is fast verging towards European standards of

value. There is not one acre too much in our broad domain for the supply of even three generations of our free population, with their certain increase. Immigration from Europe is crowding our own sons into the western region, and this movement is daily augmented by the application of new machines for diminishing mechanical and even agricultural labor. At this very moment, congress, after a long and obstinate reluctance, finds itself obliged to yield a homestead law to relieve the pressure of labor in the Atlantic states. Certainly, therefore, we have no need and no room for African slaves in the federal territories. Do you say that we want more sugar and more cotton, and therefore must have more slaves and more slave labor? I answer, first, that no class or race of men have a right to demand sugar, cotton, or any other comfort of human life to be wrung for them, through the action of the federal government, from the unrewarded and compulsory labor of any other class or race of men.

I answer, secondly, that we have sugar and cotton enough already for domestic consumption, and a surplus of the latter for exportation without any increase of slave territory. Do you say that Europe wants more sugar and cotton than we can now supply? I reply, let then Europe send her free laborers hither, or into Italy, or into the West Indies, or into the East; or, if it suit them better, let them engage the natives of cotton-growing regions in the old world, to produce cotton and sugar voluntarily, and for adequate compensation. Such a course, instead of fortifying and enlarging the sway of slavery here, will leave us free to favor its gradual removal. It will renew or introduce civilization on the shores of the Mediterranean and throughout the coasts of the Indian ocean. Christianity, more fully developed and better understood now than heretofore, turns with disgust and horror from the employment of force and piracy as a necessary agent of the gospel.

Fourthly. All the subtle evasions and plausible political theories which have heretofore been brought into the argument for an extension of slavery, have at last been found fallacious and frivolous.

It is unavailing now to say that this government was made by and for white men only, since even slaves owed allegiance to Great Britain before the revolution, equally with white men, and were equally absolved from it by the revolution, and are not only held to allegiance now under our laws, but are also subjected to taxation and actual representation in every department of the federal government.