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No government can excuse itself from the duty of protecting the extreme rights of every human being, whether foreign or native born, bond or free, whom it compulsorily holds within its jurisdiction. The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation, but not the less, therefore, entitled to such care and protection as the weak everywhere may require from the strong; that it is a pitiful exotic unwisely and unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard. Nor will the argument that the party of slavery is national and that of freedom sectional, any longer avail when it is fully understood that, so far as it is founded in truth, it is only a result of that perversiou of the constitution which has attempted to circumscribe freedom, and to make slavery universal throughout the republic. Equally do the reproaches, invectives and satires of the advocates of slavery extension fail, since it is seen and felt that truth, reason and humanity can work right on without fanaticism, and bear contumely without retaliation. I counsel this course fur ther, because the combinations of slavery are broken up, and can never be renewed with success. Any new combination must be based on the principle of the southern democratic faction, that slavery is inherently just and beneficent, and ought to be protected, which can no longer be tolerated in the north; or else on the principle of the northern democratic faction that slavery is indifferent and unworthy of federal protection, which is insufficient in the south: while the national mind has actually passed far beyond both of these principles, and is settled in the conviction that slavery, wherever and howsoever it exists, exists only to be regretted and deplored.

I counsel this course further, because the necessity for a return to the old national way has become at last absolute and imperative. We can extend slavery into new territories, and create new slave states only by reöpening the African slave trade; a proceeding which, by destroying all the existing values of the slaves now held in the country, and their increase, would bring the north and the south into complete unanimity in favor of that return.

Finally, I counsel that return because a statesman has been designated who possesses, in an eminent and most satisfactory degree, the virtues and the qualifications necessary for the leader in so great and generous a movement; and I feel well assured that Abraham Lin

coln will not fail to reïnaugurate the ancient constitutional policy in the administration of the government successfully, because the repub lican party, after ample experience, has at last acquired the courage and the constancy necessary to sustain him, and because I am satisfied that the people, at last fully convinced of the wisdom and necessity of the proposed reformation, are prepared to sustain and give it effect.

But when it shall have been accomplished, what may we expect then; what dangers must we incur; what disasters and calamities. must we suffer? I answer, no dangers, disasters or calamities. All parties will acquiesce, because it will be the act of the people, in the exercise of their sovereign power, in conformity with the constitution and laws, and in harmony with the eternal principles of justice, and the benignant spirit of the age in which we live. All parties and all sections will alike rejoice in the settlement of a controversy which has agitated the country and disturbed its peace so long. We shall regain the respect and good will of the nations, and once more, consistent with our principles and with our ancient character, we shall, with their free consent, take our place at their head, in their advancing progress, toward a higher and more happy, because more numane and more genial civilization.

DEMOCRACY THE CHIEF ELEMENT OF GOVERNMENT.

MADISON, WISCONSIN, SEPTEMBER 12, 1860.

IT IS a political law-and when I say political law, I mean a higher law, a law of Providence-that empire has, for the last three. thousand years, so long as we have records of civilization, made its way constantly westward, and that it must continue to move on westward until the tides of the renewed and of the decaying civilizations of the world meet on the shores of the Pacific ocean. Within a year I have seemed to myself to follow the track of empire in its westward march for three thousand years. I stood but a year ago on the hill of Calvary. I stood soon afterward on the Pirous of Athens. Again I found myself on the banks of the Tiber. Still advancing westward I rested under the shades of the palaces of the kings of England, and trod the streets of the now renovated capital of France. From those capitals I made my way at last to Washington, the city of established empire for the present generation of men, and of influence over the destinies of mankind.

Empire moves far more rapidly in modern than it did in ancient times. The empire established at Washington, is of less than a hundred years' formation. It was the empire of thirteen Atlantic. American states. Still, practically, the mission of that empire is fulfilled. The power that directs it is ready to pass away from those thirteen states, and although held and exercised under the same constitution and national form of government, yet it is now in the very act of being transferred from the thirteen states east of the Alleghany mountains and on the coast of the Atlantic ocean, to the twenty states that lie west of the Alleghanies, and stretch away from their base to the base of the Rocky mountains. The political power of the republic, the empire, is already here in the plain that stretches between the great lakes on the east and the base of the Rocky mountains on the west; and you are heirs to it.

When the

next census shall reveal your power, you will be found to be the

masters of the United States of America, and through them the dominating political power of the world. Our mission, if I may say that I belong to that eastern and falling empire instead of the rising western one-the mission of the thirteen states has been practically accomplished. And what is it? Just like the mission of every other power on earth. To reproduce, to produce a new and greater and better power than we have been ourselves, to introduce on the stage of human affairs twenty new states and to prepare the way for twenty more, before whose rising greatness and splendor, all our own achievements pale and fade away. We have done this with as much forethought perhaps as any people ever exercised, by saving the broad domain which you and these other forty states are to occupy, saving it for your possession, and so far as we had virtue enough, by surrounding it with barriers against the intrusion of ignorance, superstition and slavery.

Because you are to rise to the ascendant and exercise a dominating influence, you are not, therefore, to cast off the ancient and honored thirteen that opened the way for you and marshaled you into this noble possession, nor are you to cast off the new states of the west. But you are to lay still broader foundations, and to erect still more noble columns to sustain the empire which our fathers established, and which it is the manifest will of our Heavenly Father shall reach from the shores of the lakes to the gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. It was a free government which they established, and it was a self-government—a government such as, on so large a scale, or indeed on any scale, has never before existed. I know that when you consider what a magnificent destiny you have before you, to lay your hand on the Atlantic coast, and to extend your power to the Pacific ocean and grasp the great commerce of the east, you will fully appreciate the responsibility. It is only to be done, by maintaining the democratic system of government. There is no other name given under heaven by which, in this generation, nations can be saved from desolation and ruin, than democracy. This, to many conservative ears, would seem a strange proposition; and yet it is so simple that I lack the power almost of elucidating it. Look at England. She is ambitious, as she well may be, and ought to be, to retain that dominion, reaching into every part of the habitable globe, which she now exercises. She is likely to do it, too, and may do it, by reducing, every successive

year, the power of her aristocracy, and introducing more and more, the popular element of democracy into the administration of her government.

In many respects the government of England, though more aristocratic, is still less monarchical than our own. The British empire exists to-day only by recognizing and gradually adopting the great truth that if the British empire is to stand, it is the British people who are to maintain that empire and enjoy and exercise it. France, the other great European power, which seems to stand firmer now than ever, and to be renewing her career of prosperity and glory—— France, under the form of a despotism, has adopted the principle of . universal suffrage, and the empire of France to-day is a democracy. The Austrian empire is falling. And why? Because democracy is rising in Germany to demand the liberation of the people of its various nations, and the exercise of universal suffrage. And Italy to-day all along the coast of the Mediterranean, is rising up to the dignity of renewed national life, by adopting the principle of universal suffrage and the limitation of power by the action of the whole people.

Now if in the Old World, where government and empire are entrenched and established so strong in hereditary aristocracy, no empire can stand except as it yields to the democratic principle; look around over the United States of America, and say how long you can hold these states in a federal union or maintain one common authority or empire here, except on the principles of democraty? Therefore, it is that, I say, that you of the northwest are, above all things, first, last, and all the time, to recognize as the great element of the republic, the system and principles of democracy.

But, fellow citizens, it is easy to talk about democracy. I have heard some men prate of it by the hour, and admire it, and shout for it, and express their reverence for it; and yet I have seen that they never comprehend the simplest element of democracy? What is it? Is it the opposite of monarchy or of aristocracy? Aristocracy is maintained everywhere, in all lands, by one of two systems, or by both combined. An aristocracy is the government in which the privileged own the lands, and the many unprivileged work them, or in which the few privileged own the laborers and the laborers work for them. In either case the laborer works on compulsion, and under the constraint of force; and in either case he takes that which VOL. IV.

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