difference on this subject, along the line of the northeastern states, for they are hostile to slavery. There is no difference on the line of the southern states, for they are in favor of slavery. But there has been a severe strife between freedom and slavery, for the establishment of freedom or slavery in all the wide region reaching from the Missouri to the Pacific ocean. If freedom was to triumph in this contest, there was no point where she could expect to meet the enemy except on the very place she has met it here. And if you had been false, slavery would have swept along through the Indian territory, Texas and the whole of the country including the Rocky mountains, to the Pacific ocean.

California was imperfectly secured to freedom, and with a compromise. You opened a new campaign here to reclaim what was given up in that already broken compromise, and it has been crowned with a complete victory. Henceforth the battle is ended; henceforth the emigrant from the eastern states, from Germany and Ireland, the free laborer, in short, from every land on the earth, when he reaches the Missouri river, will enter on a broad land of impartial liberty.

He can safely pursue his way under the banner of freedom to the foot of the Rocky mountains; and there the hosts of freemen from the western coast will unite and join under the same banner, extending north and south. Everywhere, except in Missouri, is a land of freedom. Missouri stands an island of slavery in the midst of a broad ocean of liberty. You occupy not only the pivotal position, but it was your fortune to attempt this great enterprise in behalf of freedom at a critical period for mankind. Slavery was then just two hundred years old in the United States. In the year 1776 our fathers gave battle to slavery; they declared war against it, and pledged their lives and sacred honor in the service against it. Practically, it was to be destroyed peaceably under the constitution of the United States. Those good men believed it would reach its end long before this period; but the people became demoralized. The war went back, back, BACK, until 1854-until all guaranties of freedom in every part of the United States were abandoned, and Kansas, that had for forty years been perfectly free from the footsteps of the slave, was pronounced by the highest power of the government as much a slave state as South Carolina. The flag of the United States was made the harbinger, not of freedom, but of human bondage.

It was at this crisis that the people of Kansas appeared on the stage, reviled and despised, and lifted the banner of liberty on high, and bore it manfully forward, defied all force, and yet counteracted peaceably all the efforts made to subdue them. In three years they not only secured freedom in Kansas, but in all the territory of the United States.

You have made Kansas as free as Massachusetts, and made the federal government, on and after the fourth of March next, the patron of freedom--what it was at the beginning. You have made freedom national, and slavery sectional. Had you receded after your first conditional or provisional government was dispersed at Topeka by cannon and bayonet; had you surrendered and accepted the Lecompton constitution; had you even abandoned the Wyandott constitution, at any stage of the battle, it would have destroyed the cause of freedom not only in Kansas, but also throughout the whole Union.

I know I shall be justified in history; shall I not be justified by cotemporaries? Wise, best, bravest of citizens, no other hundred thousand people in the United States have contributed as much for the cause of freedom as Kansas. Before this people, then, appear ing for the first time, I bow myself, as I have never done before to any other people, in profound reverence. I salute you with grati

tude and affection.

Fellow citizens, my time here, as well as yours, is brief. It is but few of many subjects upon which we can even touch. As to the least important subject of all, myself, I give you, in one word, my sincere and heartfelt thanks. I had formed my opinion of you from your past conduct and history. I have not been disappointed in your kindness. For all that remains to me, give yourselves no trouble. Freedom is saved and assured to California and Kansas, and therefore assured to the future states in the Rocky mountains. If I may, indeed, hope that my poor name will find a place in the history of California and Kansas, then all the ambition I have ever cherished is more than abundantly satisfied.

The second consideration to which I would advert for a moment, is this sadness which lies like a pall over a large part of the territory of Kansas-the result of the withdrawal of the rain for a period so long as to excite apprehensions of famine.

I have carefully examined the condition of Kansas-the river bottoms and the prairies, and my conclusion is-not more from the

condition of the crops than from the character of the people-that there will be no famine in Kansas, because there is wealth and credit enough in Kansas to carry you through more than one year like this. You will take care of this credit and retain it so far as possible. If this will not do, then appeal to your friends in the east, and they will not allow you to suffer. I myself will do what I can for you. Be of good cheer. Suffer yourselves not to be discouraged. There are cattle enough on your thousand hills, if sold—although it is a fearful sacrifice-to carry you through and sustain you during the winter, and still come out in the spring with milch cows and working oxen. And we who are here coming from states whence emigration flows, and from the Atlantic states, where emigrants are received and sent onward-will all do our share to direct emigration to Kansas, assuring them from our own observation, that it is a climate as salubrious as any in the world, and a soil as rich as any the sun ever shone upon. This is a smiling and fair dominion, and we think, were we set back twenty or thirty years, the place of all others that we would seek for homes in the United States would be the plains of Kansas.

One other consideration. When we see before us the transactions of this day, do they not illustrate the subject of the "irrepressible conflict?" Did not our forefathers, in 1787, settle this whole question, and, by an ordinance, put at rest forever the question of freedom and slavery in the United States? Certainly they did. Did they not, in 1820, settle this conflict forever? Did they not declare that all north of 36° 30′ and west of the Missouri river should be given up to freedom? Certainly they did. Was it not settled finally a third time in 1850, when Kansas and Nebraska were still saved to freedom, and all lying west of them? Was it not settled a fourth time in 1854, when it was ordained that the people of Kansas were free to choose freedom or slavery for themselves, subject to the constitution of the United States? Was it not settled for the fifth time, when the Lecompton constitution was adopted by one scratch of the pen of the President of the United States and the Supreme Courtand this became a land of slavery? Why was not slavery settled by all these settlements? For no other reason than because the conflict was irrepressible. But you determined, in your struggle for Kansas, that she shall be forever free; and that settles the question. In New Mexico they tried to settle it in favor of slavery, but they now

find it is irrepressible there. I think you will find that the whole battle has been settled in the deliverance of Kansas, and that henceforth freedom will be triumphant in all the territories in the United States.

And yet, while this is clear to these intelligent, practical and sensible men who have gone through the problem, what a contrast is seen here to what is occurring in other parts of the United States, where they suppose, because they are older, they are so much wiser; where they believe me still as false a prophet as Mohammed. In Pennsylvania they have not yet made up their minds that there is any conflict at all, much less that it is irrepressible. In the southern states they are actually organizing a militia against the freemen who are establishing freedom in Kansas and New Mexico, as if the settlers in Kansas were no wiser than they are, and would seek to propagate freedom by the sword. When freemen want to make a territory free, they give it ballot boxes, and school houses and churches; and slavery will never triumph where these are first established.

But to go a little deeper into the subject. In 1776 and 1787, there were wise men administering the government of the United States; and if you look into their sayings, you will see they had all found out that this republic was to be the home of an ever-increasing people, so free, so proud, so wise, so vigorous, that they could not be confined in the old thirteen states; they saw that this republic was to be the home of free men, of free labor, and not slave labor. So, they set apart all the territory within their reach, i. e., all they then had control over-for freedom and for free emigration. Now, contrast that which was wisely done in 1787 with what actually happened in 1820! In 1820 it was found that the population of the United States had crossed the Mississippi. Then what was necessary was, to provide exactly the same kind of government for the territory west of the Mississippi, as had been provided for the country east of it; so that, when the government should be extended to the Pacific, all should be free. Could anything have been wiser than for government in 1850 to have given freedom to these territories? But it did not. They had previously given Missouri to slavery, and said freedom might take the rest; but now they wished to block up free labor by the barrier of slave Missouri. Could anything have been more absurd than to thus attempt to stay the course of freemen? Either free labor must go out of the United States, or it

It did go

must go round Missouri to Kansas and New Mexico. round for a short season, but then it broke their barriers, and passed through the very garrison of the slave power.

There were long ago good and brave men who foretold this result. There was John Quincy Adams, who remonstrated against the extension of slavery as political suicide. There were Henry W. Taylor, James Tallmadge, and peerless among them all, Rufus King, who declared in the senate of the United States, that the slave power in Missouri would prove a mockery; that this land was for liberty; and that the slave power would repent in sackcloth and ashes. But these good men were overruled. Missouri and Arkansas came into

It was because the not be confiscated,

the Union with slavery. And for what reason? slaveholders had property-capital which must even to prevent slavery from being established over as large a domain as half of Europe. This was the reason the federal government determined to secure their slaves to the capitalists of Missouri. What capital had Missouri in slaves that was saved at that time? All the slaves in Missouri at that time, were exactly ten thousand two hundred and twenty in number, and were worth (I was born a slaveholder, and know something of the value of slaves) three hundred dollars a head, including the old and young, the sick and decrepid, which made the total value of the slaves in Missouri, in 1820, three million sixty-six thousand dollars. Arkansas then had one thousand six hundred slaves, worth four hundred and eighty thonsand dollars. The whole capital of slaves in Missouri and Arkansas was about three million five hundred thousand dollars, but to save that capital in negroes, the great compromise of 1820 was made, and those states given up to slavery. Three million and a half of dollars was a large sum, but nobody then or ever proposed to confiscate it. They were left free to sell their slaves; they were at liberty to keep them, so only that they should import no more. There was no need of confiscating the slaves in Missouri any more than there was in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania; so this three million five hundred thousand dollars was never in jeopardy.

Even if it had been confiscated, how small a sacrifice of property it was, weighed against the incalculable blessing of freedom over the American continent. Look now at the advantages of their success, and see how unavailing are the contrivances of politicians, and even