plaud and approve for their inhumanity to the negro? It is because slavery will not tolerate one of you upon its soil. You manufacturers, whose mills have been so often put in motion only to encounter hostile legislation in congress under the influence of the slave power of the slave states, will you tell me why it is that the. government of the United States maintains, as its true and settled policy that an American citizen must carry all his materials to the manufacturers and workshops of England to be wrought up into fabrics by the mechanics, artisans and manufacturers of England, and must send his wheat, his corn, his beef and his pork to support those manufacturers in England, instead of bringing the educated and trained artists and machinists of England here to set up his mills, to put his wheels in motion upon the banks of the Mohawk, the Owasco, the Seneca and the Niagara rivers?

The explanation is a simple one; slavery wants as little of the industry of the white man in the nation as possible. Can you tell me why it is that the expenses of the government, which have risen in the period of thirty-two years from ten millions of dollars, to eighty, ninety and a hundred millions of dollars annually must be levied in such a way as to discourage American manufacturers, and that the deficiency, if there be any, of revenue, must be paid out of the sales of the public lands of the Unit d States at a dollar and a quarter per acre, when there are in every city, in every town, in every village, and in every hamlet of the land, poor, unfortunate white men, with their families, seeking and asking for a living upon this public domain,—and willing to convert it into farms, yielding and paying revenue to the United States? It is simply because slavery is unwilling that the free white man should go there. Can you account for the obstinate resistance to the enlargement of the Erie canal, continued so long, on any other ground? Can you tell me why it was that twenty years ago, this whole state was filled with alarm because equal and free education was being extended to the children of the catholic and the foreigner, upon the ground that, as the children of the foreigner were to be future members of the state, it was important, not more to them than to the state itself, that they should be prepared for citizenship ?* Oh! then the Bible was in danger. Oh! then the protestant church

1 See Vol. I, p. xlii, Vol. II, pp. 206, 216.

was to go down. All the hostility to education was the suggestion of slavery in order that free white men might not come to swell the population of the free states, and swarm into the new states beyond the Alleghany mountains.

But all this is ended. The agents, and the parties who were deceived, misled and perverted, who opposed the interests of freedom, have all within six years fallen and disappeared. The whig party once cherished by so many of us, and relied upon with faith and hope against evidence, proved unfaithful at last and perished, and I know not one sound thinking man, however much he was attached to it, that laments its loss. The American party that sought to deceive itself with the idea that it could secure forbearance for freedom in the new alliance formed with slaveholders in the south, suddenly, even more suddenly disappeared, and there is not one man living to vindicate its memory. And so the democratic party had a form and existence a year ago. Where is it now. It has changed its form as often as a guilty dream. It was single, united, unterrified and violent a year ago. Six months passed and it wore two forms in hostile attitude against each other. Six months later the two disappeared, and now it is nowhere. An opposition is organized but it is an organization, not of the democratic party but of three parties. It presents not one candidate, but three candidates for president. It comes up to fight its first, last and desperate battle with the republican party which is engaged in the effort and determination to elect a president by a majority of votes; and this hybrid party comes up and puts into the hands of the electors, ballots for scattering the votes, not concentrating them; to defeat the election of a president of the United States because they cannot agree whom they would elect. Strange confusion of the times, this! Have you ever studied the present creed of the opposition? I will endeavor to recite it for you:

"I believe in intervening in the territories of the United States for slavery; I also fully believe in non-intervening in the territories of the United States for slavery, and I further believe that it is not right either to intervene or to not intervene. Each of these three articles of faith is essential and of saving health to the nation. He that is faithful must believe them all, and he that is faithful must believe one and reject the other two. I believe in Stephen A. Douglas as a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and

I pledge myself to vote for him to the exclusion of everybody else. I also believe in John C. Breckinridge, and I pledge myself to vote for him to the exclusion of Stephen A. Douglas and of everybody else; and I also equally and implicitly believe in John Bell as a candidate for president of the United States, and I pledge myself to vote for him to the exclusion of Douglas and Breckinridge. I promise faithfully to vote for them all, and to vote, at the same time, against either one, except the one not designated as my choice." Now here is the trinity in unity and unity in trinity, of the political church, just now come to us by the light of a new revelation, and christened "Fusion." And this "Fusion" party, what is the motive to which it appeals? You may go with me into the streets to-night and follow the little giants, who go with their torchlights and their flaunting banners of "Popular Sovereignty;" or you may go with the smaller and more select and modest band who go for Breckinridge and slavery; or you may follow the music of the clanging bells, and, strange to say, they will all bring you into one common chamber. When you get there you will hear only this emotion of the human heart appealed to, fear,-fear that if you elect a president of the United States according to the constitution and the laws to-morrow, you will wake up the next day and find that you have no country for him to preside over. Is that not a strange motive for an American patriot to appeal to? And in that same hall, amid the jargon of three discordant members of the fusion party, you will hear one argument, and that argument is, that so sure as you are so perverse as to cast your vote singly, lawfully, honestly, as you ought to do, for one candidate for the presidency, instead of scattering it among three candidates, so that no president may be elected, this Union shall come down over your heads, involving you and us in a common ruin.

Fellow citizens, it is time, high time, that we know whether this is a constitutional government under which we live. It is high time that we know, since the Union is threatened, who are its friends and who are its enemies. The republican party who propose in the old appointed constitutional way to choose a president, are every man of them loyal to the Union. The disloyalists, wherever they may be, are those who are opposed to the republican party and attempt to prevent the election of a president. I know that our good and esteemed neighbors-Heaven knows I have cause to

respect and esteem and honor and love them as I do, for such neighbors as even my democratic neighbors, no other man ever had—I know that they do not avow, nor do they mean to support or think they are supporting disunionists. But I tell them that he who proposes to lay hold of the pillars of the Union and bring it down into ruin, is a disunionist; that every man who quotes him, and uses his threats and his menaces as an argument against our exercise of our duty, is an abettor, unconscious though he may be, of disunion; and that when to-morrow's sun shall have set and the next morning's sun shall have risen upon the American people, rejoicing in the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, those men who to-day sympathize with, uphold, support and excuse the disunionists, will have to make a sudden choice and choose whether, in the language of the senator from Georgia, they will go for treason and so make it respectable, or whether they will go with us for freedom, for the constitution, and for eternal Union.

east.

THE PAST AND THE FUTURE.

THE past was for the east-the future is for the west. Empire has culminated in the east, and is now passing to the west. The past was for slavery, which at one time was practically universal in the The future is for freedom, which, in the order of Providence, is to be universal in the west. The change from past eastern slavery to future western freedom is to be effected simply by bringing the mind of the nation to a just apprehension of what slavery is. Our fathers in the east understood it to be a question simply of trade. The Declaration of Independence and the constitution of the United States, announced on the other hand, that slavery is a question of human rights. While they left the regulation of that subject within the states to the states themselves, they did establish the principle that in the common territories of the United States and within the sphere of federal action, every man is a person, a man, a free man, who could neither hold another in slavery nor be held in bondage by any other man.

1 Extract from a speech at Cleveland, Oct. 4, 1860.